Jesus Freaks

by Don Lattin

  Seeing the Prophet Prince in real life was also a wake-up call for Celeste Jones.

  “Ricky and those guys were just being normal boys—telling jokes and being frivolous. There was nothing really bad going on. Then all of a sudden we got herded in and blasted by Peter Amsterdam. We were put on punishment and scrubbing toilets for months.”

  For Celeste, the crackdown was another example of the unique style of child abuse in The Family. Yes, there was sexual abuse. Some kids were physically beaten. But in a way the worst abuse was the constant changing of rules and expectations. They were always on edge. David Berg would get a new prophecy or get pissed off about something and everything would change.

  “One day you were supposed to have sex, and the next day you weren’t even supposed to hold hands. It was all on a whim. It was crazy,” she said. “There was nothing you could grab onto. Then you were separated constantly from who you knew, from your family and friends.”

  What happened to Merry Berg was a perfect example.

  “They come out with a new letter, and say Merry is possessed by the devil. That letter was shocking. That was not the Merry I knew. It was scary. Then they started looking at us, and you do not want to be singled out. It was so driven into us that we represented the future, but we weren’t turning out like they thought. So they clamped down really hard.”

  Merry’s brother, Don Irwin, was living in a “Teen Combo” in Thailand. He had the same feelings and the same fear of being sent to a Victor Camp.

  “I told them I wanted to go to university, and next thing I knew I was sitting in a room with three people sitting around me telling me there were going to be complications if I kept up this hankering for worldly knowledge. It just freaked me out. I had no choice. I wasn’t with my biological parents. The only recourse you had was to submit to them, have the demon cast out of you, or get sent to a Victor Camp.”21

  Berg’s letters about Merry’s punishment and Ricky’s bad behavior did what they were supposed to do—at least for Don Irwin. They terrified him and kept him from acting out at his Teen Combo in Bangkok. “Any type of somewhat lucid, smart person over the age of twelve who knew how to read and reason could see that if they rebelled they were going to drop their ass into Macao.”

  Irwin starts talking faster. It had been more than fifteen years since he read those letters, but the fear returns to his voice when he starts talking about growing up in The Family.

  “There were a couple of girls in Thailand in 1992 or 1993 who rebelled and wouldn’t say uncle, and they sent them to Macao,” he said. “They were there one day, and the next day they weren’t there. You’d see some of the kids come back. When you are fourteen or fifteen you don’t understand what post-traumatic stress syndrome is and what trauma is. You don’t understand girls who are acting out and flirting and trying to get sexual attention from people because you don’t understand what being sexually compulsive is after being sexually abused as a child. They are either sexually compulsive, or asexual, or very maladjusted or very fearful. It was a traumatic thing to see. You didn’t understand what you were seeing as a fifteen-year-old. Now, looking back, I see what it is. It was freakish.”

  Irwin said he and other young people at the Teen Combos and Victor Camps were trapped. They couldn’t go home—wherever home was. “If you are not with your parents, who is going to help you to go to the states and go to high school? Nobody is. You are at the mercy of whatever random clown Zerby decided to make the head of that location.”

  Ricky suffered sexual molestation as a child and teenage boy, but he was more enraged by the sexual abuse he saw Davida and Merry suffer at Grandpa’s compound in the Philippines. Years later, Ricky would dream of revenge when he’d think about what happened to Merry in the Philippines.

  “We would often see multiple, large black and purple bruises on her [Merry’s] body as she was escorted from room to room like a scared, demoralized little prisoner of war,” he recalled. “They also tried to keep [Merry] away from us, explaining that she was violent, and had visions of cutting people up with knives. Well, let me tell you, when I think of those sick, fuckin’ perverts, thoughts about edged weapons are never far from my mind.”22

  8

  Joy

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  May 1993 – King County District Court

  Sue Kauten, a.k.a. “Joy.”

  SUE KAUTEN WENT by many names, but “Joy” best describes her. Just try finding a picture not dominated by her gaping smile and dark, compassionate eyes.

