A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (11 page)

I tried to assure her that that wasn’t the case and left her sitting on the sofa in a sad little nest of moist tissues.

W
hether the black man at the door was Ted Patrick or not—and Patrick maintains that he has so many parental requests for deprogrammings that he has no need to recruit additional work—the fact is that the people who pay his expenses are broken-hearted parents who feel, with some justification, that they have been trespassed upon. Their children will not come home from most of the new cults—from places like the Alamo Foundation, from the Children
of God Colonies, from Love Israel’s Commune in Seattle, or from their own apartments once they have joined Hannah Lowe’s New Testament Missionary Fellowship in New York.

After years of love and mistakes, of dental bills and tears, the sons and daughters of FOC parents will not, in many cases, so much as have dinner with their fathers and mothers. If they do, they bring a scowling older Christian with them. Some parents have been told to drop to their knees and repent before the children will embrace them. William Rambur’s daughter Kay told him, he says, that she would murder him if her leaders told her it was necessary.

So the parents come to Patrick and to deprogrammers Mrs. George Meese, a San Diego grocer’s wife, and William Rambur, Lt. Commander USN (ret.), now an industrial arts teacher in a high school near San Diego. When the loose-knit organization formed, about two years ago, it was focused on the activities of a mysterious Apocalyptic Christian organization called the Children of God, which was scooping up San Diego young with such terrifying frequency that, the deprogrammers felt, it could only have been the result of hypnotism. A Los Angeles television show and a later network show about the group garnered new recruits nationwide.

Mrs. Meese’s daughter joined the Children for one evening until her mother marched in and “rescued” her. Mr. Rambur’s daughter now lives in a Children commune and does not communicate with her father. Ted Patrick’s fourteen-year-old son was approached by the evangelical Children on a San Diego beach.

In 1971, Patrick helped to organize a Committee to Free Our Sons and Daughters from the Children of God (FREE-COG). He drew up a legal complaint and submitted it to State Attorney General Evelle Younger, who refused to act. In search of proof of his accusations of hypnotism, brainwashing, and financial fraud, he and the parents of a young Children of God man swept down on a southwestern colony for a rescue. The deprogramming took only a few hours. Other rescues followed. Authorities on both coasts
refused to take legal action against what the Children called kidnapping. Because parents were involved, police tended to look on the events as family squabbles not worth prosecuting—from either side.

Working out of San Diego, Patrick and Mrs. Meese collected data from all over the country on the Children of God. The majority of the claimed successful deprogramming subjects are former Children, and Patrick earned his nickname, “Black Lightning,” from the sect. Largely because of FREE-COG pressure, the Children of God virtually moved out of California and Texas, two of their most fruitful recruiting grounds. They adopted a low profile and swept across the Midwest, establishing nomadic colonies, and eventually reached into England, Ireland, and West Germany.

Emboldened by success—which Patrick cites as proof of the righteousness of his cause—FREE-COG, for all intents and purposes, became FOC: Free our Children—from
all
religious cults practicing what Patrick calls “mind control.” In addition to the Christian groups, he has also moved against disciples of Eastern mystics, notably the Hare Krishna people.

A typical deprogramming, reproduced from the statements of Patrick, Meese, and Rambur, as well as newspaper accounts, may last anywhere from several hours to fourteen days. Patrick claims—and the sects refute this—that he is not involved in the “kidnapping.” The parents ask their children out to dinner and try to talk about pleasant subjects. Afterward, instead of driving back to the commune or apartment, the young people are taken to a motel room—Patrick likes the Royal Inn Motel in Chula Vista, though at least two other motels have been frequently used, notably one near Masontown, Pennsylvania.

“The only thing that might seem a little harsh,” William Rambur says, “is that we don’t allow them to run away. If we did that, there would be no point in getting them there in the first place.” The parents may talk to the children first, then Mrs. Meese or Mr. Patrick. Generally the deprogrammers hear “programmed” replies: “You are devils; I want
to go back and serve the Lord with Tony and Sue.” Patrick gets rough, verbally. He tells the devout young that they are mentally incompetent, that they are being duped and defrauded, that they are possessed by devils and that they hate their parents. He will sling insults about the sect’s leaders. An emotional scene develops.

The young person may then be asked to pray with the deprogrammers. Certain Bible passages will be discussed and evidence of twisted interpretation will be pointed out. A taped message from a deprogrammed sect member may be played. More insults and accusations may be hurled until an excruciating emotional peak is reached.

At this point someone—a calming, loving influence—may read a selected Bible verse: something perhaps from Corinthians about love and kindness and compassion. The subject “breaks,” and may burst into tears or rush to embrace his parents. In Patrick’s terms, the spell has been broken.

“That ‘break’ is a harsh word,” William Rambur says. “I would prefer to think of it as an awakening.”

The religious sects charge that Patrick is guilty of his own accusation: brainwashing. The impossibly complicated thing about this word is that no one seems to know exactly what it means. It was originally a term invented by a Western journalist to describe what happened to American POWs during the Korean War. The Chinese communists called it “thought re-education.” The processes involved, according to psychologist Nathan Adler, are similar, if not identical, to those in religious conversion and the kind of personality reorganization that takes place in such organizations as Synanon or Alcoholics Anonymous. Or army basic training, for that matter.

There is always the theme of death and rebirth. Alamo-ites, of course, are “born-again Christians.” In deprogramming, the devout young are made to feel that they are social nullities unable to live normal lives in “the World,” and that, in reference to actual human beings, they are nonpersons: walking dead.

