I held up two hands, fingers spread wide. I curled up three fingers. A fourth.
“Okay,” he said. “Dariell Thof. As I said on the phone, I know who he is and what he’s doing. And, based on what I know, your girl’s in danger.”
“How can you be sure?” I was glad we’d made it back to the main topic but not satisfied enough to sit down.
“Because I’ve been tracking Dariell for over three years. And until you rang me the other day, I hadn’t heard anything new about him for more than six months.”
“Why your interest?”
“’Cause he’s bad news. I think it’s just a matter of time until something bad happens around him, and I’m afraid a lot of people are going to get hurt when it does.”
“Don.” I sighed. “I hate to burst your bubble. I’ve run a nationwide search on your man. There’s no trace of him. He doesn’t exist.”
“Oh, he exists alright.”
When my face hadn’t changed, he blew out a breath.
“Sit down, Rafferty. I’ll tell you everything.”
“And more coffee?”
He nodded. “More coffee.”
I sat down.
Chapter 12
Two hours later I was still sitting, buzzing with coffee overload and looking at the table top covered with files and papers. Don might have been exaggerating when he said he kept track of all the churches in the US, but he did have info on a bunch of them. And although his filing system left a bit to be desired—not that I’m a paragon of virtue in that regard—I couldn’t fault his work.
As an ex-priest, he was one hell of an investigator.
He had files on all the major religions, most of the minor ones and a boatload of stuff on weird groups that I’ve never even heard of. The Seventh Day Adventists, they were almost mainstream, but who knew that they had a splinter group called the Davidians. And who knew that the splinter group had its own offshoot called the Branch Davidians, with a commune right here in the Lone Star state.
Don did, that’s who.
There was good ol’ L. Ron Hubbard who had turned a bunch of mediocre science fiction stories into a rather more financially successful moral and ethical code. Read: religion-cum-business.
The Order of the Solar Temple was an attempt to recycle the legend of the Knight’s Templar.
Not to mention the completely unhinged few like Do and Ti—no, I did not make that up—the leaders of a group called Human Individual Metamorphosis, who believed that the only way humans could escape the next great cleansing of the earth was to hitch a ride on a passing UFO.
Chrissake!
The saddest part about people like this was the unsuspecting dupes they convinced to join the cause. It would be several years before H. I. M., re-branded by then as Heaven’s Gate, would show the public how deep their delusions went, and how far they would go to live down to them.
“And don’t even get me started on the continued marginalization of minorities,” Don said. “Homosexuals, divorcees, women in general.”
I looked up from my reading as he continued.
“God, think about women. When was the last time you heard of a woman in a position of power within the Catholic Church? Never.”
“Nuns?” Hilda asked.
“As aides, staff, nurses, teachers, etcetera. Always in a supporting role. A female priest in the Catholic Church? It won’t happen in our lifetime. If ever.”
He took a breath.
“I’ll get off my high horse now. As much as I despise the major religions for their brainwashing and interference in our social and political arenas, they’re not my main concern. Because they’re so public, there’s almost no chance of a major incident that will end up hurting scores of people.”
“Like Jonestown,” I said.
“That thing in South America?” Hilda said.
“Guyana.” Don and I said together. I waved him to carry on.
“Nineteen seventy-eight. More than nine hundred men, women and children died because their leader told them to drink grape Kool-Aid mixed with all sorts of chemicals. Including cyanide. Some people say the church members knew it was poison, some say they didn’t. I know the babies whose mothers syringed the shit into their mouths didn’t have any idea what was happening.
My pulse started hammering and I don’t think it was the caffeine.
“Every single one of those people died because Jim Jones decided they would. They were so convinced by his words that, when push came to shove, they didn’t, or couldn’t, do what was necessary to save themselves. That scares the living hell out of me.”
“Why would people listen to him?” Hilda asked. “I bet he wasn’t the most rational of people.”
“You’re right about that,” Don said. “In the end, he was a raving lunatic, talking about how the CIA was sending in US troops to kill them all. But if you’ve been extensively weaned on messages that shift your beliefs in certain ways, then outrageous ramblings can be accepted as normal.”
“Like how Hitler got to the point of murdering Jews without anyone stopping him,” Hilda said.
Don and I looked at her.
“I was trying to secure a Jewish estate on behalf of a collector a couple of years ago and I picked up some research.” She tilted her head. “The first step he, Hitler, took was to convince the German people that the Jews were taking money, business, education and land away from them. Remember, this is during a time when the ordinary working family was worried whether they’d be able to eat tomorrow, or have a place to sleep next week. From there, it’s a small step for the German people to agree that Jews should be considered a different class. No harm in that, right?” She spread her arms. “Then, it’s more small steps to open segregation, closed segregation, relocation, work camps, and then finally to death camps.
“If he’d told Germany in the beginning that his plan was to murder six million Jews, not only would they have known he was mad, they’d have risen up against him.” Her eyes were bright and shining, her face defiant.
