Outlaw Country

Klamath County, Oregon, is the perfect place to go if you don’t want to be found—and the worst place to be if someone threatens your life.

By Emma Marris

Photographs by Michael Hanson

1.

Little Timathy Taylor lived behind the PDQ mini-mart in Roseburg, a small timber town in western Oregon surrounded by mountains. In many respects, Taylor had a typical rough-and-tumble 1980s childhood. He and other neighborhood kids were mostly left to themselves, their parents either working or at home drinking too much and apt to whale on them if they got in the way. Taylor spent his days collecting cans for nickels, riding his bike in empty lots, and playing alone by a creek near his home, watching polliwogs wriggle in the shallow water.

“Timmy loved the woods,” his mother, Becky Wanty, remembered. She described him as timid and softhearted. When he caught fish or frogs in the creek, he threw them back. He liked the idea of hunting because it was outdoorsy and manly, but he didn’t like the killing part. “He had a hard time even trying to shoot a deer,” Wanty said. “He never got one. He would miss them because he couldn’t do it.”

Wanty worked at the mini-mart, cleaned offices, roofed houses, and tended bar to support her six kids. “When I was eight months pregnant with my fifth child, I was out there pumping gas,” she said. Her husband, David, drove a semi and was gone much of the time. He spent most of his wages gambling, and Wanty described him as “a drinker and drug addict” who may have had learning disabilities. When Wanty married him, David wasn’t literate. “I had to read the book to him and read the questions to him down at the Department of Transportation to get his chauffeur’s license,” Wanty said. David had little patience with his kids. “Instead of just giving them a spanking, he would take whatever he could get his hands on—a brush or a hanger or whatever—and beat them with that,” Wanty said. “There was always a reason when I smacked them, but not with him. He would do it just when he was pissed.”

The family were Jehovah’s Witnesses, but after years of living a devout life while her husband drank and smoked and gambled without consequences, Wanty decided that she was done with the church. In 1989, when Taylor was 13, his mother intentionally got herself kicked out, then celebrated her freedom with a cigarette. Three years later, the family moved to Wisconsin. She and David split up, and David threatened suicide; the police were called.

Taylor never got much respect in high school, according to Mike Bishop, his closest friend. People thought he was a redneck, but when a car wouldn’t run, he was the one they called. “He’d help anybody,” Bishop said. “He was the guy that people went to when shit broke down.”

Taylor was still drawn to the outdoors like he’d been as a little boy. Bishop remembered Taylor decorating his room with pictures of mountains. “We would go camping and try to live off the land for a week or two and see if we could do it,” Bishop said. “We’d bring minimal food, just enough to keep us alive if we didn’t find anything. He started going out for longer and longer.” The trips were an escape from the social meat grinder of high school, where Bishop said Taylor was more or less an outcast who preferred walking away from fights to proving his mettle.

Taylor dropped out of high school, planning to finish his degree in the Army, but then quit basic training after he injured his knee. Around age 19, he ended a relationship with a woman named Tammy and decided to return to the city of his childhood, hoping for a fresh start. He drove more than 2,000 miles, crossing the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Cascades to Roseburg. But he couldn’t find work, and his van broke down and was impounded. Taylor sold the van to pay the impounding fees, get back what he’d left inside, and buy a bus ticket back to Wisconsin. By the time he returned, Tammy had given birth to their son, Jesse.

When Taylor was 23, he married a woman named Erin. They had two sons in as many years, Isaiah and Josh. The marriage didn’t last. Erin said that Taylor “was not a mean person” but claimed he could be cruel to a son she had from a previous relationship. (Taylor later said that while he believed in corporal punishment and was “firm” with children, he was never abusive.) Records from Wisconsin indicate that Taylor was charged with battery in 1999 for hitting Erin’s son and was sentenced to 60 days in jail. In 2002, the couple divorced. Of Taylor’s three sons, only Josh maintained a strong connection with his dad.

Taylor found work as a laborer, doing construction and installing home security systems. For a while he lived out of his truck. He seemed always to be teetering on the edge of financial ruin, adrift at society’s fringes. In 2008, Taylor found himself sitting by his father’s hospital bed as the old man slid toward death following years of medical issues: hepatitis C, a liver transplant, lung cancer, and, near the end, pneumonia. Despite the beatings he’d received, Taylor wanted to be with his dad as he died. “It is the type of person Tim is—forgive, forget,” Bishop said. “If you needed him, he was there. You could have shot his dog, and if you really needed help, he was there.”

Not long before his father passed, Taylor had undergone spinal-fusion surgery in an attempt to treat chronic back pain. He tried to transition to less physically demanding work, but he dropped out of computer-programming classes in the wake of his father’s death. He had always struggled in the classroom. “Me learning from a book is like learning Chinese,” he wrote in a Facebook message to his aunt. He ended up depending on food stamps and disability payments: $730 a month after child support.

A couple of years later, he began a new relationship and started making payments on a fixer-upper in Madison, but the house’s owner died before giving Taylor and his girlfriend the deed to the place. Feeling aggrieved and wondering whom to blame, Taylor turned to the internet. Whatever terms he initially plugged into Google or Facebook or YouTube, he was soon frequenting websites promoting far-right conspiracy theories, watching videos predicting imminent social collapse, and reading how-to guides on survival preparedness. Over a few months in late 2012, the content of Taylor’s Facebook posts shifted from topics like trucks and music to videos from the hacktivist group Anonymous and posts about pandemic disease, the threat of GMO foods, the rise of Islam, and the Obama administration’s purported plans to confiscate everyone’s guns. Taylor devoured TV shows like Doomsday Preppers, Survivor Man, Live Free or Die, and Man, Woman, Wild. The notion of living off the land allowed him to imagine ways he might escape the wage economy and finally make something of himself. He spent a sizable portion of his disability checks on items like seeds, water-purification supplies, and ammunition, in case the apocalypse should arrive. At one point, he overdrew his bank account. Not long after, his relationship fell apart—the woman said he had been physically rough with her son and she didn’t like how angry he was. She kicked him out.

