A Lost Boys Slide Show 
Evil
A minister and his wife brutally murdered. A serial killer on the lam. A small town that has never before known fear. It’s like a Texas version of In Cold Blood— and as the people of Weimar know too well, the final chapter hasn’t been written.
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For as long as anyone can remember, the UCC has shared a minister with Trinity Evangelical, which is its sister church. They hired one back in 1988, but he was no country preacher. The wiry man with the bushy mustache and thick eyebrows insisted on being called Skip, not Reverend Sirnic. In a denomination not known for its frivolity, he told stories and jokes from the pulpit. He called children up to the altar during services to tell them stories. He walked down into the congregation to speak. In his sermons he would use examples from his own life, which wasn’t perfect.
He had never liked his own country much, and they had never liked him in this one. Even in prison they didn’t like him. He lived alone, and he would die that way: living by his own rules, making his own choices. In his younger days he looked soft and womanish, but he became hard and mean. He was short and powerful, with a tattoo of a snake on his arm and scars on his head and hands. He had changed his name so many times he didn’t know who he was anymore. He wore wigs, glasses, even, some swore, a dress. He rode the rails—the country’s secret highway—unseen. The cops said he was like a ghost.
NORMAN “SKIP” SIRNIC WAS BORN ON MAY 2, 1952, in Sharon, Pennsylvania. Twelve years later his parents divorced, and he moved with his mother to the Panhandle town of Friona. After graduating from Friona High School, he went to Trinity University in San Antonio, where he met and married a woman named Angela Skaggs; they had a son, Nathan. He went on to Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, was ordained in 1977, and served at three Texas UCC churches (in Friona, Riesel, and Bryan) before settling in Weimar. By then, he and Angela had divorced. In 1990, Skip married Karen Foltermann, a biochemist seven months his senior, whom he had met in Bryan.
It takes Weimarites a little time to get used to strangers, and it took Skip time to get used to living in such a small town. He had come as an interim minister. “I need to pause and assess my life,” he told his father, Norman, explaining why he had taken the assignment. But he liked this particular church, and its members liked him. He was one of them. He was divorced, like some, and a workaholic, like most. He didn’t take himself too seriously, and he was never condescending. “He was a human being like everybody else,” says his brother, Mark, who is a UCC pastor in Colorado and who visited him often. “When you take time to get in touch with your own weaknesses, it gives you compassion for other people’s weaknesses.”
Skip, in turn, liked them, because he felt like he belonged. He told his father that he was happier in Weimar than he had ever been. “The people were genuine, and they accepted him as a person,” Norman recalls. “Skip said that in other towns they had put him up on a pedestal, but in Weimar he could go to picnics, chase the kids, play volleyball, have a beer if he wanted.” Church member Kelly Janak gets tears in his eyes when he talks about his children wrestling with Skip at the weekly church volleyball games. “He was just family,” Janak says. At picnics Skip was the one who slipped the ice cubes with plastic bugs into someone’s tea and filled the balloons with water. A gifted thespian in high school and college, he was the ham who organized church plays, usually playing the villain.
The thing his congregation loved the most about him was that he practiced what he preached: compassion. Nearly every person I spoke with at the UCC had a story of Skip driving to Houston or Austin to visit someone in the hospital. He called on three dozen shut-ins every month. He started the Caregivers, a group that made sure every member of the church had someone who checked in on him or her regularly. He was always starting projects to get people involved in the community, from a food drive to an adopt-a-flower-bed program. He was on the Ministerial Alliance, an interfaith group of Weimar churches. He was the president of Colorado County Child Protective Services. “He was especially good with kids,” says one parishioner, who—like many interviewed for this story—was too anxious about the killings to have her name used. He was a counselor for children at Slumber Falls Camp near New Braunfels, and a personal and marriage counselor for everyone else. “Everybody went to Skip for counseling,” remembers a woman whose wedding ceremony was performed by Skip on his fortieth birthday. “That tells you something about the man,” she says.
His sermons were somehow both lighthearted and serious. “He had a way of delivering his message that you felt ‘He’s talking right to me,’” a parishioner remembers. “He always made the littlest guy feel so important,” says another. “He brought out the best in people,” says Janak. “He would make you do what came natural to you, what you felt the Lord would like.”
Karen became his partner in all things, singing in the church choir and serving as the church secretary. “Skip always preached about the light: ‘The light will shine through, the light will set you free,’” says Janak. “Karen had her own light.” Soon after they moved to Weimar she began planting flowers and plants around town, at city hall, the museum, the library. He joined her, working in the soil around the monotonous brown sixties-era UCC building. The garden, particularly behind the parsonage, where they lived, grew more and more elaborate: roses in a giant star on the lawn; tomatoes and green beans; purple, red, blue, and yellow flowers. Whenever Skip wasn’t working with people, he and Karen were working in the garden, stopping to smile and wave to the engineers as the trains passed. The garden was dirt therapy, they joked, a way to see tangible evidence of their work. With people it wasn’t always so clear.
On the night of Friday, April 30, Skip called his mother in Lubbock around ten. She had undergone open-heart surgery the week before, and he wanted to check on her. Then he and Karen went to bed. It was going to be a busy weekend: Sunday was Communion Sunday, and it was also Skip’s forty-seventh birthday.
When Sunday came, however, Skip didn’t show up for the nine-thirty service. His pickup wasn’t in his garage, and some figured the birthday celebration at New Bielau, where he preached at eight, was running late. Jim Bibee, who was liturgist that day at UCC, started without him. Everyone knew the routine: Hymns were sung and prayers read. Skip had picked several Scriptures for the day; Bibee read them and added his own comments—a sermonette, he later commented. By this point the congregation had become alarmed; it wasn’t like Skip and Karen to be this late. Thinking the couple had been in some kind of accident, Bibee led a moment of silent prayer for them. Communion was served. Finally, with about ten minutes left in the service, the UCC’s president, Ted Neely, walked over to look in the parsonage. He came back visibly shaken and walked to the front of the church. He stopped for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts. It was obvious that something was terribly wrong. “I have a horrible announcement to make,” he stammered quietly into the microphone. He paused and put his head in his hand. “Skip and Karen are dead, and their home has been ransacked.”
The congregation sat stunned. Bibee led a short prayer. Usually parishioners were ushered out row by row. On this day, some sat and cried, while others stumbled out.
For a long time he was just another hobo—hopping trains, living in migrant camps, working in the fields. He might steal something here or there, sometimes a car. He only hurt a few people, fools who had gotten in his way. But then he changed. How free could a man be? How far could he go? And who could stop him?
TWELVE HUNDRED PEOPLE, INCLUDING more than sixty ministers, flocked to the UCC for the memorial service on May 6. From the pulpit, Mark Sirnic asked the question on everyone’s mind: Why? “This was not God’s will,” he said. “This was a human choice.… God gave us choices, choices between good and evil, choices between love and hate, choices to either destroy or create.” In words that many would fondly recall over the next several weeks, he spoke of Skip and Karen’s garden and of the spiritual seeds they had planted in everyone. It was their obligation now to “cultivate beauty and goodness and bring the fruits of spirit and wonder into the lives of other people.”
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