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

by Rick Alan Ross

  Through varying degrees of relative isolation, members of family cults come to depend on the leader of the group, usually a father figure, who essentially becomes their sole source of confirmation or validation. Langone, explaining the wider context of destructive cults, says, “Because by definition the group is always right,” the seemingly logical result is that any “‘negative’ thinking is unacceptable” and within a family cult functionally inexcusable.

  It is within this environment, contained by absolutes, that whenever or whatever failures occur, they cannot be attributed to the leader. The members of family cults must therefore learn to suppress their “doubts and criticisms.” They inhabit a world of shame and submission where their leader is “actively encouraging escalating dependency.”371

  Status within the family cult is contingent on agreement with a form of “black and white” thinking that allows little, if any, room for ambiguity. As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton noted, within such an environment, “nothing human is immune from the flood of stern moral judgments. All ‘taints’ and ‘poisons’ which contribute to the existing state of impurity must be searched out and eliminated.”372 As Langone elaborates about the wider world of destructive cults, there is an ongoing “subtle undermining” of self-esteem. And the group may also strengthen and/or sustain dependence by “threatening or inflicting punishment.”373

  It is the dread of disequilibrium, physical punishment, or some imagined terrible future retribution that often further solidifies control within a family cult. As Langone generally concludes concerning deceptive cults, “The result of this process, when carried to its consummation, is a person who proclaims great happiness but hides great suffering.”374

  The following historical examples of family cults offer vivid illustrations of this suffering, which people often endure silently and mainstream society doesn’t readily see.

  2002—Winnfred Everett Wright Murders

  In February 2002 a man and four women faced criminal charges connected to the death of a nineteen-month-old boy due to malnutrition. The four adults lived with thirteen children in a small house near San Francisco. DNA tests subsequently proved that the man, Winnfred Everett Wright, forty-five, had fathered all the children.375

  Wright and three of the women were indicted for second-degree murder. All five were also charged with involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment. The remaining children, ages eight months to sixteen years, were placed in foster care and “treated for varying degrees of malnutrition and neglect,” Fred Marziano, the Marin County sheriff detective, told the press.376

  The adults and children involved were described as a “cultlike family” ruled over by Wright, who manipulated “the bible’s Book of Revelations or astrological charts” as a means of influence. He also reportedly “used a mixture of charm and psychological coercion to make the women stay.” Drugs evidently played a role in the situation.377 Wright simply referred to the women and children he dominated as “The Family.”378

  Psychologist Margaret Singer interviewed the mother of the dead child at the request of police. “What I found strange about it, it was not a great big deal to her,” she said. Singer explained that Wright, an African-American, used “white guilt” to manipulate the women, who were Caucasians. “They [were told by Wright that they] had karma they had to work off because white men had been so cruel down through the ages to black men, that white women should come, live with him, take care of him, minister to him.” Singer compared Wright to Charles Manson, calling his family a “cult based on conceit.”379

  Wright had a “Book of Rules,” and if those rules were somehow broken, he expected “the kids to be ceremoniously whipped with belts and force-fed spicy jalapeno peppers.” One little girl was reportedly “tied to a playpen for two weeks when, during an enforced fast” she ate something. At times “the children’s mouths were taped shut for violating the ‘rules.’” 380 Punishable infractions included “sneaking food” or “answering the front door of their home.”381

  A consulting psychologist who saw one of the women said the woman “suffered psychological regression and dependence” but was “ready to begin the therapeutic process necessary to rebuild her psychological stability.” The women seemed to improve once they were removed from Wright’s influence and control.382 Two women from the Wright group requested that a judge allow them to be temporarily released for treatment at Wellspring Retreat in Albany, Ohio. Wellspring is a licensed mental health facility specifically focused on the treatment and recovery process of former cult members. The judge granted bail and release for one of the women to receive care at Wellspring.383

  Winnfred Wright was sentenced to sixteen years and eight months in prison, which was the maximum allowed under his “plea deal” with prosecutors.

