TO HIS WIFE AND CHILDREN, Hale was a violent and unpredictable monster, a tyrant who delighted in sadistic manifestations of his own power. And while the remoteness of the family's homesteads in New Mexico and Alaska gave his perverse inclinations room to fester, there were signs all along that something was wrong with him.

Hale's own father was I.B. Hale, a larger-than-life figure who, after a prolific college-football career, turned down an offer to play for the Washington Redskins and later joined the FBI. In the early 1940s he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where he raised his twin sons, Robert and William, and became a fixture on the local country-club scene. I.B. Hale was a dominating man, and his sons grew up with something to prove. From his earliest years, Robert was known for his explosive temper, his capable fists, and his willingness to slug it out with anyone. "The only way to win a fight against Bobby," William told a college acquaintance, "was to grab a heavy object and hit him until he blacked out. If you didn't knock him out quickly, it was best to run."

At 17, Hale ran away with his high school sweetheart, 16-year-old Kathleen Connally, the daughter of local attorney John Connally, who would later become governor of Texas and ride with John F. Kennedy through Dallas the day the president was shot. (The governor suffered serious injuries in the shooting.) The couple eloped to Tallahassee, Florida, where Connally found out that she was pregnant. Soon, they began fighting. On the night of Monday, April 27, 1959, one argument became so heated that Connally spent the night with their apartment building's landlady. The following morning, she went to the local police station, where, according to Palmer Newton, who was on the Tallahassee police force at the time, she asked to be sent home to Texas. But before the officers could do anything, she returned to the apartment. She was found dead there a few hours later, the back of her head blown off by a 20-gauge shotgun.

To this day, it's not clear what happened. The morning after Connally's death, Hale told a coroner's jury that he'd come home to discover his wife lying on the sofa with a loaded shotgun, threatening to kill herself. He'd pleaded with her to put the gun down, but she refused, and when he lunged for the weapon it went off. The death was eventually ruled an accident, despite conflicting evidence—including the fact that, according to Newton, the gun was absent any of Connally's fingerprints.

After Connally's death, Hale went home to Fort Worth, where he got his GED and attended Texas Christian University for a short time. He then made his way to Los Angeles, where he was spotted by the FBI breaking into the apartment of one of President Kennedy's mistresses, Judith Campbell Exner. No one has ever confirmed exactly what Hale was doing in Exner's apartment, but, as reported by Seymour Hersh in his 1997 book The Dark Side of Camelot, there's reason to suspect blackmail: Around that same time, the federal government awarded I.B. Hale's new employer, General Dynamics, one of the largest military contract in U.S. history. (In an angry letter he sent to me earlier this year, Hale issued a rambling denial of both the break-in and any wrongdoing in Kathleen Connally's death. He's given similar blanket denials to reporters investigating many aspects of his life presented here.)

After L.A. came Houston, where Hale worked as a gigolo for society ladies, and then Lake Tahoe, where he spent a winter as a ski bum and served three months in jail for marijuana possession. By the mid-sixties he'd wandered back to California, where he went by the name Bob Sunstar and traveled in the same circles as Charles Manson. By the end of the decade, he'd had four children—in Texas, Oregon, and California—by three different women.

It was while resting near a waterfall in the San Bernardino Mountains that Hale met 16-year-old Kurina Rose Bresler, who would become Country Rose. Bresler was the runaway daughter of Hollywood actress Betty Freeman; according to Freeman, Hale, then 33, spirited her daughter away. "He trapped her with sex and drugs," she would tell an Anchorage Daily News reporter in 2003.

Bresler and Hale had their firstborn, Butterfly Sunstar—now Eli­shaba—in 1975. And approximately every two years for the next 30, Bresler would bear Hale another child, all far from medical care. For more than two decades, the family raised sheep and goats and grew vegetables on a small parcel of a northern New Mexico ranch owned by Jack Nicholson, an arrangement worked out by Freeman with the actor's business manager.

Throughout his wanderings, Hale had dabbled with New Age tracts such as The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, but it wasn't until 1979, while living on Nicholson's ranch, that he converted his family to his home-brewed Christianity. He took the name Preacher Bob and then Pilgrim and, over time, became adept at spreading his version of the Lord's word. In the early nineties, he convinced his twin brother, William, a successful Fort Worth veterinarian, to give up his material possessions and come to New Mexico. William's wife, Patsy, remembers coming home from work before he left to discover that her clothing was missing. "Bob convinced Billy that my wardrobe was the work of the devil," she says. "He said they burned it."

The New Mexico ranch was so remote, and Hale's rules about leaving so strict, that Country Rose and the children would sometimes go six months without interacting with anyone outside the family. Absent anything resembling normal social mores, strange things happened: The older sons would later recount an episode in which several of them—confused teenagers forced to share a single bed—experimented sexually with one another. Hale's commandments were to be followed at all times, and when someone disobeyed, he would administer a "correction." Such punishments could be unbelievably barbaric. When Hale found out about his sons' deviance, he lashed them over a whipping barrel. Country Rose—17 years Hale's junior and deeply afraid of him—suffered terribly. Once, after Hale dragged her outside by her hair to administer a beating, he nailed clumps of her hair to a post as a warning. Around the time Elishaba turned 18, he started forcing her to satisfy his sexual desires.

As the years went on, neighbors began building homes closer and closer to the ranch and started taking a concerned interest in the backwoods family, especially after law-enforcement officers came looking for a woman Hale had allegedly brainwashed and convinced to run away from her husband, along with their daughter. In the late 1990s, the neighbors notified Hale that they were drafting a letter to Nicholson asking that the family be evicted from the ranch.

Alaska beckoned. It was there, Hale imagined, that he would create a holy, untainted community populated by him and his children. And from the outside, that was just what it seemed.