Ted Patrick And The Kidnapping Of Susan Jungclaus
By Syran Warner
Original Art by Jahera from Nairobi, Kenya
It was 77 degrees in Moorhead, Minnesota the day Susan Jungclaus was abducted. It was May of 1976 and the semester had just ended at the university the 20-year-old attended. Some of her friends had seen Susan that day, but no one reported anything suspicious. The student was waiting for a ride home to the tiny town of Bird Island in southern Minnesota when she vanished in plain sight in.
Moorhead Campus
Susan had been observed on the Moorhead campus in broad daylight, surrounded by other students leaving school for summer vacation. It was a typical spring day in a safe midwestern college town, and it would take a while before anyone hypothesized that the bright pupil could had been kidnapped. Even then, when Susan’s fiancé reported her missing, the case wasn’t taken seriously once a few phone calls were made. After all, her parents were nonplused by the report and assured law enforcement the student was safe, as did a Bird Island preacher. It could stand to reason that maybe Susan wanted some time apart from her fiancé. And yet Susan was, in fact, confined against her will at a home in Minneapolis, hundreds of miles from Bird Island.
The real piece of pertinent information for anyone poking around the Susan Jungclaus disappearance or looking into all the court proceedings that followed is that Susan was in a cult called The Way and had been descending into its clutches since she began attending Moorhead as a freshman. She’d been warned it was a dangerous slope, but no one suspected an outcome like this when she’d first been seduced as a teenager.
The Way International was a Christian organization founded by Victor Wierwille in the 1940’s. Victor liked to be called “Doctor” because of his vast religious education, but the schools he went to were unaccredited and his degrees were bogus. The Way had modest origins in Ohio before the group eventually spread across the country and amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who were more or less obligated to make substantial donations to the church. In the process of accumulating the savings of the people who thought they were being saved, “Doctor” became a millionaire and lived a lavish lifestyle. As his material wealth built, more outsiders became suspicious of The Way. By the 70’s, when anti-cult hysteria was building, Wierwille was gaining a reputation as a cult leader, which he vehemently denied.
Victor Wierwille
A deep analysis of The Way International and its position in Cultland would be a digression in a story about kidnapping, but there are a few points about Victor Wierwille that are fair to bring up. First, if he wasn’t a cult leader as he claimed, he certainly groomed one. In Wierwille’s inner circle was a man named Victor Barnard, and after Wierwille’s death and the disbanding of The Way in the 80’s, Barnard started his own church called The River Road Fellowship where he was worshipped as a Christ figure and where he convinced some of his followers to sign custody of their young teenage daughters over to him. This went about as well as you can imagine, and Barnard earned himself a 30-year prison sentence for his crimes and status as the most notorious cult leader in Minnesota history. It’s easy to hypothesize that Barnard learned his tricks from Wierwille and there are numerous examples of this sort of training happening in cults. It’s important to point out that there’s no evidence of Wierwille being a pedophile like Barnard turned out to be, but he had his own sexual peculiarities that came to light.
It’s policy that we don’t include graphic sexual details in these articles as they may be triggering for some readers. Euphemism will have to do. Let’s just say Wierwille had a serious case of the Cosby’s when it came to the condition he liked his partners to be in before intercourse. Wierwille was a sick man for sure, and there’s another story of his strange sexual deviances that should be mentioned because it’s too insane to leave out. In the years before his death, “Doctor” was known to gather groups of his followers together to play them a video tape that highlighted the perversions of the secular world outside of the safe and moral confines of The Way. The tape was something of a porno, and it would be tasteless to describe what was on it. Let’s just say that one of the actors definitely wasn’t paid and that he was probably a very good boy when he wasn’t fucking a human being. ANYWAY…
The sect of The Way that Susan joined in college had been established a few years before it found her. People going through transitions in their lives are at the highest risk of falling prey to coercive control, and whether or not Victor Wierwille knew this, he encouraged his missionaries to set up shop and look for new members on college campuses. Here he found people who were likely going through the biggest transitions of their lives and more likely to join a new group of friends. Susan was directly in The Way’s hot zone as a small-town girl with a religious background, hours away from anyone she knew, adjusting to life on her own. The Way got to her before her first classes began. In her first semester, the freshman was able to balance her newfound faith and schoolwork, but by her second her grades started to slip, and she was spending more time in The Way than she was at school.
