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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 5: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 5: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 2: Good evening. What's scarier than a murderer? Someone with the
Speaker 2: charisma that compel others to kill for them or to
Speaker 2: kill themselves. Eat these cult leaders and get an inside
Speaker 2: look at their beliefs and how they controlled others. Some
Speaker 2: cults led by leaders like Charlie Manson, Jim Jones, and
Speaker 2: David Koresh are notorious, but others are less well known,
Speaker 2: such as Shoko Ashihara and his doomsday cult Amshimriko, who
Speaker 2: orchestrated the seren gas attack on the Tokyo Subway, or
Speaker 2: Joseph di Mambro and Luke Jerray, who founded the Order
Speaker 2: of the Solar Temple, a doomsday cult that led to
Speaker 2: the death of fifty one members by murder or suicide.
Speaker 2: Then there is Marshall Applewhite, leader of Heaven's Gate, who,
Speaker 2: along with thirty eight followers, killed themselves in the belief
Speaker 2: that the hail Bop comets signaled the arrival of a
Speaker 2: spaceship that would transport them to a higher plane of existence.
Speaker 2: What makes cult leaders so compelling is their often unfathomable
Speaker 2: power over their adherents. Why do people kill others or
Speaker 2: themselves for a questionable set of beliefs? Tells the stories
Speaker 2: behind both famous and unfamiliar cults and the people behind them.
Speaker 2: Across a series of profiles, we learn the jow dropping
Speaker 2: truth behind some of the most mystifying and deadly cults
Speaker 2: and their leaders, all of whom led their followers down
Speaker 2: the dark path. The book that were featuring this evening
Speaker 2: is Killer Cults, Stories of Charisma, Deceit and Death with
Speaker 2: my special guest journalists and authors Joyce and Steven Singular.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much
Speaker 2: for this interview. Hi, thanks back, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: It's a real it's always a great pleasure to have
Speaker 2: you both on talking about this latest book, Killer Cults.
Speaker 2: Let's just talk about what is contained in this The
Speaker 2: stories that we mentioned that both familiar and not so familiar.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us what some of the chapters are
Speaker 2: in this book? Nineteen of them?
Speaker 6: In all right, Well, we start with Keith Rainier, who's
Speaker 6: become quite well known and notorious with his Anxiom cult
Speaker 6: that has had emerged in the last decade, and he'd
Speaker 6: gone to trial in New York and been convicted and
Speaker 6: received a lengthy sentence. That story brought in several celebrity celebrities.
Speaker 6: There were one was the Alison Mack who was a
Speaker 6: TV actress, and then there was an heir to the
Speaker 6: Seagram's fortune, Sarah Brownfman. So that we lead off with that,
Speaker 6: we go to an obscure cult called the Slavonians. I
Speaker 6: particularly thought this was very fascinating because there's a tendency
Speaker 6: to believe that maybe cults only draw in uneducated people,
Speaker 6: people who aren't worldly, people who don't have many resources.
Speaker 6: But this was a cult found that on the Upper
Speaker 6: West Side of Manhattan in the in the seventies, and
Speaker 6: it was filled with very intelligent, very worldly people, people
Speaker 6: with resources who were drawn into the idea basically the
Speaker 6: fundamental ideas, how do we make better human beings? Basically
Speaker 6: through psychoanalysis heavy and in that and in.
Speaker 7: That particular cult. Even Judy Collins, the singer, was a
Speaker 7: member for a while. So that's what we found fascinating
Speaker 7: about and we had them. We asked the publishing house
Speaker 7: to specifically put the Sulavanians right next to the next
Speaker 7: cult that we profiled, a Magdalena Solise, a woman cult
Speaker 7: leader in Mexico, because, as Steve said, we found it
Speaker 7: fascinating from a psychological point of view that very well
Speaker 7: educated people with resources from all socioeconomic groups would join
Speaker 7: cults and to be, you know, and to be totally
Speaker 7: on the opposite side, like in Magdalena Solis and you're
Speaker 7: b Buena, Mexico in the sixties. These people were very insular,
Speaker 7: isolated in a little mountain town in Mexico, uneducated, very
Speaker 7: very poor. So we found, you know that across the board,
Speaker 7: people from all walks of life have been pulled into
Speaker 7: cults throughout the history of the human race, apparently.
Speaker 6: Right, and it's always what hits the deepest emotional needs,
Speaker 6: and a number of the ones that we'll be talking about,
Speaker 6: there's this idea of improving the human race. That's one
Speaker 6: of the themes that runs through a lot of it.
Speaker 6: How to make people better how to deal with issues
Speaker 6: like racism or poverty and things like that. So in
Speaker 6: numerous cases they start out with high ideals and they
Speaker 6: certainly don't end that way. The next one is Bogwan
Speaker 6: Rajnie fascinating story that unfolded in the seventies and eighties
Speaker 6: in Oregon. Raich was a spiritual leader in India and
Speaker 6: he ran into some trouble there and decided to come
Speaker 6: to the American West and bring his flock with him
Speaker 6: and start over. And again it appeared that they had
Speaker 6: good motives at least at one time, but he sort
Speaker 6: of descended into somebody who wanted to have one hundred
Speaker 6: rolls royce, a million dollar watch, all kinds of things
Speaker 6: as he sent out his minions to do some really
Speaker 6: nefarious things like trying to take over some towns through
Speaker 6: voting roles by poisoning some of the local populations so
Speaker 6: those people wouldn't be around to vote.
Speaker 7: And that particular story was very well documented in a
Speaker 7: Netflix documentary called Wild Wild Country, which I would highly recommend,
Speaker 7: just to see the depths to which these people went
Speaker 7: to control their group and then others around them, and
Speaker 7: to control the voting block in the towns that they
Speaker 7: started occupying.
Speaker 6: And again it was basically a woman who was running
Speaker 6: this my name mas Sheila Brasny sort of backed off
Speaker 6: and just lived this life of splendor or took a
Speaker 6: vow of silence. But there were several very powerful women
Speaker 6: who basically took over this cult and and did a
Speaker 6: lot of the activities that we're talking about. The next
Speaker 6: one was Joseph de Maambre and Luxerie. As you mentioned, Dan,
Speaker 6: they they decided to recreate the Cellar Temple in modern times,
Speaker 6: and again it started out with sort of New Age
Speaker 6: ideas and maybe New Age ideals.
Speaker 7: Well it actually, I thought, started out with some occult
Speaker 7: types of stories, like based on Rosicrucians and the Knights Templar.
Speaker 7: That's another aspect we found very you know, compelling about
Speaker 7: writing about all these different types of cults is that
Speaker 7: it spanned from you know, offshoots of Christianity to Satanic
Speaker 7: cults and New Age cults and occult cults, you know,
Speaker 7: and it just there was just no you know, set
Speaker 7: group that it seemed to prey upon. It infiltrates into
Speaker 7: all aspects of religious.
Speaker 6: Beliefs, right right. The next one is one people have
Speaker 6: heard about Jim Jones, the People's Temple. Again, what I
Speaker 6: found fascinating about Jones is that he started out in
Speaker 6: the Midwest, I believe, in Indiana, and he was very
Speaker 6: committed to civil rights, to racial equality, to to you know,
Speaker 6: really some social ideals, and he wanted to do good
Speaker 6: in the world. He eventually moved to California and started
Speaker 6: recruiting members to his People's Temple. And that the strain
Speaker 6: that you sort of find here is that once people
Speaker 6: start to accumulate power, it has a very it often
Speaker 6: has a very corrosive and debilitating effect, and with him,
Speaker 6: that's certainly true.