By 2014, when Taylor was almost 40, he was single and living in a trailer on a small dairy farm, where he worked as a hand in exchange for room and board. One day he accidentally ran his son Josh over with a manure spreader, nearly killing the 15-year-old. The incident prompted Taylor to contemplate his own mortality. If he died suddenly, he’d have nothing to leave his kids. He decided to do the thing he’d been fantasizing about for years: buy property, build a cabin, and create a legacy for his sons.

Taylor began cruising real estate websites that promised acres of wilderness for as little as a few thousand dollars, which in monthly payments would be doable even on his paltry income. Taylor’s family thought his plans were foolhardy, but his mother understood the pull of returning to Oregon. “I think he was looking for something different,” Wanty said. “I don’t know. Something that would help him go back to the past. To easier times.”

In May 2015, Taylor signed a contract for nearly nine acres of unimproved backcountry in Klamath County, sight unseen. The ad for the lot had included a few photos of flat, grassy land with mountains in the distance.

GENERAL INFORMATION: Huge Parcel in the Oregon Pines Subdivision with over 900 feet of frontage on Nagel Ridge Way.TYPE OF TERRAIN: rockyZONING: residentialPOWER: noPHONE: noWATER: no. must install well or holding tankSEWER: No. Only needed when/if you build.ROADS: dirt

Taylor liked the sound of it. He agreed to a price of $19,200, with 7 percent interest. That worked out to 72 monthly installments of $317.11. He imagined the Oregon of his youth: green, balmy, bathed in golden sunlight, far from Wisconsin’s bitter winters. What he found when he arrived was something else entirely.

2.

Klamath County is in eastern Oregon, nowhere near Roseburg. It’s high desert, on the eastern side of the Cascades, land veined with ice-cold trout streams, dotted with tiny ranching hamlets, and dyed deep red politically. Taylor’s lot was in a particularly out-of-the-way place called Tableland—or sometimes just “the mountain.” Tableland is made up of basalt mesas, ancient lava flows that rise like steps from the Sprague River valley. The few houses that exist there have no addresses. Tableland is mostly composed of rocks and sage and sky and antelope and silence. On hot summer days, the dry air smells like Ponderosa pines and wildfire smoke. In winter, clear nights bite the skin, the moon looks like thin bone, and deep snow cuts locals off from the outside world for weeks at a time.

For thousands of years, Native people used the mesas as hunting grounds and to cultivate an edible root called epos or yampa. After 1864, Tableland became part of the Klamath Indian Reservation. Albert Lawvor, the grandson of Chief Yellowhammer of the Modoc tribe, remembered the area as it was in the mid-20th century. “The land was good,” Lawvor said in an oral history published with his obituary in 2012. “Everybody helped everybody, everybody looked out for everybody. The ranchers would go together and hay together. The elders always had their wood cut for them.”

By 2015, when Taylor arrived, things had changed. The U.S. government had stopped recognizing the Klamath tribes in 1961—a decision it would reverse in 1986—and purchased much of the Native people’s land in southern Oregon. Private buyers swooped in to buy the rest. In the 1960s, speculators subdivided vast swaths of the area—including Tableland—and sold lots to city people who wanted a place to hunt and camp. There was even a how-to manual published by a real estate mogul from Alturas, California, with the title Freeway to Fortune: Profit Through Recreational Land. The business wasn’t an outright scam; buyers got the lots they paid for, in subdivisions with fancy-sounding names like Klamath Forest Estates. But when they showed up to inspect their purchase, they were often astonished to find that there was no power or water available, and that the local government didn’t maintain the roads. Some owners abandoned their purchases and stopped paying taxes on them. By the 1990s, Klamath County was foreclosing on roughly 500 lots per year. Speculators then scooped them up at auction for as little as $1,000 and sold them for a profit. The deals were often owner financed, which meant that the buyer paid the seller in installments rather than getting a mortgage. The seller collected monthly payments, including interest, and handed over the deed once the last check cleared. If the buyer ever stopped paying—and many did—they forfeited the previous payments and the seller kept the lot.

Prices remained so low that the properties looked like a screaming deal to people who wanted solitude, independence, or a place to hide. Over the years, Tableland turned into outlaw country. It is now sparsely populated by marijuana growers, tweakers, loners, and dreamers. Most people live in trailers, often surrounded by a penumbra of trash and outbuildings in various stages of decomposition. They pay for necessities with money they receive through government assistance. Residents by and large are wary of outsiders and often of each other, even as they sometimes need their neighbors in times of crisis—a dead pickup, a lean winter, a snowed-in road. Self-reliance may be the ideal, but reciprocity is the reality.

The closest town, Beatty, is down off the mesas. It has just one small store, the Palomino Deli, which is the unofficial community center for Tableland residents. Its owner, Sara Palomino, a circumspect woman with dark hair and dark lipstick, knows everything that happens in the area. The nearest law enforcement is in Klamath Falls, 50 miles and a good hour-and-a-half drive southwest. The Klamath County Sheriff’s Office is spread extremely thin. From 7 a.m. to 3 a.m., its minimum staffing level is three people on patrol in the entire county, which at 6,136 square miles is considerably larger than Connecticut. After 3 a.m., deputies are simply on-call in case of an emergency.

People who live on and around Tableland are remote from the law but often uncomfortably close to one another. The combination can lead to violence. In 2009, a man named Robert Kincaid was shot in the back of the head with a .410 by a woman named Deanna Brindle, who said he’d raped her. She and a friend used a backhoe to bury him in a shallow grave, and it’s possible no one would ever have gone looking for Kincaid if his horse hadn’t shown up near Beatty riderless and with a bullet wound. Brindle was ruled guilty but also insane and sentenced to 20 years of psychiatric supervision. The day after Christmas in 2016, Troy Kimball was stabbed and shot to death by his brother Travis with a 9mm Beretta. Travis claimed that he was defending their father, whom Troy was attacking. In January 2018, Benito Devila Sanchez was shot by Richard Bryon Johnson with a .45 during an argument; Johnson hid the body in the woods, where it was discovered after Sanchez’s roommate reported him missing. In March of the same year, the body of Beatty resident Jack James Hasbrouck was also found in the woods. When reporters asked Klamath County district attorney Eve Costello if the public should be concerned about a killer, she said, “Mr. Hasbrouck had a lot of friends that maybe weren’t the kind that an average citizen is going to have.” No one was ever charged. “The meaner you seem, the safer you probably are,” Klamath County sheriff Chris Kaber told me of living in the area.