Her report card was the first warning sign to her parents. They were open to Susan’s exploring of a new Christian religion at first, but their daughter had always been an A student and it seemed unlike her to be floundering at college. Then came the first summer break when Susan came home and worked as a waitress in a small Bird Island café. At a certain point her father Norman learned that Susan was sending nearly all her earnings to The Way and when Norman figured this out, he started trying to convince his daughter that the church was bad news.
Susan wouldn’t hear it. The Way was her salvation. After another year at Moorhead, Susan took her donations a step further and sold a car Norman had bought for her, giving every penny she got from the sale to Wierwille’s church. At that point, Norman sought the advice of his pastor in Bird Island. The two men thought of ways to get Susan to see that she was being taken advantage by a charlatan. The pastor talked to Susan about her faith but didn’t make much progress.
All appeared hopeless when the following semester Susan became engaged to a member of The Way who’d helped recruit her two years earlier. At the end of her next semester Susan got into a car she recognized on that sunny day in May of ’76 and after the car missed its expected exit, found herself hostage to captors who’d keep her bound until she gave them what they wanted. This was the price Susan had to pay for joining the cult her parents warned her about.
Did her fiancé have something to do with her disappearance? Was Susan kidnapped by The Way?
The man driving the car was Norman Jungclaus, and sitting shotgun was the pastor who helped him come up with the abduction plot. After missing the turn south to Bird Island, Norman continued east on Interstate 94 to Minneapolis. Here Susan’s father and the pastor had to drag the young woman kicking and screaming into a house she’d never seen where a therapist and a group of former cult members Norman had paid $14,000 were preparing to change her mind and get her out of the cult she’d joined by any means necessary. Once inside Susan was restrained and locked in a guarded room.
Susan was about to go through a process called deprogramming. Her story became unique enough that it’s a good case study in the phenomenon the “therapy” was, but Susan’s plight it just one of thousands of kidnappings and false imprisonment tales involving cult members in the ‘70’s and 80’s. Who would think of such a thing?
Ted Patrick with the family a cult member.
Ted Patrick became a cult crusader in 1970 after discovering that a religious organization had used mind control tactics on his son. He wouldn’t have known it at the time, but he was at the precipice of a movement that would go on to define his life and decades of cult intervention. Patrick’s story of fighting against coercive organizations is perhaps the most fascinating in the cultiverse, not just for all the kidnapping or the success rate of the process he invented, but because of the unlikeliness of his origins in the world of therapy.
Patrick was born a poor Black child in the red-light district of Chattanooga, Tennessee. A severe stutter limited his socializing and made his educational experience difficult. Patrick was considered something of a lost cause by his teachers and did poorly in school. He was a drop out in the 10th grade, and he’d later say he should have given up on school in the 9th. His prospects for a successful life looked grim as a teen. Ted Patrick had few options, but he turned out to be an ace at defying the odds.
Somehow, Ted figured out a way to overcome his speech impediment on his own, without access to therapy. Later, he went on to get a job for the state, became a community organizer, and created a middle-class family with his wife. He was already an underdog success story by the time cults became his obsession. Patrick would say of himself that he may not have had a formal education, but he was an expert in the school of life. This was what he claimed prepared him for his experience removing the clutches of mind control from his son. He certainly had a talent for reaching people.
To understand the story of deprogramming and Ted Patrick today, it’s important to realize how perceptions differed in America when Patrick started expanding his anti-cult crusade outside of his home in the early ‘70’s. The 60’s had been a time of cultural revolution with many young people actively seeking alternative lifestyles and this coincided with an explosion in the world of cults. Up until then the phenomenon was mostly away from the mainstream understanding of dangers in this world and even the language used to describe them was limited. Before the end of the decade the word “cult” was rarely seen in the press.
By definition, a cult was a small religious group that was unorthodox and simply strange to outsiders. Then as more destructive groups came onto the scene -including groups with no religion at all- concerns grew, and the definition expanded. Academics started applying studies of Stockholm syndrome and stories of POW’s who refused to come home after being granted freedom to their books. Research coming out on authoritarian régimes like communist China seemed to grant a better understanding of cults and why they appeared to have such a grip over ordinary people, even when their lives were being turned upside down. Terms like brainwashing became further understood by the public.
Then at the close of the 60’s Manson happened and the perception of how dangerous a cult could be changed. There was nothing religious about The Family and that caught many by surprise. Now all kinds of groups were being picked apart for signs of danger. Guru’s and self-help programs were put under the microscope. Parents across the country had more of a reason to be alarmed when their children became affiliated with new age organizations that changed their behaviors. It was seen as an emergency and there was no guidebook for how to deal with indoctrinated youth. Traditional therapies were seen to have little effect in getting people away from strange beliefs if they could even be convinced to attend therapy in the first place. For hundreds of thousands of families, the situation appeared to be hopeless. Then Ted Patrick came along.
