This came out in todays issue of the News Register. It is the second half of a two hour two part interview.
http://204.200.26.244/news/story.cfm?story_no=147722
Sharon Roe does not know why her brother-in-law, Robert Bryant, reached a place so dark he felt compelled to murder his children and wife in their beds before putting a shotgun to his chin and pulling the trigger.
But she knows where he came from.
The 37-year-old man's path led to emotional oblivion and a blood-soaked crime scene in McMinnville. And Roe knew Bryant when he embarked on that path.
Although its broad outlines have been reported, details have been sketchy. Now, Roe is starting to fill them in.
New details, which she revealed in an initial two-hour interview with the News-Register and several followup interviews, shed new light not only on Bryant, but also on the highly insular and sectarian character of the church that shaped him - in his case, a California-based Jehovah's Witnesses congregation of about 130.
How insular? When Washington sociologist Rodney Stark set out a few years ago to explain the 71-year-old church's rapid growth, he ran into a problem: Except for the fairly reliable membership statistics it published annually, little independent information was available.
Witnesses may show up on doorsteps with copies of "Watchtower," Stark wrote in 1997 in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, but they keep a low profile otherwise.
This dearth of research on Witnesses, he wrote, "is matched by their almost complete omission from textbooks on the sociology of religion, as well as from those devoted to American religious history."
That's not surprising, Roe said.
Now a 33-year-old housewife, Roe recalls approaching Robert Bryant's father, Keith, an elder in the Shingle Springs, Calif., congregation, many years ago to talk about some problems she was struggling with. She told him she was considering counseling.
"He said, "Oh, no, you don't want to go to a counselor,'" she recalled. "He's all, 'No, no, no. Those people are wackos.'"
Roe suspects Bryant also was depressed - severely depressed. In hindsight, she recalls seeing the signs years ago.
But it probably would not have occurred to Bryant, she said, to seek outside help.
"Witnesses don't want you to go to counselors because counselors will teach you you're your own person, first of all," she said. "Make your own decisions, that you don't need an organization to tell you what to do. Take control of your own life, that's what a counselor will teach you. Witnesses don't want you to learn that."
To remain in good standing with the church, members are expected to follow strict rules of conduct, both in their personal and public lives. Church doctrine holds that they must not vote, run for or hold public office, salute the flag, celebrate holidays or serve in the military.
They also are expected to be "publishers" of God's word, which is where distributing church literature door-to-door comes in.
"They're quite secretive," said Dr. David Weddle, chairman of the religion department at Colorado College, who has written about the Witnesses. "The attempt is to create a uniform culture in each Kingdom Hall."
Bryant was "disfellowshipped" by his congregation about three years ago. Early accounts alluded, somewhat ominously, to "unrepentant behavior."
As it turned out, however, Bryant's crime was simply open disagreement with church doctrine. According to Stark's study, that is the most common reason for the widely reported shunning of ex-members.
What follows is Roe's account.
As an elder, Bryant was a Witness of another kind: He had a front row seat to the Kingdom Hall's internal politics. And it left a sour taste in his mouth.
He raised concerns, but felt they were not taken seriously. He questioned certain doctrines. He visited Christian bookstores to study different viewpoints - a serious taboo. He also developed an interest in applying etymology, studying the origin of words, to Christian scripture.
Then, while riding a mower for his landscaping work one day, Bryant had an experience that he viewed in mystical terms.
"He remembered being very appreciative at that time in his life, in that year, of being very happy and privileged to know God the way that he did," Roe said. "And all of a sudden he said he felt a very bizarre sensation come over him, and he heard a voice over him."
"It said, 'Robert, you have been approved,'" Roe recounted. "He didn't know what to think about it. It kind of scared him at first."
Bryant eventually decided the experience meant that Jesus Christ had anointed him for some special purpose. What put him at odds with his fellow elders was his conclusion, which he later came to doubt himself, that he was one of the 144,000 so-called "elect" souls who would accompany Jesus to heaven after a climatic battle between Jehovah and Satan.
When Bryant finally summoned the courage to share this view with his family and congregation, the quiet, then 34-year-old man was met with two powerful reactions. Given the context of Witnesses theology and the congregation's gerontocratic rule, he probably anticipated them.