Speaker 7: And I've also found that, you know, even though we
Speaker 7: profiled some of these very well known cults like Jim
Speaker 7: Jones and the People's Temple and Charles Manson and the
Speaker 7: Branch Division, I found in doing the research that we
Speaker 7: uncovered details that I had never really gone deeply into.
Speaker 7: I mean, you know, when you heard the accounts of
Speaker 7: these crimes being committed at the time, he mostly I
Speaker 7: think most people just saw what was on television or
Speaker 7: they heard on the media. But as we looked closer,
Speaker 7: it was interesting to find. And what we've always been
Speaker 7: interested in where religion intersects with violence. I mean, three
Speaker 7: of the books that we've worked on have been primarily
Speaker 7: that the BTK serial Killer, the Doctor Tiller assassination, Jennifer Reality,
Speaker 7: a woman in Colorado Springs that was coerced by her
Speaker 7: lover to kill his wife based on you know that
Speaker 7: she would be forgiven and redeemed if she just embraced Christianity.
Speaker 7: We've always found that particular. Oh in Emmy alan Berg book, right, yeah,
Speaker 7: that one too, so so we've always found that an
Speaker 7: interesting area to explore. And with the Jim Jones people temple.
Speaker 7: An interesting fact on that one was that the congressman
Speaker 7: that went that was murdered in on the on the
Speaker 7: airstrip in Guyana when they went down to investigate, based
Speaker 7: on the people in his district telling them that their
Speaker 7: relatives were complaining about the living conditions down that Can
Speaker 7: you remember his name, Steve? We always forget that. Well.
Speaker 7: The interesting thing about that was that his aid was
Speaker 7: Jackie Spear, who was shot multiple times and now she
Speaker 7: is a congressman congresswoman from California, and she has spoken
Speaker 7: publicly about you know, what that was like to be
Speaker 7: on that airstrip when they were when they were attacked
Speaker 7: and ambushed by the followers of Jim Jones. Oh le
Speaker 7: O'Ryan that was a.
Speaker 6: Name, and again it just shows the power that Jones
Speaker 6: head over these people. One of the things that struck me,
Speaker 6: which I didn't know before writing this, was that he had,
Speaker 6: i think three times previous to the actual mass suicide
Speaker 6: that occurred in nineteen seventy eight, he had asked his followers,
Speaker 6: which were about a thousand down there, to drink something,
Speaker 6: you know, drink a concoction which he said was poison,
Speaker 6: just to see if they would actually drink the thing.
Speaker 6: And it wasn't poison, but every time he asked, they
Speaker 6: actually went ahead and drank it. So he had a
Speaker 6: pretty good idea that, you know, that when the time
Speaker 6: came to actually conduct the mass suicide, they would do that.
Speaker 6: So again, a lot of these people held high ideals,
Speaker 6: a lot of them were educated, but they had this,
Speaker 6: you know, profound weakness and this desire to follow a
Speaker 6: leader who was going to give them absolute answer.
Speaker 7: And in many cases a charismatic leader.
Speaker 6: Yep, yeah, yeah. He was an interesting looking man. You know,
Speaker 6: he had the swoop of dark and well.
Speaker 7: Spoken, spoke like a preacher, you know, had that ability
Speaker 7: to draw people in. We also found that as a
Speaker 7: parallel with some of the serial killers that we've written about,
Speaker 7: like John Robinson, the man who entombed his victims in
Speaker 7: fifty five gallon barrel drum barrels outside of Kansas City.
Speaker 7: They just had an ability to be a real fast talker,
Speaker 7: think fast on their feet, to know how to charm people,
Speaker 7: to disarm people.
Speaker 6: Yeah, if I were naming a quality of a cult
Speaker 6: leader or trying to identify when in particular, it's somebody
Speaker 6: who can get people who've never engaged in criminal behavior,
Speaker 6: people who would shun criminal behavior in most circumstances, to
Speaker 6: commit crimes that they're behist I mean, they have that
Speaker 6: ability to in case after case, they don't actually commit
Speaker 6: the crimes, but they get seemingly you know, normal people
Speaker 6: to do that.
Speaker 7: And they also get people to turn over their financial
Speaker 7: resources and to associate themselves with their family, their core unit,
Speaker 7: family unit. That seems to be one of the driving
Speaker 7: principles with a lot of these cult leaders that we discovered.
Speaker 6: And they also tried basically to take over their sex
Speaker 6: lives or their sexuality in certain cases by determining who
Speaker 6: can sleep with whom, who can marry home, you know,
Speaker 6: who should have sex and at what time and in
Speaker 6: what circumstances. So I mean they go for the most
Speaker 6: animate and vulnerable parts of people, their resources, their family,
Speaker 6: and their sexuality.
Speaker 7: But then continuing down the list, then the next person
Speaker 7: on the list was James Arthur Ray, who was a
Speaker 7: self help guru and he was featured in the book
Speaker 7: The Secret, which became huge bestseller worldwide. And interesting thing
Speaker 7: about him was that, you know, he was touted on
Speaker 7: both the Ellen de Generes Show and Oprah Winfrey, of
Speaker 7: course that they didn't know at the time that you know,
Speaker 7: what he was doing would lead to three people deaths
Speaker 7: outside of Sedona, Arizona, in a kind of a Native
Speaker 7: American sweat live ceremony.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So he brought people there. It cost a lot
Speaker 6: of money to go. He had some prior problems with
Speaker 6: trying to put people in extreme circumstances to see if
Speaker 6: they could endure them, apparently as a way of building
Speaker 6: their character, their endurance. And he had these people go
Speaker 6: into a tent in Arizona and very hot at a
Speaker 6: very hot time that the space inside the tent got
Speaker 6: up to one hundred and twenty two degrees. People were
Speaker 6: gasping for air, begging to get out, and he, you know,
Speaker 6: essentially said they needed to go in. He was convicted,
Speaker 6: not on murder but on lesser charges and served a
Speaker 6: couple of years.
Speaker 7: I think it was. Yeah, but the thing isn't that
Speaker 7: he got out and now he's trying to reinvent himself again.
Speaker 6: Right, But again, these people were not unsophisticated at all.
Speaker 6: You know, they were just willing to do whatever he said,
Speaker 6: you know, right up to the point costing them their lives.
Speaker 2: So one of the common threads though, is as well
Speaker 2: as is offering these people this incredible advantage with whatever
Speaker 2: the philosophy of the cult is as well. When you
Speaker 2: mentioned James up the ray, I just had to mention
Speaker 2: as well that he had the endorsement of people like
Speaker 2: Oprah Winfrey, and so it's not It seems that one
Speaker 2: of the common threads is that it's easier to attract
Speaker 2: a celebrity, and then a lot of that recruiting is
Speaker 2: done because of the celebrity itself.
Speaker 6: That's definitely true in this case. You know, he again,
Speaker 6: he was charismatic, he was good looking, he was successful.
Speaker 6: He had the backing of those celebrities and again, people,
Speaker 6: I mean, if there's any you know lesson here that
Speaker 6: runs through so many of them. I mean, at some
Speaker 6: point you have to listen to yourself. You know, you
Speaker 6: can't away your personal power to somebody who's charismatic once
Speaker 6: they crossed that line into very questionable or even criminal behavior.
Speaker 6: And he, you know, again, he had something of a
Speaker 6: track record of putting people in dangerous circumstance.
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Speaker 6: Every details and you know, ending up in a tragic situation.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I mean you you have to pick your
Speaker 6: guru very carefully.
