A Twisted Faith: A Minister's Obsession and the Murder That Destroyed a Church

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A Twisted Faith

St. Martin's Press

Chapter One

Connected by Agate Pass Bridge to the Kitsap Peninsula to the north and by the state ferry system to Seattle to the east, Bainbridge was isolated and insular-which was a blessing, as far as newcomers were concerned. Islanders hated being part of Kitsap County, the poorest of the major counties around Puget Sound. To resist the influence of a county that allowed chain stores like Wal-Mart to take root like so many scattered weeds, the entire island incorporated as a city in 1991.

It was that kind of insularity and attitude that brought members of Christ Community Church close together and, ultimately, set tragedy in motion.

Many of the Christ Community Church faithful were part of the island's old guard. Families like the Glasses, Klovens, LaGrandeurs, and Smiths were of somewhat-modest means. While some were ferry ticket-takers, checkers, housecleaners, or baristas, several, like building contractor Einar Kloven, had their own businesses. Dan Hacheney ran an auto repair shop a few doors down from the ferry landing with service to Seattle. Dan and Suzy Claflin owned a restaurant. James Glass and his son Jimmy were skilled carpenters.

Some congregants, like the Andersons and the Mathesons, lived off the island on tribal land in Suquamish, the birthplace and final resting place of Chief Sealth, for whom the city of Seattle was named. Suquamish was a quick drive over the Agate Pass Bridge. A few miles down the road was Poulsbo, an orderly enclave best known for its Norwegian bakeries and a marina that on a summer's day boasted a rainbow of spinnakers from one side of Liberty Bay to the other.

Raised mostly on the outskirts of Poulsbo, Nick Hacheney came from a troubled family. Observers would later suggest that Nick had been somewhat neglected as a child in a chaotic household, and that it was that lack of attention that had shaped him more than anything else. He was the fat kid without many friends. He was the one who always tried to be outgoing but still managed to be a loner. It wasn't until he picked up a Bible and dug deep into the meaning of God's Word that he seemed to find his place. It was God's calling, he insisted, that gave him strength and shaped every bit of his character. In his family, he became the rock, the point person for every family calamity. When his brother Todd, a drug addict, was rendered brain-dead after being hit by a car on Bainbridge Island, it was Nick who instructed his parents to remove Todd from life support.

"My parents didn't have the stomach for it," he told a friend much later. "But I knew what God wanted."

Nick was seen as the strongest and most responsible member of his family. Nick's mother, Sandra Hacheney, was a fiercely independent woman who ran a home day care and took in foster children whenever the spirit moved her, which was quite frequently. Nick would later gripe that his mother favored his brothers, his sister, and even the foster kids over him.

"I don't think she ever loved me," he told a friend. "Actually, I think she hated me."

For her part, Sandra Hacheney seldom said a cross word about her youngest.

Dan Hacheney always knew his greatest legacy would be his children, especially Nick. Even when he was a little boy, there was no doubt among the Hacheneys that Nick was the golden child. He had a backstory that confirmed it. Dan and Sandra Hacheney told the story often. Nick recited it too, albeit with a sheepish sense of burden.

"You have no idea," he told a friend, "what it is like to be handed over to God."

It was 1970 and Dan and Sandra Hacheney were in a state of terror. Nicholas Daniel was turning a deep shade of blue. As the auto mechanic and his wife jumped into the car and drove to a Bremerton hospital, they were sure the youngest of their four children was going to die.

At twenty-eight, Dan was a rare combination of toughness and gentleness. His hands were never clean, always stained with motor oil from a job that kept food on the table and Sandra washing coveralls. A year younger than her husband, Sandra could be a somewhat sullen figure, given to what some believed were long bouts of depression. She had dark eyes and hair, like Dan and their baby.

Nick gasped for air in his mother's arms and Dan knew only one thing to do. So convinced was he that he couldn't get to the hospital in time, he parked the car on the edge of the roadway.

He began to pray.

"Dear God, don't let him die. If you let him live, I'll give him over to you right now, forever. Please, God, you raise my son! You be his father! Please, God, don't let this boy die."

A moment later, the blue cast on his son's face was transformed to the rosy flush of a healthy baby.

"Thank you, Jesus," Dan said.

