CULTS 'R US HIT LIST
By 1977, as things started getting weirder, he was forced to move his church to Guyana, South America. There, in the isolation of the jungle, Jimmy created his dream community, Jonestown, and lost his mind. Jim's nirvana rapidly deteriorated into a nightmare which he knew of only one way to end.
On November 18, 1978, when Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown to investigate alledged human rights abuses, the good reverend had him and his party killed. Then he ordered his followers to drink from a tub of Kool Aid laced with cyanide and tranquilizers. All 900+ did. As the ritual suicide progressed, Jim put a bullet through his brain. Some believe that Jimmy was linked to the CIA and that the Jonestown massacre was in fact a mind control experiment. If it was, it was a total success. Years later, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas confessed that he did indeed personally delivered the cyanide to his "good friend, Jim Jones."
On April 19, 1993, he delivered. As the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, under the lead of Bob Ricks launched their assault, the compound broke out in flames killing eighty-six people inside. The government claimed that Koresh ignited the flames and had the compound booby-trapped so it would go up in a fireball. Some, like the recently infamous Michigan Militia, believe the Feds and Attorney General Janet Reno were completely responsible for the deaths of Koresh and his fellow charred Branch Davidians.
The Temple came to prominence on October 5, 1994, when 53 people committed suicide simultaneously in several chalets in Switzerland and Canada. The two known leaders of the group, the Belgian New Ageist Luc Jouret, and the guru Joseph di Mambro, died in the 1994 ritual. The cult seems to give great importance to the sun. The 1994 deaths were meant to take the sect members through fire to a new world on a planet called "Sirius." To assist with the trip, several of the victims, including some children, were shot in the head, asphyxiated with black plastic bags and/or poisoned. Luc and Joseph wrote, in a letter delivered after their deaths that they were "leaving this earth to find a new dimension of truth and absolution, far from the hypocrisies of this world."l
The second mass suicide ritual ocurred about a week before Christmas in 1995. On December 23, on a remote plateau of the French Alps police found 16 charred bodies arranged in a star formation with their feet pointing to the ashes of a fire. Like the rituals of 1994, they all died by stabbing, asphyxiation, shooting and/or poisoning. Their bodies were burned as part of a cleansing ritual.
A week before discovering the bodies, Swiss and French authorities suspected the worst when 16 cult members dissappeared from their homes. Some left behind handwritten notes expressing their intentions of committing mass suicide. One of the notes stated: "Death does not exist, it is pure illusion. May we, in our inner life, find each other forever." Two of the dead were the wife and son of French ski champion and millionare eyewear manufacturer, Jean Vuarnet.
Their gig ran afoul when they decided what they needed was to kill a gringo. They abducted Mark Kilroy, a college student on spring break, and killed him in their border ranch called Santa Elena. There his body was dismembered and his heart, genitals and spine were used to make a magic stew. The disappearance of Kilroy triggered an all out police search around the border. Authorities were alerted of the weird rituals practiced in Rancho Santa Elena. As the digging in the ranch began a large number of dismembered bodies started appearing and several members of the cult were arrested.
Previously no one cared about the missing drug dealers figuring there were victims of a drug war. However, once the gringo was sacrificed, the group was put on the run. By the time the bodies in Matamoros were found Constanzo and Aldrete were hiding in an apartment in Mexico City. Police discovered their hideaway and surrounded the apartment. After a brief exchange of gunfire Constanzo ordered another cult member to kill him and his boyfriend. When police stormed into the apartment they found the embracing couple machine-gunned to death inside a closet. His college-student-gone-cult-priestess girlfriend, Sara Aldrete is now in jail in Mexico where she gives totally schizophrenic interviews.
The secretive Church of Love preached that the American blacks were true Jews living in the land of the "white devil". It's members dressed in white robes, took the last name Israel and followed a kosher diet. The cult is accused of a reign of terror that includes the beheading of an ex member, the fire bombing of a Delray Beach neighborhood and many other acts of violence. It seemed that to become part of the "Brotherhood", a secret group within the sect, one had to smoke a "white devil". Many of the shady details of the sect's activities come from Robert Rozier, a former football player, who was arrested in 1986 in connection to four killings.
Asahara justified indiscriminate mass murder through the religious belief "poa" -- a Tibetan Buddhist term for reincarnation to a higher existence. According to Shoko's twisted doomsday teachings, one can only save their soul through killing. Asahara taught his followers that a "poa" killing relieved victims from everyday life and the inevitable accumulation of more bad karma. Thus what we call cold blooded murder was regarded "as a beautiful 'poa,' and wise people would see that both the killer and the person killed would benefit."
In 1994 Shoko, seeing that his cult was entangled in all types of legal difficulties, ordered his disciples to mass produce deadly nerve gas and test its power in the streets of Matsumoto. It was the start of a doomsday plot to wipe out untold numbers of innocent people and his first volley in a war against the police and the Japanese government. The objective of the attack was to kill several judges staying at a courthouse dormitory who were due to rule against the sect in a property lawsuit. Seven people died and 144 were injured in the experiment. However, nothing happened to the judges.