It was into this world that Tim Taylor drove in August 2015, in a tan-colored diesel truck he called Blondie, pulling a trailer and accompanied by his little dog, Dixie Mae. He wasn’t aware of Tableland’s violent reputation. His more immediate concern when he arrived was that the pictures on the real estate website, the ones that had convinced him to buy the land, weren’t actually of his lot. His property wasn’t flat or grassy; it was a narrow canyon that cut into a rise, the last place on a dirt road before it petered out into rough, nearly impassable track. The landscape was pretty—pine trees sharp against a bright blue sky, aspens rustling in the wind along an ephemeral creek—but the land was extremely steep, the soil rocky and parched. Taylor could barely get his truck and trailer off the road. “Everything reeked of failure,” Taylor later wrote in a letter. “But with so much failure in my life, I had an even harder drive to succeed.”

His plan was to build a log cabin, raise vegetables, and hunt game. He had some success at the survivalist life he’d imagined—bagging a few rabbit and quail and making pine-needle tea when he had a cold—but he didn’t build the cabin, living instead in his trailer, and eating mostly ramen noodles, canned food, and military MREs. Life was a lot harder than it had been on the farm in Wisconsin. Every month he drove to Klamath Falls, cashed his disability check, and spent it on laundry, groceries, gas, propane, and other necessities. Moving had wiped out his savings. Before long he stopped making payments on the land.

Taylor disdained those who lived off the government instead of working. He considered them lazy bums, but he didn’t count himself among them. He had paid into the Social Security Disability Insurance program when he was working and now needed its help in return. He had no choice but to take food stamps, because people on disability weren’t allowed to work.

Without close neighbors or friends, Taylor spent a lot of time on his phone, which barely got a signal. He cruised Facebook and reposted memes that spoke to his ideals of tough, self-reliant manhood. “This is America,” one began. “We drink beer. We eat meat. We pray. We own guns. We speak English. We value freedom. If you don’t like it then G.T.F.O.” Another showed an old black-and-white photo of little boys playing with toy guns. It read, “This is how my friends and I played back in the day. Not one of us grew up and killed anyone.”

One day, on his way to Beatty to get food at the Palomino Deli, Taylor stopped his truck to talk to a bearlike Vietnam veteran with a cane and a felt hat. His name was Gary Powless, and he’d gotten his Tableland plot back in the 1980s, in exchange for a roofing job. Tableland suited him and many other veterans, Powless explained, because they “couldn’t deal with society and people anymore.” When he’d first moved in, his immediate neighbor was “a Hell’s Angel running from the law and living in a tepee.”

In the 1980s, Powless bought a bar in Beatty, a popular hangout that overflowed when the rodeo was in town. Powless recalled dialing the sheriff once because two of his regulars were on the verge of a shootout with deer rifles outside the bar. According to Powless, the law told him that no one was coming. “When they ran out of ammunition, they came inside and got drunk,” he said, chuckling.

Powless married a woman named Wanda, the sister of one of his barmaids. After his bar burned down, they built a house and raised a family. Their kids were grown and gone by the time Taylor came to Tableland, but the Powlesses still had dependents of a sort: People regularly showed up at their door clutching printouts from the internet, needing help finding the land they’d bought. Often the same people came back later to ask for water, food, gas, or propane.

Powless immediately pegged Taylor as “very naive.” But the new arrival had mechanical skills, so the Powlesses gave him odd jobs. They would sometimes pay him in bulk beans and rice. It was helpful but not enough. Wanda Powless told me that to live safely on Tableland, a person needed the funds to install power, a well, and a septic system, plus several months of food in case of heavy snow, and enough gasoline to get to town in an emergency. Taylor had none of those things.

Still, he was determined to make his situation work. In November 2015, he took the train back to Wisconsin to collect a second truck, a blue Ford F-150 he called Handy Smurf, which he drove back to Oregon. Josh, then 16, decided to leave high school and go to Oregon with his dad for a few months. “I wanted to live in the mountains for a little bit,” Josh said. “I am more the outdoorsy kind of person, like my father. That was fun for me. No running water, no power. Just being so far away from a town or civilization.”

The aspen trees on Taylor’s lot had dropped their leaves by then, and through the bare branches Josh could see a seemingly abandoned place just down the road from his dad’s. He heard it belonged to a guy named Roy who was in Minnesota, sick or maybe dead. The property had a trailer on it, with its door hanging open and a window busted out, and also a houseboat, a school bus, a half-built shed, an ancient truck, and a backhoe. Josh walked over one day and looked inside the trailer. “There was a bunch of trash,” he said. “There was raccoon feces everywhere, and it reeked of mold. It looked like no one had been living there for years.” Josh found a .22 handgun inside and took it.

Eventually, after Josh went back to Wisconsin, Taylor visited Roy’s place, too. He’d bought a few small solar panels on Amazon before he moved to Oregon, but they didn’t give his trailer enough juice. Taylor took eight solar panels and several six-volt batteries from the property, figuring that no one would miss them.

Then Roy came home.

3.

His full name was Fay Roy Knight, and he’d bought his lot in the 1990s. He moved there on a more permanent basis in 2009, when a bankruptcy swallowed up a boat, a motorcycle, and a trailer near Boise. Before leaving Idaho, he said goodbye to Vicki Lynn Vosburg, an herbalist with her own shop. Knight had spent hours in the store kidding around and flirting with Vosburg. She grew to care for him but never learned anything about his past, which he kept close to his chest. “He was my big old sweetie,” Vosburg later said, an “old cowboy” with a loud, gruff voice and a towering frame who “didn’t take any shit from anybody.”

When Knight told Vosburg he was moving to a remote part of Oregon, she was worried that it wouldn’t work out, but he couldn’t be convinced to stay. “You get what you get then,” she said. “Don’t come crying to me.”

“Girl, I am going to come crying to you anytime I want to,” Knight replied. Then he kissed her goodbye, though they’d never kissed before.

Knight moved into his Tableland trailer and stored his possessions, including hundreds of books, in the houseboat and in other dilapidated buildings and vehicles that he’d dragged up to his property. He even bought a backhoe to tend to the dirt roads near his place.