Speaker 7: And then the next man on the list is a
Speaker 7: man from Japan named Shoko Asahara. He grew up in
Speaker 7: Japan in a small village, started out selling Chinese medicine,
Speaker 7: but he was eventually arrested for peddling fake drugs. Then
Speaker 7: he traveled to Tibet and to Paul where he claimed
Speaker 7: that he achieved enlightenment by studying Buddhism and Hinduism. He
Speaker 7: went back to Japan and he formed a group called
Speaker 7: the almshin Rico and I hopeing I'm not mangling that name,
Speaker 7: but where he combined Eastern philosophy with apocalyptic teachings. And
Speaker 7: this is another thread that we've found through many of
Speaker 7: these cults, this apocalyptic end of times, using that tactic
Speaker 7: to scare people and to say, you know, this is
Speaker 7: when the this is where we're going to ascend into heaven,
Speaker 7: or this is when the rapture is going to occur,
Speaker 7: or this is when the great earthquake in California is
Speaker 7: going to occur. And that was part of the driving
Speaker 7: force as we were leading up to the year two
Speaker 7: thousand and to twenty twelve, when the Mind prophecy and
Speaker 7: when the Mind Calendar supposedly ended, a lot of groups
Speaker 7: were built up on that foundation and that fear.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah, especially the end of the millennium, that that's
Speaker 6: the theme that runs through through much of this. Yeah.
Speaker 7: And with that, Shoko Asahara he is the one that
Speaker 7: his followers at least saren nerve gas in the subway
Speaker 7: in Tokyo. And and was what I found interesting about
Speaker 7: him was that he had recruited again very educated chemists
Speaker 7: and engineers and journalists and I mean people in the
Speaker 7: legal system, telecommunications people that worked for that join that group,
Speaker 7: at work for IBM in Japan, Toshiba, Hitachi, other major companies.
Speaker 7: They gave thousands and thousands of dollars to his organization.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and his plan in putting the nerve gas in
Speaker 6: there was to kill thousands of people. That didn't turn
Speaker 6: out that way. It was a much much smaller figure,
Speaker 6: but the plan was for absolute mass destruction and it
Speaker 6: was probably the biggest, well it was the biggest sort
Speaker 6: of mass potential mass destruction event in Japan since the
Speaker 6: end of World War two, and people were very, very
Speaker 6: shaken by it.
Speaker 7: Yeah. And besides, you know, sexual manipulation. He subjected his
Speaker 7: followers to sleep in, food deprivation, sensory deprivation hallucinogens to
Speaker 7: induce visions. We saw that in other sects and cults
Speaker 7: exerting mind control. Sometimes people were allowed to leave the sect,
Speaker 7: but only after they had agreed to turn over their
Speaker 7: property to him, and the sum that refused to disappeared
Speaker 7: or died.
Speaker 6: Now yeah, yeah, so he, he and a handful of
Speaker 6: his followers, I think about six or seven were eventually executed.
Speaker 6: It took a long time to go through the Japanese
Speaker 6: legal system, but when I.
Speaker 7: Believe was eight years.
Speaker 6: The child dire lasted eight years and he pretended or
Speaker 6: actually been saying at that point, yeah, just talked a
Speaker 6: lot of gibberish in the court.
Speaker 7: I think they executed him by hanging on in July
Speaker 7: of twenty eighteen.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they hung all of them, so that it wasn't
Speaker 6: legally resolved until very recently. So to.
Speaker 2: At the same time, it's it's interesting that at one
Speaker 2: time Japan, Japanese government considered his this sect a religion.
Speaker 2: So it's interesting to go from legitimacy to outright you know,
Speaker 2: being executed is interesting to say the least, and.
Speaker 7: Also interesting, well maybe you know, maybe pretty understandable that
Speaker 7: absolute power, you know, just pollutes. Absolutely, it when when
Speaker 7: somebody is given that much control and that many resources
Speaker 7: they can they start to get corrupted, especially if they
Speaker 7: had any any bit of sociopathic or narcissistic psychopathic tendencies
Speaker 7: to begin with.
Speaker 6: But again, you think about sending you know, sending people
Speaker 6: out to poison their fellow citizens, and people you know,
Speaker 6: being willing to do that just to follow the orders
Speaker 6: and go and you know, create the circumstances that could
Speaker 6: have been far worse than they were.
Speaker 7: Absolutely amazing to me that, you know, his net worth
Speaker 7: jumped to like four point three million to one billion
Speaker 7: dollars six years later. He had people throughout the world, Russia,
Speaker 7: New York, you know, all over Japan. It's incredible that
Speaker 7: he got he had that many followers at one time.
Speaker 6: Right, and that people, I mean, there's just been this
Speaker 6: hunger running through all of these stories of people to
Speaker 6: find somebody who can give them absolute answers to what
Speaker 6: really are life's mysteries. I mean, if if that's the hook, also,
Speaker 6: I don't have to think for myself. I don't have
Speaker 6: to solve these problems. In many cases, I don't have
Speaker 6: to earn a living and make money or.
Speaker 7: Maybe their family life wasn't that great, so they wanted
Speaker 7: to join up with a better family, a larger purpose.
Speaker 6: Right. We interviewed someone who was in the Reverend Moon organization,
Speaker 6: and he didn't participate in any criminal behavior or anything,
Speaker 6: but that's basically what he said. You know, he was
Speaker 6: looking for a family and this at that time was
Speaker 6: the best alternative for him until Reverend Moon decided to
Speaker 6: decide to pick who he would marry, and that was
Speaker 6: sort of the thing that pushed him out.
Speaker 7: I really like his quote. He was in there for
Speaker 7: twelve years, and he said, I felt myself that loose ends.
Speaker 7: I had a deep longing for connection, for overriding spirituality.
Speaker 7: I gave myself completely to this extended nuclear family. We
Speaker 7: wanted to make a better world. If I trusted in God,
Speaker 7: it gave myself completely to it. What could go wrong?
Speaker 7: I just thought that was really a pivotal quote to
Speaker 7: put at the very beginning of the book.
Speaker 6: Yeah, definitely, it's a mindset that runs through much of this.
Speaker 6: The next Colt was it was in Massachusetts a fall river,
Speaker 6: just called the Fall River Colt. I thought it was
Speaker 6: really really interesting. It's it's one of the shorter entries
Speaker 6: in the book. But it was basically just this group
Speaker 6: of criminals sort of the underbelly of Fall River.
Speaker 7: Who Tempson prostitutes, who.
Speaker 6: Got into well what was called the Satanic called and
Speaker 6: then created what was locally known as the Satanic Panic,
Speaker 6: where people were disappearing and being mutilated out in the
Speaker 6: woods and things like that. But it's you know, we
Speaker 6: researched the story, wrote the story. When you get to
Speaker 6: the end of it, you won't. I for one didn't
Speaker 6: know exactly what happened because they were all blaming each
Speaker 6: other for doing this, and.
Speaker 7: Some of them are scented their original statements. But I
Speaker 7: believe they are making a movie of that one or
Speaker 7: have made it. I believe it be called Satanic Panic actually.
Speaker 6: Right, right, But in terms of criminal I mean again,
Speaker 6: these these people were involved in criminal behavior, and it's
Speaker 6: fun to me. It's one of the most colorful and
Speaker 6: compelling and interesting of the entries in the anthology.
