World Famous Cults and Fanatics

by Colin Wilson

  When he returned to the Centre he took with him a mistress he had acquired on the train journey, Myrtle Baumgartner. But she was quickly hustled off to Valdes Island where – Wilson told his closest confidants – she would give birth to a child who would be the new Christ. When the other disciples found out about her, there were murmurs of indignation – the first sign of the dissension that would destroy Brother Twelve’s empire. They even refused to be convinced when he told them that he and Myrtle had been married in ancient Egypt. Elma Wilson – the discarded wife – was sent off to Switzerland to organize another Foundation. But her rival’s days were numbered – after two miscarriages, she was also sent packing.

  Meanwhile, an article in the Foundation newsletter expounding Brother Twelve’s inspired revelations on “spiritual marriage” caused even more hostility. A few days later, the other six “Governors” told Brother Twelve that they had decided to dissolve the Foundation.

  Ironically, it was Wilson’s talent for organization that had proved to be his Achilles’ heel. The disciples had worked and contributed money – sometimes a fortune. Naturally, they felt they had a say in what happened. Moreover, by law, the assets of the Foundation had to be distributed among the seven Governors. Wilson was understandably indignant – after all, he was the founder – but at least he had recently collected another $25,000 from a rich admirer called Mary Connally.

  When his treasurer, Robert England, defected, and took with him $2,800 that he considered Brother Twelve owed him in wages, the angry messiah swore out a warrant for his arrest on a charge of embezzlement. England was intercepted as he was leaving the country and jailed. Next, Wilson appointed four of his supporters to the now depleted Board of Governors, so he was able to outvote the remaining four. These promptly obtained an injunction freezing the $45,000 assets of the society.

  Brother Twelve was becoming paranoid. Disciples noted that he had changed for the worse, and attributed this to the fact that after he had taken the “Sixth Initiation”, Brother Twelve had come under the influence of a Black Adept on the spiritual plane. When Robert England was set free by the court, Wilson was furious; soon after that, England vanished, leaving all his effects behind. There is no proof that Brother Twelve had anything to do with his disappearance, but it remains a distinct possibility. At this time, Brother Twelve was found not guilty of appropriating $13,000 of the society’s funds.

  On 6 December 1928, Brother Twelve gave a demonstration of what certainly looked like magical powers. An ex-disciple was suing him for $450 in back wages. As one witness stood up in the box, he began to shake, and crashed to the floor. At the same time, several people at the back of the courtroom fainted. And when the prosecuting lawyer rose to his feet a few minutes later, he stared blankly in front of him, then began to stammer. He finally managed to gasp: “This is ridiculous, but I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.” He shuffled back to his seat looking puzzled and bewildered.

  The judge awarded a verdict in favour of Brother Twelve. But there was a general feeling that his days were numbered. And when one of his followers was arrested for raping a cinema usherette, newspapers predicted that his career was finished.

  Ignoring these prophecies, Brother Twelve and the remaining faithful disciples set up a colony on Valdes Island, where a millionaire disciple named Roger Painter came to join him, bringing a red-headed volatile woman named Mabel Skottowe. She and Wilson soon became lovers; Painter beat her brutally, and was ordered to leave. Mabel changed her name to “Madame Zee”, and moved in with the messiah. But her bad temper – she carried a riding crop and used it unsparingly on the disciples – caused mutterings of rebellion. By now Wilson had purchased the neighbouring De Courcy Island, which had a harbour, and Mary Connally also presented him with a 160-acre property in San Bernardino, California.

  When Wilson and Madame Zee moved to De Courcy Island, leaving the disciples behind, real disaffection began to set in. The disciples were expected to work long hours at building and gardening, and many of them looked forward to the day when they had enough money to leave. When he learned about this, Wilson preached an impassioned sermon about greed and treachery, and cowed them into handing over their savings.