Ted followed the news concerning the phenomenon and was among the many concerned parents in the country when he cornered his son and reasoned him down from the influence of The Children of God in 1970. He also had a background with cults from previous life experience. As a child, Ted Patrick’s parents belonged to church with a charismatic leader who drained the family’s bank accounts. He was confused and frustrated by his parents giving money to a wealthy preacher when they could barely afford to put food on the table. Growing up he resented his preacher and his parents equally.
As an adult with a family to protect in a time when public understanding of cults was on the rise, he was able identify how his parents had been manipulated. The story is that Ted Patrick noticed the presence of a cult in San Diego where he lived. When the cult harassed his son, Ted became concerned. Then he heard stories from other families in the community whose kids had joined the group and had changed. This led to Patrick taking a look for himself and planting himself in the middle of the cult. Ted spent over 48 sleepless hours in the group before making a run for it. The experience amplified his concern and Patrick became something of an advocate in his community for other concerned parents. It wasn’t long before people sought him out to talk to their kids. One family who’d been abandoned by their daughter when she joined The Children of God sought Patrick’s help. He had her removed from the cult using some physical force beyond what the girl’s family had attempted and after a chat, convinced the girl to return home. This successful cult exit led to more parents seeking out Patrick to talk to their kids.
There was a fly in the ointment, however. When Patrick’s subjects found out he was going to talk to them about the cults they were in they’d simply leave the situation. The early clients he took on pro bono were desperate for a solution and Patrick was desperate to help. This is when the process of deprogramming was devised. Patrick reasoned that the problem was so critical that if he couldn’t get his subjects to listen voluntarily, he’d do so through extralegal means. His clients desperate to get their children back felt they had no other option, and thus began the most prolific kidnapping spree in United States history.
Ted Patrick
Ted Patrick’s early deprogramming cases proved to be effective. Through word of mouth, it spread that there was a man who could remove individuals from situations that were controlling their lives. A few more successful deprogrammings occurred and then there was a serious problem. Patrick had a case he couldn’t crack. In this instance, the deprogrammer’s subject wasn’t too happy with having to listen to a stranger try to convince him he was in a cult and was very pissed off about the kidnapping and confinement part of the equation. The subject called the police and Patrick was arrested on false imprisonment charges. The prosecution had a solid case, and Patrick admitted he had done what his subject said he did, but he pleaded his innocence on account of what he’d done was in the subject’s best interest. The legal case might have been the end of deprogramming, but you must remember just how high anti-cult sentiment was at the time. In the end, it was an expensive court case for Patrick, but the charges were dropped.
The court case against Ted Patrick and his legal victory got press, and soon it became known outside Chattanooga that Patrick’s was someone to go to if you wanted to get a loved one out of a cult. Now, the man who invented deprogramming was in high demand, but after losing a significant amount of money paying for his attorneys the process would no longer be pro bono. From that episode on the process came with a hefty service charge to match what Patrick would have to pay his lawyers if things went sideways and he had to fight another case or was sued. Despite the cost Patrick’s service now came with, the publicity made for good business and deprogramming hit the road.
More and more cult members were thrown in the back of vehicles and locked in hotel rooms. Unsurprisingly, this led to all kinds of criminal cases against Patrick, but he continued to beat the cases prosecutors built against him. Ted Patrick was also even supported by law enforcement sometimes while in the act of committing felonies. In Mia Donovan’s documentary Deprogrammed which chronicles the life of the serial kidnapper, Patrick recalls an incident where police were called to hotel room after a neighbor had heard someone screaming for help. When the cops arrived, Patrick explained the situation, and despite the obvious false imprisonment going on the continued pleas for help coming from his subject, the officers sided with the deprogrammer and even tried to help him talk sense into his prisoner.
It's not a leap to call what Ted Patrick was doing indefensible, but there’s a reason so many parents were calling him to have their kids roughed up. For all the human rights questions that are unavoidable when the subject of deprogramming comes up, it had a remarkable success rate. It’s estimated that over 70% of Patrick’s subjects got out of the cults they were in and returned to normal lives. If you compare that percentage to the success rate of something like chemical dependency intervention, deprogramming obliterates the outcomes for successful recovery. In just a few years, opinions about kidnapping and false imprisonment began to shift favorably in Patrick’s favor when it came to cult cases and soon there was a small industry of new deprogrammers using the Patrick method all over the country.
