On the morning of 8 June 2022, the state of Arizona executed by lethal injection a man named Frank Jarvis Atwood. The day before, he had received the Great Schema, the highest degree of Orthodox monasticism, and the name Ephraim. His spiritual father stood beside him in the execution chamber: Archimandrite Paisios, abbot of St Anthony’s Monastery in Florence, who had baptised him twenty-two years earlier. According to the Arizona Department of Corrections, it was the first time a priest had been present in an execution chamber in that state.
He had been convicted in 1987 of the kidnapping and murder of an eight-year-old girl. To the last moment he maintained that he had not done it.
In certain Orthodox circles his death was received as a testimony of conversion and repentance. Two well-known hierarchs wrote about him, a monastic circle commemorated him, his book was translated into Romanian, and Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol likened him to the Good Thief.
Much has been written about his guilt, on both sides. What has scarcely been examined is something else, though the material lies in plain sight: what this man wrote about his own inner life, and how closely that resembles what was written about him. There lies the genuinely useful part of the case, and there also lies the problem.
The Child
Her name was Vicki Lynne Hoskinson. She was born on 2 February 1976 and was in the third grade. On the afternoon of 17 September 1984 her mother sent her on her bicycle to the nearby mailbox, to post a birthday card for her aunt. After twenty minutes the mother sent her older sister, Stephanie, to look for her. Stephanie found the bicycle lying at the side of the road. The child’s remains were found in April 1985, in the desert north-west of Tucson.
Her mother, Debbie Carlson, spent the following decade fighting for victims’ rights and had a decisive part in the passage, in 1990, of Arizona’s Victims’ Bill of Rights. Three years earlier, at the trial of her daughter’s killer, the family had waited in the corridor: being witnesses in the case, they were not permitted into the courtroom.
After the execution, the mother told the press that her daughter had been a lively child with an infectious laugh, and that her freckled nose can be seen today in the grandchildren Vicki never knew.
We begin with her because in the Orthodox accounts of this case that I have been able to read, she appears at the end, or does not appear at all.
The Trial
The jury found him guilty of kidnapping and of first-degree murder committed in the course of it. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 1992, and the Supreme Court of the United States declined to review the case in 1993.
The evidence was circumstantial, but there was a good deal of it. The 1992 opinion gathers it into four points: the defendant, whom the court calls “a convicted pedophile,” was seen within yards of the girl seconds before she vanished; witnesses identified him as the man they had seen driving with a young child in his car; that same afternoon he was seen with blood on his hands and clothing; and he was seen with cactus needles in his arms and legs. To these were added the forensic findings of contact between the bumper of his car and the girl’s bicycle. Witnesses further said that when asked about the blood, Atwood told them he had stabbed a man in a drug deal and taken the body into the desert, a story he later said he had invented to appear tough; one saw him sharpening the blade of a knife.
At the time of the offence he had been on parole for four months from a conviction for the kidnapping of a small boy. According to the record, he came upon the child while riding a motorcycle, and when the boy refused the ride offered him, he threw the boy’s bicycle to the ground, pulled him onto the motorcycle, forced a sexual act upon him and threatened to kill him if he cried out.
He had also been convicted in 1975, in California, of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under the age of fourteen. That is the legal category. The child was ten.
The boy in 1980 was pulled off a bicycle. Four years later an eight-year-old girl vanished beside her bicycle at the side of a road. The resemblance does not prove that he took Vicki as well. It does explain why the prior record weighed so heavily.
One thing must be set apart, because it changes how everything else is to be read.
The 1975 conviction was the only aggravating circumstance found against him. Under Arizona law, without such a circumstance the death penalty could not be imposed. In other words: the killing of Vicki made him guilty of first-degree murder, but the 1974 offence was what made a sentence of death possible.
So between him and the execution table there stood, in law, an act committed at eighteen, thirteen years before the trial.
He contested it from the first appeal to the last, a week before his death. He never succeeded.