Under Asahara's command, the doomsday cult built a sarin plant to produce 70 tons of the lethal Nazi-invented gas in order to wipe out the population of entire cities. On the side he also had plants manufacturing barbiturates and truth serum. Furthermore, he ordered the production of 1,000 automatic rifles and one million bullets in preparation for his war against the Japanese Government. Not the humble type, Asahara demanded that his followers treat him as a "living incarnation of God." He also allowed them, at a steep price, to drink his bathing water which would be a sure way to cleanse their souls. Shoko also had a habit of kidnapping and executing anti-cult activist. Prosecutors described how one rebel cult member, Kotaro Ochida, was strangled while Asahara looked on.
During the opening day of his trial the blind visionary's only words were: "I have nothing to say." Later he appeared to doze off and one of his lawyers had to wake him up. If convicted the blind doomsday cult leader could be sent to the gallows. Virtually all of the other top cult members- including Shoko's wife- have been arrested for crimes ranging from misdemeanours to helping to carry out the Tokyo subway murders. Until his arrest, the portly cultist predicted that the world would soon come to an end and only the Aum Supreme Truth would survive. Until then, they will all be in jail waiting for the apocalypse.
Born "No Name Maddox," Charlie was the son of a teenage, bisexual, alcoholic prostitute. As an infant his uncaring mom once traded him for a pitcher of beer. As a young boy he watched his mother bring home lovers of both sexes and was constantly shuffled between the home's of relatives and orphanages. One particulary sadistic uncle forced Charlie to wear a dress to school so he would "learn to fight and be a man." Not surprisingly Charlie started his career in crime at a young age. As a young man he was the poster-boy of institutional life, constantly in and out of reform schools and prisons. Before he was thirty-five, he had spent more than half of his life incarcerated.
When he was paroled in 1967, this ex-con and aspiring musician drifted to San Francisco just in time to catch the Summmer of Love. There he became the "God of Fuck". Charlie's charisma made him the Messiah of every lost flower child. Curiously, Charlie turned out to be full of love. Describing himself as a "little runt" he managed to surround himself with a bevvy of beautiful young girls who considered him God. While in San Francisco he traded the rights to one of his songs for a bus, which his girls painted black and he drove all across the West collecting "Garbage People."
When the bus broke down north of Los Angeles, they settled in the Spahn Ranch, a derelict ranch that was used for Western movies. There the Family grew to have more than 30 girls with more joining each day. At first their life in the ranch was pure hippie Nirvana. Charlie would sleep with a different girl each night as they all fried on acid and sang songs around a campfire when the sun went down. They would raid garbage dumpsters in the back of supermarkets for food and would shoplift for other necessities. Back at the ranch, as they fucked and sucked with abandon, the Family envisioned themselves as representatives of the "Infinite Soul." On the side the formed alliances with various satanist and biker groups and occasionally committed ritual murders.
All along Charlie planned to launch his stellar career as a folk singer with the help of Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Sadly, for Sharon Tate and her friends, things didn't turn out the way he thought. Shunned by the music industry Charlie grew bitter and vengeful. His odd interpretation of the Beatles' song "Helter Skelter" warned of a coming race war in which "blackie" would win. Then he and his minions, who had been breeding at a furious rate in the Spahn ranch, would take over and rule the world. Ultimately, the reign of terror perpetrated by this midget genius had nothing to do with his visions of Armageddon. Instead, it was simply an act of revenge against the music industry that had ignored him.
Terry Melcher, a music producer who had rejected Manson (and also the son of Doris Day), moved out of his house in Cielo Drive and subleased it to Roman Polanski and his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate. In a desperate attempt to get his music produced Manson had gone to talk to Terry to find out that he had moved. He thought the new tennants of Cielo Drive treated him like "a piece of scum to be sucked into the toilet." So when he felt that a series of random murders were in order to feed the "Infinite Soul" he knew exactly where to go
The first hit was Gary Hinman, a rich Buddhist musician partly associated with the Family. Members Susan Atkins, Marie O'Brien and Bobby Beausoleil went to pay him a visit. After torturing Gary for five or six hours he proved unwilling to give the Family money. Manson and Family member Bruce Davis were called to the scene to see if they could convince Hinman to cooperate. He refused again and Manson told Bobby: "You know what to do. Kill him-- he's no good to us." Bobbie stabbed him and later wrote on the wall "POLITICAL PIGGY" in blood to divert attention to the Family and make it look like a hit by the Black Panthers.
