David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Reynolds about Three Strikes: the long drive up from Los Angeles into the flat fields of the Central Valley has become a kind of pilgrimage. It is Reynolds’s habit to take his visitors to the Daily Planet—the restaurant where his daughter ate before she was killed across the street. I heard about one of those visits before I made the same journey. Reynolds had gotten into an argument with the restaurant’s owner. She told him to stop bringing people around on tours. Reynolds was harming her business. “When will this be over?” she asked him. Reynolds was livid. “Sure, it’s hurt her business,” he said, “but it’s wrecked our lives. I told her it will be over when my daughter comes back.”
    At the end of our interview, Reynolds said he wanted to show me where his daughter was murdered. I couldn’t say yes. It was too much. So Reynolds reached across the table and placed his hand on my arm.
    “Do you carry a wallet?” he said. He handed me a passport-size photo of his daughter. “That was taken a month before Kimber was murdered. Maybe set that in there and think about that when you open your wallet. Sometimes you need to put a face with something like this.” Mike Reynolds would always be grieving. “That kid had everything to live for. To have something like this happen, to have somebody kill her in cold blood like that—that’s bullshit. It’s just gotta be stopped.”

1.
    When France fell in June of 1940, the German Army allowed the French to set up a government in the city of Vichy. It was headed by the French World War One hero Marshal Philippe Pétain, who was granted the full powers of a dictator. Pétain cooperated actively with the Germans. He stripped Jews of their rights. He pushed them out of professions. Revoking laws against anti-Semitism, he rounded up French Jews and put them into internment camps and took a dozen other authoritarian steps, large and small, including instituting the requirement that every morning French schoolchildren honor the French flag with a full fascist salute—right arm outstretched, palm down. On the scale of the adjustments necessary under German occupation, saluting the flag each morning was a small matter. Most people complied. But not those living in the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
    Le Chambon is one of a dozen villages on the Vivarais Plateau, a mountainous region not far from the Italian and Swiss borders in south-central France. The winters are snowy and harsh. The area is remote, and the closest large towns are well down the mountain, miles away. The region is heavily agricultural, with farms tucked away in and around piney woods. For several centuries, Le Chambon had been home to a variety of dissident Protestant sects, chief among them the Huguenots. The local Huguenot pastor was a man named André Trocmé. He was a pacifist. On the Sunday after France fell to the Germans, Trocmé preached a sermon at the Protestant temple of Le Chambon. “Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty,” he said. “Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.”
    Giving the straight-armed fascist salute to the Vichy regime was, to Trocmé’s mind, a very good example of “obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel.” He and his co-pastor, Édouard Theis, had started a school in Le Chambon several years earlier called the Collège Cévenol. They decided that there would be no flagpole and no fascist salutes at Cévenol.
    Vichy’s next step was to require all French teachers to sign loyalty oaths to the state. Trocmé, Theis, and the entire staff of Cévenol refused. Pétain asked for a portrait of himself to be placed in every French school. Trocmé and Theis rolled their eyes. On the one-year anniversary of the Vichy regime, Pétain ordered towns across the country to ring their church bells at noon on August 1. Trocmé told the church custodian, a woman named Amélie, not to bother. Two summer residents of the town came and complained. “The bell does not belong to the marshal, but to God,” Amélie told them flatly. “It is rung for God—otherwise it is not rung.”
    Throughout the winter and spring of 1940, conditions for Jews across Europe grew progressively worse. A woman appeared at the Trocmés’ door. She was terrified