Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

“Aaron was heartbroken. He was crying and weeping,” Shula said. “One day I was in the kitchen chopping vegetables. Aaron said, ‘You’re thinking of leaving, aren’t you? You’re thinking of leaving because you need a husband. I’ll marry you.’ Aaron took me up to his trailer and started reading the Song of Solomon to me. I knew this guy was really desperate. So we had sex. Then all hell broke lose.”7

  Two of Berg’s other children were outraged that Aaron wanted to take another wife. “Hosea accused me of seducing Aaron,” Shula said. “Deborah went crazy.”

  They hoped their father would end the relationship, but David Berg had other ideas. “Berg came along and said our marriage was of the Lord,” Shula recalled. “He said, ‘They are two people who needed each other, and they will give comfort to each other.’ He shut Deborah up, and he shut up Hosea.”

  Shula was betrothed to Aaron and about to get her own intimate look inside the Berg family circus.

  She gave birth to her first child, a baby girl, later that year. She had joined up with the Bergs so that her unborn child would have a father. But that father was not Aaron, nor would Shula be the mother who would raise her. The little girl was just six months old when David Berg sent Aaron and Shula up to Canada to bring more converts into his hippie army.

  How could she explain what she had done? She had given her daughter over to a disciple named Susan in order to be with Aaron. “At the time,” she confessed, “I didn’t think I was leaving my daughter. I thought I was putting God first. It was a communal attitude. Your kids were everybody’s kids. When I came back, Susan and her husband were totally in love with my daughter. Aaron didn’t want her. I allowed myself to be influenced by people who didn’t really care about me. Deborah was saying, ‘Do you want to be with Aaron, or do you want to be with your baby?’”

  In 1971, Berg and Zerby went on a secret mission to Israel. The Endtime Prophet had visions of relocating his flock to a kibbutz in the Jewish state. He expected “Hosannas” from the Jews, but wound up getting deported. Few of his disciples at the Texas Soul Clinic knew about it, but Berg and Zerby had returned to the Lone Star State and were hiding out in a Dallas hotel room. Berg would summon his children and other top leaders to the hotel for meetings. One time, Shula was invited to come along with Aaron.

  “Berg was blasting the hell out of Deborah and her husband for something. He knew I had issues with Deborah, and I think he invited me in order to impress me.”

  Business was adjourned. Berg was in the mood for one of his “sharing” parties. By now, the prophet had pulled out a bottle of wine and removed his clothes. He was walking around the hotel room stark naked, proclaiming his favorite proverb.

  “To the pure,” Berg said, “all things are pure!”

  Before long, the sharing was in full swing. “Everybody was having sex,” Shula recalled. “It wasn’t like an exhibition. It was under the covers. There was one bedroom with two double beds. There was a mattress on the floor in the living room. Hosea and his wife were off in one corner. I shared with someone other than Aaron. Later on, Berg came up to me in the middle of the night and started kissing me and playing around and said, ‘Oh, I could make you my fifth wife.’ That’s all that happened. The next morning, Berg didn’t remember a thing. He’d had a couple glasses of wine and didn’t remember what he said the night before, and I certainly wasn’t about to remind him.”

  Nevertheless, the young convert had seen what really went on inside the Berg family. She had been initiated into sharing years before the rank-and-file members of The Family could even guess that teaching was coming down the line.

  “In some ways, I guess I thought it was possible to love everybody,” Shula recalled. “Now I see that stuff doesn’t really work. I was twenty, but my maturity level was maybe seventeen or eighteen. Maybe I was trying to break away from my Puritan heritage. I had never been a hippie, so I guess I was trying to be one. I was just totally taken in.”

  Shula’s next child, Merry Berg, was conceived while she and Aaron were off proselytizing across eastern Canada. This time Aaron was the father. Mothers often know the moment their children are created, and Shula believes Merry was conceived in the back of a van heading through the Canadian countryside. Aaron’s mother, Jane, was riding shotgun and her new mate, Stephen, was behind the wheel. By now, Jane had accepted Karen Zerby’s rightful “place above all the maidens.”