Speaker 7: And then the next one is of course Charles Manson,
Speaker 7: which everybody has heard so much about. So what what
Speaker 7: what I found interesting on that was some of these
Speaker 7: little details where we really had to dive deep, and
Speaker 7: I didn't realize I mean I was, I miss, I
Speaker 7: must have been about seventh grade when that crime occurred,
Speaker 7: and it was sort of the end of the you know,
Speaker 7: the free love hippie the benevolent type of hippie movement.
Speaker 7: That crime to kind of stop all that, and that
Speaker 7: this darker side emerged. But I didn't remember, and I
Speaker 7: had read you know, Victor Bugliosi's seminal book on it,
Speaker 7: Helter Skelter, years ago, but I didn't realize that the
Speaker 7: group had not only targeted you know, who they thought
Speaker 7: was Terry Melker, Doris Day's son who lived in the
Speaker 7: house that Sharon Tate and Roman Polonsky had rented, but
Speaker 7: they had also had on our death list of celebrities
Speaker 7: people like Richard Burton, Steve McQueen, Tom Jones, Elizabeth Taylor,
Speaker 7: Frank Sinatra. Those little details that where we really had
Speaker 7: to dive deep into the story I found fascinating.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Well, yeah, the demonic nature of Charles Manson, I
Speaker 6: think really comes through in this piece. And I mean
Speaker 6: he was somebody who sort of fits the standard profile
Speaker 6: the psychopath, you know, damage at a very early age,
Speaker 6: sort of cast aside.
Speaker 7: In many ways, institutional life.
Speaker 6: Goes in and out of prison very very often, and
Speaker 6: he sort of, you know, he sort of comes out
Speaker 6: there number of stories in this anthology that dovetail kind
Speaker 6: of with the nineteen sixties and all that he wanted to,
Speaker 6: you know, write songs and get in the music business
Speaker 6: and sort of ride the way of all of those things.
Speaker 6: And you know, he tried to do that, but he
Speaker 6: kept getting robust in that world as well. He wasn't
Speaker 6: that talented, and you know, he just descends further and
Speaker 6: further into criminal madness.
Speaker 7: And again prayed on young you know, just people that
Speaker 7: were on the street, that were doing drugs, that were disenfranchised.
Speaker 7: Those were his targets. And that's where a lot of
Speaker 7: not all of these cult members, but a lot of them,
Speaker 7: that's who they would pray on. People like that that
Speaker 7: they could tell we're looking for something or needed some
Speaker 7: something larger to belong to, right.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: The next one is a fairly unwell known one, Aldolfo Constanzo,
Speaker 6: who grew up in Florida, I believe in Miami and
Speaker 6: where in the drug trade there was becoming very very intense.
Speaker 7: During the time of what's that Farco.
Speaker 6: Yes, he'd sort of studied Pablo Escobar's reign of terror
Speaker 6: in Colombia. It's estimated that Escobar may have been responsible
Speaker 6: for about five thousand deaths. And this guy sort of
Speaker 6: studied that looked at it. He also, with his mother,
Speaker 6: I believe, had gotten into Santa Ria, which is a
Speaker 6: form of religion and kind of like voodoo. Yeah, kind
Speaker 6: of like voodoo. And so he eventually gravitated into the
Speaker 6: dread world himself, recruited people.
Speaker 7: But he partnered up with this young woman named Sarah Aldrete.
Speaker 7: And she is interesting because she was a model student.
Speaker 7: She was, you know, successful, and she became president of
Speaker 7: her soccer booster club and she'd received the National Collegiate
Speaker 7: Health Physical Award. But she also had this fascination with
Speaker 7: the dark arts and black magic, and that came up
Speaker 7: when she took up with this constanzo and then she
Speaker 7: devoted herself to his cause. So again, this is another
Speaker 7: interesting aspect of studying these cults. In some instances, it
Speaker 7: takes two people to form this other entity that will
Speaker 7: actually take you carry out these types of crimes, whereas
Speaker 7: maybe one or the other alone would not have ever
Speaker 7: done that, but the two together form a different entity
Speaker 7: where they can feed off each other and sort of
Speaker 7: like Cleebold and Harris.
Speaker 6: Did Cree Bold and Harris and Dick Hickock and Perry
Speaker 6: Smith and then cold Blood. You thought Dick Hitcock was
Speaker 6: the really bad guy with the criminal you know mind
Speaker 6: and the plans, but Perry ends up being being the killer.
Speaker 6: You know, bad chemistry. In the Aldolpho Constanzo case, I mean,
Speaker 6: one of the things I found interesting was that they
Speaker 6: they were they had property in Mexico where they were
Speaker 6: doing a lot of drug deals and other criminal activities,
Speaker 6: and they were killing people and chopping them up and
Speaker 6: marrying them and all of that. But one night an American,
Speaker 6: a young American man was there and crossed the border
Speaker 6: from Texas in New Mexico looking for some sort of
Speaker 6: action probably and ends up dead. And it was that
Speaker 6: killing of the American that set off the investigation. I mean,
Speaker 6: something you find, you know in other stories as well.
Speaker 6: When you kill an American citizen or somebody in the government,
Speaker 6: the EAFBI, any of that, it ups the ante for
Speaker 6: an investigation by a lot. And that sort of unleashed
Speaker 6: the authorities on Alfonso and on Sarah Aldrete, and that's
Speaker 6: what brought them down, so he was he.
Speaker 7: Was later killed or he killed himself or had someone killed.
Speaker 7: But she was sentenced to thirty years in jail.
Speaker 6: Right right. She tried to sort of wiggle out of
Speaker 6: her responsibility in the case, but it didn't work. So
Speaker 6: it's again, it's a fascinating tale that most people don't
Speaker 6: know that much.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the ones in Mexico, like Magdalena Solis in this
Speaker 7: one I found fascinating.
Speaker 6: Ido. Yeah, I thought they were very interesting. The next
Speaker 6: one is something again people have probably heard of Marshall
Speaker 6: Applewhite and Heavenskgate in nineteen ninety seven. Again, they thought
Speaker 6: that they were Their purpose was to really ascend to
Speaker 6: a higher plane of existence from what we have on Earth.
Speaker 6: And they had talked about this and planned this for
Speaker 6: a long long time, and they took as a sign
Speaker 6: that when the Hall Bob comet passed by the Earth,
Speaker 6: and I believe in the spring of ninety seven, there
Speaker 6: would be a spaceship behind it, and that spaceship would
Speaker 6: would whisk them away into this other dimension. So again,
Speaker 6: these were not unsophisticated people at all. They were very
Speaker 6: much ahead of the curve in terms of computer technology
Speaker 6: and the early work on the Internet, and they were
Speaker 6: in the mid nineties. They were putting out in for
Speaker 6: me about their belief system and what they thought was
Speaker 6: going to happen, and recruiting people to their cause and
Speaker 6: bringing in money and all of those things. They moved
Speaker 6: to them very wealthy suburb in southern California, Rancho to
Speaker 6: Santa Fe, and Rancho Santa Fe, and then you know,
Speaker 6: in April of ninety seven they laid their final plans.
Speaker 7: The onset of the Internet has been an interesting factor
Speaker 7: also in some of these cults because the ability to
Speaker 7: recruit grew exponentially once they were able to go online
Speaker 7: and reach vast, vast numbers of possible recruitinges.
Speaker 6: Right, So they finally decided again in April ninety seven
Speaker 6: to have their last meal at Marie Calendar's restaurant. They
Speaker 6: all ate the same thing, I.
Speaker 7: Think, and then they all dressed in the same clothing.