His family, Roe recalled, was devastated. As members of the remaining faithful - Jonadabs, as they are sometimes called - Bryant's parents regarded their son's announcement as a palpable threat to the family. In Witnesses theology, the faithful go on to live forever in paradise on Earth in resurrected bodies. But only the 144,000 elect actually go to heaven.
Bryant's declaration, which Roe said was grudgingly taken seriously by his father but furiously rejected by his mother, was tantamount to announcing they would not spend the afterlife together.
Church elders, meanwhile, felt that they - not this opinionated young man - were more deserving of being named to the elect, Roe said.
"They sat there and said, 'We've been on this Earth longer than you. We've been in this organization longer than you. Why would Jehovah choose you?
"'You're so young. You're not experienced enough. He would choose one of us.' That was what they told him!"
That marked the first major fissure in Bryant's relationship with the church. Others followed.
Later, Bryant engaged in the Witnesses equivalent of taking communion - a public act reserved only for elect Witnesses. One elder, Roe recalled, called Bryant a "freak."
Bryant also continued to pound on doctrinal issues. Although it's not clear whether he raised this one, Roe said her brother-in-law eventually went so far as to question the notion of a finite number of elect Witnesses. He wondered, why only 144,000? Would Jesus limit bliss to so few?
The breaking point came when Bryant put his concerns in writing.
The letter took issue with doctrinal issues, and reportedly went so far as to raise issues of what Roe called hypocrisy and favoritism in the church hierarchy. And the shunning began.
'Total outcast'
According to the Jehovah's Witnesses official web site, "those who simply cease to be involved in the faith are not shunned." Testimony by former members overwhelmingly suggests otherwise.
Randy Waters, an ex-Jehovah's Witness, left the church in 1981. He now runs a web site out of California called Watchtower.org.
He's familiar with the wrenching stories told by shunned Witnesses. The practice - whatever practitioners may call it - he said, is devastating.
"Any religion is just an extended family," Waters said. "Imagine being in a family on a deserted island with 18 people, and then imagine being outcast. You are a total outcast.
"Your only hope is to develop friendships outside the church. But that's very hard, because you've been taught that people outside are 'worldly' and under the direction of the devil. So it's a Catch-22."
In Bryant's case, Janet stuck with him, as did Roe, her sister. The three had known each other since they were teen-agers. And now, the two women were themselves struggling with doubts about church doctrine.
At one point, Robert Bryant wondered if he had made the correct decision, turning his back on the church in which he'd been raised. Roe said he even tried going back, but it didn't work.
He didn't try to pull his family out with him, though. The two sisters reached that point on their own.
One day, Roe recalled walking home after another intense discussion with Janet about their faith. Roe spotted Bryant working a landscaping job along the way, and the two discussed her crisis of faith as he drove her home in his pickup.
"I asked, "Rob, what brought you to this point? Why, why do you feel this way?"
Bryant had his Bible with him. He carried it along on jobs and would read it while he broke for lunch.
"Now, you read this and tell me what you think," Roe recalled Bryant saying.
While still in his 20s, Bryant had been humble enough to ask Roe - then a teen-ager - her opinion about scriptures. Within the rigid theological limits imposed by the church, Bryant had a streak of rebellion in him. He placed value on thinking for one's self.
"What am I supposed to do?" Roe asked. "What does God want me to do?"
He did not tell Roe what God wanted her to do.
"You read the Scriptures," Bryant replied. "You pray, and he will show you what to do. You don't need an organization to tell you."
Three months later, Sharon and Janet left the church.
Moving to Oregon
Robert Bryant started making preparations to move his family to Yamhill County more than a year ago. He apparently kept the secret from his own family, but Sharon and her husband, Marvin, knew about it and helped.
As a Bryant family spokesman has previously explained, disfellowshipping does not apply to the children of someone who has been expelled from the church. But Bryant regarded his parents' attempts to stay in touch with his children - Clayton, Ethan, Ashley and Alissa - as a threat.
Yamhill County looked beautiful in the winter of 2000 when Bryant was looking around for a place to live. It certainly was drier than usual.
Roe suspects that moving to the Willamette Valley six months later, in the summer, only to have a full-blown Oregon winter arrive in force hit Bryant hard.
"This is a man who lived his whole life from the time he was a teen-ager doing landscaping, learning it with his dad, being outdoors" Roe said. "That was his life. It wasn't just once in a while. It was every day, being outdoors."
Sharon and Marvin helped the Bryants move. It was during the night, so as not to attract any attention. But it wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision, as it's been characterized.