  But the judge was lenient regarding the women Wright had influenced. One woman received a ten-year prison sentence, which was four years less than the maximum allowed. Another received seven years and four months, also about four years below the maximum. One of the Wright women died from leukemia while in custody. One had her charges dismissed.384

  When the last woman from the Wright family was sentenced, she addressed the court and said, “Mind control is a reality.” She also expressed “great sorrow” over the harm done to the children and said she would be “ashamed the rest of her life.”385

  The Wright women were granted parole in 2005 and 2007.

  Winnfred Wright was granted closely supervised parole in November 2010. One of his children specifically requested that Wright not be paroled in the Marin County area near family members. That request was granted, and Wright was specifically required to serve his supervised parole four hundred miles away.386

  2004—Marcus Wesson Murders

  On March 12, 2004, the worst mass murder in the history of Fresno, California, occurred. Nine bodies were found. Three of the victims were toddlers, four were children younger than nine, one a teenage girl, and one was a twenty-four-year-old woman. All were found shot dead.387 Charged with murder was Marcus Wesson, the fifty-seven-year-old patriarch of a family “cult” and “master manipulator.”388

  Wesson taught his family he was “God’s messenger” and that the “end times” were “close at hand.” The family was reportedly heavily “indoctrinated by Marcus Wesson’s ‘bastardization’ of religion.” Wesson wrote his own version of the Bible, and he insisted on daily “bible studies.”389 The Wesson family included seventeen children, seven nieces and nephews. A stern disciplinarian, Marcus Wesson dictated everything, including diet, dress, and home schooling. He didn’t have a regular job but instead managed whatever money those in his household earned.

  According to Wesson’s son Dorian his father was “psychotic, delusional and narcissistic.” Another son Adrian said, “He was God. That’s just the way it was.” Punishments were often brutal. One of Wesson’s children recalled being beaten with wire for twenty minutes for simply sneaking a spoonful of peanut butter. “It felt like being in a prison. Very depressing—like, hopeless. And you felt trapped…nowhere to go,” his daughter Gypsy Wesson told ABC News.390 In private, individual conversations Wesson convinced each of his daughters that the Bible mandated incest.391 He fathered eighteen children with seven women, including his daughters and nieces. At times Wesson fed his family from trash cans, while he ate hamburgers and junk food.392

  Born in Kansas, Marcus Wesson, was raised by a “devout Seventh-day Adventist” mother and “alcoholic father.” His family wandered from state to state, moving from Missouri to Kansas, to Indiana, to California, and then to Washington.393 Wesson served in the army during the Vietnam War as an ambulance driver in Europe. He returned to the United States in 1968. In 1971 he moved into the home of single mother Rosemary Solorio in San Jose, California. Solorio had children, and one of her daughters, Elizabeth Solorio, married Wesson during 1974. He was twenty-seven, and she was fifteen. By the 1980s Marcus and Elizabeth Wesson had a family of nine children.394 At variou
s times the family lived in a tent, on a boat, on a bus, and on “bare land,” according to court documents. In 1981 Wesson managed to buy a home with a loan of $60,000. In 1990 he was convicted of welfare fraud and perjury.395 The family occupied a succession of homes purchased by various family members.396

  Wesson began to sexually touch his daughters when they were eight and nine years old. “I didn’t know anything else and I thought it was all right,” Kiani Wesson told ABC News. “Such was his control over their minds that he could even send them out into the world and they didn’t blow the whistle,” commented psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, director of the Hallowell Centers in New York and Boston.397

  According to testimony in court, Wesson was fascinated with cult leader David Koresh. And like Koresh he often characterized the authorities as “Satan.”398 Prophetically he warned his family that one day “the devil with a badge and a blue uniform would show up at their door.”399 His response on that fateful day of reckoning was that death would be preferable to family separation.400

