On
Tuesday evening, as tourists snapped photos in front of the White
House, a young man with blond hair and blue eyes approached the black
iron fence.
Kyle Odom wasn’t there to take pictures, though.
He was there to deliver a message to the president.
A
Secret Service agent spotted Odom tossing something over the fence and
approached him. When the agent ran his name through a law enforcement
database, a red flag popped up: an arrest warrant issued just two days
earlier on the other side of the country.
The charge: attempted murder.
Arriving
seemingly out of nowhere, Odom was arrested at the White House,
bringing a sudden end to a two-day hunt for the Marine veteran.
It
also provided a bizarre coda to an already baffling crime saga, one
that stretched from rural Idaho to the nation’s capital and potentially
threatened the lives of 50 members of Congress.
When
Secret Service agents unwittingly stopped Odom, the 30-year-old was the
only suspect in the shooting of an Evangelical pastor in Coeur d’Alene,
Idaho, on Sunday. According to authorities, Odom had ambushed Tim
Remington in his church parking lot, shooting the popular pastor in the
head and back before he vanished.
Remington, who survived the
point-blank shooting in what one church member called a “miracle,” had
appeared a day earlier with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) at an event hosted by
his presidential campaign. That led to speculation that the shooting
was politically motivated.
But Odom’s manifesto suggests that the shooting, if he did it, was something else entirely: the act of an unraveling mind.
The 21-page manifesto,
which authorities say Odom sent to his parents as well as several Idaho
television stations, is a window into what he was thinking.
According
to Coeur d’Alene police, Odom has a history of mental illness. In his
manifesto, he outlined his path to Sunday’s shooting in clear but
increasingly paranoid prose.
He admitted to plotting to shoot
Remington. He also claimed that the pastor was part of a vast alien
conspiracy to enslave the human race — a conspiracy that Odom believed
extended to Congress.
“My last resort was to take actions to
bring this to the public’s attention,” Odom wrote in the manifesto. “I
hope that something good comes of it. Just realize that I’m a good
person, and I’m completely innocent. Also realize that the ‘people’ I
killed are not what you think.”
‘Who is Kyle Odom?’
The manifesto opens with the question on the minds of many Americans: “Who is Kyle Odom?”
“Born
and raised in North Idaho,” Odom wrote. “Grew up in a loving family.
Joined the Marine Corps after high school. Developed an interest in
science. Went to school for a degree in Biochemistry. Won numerous
scholarships and awards. Graduated Magna Cum Laude then got invited to
prestigious university to work on genetics.
“Check my personal documents,” Odom continued. “As you can see, I’m pretty smart. I’m also 100% sane, 0% crazy.”
But
the documents Odom sent to local media reveal an intense and dangerous
paranoia, as well as an obsession over “hypersexual,” mind-controlling
Martians.
“Everything started while I was at University of
Idaho,” Odom wrote. “Spring 2014 was my final semester and was taking a
heavy course load. I was very stressed due to the intensity of my
schedule, so I searched for a way to cope. I discovered meditation,
which seemed to help, so it became part of my daily routine. As I
learned more about meditation, I became interested in consciousness and
our ability to affect it. I kept working on my meditation techniques and
began achieving extreme states of consciousness.”
One night in February 2014, Odom was meditating when he said he had an out-of-body experience.
“I entered
a space that was completely dark and had no awareness of my physical
boundaries/orientation,” he wrote. “I felt very peaceful there until a
blue light began to approach me. As the blue light got closer, I
realized that it was another being.”
When Odom awoke, he had tears in his eyes, according to his manifesto.
At
first, the alleged alien encounter seemed like a blessing for Odom.
“The remainder of the semester became exceedingly easy for me,” he
wrote. “It felt like I had tapped into some kind of power. I was
exerting no mental effort even though the classes had been extremely
difficult before.”
But Odom’s close encounter would prove to be the beginning of his nightmare.
Odom
accepted an offer from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, to work
on a PhD in human genetics, but he quickly dropped out because the work
was too easy, thanks to his alien awakening, he wrote.