Speaker 6: They're all dressed in the same clothing. They put like
Speaker 6: five dollars in their pockets, five cents, right, so that
Speaker 6: they could have transit fair to the next place they
Speaker 6: were going, and they took a concoction and you know,
Speaker 6: when the somebody came by the house and of course,
Speaker 6: the smell had gotten very bad. I believe there were
Speaker 6: thirty nine bodies laid out in their dark clothing with
Speaker 6: their tennis shoes on and their veils over their faces.
Speaker 6: And it was a I mean, it was a shocking,
Speaker 6: shocking story. I believe that President Clinton even talked about
Speaker 6: it at a national level. Yeah, he did so. Again,
Speaker 6: it tied into the new millennium coming only three years away.
Speaker 6: The apocalypse was at hand. You know, there's a better
Speaker 6: existence out there somewhere, and if you just follow me
Speaker 6: and take your life, we'll find it. Extraordinary message that
Speaker 6: people would be willing to follow.
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Speaker 2: Now? Joyce and Steven you were talking about Marshall Applewhite
Speaker 2: and Heaven's Gate and talking about also it's incredible the
Speaker 2: things that people will do. We talked about the Aldolfo
Speaker 2: Constanzo and the Human Sacrifice cult and what those people
Speaker 2: were capable of doing, ripping out hearts and other organs
Speaker 2: and dismemberment. And then the Marshall Applewhite. He had castrated
Speaker 2: himself and then convinced members other members that they should
Speaker 2: cast themselves as well.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that up because Steve and I were discussing that
Speaker 7: yesterday and I said, you know, in the in the research,
Speaker 7: we couldn't find if, hopefully presumably he went to a
Speaker 7: medical facility to have that done. I don't know how
Speaker 7: when could do that to himself. Yeah, because he was
Speaker 7: unable to stifle his sexual urges.
Speaker 6: Well, he was also deeply conflicted about being gay or
Speaker 6: not gay. And he married this woman. As joy saluted
Speaker 6: to earlier, she sort of the two of them together,
Speaker 6: you know, began to lay these you know, great plans
Speaker 6: about their transit into the next into the next realm.
Speaker 6: But again it sort of took the combination of people
Speaker 6: to get it off the ground, right.
Speaker 2: And also all these cases do there there's a combination
Speaker 2: of things where there's a confluence events in sort of
Speaker 2: like you say that it's the turn of the Millennium
Speaker 2: or the Hail Bob Comet or just unrest in society
Speaker 2: in the late sixties. That is part of the allure
Speaker 2: or feeds into the allure anyway, right.
Speaker 6: And you know, if you think about some of those decades,
Speaker 6: I mean one of the things that you know, they
Speaker 6: were known for is somewhat the disintegration of the nuclear family.
Speaker 6: I mean, people were getting a lot more divorces, kids
Speaker 6: were growing up maybe much more without two parents. I mean,
Speaker 6: all of that slow unraveling of the fabric was going on.
Speaker 6: You have kids who you know, are maybe at loose
Speaker 6: ends and looking for something. I mean, there are examples
Speaker 6: here where you know, people start coffeehouses with a religious
Speaker 6: undertone and start drawing them in again through the music
Speaker 6: of the sixties and things like that. And you know,
Speaker 6: I was around the situation like that myself once, and
Speaker 6: I could see how vulnerable people were and how much
Speaker 6: they were looking to a leader.
Speaker 7: You mean about that minister in your small town, right was,
Speaker 7: but then they're in young men he.
Speaker 6: Was then, but then he went to a much more
Speaker 6: populated area in New Jersey, just outside of New York City,
Speaker 6: and you kind of thought, well, these people are more sophisticated,
Speaker 6: but they weren't, you know, they were looking for someone
Speaker 6: to basically show them the way. And again it may
Speaker 6: be redundant, but to me, it's just one of these
Speaker 6: themes of not sort of being willing to take responsibility
Speaker 6: for your life, figure out who you are, find your
Speaker 6: own answers, take your own steps, being willing to sort
Speaker 6: of do that for yourself. It's the absolute common theme
Speaker 6: of all of this. If you just hand over that
Speaker 6: personal power, you know your life will get better. It's
Speaker 6: a very dubious thought, it's a.
Speaker 7: Very it was, you know, for us writing the book
Speaker 7: was not only did we educate ourselves vastly on a
Speaker 7: lot of these details that we neither one of us
Speaker 7: remembered or knew about, but we just think it's really
Speaker 7: a good a good thing to put out there for
Speaker 7: people to read about so they can see how vulnerable
Speaker 7: people can be preyed upon and how quickly it can
Speaker 7: descend into something horrendous and out of spiral, totally out
Speaker 7: of control, and putting your trust into someone you know,
Speaker 7: just blindly like that.
Speaker 6: Where and all of us, all three of us, are
Speaker 6: you know, very familiar with researching and writing about criminal behavior,
Speaker 6: you know, in a cult. And this runs through most
Speaker 6: of this. You know, you can believe anything you want
Speaker 6: up to a certain point. You can do anything you want.
Speaker 6: But when you cross that line into criminal behavior, you know,
Speaker 6: whatever that is, it not only changes the dynamic of
Speaker 6: the cult, but it brings in law enforcement. And that's
Speaker 6: I mean in the Rajenese case, it was it was
Speaker 6: really true. For example, they would go into these tiny
Speaker 6: towns in Oregon and they would make a point of
Speaker 6: having sex on the lawns of these people, not necessarily
Speaker 6: a crime. But when you start poisoning their food and
Speaker 6: people start getting sick and could potentially die, and you
Speaker 6: cross that line into criminal behavior, that's what brings. That's
Speaker 6: what brings the rain and some of.
Speaker 7: The frustrating things for me anyway, reading about these people
Speaker 7: is that some of these people died natural deaths. Sheila
Speaker 7: the one involved with the bugwe shri Ra's niece group
Speaker 7: in Oregon. She's living in Switzerland right now. She did
Speaker 7: do a little bit of time here in the States,
Speaker 7: but not very long. And David Berg, who will talk
Speaker 7: about a little bit later. He also died at ninety
Speaker 7: two of natural causes. And you just are it's frustrating
Speaker 7: to see that some of them actually get away with
Speaker 7: this right.
Speaker 6: And some will be for a long time, which is reassuring.
Speaker 2: Yes, tell us about the Chris Korda and the Church
Speaker 2: of Euthanasia, Like I said, very hard, that's.
Speaker 7: A very interesting one. He's still a lot today as well.
Speaker 7: He was born He was born a man in nineteen
Speaker 7: sixty two in New York and would later transform into
Speaker 7: a transgender software developer, slash musician, slash DJ with a
Speaker 7: deep attachment to the Dottist movement that had started in
Speaker 7: Europe in nineteen fourteen after the start of World War One.
Speaker 7: He also is like a multi media artist electronica music,
Speaker 7: conceptual art. But started a church called the Church of Euthanasia.
Speaker 7: And when he was ten, he had read an article
Speaker 7: in the New York Times about climate change that deeply
Speaker 7: impacted him. He interpreted it to mean that global warming
Speaker 7: was irreversible and the human race was doomed unless some
Speaker 7: sort of radical action was taken immediately. So he be
Speaker 7: twenty years later when he formed this Church of Euthanasia.
Speaker 7: It promoted mass suicide.
Speaker 6: Right their slug and was saved the planet, kill yourself.
Speaker 6: So he he went to the great extreme of thinking
Speaker 6: that the human population needed to be lowered significantly in
Speaker 6: order for the species to have a chance to survive
Speaker 6: and the planet, you know, to be healthy as well.