  Towards the end of 1929, Brother Twelve and Madame Zee took a year-long holiday in Europe. The island dwellers were glad to see them back – until they realized that Brother Twelve was more paranoid than ever. There were sudden and unprovoked “purges” of disciples, and when his “wife” Elma returned from her proselytizing expedition in Switzerland, she was forbidden to rejoin the colony. Even Wilson’s benefactress Mary Connally was made to do domestic chores and farmwork.

  Brother Twelve seemed to be developing his own brand of sexual mysticism; he ordered disciples to “pair up”, because sex was part of the process of “initiation”. One new female disciple, Isona Supelveda, became his mistress, but was upset when her thirteen-year-old daughter was raped by one of the males. Another daughter had to flee in the middle of the night from the middle-aged man who had been assigned to be her lover. Brother Twelve took in her attractive fourteen-year-old son Dion and allegedly seduced him. When Wilson grew tired of Isona, she fled the colony and reported the rape to the police. That night, Dion stole a speedboat from the mainland and tried to return to Brother Twelve – he declared later that he had been hypnotized and ordered to return at whatever cost. (One disciple was to describe how she had seen Madame Zee exercise “mental power” over Dion; the boy was running towards Brother Twelve’s cabin when Madame Zee stared after him and mentally ordered him to stop; Dion stopped in his tracks – an episode that suggests that Madame Zee may have been responsible for the problems in court.) But the rape charge was dropped, and, incredibly, the Sepulveda family returned to the island.

  In the following year, 1932, an increasingly paranoid Wilson ordered the disciples to stop construction work, and to start building fortifications. He also purchased a case of carbines and some ammunition. But the siege he expected – the state government was considering criminal charges – never materialized. Instead, some bewildered and exhausted disciples fled to the mainland, while others presented Wilson with a letter telling him that they were at the end of their tether. Wilson flew into a rage; then decided to cast off the rebels; he began taking them back to the mainland in small boatloads. Those ejected from Eden included Mary Connally.

  This was the last straw. The homeless ones went to a local law firm and instituted proceedings. In April 1933, Mary Connally was awarded $26,500, and another litigant, Alfred Barley (one of the earliest disciples) $14,232.

  But it was too late. Brother Twelve and Madame Zee had already absconded with the cash. They moved to a farmhouse in Devon, then to Neuchâtel in Switzerland. And on 7 November 1934, Wilson died in his apartment there. Madame Zee had him cremated, then left Neuchâtel. With the remainder of Brother Twelve’s fortune (about $400,000), she seems to have spent her remaining years in comfort in luxury hotels.

  The defectors in Vancouver refused to believe the news – they were certain that Wilson had “fabricated” his death. But in spite of a number of alleged sightings, Brother Twelve was never to reappear.

  In 1991, his amazing history was reconstructed from memories of disciples by Vancouver writer John Oliphant in a book called Brother Twelve. It is probably the most remarkably detailed case history of a “false messiah” that has ever been compiled.

  The Ku Klux Klan

  During the chaos and maladministration that followed the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the social order in the defeated Southern states was effectively turned upside down. Former slaves were not only given the vote, they were given virtual freedom to take revenge on their old masters.

  Gangs of ex-slaves and opportunists from the North (nicknamed “Carpetbaggers”) pillaged, raped and murdered almost under the noses of the occupying Federal troops. Where punishment took place it was often ludicrously light and the whites grumbled that there was one law for “niggers” and a
nother for “decent white folks”. Into this gap in the justice system stepped former General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Klansmen.

  Forrest (who had distinguished himself during the war by ordering the massacre of over 200 surrendered black Union troops at Fort Pillow in April 1864) told the Klansmen to dress themselves and even their horses in white shrouds; thus to convince the superstitious and poorly educated blacks that they were the avenging ghosts of Confederate soldiers.

  The Klan saw themselves as modern knights, dedicated to the Southern code of honour. Indeed, in the beginning, they made some effort to catch the real offenders and the beatings generally outnumbered the lynchings, but their very popularity eventually brought about their collapse.

