Cults Inside Out: How People Get in and Can Get Out Read online

  Mental health experts categorized Koresh as a malevolent psychopath much like Charles Manson.274

  Remnants of a huge arsenal were later found in the ruins, including grenades, gas masks, more than a million rounds of ammunition, body armor, Kevlar helmets, and at least forty submachine guns. Also found were lathes, milling equipment, and other tooling machinery most probably used for the illegal conversion of assault rifles and the manufacture of crude “grease guns.”275

  Five surviving Branch Davidians were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and weapons charges, and three more were convicted on weapons charges. A federal judge sentenced most of those convicted to long prison terms; however, the US Supreme Court later overturned their sentences, which were subsequently reduced. Thirteen years after the cult mass suicide, six Davidians were released from prison.276

  Antigovernment conspiracy theories swirled around the Waco Davidian standoff. And it was such conspiracy theories that motivated Timothy McVeigh in 1995 to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City as a supposed act of retaliation for Waco. That bombing claimed 168 lives.277 McVeigh was sentenced to death and executed on June 11, 2001.278

  The US Congress held hearings about Waco in 1996. The official Republican report concluded the following:279

  “Who fired the first shot on February 28th cannot decisively be resolved given the limited testimony presented to the Subcommittees. It appears more likely, however, that the Davidians fired first as the ATF agents began to enter the residence.”

  “Koresh sexually abused minor females at the residence.”

  “Koresh employed severe physical punishments as a means of disciplining the children.”

  “On April 19th multiple fires began in different places inside the Branch Davidian residence and that they were deliberately set by the Davidians themselves.”

  “Opportunity existed for the Davidians to safely leave the structure had they wanted to do so.”

  Nevertheless, surviving Davidians and relatives of deceased members of the group filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the government. The plaintiffs alleged that the government was responsible for the deaths of Davidians in the compound. The trial concluded in July 2000. After two hours of deliberation, the jury found against the plaintiffs.280

  During 1999 John Danforth, the former US senator, conducted an independent investigation of the Waco Davidian standoff. After conducting ten months of interviews with about nine hundred witnesses and examining more than 2.3 million pages of documents, Danforth said with “100 percent certainty” that the FBI didn’t start the fire. He further stated, “There are no doubts in my mind,” and concluded, “The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of David Koresh.”281

  Since the Waco Davidian standoff and through other standoffs with cultlike groups, authorities have learned and employed more nuanced strategies. The specific dynamics in cults make such special consideration necessary. Cult followers represent a unique and different mindset apart from common criminals, terrorists, or both.

  1994—Luc Joret and the Solar Temple Suicides

  Some academics and others have attempted to blame the government, cult critics, and former cult members for tragedies like Jonestown and Waco. They have opined that if cult groups were just left alone, there would be no such tragedies. History has repeatedly proved this theory wrong.

  In October 1994 an obscure cult with members in Canada, France, and Switzerland became committed to self-extermination despite the fact that no one was “persecuting” or investigating them. Fifty-three members of a group known as the Solar Temple were found dead at two locations in Switzerland near Geneva. Almost all had been shot in the head (some shot as many as eight times), and others had been repeatedly stabbed. An elaborate system had been designed and set in place to subsequently burn all their remains. Twenty-two bodies were found at one Swiss site and twenty-five at another. Those dead included at least five children.282 As authorities uncovered the charred remains of the cultists in Europe, five more dead devotees of the group were found in Canada forty-five miles from Montreal. This discovery included a Swiss man, his British wife, and their three-month-old son.