Speaker 6: So some of it seemed like sort of like theater
Speaker 6: of the absurd. I mean, the Dadis were known for
Speaker 6: sort of embracing absurdism in the early twentieth century, and
Speaker 6: some of it was you know, absurdist theater, but I
Speaker 6: think the message behind it was quite serious. So he
Speaker 6: attracted a certain following. I mean they would go they were,
Speaker 6: you know, big supporters of abortion, which would you know,
Speaker 6: be away again of lowering the population, and you know,
Speaker 6: attended a number of events like that and did some
Speaker 6: again some absurd theatrics around all of that.
Speaker 7: But the church was eventually sued by the parents of
Speaker 7: children who were considering suicide. And then this Missouri woman
Speaker 7: was found dead the print out from the church lying
Speaker 7: next to her. So then a prosecutor in Saint Louis,
Speaker 7: Missouri threatened the church with voluntary man slaughter charges, and
Speaker 7: he took down those instructions off of his website.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, so again it's a very bizarre story. It
Speaker 6: wasn't known to me before we started. Before me, I
Speaker 6: wasn't aware of it. So I think people would find it,
Speaker 6: you know, very entertaining, just to find out the extremes
Speaker 6: to which this individual went to make a.
Speaker 7: Point, and I thought this was interesting about him. The
Speaker 7: idea for the Church of euth in Asia came to
Speaker 7: him in a dream, this according to his website, where
Speaker 7: he was confronted by some alien intelligence known as the Bean,
Speaker 7: who spoke to for the inhabitants of the Earth and
Speaker 7: other dimensions. I mean, you know, you can't make this
Speaker 7: stuff up.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that was that was.
Speaker 7: He's still alive and well and living in Europe, I believe. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: he still has a Facebook page up right.
Speaker 6: And again just just just to tell listeners, I mean, again,
Speaker 6: this is an anthology. It is not necessarily something with
Speaker 6: someone or to read beginning to end, but you can
Speaker 6: just dip in and find these very fascinating stories. That are.
Speaker 6: You know, they're four to five thousand word entries and
Speaker 6: they're easy to you know, to consume. So it's a
Speaker 6: different type of project than we've ever worked on before.
Speaker 6: It's not a long narrative story, right.
Speaker 7: We purposely interspersed the longer, the longer stories about say
Speaker 7: like Manson with the shorter ones, just so that it
Speaker 7: would be easier to read.
Speaker 6: Right. The next one, again is a well known one,
Speaker 6: the David koresh Brands Davidian group. In the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 6: They had gotten together on this ranch that should been there.
Speaker 6: The Branch Davidians had been around for some period of time.
Speaker 6: David Kresh showed up again. He was charismatic, he had
Speaker 6: natural leadership abilities, played.
Speaker 7: Guitar, kind of a rock star. Looked about him.
Speaker 6: Yeah, music runs through. This developed a following and you know,
Speaker 6: had their own lives there on the Branch Davidian compound
Speaker 6: near Waco, Texas. This is a complicated story and you know,
Speaker 6: the ultimate truth of it is something people have to
Speaker 6: decide for themselves. But the federal government showed up there
Speaker 6: and I believe it was in February of nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 6: and they were looking into illegal arms on the branch
Speaker 6: Davidian Ranch.
Speaker 7: Well, the ATS thought that they had sold weapons at
Speaker 7: gun shows and converted semi automatic firearms to automatic without
Speaker 7: proper permits, which was one of the of the reasons
Speaker 7: for going to the compound in the first place. So
Speaker 7: it was an issue originally.
Speaker 6: Yes, it was atf and there were four agents that
Speaker 6: were initially killed, something many people don't know about in gunfire.
Speaker 6: And then the standoffs started. It would go from February
Speaker 6: to April nineteenth. On March twelfth, a new Attorney General
Speaker 6: came into the United States, Janet Reno, and she was,
Speaker 6: you know, we don't know exactly how well informed she was.
Speaker 6: But after March twelfth to April twenty twenty ninth April nineteenth,
Speaker 6: the negotiations went back and forth, and the authorities were
Speaker 6: constantly trying to get Korreesh to you know, stop, to standoff,
Speaker 6: let the children go, whatever they could negotiate with them.
Speaker 7: And you know, I thought one of the interesting I'm
Speaker 7: sorry to interrupt you, but one of the interesting aspects
Speaker 7: of that during the fifty one day standoff that I
Speaker 7: had never heard before until I had to do this
Speaker 7: dive into the research was that the agents had put
Speaker 7: up spotlights around the property with giant speakers that broadcast
Speaker 7: around the clock different things like Tibetan monks chanting, telephones,
Speaker 7: ringing Christmas carols, the sound of rabbits being killed, Nancy
Speaker 7: Sinatra singing these boots are made for walking reavely. Yeah,
Speaker 7: all of it making it harder and harder for the
Speaker 7: followers of Koresh to get any sleep. That was an
Speaker 7: interesting tactic I had never heard about. Right.
Speaker 6: So eventually, on that morning of April nineteen, nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 6: the federal government made the decision to shoot gas into
Speaker 6: the compound and you know, try to flush these people out.
Speaker 6: There were It's included in our story that you know,
Speaker 6: there were people in the religious community, I mean scholars
Speaker 6: and people with knowledge that said, you know, the government
Speaker 6: doesn't really understand what Koresh believes and what these people
Speaker 6: are doing, and you don't have to push you to
Speaker 6: this extreme. I mean, they have the right to practice
Speaker 6: their religion under the First Amendment. And so that argument
Speaker 6: was made, the government decided to go in. What we
Speaker 6: think happened is that then Koresh or the followers set
Speaker 6: fires and that caused the conflagration that ended up with
Speaker 6: I believe seventy six or seventy seven people dead, including
Speaker 6: twenty five shows.
Speaker 7: Well, they actually had a report filed by a man
Speaker 7: named Dan Worth whose conclusion was that the Koresh followers
Speaker 7: had actually started the fire. Yes, even though you know,
Speaker 7: the FBI and Jennerino later said that it is possible
Speaker 7: that some of the weapons that they shot in could
Speaker 7: have ignited something. So there always will be That's where
Speaker 7: you have to make up your own mind, I suppose.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And Jennerina and Bill Clinton both said later on
Speaker 6: they were somewhat of a mea culpa and saying, you know,
Speaker 6: if we had it to do over, we might do differently.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So that went on for years. There were congressional investigations
Speaker 6: and other things. But I mean, obviously an overwhelming tragedy.
Speaker 7: There, and with all the children, all those poor children
Speaker 7: that got killed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, horrible And another story we'll get too later. I mean,
Speaker 6: this cloud of Waco has hung over a number of
Speaker 6: other situations where the federal government does not quite know
Speaker 6: what to do when when there's a standoff or people armed,
Speaker 6: do they have bombs? Are they going to blow themselves?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 7: And the damage to the government's credibility at that point,
Speaker 7: at least in some people's eyes, had already been done well,
Speaker 7: because now there's reports of a growing militia movement spreading
Speaker 7: across the country, and part of what happened in part
Speaker 7: because of what happened at Waco.
Speaker 6: Yeah, two years later to the day Tennessee, they went
Speaker 6: to Oklahoma City with his truck full of explosives, very
Speaker 6: much making the point that it was the same day,
Speaker 6: just two years later, and blowing up the Alfred Mara
Speaker 6: Building in Oklahoma City and killing one hundred and sixty
Speaker 6: eight men, women and children. So the repercussions of this
Speaker 6: have rolled out. I mean, Koresh has been seen as
Speaker 6: sort of a religious or right wing martyr ever since.
