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Night of Terror

Eric Shannon was a religious man. Raised up Baptist, he believed in the virgin birth, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He also believed in water baptism, the Trinity of God, and the Ten Commandments. For a time, Eric felt God was calling him into the ministry as a pastor.

His mother, Shirley Dunham, recalled that as a teenager, her son “was a little evangelist. He knew his Bible very well.” But somewhere along the way, Eric grew dissatisfied with the washed-in-the-blood-of-the-Lamb version of Christianity that his mother had instilled in him. He wanted to claim a faith of his own. When it came time to raise his own family, Eric settled on a perversion of Judaism. Eric fathered seven children, four daughters and three sons. He made it clear that his children were not allowed to question his authority—ever. They were taught to obey their father. And to fear him.

Shirley, an old-fashioned Baptist, didn’t much care for the way Eric was raising her grandchildren. She wasn’t sure where he’d gone astray, but there was no question he had. The two argued bitterly about their conflicting beliefs.

Eric became obsessed with Levitical law. He rejected the message of the New Testament—the foundational cornerstone of his mother’s faith—altogether. He wouldn’t allow his children to attend public school because he feared they would be given hot dogs for lunch, a direct violation of Eric’s no-pork rule.

Eric embraced a primogenitor philosophy held by many traditional societies—a belief that a family’s eldest son is to be honored above all others. He taught his eldest son, only thirteen, that he had, by birthright, dominion over his younger siblings, particularly his sisters. This was all part of God’s order for man, Eric insisted. Handing over his belt to his boy, Eric encouraged him to whip his sisters if they didn’t do whatever he ordered. The boy protested, but enjoyed the honor of being his father’s chosen son.

Eric’s oldest daughter told no one of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. But the eleven-year-old kept track of that abuse in a worn journal that chronicled her family’s history. She wrote of beatings, obscenities, drugs, and sex. She was sure of one thing: If her father ever found out what she was writing, he’d kill her.

The frightened girl told her grandmother that her father had repeatedly threatened her. Shirley recalled her son’s threat: “Eric told the kids that he put them in this world and that he could take them out.” Shirley knew that Eric wasn’t spouting off in a good-natured way. He meant what he said. Literally.

Seeking help the only way she deemed safe, Eric’s daughter gave her dangerous diary to Shirley, who, after much deliberation and with much unease, turned it over to Oregon’s Department of Human Services.

The diary provided the state agency with a detailed account of times that Eric withheld food from his kids and offered them marijuana instead. While other kids were watching Disney flicks, Eric’s children were treated to a steady fare of pornography. He cuffed his kids around quite a bit. Some nights the kids would huddle together in the back seat of the family’s car while Eric’s common-law wife, the mother of the youngest four children, Robin Hocker, earned money as a dancer in a strip joint.

Eric’s fundamentalist beliefs gave him the one thing he was searching for—justification. With God on his side, who could stand against him? Eric felt it was his right to intimidate others. He did so without fear of retaliation or repercussions because God was his defender. It was Eric and God against the world. Eric trusted no one, particularly not anyone affiliated with any government agencies.

His mother knew there would be hell to pay when the state agency removed the children from Eric and Robin and placed them in her care. Shirley warned agency officials that they were in way over their heads.

One afternoon, the phone rang. It was Eric, screaming at his mother, “Give me my children back, or I’ll come and kill you!”

It was a promise. Not a threat.

Shortly after ten o’clock on a chilly Wednesday night—prayer meeting night—in January of 1998, Eric Shannon and Robin Hocker pulled into the drive of Charles and Shirley Dunham’s rural trailer house. Eric reached across the front seat for his gun—an SKS. He told his pregnant partner, Robin, to grab the other guns—a .22 and a 12-gauge shotgun—along with some extra ammunition. Carrying the loaded weapons, they walked in hushed silence to the south side of the Dunhams’ yard, where Eric cut the phone lines.

He removed a screen from a window, climbed into the living room, and opened the front door for Robin. The couple’s three-year-old son was asleep on the couch. Brandishing the semi-automatic assault rifle, Eric barreled into his mother’s bedroom, demanding that she hand over his firstborn son.

“Give me my son!” he screamed.

Shirley tried to tell him she didn’t know where the eldest boy was. Suspecting that Eric might use force to reclaim the boy, the state agency had placed him with a foster family in a nearby town. Eric cursed his mother.

In the past, Robin had acted as a peacemaker between Shirley and Eric, but not that night. Robin, eight months pregnant with Eric’s child, pulled a gun on Shirley.

“That night she was completely helping him,” Shirley said in an interview at her home a year afterward. The wrinkles in her forehead and around her eyes deepened in recollection. “I had my hand on the barrel of the gun. I tried to wrestle it away from her, but she kept shoving me back. If I had gotten it, Eric probably would’ve killed me.”

Eric pulled the butt of his rifle up to his shoulder, jumped across the bed, and threatened his mother as she and Robin struggled down the hall. Shirley’s husband, Charles Dunham, muscled his way between Eric and Shirley.

“I can’t let you shoot your mom,” Charles said. Eric pushed the SKS into his stepdad’s gut. Charles knocked the barrel away. Eric pulled the trigger, shooting Charles in the thigh, blowing off all the flesh. Bone shattered. Blood gushed.

“Dad’s shot Grandpa!” Shirley’s eldest granddaughter screamed.

“Mommy, you got a gun? Daddy’s here? You got guns?” a wide-eyed toddler asked.

Scooping the three-year-old up in her arms, Shirley started for the door. Robin raised the gun at Shirley.

“Put my baby down, or I’ll blow you away,” Robin demanded.

BIO

KAREN SPEARS ZACHARIAS was once bit by a big ol’ water moccasin in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamps. She survived, thanks to the prayers of Mrs. Josie Hays and a heaping dose of bleach scrub. Despite that frightful incident, Karen grew up to become a notable journalist/author, mesmerizing speaker, and a midnight-blogger. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

Karen is an editorial writer for the Fayetteville Observer, Fayetteville, N.C. and author of the nationally-acclaimed After the Flag has been Folded, HarperCollins, 2006.

Karen served as an adjunct professor of journalism at Central Washington University, and as the 2008 author-in-resident for the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts. Fairhope, Alabama.

Karen was an editorial panelist for the National Endowment of the Arts, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, Random House, 2006. Her other works have appeared in Oregon Literary Review and Blue Moon Café Anthology. She is a member of the Authors Guild.