  Luc Joret, a forty-six-year-old self-styled guru and supposed homeopathic healer, led the Solar Temple. He lectured about his various theories concerning nutrition and parenting. Joret, like David Koresh, told his followers about a coming apocalypse. He explained that this would occur through environmental disasters and that only the elect would survive.283

  Joret was born in the Belgian Congo, now known as Zaire. He immigrated to Brussels in the 1970s to study acupuncture and homeopathy; later he joined a French group called Reformed Catholicism. The group’s leader was a former Nazi Gestapo officer. The group practiced an eclectic mix of yoga and alchemy, suffused with supposed, arcane Christian rituals. After the leader died in 1981, Joret took over and set up a network of clubs to attract and recruit new members.284 Joret publicly urged his followers to stockpile weapons. Originally the group was based in Canada. In 1993, however, Joret fled Canada after pleading guilty to charges of attempting to illegally obtain guns with silencers.285

  Under the influence of Joret, the group’s adherents came to believe in what they called “death voyages,” which would supposedly allow them to be reborn on a star named Sirius.286

  Luc Joret and Joseph Di Mambro, a prominent member of the group, lived lavishly and may have gathered a fortune of as much as $93 million from their followers’ surrendered assets. Di Mambro’s final words stated that he had simply “decide[d] to leave this terrestrial plane.”287 Luc Joret’s body was identified along with the bodies of other Solar Temple members in Switzerland.

  After the initial round of Solar Temple suicides in Europe and Canada, the death toll of the group continued to climb. In 1995 there were sixteen Solar Temple-related suicides in France. During March 1997 five more remaining devotees committed suicide at a retreat near Quebec City in Canada.288 By 1999 seventy-four deaths were linked to the Solar Temple.

  In early 1998 Spanish police arrested a German psychologist reportedly only hours before she allegedly planned another group suicide involving twenty-nine of her followers. This group included twenty-eight Germans, who were located in the Canary Islands. The group was believed to be an offshoot of the Solar Temple.289

  In January 2002 Switzerland opened a public information center exclusively focused on religious cults. This was done largely in response to the Solar Temple members who had died in Switzerland.290 Gérard Ramseyer, Geneva’s cantonal justice minister, said, “Those seventy-four coffins, especially the eleven children’s coffins, are still fresh in my mind.”291 Geneva’s justice department estimates that there are between 150 and 180 fringe religious groups in French-speaking Switzerland. The center helps cult victims and generally educates the public.292

  1997—Marshall Applewhite and the Heaven’s Gate Suicides

  In March 1997 thirty-nine people, twenty-one women and eighteen men, were found dead at a mansion in the exclusive neighborhood of Rancho Santa Fe near San Diego in the United States. They ranged in age from twenty-six to seventy-two and came from nine different US states. The thirty-nine bodies were identified as members of a cult group known as Heaven’s Gate.293

  Again, like the Solar Temple, the small group had not been subjected to intense scrutiny or what some might label “persecution”; rather it had remained relatively obscure and unnoticed.

  The bodies of the cult members were found dispersed in the mansion on cots and mattresses. All but two had shrouds of purple covering their heads and shoulders. Most had died of suffocation, induced by plastic bags placed over their heads after they took a concoction of phenobarbital and alcohol. Found among the dead was Marshall Herff Applewhite, the sixty-five-year-old leader of the group.

  Applewhite had a troubled history. In 1970 he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital after hearing voices. He also hoped to find a cure for his “homosexual urges.”294 Marshall Applewhite never r
esolved his mental illness. After discontinuing his psychiatric treatment, Applewhite had himself castrated, it appears in an effort to resolve his sexual conflicts. Videotapes of Applewhite’s final statements were shown to Louis Jolyon West, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. Dr. West concluded that the tapes demonstrated Applewhite was “delusional, sexually repressed and suffering from clinical paranoia.”295

  Applewhite taught his followers that he was a messenger from an “Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human.” He claimed that periodically this higher kingdom sent messengers to earth and that one such previous visitor was Jesus. Applewhite believed he had once been Jesus in an “away team” and had been “incarnated again in…[a] mature (adult) [body] that had been picked and prepped for [his] current mission.” He advised his followers that if they studied with him, he would become their pivotal link to this higher level. He said that only through him would it be possible for them to eventually evolve and shed their human “containers,” which were only temporary “vehicles” for this supposed journey.