  “We called her Joy. Such an appropriate name for her. She was a joy to be around,” recalled Jeannie Deyo, one of Karen Zerby’s two sisters. “She was undoubtedly one of the most unique people I had ever met. She was a ray of sunshine in our lives.”1

  Over the years Sue was also known as “Cedar” and “Trust.” Family leaders often changed their names to arouse less suspicion when unrelated devotees crossed borders with other people’s children—and to make it harder for reporters, government agents, and angry parents to track them down. On May 10, 1993, Sue signed papers at King County District Court legally changing her name to “Angela Marilyn Smith.” But her given name was Susan Joy Kauten.

  Sue left her family home in Winchester, Virginia, when she was eighteen years old, right out of Edison High School. There was a young man, a pregnancy, a parental argument, and an abortion. It was the early seventies. Sue moved in with her brother, John Jr., his wife, Tina, and their baby daughter in their apartment in Charlottesville.

  John Kauten was nine years older than Sue and often called on to babysit her when they were growing up. Sue loved her big brother, and cried when he left to go into the Navy in 1962. But she always knew she could go to him when she was in trouble. After he came back from the Navy, but before he got married, Sue would come over to his apartment and clean the place for him. “She really cared a lot about people. She liked to please,” her brother recalled. “Sometimes she was so nice I almost felt uneasy.”2

  It was the tail end of the sixties, not the decade, but the era, when Sue ran off with The Family. Her brother used words like “hippie” and “flower child” to describe her back then. “A lot of people were running away from something. Trying to find a family,” John said. “I think Sue was just looking for somebody who really cared.”

  Sue struck out on her own and moved to Vienna, Virginia—the same town where David Berg revealed the founding prophecies of The Family. There, she fell in with a group of early devotees and was soon on her way to Texas for missionary training. Sue moved in with a band of “babes” packed into a big house in Houston.

  Anneke Schieberl, a devotee who left the fold in 1978, remembers Sue from the beginning. “We were in basic training together,” Schieberl said. “You could tell she was going to do whatever it took to be in this group. She was always smiling and cheering. She was always telling me to ‘get the victory, sister!’ She just bought into the whole thing wholeheartedly.”3

  Schieberl grew up in the Baptist church in Houston, and like Sue, was enraptured by the positive energy of the Jesus movement. “When I first met them they were dancing and singing and living communally. It seemed like everything I had ever wanted,” Schieberl recalled. “But in the beginning, it was very puritanical. You had to pray before you were allowed to date.”

  There was no sex before marriage.

  “They called it betrothal,” Schieberl said. “I remember this one brother walking up to me one day and saying, ‘I’ve been praying, and God said we should get married.’

  “I looked at him and said, ‘Well, God didn’t tell me anything.’”

  Schieberl said the sexual mores in The Family changed gradually—one revelation at a time. “We were like frogs in water that gets hotter and hotter until you don’t realize you’re being boiled alive. First there was this beautiful, romantic story about Maria [Zerby] meeting this man in London and showing him Jesus’ love. He turned out to be the first fish of flirty fishing, and before
long everyone was supposed to be doing it.”

  Schieberl also met her husband, Ron, in the early years. He was a convert from California who would become one of the top European leaders in the sect. But they were never sold on flirty fishing.

  “At first, we would get around it by going out to piano bars in Italy, then come back and lie and say, ‘Oh yeah, we picked up this guy.’ I kept thinking that this was just a phase Berg was going through, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger and out of control.”

  Sue Kauten first appears in the written record of The Family when she and her partner at the time, Monty, came from South America in 1976 to serve on Berg and Zerby’s staff on Tenerife. Sue had been working for Deborah, Berg’s oldest daughter, until Deborah had a falling out with her father and began working on her tell-all memoir of Berg’s sexual excesses and theological errors. Perhaps Sue knew too much to be left unattended. Berg heard that she was a good typist, secretary, and “had a lot of other talents!”