The weaknesses of the case are real as well. No one saw the abduction and no one saw the killing. The cause of death could not be established from the remains. Defence experts disputed the paint findings, and from 1996 at the latest the defence argued that the trace had been planted on the bumper by investigators. The courts rejected this theory, and in 2017 the Ninth Circuit found it implausible against the record. In 2021 an FBI memorandum from 1984 was discovered, concerning an anonymous call that pointed toward another suspect; the Court of Appeals examined it in 2022 and held that the material did not meet the legal threshold for authorising a second federal habeas petition.
The burden of proof rests on the prosecution, and a convicted man has no duty to prove his innocence. But in thirty-five years of appeals no court vacated his conviction, and none found that the new evidence established his innocence.
None of this tells us who killed Vicki. It tells us only that his innocence was never established, though it was spoken of as a thing known.
The Road to the Church
He spent his childhood in comfortable circumstances in southern California, in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles, and most of his middle-school years at a well-regarded military academy. He was raised in the Episcopal Church, attended services often, and had been an acolyte and a choirboy. His book places everything that followed under a single event in the summer of 1970. He was fourteen when he was abducted and sexually assaulted. Almost nothing was known in those years, the book says, about the aftermath of such an injury, and the consequence was devastating.
From there everything that had gone before collapsed: church several times a week, music — he played the trumpet, the cello and the piano, and went to concerts with his parents — school, sport. In their place came astrology, Eastern philosophies, rock music, drugs, revolt against every established order, and, as the book says without evasion, sexual perversion.
At eighteen he was in state prison, and of the eleven years that followed he spent more than nine in California penitentiaries. His schooling stopped in 1975, at a high-school equivalency examination.
Everything he learned after that he learned in a cell. Once on death row he enrolled at once in correspondence courses and gathered, within a decade, a bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in law and a master’s in literature, the latter in 1998. He hoped to become a lawyer.
So when he first wrote to Cyprus, he had ten years of study and a master’s degree behind him. He did not come to Orthodoxy an unlettered man. He came a formed writer.
He met his future wife in 1987, the year of the trial. They married in December 1991. Through her he returned to Christianity, in a Protestant form that left him, he says, with an inner emptiness. He then wrote to Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol, in Cyprus. The hierarch did not confine himself to sending books. He put him in touch with St Anthony’s Monastery, founded in 1995 by Elder Ephraim in the Arizona desert, in the same town as the prison, and, by his own account, saw to it that Abbot Paisios should go to him, baptise him, and take upon himself his spiritual protection and responsibility. Paisios began coming to the prison. Several years of correspondence and reading passed before the baptism. In July 2000 he was baptised and received the name Anthony. His wife was baptised in 2007 and received the name Sarah.
There followed twenty-two years of a daily rule of prayer under the obedience of the same spiritual father.
The conditions must be stated. He spent nearly thirty-five years on death row, much of that time under maximum security. A degenerative condition of the spine confined him to a wheelchair and left him in constant pain. When he sought a stay of execution on that ground, the state proposed a medical wedge and the tilting of the table, to approximate the position he already took in his cell to ease the pain.
None of this comes from his memoirs. These are matters of record and of the press. The rule of prayer, the fasting and the vigils were kept in a small room, in pain, and with no audience present.
But a prison cell is not a monastic cell. The whole protective order of the hesychast tradition rests on people who are present: a father who sees you daily, brothers who cut across your will in small things and who contradict you, an abbot who notices what you do not say. Atwood had a spiritual father who visited and guided him, not the life of a brotherhood. Isolation therefore works in both directions. Ascetic labour carried for years without witnesses cannot easily be reduced to performance, but neither can it be weighed as the life of a monk in a monastery is weighed.
What He Wrote About Himself
Here begins the part that has remained almost unseen in the accounts of him, though it was published by Orthodox themselves, in English and in Greek, in the days of his death.
Shortly before the execution, Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos brought their correspondence to light. One expects there the testimony of a man arrived at high measures. One finds something else.
Of prayer he writes that he had tried the hesychastic methods, with the breathing and the rest, and that once he felt something he believes was the Prayer descended into the heart. He adds at once that worldly thoughts drive it away. And he ends by saying of himself that he feels he is such a failure.
He writes next that he is afraid. He fears the aerial toll-houses. He says the demons whisper to him that he will not be able to pass them. He speaks of his bad side, which others do not see.