Speaker 7: And because Timothy McVay had studied this white supremacist novel,
Speaker 7: The Turner Diaries, which is about it's a fictional account
Speaker 7: of a revolutionary named Earl Turner who blows up a
Speaker 7: federal building, you know.
Speaker 6: I mean, will that one that's.
Speaker 7: Going to tie into later another.
Speaker 6: So there are some cross ties here and in some
Speaker 6: of these stories. The next one is again it wasn't
Speaker 6: that well known to me. David Berg and the Children
Speaker 6: of God, and this one released, from my point of view,
Speaker 6: just seems like somebody who is a sex criminal and
Speaker 6: just decided to get into the business of you know,
Speaker 6: salvation and religion and trying to offer people, you know,
Speaker 6: answers to the impending apocalypse.
Speaker 7: Well, he found his little niche there in the counterculture
Speaker 7: movement in southern California in nineteen sixty eight, and he
Speaker 7: was he gained notoriety for incorporating sexuality into his spiritual
Speaker 7: message and recruitment methods. So, you know, what was interesting
Speaker 7: to me about him was that he hit upon this
Speaker 7: idea to allure young people who said they were ready
Speaker 7: for his Christian message. He opens a coffee shop, he
Speaker 7: brings in rock music, He hands out free peanut butter sandwiches.
Speaker 7: You know, his timing was good because those activities were
Speaker 7: coinciding with the hippie movement, and you know, and the
Speaker 7: music thing really was one of his inroads. Guitars and evangelism.
Speaker 7: Evangelism were gaining ground at that time, so he capitalized
Speaker 7: on that, on that growing communal lifestyle, and he began
Speaker 7: to dress the part, you know, began to dress so
Speaker 7: that he looked so that the young people could relate
Speaker 7: to him.
Speaker 6: Right right, big set. You know examples as with him,
Speaker 6: you know, dressing to look like what the image of
Speaker 6: Jesus we've been given is. You know, whether that's accurate
Speaker 6: or not, you know, the long hair, the robes and
Speaker 6: all of that. Now, two very well known people, Walking
Speaker 6: and River Phoenix. The actors their parents were drawn into
Speaker 6: this and Rose mc and well, they were young and
Speaker 6: they were exposed to some of these ideas and activities.
Speaker 6: River Phoenix, as most people know, an incredibly promising young actor,
Speaker 6: killed himself in the early in his early twenties, and
Speaker 6: his brother Jouquen you know, and interviews, has talked about
Speaker 6: thinking that maybe some of this influence you know on
Speaker 6: him was very bad from a young age. So so
Speaker 6: again death has attached itself to this group. David Berg
Speaker 6: was very outspoken about you know, having sex with everybody
Speaker 6: at all times. You know, that was his idea of revolution.
Speaker 7: That really really really disturbing to me. Particularly this cult
Speaker 7: disturbed me the most because they were having sex with
Speaker 7: young children and promoting sex with young children, boys and girls.
Speaker 7: And he would have his followers, some of the young women,
Speaker 7: he would have him go to bars and he used
Speaker 7: this technique called flirty fishing, where they would go to
Speaker 7: bars and try to get men at the bar to
Speaker 7: sleep with them and then recruit them into the group
Speaker 7: or or at least take their money so that they
Speaker 7: could you know, finance the group. And that was another
Speaker 7: cult that made just incredible amounts of money so that
Speaker 7: he could sustain this lifestyle. He lived in a seclusion
Speaker 7: apart from his followers, who you know here he was
Speaker 7: espousing this humble lifestyle for his followers. But he lives
Speaker 7: in a nice home with a swimming pool, you know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So he ended up in Europe, I believe Joyce said,
Speaker 6: away from the legal troubles.
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly. That's how he escaped his legal troubles here
Speaker 7: in the States and died peacefully at age ninety two.
Speaker 6: The next one in the book is a man named
Speaker 6: Bob Matthews. I have written about Bob Matthews starting about
Speaker 6: thirty five years ago with the assassination of the talk
Speaker 6: show host in Denver named Alan Berg. But I thought
Speaker 6: that Matthews and his group The Order were again sort
Speaker 6: of a classic example of a criminal cult. They had
Speaker 6: studied this book that we referred to earlier called The
Speaker 6: Turner Diaries, which is about a white power revolution that
Speaker 6: sweeps across America and gets rid of my minorities, gay people,
Speaker 6: feminist liberal judges, etc. And Matthews was bold enough to think,
Speaker 6: let's take this novel and use it as an actual
Speaker 6: blueprint for real activity. Let's start assassinating people and eliminating minorities.
Speaker 6: They did commit two hundred and forty crimes. They did
Speaker 6: steal something in the neighborhood of four and a half
Speaker 6: million dollars, and they did come to Denver and assassinate
Speaker 6: Alan Berg. Again. He had recruited it among the sort
Speaker 6: of dispossessed, you know, white working class men. Some of
Speaker 6: them were Vietnam veterans. They were very disaffected, they were
Speaker 6: very angry, and but they had many of them had
Speaker 6: never committed or contemplated criminal behavior, and he got them
Speaker 6: to cross that line into very serious criminal behavior. So
Speaker 6: he is considered something of a At the end of
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety four he died in a shootout with the FBI.
Speaker 6: It would be Island up near Seattle, and he is
Speaker 6: considered something of a godfather of the right white nationalist
Speaker 6: movement that we see today. They refer to his activities,
Speaker 6: his attempt to bring down the government and the society
Speaker 6: and the crimes that he committed. So his thread runs
Speaker 6: right into the present. If you go onto the far
Speaker 6: right websites you'll see that.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so the next one is again from my perspective,
Speaker 6: not well known Jiangyan Suuk with a cult named Providence,
Speaker 6: and again he I mean, he was something of a
Speaker 6: spin off from the Moon organizationication Offication church, and I
Speaker 6: in my view reading about him, he again sort of
Speaker 6: fell into the category of somebody who was a sex
Speaker 6: criminal and just sort of used all of these other
Speaker 6: tools religion, you know, the impending doom, et cetera to
Speaker 6: satisfy himself sexually.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, you know he was so eventually, as as happens
Speaker 6: in case after case, you know, somebody eventually comes forward
Speaker 6: and blows the whistle on these people or civilians do
Speaker 6: it who are outside the group, as in this case happened,
Speaker 6: and he is eventually brought down. So the story of
Speaker 6: Orange Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints is the
Speaker 6: next to the last entry in the book. Many people
Speaker 6: are probably familiar with Warren Jeffs by now, but it's
Speaker 6: something that we had researched starting in two thousand and six.
Speaker 6: The book When Men Become Gods about the subject came
Speaker 6: out in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 7: And when we went down, we drove down to the
Speaker 7: compound on the border of Arizona and Utah called Colorado
Speaker 7: City where Warren Jeffs and his followers lived and at
Speaker 7: the time, Warrang Jeffs was on the FBI's ten most
Speaker 7: wanted list, And it was rather it was a little
Speaker 7: bit nerve wracked game driving around that town because at
Speaker 7: that point in time, people didn't know if they have
Speaker 7: the FLDS. The fundamentalist Latter Day Safe had stockpiled munitions
Speaker 7: on the edge of town, much like Waco. They we
Speaker 7: you know, the authorities were nervous to go in. They
Speaker 7: didn't know if there was going to be a conflagration
Speaker 7: or you know, mass suicide or what was going to happen.