Bremerton, the blue-collar heart of Kitsap County, had its positive attributes: decent-paying jobs, cheap housing, mountain and water views at every turn. Kitsap County's largest city was home to a U.S. Navy shipyard, submarine base, and port for aircraft carriers, and for many years that meant nothing more than topless bars, tattoo parlors, sailors on leave, and the women they left behind on the prowl when ships and subs departed for tours of the Pacific. Things had improved somewhat in Bremerton, though it was still "Bummertown" to many, the butt of Seattle jokes. But in 1990 a great irony came to pass when Money magazine named Bremerton "America's Most Livable City." Even locals, proud as they were of the completely unexpected designation by a well-known publication, wondered out loud if Money's editors had bothered to visit the town in person.

Dawn Tienhaara had been raised in Bremerton. Her father, Donald, was a shipyard worker; her mother, Diana, a homemaker. Dawn was the oldest and the only girl in a brood that included three brothers-all named with the initial D. She was a honey blonde with pretty green eyes, a tiny birthmark above her upper lip, and a knack for memorization that, when she was a schoolgirl, took her all the way to the Rose Garden of the White House and a meeting with President Ronald Reagan when she competed in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Diana Tienhaara was an anxious woman who by her own admission required more love than she could get from her husband, Donald. Diana wanted a happy marriage, but she didn't quite know how to achieve it. Her search for affection and acceptance sometimes brought turmoil. In February 1980, Diana left her husband, daughter, and son, Dennis, to live with the father of a baby she named Daron, whom she conceived during an extramarital affair. After some soul searching and a flood of tears, she returned to the family home on Rimrock Avenue in East Bremerton. She didn't tell her youngest son about his true parentage until he was a young adult. During the difficult times, Dawn lent her mother as much support as a child could. Sometimes Diana would find small notes from her daughter under her pillow. You are great, Mom! I love you.

That Nick and Dawn would fall in love at Northwest College of the Assemblies of God-known informally as Northwest Bible College but celebrated and mocked by some as "Northwest Bridal College"-in Kirkland, Washington, was hardly a foregone conclusion. Those who attended the east-of-Seattle college with the young couple were surprised by the relationship. Dawn was an achiever, after all. She wasn't gorgeous, but she was pretty in a girl-next-door way. Her roommates at the time saw Nick, on the other hand, as a loser-a guy "who tried too hard" and was clueless about it. He was brash and pushy, but Dawn was no match for his everlasting persuasion. Always a little overweight and with his hairline starting to recede while he was still in his teens, Nick was more concerned about the spiritual than the physical. No one would have said he was handsome. And yet, he had a kind of magnetism that some couldn't resist.

Nick proposed marriage to Dawn over Oreo cookies and milk on Alki Beach, not far from her grandparents' home in West Seattle, and the two married soon after, on April 20, 1991. They moved into a place in Bremerton; Dawn found work at the credit union and Nick set his sights on his long-held dream: to be a youth pastor under the tutelage of his beloved pastor, Bob Smith, at Christ Community Church on Bainbridge Island.

Despite being so capable-she was, after all, her high school valedictorian-Dawn surprised many with how quickly she abdicated all decision making to Nick. She appeared to go along with the fundamentalist edict that submitting to her husband's authority was God's plan and the greatest gift a woman could give him. When Nick's decisions seemed foolish, Dawn backed him all the way. If he wanted to take in a troubled congregant, she agreed, although she longed for privacy. When he charged hundreds of dollars in music CDs for church friends on his credit card, Dawn shrugged it off, even though she'd had her eye on a new Jaclyn Smith outfit for work.

Years later, a woman who lived with Nick and Dawn in the early days of their marriage stumbled onto a cache of dildos and other sex toys in the master bathroom of a house they were remodeling on Nipsic Avenue in East Bremerton. Crystal Gurney, a twenty-year-old church member going through a bad patch with a new marriage at the time, wasn't horrified by what she'd discovered. She'd lived a tough life of her own and had seen plenty. Long after her friend's death, though, Crystal grappled with her observation. "It just didn't seem like Dawn at all. Not the girl I knew. I wondered how it was that Nick got her into that."

Chapter Two

On this day in the mid-1980s, drivers whizzing by on Highway 305, which bisects the island from Agate Passage to the ferry landing, scratched their heads, wondering just what was being built where the ground was broken. A bank? New restaurant?

There was no marker to proclaim what it would be.

Finally, in what would one day prove to be a twist of irony, Einar Kloven, who had volunteered countless hours of labor, made a sign and hung it up facing the highway: NEW PRISON.

