by Don Lattin
Now that Sue was back in the states, John was finally getting a chance to reconnect with his little sister. They would take bike rides along the old railroad bed that leads into Vienna, Virginia. Sue confided to her brother that there were changes in The Family that she did not like. In the last few years, she was helping out at the Zerby family’s nursing home in Tucson. She wanted to do something other than take care of old people for the rest of her life. She started talking about going back to school.
“All she had was a high school education, as far as a piece of paper goes, but she was fluent in all these languages, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese. She couldn’t write them all, but she could converse. One time when she was here, we went out to a favorite little Italian restaurant in town. Two guys who knew the owner came in and started talking Italian. Sue said something to them, and they started having a long conversation. She knew a lot of people in Italy and had been to the town they were from.”
Sue’s visits back home became more frequent. Then, in 2004, she got involved with a man who was not part of The Family. Her new boyfriend, Dave Carpenter, was giving her the courage to cut her ties to the movement she had dedicated her life to for the past twenty-five years. They’d met at Elderhaven, the board and care home in Tucson owned by Zerby’s parents and her sister, Jeannie. Sue had been caring for Carpenter’s father there and saw the chance to make her first clean break. As late as August 2004, Sue had been working to set up a Family orphanage south of Mexico City. But by the end of the year, she’d moved into Dave’s apartment in Palo Alto, California, and gotten a job at Restoration Hardware, an upscale chain of home furnishing stores.
But that relationship, too, had its problems. Sue confided to her big brother over the phone that she was moving out of Dave’s place and getting her own apartment. The job at Restoration Hardware, however, was going great. She sounded happy and ready to move on with her life. John was thrilled with the news, and remembers thinking, “Finally. She’s come back to us.”
Sue and John spent about half an hour on the phone the afternoon of January 8, 2005. Sue told him she was in Tucson tying up some loose ends and planned to fly back to California in the morning and start her new life. She had one last appointment. She told John she was planning to have dinner that night with an old friend. “He has some issues that he wants to talk about,” Sue said.
It was the last time John Kauten would ever speak to his sister.
9
Expert Witness
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
January 1994 – Church in the Marketplace
David “Moses” Berg reads to Ricky, the Prophet Prince.
DAVID MILLIKAN HAD spent enough time studying The Family to know that the eighteen-year-old guy waiting to meet him was the famous Davidito. Rev. Millikan was one of the few people on the continent of Australia who possessed a copy of the long-suppressed Story of Davidito, and those childhood pictures of the Prophet Prince cavorting with his nannies were finely etched in the minister’s memory. You could still see the Spanish influence of Ricky’s biological father, who was now just a footnote in The Family’s twisted saga.
Ricky’s spiritual father, David Berg, was still alive, but very ill and would be dead by the end of the year. Amsterdam was firmly in place as Zerby’s new consort and guiding light into the new millennium or the end of time, whichever came first. Peter Amsterdam was Ricky’s shepherd on this secret mission to Australia—one of several attempts to contain government investigations of alleged child abuse at Family colonies around the world.
Millikan, an ordained minister with the Uniting Church in Australia, was known to be a sympathetic scholar of new religious movements. He had defended The Family after a series of police raids in Australia in 1992 rounded up scores of children and placed them in temporary state custody. Millikan knew all about The Family’s history of sexual experimentation, but thought the sect had since changed their child-rearing ways. He saw the police action as an outrageous abuse of state power.
By early 1994, when Ricky arrived in the country, the controversy over the raids was finally quieting down. Millikan was in his church office one morning when the phone rang. It was one of his local contacts with The Family.
“We’ve got something very exciting for you, but we can’t tell you on the phone,” the voice said. “Can we come by and see you?”
Two Family leaders in Australia soon appeared at Millikan’s office. They insisted that they take him out of his office before they’d give him the news.
“Can you guess?” they asked, breathlessly.
“Amsterdam’s here,” said Millikan.
They were shocked. “How did you know? People in The Family here don’t even know!”
“Just a guess,” the minister replied.
“OK. You can’t tell anyone about this,” one of them said. “Not even your wife.”
“No way, mate,” Millikan countered. “I’ll tell my wife whatever I bloody want.”1
They worked out a deal. Millikan could tell his wife, but no one else. Two days later, Millikan was to show up on the front steps of the Sydney Town Hall at exactly 10: 30 A.M. and wait for his contact. The minister got there a bit early and waited through the appointed time. He had a feeling he was being watched. He also felt like he was in some bad spy novel.
Millikan was just starting to get impatient when someone he recognized as a top-level Family operative walked up to him.
“You’ve been watching me, haven’t you,” the minister asked.
“We just wanted to make sure you were on your own,” the man replied. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
They had coffee and made chitchat. Finally the man said, “Shall we go?”
They walked out to the street to a hail a cab. Millikan noticed that the guy let a couple taxis go by before hailing one to stop.
“Where to, mate?” the driver asked.
“Just head down the road. Straight ahead,” the mystery man told the driver.