And when he comes to what he hopes for from his death — the tonsure, martyrdom, Paradise — he stops himself and adds that it seems arrogant to say it.
Nowhere does this man describe himself as having arrived at any measure. He describes himself as a frightened beginner, with one visitation of grace of which he is unsure, with a hidden part he fears, and with hesitation when Paradise is mentioned.
This is his voice in the letters.
Anthony of the Desert
There is, however, a second voice of his: public, printed, and still visible on the internet. The difference between the two says more than the whole Arizona record.
At baptism he received the name Anthony. The addition “of the Desert” he gave himself. The explanation is his own, on the website: he was not thinking of the Arizona desert, nor of the wilderness of death row, but wished to keep his mind on the desert of sin in which he lives and struggles. The explanation is good and humble. The name, however, belongs to St Anthony the Great, the father of monks.
The site on which he published his writings is called Church Father Theology.
What he wrote there can be seen from the descriptions he composed himself.
Without having been able to know Athos at first hand, he compiles a forty-six-page anthology of the Holy Mountain, drawn from the literature and from his own research: the history, the typika, the twenty monasteries, the sketes, with drawings.
A pamphlet on depression. He writes that in our age of so many “disorders” — the quotation marks are his — it is necessary to know what the Holy Fathers teach. He treats depression as a passion and as an affliction, sets out its cause and its cure, and the reader, he says, will be left armed with powerful weapons to defeat this most destructive demon. The text was written from a cell, on death row, by a man who lived in unbroken pain and in solitude.
A pamphlet on the cosmos and man: the state of creation before the fall, the corruption that entered the world through sin, the return to incorruption at the Second Coming. That is to say, dogmatics.
And a pamphlet against the New Age, in which science fiction, Star Trek, Harry Potter and fantasy literature are set side by side, their ties to the occult displayed, and the danger noted of taking such things for harmless entertainment. It was written by the man of whom the biography on the same site says that, during the prison years in California, he had become adept in occult studies.
The books bear titles to match: West of Jesus, Spiritual Alchemy, The Gates of Hades Prevaileth Not, Noetic Jerusalem.
The pattern is visible from the beginning, before Orthodoxy. Already in the Protestant decade he had been an editor at two Christian magazines, had published articles there with titles such as The Pride of Man and Divine Union, and had written instructional pamphlets for two youth ministries. Then, as an Orthodox, he began a three-year theology programme and published, in the same period, pamphlets of dogmatics.
From the first years of his return to faith, this man taught others. In the public biography we can trace, there is no long stretch of silence before he began to instruct.
Where the Facts Are Lost from the Book
On the site devoted to his writings there is an account of his life, in the third person. We do not know who wrote it. It says that in the summer of 1984 he was setting up a multi-state drug operation, that he spent a weekend in Tucson, and that near Austin he was arrested for a kidnapping and murder about which he knew nothing. Of the nine years spent in Californian prisons it says only that he continued illegal activity and became adept in occult studies. What he was there for, it does not say.
In his own book, however, the facts are in plain view.
Injustice for All, three hundred and twenty-seven pages printed in 2018, is first of all a brief for innocence, with maps, photographs, statements and appendices. Its introduction nevertheless states openly what the site passes over: that at eighteen he kissed a girl of ten, that at twenty-four he molested a boy of seven, and that psychiatric records show he had sold sexual favours to older men in his teenage years.
So at the source the facts are spoken. They are not spoken, however, as sins confessed, but as consequences of what had been done to him at fourteen.
If this is true, it calls for mercy, not contempt. And we have no way of deciding from outside how much weight it carries.
What can be traced is something else: what became of these facts along the way.
In the book they are present. In the account on the site they are gone. In the Romanian retellings they are gone. In the homilies they are gone.
The same narrative reached us as well. The autobiography written together with his wife appeared in Romanian from Sophia Press, under the title Lumina din spatele gratiilor — The Light Behind the Bars — with the subtitle “the true story of a man on death row converted to Orthodoxy in the prisons of Arizona.”