No one laughed with more gusto than Pastor Bob, or "PB," as congregants called him. He could take a joke. He was the kind of pastor who'd cry with the hurting, feed the hungry from his own plate, and shoulder the burdens of those who could no longer carry them alone. Growing up in a rural Northwest community had taught him not only to love God but to cherish the relationships that united the disparate. PB and Adele were married after he graduated from Northwest College in 1972. After he'd served as a pastor on the Yakama Indian Reservation in south-central Washington, the young family moved to Kitsap County, first leading a church in Bremerton and then, in 1982, moving to Bainbridge Island to oversee an Assemblies of God congregation.

The new Pentecostal church on Moran Road was the culmination of a dream. Everything was coming together as it had been mapped out, every nail lovingly hammered into place. One hundred Bainbridge area families had joined forces to build a house of God.

Yet PB Smith and his congregants weren't the only ones with a dream that involved the church on Moran Road. Far away, in California, a woman named Pamela Bily had a vision-a gift God had given her on many occasions-that her pastor husband, Robert, and their children would live on the northeast side of an island near Seattle. It was a remarkable and vivid dream. Like putting a pin in a wall map, God had shown her just where it was.

It was Bainbridge Island, Washington.

When Pamela told her husband, Robert, about it, there was only one thing to do.

In his forties, Robert Bily, an exceedingly fit 173-pound six-footer, was a Stanford University graduate who had been a senior manager in his father's cheese-processing and distribution business, a leader in a financially troubled church in San Jose, and an investor and board member of a computer company that went kaput. Each endeavor brought new burdens, mostly financial. He came to the Seattle area in the early 1990s to work with TV cook Graham Kerr, a devout Christian who had achieved worldwide fame as the flamboyant host of TV's The Galloping Gourmet. The two had conversations about marketing a soy-based foodstuff that Robert had developed to feed the Christian masses. There was also talk of books, a new television program, and a worldwide network. But egos clashed and the project dragged on until, like other good-intentioned endeavors that Robert dove into headfirst, it failed.

Along with Pamela and their children, Robert arrived on Bainbridge Island with the remnants of a once-luxurious California life: Persian rugs, a Mercedes-Benz, and stylish wardrobes. Robert was undeterred by any setback. Pamela's dream had brought them there. God had a plan.

He told Robert to work for Him at the church led by Bob Smith.

Robert Bily was an unfaltering proponent of the apostolic approach to Christianity, which sought the creation of new churches made of nondenominational congregants. Robert brought strengths: management skills, a deep understanding of the Bible and how it should be used as a blueprint for modern lives, and the ambition to make the church into something greater than it had been. Robert saw Bob Smith's church as the launching pad for a profound and ultimately world-changing movement. The way to get there was to listen very carefully to God, act upon His wishes, follow His direction, and, above all, understand that being a Christian was more than just believing in the Word of God; it was living it. All day. Every day.

At first Robert taught Sunday-school classes in which he recast some of the themes to better reflect his beliefs that church denominations were divisive and against God's message of Christian unity.

He convincingly pointed to passages in the Bible that illustrated what it was that God had truly sought, and that man-through church denominations-had corrupted the message of God. He pointed to the etymology of specific words, pulling out scriptural passages and historical references. He had a lawyer's mind for presenting his point of view in a conclusive and logical manner.

Over time, Robert went from teaching children to offering sermons. He was powerful and persuasive. When he preached from the pulpit that one of the accepted tenets of the Assemblies of God church-that every Spirit-filled believer would speak in tongues-was in error, he had biblical backup at his fingertips.

"Robert knows better than I do," PB said to a church member who wondered aloud if they were on the right track.

Some members of the congregation were uncomfortable with the transfer of power. Although by this point Robert had been a part of Christ Community for years, it was still seen as PB's church. PB was a gentle and caring man. Robert seemed to try his best, but neither sympathy nor empathy appeared to be in his repertoire. Nevertheless, PB and the church board promoted him to pastor.

Not long after Robert managed a toehold in the church leadership, Nick Hacheney, then in his early twenties, arrived to serve as a youth pastor. It was a surprise appointment, made by PB. Nick and PB had known each other since Nick was a kid. Both men, with almost a father-son bond between them, saw as essential the nurturing of youth in their understanding of he love and power of the Lord.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Twisted Faith by Gregg Olsen Copyright © 2010 by Gregg Olsen. Excerpted by permission.
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