Sharon Roe said the Bryants made the house appear all but empty, so inquisitive relatives who were keeping tabs on them would give up. It worked, freeing the family to pack up and move out for good one night.
Press reports have suggested Bryant lost his landscaping business in California because a good portion of his customers were Jehovah's Witnesses and broke with him when he broke with the church.
But that doesn't sound right to Roe. She thinks the events leading to his California bankruptcy were much more complicated.
But whether business was good or bad, Bryant had long been prone to what his family called his "doom and gloom" days.
Roe said he "stressed over things way more than people normally would," as if driven by demons. "He would just sit there going over scenarios in his head, and he would always focus on the worst scenario," she recalled.
She said he tried to escape the intense anxiety he felt by losing himself in his work. Janet, incapable of dealing with her husband during his doom and gloom moments, would respond by trying to lose herself in her housework.
Roe remembered one incident in particular.
While visiting the family in their manufactured home during the final week of December, Bryant spread his records out on the kitchen floor and started crunching numbers. As Janet washed dishes, the numbers became clear. And they weren't good.
When the Bryants moved to Oregon, they sold their house in California for $269,000. They owed only $153,000 on it, giving them a lot of equity to cash out, even after paying all of their real estate fees and such.
He also had sold what Roe recalls as a successful landscaping business in Shingle Springs, and the payments for that had stopped coming in November.
Now, they were burning through money at an alarming rate.
There had been a $16,000 down payment on property, then $30,000 in site work. By the end of December, monthly expenses were mounting and new landscaping clients were getting difficult to come by.
"He went through it all, and looked at Janet," Roe said. "'We have enough food and money for two months,'" she remembered him saying. "'After that, we're going to starve.' Those were his exact words."
Janet tried consoling him.
Roe remembers her saying, "It's OK, Rob, we'll just buy lots of rice and beans. We'll buy cheap food and we'll make it through."
At that point, Janet noticed something wrong with the water flow. It was running out too quickly. The family trooped into the master bedroom and Marvin Roe removed a panel from inside a closet.
"Janet, here's why your hot water runs out so fast," Sharon Roe told her sister. "You've got a little bitty tank there."
"Oh my gosh, that's not going to be enough," Janet replied. "We're going to need a bigger tank."
Bryant was stunned.
"We don't have the money for a bigger tank!" he exploded. "Don't you understand? We don't have enough money to buy anything right now!"
The last time Roe talked to her sister and brother-in-law, both cited mounting problems.
Bryant was having back problems, although he had apparently arranged with a chiropractor to trade treatment for landscaping work. Janet, meanwhile, was nervous about stories she was hearing from a former neighbor in Shingle Springs.
Although the details are murky - the conversation was a month ago and Janet herself may not have understood the story correctly - someone in the community they'd left had apparently tried to serve papers on the Bryants. And the new tenant of their house was upset about it.
Roe has trouble pinpointing the date of that conversation, but her husband recalls it more clearly.
It was one week before Robert Bryant went to a local store and bought shells for his two, 12-gauge shotguns.
The tragic end
Sharon Roe said she doesn't know why Robert Bryant killed his children and wife and then himself.
She doesn't condone it or excuse it. She doesn't blame it on any individual, nor does she attribute it to divine will. She expressly rejects that idea.
Investigators said they don't know, either. At a press conference last week, Yamhill County District Attorney Brad Berry said his office had all but stopped searching for a motive.
Some point at Robert Bryant and see domestic violence - another theory Roe adamantly rejects.
Nearly everyone who has speculated points to a confluence of factors that led to a tragic conclusion.
"This tragedy may not have much to do with Jehovah's Witnesses as it has to do with a sense of desperation that this man had," said Weddle, the religion professor.
"There really isn't a history of violence in this tradition, but what you have is a group in which people are put under a great deal of pressure to conform, and it is the sort of pressure that can lead certain personalities to snap."
Bryant snapped. And Roe, along with many others, is left to grieve.
She hopes some good will come of it. She hopes it will help people understand "how horrible and injurious judgment of other people can be."
In the meantime, she and Marvin have returned to California. During a phone interview Monday night, her children could be heard playing happily in the background.
She has not heard a word from Bryant's family, and she doesn't expect to.
Her plans do not include calling them.
But she is writing a letter to the Shingle Springs Jehovah's Witnesses congregation.