Millikan almost started to laugh when his contact told him they had to get out of that taxi and hail another one.
“Security,” he explained.
They finally pulled up to an apartment complex in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. They entered one of the apartments, and there sat Peter Amsterdam, Ricky, and two women. “They were two very good-looking women with long hair,” Millikan recalled. “They were also extremely good typists. Their job was to take down everything that was said on two laptop computers. They took turns typing.”
Millikan started talking to Ricky. It didn’t take long for Millikan to bring up The Story of Davidito. “I told him I was appalled by what I saw in that book,” the minister recalled. “I told him it fell into my definition of child abuse, and as far as I was concerned, it was abusive behavior.” Ricky handled it with aplomb.
“What happened with me was not people using sex out of lust and desire,” Ricky told the minister. “It was Father David trying to create a more open world. We believed it was just an expression of the law of love.”
Ricky told the minister he was a “test tube” for Berg’s ideas about child sexuality, but all that was just a small part of growing up in the Unit. People have blown it all out of proportion, Ricky said.
“They believe it had a bigger emphasis and played a greater part than it did,” Ricky said. “If they think my early life revolved around sex it’s going to seem very weird, but I know that wasn’t the case, so it was not such a big deal.”
Millikan found that Ricky had no trouble talking about his early sexual experiences. He told the clergyman that he had a girlfriend and had other enjoyable relationships with young women. “I really don’t think it hurt me in any way,” he said. “I never felt uncomfortable with it.”2
Ricky’s interview with Millikan was part of a worldwide Family counteroffensive against a wave of negative media coverage and government actions in the early 1990s. In September 1993, Merry Berg had talked about her childhood sexual abus
e on the NBC News program Now. That same month another of Berg’s granddaughters, Joyanne Treadwell, the eldest daughter of Deborah Davis, said her grandfather molested her when she was five years old. Critics of The Family had released portions of The Story of Davidito to show that the son of Karen Zerby had also been abused as a child.
Meanwhile, two Family defectors, Daniel Welsh and Ed Priebe, were causing real problems. Welsh, an early Huntington Beach convert known as “Samson Warner,” had left in 1986 and joined another charismatic Christian church. Priebe, known in The Family as “Hart Inkletter and “Eduardo,” had been one of the Jesus freaks who joined in the summer of 1971 when several Jesus people groups on the West Coast combined forces with Berg. Priebe left the fold in 1990 and like Welsh joined another charismatic Christian congregation.
Priebe flew back to the Philippines in 1992, where he had worked as a top Family operative. He hoped to gather evidence about how Berg had used his sacred prostitutes and other means to compromise political and military officials in the Philippines. Priebe also hoped to find Amy, a Filipino disciple he knew from The Family.
Pretending to be a high-level Family leader, I got the phone number of the home from a Family friend, and then had Samson Warner phone the home, imitating Berg’s voice perfectly and telling the shepherds to pick me up at the airport. So while I blame The Family for officially promoting deception, I’ve been guilty of the same since leaving them. The shepherds picked me up and drove me to the home where they informed me that there were some hot videos in a storage depot. It turns out these were the last remaining videos proving children had been sexually exploited in The Family, so I asked them to give them to me. To make a long story short, I came out with sixteen trunks of videos and literature and Amy made the decision to leave The Family and marry me.3
Within a year, those incriminating videos would find their way onto television back in the United States and around the world. There were police raids and temporary removal of children from Family colonies in Australia, Argentina, France, and Spain. Heightening the public alarm in 1993 was the February 28 to April 19 standoff in Waco, Texas, between federal law enforcement officials and followers of David Koresh, the apocalyptic prophet and leader of the Branch Davidians. That drama began with a shootout between the Branch Davidians and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that resulted in the death of four federal agents and an unknown number of Branch Davidians. It ended with a federal assault on the Waco compound and a devastating fire. Investigations found the remains of seventy-five men, women, and children in the smoldering ashes.
Like the 1978 mass murder/suicide in Jonestown, the 1993 Waco standoff sparked hysteria on both sides of the cult wars. To some, the lesson was the danger of authoritarian cults brainwashing adults and stealing the minds of their children. Others saw the federal government’s invasion as a reckless overreaction and an assault on the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom for all Americans. For the leaders of The Family, the horror of Waco and the sudden crackdown on its colonies around the world inspired a new approach to dealing with the Systemites.
Ricky became a key part of that public relation’s campaign. Millikan’s interview in Australia was just one piece of the PR puzzle. Ricky was also interviewed and analyzed by two members of the faculty at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan—sociology professor Gary Shepherd and psychology professor Lawrence Lilliston. Both had written on new religious movements and were known to be sympathetic to the argument that such groups often face unfair persecution and stereotyping by powerful interests in mainstream society—especially the news media.
Lilliston and Shepherd’s “Psychological Assessment of Children in The Family” included an interview and examination of Davidito shortly after his session with Millikan. Ricky had turned nineteen, but was still on tour with Peter Amsterdam. They spent several days at a motel near the Michigan college. Lilliston subjected Ricky to a battery of psychological tests. Shepherd and his wife invited Ricky and Amsterdam to their home to have dinner.
