December 23, 2006

• Papa Pilgrim has decided to cut a deal with the DA.

  Here in the midst of my Christmas Countdown, with just two more entries to go, I thought I’d insert something a little different.  It has been relatively easy to recycle the old posts, and easy is how I have wanted it.  I was feeling wretched for a while, physically.  Mentally and spiritually I’m in much better shape than this body is.  This entry is also partially recycled.  It’s a new development in an old story that had caught the interest of some of my readers.

  This is Robert Alan Hale AKA Papa Pilgrim.  We have been hearing and reading about him in the local news for over three years.  First, it was a running feud he had with the National Park Service over his family’s clearing of a road through parkland for access to their “homestead”.

  Then last year he was indicted for kidnapping, incest, sexual assault, a total of thirty charges, and went on the lam.  The manhunt made news for a few weeks.  When he was spotted by a railroad cop, he went peacefully to jail.  This week, prosecutors said he is ready to plead no-contest to reduced charges.

  Papa P has had an interesting and eventful life.  In 1958, he eloped with the sixteen-year-old daughter of John Connally, a Texas political strategist who would later become governor and be wounded during the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

  At the coroner’s inquest, Bobby Hale said she’d been alone in their apartment with the shotgun when he returned home from looking for her. He tried to persuade her to put it down. He said he’d grabbed for the gun and it went off.  Who knows?  The death was ruled a suicide according to Connolly’s account, and an accident according to Papa Pilgrim.  Perhaps because Bobby’s father was much-respected FBI agent and former football hero, I. B. Hale, authorities were inclined to take his word for what happened.

  John Connally was one of the people who didn’t trust Bobby Hale.  Author Seymour Hersh is apparently another one.  In a 1997 book about the Kennedy administration,
  “The Dark Side of Camelot,” Hersh…

  …places Bobby and
  his twin brother, Billy, at the heart of a possible plot involving his
  father to blackmail President Kennedy.

  Papa Pilgrim dismisses the book’s account as
  a ridiculous lie and slander of his late father. The Hales had nothing
  to do with a burglary, he said.

  “That’s the most preposterous thing I ever heard in my life,” he said. “My father was one of the most adored men in Texas.”

  Hersh’s story is based on FBI documents
  obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. It involves Judith
  Campbell Exner, the woman revealed by a congressional committee in 1975
  to have been having an affair with the president even as she had close
  ties with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana and mob associate Johnny
  Rosselli.

  The affair was known to FBI chief Hoover. He
  had Campbell’s Los Angeles apartment under FBI surveillance in August
  1962, when agents observed two young men break in through a sliding
  glass door on a balcony.

  According to FBI documents in the case
  examined by the Anchorage Daily News, the burglars’ getaway car, a blue
  Chevy Corvette, was registered to I.B. Hale, the former agent who was
  now chief of security for General Dynamics.

  Hersh’s account was also corroborated by an ABC-TV documentary.

  The FBI said the description of Hale’s sons
  is “generally similar” to that of the two burglars seen at the glass
  door, one of whom later drove away in the car registerd to Hale. The
  Dallas FBI office reported one of the sons drove a Chevy sports car and
  was possibly in California.

  The FBI agents did not try
  to intercept the burglars or report the incident to police –
  presumably, Hersh wrote, because they would have blown the cover for
  their own stakeout.

  Exactly what happened in the apartment is
  unknown; the FBI agent interviewed by Hersh said agents assumed an
  electronic listening device was planted.

  Three months later, Hersh wrote, the Kennedy
  administration shocked the Pentagon and Congress in awarding what was
  then the largest U.S. military aircraft contract in history. The $6.5
  billion contract for the experimental TFX jet fighter went to General
  Dynamics, a distant second to Boeing in all the procurement studies.

  Had Kennedy been blackmailed? The surprise
  contract inspired investigative hearings in Congress, which found no
  collusion between the company and high government officials. But investigators
  did not have access to the burglary information in the FBI files, Hersh
  said. The congressional investigation, unfinished, was called off after
  Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

  adn.com 10-06-2003

  That same ADN story published at the time of his first coming to public notice over the Park Service charges and reprinted after his indictment for imprisoning his teenage daughter and forcing her to have sex with him, tells of him dropping out and doing drugs along with a lot of us in the ‘sixties.  Then, in 1974, when he was 33 and she was 16, he met the woman who would bear his large family, eight children, and become Mama Pilgrim.  But before they changed their names to Pilgrim, they changed them to Sunstar for a while.

  They squatted on public lands in the lower 48 and were a thorn in the sides of authorities, neighbors and benefactors, including Jack Nicholson who let them live on his New Mexico property.  One neighbor in New Mexico, Carolyn Vail,

  …said she found the kids well-mannered and impressively at ease roaming the nearby national forest wilderness on horseback. But she had trouble with Bob and his “pretty off-the-wall attitudes,” she said.

  “He takes the Bible and interprets it according to Bob, sometimes out of context, sometimes in,” Vail said.

  Vail said other neighbors complained about the Hales but she got on well with them, except for the time when they stole hay from her family’s barn. The Vails had to start locking their barn. (Hale said he took the hay in an emergency for a dying horse.)

  “I didn’t like the fact that they would take it without asking,” she said. “I told them if they need it next time, just ask. But they will not lie to you. They will tell you God told them it was OK.”

  Fleeing a forest fire in 1998, they came to Alaska.  That’s about the time that Preacher Bob Sunstar became Papa Pilgrim.  One of his sons got in trouble for killing 2 sublegal wild sheep in 2001.

  Fish and Wildlife Protection trooper Todd Mountain said Papa Pilgrim described the family’s economic plight at the scene as all eight children cried, as if on command. When Mountain insisted on writing the ticket anyway, he said Papa turned angry.

  “His face got beet red. I was going to hell, quickly. I was worse than the terrorists,” Mountain recalled.

  Pilgrim recounted the incident differently, insisting one sheep was legal and the other killed accidentally. He said they were turned in by other hunters jealous of his family’s success.

  The family was sweet again at the jury trial, with the small children perched on the courtroom railing, Mountain said.

  “They tried to pull the strings of the heart,” Mountain said. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

  Maybe Papa wasn’t too sure it would work for him with a jury now that he has alienated at least some of the kids, or maybe he got tired of sitting in jail waiting and wondering how the trial would go.  Maybe Mama Pilgrim or one of his kids persuaded him to cop a plea and save that daughter from having to testify against him.  Maybe the prosecutor just wanted to get the case off the books.  Whatever, the wait for a trial is over.  His thirty separate charges have been consolidated into three:  sexual assault, incest, and coercion.  He is expected to receive a 14-year sentence after his plea.

  

  • 6:44 pm
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