  Despite these dark predictions and what Hallowell described as a “crucible of fear” that effectively debilitated family members, two of Wesson’s nieces managed to escape. But they left children behind. When they returned for their children, Wesson refused to give them up. The police were called, and when they arrived at the scene, Wesson seemed cooperative at first. However, after he disappeared into the house, the officers heard gunshots. It is believed that Marcus Wesson’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, Sebhrenah, fired the gun that killed her son, sister, nieces, and nephews. “I think that he had her take everybody, and then he took her life,” said Kiani Wesson, one of the mothers.401

  Marcus Wesson was charged with nine counts of murder and fourteen counts of sexually abusing his daughters and nieces. He was the father of all the murdered children. Some of the children were the result of incestuous relationships with his daughters. “They were exterminated, one after the other,” Lisa Gamoian, the prosecutor, said at Wesson’s trial in 2005. “In this family, he was Christ himself, the ultimate authority figure who determined life and death. But for his suicide pact, for his teachings, none of this would have happened,” Gamoian concluded.402

  The jury found Marcus Wesson guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to death on June 27, 2005, and now resides on “death row” at San Quinton State Prison in California.403

  Surviving members of the Wesson family have struggled to heal from the years of manipulation and abuse they endured. Both of Wesson’s two nieces, Kiani and Gypsy, who lost their children in the mass murder, have new daughters. “It does get better…Counseling and talking to friends and loved ones helps,” Kiani Wesson said in a 2009 interview.404

  The house where Marcus Wesson molested and murdered his children stood abandoned and empty for years before it was finally demolished in 2006.405

  2004—The Trial of Karen Robidoux

  In 2004 Karen Robidoux was on trial in Massachusetts, charged with the second-degree murder of her baby boy, Samuel. The child was denied solid food for fifty-one days during 1999 and died before his first birthday. The suffering of Samuel Robidoux was demanded through a “leading,” supposedly a revelation “God” had given to his aunt, Michelle Mingo.

  Robidoux and Mingo belonged to an Attleboro religious group largely composed of Robidoux’s family members and their relations, known as “The Body,” which renounced modern medicine.406 Mingo declared that her nephew, Samuel, must subsist only by being breast-fed, while her sister-in-law, Karen, consumed nothing more than almond milk. This was a punishment for her vanity. The young mother was then also pregnant, but she struggled to obey the dictates of the group. Charlotte E. Denton, a Department of Mental Health forensic psychologist, testified that Robidoux breast-feed Samuel every hour, twenty-four hours a day. However, the mother watched helplessly as her son deteriorated and died due to starvation.407

  The defendant’s lawyer, Joseph Krowski, explained that “evil” people around her had so controlled his client that she was incapable of saving her child. But Karen Robidoux‘s “vile, deranged, evil” father-in-law, Roland Robidoux, led the group. “It was about power. It was about mind control. It was about brainwashing,” Krowski said.408 Psychologist Ronald Ebert examined Karen Robidoux through twelve meetings beginning in 2002. He testified in court that Robidoux believed that “if she wasn’t good, God would take her baby. She had to do what they told her to do.” Ebert concluded, “It’s my opinion that she was not able to leave the group.”409

  Robidoux was twenty-eight at the time of her trial. She had joined the group at the age of fourteen and was wed to Jacques Robidoux, the leader’s son. Karen Robidoux was described as successfully “deprogrammed” before her trial. According to press reports she “cut off all the group members” during her confinement. It was within this period that she was “deprogrammed.” Shortly before trial she reportedly “finally emerged from the fog of the brainwashing sect that swallowed 14 years of her life.”