He was a man of fixed habits and an abiding interest in staying alive. He ate the majority of his meals at the Palomino Deli. He loved salads, fussed over his health, popped vitamins, lifted weights, and drank a lot of water. He was also known to enjoy a drink or two of harder stuff. He lived on Social Security and a longshoreman’s pension. He told friends that he’d worked as a logger and as a roughneck in oil fields. And he could be mean. Sara Palomino never forgot the time he viciously kicked a dog outside her store that was, she said, “in his way.”

Gary and Wanda Powless described Knight as a bully who used his guns to intimidate people. Everyone on Tableland kept guns, but Knight’s collection was particularly well-known, including the mini revolver he kept in his pocket—a North American Arms .22 that had a barrel less than two inches long. He also bragged about having a “throwaway” gun that couldn’t be traced to him. Knight liked to tell a story about catching a thief at his place when he lived up in Washington. He’d pulled a shotgun on the intruder, then asked him to step a few feet to the left so he could shoot him in the ass without breaking the glass in his front door.

Knight had friends and admirers. Carolyn Decker’s property in Sprague River backs up against Tableland. She described Knight as a good man who helped his neighbors, partook in the produce she grew on her land, and read voraciously. “He had a thirst for knowledge,” she said. “He was always reading about health things.” However, she added, “if you wronged him or were dishonest, he’d let you know.” Decker’s partner, Ian Pymm, said that Knight could be intimidating, because he yelled a lot—but that was only because, in his late seventies, Knight was nearly deaf.

Knight wasn’t home when Taylor first moved in, because he’d traveled to the Midwest to get two knee replacements. He came back in May 2016, mostly healed and still imposing. When Knight saw that some of his belongings had been taken, he was determined to find the culprit. He spotted a wheelbarrow track going uphill from his lot and followed it to Taylor’s trailer. Dixie Mae started barking, and Taylor came outside.

“Who in the hell are you?” Taylor asked.

“I’m Roy.”

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

Taylor thought Knight was scary—large and mad, with a big brass belt buckle that spelled out his name and a finger missing from his left hand. Taylor confessed to taking the solar panels and batteries. Knight was furious and called Taylor a piece of shit. Taylor apologized. Knight demanded to see proof that Taylor owned the land, suggesting that he might just be a squatter. Taylor showed him the contract; Knight implied that it was phony.

Tensions eased when a couple on horseback came down the road from the north, looking for stray cattle. Knight offered to give everybody—even Taylor—a tour of his place. Afterward the couple rode off and Taylor promised to return all the things he’d taken from Knight. The men shook hands, and Taylor thought that maybe there wouldn’t be any bad blood between them.

The next day, Taylor’s opinion changed. Knight drove his truck up the road and appeared at Taylor’s door, angry again. He accused Taylor of stealing a .22 pistol. According to Taylor, Knight told him that the gun had been used in a murder; Taylor wasn’t sure if that was the truth or just a scare tactic. Taylor said he didn’t have the weapon.

Taylor had installed security cameras around his trailer, and in silent footage taken that day, he can be seen loading solar panels into Knight’s truck. Knight then gestured toward Blondie, Taylor’s diesel pickup, demanding that Taylor give him one of the truck’s two batteries, as payback or a peace offering. Taylor handed it over without hesitation, even though doing so would render Blondie inoperable.

“Well that’s all shot in the ass,” Taylor wrote Josh on Facebook Messenger soon after the encounter. “He is probably gonna try to make my life hell as long as I am here.” Taylor worried that locals would side with Knight, since he’d lived on the mountain much longer. “They don’t like outsiders,” Taylor wrote. Maybe he should move, he suggested. “And you live there for about a year you aren’t an outsider,” Josh replied, “quit acting like a pussy and stand your ground.”

Without Knight’s solar panels, Taylor’s electricity failed and his security cameras stopped working. The next day, while doing some work on his F-150, Taylor saw Knight approaching on foot. Taylor later said that Knight pulled the mini revolver out of his right back pocket and announced that he was going to kill Taylor. After 15 tense minutes, Knight left. Later that day a woman named Kelli Boone, whom Taylor had met online, arrived for a visit. Taylor had warned her in advance that his neighbor was mad at him, but she came anyway. “My heart says fuck it drama or no drama go see my cowboy,” Boone wrote in a Facebook message.

The next morning, Taylor heard Dixie Mae barking. Leaving Boone in the trailer, he went outside and found himself face-to-face with Knight and a man Taylor didn’t know. The newcomer was tall and tattooed, with a shaved head and a flamboyant mustache. His name was Paul Strong, and he was a ranch manager, trapper, and friend of Knight’s. The men had come in a flatbed truck carrying a 55-gallon drum in back.

“This here is my crazy friend Paul,” Knight said, according to Taylor. “And this barrel—this is for you.” Then he said Taylor had three days to get off the mountain or he’d be shot, hacked up, and stuffed in the drum, which would be buried vertically to leave a small, inconspicuous grave. No one would ever find him. According to Taylor, Strong grabbed him by the throat and squeezed it while clenching his other hand into a fist. Strong told Taylor he was lucky he had a guest or he’d be dead already. Then the two men left. (Strong later admitted that he and Knight had gone to Taylor’s property and that he’d made a fist, but he denied the death threats.)

Taylor wanted to leave Tableland, but it wasn’t as easy as hopping in his F-150. He didn’t want to abandon his belongings—his tools, trucks, and photos of his kids. He needed time to pack, and more important, he needed money. He was broke. The next day—Sunday, May 22—Kelli Boone left and Taylor messaged Josh, “Can you get like $100 so I have the gas to get out of here?” Josh replied, “Yeah, I’m selling my black truck. I can get you 200 maybe.” Taylor sent his son the number of his Walmart card and asked him to put the money on it as soon as possible. 

Taylor then called Wanda Powless and told her he was planning to leave, given Knight’s ultimatum. “Why are you running, Tim?” she asked. “You’ve run your entire life. You are too old to keep doing this.” She suggested that he call 911 instead and turn himself in for the theft of Knight’s property. That might square things with his neighbor, she said. After hanging up with Powless, Taylor punched the numbers into his phone.