Patrick himself claims responsibility for over 2,000 kidnappings in the process of mind reclamation, and thousands more were committed by other deprogrammers. The scope of all the felonies committed that the justice system more or less turned a blind eye to is simply without precedent after the civil rights era. It’s the kind of story that when told, almost requires a few interruptions to tell the audience, “This really happened, and it wasn’t that long ago.” Ted Patrick. Holy shit.
In 1976, when Norman Jungclaus was searching for a solution to the cult problem he was having with his daughter, he heard a story about the unorthodox system that had proven effective at getting kids out of cults. It sounded like a miracle to the flummoxed and desperate father and Norman became willing to part with his savings as a last-ditch effort to reach his daughter before she was gone for good and married into The Way. Norman did some searching to find a deprogrammer in the Twin Cities and there he met a woman named Kathy Mills who knew Ted Patrick and had a stable of former cult members who helped her perform the process. Kathy explained to Norman that he’d have to do the kidnapping himself and agree to sign a document that could potentially rest all legal penalties on himself if things went awry. At his wits end, Norman was happy to agree to the terms. Anything to get Susan away from the cult and what he termed “psychological bondage.” That’s how Susan Jungclaus ended up tied to a bed in a room in Minneapolis with no windows while muscly former cult members rotated shifts keeping watch on her door.
Like virtually everyone subjected to deprogramming, Susan wanted no part of the process and protested her capture. For the first few days she wouldn’t speak or make eye contact with Kathy Mills or the other members of the crew who were relentless in trying to break through with the young woman. Eventually, Susan began asking questions and seemed to have shed a layer of her cult identity. Progress was being made. Now that Susan was cooperating in her deprogramming there was hope for a successful outcome. On day 5, Susan broke. She renounced The Way and could articulate to Mills why it was a cult and how the group had taken advantage of her. It appeared to be a successful deprogramming.
After coming around to the side of the friendly faces that were keeping her in captivity, Susan was allowed some of her freedom back. She was allowed to go on supervised walks and after making more progress she was allowed to conditionally leave the house on her own. Kathy Mills had seen such a turn in Susan’s state of mind that she even allowed her subject to go on a trip where she’d likely encounter active members of The Way. Susan returned like she promised, and it appeared as though Ted Patrick’s system of cult recovery had another success under its belt. Susan was given a short timetable for her permanent release, and all was well going into the final days of her recovery. There was one problem. The issue of the fiancé. Susan had renounced The Way, but she was in love and wanted to maintain her relationship. Mills eventually agreed to a phone call between the two despite knowing how dangerous of an outcome it presented.
When Susan Jungclaus called her man to explain why she disappeared she left a few details out at first. She professed to seeing the light and expressed a desire to leave The Way with her lover in tow. However, the fiancé had an idea what was going on and soon got Susan to admit she’d been kidnapped and held against her will. He said it was torture. This opened the door for what was a common comeback of active cult members against the recently deprogrammed. The fiancé explained that The Way hadn’t brainwashed her at all. Instead, the brainwashing had occurred while Susan was in a situation where she was forced for weeks to listen to lies. The man she was in love with on the other end of the phone begged Susan to reconsider and he began to make progress. After the phone call, Susan was more or less stuck between two minds, which Kathy Mills sensed after talking to her prisoner.
Maybe things would have worked out differently if Kathy had given Susan a few more days in the company of her team for Susan to sort things out further, but Kathy got spooked and made an impulsive decision. The deprogrammer drafted up something of a contract that would release her from criminal liability and asked Susan to sign it. Was Kathy being manipulative? Was this an attempt to control the outcome like a cult leader? Susan had just spent over two weeks getting a crash course on bullshit and this sent her meter off.
Susan declined her signature and the next time she had the opportunity to go for a walk she made a beeline towards the nearest high-traffic boulevard and was able to flag down a vehicle whose driver she convinced to take her away from the neighborhood where she’d been deprogrammed.
Shortly after her escape Susan and her fiancé got married and Susan Jungclaus became Susan Peterson. For Norman Jungclaus, it was the outcome he’d feared most, and the stakes were about to rise significantly.
