Klamath County, Oregon, is the perfect place to go if you don’t want to be found—and the worst place to be if someone threatens your life.

1.

Little Timathy Taylor lived behind the PDQ mini-mart in Roseburg, a small timber town in western Oregon surrounded by mountains. In many respects, Taylor had a typical rough-and-tumble 1980s childhood. He and other neighborhood kids were mostly left to themselves, their parents either working or at home drinking too much and apt to whale on them if they got in the way. Taylor spent his days collecting cans for nickels, riding his bike in empty lots, and playing alone by a creek near his home, watching polliwogs wriggle in the shallow water.

“Timmy loved the woods,” his mother, Becky Wanty, remembered. She described him as timid and softhearted. When he caught fish or frogs in the creek, he threw them back. He liked the idea of hunting because it was outdoorsy and manly, but he didn’t like the killing part. “He had a hard time even trying to shoot a deer,” Wanty said. “He never got one. He would miss them because he couldn’t do it.”

Wanty worked at the mini-mart, cleaned offices, roofed houses, and tended bar to support her six kids. “When I was eight months pregnant with my fifth child, I was out there pumping gas,” she said. Her husband, David, drove a semi and was gone much of the time. He spent most of his wages gambling, and Wanty described him as “a drinker and drug addict” who may have had learning disabilities. When Wanty married him, David wasn’t literate. “I had to read the book to him and read the questions to him down at the Department of Transportation to get his chauffeur’s license,” Wanty said. David had little patience with his kids. “Instead of just giving them a spanking, he would take whatever he could get his hands on—a brush or a hanger or whatever—and beat them with that,” Wanty said. “There was always a reason when I smacked them, but not with him. He would do it just when he was pissed.”

The family were Jehovah’s Witnesses, but after years of living a devout life while her husband drank and smoked and gambled without consequences, Wanty decided that she was done with the church. In 1989, when Taylor was 13, his mother intentionally got herself kicked out, then celebrated her freedom with a cigarette. Three years later, the family moved to Wisconsin. She and David split up, and David threatened suicide; the police were called.

Taylor never got much respect in high school, according to Mike Bishop, his closest friend. People thought he was a redneck, but when a car wouldn’t run, he was the one they called. “He’d help anybody,” Bishop said. “He was the guy that people went to when shit broke down.”

Taylor was still drawn to the outdoors like he’d been as a little boy. Bishop remembered Taylor decorating his room with pictures of mountains. “We would go camping and try to live off the land for a week or two and see if we could do it,” Bishop said. “We’d bring minimal food, just enough to keep us alive if we didn’t find anything. He started going out for longer and longer.” The trips were an escape from the social meat grinder of high school, where Bishop said Taylor was more or less an outcast who preferred walking away from fights to proving his mettle.

Taylor dropped out of high school, planning to finish his degree in the Army, but then quit basic training after he injured his knee. Around age 19, he ended a relationship with a woman named Tammy and decided to return to the city of his childhood, hoping for a fresh start. He drove more than 2,000 miles, crossing the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Cascades to Roseburg. But he couldn’t find work, and his van broke down and was impounded. Taylor sold the van to pay the impounding fees, get back what he’d left inside, and buy a bus ticket back to Wisconsin. By the time he returned, Tammy had given birth to their son, Jesse.

When Taylor was 23, he married a woman named Erin. They had two sons in as many years, Isaiah and Josh. The marriage didn’t last. Erin said that Taylor “was not a mean person” but claimed he could be cruel to a son she had from a previous relationship. (Taylor later said that while he believed in corporal punishment and was “firm” with children, he was never abusive.) Records from Wisconsin indicate that Taylor was charged with battery in 1999 for hitting Erin’s son and was sentenced to 60 days in jail. In 2002, the couple divorced. Of Taylor’s three sons, only Josh maintained a strong connection with his dad.

Taylor found work as a laborer, doing construction and installing home security systems. For a while he lived out of his truck. He seemed always to be teetering on the edge of financial ruin, adrift at society’s fringes. In 2008, Taylor found himself sitting by his father’s hospital bed as the old man slid toward death following years of medical issues: hepatitis C, a liver transplant, lung cancer, and, near the end, pneumonia. Despite the beatings he’d received, Taylor wanted to be with his dad as he died. “It is the type of person Tim is—forgive, forget,” Bishop said. “If you needed him, he was there. You could have shot his dog, and if you really needed help, he was there.”

Not long before his father passed, Taylor had undergone spinal-fusion surgery in an attempt to treat chronic back pain. He tried to transition to less physically demanding work, but he dropped out of computer-programming classes in the wake of his father’s death. He had always struggled in the classroom. “Me learning from a book is like learning Chinese,” he wrote in a Facebook message to his aunt. He ended up depending on food stamps and disability payments: $730 a month after child support.

A couple of years later, he began a new relationship and started making payments on a fixer-upper in Madison, but the house’s owner died before giving Taylor and his girlfriend the deed to the place. Feeling aggrieved and wondering whom to blame, Taylor turned to the internet. Whatever terms he initially plugged into Google or Facebook or YouTube, he was soon frequenting websites promoting far-right conspiracy theories, watching videos predicting imminent social collapse, and reading how-to guides on survival preparedness. Over a few months in late 2012, the content of Taylor’s Facebook posts shifted from topics like trucks and music to videos from the hacktivist group Anonymous and posts about pandemic disease, the threat of GMO foods, the rise of Islam, and the Obama administration’s purported plans to confiscate everyone’s guns. Taylor devoured TV shows like Doomsday Preppers, Survivor Man, Live Free or Die, and Man, Woman, Wild. The notion of living off the land allowed him to imagine ways he might escape the wage economy and finally make something of himself. He spent a sizable portion of his disability checks on items like seeds, water-purification supplies, and ammunition, in case the apocalypse should arrive. At one point, he overdrew his bank account. Not long after, his relationship fell apart—the woman said he had been physically rough with her son and she didn’t like how angry he was. She kicked him out.

By 2014, when Taylor was almost 40, he was single and living in a trailer on a small dairy farm, where he worked as a hand in exchange for room and board. One day he accidentally ran his son Josh over with a manure spreader, nearly killing the 15-year-old. The incident prompted Taylor to contemplate his own mortality. If he died suddenly, he’d have nothing to leave his kids. He decided to do the thing he’d been fantasizing about for years: buy property, build a cabin, and create a legacy for his sons.

Taylor began cruising real estate websites that promised acres of wilderness for as little as a few thousand dollars, which in monthly payments would be doable even on his paltry income. Taylor’s family thought his plans were foolhardy, but his mother understood the pull of returning to Oregon. “I think he was looking for something different,” Wanty said. “I don’t know. Something that would help him go back to the past. To easier times.”

In May 2015, Taylor signed a contract for nearly nine acres of unimproved backcountry in Klamath County, sight unseen. The ad for the lot had included a few photos of flat, grassy land with mountains in the distance.

GENERAL INFORMATION: Huge Parcel in the Oregon Pines Subdivision with over 900 feet of frontage on Nagel Ridge Way.

TYPE OF TERRAIN: rocky

ZONING: residential

POWER: no

PHONE: no

WATER: no. must install well or holding tank

SEWER: No. Only needed when/if you build.

ROADS: dirt

Taylor liked the sound of it. He agreed to a price of $19,200, with 7 percent interest. That worked out to 72 monthly installments of $317.11. He imagined the Oregon of his youth: green, balmy, bathed in golden sunlight, far from Wisconsin’s bitter winters. What he found when he arrived was something else entirely.