The dispatcher was confused. People didn’t often call to confess to a crime. “Has this been reported?” the man asked Taylor. “I guess what I’m asking: Is someone looking for you, or is this something that hasn’t been reported, do you think?”

“It’s been reported, because I’m reporting it,” Taylor said.

After that first conversation, Taylor called dispatch again to get his incident number. In the midst of the exchange, he said that he heard gunshots outside his trailer.

“OK and how—why are you saying this is related to the theft call?” the operator asked.

“Um, because they’ve already threatened my life,” Taylor responded.

4.

Sheriff Kaber said that there’s no official procedure for deciding whether to respond to a 911 call, but his understaffed department can’t follow up on everything that gets reported, which on Tableland as in other remote parts of the county is a hodgepodge of noise complaints, reports of shots fired, accusations of theft, and allegations of physical violence. “Decisions have to be made based on the manpower at the moment,” Kaber said.

In 2016, manpower was in particularly short supply. Kaber wasn’t the sheriff then. A man named Frank Skrah was in charge, and he made it difficult to recruit and keep staff. A veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, Skrah was old school, subordinates would later say. He had a habit of throttling and punching suspects after they were apprehended. He also referred to women in the district attorney’s office as “broad,” “babe,” and “sweetheart,” and he sometimes swatted them with case files. At the time of Taylor’s first 911 call, Skrah was under indictment for harassment, official misconduct, assault, and strangulation. Nevertheless, he remained on the job. (In 2017, Skrah was convicted on five of the nine charges against him; he paid a $3,000 fine and completed 120 hours of community service at a baseball field in Klamath Falls.)

After calling 911, Taylor locked his doors and stayed inside. He messaged his old friend Mike Bishop. “The guy lived up here 20+ yrs,” he said of Knight. “So he has a few friends up here.”

“So he has mountain law on his side,” Bishop replied.

The next day, Monday, May 23, Knight and Strong returned to Taylor’s property. Taylor called 911 again. “They have just come up my driveway, turned around, rode back down, and fired off a couple shots down there at their property, which is a jump, skip, and a hop away from me,” Taylor said, sounding uneasy. The dispatcher seemed unimpressed. “They’re shooting on their own property?” he asked. Taylor mentioned his previous contact with authorities, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Taylor messaged Bishop soon after the 911 call. “Now really nervous. They just fired off a few rounds. Debating on firing off a shot from the 12ga,” referring to his 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

That afternoon, Taylor fiddled with the few solar panels he still had and was able to restore partial power to his property. His security cameras started recording again. They captured what happened after the deadline Knight had set for Taylor to be gone came and went. Just past noon, Knight arrived in a car with another friend of his, this one sporting a long ZZ Top–style beard. It was Ian Pymm, Carolyn Decker’s partner. Knight grabbed a stick and whacked Taylor’s door, telling him that time was up according to Pymm. The men could hear Taylor inside trying to hush his dog, but he didn’t reply to Knight or come out. “That’s yellow spine,” Pymm later said. “That guy was never going to leave. He was just going to be a pain in the butt up there. I knew it. I knew shit was going to happen. Always does.” Knight took out a handkerchief and, keeping it between his fingers and the handle of Taylor’s trailer door, tried to get inside. When the door wouldn’t open, Knight folded the cloth carefully and walked away.

Inside, Taylor was on the phone with 911 for the fourth time. A sheriff’s deputy returned the call and told him that if he wanted to pursue the matter, he would have to come to Klamath Falls and file a report. Taylor claimed the deputy told him, “We’re not peacekeepers.” He barely had enough gas in his F-150 to get to the closest gas station, 13 miles away. He was still waiting on Josh to transfer money to his Walmart card.

Taylor decided to write Knight a note, which he posted on the porch of his trailer. It warned that there were video cameras uploading footage to the internet and that the sheriff’s office had been notified about Knight coming onto the property. “Roy Knight I have done you wrong and I am owning up to what I have done and this is between you and I only,” the note read. “Any other communication will be done with a 3rd party involved.”

On Wednesday, Taylor hunkered down in bed with Dixie Mae and his shotgun. Josh messaged his dad to say that he’d finally managed to scrape together $100, but it would cost $20 to transfer it. “And you have to pick the money up at Walmart,” Josh wrote. “I can’t get it on your card.” The closest Walmart was in Klamath Falls. Taylor posted a photo on his Facebook page of a man in tactical gear holding a military rifle. The caption said, “With guns in the hands of the public, sure there will be tragedies, but without them there will be genocides.” He didn’t sleep that night. All he could hear were the howls of coyotes echoing off the nearby canyon’s walls.

The next day was sunny and warm. Because Wednesday had passed without incident, Taylor thought that maybe law enforcement had talked to Knight. He planned to stay a few more days, until his next disability check arrived at the beginning of June. The money would help him get enough fuel to tow his trailer away from Tableland if that’s what he decided to do. The decision was made for him when he went outside to his truck, shotgun over his shoulder, to charge his dead cell phone with on the battery. It was drained, too, which meant that Taylor now had no working vehicle. He wired a solar panel to the battery, hoping to bring it back to life and at least give his phone some power.

Around 2 p.m., while packing up his belongings, Taylor saw Knight again. He was on foot, and he had Taylor’s phone in his hand; Knight had found it charging at the truck on his way up the hill. One of Taylor’s security cameras captured the ensuing scene. Taylor raised his shotgun to show Knight that he was armed. Knight kept coming. Taylor backed toward his porch. Knight shoved Taylor—or perhaps stumbled against him—until Taylor was pressed up against the trailer door. Knight jabbed a finger into Taylor’s chest, alcohol on his breath. “I’m going to go down there and get my backhoe. I’m going to bury everything up here—and you,” Knight said, according to Taylor.

After berating Taylor for several minutes, Knight started to walk away from the trailer, still in possession of Taylor’s phone. That’s my last link to the outside world, Taylor thought. Taylor stepped down from the porch; Knight turned to face him. The two men were about 20 feet apart. Knight kept shouting. Taylor asked for his phone back. “Screw you, take it,” Knight said, according to Taylor. “You going to do something? Shoot me.”

Knight turned away again, lifting his hand in what looked like a dismissive gesture. Taylor raised his shotgun and fired.

