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INSIDE THE SINISTER WORLD OF CRIMINAL CULTS Charismatic Leaders Who Use Mind Control SURVIVORS A Woman Who Escaped Charles Manson’s Murderous Family • Jim Jones’s Mass Suicide Cult • Sex Slavery PLUS Stories Behind TV Documentaries & Miniseries…
Cults and cultlike groups have an undeniable mystique, exerting a strange power over not only their members but the wider public. Whether merely zealous, criminal or even murderous, cults also provide constant fodder for popular culture: 2023 saw a Hulu documentary on the sex cult that preyed on Sarah Lawrence College students, and an HBO film on the bizarre religious cult called Love Has Won. In recent years Paramount Network aired Waco, a dramatized account of the Branch Davidian sect, whose leader, David Koresh, and 74 devotees met a fiery end after a 51-day standoff with federal agents in 1993, sparking a cottage industry of right-wing conspiracy theories; SundanceTV’s Jonestown told the story of Peoples Temple cult leader Jim Jones, who in Guyana in 1978 led more than 900…
SUCCEEDING—AND THRIVING—amid challenging circumstances was pretty common for Felicia Rosario. By 2010 the Bronx-born daughter of Dominican-immigrant parents had earned a degree in biochemistry from Harvard and a medical degree from Columbia. In her late 20s she was halfway through a rigorous forensic-psychiatry residency at a Los Angeles hospital, working toward her lifelong dream of becoming a doctor. But on a family visit, her younger brother Santos, then a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., introduced her to Lawrence “Larry” Ray, a shady businessman fresh out of prison for securities fraud who was crashing at his daughter’s dorm. Ray claimed to be a brilliant self-help guru who could heal past traumas. Felicia soon left her residency to join Ray and five college students, even as the “self-help” turned…
SARAH EDMONDSON DISLIKES THE TERM “BRAINWASHED.” But the Canadian actress ruefully admits that the word pretty much captures how she spent 12 years of her life. “On any given day,” she told People, “I’ll catch myself thinking about something and suddenly go, ‘Is this me thinking or is this the cult’s belief system?’” In 2017 Edmondson broke free from NXIVM—the Albany, N.Y.-based group whose cofounder, Keith Raniere, is serving 120 years in federal prison for charges including sex trafficking. Since then she and her husband, former NXIVM member Anthony Ames, have been working to piece their lives back together. “We’ve both just been focusing on trying to heal,” said Edmondson, “seeing therapists and trying to get back in touch with reality.” India Oxenberg’s NXIVM story, like so many of…
IT WAS A BUSY MORNING at Naifeh’s Deli and Grill in Cushing, Okla., on June 7, 2022. Waitress Holly Marie, a 42-year-old mother of five, was putting the last batch of cookies in the oven for a large take-out order when a detective and an official from the Texas attorney general’s Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit stopped by unannounced and asked to speak to her. As they all sat together in a booth, the officials said they were investigating the 1980s double murder of a young couple near Houston, Dean and Tina Clouse, who left behind a baby daughter who had been missing ever since. As Holly—who was adopted as an infant and raised by a Seventh-day Adventist pastor—listened in stunned silence, the investigators said they had reason to…
ONE DAY, WHEN Ruby Garnett was a 14-year-old girl sitting alone in a New York City beauty shop, a man walked in, looking as if he’d come from another world. He was dressed in white robes and smelled of sweet, exotic oils. To Ruby’s shock, he approached her and politely introduced himself. He was a member of a community called the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, he said, and he wanted to tell her about it. A few days later he took teen Ruby, without her mother, to see the community for herself. He led her down Bushwick Avenue, a run-down Brooklyn street. But as they arrived at the neighborhood where the Nuwaubians lived, “the whole scenery changed,” Garnett told People Magazine Investigates in 2018. The atmosphere, full of…