The next stop in their war against "the Establishment" was Cielo Drive. On August 8, 1969, Manson sent Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian to "do the Devil's business." What ensued was a bloodbath of apocalyptic proportions. Armed with knives and a gun, the Family members butchered Steve Parent, Abigail Folger, Voityck Frykowski, Jay Sebring and a very pregnant Sharon Tate. After the killing Tex ordered Susan to return inside and, "write something that will shock the world." Using a towel soaked in Tate's blood she wrote "PIG" on the door. She also thought of carving out Tate's unborn child and bringing it to Charlie wrapped in the towel. "How proud Charlie would be if I presented him with the baby cut from the womb of the woman." She later considered cutting out the heart and eating it or skewering the baby and roasting it in a bonfire. Fortunately these were just fleeting thoughts.
Feeling that the massacre in Cielo Drive was too messy, the next night Charlie joined his hippie death squad to demonstrate how the killings should be done. After meandering through the streets of Los Angeles they ended next to a monastery in the Los Feliz area. There he entered the home of supermarket magnate Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary. After tying up the couple and reassuring them that everything was going to be fine, Charlie sent Tex, Leslie and Patricia to do the job. They killed the hapless couple and scribbled in blood "ARISE" on the wall, "DEATH TO ALL PIGS" on the front door, and "HELTER-SKELTER" on the refrigerator. Then they took showers, ate watermelon and hitchhikked a ride home. Before leaving, Patricia, in a stroke of evil brilliance, carved the word "WAR" on the stomach of LaBianca using a fork. When police discovered his body the next day he still had the fork protruding from his gut. To make the rampage look like part of the impending race war Charlie drove to a black neighborhood and left the wallet of Rosemary LaBianca in the bathroom of a gas station.
The last killing perpetrated by the family before their arrest was a ranch hand called Shorty Shea at the Spahn Ranch who knew too much about the "five dead piggies.". He was ritually dismembered, beheaded and buried in the ranch. The Family then relocated to the Barker ranch in Goler Wash on the outskirts of Death Valley. There Charlie and the Family "tried to get as close as we could to all the animals, try to learn from them how to live." They also had fun with dune buggies playing some type of desert war games. Eventually, because of their nightly desert escapades, U.S. Marshalls came to arrest the Family on charges of arson and auto theft after they torched some park ranger equipment. Once in custody Susan blabbed to one of her cellmates about the murders and their house of cards came tumbling down.
During their trial Charlie tried unsuccessfully to defend himself and staged several media pranks in his ongoing attack on "the Establishment." He wanted to form a corporation with the other six jailed Family members called "The Family of Infinite Soul, Inc." to pay for their defence. Eight days after the defense rested their case, Manson's court-appointed attorney Ronald Hughes dissapeared. His decomposed body was found five months later. At one point Charlie and the girls carved Xs on their foreheads as a symbol of X'ing oneself out of society. All the histrionics never amounted to anything other than Vincent Bugliosi penning a best-seller out of prosecuting the Family.
By 1971 seven members of the Family were handed death penalties which were revoked in 1972 when the California Supreme Court abolished it. Charlie, although convicted of multiple murders, was never proven to have killed anyone. It is believed that the Family was probably responsible for dozens of other deaths before and after the arrest and incarceration of their leader. Years later, Family member Squeaky Fromme managed to capture the headlines pn September 4, 1975 when she lunged at President Ford with a gun. Fortunately a Secret Service agent managed to wedge his thumb between the hammer and the firing pin preventing one more death to be tallied for the Infinite Soul. A week later fellow Family member Sandra Good leaked to the press a hit list of corporate and political big wigs targeted for assasination by the Family for their destructive actions against the environment.
In 1987 he settled with his cult in a fifteen-acre farm in rural Ohio. There, according to cult members, they were intending to meet God in the final days of planet Earth. However, God would be angry with the cult, due to "man's sins." Lundgren, a resourceful man, figured that if he sent five of his own, the Avery's (whom he considered the weakest family in the cult), before the "judgement bar," God would take out his anger on them.
The Avery family was thrown in a pit under the barn of the cult's ranch and were shot to death with a Colt 45 which, incidentally, Avery had paid for. After the killing Lungren and his family fled to what they called "The Wilderness" in Tucker County, West Virginia. By the fall of 1989 the group relocated to Jackson County, Missouri where things started to really fall appart.
On December 31, 1989, Larry Keith Johnson, (whose wife, Katheryn Renee Jackson was chosen by Lundgren as his "wife.") reported the murders to Larry Scott of ATF-Kansas City. Three days later the first body was uncovered, that of Dennis Leroy Avery. On January 7, 1990, Jeff Lundgren, his son Damon, and wife Alice were arrested in Room #29 of the Santa Fe Motel in National City, California. At the time of their arrest police and ATF agents found an arsenal of weapons tucked in the room with them. His wife and nineteen-year-old son received five consecutive life terms for the doomsday killings of the Avery family. Jeb7 was sentenced to death. The remaining cult members (except for Larry) were sentenced to various lengths of imprisonment.
Evidence found at his home included a black and white bowl that held a rubber fright mask on which his dad's head rested. The mask, trimmed with a black wig, was the image of a man shot in the head. Investigators also found books about satanism and the occult and a biography Jeffrey Dahmer.
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