“My impression about Davidito was that he was shy and quiet and reserved,” Shepherd said. “But once the ice was broken, he opened up. He was a bright guy, articulate and well informed about the world generally. We talked about his interests as a young adult Family member. I was aware of his designated status as an infant and young boy, and that he had been projected to be a great leader in The Family and had been celebrated in various publications. I was also aware that those leadership projections were not being fulfilled.
“I asked him what he saw himself doing in The Family. He had a lot of interest in music. He was not gifted in the performance of music, but he thought he could identify and arrange new music that would be more appealing to second-generation kids.”4
Larry Lilliston, who had spent much more time with Ricky, did not respond to requests for an interview. Shepherd said his colleague was suffering from health problems and had “zero interest in revisiting this topic.”
Shepherd and Lilliston’s assessment of the Prophet Prince was published in a 1994 anthology entitled Sex, Slander, and Salvation: Investigating The Family/Children of God. Like Millikan, the two scholars refer to The Story of Davidito and “critics [who] suggest that this book is a manual for sexual abuse of young children.” Lilliston and Shepherd concede that the book describes Ricky’s “early witnessing of sexual behavior and encouragement to explore his own sexuality.”
“While these experiences would be characterized as sexually abusive or neglectful by most child abuse experts,” they wrote, “there is no report of [Ricky] having been actively molested or abused by adults. Moreover, there is no evidence of long-term negative effects on [Ricky].”5
Shepherd and Lilliston’s report primarily concerns their 1993 study of thirty-two children in two Family homes in California. Once again, they found that “the charges of widespread, institutionalized child abuse are clearly unfounded. The children we studied are simply too healthy to be products of a system in which abuse occurs at a high level.”
They even conclude that “the findings regarding these young people are quite probably reflective of child rearing and educational practice found generally in Family homes.” They base this conclusion on the fact that kids moved around a lot from home to home around the world, and from later visits to a Family home in Michigan and two in Washington, D.C.
One critical assessment of this study criticized the two Oakland University professors for not revealing that The Family paid them for their work. It also says they had no data to allow them to generalize about child rearing conditions elsewhere in The Family, especially at the leadership level. Carol Buening, an adjunct faculty member with the Ohio State University College of Social Work, writes:
Lilliston and Shepherd’s methodology and their contractual status with The Family squarely place their work in the realm of program evaluation, and it is a misrepresentation to present it as research…. The evaluation was commissioned by an organization that wanted to demonstrate benign outcomes in its child-rearing practices…. Despite the inherent limitations of program evaluation, Lilliston and Shepherd conclude that because their subjects come from international backgrounds, “the findings regarding these young people are quite probably reflective of child rearing and educational practices found generally in Family homes.” The evaluators’ methodology does not support publication of such a conclusion. It is bad social science to make a generalization based on the untested assumption that a sample is representative of its population….
There is a significant body of evidence that children in these “World Service” homes—or any home where top leadership was present for any length of time—grew up in sexualized environments where overt forms of sexual abuse did occur.6
Millikan’s and Shepherd and Lilliston’s assessments of Ricky and other children raised in The Family comprise three of thirteen chapters in the Sex, Slander and Salvation collection. According to the co-editor of the anthology, J. Gordon Melt
on, the book was largely the work of academic experts hired by Family lawyers in the British custody case heard by Lord Justice Ward. Melton said the co-editor of the collection, James R. Lewis, received Family funds to publish the book.
Ricky’s teenage interviews and psychological assessments by sympathetic scholars were conducted over three very important years in the history of The Family—the period between the 1992 filing of the British custody case and Ward’s voluminous ruling in November of 1995. These were the years when the outside world first heard Merry Berg’s hellish testimony about what happened to her inside the walls of Berg and Zerby’s compound in the Philippines. High-level defectors leaked damning documents and videotapes of erotic performances by young girls for the pleasure of David Berg. News outlets around the world were sent some of the steamiest pages from The Story of Davidito. How could the leadership of The Family explain all this away? There was only one way. Ricky himself would have to testify for the defense. Ricky had not been living up to his early billing as the mighty prophet for the coming apocalypse. At least he could be paraded before a few accommodating academics to show the world that it really wasn’t so bad to be a child in The Family.
Millikan, Melton, and Lilliston were among the experts presented by The Family’s lawyers during more than two months of hearings in England. Millikan and Melton shared a room in London during the court proceedings. “Family lawyers were supposed to pay us to testify in court,” Melton said. “We never got paid for our time—or at least I never got paid back for my time. They barely covered my expenses.”7
Another expert called to The Family’s defense was Susan Palmer, who teaches a course on new religious movements at Dawson College in Montreal. Like Shepherd, Palmer had been invited to spend a week at a newly established Family colony in San Diego. It was a large, ranch-style home, shaped like an “L” with a swimming pool in the backyard. Family insiders would call the place a “show home,” a special colony established for inspection by religious scholars and the news media.