  “We [Shula, Aaron, Jane, and Stephen] called ourselves the Fearsome Foursome. It was in some ways the happiest time in my life,” Shula said. “We won people to Jesus every day. People were dropping out of society and joining us. Aaron would write three or four songs in a day. He had a powerful anointing on him.”

  Aaron and his pregnant wife returned to Texas just as the Soul Clinic was breaking up. David Berg had gotten into another battle with his old boss and landlord, Fred Jordan. But there were other reasons to leave. Angry parents and law enforcement authorities were coming after the Endtime Prophet. Berg took off to England with Zerby, and amidst the chaos, Merry Berg was born in Mingus, Texas, on June 5, 1972. Within a month, Shula was flying off to London with a newborn baby on her lap.

  Shula’s experience was different than that of most recruits. Her involvement with Aaron gave her an early glimpse of what The Family would soon become. Many of those who joined the sect in 1971 didn’t know David Berg existed when they were first brought into the fold. All they knew at first was that they were joining a band of Christian revolutionaries who were preparing for the Endtime. They had to be hooked before they were fed the teachings of David Berg through his “Mo Letters.”8

  Consider the story of Jim LaMattery, who joined The Family before he ever heard of David Berg. Family missionaries approached him in a park in San Diego in the summer of 1971. Jim was sitting under a tree. He’d just smoked a joint.

  “Want to hear a song?” one of the missionaries asked.

  “Um, sure man, I guess so,” he replied.

  Jim loved music and also played guitar. But he’d never heard this song.

  How long you have been waiting,

  For somebody to love you?

  How long you been waiting,

  For somebody to care?

  This guy could really sing. Jim asked him if he was in a band.

  “Yeah,” he answered, swinging his guitar onto his back and sticking his hands into the pockets of his bell-bottom pants. “So what are you doing here?”

  “Just hangin’,” Jim said.

  The stranger smiled and turned his head over toward a crimson van that was pulling up to the curb. There was a young girl riding shotgun. Jim gladly accepted his new friend’s invitation to come and have dinner with them. They both piled into the van with the girl and her friend, another attractive hippie chick. Strands of colored glass beads separated the driver and front passenger seats from the rest of the van. All the other seats had been torn out. Intense conversation ensued as the van rolled down the streets of San Diego. They were talking about a revolution of love.

  “Love means getting together,” said the girl behind the wheel.

  “Yeah, and sharing everything,” added the one riding shotgun, flashing a smile at the star-struck teenager.9

  LaMattery went for dinner and wound up staying six years. At first, when he was living at The Family mission in downtown Los Angeles, he didn’t even know David Berg existed, or that there was another large group of disciples in Texas. Berg’s youngest daughter, Faithy, and her husband were running the colony in Los Angeles.

  Jim LaMattery soon took his guitar into the streets to sing about the revolution of love. It was about Jesus, but not the same Jesus he’d learned about growing up in the Catholic Church. This was radical, revolutionary. Jesus as Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary, not like that good shepherd from Sunday school. It was radical, but there was also a feeling of safety in the sect. It seemed like the war in Vietnam would never end. The prospect of the draft hung over LaMattery and his generation like a mushroom cloud, and Th
e Family was a ready-made bomb shelter. Just before his encounter with The Family, LaMattery had started a summer job picking apricots on a farm outside San Diego. Here was an alternative—a radical, communal alternative to getting sucked into the military or some dead-end job. They were going to change the world, and they had God on their side.

  “They made rebellion look great,” he recalled years later. “It was a radical stance against the government. They called it the ‘gospel of rebellion.’ They used the shell of religion to control people. That put a holy stamp on the whole thing. It wasn’t just a playground or some kind of experimental living. You had some very devoted people.”

  Among those LaMattery brought into the fold was Donna, a nineteen-year-old convert and his future wife. When the word came down to leave the country—that the United States of America was about to face the wrath of God—Jim and Donna didn’t think twice. They took off to a new Family outpost in Denmark, on the site of a vacated Danish army base that had been taken over by a band of European hippies.

  David Berg’s unorthodox ideas about sexual freedom had not yet filtered down to rank-and-file members of The Family. “It was so fundamentalist. It’s hilarious to look back on it now,” Jim recalled. “It was no drugs, no sex. You were strictly there for God, to be a revolutionary for Jesus.”