Speaker 7: When we were investigating that particular story.
Speaker 6: What struck me about this story, and again you might think, well,
Speaker 6: these people were isolated and you know, uneducated or whatever.
Speaker 6: I found many of the people who had been thrown
Speaker 6: out of the FLDS bywar and Jest to be quite intelligent,
Speaker 6: quite long form before they had all forms of media.
Speaker 6: They had the Internet. He took over in the early
Speaker 6: two thousands, so they had all of that technology. But
Speaker 6: he did things that, to my knowledge, no one else did.
Speaker 6: And the people that we wrote about, such as he
Speaker 6: would take men and tell them you've sinned against the
Speaker 6: Church or you've sinned against me. So what you need
Speaker 6: to do is go away and repent for your sins.
Speaker 6: Go away to Saint George and nearby town or some
Speaker 6: other town, write down all your sins, stay away, and
Speaker 6: tell I tell you to come back. While they were gone,
Speaker 6: he would take They all had multiple wives. I mean,
Speaker 6: they might have twenty wives and forty children. He would
Speaker 6: take their wives and their children and just disperse them
Speaker 6: among other men who were in his favor, just give
Speaker 6: their kids away. I mean. And it was extraordinary to
Speaker 6: me that these hard working, you know, decent right people
Speaker 6: would just go along with this until they realized that
Speaker 6: he was a monstrosity and.
Speaker 7: They I have to make a point here about Warren Jeffson.
Speaker 7: The FLDS. Similar to people that were born into cults,
Speaker 7: like say the children of got David Berg. Some people
Speaker 7: are actually born into cults. They don't know, anything else
Speaker 7: until maybe they're to start thinking for themselves or like
Speaker 7: as we found in the instances of the Warren Jeff's case,
Speaker 7: there are always people that are renegades. There are always
Speaker 7: people that will chafe at the bit and push back about,
Speaker 7: you know, against authoritarianism. And that's what happened in the
Speaker 7: Warren Jeff's case. These women stood up against him, and
Speaker 7: when some of the men failed, these women stood up.
Speaker 7: They went to court and eventually helped bring him down.
Speaker 6: Yes, eventually got the state of Arizona to investigate him,
Speaker 6: and that led to bringing in the FBI. All of
Speaker 6: the women that the joyce they're referring to had been
Speaker 6: forced into young marriages, you know, arranged marriages, and finally
Speaker 6: they just hit a place where they said, we're going
Speaker 6: to fight back.
Speaker 7: And in many cases, you know, marriage to men that
Speaker 7: are quite older than them, where men in their seventies
Speaker 7: or eighties, you know, and they're like maybe fourteen or sixteen,
Speaker 7: you know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And Jeff eventually picked up when he was on
Speaker 6: the FBI ten most wanted this. He went to trial
Speaker 6: in Utah in two thousand and seven and was convicted
Speaker 6: on two rape charges or accomplished the rape. That verdict
Speaker 6: was overturned. But then the most probably the most spectacular
Speaker 6: part of the story is that he had built this
Speaker 6: huge white limestone temple in Texas and started moving all
Speaker 6: of his people there when the heat got too much
Speaker 6: in Arizona and Utah, and eventually there was a raid
Speaker 6: on that compound and they found that he was marrying
Speaker 6: eleven year olds or twelve year olds, and the evidence
Speaker 6: was there, and he went to trial in Texas and
Speaker 6: got what is essentially a life sentence. So he has
Speaker 6: been brought down and has paid the price.
Speaker 7: But there are tendrils of that sect that are still
Speaker 7: in operation in Canada, in southern Colorado and other parts
Speaker 7: of the country. Again, they like to move into places
Speaker 7: that are isolated, insular where they can hopefully infiltrate the
Speaker 7: local politics, so they can kind of have some control
Speaker 7: in that regard.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and he has still tried to lead people from
Speaker 6: his selle in Texas, but his hold is far less
Speaker 6: than it once was.
Speaker 7: And then finally, this is when you know, the publishing
Speaker 7: company asked us to do most of those people on
Speaker 7: the list, and we offered a few suggestions of our own,
Speaker 7: but we We really wanted to end with this cult
Speaker 7: of Columbine because we thought this is one that's current,
Speaker 7: it's ongoing, and this is young people who have supported,
Speaker 7: you know, the shooters in the Columbine case. Cleebold and
Speaker 7: Harris saw them as martyrs and started emulating them and
Speaker 7: trying to outdo them or trying to, you know, replicate
Speaker 7: what they did in several schools that they were involved in.
Speaker 6: Right and again, the rise of the internet has been
Speaker 6: I mean, anyone, any young person who wants to access,
Speaker 6: for example, the tapes that Harrison Creebole made leading right
Speaker 6: up to their crimes. Those things are out there. If
Speaker 6: the authorities had a lot of mixed feelings about releasing
Speaker 6: some of this material, but ultimately they did, and other
Speaker 6: people around the country have studied it and taking these
Speaker 6: guys on as their role models. We provide numerous examples
Speaker 6: of people who were planning to do some sort of
Speaker 6: mass killing. In some cases it didn't come off because
Speaker 6: I think the authorities have gotten better at detecting these
Speaker 6: things and stopping them.
Speaker 7: Not only the authorities, but people are beginning to see
Speaker 7: the warning size and taking it seriously. When their classmates
Speaker 7: are people they know are making statements on social media
Speaker 7: or exhibiting some kind of strange behavior and they're actually
Speaker 7: seeing something insane, something thankfully right.
Speaker 6: Right. So again it's this idea, you know, are you
Speaker 6: willing to sacrifice your life for either something or someone
Speaker 6: that you believe in? An example after example in these cults,
Speaker 6: people are willing to do that.
Speaker 2: It's interesting in these cases not that they all share
Speaker 2: the same characteristics, but many of the stories they share
Speaker 2: the same kinds of characteristics in terms of how they
Speaker 2: were lured into these cults and then made to do
Speaker 2: things like give up your property, give up secrets that
Speaker 2: to be able to stay in the cult, personal success,
Speaker 2: peace of mind, supernatural powers, higher power for the people
Speaker 2: in the cult. It's incredible all of these similar characteristics
Speaker 2: to lure some of these same people, same types of
Speaker 2: people into these groups.
Speaker 6: Yes, absolutely, and again throwing in you know, the end
Speaker 6: of the second millennium, the arrival of the new millennium.
Speaker 6: If we all remember the Y two K scare, I
Speaker 6: mean that went through the general population. You know, the
Speaker 6: computer world is going to crash, you have to thoctpile food.
Speaker 6: I mean that was a pretty common idea, and these
Speaker 6: people just took it to the next two or three levels.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. I want to thank you very much Joyce
Speaker 2: and Stephen for coming on and talking about killer Cults,
Speaker 2: Stories of Charisma, deceit and death. For those that might
Speaker 2: want to check this out, is there facebook page a
Speaker 2: website tell us about.
Speaker 7: Our website is www dot stevensingular dot com and that's
Speaker 7: Stephen st e p h E N s I N
Speaker 7: g U l a r dot com. We always update
Speaker 7: that dan so that people can see when things are
Speaker 7: coming out, or when there's going to be television appearances
Speaker 7: or you know, podcasts, anything, any developments we always put
Speaker 7: on the website.
Speaker 2: Great well, thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 2: Killer Cults, Stories of Charisma, deceit and Death. Thank you
Speaker 2: very much for having bye, Thank you, good night.