A jailed man who has confessed to murdering a gay couple in their Happy Valley, California, home last summer told a reporter that he helped set the June 18, 1999, blazes that damaged three Sacramento-area synagogues and destroyed the 5,000-item library of Congregation B’nai Israel in Land Park.
“It was the cusp of my life where I was putting faith in my beliefs,” Matthew Williams, 31, was quoted as saying in the January 12 Sacramento Bee, claiming that he and two others poured a gas-and-oil mixture on the library floor before igniting a fireplace lighter.
Williams also told the paper that he helped set the fires as an initiation rite to join an organization he declined to name. When he and his brother Tyler, 29, were arrested at their homes for the double murders, authorities found literature from the World Church of the Creator, one of whose members was denied space to distribute pamphlets by the Akron-Summit County (Ohio) Public Library.
Posted January 17, 2000.