The date carries its own weight. On 7 June 2022, the eve of the execution, the publisher’s blog was still announcing it as a book soon to come off the press. And the description, afterwards taken up by every bookshop, opens in his voice: he had been condemned for the murder of a child, a crime he did not commit.
The defendant’s assertion about his own case thus entered, with no qualification from the publisher, a book presented to the reader as the true story.
No one lied along this road. Each retold what he had received, shorter and clearer than he had received it. And at every passage what was hardest to carry fell away.
This loss, however, has a consequence that no one appears to have noticed.
The 1974 offence was not some stain from a tangled past. It was the very circumstance that made a sentence of death possible. Whoever retold his life without it did not merely leave out an old sin. He left out the reason that man was going to be killed.
And then wrote about the injustice of the execution.
What Was Written About Him
Now set beside it what was said about him, often by people who had the letters in hand.
One Orthodox account states plainly that he had attained the prayer of the heart. He writes that it seemed so to him once, and that he lost it.
His spiritual father told the clemency board that he was certain of a complete change, and that he had not met such authenticity of faith among the hundreds who had come to him. He writes that he feels a failure.
Metropolitan Hierotheos wrote, the day before the execution, that he personally believed in his innocence. Metropolitan Athanasios said that the sentence was not just, because he had not committed the murder.
And Atwood relates, in one of the letters, that Metropolitan Athanasios had told him that if God permits the execution, it means He has accepted his repentance and that he is ready to depart for Paradise. He feared the toll-houses. He was told he was ready.
Seen from a distance, this certainty has a particular shape.
Atwood writes to a hierarch in Cyprus that he did not do it. The hierarch judges him worthy of help and sees to it that a spiritual father is sent to him. The spiritual father comes for years and sees a change he judges to be without parallel. That change becomes, for those around them, ground for holding that the man had been telling the truth from the beginning. In 2022 the spiritual father testifies to the change, and the hierarch speaks of innocence as a thing known.
In the public materials there is no examination of the deed by any of them. The grounds they made public for his innocence return, in the end, to the man they were pastoring and to their conviction that his change made his testimony worthy of belief.
We do not say that any of them acted in bad faith. We say only that a certainty which returns to its own source is not made stronger by the distance travelled, however worthy those who travelled it.
The heaviest exaggeration is not his, in the form in which it was carried onward. In the letters he is markedly more careful about his own state than the accounts of him are, and this ought to be said for him.
It would be false, however, to conclude that he was humble and others inflated him. His public voice is another: he writes, he teaches, he composes treatises and speaks with confidence about the spiritual life, under a hermit’s name, on a site named after the Holy Fathers. The tension between the two voices is precisely the thing to look at. We do not have before us a humble man raised by others beyond his measure, nor a pretender. We have a man who, in the same period, spoke with great assurance when instructing others and with far less when he had to say where he himself stood.
When a Man Becomes a Cause
A man who entered the Church at forty-five, out of a hard life and out of a cell, became within twenty years a cause. Hierarchs from Cyprus and Greece wrote to him. Monasteries commemorated him. To his clemency hearing there came, by his own count, some two dozen monks and nuns and more than a hundred and fifty faithful. His books were printed and translated.
The ascetic tradition returns always to the same care. Vainglory is called by the Fathers the thorn that grows out of every virtue and the danger that attaches precisely to what is good; and haste in setting the untried man in the place of a guide is perilous not because he is more sinful than others, but because few can carry honour without harm.
He was given all that honour at once, and not by ordinary men, but by men he held to be saints. And to his credit it must be said that this pressure, which ran entirely in one direction, did not move him altogether. He went on reckoning himself powerless even then.
That is no small thing.
The question is not addressed to him. What did it profit those around him to set him there? A man who fears the toll-houses needs prayer, not assurances. A man who says he felt something once needs silence around that thing, not its publication. A man walking toward death needs a spiritual father, not a cause.
The Thief on the Cross
The parallel with the Good Thief can be understood in two ways, and they must be kept apart.
Metropolitan Athanasios appears to use it looking back to his earlier life: Frank was a thief, Anthony became Orthodox, Ephraim became a monk. Read thus, the parallel is warranted. And one thing must be said plainly, which hasty criticism overlooks: if a man is truly innocent of a particular deed, repentance does not require him to lie and confess a crime he did not commit. Truth does not repent by falsehood.