  Sue’s “other talents” were of a sexual nature. Zerby, Sara Kelley, and Sue were the first “flirty fishing” team for The Family. Here’s how Berg remembers her from the good old days in the Canary Islands:

  “God bless dear Sue. She had the talents and she’s still using them, thank God! She’s got a lot of talent—some ways you don’t know about! Or maybe you do! God bless her! She’s a good FFer too. I’ll tell you, this is the FF team I started off with, Maria [Zerby], Sara and Sue. They’re top-notchers. They really know what they’re doing! I started off with that little team in Tenerife. I think they can probably remember the first night we went out. Hallelujah! So if you want to know anything about FFing, you can ask them.”4

  Monty was another story. He never got used to sharing his lover with Berg and all those potential converts Sue would approach at the clubs in Tenerife. “Monty could do a lot of things,” Berg would later recall in one of his letters, “but his worst fault was he was almost insanely jealous of Sue, jealous of me, jealous of her fish. He just made her life almost Hell on Earth by nagging her all the time about her other loves and being disrespectful and almost insolent toward me—disobedient.”

  Monty got tossed, and Sue settled in as Karen Zerby’s executive assistant. “Her biggest job turned out to be Maria,” Berg would later say. “I think she fell in love with Maria before she fell in love with me! She made herself so useful—indispensable. Maria just figures she can’t go on without her! Because she’s always there, always willing, works night and day, knows no hours, brings Maria something to eat any time of day or night, is willing to go down and cook it herself, fix it if it isn’t fixed, or fuck me, or go to town and shop or whatever is needed. She’s willing to do anything, any hour of the day or night.”5

  “Dear Sue,” Berg said. “She’s so super conscientious and over conscientious and careful and always afraid she’s makin’ a mistake or something and always trying to be so attentive and so careful and tryin’ to do her job overly well, always wondering or worrying if she’s not doing it right or something. She’s got such an inferiority complex about that. She’s so faithful and so diligent and so careful with every detail and takes such good care of us and the work and everything.”

  “It’s good she is,” Zerby added.

  “Of course it is,” Berg replied. “But I mean sometimes she almost overdoes it.”6

  Davida was just a few months old when Sue and Monty arrived in the Canary Islands to join the inner circle. Davida doesn’t remember Sue’s arrival, but she does recall her later on as one of the pillars of the Unit. “She was one of the nannies, but she wasn’t as hands-on with Ricky as my mom. She was foremost a secretary. We saw her every day, but she wasn’t an integral part of my upbringing like my mom. She would babysit Ricky, but she was just one of many adult women who molested him.”

  During the seventies, eighties, and well into the nineties, Sue Kauten followed Berg, Zerby, and the rest of the Unit across Europe to South Africa and from there to the Philippines and beyond. It took patience and devotion to put up with the royal family, and Sue persevered.

  “When you were on their staff, the whole idea was to be yielding and hope they wouldn’t go after you,” explained one staffer who worked with Sue. “Berg could be very charming, but he had these mood swings. But that was God manifesting before us. You didn’t want to get in the way of God’s spirit, and God was working through whatever Berg was doing. We’d just go with that. You weren’t paid to be an individual with your own opinions. When someone said ‘Jump,’ you asked, ‘How high?’ You had to be yielding, beaten down. Sue was a perfect example. Mindless. She would just do what she was asked. Sure, she liked to help people, and they took advantage of that. She’d do anything, and she wouldn’t think twice.”7

  That kind of loyalty and service would keep Sue at the center of the inner circle for more than two decades. Davida’s mother, Sara, was Ricky’s primary nanny and sexual playmate, but Sue was an important part of the team. In the “Prophecy for Davidito” letter, where Ricky and his mother are identified as the “two witnesses” who will usher in the Endtime, Sue is listed as one of the four teachers of the Prophet Prince.8

  When Berg was sick, Sue was among those who nursed the End-time Prophet back to health, tucking Ricky into bed with Berg, laying on hands, and serving Berg “fortified health or wine drinks.” She would also care for Ricky when he was sick, playing with him and his toy cars. Sue was also a key player in the morning conferences with top staff, when Berg would get updates about what was going on at Family colonies around the world.9