Knight staggered, turning toward Taylor for a moment, then rotating away. He was hit. Two seconds after the first shot, Taylor fired again, this time blowing a three-inch hole in the back of Knight’s left shoulder. One pellet from the blast hit an artery that carried blood to his brain; others damaged major arteries on the left side of his body and entered his lungs and spinal cord. Knight fell to his knees and then collapsed, face-first, onto the dirt.

Taylor walked over to Knight and picked up his phone. He plugged it back into his truck’s battery. Then, for the fifth time in less than a week, he called 911.

“Hi, yeah. This is Tim Taylor up on Nagelridge Way again. He had come up here… Uh—I shot him.”

“Shot who?” a dispatcher asked.

“Roy Knight. He’s already threatened my life.”

“What’s the address?”

“I don’t have an actual physical address.”

“Did you call earlier?”

“Yes,” Taylor said. “I’ve been calling ever since last Friday.”

5.

It took an hour for deputy Brian Bryson, a search and rescue expert with elk antlers tattooed on his forearms, and his partner for the day, Daniel Tague, to find the narrow dirt road that Taylor had described over the phone. As they approached Taylor’s place—a trailer flying both the American flag and the Don’t Tread on Me banner—they saw a large ponytailed man on the ground. He was lying facedown, blood haloing his head and flowing downhill. He had on a green sweatshirt, shredded by shotgun pellets, and faded black Wrangler jeans. He was wearing a hearing aid.

Bryson called for Taylor to come outside. “Show me your hands!” he yelled. Taylor obeyed and emerged from the trailer. He was skinny, wearing a camouflage T-shirt and pants and a pair of brown desert boots. Bryson handcuffed Taylor, then Tague went over to look at Knight, who was dead.

Taylor seemed eager to talk, chattering about how Knight had been threatening him for days, explaining that he’d been calling 911 but nobody ever came. He had security cameras, Taylor said, and he invited the lawmen to watch the videos. Everything was on film. More officers arrived, parking their vehicles nose-to-tail on the road and walking past the small grove of aspens to Knight’s body. They emptied the dead man’s pockets and photographed the contents, including his wallet, which contained a driver’s license from Minnesota, and the .22 pistol, fully loaded.

Taylor was read his rights and driven to Klamath Falls, where detective Patrick Irish of the Oregon State Police was waiting for him. Irish, who would handle the case investigating Knight’s death, had listened to Taylor’s final 911 call. He heard Taylor say that Knight was “reaching around in his back pocket,” where he kept his gun, and that Taylor thought he’d shot Knight somewhere in his chest. Taylor said that he’d acted in self-defense.

Taylor was escorted into an interview room and given a burger, coffee, a glass of water, and a cigarette. “Have you ever had to take a life?” he asked the officers in the room. “I mean, I watched my father pass away, take his last breath, and the emptiness I felt after that—I mean, I’m still not over that.” Taylor described the first shot at Knight as a “warning” and said he hadn’t meant to hit his neighbor. The officers asked why he’d taken the second shot. What did he think was going to happen if he didn’t?

“I was getting buried,” Taylor replied.

“What’d you think he was going to do? How was he going to do it?”

“He’s got a back loader down there. With a backhoe on it. He’s got a big bulldozer.”

Up on Tableland, officers cataloged the scene into the early hours of Friday morning. Inside Taylor’s jam-packed trailer they found tools, a marijuana pipe, prescription medicine bottles, and three rifles. They didn’t find Knight’s missing .22. Irish didn’t visit the trailer. Taylor had admitted to the shooting, and thanks to the security cameras, Irish had video of Taylor shooting Knight in the back. He decided that it was enough to charge Taylor with murder.

Taylor was shocked. He assumed that he’d done the right thing. He’d called the authorities and defended himself when they didn’t show up. He thought that any legal troubles would be quickly sorted out. He never expected to be charged with murder.

Taylor was booked into the Klamath County jail, a small facility on the top of a ridge with a view of Mount Shasta, a snow-topped mountain framed by yellow rabbitbrush and a wide blue sky. He was assigned a public defender, Phil Studenberg, a genial city councilor in his sixties with wavy silver hair and sideburns. Joining him was a young defense attorney named Alycia Kersey, a former prosecutor who’d never defended an accused murderer at trial.

Irish, who handled 166 cases in 2016, conducted a quick investigation of what he believed was a cut-and-dried case. He and other officers interviewed a few witnesses, including Taylor’s ex-wife in Wisconsin and the Powlesses. Irish attended Knight’s autopsy and took photos, but he subsequently misplaced them. Eventually, Knight was cremated. Ian Pymm and Carolyn Decker spread his ashes on a rocky ridge on his property where Knight had liked to sit and read. 

A grand jury met a week from the day Taylor was arrested and determined that there was enough evidence to try him. In Oregon, murder carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years, with no possibility of a reduction for good behavior. On June 6, 2016, when Taylor was arraigned, he pleaded not guilty.

In Klamath County, justice is rarely in any hurry. While Taylor sat in jail, according to Kersey, the prosecution refused to turn over evidence. She filed motions to compel it to do so, first in September 2016 and again in March 2017, the same month Taylor was denied bail by a judge who’d watched the video of the shooting. “That is not self-defense,” the judge said, sending Taylor back to jail. Kersey also filed continuances—motions to postpone the trial—multiple times, arguing that the prosecution wasn’t providing what was needed to mount a defense.

In jail, Taylor met a man named Pete Seller who lived just below Tableland, down the road from the Palomino Deli. Like Taylor, Seller lived on his disability checks. Unlike him, Seller was married, his wife had a source of income, and they had water, chickens, and even a few head of cattle. He was behind bars for unlawful use of a weapon and menacing an Iraq war vet and lavender farmer, who Seller claimed was making advances on his teenage daughter. “I don’t trust anyone out here,” Seller said. “But the nights are beautiful.”

Taylor told Seller his story. Seller liked Taylor, describing him as a “quiet guy.” They both felt they were in jail for doing nothing wrong—for defending themselves or their family. When the charges against Seller were dropped, allowing him to go home, he offered to tow Taylor’s trailer to his own property. “Nobody was helping the poor guy,” he said. “I had the gas and the time.”