  Shula, who had just flown into England with Aaron and their baby, was getting a very different view of life in The Family. She was about to have one more close encounter with her horny father-in-law.

  “We had gone to live in Berg’s house in London,” Shula recalled. “I was trying to cook for him and keep this house up while I had Merry, a new baby. It was like a month after having her. I was still healing. One night Aaron sent me into Berg’s room. He and Maria were watching something on TV about the Royal Family. They were really into the Royal Family. He offered me a glass of wine and started kissing me. We didn’t have sex. He told me he had just been with Becky and Rachel [two of Berg’s other wives] and was worn out. I think he was just a drunk and couldn’t get it up. Well, the next night he comes up to me and starts kissing me again and wanting to have sex. I told him, ‘You know, I’m really tired. Can we do it another time?’ It was the truth on my part. Obviously, he took it personally. When I told Aaron that I’d turned Berg down and said I was tired, he couldn’t believe it. Aaron said, ‘What! You didn’t have sex with the prophet!’ Maybe Aaron was trying to get back in his father’s good graces by letting him have sex with me. Berg would play games with his kids—promote one and demote another.”10

  Aaron was already losing his father’s trust. Having his wife turn Berg down certainly didn’t help his cause. But there were deeper problems. Aaron had long suffered from bouts of depression, and he was once again sinking into that mix of anger and melancholy. He and Shula were sent off to Sweden, where they briefly crossed paths with Jim and Donna LaMattery.

  “Aaron was flown into Sweden,” LaMattery said. “He was in a world of confusion when he got there, and I was told to babysit him. I knew he had been shifted to me for babysitting duty, but no one told me why. They just said to watch out for him. We had a lake there, and we would go out. He was a great guitar player, but a really miserable guy. Aaron was always a little strange. We would go out to eat and he was always in left field. Back in California, he would go on these crazy expeditions, singing through the streets of LA. But he seemed really depressed and despondent in Sweden.”

  Shula could see her husband was going down into the spiritual spiral of depression. “Aaron knew that his dad did not want us back in England,” she said. “Merry was about nine months old. Aaron was really depressed.”

  After Sweden, Shula, Aaron, and Merry moved into a Family colony in Paris, where the eldest son of the Endtime Prophet continued his descent. One night she saw him writing a long letter to his father. “He was really depressed. I looked over his shoulder to see what he was doing and he was writing about how Jane [Aaron’s mother] would leave him in the house [as a baby], and he’d scream for hours. He put the letter in an envelope, and wrote on it, ‘Goodbye dad. You’re the best dad a son ever had.’ Then he gave it to me to mail. It was a suicide note.”

  Jane Berg, the Endtime Prophet’s long-suffering but ever-loyal wife, was dispatched from London to Paris to deal with her suicidal son. Before she arrived, Aaron’s behavior worsened. “One night he wanted to have sex,” Shula recalled. “I just said, ‘No. I’m tired,’ and he pushed me out of bed and onto the floor. It was totally out of character for the way he treated me. It was evil. He was possessed. I called Jane and she told me to lock him in a room and pray for him until she could come and deliver that spirit out of him.”

  Jane arrived the next day and told Shula she was taking Aaron with her to Switzerland. It was the last time Shula would see her husband.

  According to a statement later released by The Family, Aaron Berg died in a climbing accident. He was last seen alive in Geneva on April 3, 1973, when he headed into the Alps “to pray and be alone with the Lord.” His body was found nineteen days later at the bottom of a cliff—on Easter Sunday.

  Berg claimed his son’s death fulfilled one of the “Laurentide Prophecies” issued back in Quebec in 1969 at the founding gathering of The Family. “I saw a vision of Aaron dying on a mountain, and the Lord said, ‘Thy Aaron shall be taken from thee and depart on the mount!’ And he did! God’s word never fails!”