It remains, however, to say what repentance looks like in the Tradition.
The Good Thief does not say that he is being wronged. He says: “And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss” (Luke 23:41). Only after these words comes the petition, and only after the petition comes the promise of Paradise. St Moses the Ethiopian, who had been a robber and a murderer, wept for his deeds to the end of his life. St Mary of Egypt told Abba Zosimas everything she had been, sparing herself nothing.
The clear confession of sin is one of the chief marks of repentance. A man does not repent of a sin he knowingly refuses to acknowledge.
What we cannot do is decide, from outside, whether this man passed through that door or not. If he killed Vicki and denied it to the end, then he died without confessing the gravest deed of his life. If he did not kill her, then his denial was truth. Which of the two occurred is not given us to know.
The Great Schema, a Day Before Death
There remains the question with which we began, and which has been asked least of all.
On 7 June 2022, the day before the execution, Archimandrite Paisios tonsured him into the Great Schema and gave him the name Ephraim, after the elder who had founded the monastery. The next day, at 10:16, he was executed.
The Great Schema is the last degree of monastic life. It is reached, in the ordinary order, through years of obedience as a novice, then the rassophore, then the little schema. The one tonsured promises obedience, chastity, poverty and stability in his monastery.
Tonsure at the hour of death, however, is also ancient in the Church, and there the degrees are gathered into one. So the compression is not, in itself, a lapse. And a man with a signed death warrant stands at the hour of death more certainly than many of the sick.
Nor do the promises raise a difficulty. The monk promises until death, and if death comes in a day, he keeps them for a day.
Two things nevertheless remain unclear in all that has been published, and we note them as such, drawing no conclusion from silence.
The first is the marriage. His wife was living, had been Orthodox since 2007, and was widowed the next day.
The canonical tradition does not permit one spouse to leave the marriage alone for a higher state. Canon 48 of the Council in Trullo directs that the wife of a man raised to the episcopate shall separate from him by their mutual consent. That canon concerns the episcopate, not monasticism. But its reasoning — that neither spouse departs alone from a bond that holds them both, according to the Apostle’s word that they do not have power over themselves apart from one another — was applied by the canonical tradition to the man entering monastic life as well.
In the public accounts of his tonsure nothing is mentioned about his wife’s consent, though every other detail of those days was recounted at length. This silence does not prove that consent was not asked and given. It means only that from the public material it cannot be known.
What speaks in defence of the tonsure must also be said. He was not leaving a marriage in order to enter a monastery. He had been imprisoned for thirty-five years and was to be killed the next morning. In such a case the Church has her oikonomia, and the canon remains in force without deciding by itself what was to be done.
The second concerns the authority under which it was performed. The tonsure was carried out by the abbot, which in itself is nothing unusual. Abbots tonsure, with the blessing of the local bishop. The public sources do not say whether that blessing had been sought and received. Here too, silence does not permit us to assume anything either way.
What, then, did the tonsure accomplish?
For him, consolation, and perhaps the beginning of a new life, even if that life lasted a day. That is no small thing, and no one has the right to grudge it him.
For others, the tonsure worked otherwise. It gave a name and an image. In many of the Orthodox accounts, from that moment it was no longer Frank Atwood dying, the man convicted in the Vicki Hoskinson case, but the Monk Ephraim, and under that name he was commemorated, buried and retold.
And here it must be said plainly what the tonsure is and what it is not.
The tonsure is a rite of repentance and of self-offering to God, and the tradition uses for it the language of a second Baptism. But it cannot be turned back and used as proof that the repentance of the one tonsured had been complete, still less as proof concerning a criminal fact. In either case it says nothing about what happened in September 1984.
And to the second question — whether the repentance shown was sufficient — the honest answer is that it does not belong to us. His confession is sealed. What passed between him, his spiritual father and God does not lie open before us, and this cuts both ways: we can say neither that the repentance was complete nor that it was absent.
We can look only at what was seen.
