By Katie Ginn
When Bill and Becky Caldwell went to bed at their home in Little Rock on December 1, 1991, they had no idea that they’d be spending the next afternoon as hostages in their own attic.
Around midday, escaped inmate Paul Jerome Spiers broke into the Caldwells’ home and escorted them upstairs at gunpoint. For three hours, the Caldwells prayed, shared the gospel with their “new friend,” and even helped him negotiate with police via the walkie-talkie he had stolen.
“We were never afraid,” Becky says now in the den of the Caldwells’ home in Madison County. “People don’t understand that. I just think that’s God.”
Baptism by flood
Before they were fearless hostages, the Caldwells were high-school sweethearts in Memphis. Becky had been saved as a child “and was witnessing on the playground the next day,” Bill says. He himself was not a believer when he met his future wife.
Despite being unequally yoked, “I just didn’t like anybody like I liked him,” Becky recalls. But a few years after she married Bill, he met Jesus, thanks to a desperate need for parenting help. He took the kids to Sunday school so they could learn “how to behave better,” and he attended worship himself.
“(At church) the Lord just pounded into my heart how much He loved me. I was not a willing recipient of that message. It took several iterations before I understood He really did.”
Bill knew he’d done a terrible job of running his life, he says. “I was ready to be saved, and I was ready to live saved.”
When Bill started following Jesus, the Caldwells were living in Jackson after moving a couple of times for his job in the printing business. “We were living in what we now know is the flood area,” he says.
During the 1979 flood, the water rose “over the curtain rods,” Becky recalls.
“They gave us a single-wide mobile home in our front yard while our house was being renovated,” Bill says. “There was no air-conditioning. (I was) traveling in my work … ”
A friend gave them a window unit air-conditioner, but it spit water “right where the kids would slip and fall as they would go to the bedroom,” Becky says.
Nobody could sell a house in the Jackson floodplain after 1979, so the Caldwells stayed put. Four or five years later, “in the second flood, we had the grace that the water was only up to the countertops,” Bill quips.
“I was learning what it was like to know (Jesus) and walk with Him in the middle of a crisis,” Bill says. But he praises Becky for her sense of humor through even the worst situations:
“It’s medicinal,” he says. “I think the Proverbs say that.”
For instance, after the second flood, Becky hung a sign in a tree out front: “House for sale, reduced to $750,000.” (“I think we paid $37,000 when we moved in,” she says with a laugh.)
Moving to criminal headquarters
For the first 10 years of Bill’s Christian life, he was so grateful to Jesus, he spent every spare minute at the church. But he and Becky had four kids in five years. He was needed at home.
Finally, a friend showed Bill something: He’d been obeying Philippians 2:12, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” but he’d failed to notice the next verse: “For it is God who is in you both to will and to do according to His good pleasure.”
Bill knew he hadn’t earned his salvation, but he was trying to live it out in his own strength. Now he knew he didn’t need to do that either. “All of a sudden, my working (for the Lord) took a whole different context,” he says.
Around that same time, the Caldwells were hosting a Bible study in their home. “Everybody (in the group) got more excited about, there’s more to this Christian life than attending church,” Bill says.
Fittingly, God soon called the Caldwells out of Jackson to inner-city Little Rock, where they would work in full-time ministry for five years. Their home was “right in the (headquarters) for being a gang member, a drug dealer or a prostitute,” Bill says. “We lived in that with our four by then teenagers.”
The Caldwells joined a church that had its own housing, K-12 school, and Bible college, known as a missions institute, where Bill and Becky served.
Within six months of moving to Little Rock, the Caldwells were faced with Paul Jerome Spiers.
Held hostage
That morning in December 1991, Spiers was at a supervised clinic visit when he overpowered his police guard, took her revolver and walkie-talkie, hijacked a car in the parking lot, and sped away.
He only made it a couple of miles before he wrecked the car, got out and ran, and burst through the Caldwells’ front window. At first, he came to the bedroom door – gun on full display – and demanded the car keys. Becky had just gotten home, and Bill was just waking up from a nap after a long couple of ministry days. Becky pushed Bill back and tossed the keys to Spiers.
But when Spiers turned to leave and saw the squad cars already parked outside, “it was hostage time,” Bill says. Spiers directed the Caldwells up to the attic, where they would be his human shields in the event of a shootout. By God’s grace, the Caldwell kids were at school.
Immediately, “(Becky) starts witnessing to this guy,” Bill says. As Spiers positioned the Caldwells to sit cross-legged on the floor in front of him, “she asked him straight out, ‘Are you saved?’”
Spiers’ response: “You need to be quiet now, ma’am.”
“Over the course of time, (Spiers) settled down,” Bill says. “I said, ‘I’m a pastor. Do you mind if I pray for you?’ He said yes if you do it quietly. So we did.”
Police started communicating with Spiers via his stolen walkie. Unfortunately, “The police negotiator got caught lying four different times,” Bill says.