  Applewhite’s group evolved over the years, beginning in the 1970s. The group was known by successive names including The Two (Applewhite and his platonic companion, Bonnie Nettles), Human Individual Metamorphosis (HIM), Te and Do (Nettles was Te, and Applewhite was Do), and then Total Overcomers Anonymous.296 Finally, Applewhite chose the name Heaven’s Gate.

  Applewhite required his “class” to give up virtually everything. This included their families, friends, and sex. Five of his male followers also had themselves surgically castrated, following their leader’s example. Members of Applewhite’s “crew” surrendered and renounced all their worldly possessions. They were told that they must overcome and do battle spiritually with dark forces known as the “Luciferians” and those they influenced. Luciferians became a negative label that could be applied to anyone or anything outside the group Applewhite saw as negative or threatening.

  Through a process of rigid regimentation, Applewhite was able to ultimately purge his followers of their individuality and influence them to fully accept and embrace his teachings. Members also often suffered from sleep deprivation through a schedule of periodic prayers that punctuated the night. They ate the same food, called “formulas,” at the same hours, which were referred to as “fuel for the vehicle.” They all had the same haircuts and wore identical clothing. Their uniform appearance often included gloves, which they seemingly used to avoid physical human contact, contamination, or both. Work was divided into twelve-minute intervals indicated by audible beeps. They were also given new names, which further broke down their sense of individual identity and connection to their past lives. Applewhite also controlled information; his followers weren’t allowed to watch television or read anything by choice. Rather they were given lists of designated literature. Each member was assigned a partner and encouraged to travel in pairs. One former devotee recalled that this step was an important facet of group control “to keep [members] in the mindset. The partner was there, if [a member was] falling out of what [he or she] had to do, so [he or she] wouldn’t fall out. It was part of the mind control.”297 Communication was at times limited to simply saying, “Yes,” “No,” or “I don’t know.”298 This process persisted to the end. All cult members ordered exactly the same last meal and ended their lives almost completely alike in virtually every detail. 299

  According to Marshall Applewhite the world was merely a “stepping stone” to “the true Kingdom of God.” He said planet Earth was about to be “recycled” or “spaded under” because its inhabitants had refused to evolve according to Applewhite’s prescribed process. Only those bound together through his teachings could survive the coming end by traveling to the next level with him.300 The group’s suicide might seem logical in this mind-set, since Applewhite insisted that “the Truth can be retained only as one is physically connected with the Next Level, through an Older Member.”301 Therefore, without Applewhite there was no assured hope of transition to the next “Evolutionary Level.” When he elected to die, his followers were thus obliged to do likewise. Death was the only sure way they could retain “The Truth” and move through the final necessary step to enter “the true Kingdom of God.”

  2001—Elizabeth Smart Kidnapping

  On June 5, 2002, Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped a at knifepoint from her home in Salt Lake City. The fourteen-year-old girl was missing for nine months.302 Police later found her walking along a road in a suburb of Salt Lake City with two adults on March 12, 2003. The story that emerged would prove to be eerily reminiscent of the saga of Patty Hearst. Hearst’s attorney J. Albert Johnson observed that his former client “underwent the very same brutal ordeal as Elizabeth Smart.”303

  Elizabeth Smart was one of six children within a wealthy, tightly knit Mormon family. Her father, Ed Smart, was in the midst of remodeling the family home when he hired a drifter named Brian Mitchell as a handyman. Mitchell, an excommunicated Mormon and self-proclaimed “prophet,” called himself Emmanuel. Mitchell became fixated on Elizabeth Smart as his next “wife.” Already enthralled with the erratic homeless man was the woman who would become Smart’s surrogate mother, Wanda Barzee.304

  After Brian Mitchell abducted her, Elizabeth Smart was held captive in isolation. Mitchell threatened the girl’s life and the lives of the Smart family; he also raped her.305 At the end of this reign of terror, a strange metamorphosis occurred. Smart, like Patty Hearst, took on a new identity and completely submitted to Brian Mitchell.