  As Sue settled into her new post in Tenerife, The Family was expanding across Europe. There were colonies in England, Holland, Scandinavia, Germany, and Switzerland. They had a major presence in Italy, including an estate in Zoagli, near Genoa. That coastal palace was courtesy of Victor Emanuele Canevaro, the Duke of Zoagli, an Italian count brought into the fold by Barbara Kaliher, an early Family leader and one of Berg’s mistress wives. Kaliher, a stunning brunette once crowned “Queen Rachel,” married Canevaro in the spring of 1973. She was at Zerby’s side helping deliver the Prophet Prince at the Tenerife clinic, but left The Family during the leadership battles of 1979.

  Sue Kauten kept in Berg’s good graces.

  By 1979, Sue was living on the French Riviera with Berg, Zerby, Ricky, Davida, Sara Kelley, and other key staff. In March, Zerby gave birth to her only other child, Christina Teresa Zerby, a.k.a. “Techi.” After Techi’s birth, Sue and the Unit moved to a house in Cagnes Sur Mer.

  In The Story of Davidito, Sara writes about how four-year-old Ricky “was having lots of fun too with all the girls in the house, including dear Sue who’s been our close friend and sister for so many years. Once at the dinner table Sue was stumbling over saying a big word, ‘phenomenom…phenommalnon…’ when Davidito casually looked up from his plate and said clearly, ‘phenomenal.’”10

  Ricky had his own memories of Sue during his childhood years in Europe and the Philippines. He remembers her as one of several young women who would be put on the Endtime Prophet’s sexual “sharing schedule.” Berg would take his daily swim before one of the girls would be summoned to have sex with him in the pool. “Some of the girls had exceptionally loud orgasms, especially Sara. In fact, they were so loud that someone hearing them for the first time would no-doubt believe that she was faking it. But because we were all used to hearing them at that insane volume for many years, the thought never crossed my mind,” Ricky wrote. “I think Joy [Sue] holds the record for the most times to have an orgasm at one time with Berg. I think it was in the upper twenties.”11

  There was a pool with an underwater shelf at the deep end—complete with a picture window looking into a basement office—at one of the homes in the Philippines. People would stand on the shelf with the heads sticking out of the water and their bodies visible through the basement window.

  “Often I’d walk in, and people would be fucking on the pool shelf,” Ricky recalled. “A crowd would
be gathered around in the office, watching them. There were certain favorites, like some occasional lezzie-action between Sue and Amy, or certain other couples who could put on a good show.”

  Sue accompanied the Unit when they left Asia and moved to the West Coast of Canada in November 1988. They lived in a rented house in Vancouver, British Columbia, before moving to a small farm in the suburban city of Surrey.

  Ricky turned eighteen in January 1993, and just as Sue Kauten would do later that year, the boy once known as “Davidito” went to the King County Courthouse on March 15 and legally changed his name to “Richard Peter Smith.” He gave a false Seattle address. Ricky spent much of 1993 and early 1994 traveling in Europe and the U.S. and Australia with Berg and Peter Amsterdam, returning to British Columbia in March.

  On July 13, 1994, Ricky returned to the King County Courthouse and changed his legal name once again—this time to Richard Peter Rodriguez.

  Sue remained part of the inner circle through Berg’s death in 1994, but was then eased out of the Unit. She wound up back in the United States. In San Diego, she helped longtime Family leader Grant Montgomery set up The Family Care Foundation, a charitable front group that raised money and channeled it to Family colonies around the world.

  Sue’s reassignment to the states gave her an opportunity to reconnect with John, her long-lost big brother. When she first came to visit him in Winchester in the late 1990s, it had been more than two decades since John had seen his little sister.

  “When she first joined, we didn’t know where she was. She’d write a letter or make a phone call. Later on we’d get e-mails,” John said. “I would tell her, ‘Any organization worth its salt allows a sabbatical to visit your family.’ Her argument was, ‘We have reasons for keeping our identity and location secret.’ As years went by I realized she was influential in the organization. Every chance I got I’d say why don’t you come home. There’s always a place for you here.”12