Don whistled.
“What does any of this have to do with Dariell?” I asked. “Jakob. Whatever the hell his name is.”
“It’s what I believe he’s doing right now,” Don said. “And why he could be the next Jim Jones.”
Don fixed sandwiches while we leaned against the bench and he told us about the life and times of a certain Jakob Simon Friesen.
He’d been born in the mid-forties to a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania, the youngest of four sons and the fifth of seven children. Growing up had been about what you’d expect for that kind of family, in that time and situation.
Religion, and a single-minded devotion to it, had been the primary force within young Jakob’s life. His family belonged to the Church of God in Christ Mennonites, not to be confused with any of the other eight or more different branches of the Mennonite religion.
The community lived quietly, simply—think Amish but not as uptight—and sacrificed themselves for the good of the larger group, much like young Jakob was forced to sacrifice himself for the larger family. A son, he worked outside with his father from the age of six, while the daughters helped Mother around the house. He was charged with looking after the animals, feeding, collecting eggs, that kind of thing. As he grew, like the other sons, he took on more manual work around the township, building works and farming.
His eldest brother assumed the position of spiritual leader of the community when their father died, and though we’d never know what Jakob thought of that, I didn’t think there’d ever been a younger brother who wasn’t jealous of the bond between a father and the first-born.
Jakob was probably a smart kid. It was hard to tell for sure since all the children were schooled within the community and there was a distinct lack of standardized testing for reference.
There was talk that he led groups of children in religious study, some even older than himself. All of this was hard for Don to prove; it was more of an impression gleaned during interviews with a coup
le of locals.
The first signs of trouble for Jakob appeared in sixty-one. He and three other Mennonite boys crept out of the village one night and hitched a ride to the nearest town. After getting liquored up they proceeded to vandalize a couple of local cars and let the cattle loose from a local farm. Typical teenage hi-jinks, I suppose, but what piqued my, and Don’s, interest was what the boys said afterwards.
Don had been able to get hold of notes from the local sheriff about the talking-to that the boys received that night. Don’t ask me how accurate they were, but they painted a disturbing picture of the teenaged Mr Friesen.
Each of the three boys said words to the effect that even though they were drunk—they called it “afflicted”—they knew what they were doing was wrong. They said that Jakob had made it seem that the owners of the cars and the cattle “deserved it, for being apostates.” One of the boys even went on to say, “It were like Jakob convinced m’self to do these things more’n I could convince m’self not to.”
I heard the Jonestown dead echoing through that line.
And Jakob?
He said nothing. Sat and looked at the floor, not acknowledging anyone else in the room.
That’s all the local cops got, because shortly after that Ma and Pa Friesen had arrived to take Jakob back for their own particular brand of trial and punishment.
After the rural Pennsylvania incident, cue a gap of several years to where he turned up in Kentucky as a street preacher, having left his family behind. He gained a small following until a local teenage runaway stumbled into the cop shop late one night to tell a deputy that Jakob tried to rape her.
Don had spoken with a county sheriff who remembered the night as a young deputy. The girl in question had a history of running away from home and toward a long line of unpleasant young men. She was drunk and raving when she arrived at the station and the deputy put her in a cell to dry out. Figuring this latest incident to be more of her usual routine, he asked her about it in the morning. The girl stuck to her story, but by the time a cruiser had rolled around to Jakob’s last known address, he had ghosted away and wasn’t seen again.
For ten months, where Don found evidence of him on the other side of the country, in a group living on a small orchard in Northern California, where the regular order of business was to pick apples during the day and get high at night.
Like a bunch of San Franciscan hippies this apple-gathering enclave embraced Timothy Leary’s words of “Turn on, tune in, drop out” with a fervor that they didn’t apply to much else.
Existentialism, Sartre, and the general shitcan state of the world were regular topics for conversation but, far from blissing out and spending their days making love not war, the group splintered after only a few months. Most of the members packed up and hit the road to continue their nomadic lifestyle, one ending up in Texas and confiding in a recently de-frocked Father McIlhenny.
“Where’d he go after that?” Hilda asked. “And do you mind if I smoke?”
Courteous and considerate, that’s Hilda.
Me? I was already applying the Zippo to another bowl full of Borkum Riff and doing my best impersonation of Mt. Etna.
Don waved a hand and moved a green glass ashtray from a side shelf to the table and answered her other question.
“I followed some rumors and found he’d landed in San Francisco a year or so later, leading prayer and community groups. I’m not sure what they did in private, but I tracked them to several downtown rallies: women’s rights, feed the homeless, that type of thing. I never did find personal details for him, which I assume was his attempt to make sure he couldn’t get traced back to Kentucky.
“But I did find one member of the community group. These days she runs a women’s shelter, and she painted a disturbing picture of our would-be Martin Luther. Yes, he did bring the group together and yes, he did preach about values and love for all mankind, but there was a darker side to him, too. She remembered seeing him at a group picnic offering alcohol to a girl who she says ‘couldn’t have been more than fourteen, fifteen tops.’ That girl and her family left the group soon after.”