  By the 1870s, the Klan membership had swelled to tens of thousands and Forrest’s “secret army” was totally unmanagable. He watched with growing disgust as Klan posses looted and butchered almost indiscriminately among the black communities across the South and, along with his staff he resigned in 1872. With the change in the political climate at the time (i.e. the North selling off the blacks’ rights in return for economic agreement with the South), the Klan’s reason for existence vanished and it soon died out. It did not, however, stay dead.

  In 1915, coinciding with the release of D. W. Griffith’s apparently pro-Klan movie, Birth of a Nation, an Atlanta Methodist preacher, “Colonel” William Joseph Simmons, started to agitate for a rebirth of the “noble order”. He received widespread support and the new Ku Klux Klan soon had a rocketing membership. This time, though, its interests were not in the restoration of social order, but the instigation of racial hatred.

  Simmons’s and his fellows’ vitriol was not just aimed at the blacks; Catholics, Jews, non-Americans and all critics of the Ku Klux Klan were also attacked. This broad appeal base swelled the movement to hundreds of thousands throughout the First World War and on into the next two decades. At the same time, its leaders became stunningly rich by skimming the Klan’s funds. By the 1930s, the Klan was one of the most powerful financial institutions in the USA.

  The cost to human life exacted by this hate machine was appalling. The actual number of lynchings and burnings is unknown – partially due to cover-ups by Klan-friendly police departments – but other atrocities, deliberately publicized by the Klan, were also common. Whippings, shootings, mutilations, rapes and brandings with the letters “KKK” were common throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The Government seemed powerless or unwilling to stop the persecutions.

  Then, with the coming of the Second World War, membership started to drop off. In an attempt to revive their fortunes, the Klan leaders forged an alliance with the Nazi American Bund. When the Bund was denounced as un-American and disbanded the Klan tried to erase its links with the group, but it was too late; the mud stuck and membership crashed. In 1944, the Internal Revenue Service charged the Klan with failure to pay massive back taxes; this was the final straw. On 23 April 1944, the Klan leaders officially dissolved the movement; but, again, it refused to die.

  Separate groups of Ku Klux Klansmen managed to keep the ugly dream alive throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s the movement received a boost during the civil rights troubles, but stood little chance of a full revival. The mood of the country had changed, and it was now the racists who were looked upon with distrust and loathing.

  In the 1970s and 1980s the Klan hung on, but has undergone several important changes. Its new emphasis is on religious fundamentalism (which was always a part of its belief, but never the backbone, which had always been racism) and post-nuclear Survivalism. The new creed predicts that the forces of Satan (led by Jews, Communists and non-whites) will cause a nuclear Armageddon which will be followed by a war between the powers of Good and Evil. In the preparation for this day, the modern Ku Klux Klan has set up several paramilitary training camps in the Southern states.

  Charles Manson

  A former Brother Twelve disciple alleged in court that Wilson had ordered him to kill one of his enemies by black magic, but that he had refused. In that respect, at least, Wilson had a less malign influence than Charles Manson, the “hippie” messiah of the 1960s.

  Manson was born in Cincinnati in 1934, the son of a fifteen-year-old girl who had become pregnant by her seventeen-year-old boyfriend. His mother was reported by neighbours to be “loose”. “She ran around a lot, drank, got in trouble.” She also vanished for days at a time. When Charlie was five, she was sentenced to five years in prison for armed robbery. Out again in 1942, she tried to have her son taken into a foster home, but none were available; at twelve, he was sent to a “caretaking institution” for boys in Indiana. After running away several times – his mother did not want him at home – he was arrested for burglary; escaping from custody he committed a series of burglaries and armed robberies, for which he was sent to a reform school when he was thirteen. A parole officer later said: “Charlie was the most hostile parolee I’ve ever come across.” Small and not particularly strong, Manson was nevertheless a highly dominant person who felt that his best defence was to “act tough”. He also committed a number of homosexual offences, including rape, holding a razor against the victim’s throat.