  At first when police confronted Smart, she repeatedly denied her identity and said her name was “Augustine.” She also told officers that the two adults with her were her parents. When police insisted that she was Elizabeth Smart, the girl responded eerily in stilted, seemingly biblical verbiage. “Thou sayest,” she said, apparently denying her own name.306 Robert W. Butterworth, a California psychologist, said, “They were well along in stripping away her identity. She was dressing differently, hearing nothing but their pseudo-religious talk. It was very much like the Taliban in Afghanistan.”307

  In the months before her rescue, various witnesses saw Elizabeth Smart, veiled and in a white robe resembling a hospital gown, with Brian Mitchell and Wanda Barzee at a party. A photographer named Dan Groeder took pictures of the odd trio. He said, “She could have just walked away or said something. She definitely had the opportunity to walk away.”308

  On numerous occasions Mitchell, Barzee, and Smart were seen walking together in public, eating together at a restaurant, and entering stores. They also stayed at the apartment of a Mitchell acquaintance for a week. At no time did Smart make any effort to get help. One witness told the press, “He must have really done a job on her, because all she would have had to do was to say her name.”309

  After his daughter’s rescue, Ed Smart concluded, “I can just tell that he did an absolute brainwashing job on her.”310 Her grandfather, Charles Smart, a retired surgeon, explained, “She had no ability to control her life” and “was completely controlled by Emmanuel [Mitchell].”311

  After the rescue of Elizabeth Smart, Patty Hearst commented in an interview that she could easily empathize with the teenager. Hearst said, “You come to a point where you believe any lie your abductor has told you. You don’t feel safe. You think that either you will be killed if you reach out to get help. You believe that your family will be killed. You’re not even thinking about trying to get help anymore. You’ve, in a way, given up. You have absorbed this new, you know, identity that they’ve given you. You’re just surviving. You’re not even doing that, really. You’re just living while everything else is going on around you.”312

  Elizabeth Smart recovered a and like Patty Hearst successfully moved on with her life. She testified in court against Brian Mitchell, describing her time with him as “nine months of hell.”313 Confronting her former captor in court, Smart told Mitchell, “No matter what you do you will never affect me again.” She saw letting go of her hate as a m
eaningful component of her recovery. “It’s just not worth holding on to that kind of hate; it can ruin your life. Nine months of my life had been taken from me, and I wasn’t going to give them any more of my time,” she told the press.314

  Brian Mitchell was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison. Mitchell’s accomplice, Wanda Barzee, received a fifteen-year prison term in a plea arrangement with prosecutors. She cooperated in their case against Mitchell.315

  In 2012 twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Smart married Matthew Gilmour in Hawaii. At the time the bride was a senior attending Brigham Young University.316

  2008—1 Mind Ministries and Child Abuse Death

  The remains of eighteen-month-old Javon Thompson were found in a suitcase behind a Philadelphia home in the spring of 2008. A religious cult, including the child’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon, had beaten and starved the baby to death. At the time of her son’s death in the spring of 2006, Ramkissoon was nineteen years old.317 Baltimore police identified the cult group as 1 Mind Ministries, led by Toni Ellsberry, age forty, known to her followers as “Queen Antoinette.” Ramkissoon, Ellsberry, and three other members of the group were charged with first-degree murder. Ramkissoon was held in a psychiatric ward.318

  Ria Ramkissoon’s family insisted that the young woman was under undue influence. “She had no control over that situation at all,” stepfather Craig Newton said. Ramkissoon’s mother agreed. “My daughter was a victim, just like my grandson.”319 She explained that her daughter had been coerced. “The leader of the cult—Queen Antoinette—made the decision. She was the one that said, ‘Do not feed him,’ and would beat Javon and put him in a back room.” According to her mother, Ria Ramkissoon had undergone a radical transformation. Once “a lively, jolly person,” she had changed to “an empty shell.” Family communication became largely nonexistent for two years.320 Describing her daughter as “brainwashed,” Ramkissoon’s mother said after her arrest, “I was shocked. I didn’t even recognize her voice…It’s not the same person.”321