“And I’m hollering, ‘Get a new person!’” Becky says.
Despite the drama, Becky wasn’t afraid, she says. “I remembered the scripture from Revelation that says, ‘They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death.’ And I said, ‘God, I like the first two. But I don’t believe that You brought me to Little Rock to kill me.’”
She even told Spiers, “I do carpool at 3:30.” Spiers assured her, “We’ll be finished.”
Meanwhile, Bill got his own word from the Lord: “I heard, ‘Look at yourself, son.’ So I look down, and the only way I can articulate what I saw was the peace of God on me.”
Bill asked God to give that same peace to Spiers. “And we actually got to see that evolving over the next hour or so.”
Spiers convinced the police to find his girlfriend – who had turned him in – so he could talk to her on the walkie. If they did that, Spiers said, he would give himself up. “They went and found her on the job and brought her out there,” Bill says.
However, “They didn’t coach her at all beforehand. She got on that walkie-talkie and was just ugly to him. We’re saying, no, no, that’s not what you say!”
After that conversation, Spiers asked Bill, “Now what?” Yes, Spiers was asking his captors for negotiation advice! Bill encouraged him to hold up his end of the deal.
“By this time, this peace that passes understanding was starting to show up on him a little bit,” Bill says. “He lays the gun down on the floor, pulls the bullets out of his pocket, and hands me the walkie-talkie and says, ‘Here. Get us out of here.’”
One thing you won’t see in an action movie: “Everybody had to go to the bathroom after that much time,” Bill notes. “So I told the police, it’ll be five minutes, but we’re coming out. … The SWAT team, they’re all out there, (and) we’re going to the bathroom one at a time.”
While Bill was in the bathroom, “I took (Spiers) over to the window he had broken into,” Becky recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t suppose you’re planning on fixing that, are you?’ And he said, ‘I wish I could.’”
Finally, the odd trio emerged from the house, and Paul Spiers was arrested without further incident. They all rode downtown separately, and the Caldwells gave their statements to police. (Becky didn’t make it to carpool, but a friend picked up the kids.)
Immediately after their interviews, Bill and Becky went to the jail to “finish our conversation with Paul,” Bill says, “because we knew God was working on this guy.”
The jailer wouldn’t let them in. “It’s not good for the case,” he said. But that night, an elder from the Caldwells’ church led Paul Spiers to Jesus.
“It was a serious salvation,” Bill says. He and others from church got to visit with Paul several times after he was moved to the county jail.
Eventually, Paul was extradited to New Jersey. “But we had a season where we got to see the genuineness of what happened in our attic,” Bill says.
The incident also spurred Becky to start ministering to female inmates in Arkansas. “We (sent) 700 Christmas cards I think that year,” Bill says.
‘We didn’t sign up for this’
When the Caldwells moved back to the Jackson metro a few years later, their two older children were ready to pursue college and careers. One of those kids was Clay.
Like his mom, Clay Caldwell was an evangelist, Bill says. During high school, “he worked at Chick-fil-A, and they threatened to fire him for witnessing on the job too much.”
Then Clay discovered drugs at a Christian college. For the next 20 years, he was a “prodigal” living in addiction, Bill says.
“We actively prayed Philippians 1:6 over him (that God would “finish the good work He started” in Clay). Both our Bibles were worn out. We’d tell God, ‘We know You’re in this, but we didn’t sign up for a 20-year wait.’”
Bill and Becky did their best not to lecture Clay or try to “fix” him against his will.
“I think our experience working with others had taught us that forced interventions have a very low success rate, and more often than not, they make the wall even thicker,” Bill says. “Clay had plenty of preaching from others.”
Eventually, God answered the Caldwells’ prayers: Clay was able to quit drugs and start walking with Jesus again. Today, he works in full-time ministry in Colorado – and just had his first child, with wife Kati, at 49 years old.
“He’s got the energy for it,” Bill says. “We don’t know which one to watch more, the baby or him.”
53 years and counting
After 53 years of marriage, Bill and Becky might not be wrangling four kids under 5 anymore, but they’re still busy in the best ways.
“(Becky’s) calling hasn’t changed at all,” Bill says. “She’s an amazing mom, and now she’s a grandma. Our oldest granddaughter got married this year. We’ll have four or five family gatherings this year. (Becky’s) fingerprints are on everybody.”
Bill stays active with church and loves mentoring men. He’s also involved with the Jackson Leadership Foundation, a gospel-centered nonprofit aimed at creating spiritual, social, and economic transformation in the capital city. Bill has mentored JLF ministry partners and is a member of the foundation’s governing board.
“I’ve been involved with (JLF) for five years now. It rekindled the Little Rock experience we had. It’s been one of my big chapters.”
If all of that sounds like a lot for a couple of retirees, Bill says he still quotes Philippians 2:13, a reminder of Who empowers them for service.
“There is work to do, but the fact that God loves us and indwells us with His will for our lives – we make Christianity a lot harder than it has to be.”