  The leader of that sect, Roland Robidoux, was a door-to-door salesman who had left the Catholic Church after listening to sermons by Herbert W. Armstrong on his car radio. Armstrong was the founder of the Worldwide Church of God (WWCOG), a controversial group that has been called a “cult.”410 After his radio conversion Robidoux attended WWCOG feasts and festivals with his wife and five children. In 1978 Robidoux left WWCOG, claiming God had called him to start his own church. His church was first named Church of God of Mansfield, later Church of God of Norton, and finally The Body, but it never had more than seventy members.411

  A former associate described Robidoux as the “sole authority” of his group and someone who was “not being questioned.” Robidoux “believed that he had the truth.” His truth was hard on his family, which became socially isolated. Robidoux wanted to control everything. He exercised “absolute power over his family,” said his former son-in-law, Dennis Mingo, who eventually left the group. One year he decided the family should eat only meat. The next year he ordered everyone to become vegetarians and then later to eat only organic food. The family always obeyed Robidoux’s edicts.412

  Robidoux then discovered a book by Carol Balizet, a former nurse who claimed seven impure systems in the world: education, medicine, government, banking, schools, entertainment, and commerce. Balizet said true believers should never seek medical care and should give birth only at home. Her website stated, “No matter what the result, we must do what God says. We mustn’t fall into the trap of trying to figure out which choice will work best for us: God or the medical system. Our response to God must be based on obedience, not on outcome.”413 Robidoux incorporated Balizet’s views into his own teachings.

  Roland Robidoux’s children then began to have their own “revelations.” His son, Jacques, who became an elder in the group, heard orders from God telling him to give up a business, so he shut it down. His daughter Michelle said God had forbidden eyeglasses. Later God supposedly forbade shorts, cosmetics, and photo albums. In November 1998, Jacques said God had commanded them to throw away their books. Members of the group eventually told relatives there would be no further communication. Roland Robidoux even ended contact with his eighty-four-year-old mother, who lived next door, after she dropped out of his group. Finally in March 1999, after her marriage to Dennis Mingo had fallen apart, Michelle Mingo received the ominous revelation concerning her nephew, Samuel. Karen Robidoux was told God was testing her.

  In 2004 a jury cleared Karen Robidoux of murder charges, but she was convicted of assault and battery for starving her son. The young woman was then sentenced to a prison term of two and a half years but was set free at the time of the verdict due to the time she had already spent in custody, primarily in a psychiatric hospital. After her release Karen Robidoux said, “I don’t think I could ever have true peace, because there is a hole in my heart that’s very big.”414

  Karen Robidoux’s husband, Jacques, was found guilty of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life impr
isonment for his role in the death of their son, Samuel. He later appealed that conviction on the grounds that he too had been “brainwashed” and therefore “was not competent a at the time of his trial.”415 However, his appeal was denied.416

  In 2004 Michelle Mingo pled guilty to being an accessory after the fact of assault and battery on a child. She was released after spending four years in jail.417

  After a lengthy illness Roland Robidoux died in 2006. He was never charged with any crime. Paul Walsh Jr., Bristol County district attorney, said state law in Massachusetts limited the responsibility of care concerning a child only to parents.418

  2009—Jaycee Lee Dugard Kidnapping

  What might Elizabeth Smart’s life had been like if she had never been found? That question may be answered in part by the story of Jaycee Lee Dugard, which emerged during 2009.

  In June of 1991 eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped while walking home from school on a neighborhood street in South Lake Tahoe, California. Her kidnapper was Phillip Garrido, a man already on parole for a rape and kidnapping conviction.419 His previous victim, whom Garrido abducted in Las Vegas in 1976, described him as “a monster.”420

  But unlike either Garrido’s last victim, who was soon rescued, or Elizabeth Smart, who was found after nine months, Jaycee Dugard was under her kidnapper’s control for eighteen years. Dugard was discovered living in the backyard of Phillip Garrido’s home in Antioch, California, east of San Francisco. And she was the mother of two children ages eleven and fifteen, whom Garrido had both fathered. The convicted rapist had created a family he completely controlled. Dugard and her children lived in a makeshift compound accessible through a maze of tarps and sheds. “All of the sheds had electricity by cords, rudimentary outhouse and shower, as if you were camping,” said Fred Kollar, El Dorado County sheriff.421