When Seller arrived at Taylor’s place, nearly two years since anyone had lived there, he found that it had been thoroughly trashed and looted. The trucks, Blondie and Handy Smurf, and Taylor’s tools had vanished. Taylor’s mattress lay in the sun. Empty pill bottles and an artificial Christmas tree mingled with volcanic rock and manzanita bushes. Inside the trailer, Seller found a rotting photo album, filled with pictures of Taylor and his kids.

6.

Klamath County charged more than a dozen people with homicide between 2014 and early 2019, but only two cases went to trial. The first, in 2017, involved a man who claimed that he’d been acting under “extreme emotional distress” when he shot and killed his boss at a rail yard in Klamath Falls. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The second homicide trial was Taylor’s.

The proceedings began on the morning of October 1, 2018. Taylor had been in jail for two and a half years at that point. He entered the courtroom wearing a high-and-tight haircut, a western-style plaid shirt, and cowboy boots borrowed from Kersey’s husband. He sat stiffly, never leaning against the back of his chair. Whenever the jury left the room, the deputies guarding him let him stand and stretch.

The state’s case was presented by a man named Cole Chase, who’d recently been rehired by the district attorney’s office after completing two years of probation for a 2014 incident in which he’d threatened a man with a handgun outside a Klamath Falls bar. It isn’t easy to retain professionals in a poor, remote county with a stagnant economy. When the DA rehired Cole, she told the local press that he was “the most qualified applicant” and had “dedicated himself to ensure that he upholds our office’s reputation.”

Selecting a jury in Taylor’s case was tricky. There was a raft of potential bias or conflict of interest. One person in the roughly 80-person jury pool went to church with a member of the prosecution’s team; another taught yoga with Kersey; another had been married by Phil Studenberg, the defense attorney. Half a dozen potential jurors had concealed-carry permits, all reportedly for self-protection.

Studenburg asked the pool whether any of them had ever known “a mean drunk.” Dozens of hands went up.

“My ex and our son. My son has never been bad to me, but I hear rumors.”

“My son-in-law is in prison because of alcohol and murder.”

“My ex-husband is not allowed in the state of Oregon, and my first husband passed away because of alcoholism.”

Studenberg asked whether anyone had ever used force in self-defense. Several women recounted stories of fighting back against violent partners. One elderly lady talked about hitting her abusive husband with an iron. One man raised his hand. He had been in Iran in the Air Force when the Shah was overthrown, and he’d had to do what he called “crowd control.”

“Were you armed?” Studenberg asked.

“Yes, sir, I was.”

“Was there a temptation to use the gun?”

“Not a temptation.”

“Did you shoot over their heads?”

“Initially.”

The airman, Richard Farrington, ended up as the jury foreman.

The prosecution opened by playing the surveillance footage of Taylor shooting Knight. “When you shoot someone in the back twice, that is not self-defense,” Chase told the jury. Oregon law states that defensive violence is acceptable only if a threat is “imminent.” In this case it wasn’t, Chase said, because Knight had been walking away. Kersey argued that Taylor had in fact felt that he was in danger, particularly when, after the first shot, Knight spun around and seemed to have a hand near where he kept his revolver. “Tim thinks he’s grabbing that gun out of his right rear pocket, and that’s why Tim takes that second shot,” Kersey said. “Not because he wants to kill him but he wants to live. He thinks he is going to die right there. He thinks they are going to bury his ass up there.”

When Taylor took the stand, Kersey asked him why he hadn’t packed up and left the mountain. He explained why he’d felt stuck—no money, no gas, no place to go. Even if he drove out, he’d have to pass Knight’s property. Kersey asked Taylor why he hadn’t sought refuge with a neighbor, a shy Vietnam vet who lived only a quarter-mile away. Taylor said that he didn’t know whose side the man was on. Kersey asked how Taylor felt watching the video of the shooting. “It’s hard. I haven’t had any therapy,” he replied, his voice breaking. Taylor had already made the same complaint in two lawsuits he’d filed: against Sheriff Skrah, for failing to respond to his 911 calls and to investigate the theft of his property after his arrest, and against the Klamath County Jail for not providing adequate health care. Both suits were dismissed. “I haven’t received any help to deal with any of this,” Taylor said. He began to cry.

“Somebody’s blood was going to be on the road of the Tableland. It was either going to be Tim or it was going to be Roy.”

In his closing argument, Studenberg emphasized that Taylor’s decision to shoot Knight had to be judged in the context of the mountain. “There is no law out there. It is law administered at the point of a gun, for the most part,” he said. “Who knows how many bodies are buried out in the Tableland that no one has ever found?”

“Somebody’s blood was going to be on the road of the Tableland,” Studenberg concluded. “It was either going to be Tim or it was going to be Roy.”

Cole Chase argued the opposite. “The law on the Tableland is no different than the law right here,” the prosecutor said. “You don’t get to shoot someone in the back because they have your phone.” Knight had been all bluster, Chase continued. If he’d been serious, he would have brought a bigger weapon. “This is a .22 that fits in a back pocket and holds five rounds,” Chase said of Knight’s gun. “If you’re going to be assaulting someone’s house, that’s not the gun you take with you. You know what you take with you if you intend to kill someone: You take a big black shotgun.”

The jury was sent to deliberate on October 5. The judge gave them only two options: guilty or not guilty of murder.

“When I first saw the video [of the shooting], I thought, Well, this is going to be quick,” Juror 103 said later. “But as the evidence started unfolding, it was evident that this man was terrorized.” She described Taylor as “simple,” with no idea what he was up against. “What I saw,” said Juror 388, “was someone visibly shaken to the core over what he had done, and grappling with the fact that he had taken someone’s life. There was nothing I saw in person or on tape that seemed to me at all deceptive or disingenuous.” That juror was retired from a forestry job and knew Tableland well. “I’ve been out there,” he said. “It’s a starkly beautiful place. But he [Taylor] just wasn’t mentally or psychologically equipped.”