“The day
after I decided to leave, my life became a living hell,” Odom wrote. He
couldn’t sleep. After a few days, aliens posing as classmates tried to
provoke him to become “the next school shooter,” he wrote, so he left
Texas and returned to his home town of Coeur d’Alene.
“This is
where the story gets weird,” he wrote. On a flight home after a job
interview, Odom began to suspect that strangers were sending him secret
messages. Newspaper headlines had hidden meanings.
“It was
blatantly obvious they were doing something to me, but I didn’t know
what,” he wrote. “I had applied to several government agencies before
this happened, so I thought this might be their way of contacting me.”
Back in Idaho, a friendly text message would put a beloved local pastor in Odom’s path.
‘Whoever I was dealing with was extraterrestrial’
In
Coeur d’Alene, Odom received a text message from John Padula, the Altar
Church’s outreach pastor, inviting him to attend service, he wrote.
When Odom first went to the church, though, “something felt very wrong,”
he wrote. “I felt as if my life were in danger and I became so
uncomfortable I had to leave.”
Odom began receiving text messages from Remington, but he saw them as something more menacing.
“At
first they were innocuous bible messages, but then he started
threatening me,” Odom wrote. “He sent messages talking about ‘their
power’ and other things. He did all of this through bible verses so it
would not look suspicious.”
When
Remington allegedly sent Odom a text reading “angels,” the Marine
veteran saw helicopters flying around his house. “At this point, I knew I
was in trouble.”
Odom then began to experience strange sexual
feelings — “it felt like someone was manually pumping blood into my
penis” — and he heard suggestive songs inside his head, he wrote.
Soon
the songs gave way to a voice telling him that he was going to be
“sacrificed like Jesus and get beheaded,” he said. When a man knocked on
his door with a religious pamphlet, Odom “became completely delirious”
and “thought for sure I was going to die.”
He bought a one-way
ticket to see his family in Albuquerque, and he said he thought the man
next to him on the flight was reading his mind. At the baggage claim,
Odom believed he was “surrounded” by aliens, whom he could detect by
their constant “sniffing.”
“The sniff is something they do all the time,” he wrote. “I think it has to do with dominance.”
Odom
thought he saw the aliens everywhere. They disguised themselves as
humans but really looked like giant green frogs with proboscises on the
top of their heads, he wrote.
“As time went on, they started
coaxing me to go outside alone,” he wrote. “I was scared to death they
would kill me, so I refused. Eventually, they threatened to harm my
family, which caused me to give in to them. I told them I would do
whatever they want if they left my family alone. They responded by
saying ‘Go to church.’ I knew they meant The Altar, so I agreed to go
when I got back.”
At The Altar, Odom smelled something like “a
reptile and vinegar,” he wrote. “I realized that whoever I was dealing
with was extraterrestrial, so I became very scared.”
At times,
Odom’s manifesto appears to acknowledge that he is delusional. “I began
to hear voices more often and I began to hallucinate things that I knew
weren’t real,” he wrote. But he blames the voices and visions not on his
own mind but on telepathic aliens.
Part of his alien obsession appears to have been sexual.
“They
also started playing with me sexually,” he wrote of his Martian
tormentors, who he labeled “hypersexual.” “Both the males and the
females would play out their sexual fantasies in my mind.”
Once, in a grocery bakery, Odom believed he was “surrounded by a bunch of old men” who were actually aliens.
“They started stimulating” him and ordering him to perform sexual favors, he wrote.
Odom’s tormenting visions caused him to attempt suicide twice, he said in his manifesto.
“I
filled a charcoal grill with lit coals, put it in my car and rolled up
the windows,” he wrote. “I reclined my seat, laid there calmly, then
fell asleep.”
But the aliens didn’t allow him to die, Odom wrote.
“They woke me up in an extreme panic, which caused me to get out of the car,” he wrote.
According
to his manifesto, Odom then checked himself into the local Veterans
Affairs hospital. A VA spokesman was not available Tuesday night to
confirm whether Odom received treatment at the center.
