Phelps himself says he was a "busy

Phelps himself says he was a "busy, happy little kid" growing up in the sleepy Southern town of Meridian, Miss., in a house in the center of town. His
father, Fred Wade Phelps, was a courtly man who was often away from home as a detective
for the Southern Railway. His mother died of cancer when he was 5.
Folks around Meridian remember the Phelps family as a good one, devout parishioners of the local Methodist church.
"He came from good people. Fred had a wonderful daddy and a good childhood," says a distant cousin, Myrtle Abel. "Whatever happened to him happened apart
from all of us."
As a youth, Phelps bounced around various Bible colleges. After marrying and starting his family, he settled in Topeka in 1954 and helped found Westboro
Baptist Church two years later. He decided to become a lawyer in 1961, and after a controversial career he was disbarred by the state in 1979 for allegedly
abusive behavior including, among other things, harassing a court reporter. After this his children became a well-known sight in Topeka, selling candy door-
to-door to support his church. At the church-residence, on the corner of Orleans and 12th streets, his son says, the level of rage rose and fell along with
the father's sometimes wrathful, sometimes loving moods.
"We went to school and when school was out we sold candy until 7 o'clock," explains Mark Phelps, now 41 and a successful Orange County, Calif., businessman
who owns a chain of print shops. Growing up in a household he likens to a "war zone" took its toll: "We were just peculiar," he says. "We were a little bit
like the Munsters."
Now estranged from the family, both Mark and his brother Nathan, 36, have been vocal in the news media about the brutal beatings they say they suffered at
the hands of their father, which included unremitting clubbings with an oak pole "the size of a baseball bat," Mark says.
Fred Phelps says his sons have exaggerated the extent of the beatings, but admits his children were disciplined physically, and even says that he had a
leather strap handmade at a local tannery for that purpose.
"If they say we disciplined them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, that's not a lie," Phelps says.
Since 1989, Phelps has run in the primaries for governor twice and for U.S. Senate in 1992. His estranged children believe that he began the picketing in
1991 as an attention-getting ploy after his first campaign for governor flopped.
"My dad is an egomaniac," says Dotti Bird, 30, a local attorney who changed her name four years ago to avoid being linked with family. (She chose that name
because it means "free as a bird.")
"He is a spoiled child," says Bird, "and he will stop at nothing to get attention."
Judgment -- and Sentencing