“Creepy,” Hilda said.
“Yeah. And it wasn’t the last time. There were a series of families who left the group suddenly, just after Jakob took a personal interest in their daughters.”
I hadn’t started the day with a favorable impression of this nutcase and each time I thought he couldn’t slide lower in my estimation, it turned out I was wrong.
“He followed a similar story over the next few years,” Don said. “Drifting, turning up in various cities across the country. Starting, or getting involved with small groups with religious overtones. All of which failed.”
“Okay, Don,” I said. “I’m still missing a couple of things. I’m taking your word that this Jakob Friesen turns into Dariell Thof, and I still don’t see where this is headed.”
“I’m getting there but just look at the pattern. A boy grows up in a strict religious household, the last of a line of sons to a prominent leader. Despite showing a desire to lead, from an early age, he does not assume the spiritual responsibility of the community. He then knocks around the country for years trying, unsuccessfully, to establish himself as a moral and spiritual figurehead.”
Hilda blew a stream of smoke over her shoulder. “He’s searching for the love he never got from his father,” she said.
“Sounds like pop-psychology bullshit to me,” I said.
“Call it whatever you like, Rafferty, but I think Hilda’s right,” Don said. “And don’t forget the pattern of non-consensual sexual advances to young girls. People who couldn’t say no to giving him the love he needed.”
“I don’t know about the girls, Don,” I said. “You might be reaching on that.”
Hilda widened her eyes and ground her cigarette out with more force than it needed.
“If something weird was happening, why didn’t the other members of the group do anything about it? Call the police, Social Services, someone. Hell, just punch his lights out.”
“You’ve got to remember,” Don said, “that christianity, or any religion for that matter, is the biggest form of Stockholm Syndrome there is. Anything which threatens the leader, threatens the entirety of the group. It’s easier to understand if the threat is external, but just as relevant if the threat is from within the group itself.”
“Like Hitler at his worst,” Hilda said. “To stand up and announce that your leader is wrong you have to admit that you’re wrong too.”
“Exactly,” Don said. “And don’t forget that nobody knowingly joins a cult, or something that they think will hurt them. They join a religious, or political movement that stands for reasons important to them, with people that they like.”
“So when does young Jakob decide to grow up and become Dariell?” I asked.
“After a stint in New York, he moved back west, ending up in Los Angeles and it looks like he found what he was looking for. He met, and started living with, a woman named Anastasia Buver, the only daughter of a hotshot Hollywood studio guy.
“Not long after that the name Jakob Friesen disappears.”
Chapter 13
“Nineteen seventy-six, the war in Vietnam is over, and the country is reeling from the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation. In the middle of all of this, a small church is founded in a San Diego suburb. Anastasia Buver, now calling herself Ana, and Dariell Thof are the founders.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said. “But, I found fifty Jakob Friesens in the US. How can you be—”
“Keep in mind, Rafferty, while I’ve been telling this story forward, I’ve been researching it backwards. When I got to the point where Dariell disappeared and Jakob entered the stage, I could see that the link was Ana. Like you, I wanted to be sure. It took a while to track down, but I eventually found newspaper photos from before his name change, to compare with photos of founders of this new church.”
“I remain unconvinced.”
Hilda lay a hand on my arm. “There’s more.”
“Yep,” Don said. “I got hung up on that for a time too, then I decided it doesn’t matter. The concern I have is for Dariell and the people who are listening to him now. Not for who or what Jakob was back then. That helps explain a bit about where he came from and why he might be doing what he’s doing but, in the end it’s irrelevant.”
I had to give him that one.
“With the general state of feeling in the US at the time, The People’s Church of the Reformed Temple found a following.”
I shook my head. “You’re kidding about that name.”
Don shook his in response and gave a sad smile. “It made sense when I discovered that Ana had spent time in the original Peoples Temple in San Fran. Back when Jim Jones was just a lying fraudster with a big mouth. Before he went right off the deep end. I imagine they had a lot of fun with the name. Maybe even hoped to catch a few of Jim’s left-over congregation who hadn’t made the trip to Guyana.
“Within two years the congregation was a hundred or so strong. Not big enough to raise eyebrows on the other side of the country, but they were making an impact on their local community.”
“Nothing screwy going on?” I said.
“Nope,” he replied. “A return to good old-fashioned values and morals was their approach, and the locals loved it. They were frightened of their government and pissed off at what had happened in Vietnam. They were ready and hungry for someone, anyone, to make them feel safe again. We all were.”
“That’s the key,” Hilda said.
Don nodded. “At about the same time, they started buying land. I haven’t been able to follow the money trail, so I don’t know how they funded it.”
“Land?”
“Yeah,” Don said through clenched teeth, then let out a breath. “I’ve found references to Washington State, Texas and North Dakota, though I don’t have addresses.”
“Easy to get away from prying eyes in those states,” I said.
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