After
leaving the hospital, Odom returned to the Altar Church, where he
eventually found himself face to face with pastor Remington.
‘My life was ruined’
It’s
unclear whether Odom actually met with Remington, who emerged from a
coma Monday and has not spoken publicly of the shooting. In Odom’s
manifesto, however, the Marine veteran describes sitting down with the
pastor sometime around August of last year.
“We were in mid
conversation when he suddenly revealed himself to me,” Odom wrote. “I
have no clue how he did it, but it looked as if his human face became
his real face. … His eyes … were huge and bulging, the eyelids were
darker green, and the irises were yellow/brown with slit pupils.”
Odom
thought the church was going to turn him into a “sex slave,” he wrote,
but when that didn’t happen, he left and didn’t return, allegedly until
the shooting Sunday.
For
a while, it appeared as if his nightmare might be ending. He returned
to school, studying pharmacology at North Idaho College, he said.
“I began to recover,” he wrote.
“Unfortunately,
they followed me to school,” he said of the aliens. “There were several
of them in every class I took. They made it impossible for me to study,
and they continually harassed me especially while I took tests.”
Odom
wrote that he was targeted because of his knowledge of genetics and
because the aliens had a hard time controlling his mind.
“I was
too smart for my own good, so they decided to remove me from society,”
he wrote. “They were worried I might change the way other people think,
which could lead to problems. Problems in the form of a scientific
revolution.”
After trying to kill himself twice, Odom felt that his only option was to go after the aliens, he wrote.
“My life was ruined,” he explained. “Ruined by an intelligent species of amphibian-humanoid from Mars.”
The
manifesto doesn’t discuss why, exactly, Odom allegedly went after
pastor Remington, only that Remington and Padula were supposedly aliens
or the aliens’ “puppets.”
But the manifesto helps explain why Odom traveled to Washington after the shooting and tried to communicate with the president.
On
Tuesday night, Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said that Odom
drove from his home town to Boise, Idaho, where he boarded a flight to
the nation’s capital. White said it was not clear how Odom was allowed
to travel, but he might have boarded before he was identified as a
suspect.
The manifesto suggests that Odom traveled to
Washington to deliver a message to Obama. Part of his letter is
addressed to the president.
“I want to thank you for your
sacrifice to this country,” it begins, before suggesting that the
president is controlled by aliens.
“They brag to me about what they do to you,” Odom wrote. “… I hope you stop letting them humiliate you. … It’s time someone took a stand to end this nonsense. Can you think of a better legacy than that?”
The
manifesto also includes a list of “noteworthy Martians.” On the list
are 50 members of Congress — belonging to both parties — as well as
roughly three dozen members of the “Israeli leadership,” including
“every single Prime Minister since 1948.”
“This
is by no means an all-inclusive list,” Odom wrote. “Martians are
ubiquitous. They exist at every level of society in every nation. Some
have blue collar jobs, while other occupy positions of power. They
control our government, our military, and Corporate America as well.
They keep track of every ‘wild’ human on the planet and manage us like
animals in a zoo. Our ‘freedom’ is a carefully crafted illusion.”
It’s
unclear what Odom was trying to deliver to Obama when he was arrested
Tuesday night, although it could have been flash drives with his
manifesto on them, similar to those he sent to his parents and Idaho
media.
White, the Coeur d’Alene police chief, said the manifesto
had “definitely played a part in raising our awareness and concern”
about Odom as a fugitive. He said that authorities were stumped
about where Odom had gone until he emerged on social media Tuesday.
“Things
are not what they appear to be. The world is ruled by [an] ancient
civilization from Mars. Pastor Tim was one of them, and he was the
reason my life was ruined,” Odom wrote in a Facebook post, changing his
profile photo to a picture of an alien. “I will be sharing my story with
as many people as possible. I don’t have time right now, they are
chasing me.
“I shot Pastor Tim 12 times,” he said. “There is no
way any human could have survived that event. Anyway, I have sent my
story to all the major news organizations. I have no time, I have to
go.”
He was arrested a few hours later. Washington Post
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