Farrington, the foreman, believed that Taylor should have had a better exit strategy. If there’s one thing he’d learned in the military, Farrington said, it was to “know your back door. If bad dudes are banging on the front, have a way to get out of Dodge. Take your dog and get out of there. The rest of it ain’t worth your life.” He thought Taylor’s claim that he’d fired the first shot as a warning was “bullshit.” Still, Farrington felt sorry for Taylor. “I kind of get the pioneering spirit, and from what I understand he had a shit life up to then,” Farrington said. He was indignant on Taylor’s behalf that the law didn’t come when he called 911. “I think the sheriff’s department should be sued within an inch of its life,” Farrington said.

After six hours, the jury came back. The judge asked if it had reached a unanimous decision.

“We have not,” Farrington said, his voice mournful.

“You are just hopelessly locked?”

“We are six and six.”

The judge declared a mistrial.

7.

Taylor’s retrial was scheduled for May 2019. The defense wanted the jurors to visit the scene of Knight’s death, to feel its isolation for themselves, and for that to happen—for a vehicle carrying 12 people to make it up the unpaved, rutted length of Nagelridge Way—they had to wait until the snow melted.

In the intervening months, there were several developments in Taylor’s case; some seemed to push it in his favor, others not. Klamath County reconvened a grand jury to add a new charge. Jurors at the retrial would now have the option of convicting Taylor of first-degree manslaughter, which carried a minimum sentence of ten years.

Meanwhile, during a visit to Tableland, photographer Michael Hanson had talked to Daryl Malvern, the husband of Sara Palomino, who said that Taylor had done the right thing, because Knight had been planning to kill him. In January, I convinced Malvern to talk to me, too. Sitting at a table in the back of the Palomino Deli, looking younger than his 50-plus years and dressed in a T-shirt with a marijuana-leaf pattern printed on it, Malvern said that he’d considered Knight a close friend. Not only was Knight capable of killing Taylor, Malvern claimed, but he’d had an active plan to do so. “He talked about killing the guy all the time,” Malvern said. “And he was very serious.”

The original idea was to ask Taylor to return the solar panels to Knight’s trailer, blow him away with a shotgun, and claim he’d been an intruder. Then, Knight and Paul Strong decided to run Taylor off instead. Malvern said that Strong was interested in buying Knight’s property but didn’t want Taylor as a neighbor.  The two men would pop by the deli and update Malvern on the progress of their campaign. (Strong denied Malvern’s allegations and said Malvern just wanted to buy a piece of Knight’s property, which Strong has since purchased.)

“Roy had him scared to death, he really did,” Malvern said. “He had that man trembling. Roy pulled guns on him many, many times. If he didn’t leave, Roy planned on murdering him.”

Malvern said he kept his distance from the feud. “I knew what was coming,” he said. He admitted that shooting Knight in the back wasn’t a good look but believed that Taylor was justified in doing it. “Do I think he had the right to kill Roy? I do,” Malvern said.

With Malvern’s permission, I played a tape of the interview for Detective Irish, the district attorney, and Taylor’s lawyers. Irish went out to Beatty and interviewed Malvern the following month. Kersey promised to call Malvern as a witness at the retrial.

But when May 2019 rolled around, the county decided that the roads were still too dangerous to send a bus full of jurors up the mountain. During a scouting trip, Irish took a photograph of a puddle on the way to Taylor’s property that ran the entire width of the road. The trial was postponed until the fall.

Taylor remained in jail, waiting. When I visited, he showed me pictures of Josh and Josh’s infant son, who looked uncannily like his grandfather. Three years after killing Knight, Taylor was surer than ever that he did the right thing when he pulled the trigger. He could recite the numbers of various Oregon statutes that he felt applied to his case. His lawyers thought his best shot at freedom was to keep emphasizing his naivete and ineptitude at life on the mountain: He hadn’t known what he was getting into when he moved to Tableland; he hadn’t known that his first shot connected with Knight’s body, because he wasn’t that experienced with firearms; he was deathly afraid of Knight. Taylor, however, preferred a narrative that painted him as a competent survivor exercising his constitutional right to protect himself when the law refused to. He’d acted rationally, he insisted.

The social contract is not a buffet—if you opt out because you want absolute freedom, you have to accept that no one will come to save your ass when trouble starts.

When I suggested that perhaps in Knight he saw the drunken menace of his father, Taylor dismissed the idea. He’d loved his dad; he even had a tattoo of a dragon and a Viking warrior’s skull on his shoulder, symbolizing his father’s strength and wisdom. The Klamath County sheriff’s department was the problem in his life.

Taylor also disagreed with what I took to be the moral of his story: The social contract is not a buffet—if you opt out because you want absolute freedom, you have to accept that no one will come to save your ass when trouble starts. Taylor still wished he could live “back in the 1800s and before,” a time of “limited government, people depending on themselves,” when Americans weren’t such “pansies” and hardened criminals were hanged for wrongdoing. If he ever got out of jail, he wanted to try living off the grid again. “You’ve always got to take a risk to have your freedom,” he said. At the same time, he thought that the law should have come when he called 911, that it should have protected his property while he was in jail, that it should have provided him with therapy, antidepressants, and painkillers while he sat in a cell.

“I will be the first person to admit I’m far from perfect,” Taylor wrote me in a letter. “I have made many mistakes throughout my life and will continue to make mistakes. I regret deeply having to take someone else’s life. I have relived that horrid week every night since then and highly doubt I will ever get over what had transpired and will live with it for the rest of my life. And the most difficult part—where do I go from here and how?”

One thing was certain: Taylor wouldn’t be returning to his plot on Tableland. Because he’d stopped paying for the place, it eventually went up for sale again online. As of this writing, it‘s still available. It could be yours for a mere $19,200. There’s a lovely butte on the property. If you scramble to the top, you can see a vast sweep of landscape. Below lies the sprawl of Knight’s compound and the shaggy wreckage of Taylor’s place, its thin soil stained with blood. Far in the distance there’s a dark tree line where the pines begin, and beyond that, blue along the horizon, the mountains.

---

Update

In the weeks before the retrial, Klamath County offered Taylor a deal: If he agreed to plead “no contest” to criminally negligent homicide, he would be sentenced to 75 months in prison. Taylor took the deal on September 10, 2019, rather than go to trial and risk being convicted of manslaughter, which would carry a heftier sentence. With credit for time served and reductions for good behavior and participation in prison programs, he could be out in a couple of years. Taylor will serve his sentence at a state prison after already spending three years, three months, and 17 days in county jail.