  “His music helped start the Jesus Revolution, and he was one of its hardest-working witnesses,” Berg said. “But his mind was much stronger than his frail body…so God has now enabled him to cross forbidden borders, escape his enemies and help us as never before!”11

  Shula knew it was no accident. She knew from the beginning that Aaron committed suicide, and David Berg had blood on his hands. Years of paternal abuse and cruel manipulation, she says, caused her husband to take his own life. Her theory as to what destroyed her husband would be confirmed fifteen years later in another one of Berg’s prophecies. Then, in the eighties, the focus of the prophet’s wrath would be his granddaughter, Merry, the child of Shula and Aaron Berg.

  Merry Berg did not have a stable upbringing after her father’s death. Shula took another husband in the inner circle, a loyal devotee named Ralph Keeler Irwin, but the marriage never really took. Merry was shuttled between Ralph, Shula, and her grandmother, Jane Berg, and her new mate, Stephen.

  In the aftermath of Aaron’s suicide, Jane Berg sent Shula and Merry to Spain with two trusted members of the inner circle. “Jane invited me back to Paris six months after Aaron died,” Shula said. “I was really out of it. The full impact of what had happened to Aaron had just hit me. Berg wanted Jane to take care of me. They said, ‘Pick any of these guys you want to marry.’ Jane called Ralph and I in and did this prophesizing thing over us. She talked me into having sex with him. I didn’t get involved with anyone else at the time. If I was going to get pregnant, I wanted to know who it was. And I got pregnant.”

  Don Irwin was born into The Family in 1974. Shula, Ralph, Merry, and little Don were together off and on over the next few years. They were a family—of sorts—but this was the seventies, and this was The Family. It was a chaotic time. There was a battle raging for control of the sect in several continents around the world. There was also a big proselytizing push at the time in—of all places—Libya and Tunisia. Then, amidst all the chaos all around the world, another child was born.

  6

  My Little Fish

  TENERIFE, CANARY ISLANDS

  January 1975 – Emergencia Maternidad

  The “flirty fishing” team in Tenerife. Front row (l-r) are Sue Kauten, Queen Rachel, David Berg, and Karen Zerby.

  RICKY WAS BORN just after noon on Saturday, January 25, 1975, on Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, the Spanish archipelago that dots the North African coast between Morocco and the Western Sahara. His biological mother, Karen Zerby, and his spiritual father, David Berg, hopped in a taxi that morning and rushed down
to a little clinic near Plaza Charco. They’d stopped at the more upscale Bellevue Clinic, but no one was around to help with the delivery. “There was no room in the inn, so we had to go down to the stable,” Berg would later explain. “Hallelujah!”1

  They came to the Canary Islands to conduct an experiment. Ricky was the experiment. On the second day of his life, Ricky was taken from the clinic to his new family’s home, where a series of nannies would help raise the Prophet Prince.

  He had dark curly hair, long black eyelashes, and a birth weight of 7.7 pounds. Berg was sure that had prophetic significance, as he had a long fascination with the mystical properties of the number seven. Berg was forty-nine years old (seven squared) when the world finally began to realize—in 1968—that he was the long-awaited Endtime Prophet. At the time of Ricky’s portentous birth, David Berg weighed 77 kilos. Not only that, the prophet calculated that the Prophet Prince was born in the seventh hour of the seventh day. (That numerology works if one considers that the day starts at 6 A.M. and Saturday is the final day of the biblical week.) To make the timing of his birth even more auspicious, the child was born in 1975 on the 25th day of the month. Two plus five equals seven. And it doesn’t stop there. The bill for the overnight stay at the Emergencia Maternidad was 7,000 pesetas.

  David Berg christened the baby “Davidito,” or Little David. According to the Endtime Prophet, Ricky and his mother, Karen “Maria” Zerby, were destined to be the two witnesses credited with ushering the apocalypse in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation.

  And I will give my two witnesses authority to prophesy for one thousand two hundred and sixty days, wearing sackcloth…. When they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from the bottomless pit will make war on them and conquer them and kill them…. Their dead bodies will lie in the street…. For three and a half days members of the peoples and tribes and languages and nations will gaze at their dead bodies and refuse to let them be placed in a tomb…. But after three and a half days, the breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and those who saw them were terrified. Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, “Come up here!” And they went up to heaven in a cloud while their enemies watched them.2