  Released from reformatory at twenty, he married a seventeen-year-old girl and drove her to Los Angeles in a stolen car; in March 1956, a son was born. Three months later Manson was sent to prison again. for car theft. He was behind bars intermittently until 1967, when he was thirty-two.

  Free once more, he drifted to San Francisco, which was then crowded with “hippies” who smoked pot and talked about flower power. For Manson, this was a revelation; the world had changed totally since 1956. Older than most of the drop-outs on Haight-Ashbury, he was soon a local “character”, with his own admiring retinue of teenagers. He took full advantage of the new sexual freedom, and accumulated a kind of harem. One girl, Mary Brunner, was later described as his “favourite wife”. Another, Lynn (“Squeaky”) Fromme, joined his ménage when he found her crying by the side of the road after a family row. Yet another, Susan Atkins, later described how Manson had given her confidence by making her undress, then telling her: “Look, you’re beautiful.” What such girls found attractive about Manson was that he was a totally unthreatening father figure, a kind of mixture of Charlie Chaplin and Christ. He liked to point out that his name meant “Man’s son”, and clearly thought of himself as a Christ figure.

  By October 1967, Manson was tired of Haight-Ashbury, and moved with his disciples to Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles. There were about sixteen girls in the group by this time, and four men. One of the girls, Sandy Good, told him about a ranch owned by in old man named George Spahn, who was almost blind. Manson went to look at it, and Spahn allowed the hippies to stay for several weeks.

  Manson’s ambition was to become a pop star, like Bob Dylan; he played guitar and sang his own songs. Terry Meicher, son of the film star Doris Day, talked about a $20,000 record contract. Manson sold a song to the successful pop group, the Beach Boys, whose drummer, Dennis Wilson, allowed the “family” to move into his luxury home for a while. It suddenly began to look as if Manson might end up rich and famous too.

  Another coup was persuading the owner of a small ranch near the Spahn ranch to give it to them – while they were all under the influence of drugs – in exchange for a painted tent.

  But success continued to elude him, and he developed an increasing tendency to denounce civilization and all its evils. He was convinved that a nuclear holocaust was imminent and that blacks were poised to take over America. (Oddly enough, Manson was violently racist.) In October 1968, the “family” drove an old bus into Death Valley, in the Mojave desert, until the brakes burned out, then moved into a derelict farm, the Barker ranch. When winter came they moved back to Los Angeles, and Manson’s next-door neighbour commented that he was very opinionated and very anti-establishment, and that Manson’s women said “they would give their lives for Charlie”.

  It seems likely that at this period Man
son’s non-stop psychedelic trips began to induce intense paranoia (although even at reform school psychiatrists had noted some paranoia). The Beatles song “Helter Skelter” provided him with a code name for the day of reckoning for the “pigs” – the bourgeoisie, the blacks and the authorities. The family began to acquire guns and knives, and two “dune buggies” – vehicles that would run on sand – one with a forged cheque and one with stolen money. In 1969, he shot a negro dope dealer named Crowe in the torso – although Crowe recovered in hospital and no questions were asked. Manson was relieved when no Black Panthers came to seek revenge.

  In July 1969, a Zen Buddhist convert called Gary Hinman – who had refused to sell all he had and join the family – was held at gunpoint while the family searched his home for money. When Hinman showed fight, Manson slashed his face with a sword half severing an ear. After that, Hinman was forced to sign over his car and bus to Manson, then stabbed twice and left to bleed to death.

  The police were now harassing the “family”, who were back at the Spahn ranch – looking for stolen cars and stolen credit cards. In early August 1969, Manson told his followers: “Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”

  On the evening of Friday, 8 August, a murder party of four left for a house in Hollywood where Terry Melcher had once lived; Manson chose it because he knew it. Tex Watson, Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel drove to 10050 Cielo Drive, and Watson cut the telephone wires. The house had now been let to film director Roman Polanski, who was in London, and his wife Sharon Tate was giving dinner to three guests: Jay Sebring, an ex-lover, Voityck Frykowski, and his girlfriend Abigail Folger, who were staying. Sharon Tate was heavily pregnant.