There was seen a man who acknowledged his earlier life in broad strokes: the drugs, the criminal acts, the selfishness that separated him from grace, his bad side, his slackness in prayer. There was seen a man who denied the murder, which is permitted if he was innocent. And in the Orthodox accounts of his conversion that I have been able to read, the offences against children for which he had earlier been convicted are either absent or hold nothing like the place they hold in his own brief.
And a little more than a day after receiving the Great Schema, his last public words thanked Christ for the salvation that had come through a judicial process he called unjust.
None of this allows us to say that he ought not to have been tonsured. A priest who goes to a condemned man and gives him everything the Church has is doing the work of a priest, and tonsure at the hour of death has ancient warrant. The error does not lie in the tonsure.
It lies in what it was afterwards made to mean. In some later accounts and arguments, the schema came to be invoked as a sign of cleansing, of innocence, of Paradise already won.
From the fact that he was tonsured, something can be inferred about the care of his spiritual father and, perhaps, about his own desire to give himself to God in the last hour. It cannot be inferred who killed Vicki. It does not open his confession. It does not prove dispassion. And it does not constitute a canonisation.
Where the Child Was Lost
The scene that follows we know only from his own account, written two days before his death. On 24 May 2022, after the clemency hearing, Vicki’s family passed by the cage in which he was held, and the girl’s uncle is said to have told him, smiling, that he would finally get the needle in his arm. He writes that he bowed and smiled. That the man has despised him for forty years and now had the chance to curse him to his face. That he does not agree with his hatred but believes he understands it, and that he is sorry the man needs this in order to feel better. He ends by saying it was an interesting and encouraging moment.
Metropolitan Hierotheos printed the passage as his last words and called it amazing.
The grief of the uncle of a murdered girl becomes there a weakness which the condemned man pities, and a hierarch publishes it as the fruit of his spiritual change. The whole inversion of this story can be seen here entire.
It would be unjust to say that he never showed them compassion. In a statement published shortly before the execution he spoke to the family directly, acknowledging their suffering and saying that he prayed his death would bring them some relief and an end to their torment. Even there he repeated that he had not taken the child. In the execution chamber he did not turn to them again.
One often hears, too, the demand that Vicki’s mother should have forgiven. The commandment of forgiveness is given to the one who forgives, as a medicine for him. It is not for others to turn it into a reproach addressed to a mother for the way she carries the death of her child. And there is a further distinction that ought to stop all of us. The family can forgive the wrong done to them through the loss of Vicki. They cannot forgive, in Vicki’s place, what was done to her. The only one who could have done that was eight years old.
What Remains
We do not know what passed between him and God. Perhaps his repentance was deep. Perhaps he was also innocent of this deed. We may hope in the mercy of God and pray for him, as we pray for all the departed.
But the honouring of a man as a saint belongs to the Church, not to the impression of a spiritual father nor to the personal conviction of a hierarch. We may hope that God received him. We cannot turn that hope into a canonisation of our own, nor the peace with which he died into proof that he was already in Paradise.
And the use of this case, for us, does not lie in the Arizona record.
That man contradicted himself. In one place he feared the toll-houses and the part of himself that others did not see; in another he wrote that he had complete confidence that his soul would live eternally in Paradise. He reckoned himself powerless in prayer and composed, in the same period, instruction on the spiritual life. He did not rightly know what he was, as none of us do.
Over this uncertain man a single icon was set, smooth and without flaw. From it were erased first his doubts, then his deeds, then the child.
When we lay upon a man more than he can carry, we do not honour him. We cover him. And beneath everything that was laid over him, someone else was covered too.
Her name was Vicki Lynne Hoskinson. She was eight years old. She was going to post a birthday card.
Related articles
- Known and Unknown Saints: Why Not Every Devout Life Must Be Proclaimed — on the distinction between personal hope and veneration appointed by the Church.
- Father Seraphim Rose: Repentance, Hagiography, and Discernment — on the way a real life can be smoothed by hagiography.
- Saint Moses the Ethiopian: The Repentance That Lasted Until Death — the patristic measure of repentance carried to the end.
- Elder Ephraim of Arizona — The American Period — the context of the monastery and Athonite work in Arizona.
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