When Susan told the police she’d been kidnapped by her father and held against her will for 17 days, their reaction was swift. The cops had Susan identify the house she was kept in, and a search warrant was granted. Norman Junglaus, Kathy Mills, and the pastor from the church in Bird Island who aided in the kidnapping were all arrested and charged with felony false imprisonment. The distance Susan traveled in her abduction and length of time she spent in captivity were factors for the state to consider as aggravating factors. A decision was made by the prosecution to try all three defendants together. It would take a while before the trio found themselves in front of a judge though. The case moved slowly through the system, giving the accused plenty of time to ponder their potential prison sentences and the ramifications of a hefty lawsuit that was filed separately.
By the time Norman and company were awaiting trial, deprogramming was cause for philosophical debate and the issue was becoming more political. How the case would be resolved in Hennepin County was a mystery as this was not an average false imprisonment case. The defense would argue that Susan stated many times that she agreed with the process, and they’d say that made her claims invalid, which in retrospect seems a little flimsy. Still, Ted Patrick’s history offered some hope. The accused were banking on the negative public perception of cults saving their asses.
As it turned out, sometimes it pays to be at the precise moment in history when there are anomalies in your favor. When the charges were dismissed it was the ‘making more money collecting unemployment than you did at your full-time job’ of getting away with false imprisonment. Norman Jungclaus, Kathy Mills and the preacher were free to go about their lives. Deprogramming was wining critical battles in court. However, Susan Peterson wasn’t going to go down quietly. Another case was opened, and it was petitioned all the way to the highest court in Minnesota. In that case, not only was Susan Peterson defeated again, but the state also made a little loophole in its false imprisonment guidelines to justify its decision. This was fiercely debated in the legal community for the precedent it sent. At this point there was yet one more avenue for Susan Peterson and her flock of supporters.
The Peterson case made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court and the highest court in the land determined the deprogramming escapade was within the boundaries of the law. There would be no recourse or financial penalty for the accused. This was a textbook case of false imprisonment that was punted by the Supreme Court. It’s incredible to think such a thing could happen. And to think this ripple in justice was the byproduct of a violent therapy invented by a man with a 10th grade education.
It can’t be said definitively why the judges ruled the way they did, but some journalists who covered the case pinned the acquittal on a recent tragedy. When considering the high court being blasé about kidnapping for a moment in time, it’s useful to know this case happened at a moment when sympathy for cults was at an all time low. In between the time when Susan Peterson’s case was filed and its outcome before judges, Jonestown happened. 913 American’s had been slaughtered by a deranged cult leader. If Ted Patrick caught a break when he started because of Charles Manson, Jim Jones gave deprogramming the boost it needed to be viable in the eyes of the law at the dawn of the ‘80’s.
Of course, perceptions change, and for a variety of obvious reasons deprogramming became a thing of the past. It would be incredibly difficult for someone in 2022 to use the Ted Patrick defense in a false imprisonment case and not be sent to prison. An example of how quickly the tides turned involves another abduction in Minnesota two years after the Peterson case which just so happens to involve a man named Norman abducting a relative that he believed was in a cult.
Bob Eilers was pushed into a van along with his pregnant wife on August, 19th 1982 in Winona. When he escaped a halfway house for cult members that used to operate in Iowa, Eilers placed a considerable amount of the blame on his uncle Norman Eilers, though he added 23 coconspirators to his five-million-dollar lawsuit. By then the courts in Minnesota had sowed shut their crazy false imprisonment loophole and the court sided with the guy who got kidnapped. For people like Kathy Mills who earned a living utilizing the Ted Patrick method, the writing was on the wall that business would not be sustainable.
There are a few factors in the steep decline of deprogramming as the 80’s moved along. Important advocates and legitimate cult experts knew deprogramming was a tough pill to swallow for anyone who cared about human rights and a gentler, less felonious version of getting people out of cults known as exit counseling began to replace deprogrammers as the ethical solution. What gave exit counseling a boost for its clients was not that it proved to be as effective at combatting cults, but that the ambassador of deprogramming found himself in battle with a cult that he couldn’t win. The hero of the ‘70’s anti-cult movement was about to find himself in a world of shit.
A close call.
There was another escape. A woman in California called the police to report that Ted Patrick had tied her to a bed in a hotel room and left her blindfolded and alone for two full days as part of her deprogramming. Her story amounted to torture beyond anything deprogramming had previously been accused of. When the story hit the news Ted Patrick’s already controversial reputation was dealt a blow he’d never fully recover from. People saw him as an uneducated psychopath masquerading as a healer; no different than the cult leaders he was fighting against. When the matter was settled in court Patrick would lose a significant lawsuit and his freedom. The inventor of deprogramming was sent to prison for one year.
Ted Patrick maintains the entire case was a frame job and that he was done in by a cult that wanted to destroy him as a means of self-preservation. Not only does he deny the events described by his accuser ever occurred, he claims he had never seen the woman before in his life and wasn’t in California at the time any crime could have taken place. Whether or not Patrick did what he was accused of, the move away from deprogramming was inevitable to a certain degree. An operation where money exchanges hand for the commitment of serious crimes is probably doomed to fail. If anything, it’s incredible deprogramming happened as often as it did for as long as it did. One year in prison for so many crimes would be lenient, to say the least, in today’s world. When you take the hysteria of the era out of the equation, a crime is just a crime. So, what to make of deprogramming now that’s behind us?
Making a clear judgement on Ted Patrick and his method is difficult. There are serious concerns about human rights on both ends of the spectrum. Some cult survivors who were deprogrammed also consider themselves survivors of their deprogrammers. There are claims of PTSD involved with the trauma of some “recoveries.” A few survivors even say how they met Ted Patrick was worse than anything they experienced in their respective cults.
When exit councilor Patrick Ryan was consulted for this article about the Ted Patrick question, he was decidedly against the method. It was pointed out that regardless of deprogramming’s effectiveness the truth is that 90% of people who wind up in cults leave on their own volition and that the odds of a typical cult member winding up in a Jonestown-like scenario are miniscule. Ryan suggests the cult problem is an intellectual problem that can be solved intellectually on a case-by-case basis. It’s a solid argument, yet there’s still space for a defense of the method.
Deprogramming may have been barbaric, but it got a ton of people out of cults.
It’s not difficult to argue that kidnapping innocent people and holding them against their will is an indefensible violation of rights, regardless of what organization the subject belongs to. At the same time, cults are famous for violating the liberty of their members. Fighting the violation of human rights with another stripe of a human rights violation is a mindfuck to justify, but what if Ted Patrick’s method was the most effective means of saving someone you loved?
There are no hard numbers to go on when it comes to the rates of success between deprogramming and exit counseling, but if you consider that the claim of deprogramming’s effectiveness was off the charts as far as “therapeutic” interventions go, it stands to reason that it might have an edge over a therapy where the subject can easily exit the intervention.
Hypothetically, if we had numbers that indicated deprogramming was 10% more effective than what succeeded it, would it alter your perception of the ethical conundrum? If someone is a prisoner to their own beliefs and being abused, is it justifiable to make them an actual prisoner for a few days to get them out? If the scale of intervention is thousands upon thousands of cases, 10% would represent a hell of a lot of people gaining their freedom from undue influence.
Ted Patrick kickstarted cult intervention when it didn’t exist and he is either the greatest hero in the fight against undue influence or a common crook who did more harm than good, depending on who you ask.
This is a debate that won’t be settled in the space of an article. What can be said conclusively is that under any circumstance it’s absolutely insane that a man committed over two thousand kidnappings in the United States and his penalty was one year in prison. This happened in real life, and it wasn’t that long ago!
When it comes to Susan Peterson’s fate, the story is unknown. After losing her battle with the Supreme Court she never spoke publicly about her experience. However, there’s good reason to believe she got out of the cult on her own. If 90% of cult members find their own way out eventually, that’s encouraging, but what makes Susan’s return to earth even more likely is that The Way didn’t have a succession plan when Victor Wierwille died in May of 1985. The cult splintered in a few directions before dissolving piece by piece in the span of about a year. It seems unlikely there were too many holdouts in isolated factions of the group like Susan’s after the prophet who could communicate with the divine was out of the picture. There was no one left to cash checks, at least.
The story of Susan Peterson is an obscure footnote in the vast expanse of modern cult lore. Had her case not gone to the Supreme Court, it’s unlikely anyone would remember it who wasn’t directly involved. Still, her story resonates as a demarcation point in an era when the rules of civility were out the window when it came to stifling the groups families in our country feared most. Cults are still around, and intervention is still practiced, but the landscape has changed. The fear that led to two decades of deprogramming has turned into apathy. We tolerate extreme beliefs until something goes horribly awry like it did in NXIVM or on January 6th. Concern is now on a more individual level, but you must wonder if those with loved ones effected might wish they lived in a different era. Desperation is a hell of an influence. Perception is an influence too.