Biff Alexander, twenty-four, a former Alamo-ite, deprogrammed
in three days during October 1972, describes his breaking sensation this way: “It’s as though my whole life passed before me … I began to try to recount the events of my two and a half years at the Foundation and at one point I just … it’s as though a miracle happened and I felt so free. Because I realized that I had been deceived, and I reached out my arms to the side, just like wings, and I flapped my arms. I said ‘I feel so free, I could fly away.’ ”

A second important part of the brainwashing/conversion process is the dynamics of the group involved. Humiliation and degradation are common devices. The deprogrammers apply it mentally and emotionally; the Alamos physically: that is, born-again Christians must sleep on the floor, shit in a disgusting stink-hole of a bathroom, and eat what is often literal garbage salvaged from the back of grocery stores. The group then provides models for emulation, i.e., Tony and Susan Alamo. And Ted Patrick. Biff Alexander is now heavily involved in deprogramming activities.

Indeed, out of the contexts of faith and fraud, there is little difference between the activities of the Alamos and Ted Patrick. An important exception: deprogramming subjects are sometimes, it is alleged, brought to the motels and are admittedly not allowed to leave.

There have reportedly been six Patrick raids on the Alamo Foundation. Not all have been as successful as the Biff Alexander affair. Patty Thorpe, a woman of twenty-three, was holding her three-year-old daughter, Britt, and talking to her parents in the Alamo Foundation parking lot one crisp Sunday in October 1972. She heard her mother say, “Okay, now grab her.” Her brother and a family friend shoved her into the backseat of the car, ripping her dress. They sped to a Saugus parking lot where they met another car. Britt was transferred to the second car. About nine that night, the new model Cadillac arrived at the Royal Inn in Chula Vista.

In a report she wrote some time later, Patty claimed that Mrs. Meese and her daughter told her that she had been deceived, that the Alamos were only using her for her money, and that she was incapable of making her own decisions.
Her parents said they were worried about her. She was not allowed to use the phone or leave.

The next day Ted Patrick arrived, introducing himself as a man of God. He started quietly but soon became abrasive, once allegedly telling Patty that she ought to “check into Camarillo [a mental hospital] and weave baskets and string beads for a while.” He called Susan Alamo a witch and claimed that she had called Patty a “no-good.” The Alamos, he said, taught hate and were only in it for the money. When Patty went to the bathroom, she could hear the deprogrammers discussing tactics.

Patrick had a tape recorder and tried to make her say “slanderous things about the Alamos.” At night people slept on a mattress by the door so she could not escape. Despite constant pleas, she was not allowed to see her daughter. The “torture sessions,” as Patty called them, lasted up to fourteen hours a day. Patrick continued to insist, she said, “that the Alamos were starving us, that we were forced to live like pigs in deplorable conditions, that we lived in filth, never bathed, never washed our hair; but I knew none of these things were true.

“Things became really intense. They kept hurling accusations at me, degrading me, six to twelve at a time, standing over me, always telling me that I was possessed by the devil.…”

Mrs. Meese maintains that the conversations were milder, the sessions shorter, and that there were only a few people in the room at any one time.

After ten and a half days, Patty was allowed to go to her brother’s house, where she was reunited with her baby. She was under strict supervision, but, two days later, in a lax moment, she escaped, hailed a cab, and went straight back to Saugus. “I believe,” she wrote, “that Ted Patrick actually thinks he has been appointed by God to force his religious and political beliefs on all people of every faith, even if it means violence or even murder.”

“G
od,” Ted Patrick told me evenly, “is on our side.” We were sitting in the kitchen of his modest tract home just south of San Diego. On Holy Thursday, a school holiday, the house was filled with children, both Patrick’s and others who had spent the night. Plastic runners protected the carpets in heavy-traffic areas. A large Bible filled with paper markers sat on a sofa-side table, and, in Patrick’s study, in the place of honor above the desk, an official portrait of Ronald Reagan blessed the room.

Until last year, Patrick had worked as a social services consultant for the governor. It was a $105-a-month job he got in part because of his 1965 efforts to see that the Watts riots didn’t spread to San Diego. He is a forceful man, and if he is not so short and stout as some young Christians have described, neither is he the image of the black savior some parents have talked about. The strongest impression I got from him was that of a physical certitude.

Virtually all of the deprogrammings Patrick has dealt with have involved white parents and children, a fact Susan Alamo makes use of in her characterization of him as an “Uncle Tom.” It is true that parents of “rescued” children have referred to him as “wonderful” and “a savior.” He is quick-witted. He is tough. And, as some would have it, he is a “hit man for the PTA.”

It has been charged that Patrick makes use of his former position to impress parents and convince them the government is behind him. In our conversation on Holy Thursday, however, he seemed to have little use for politicians. “The parents send letters to the U.S. Attorney, to senators, to congressmen, but everyone is afraid of it. They’re afraid to stand up for what is right. And this is your problem. Our leaders are your problem. Your government is your problem.”

Aside from the foreboding dangers of the new cults, Patrick also sees a strong political reason to stop them as
quickly and as coldly and as decisively as possible. It is a reason perhaps more rapidly perceived in this conservative area of California. “We’re fighting against a movement that is sweeping the nation. It’s sweeping the world. It makes you sick. You learn about a new group every day. If you knew half as much—one-eighth as much—as we know about this, you’d be frightened for the nation. We got books; we got everything. I mean these were written two thousand years ago by Plato. Ah, he talked about being able to live in a nation without police, without guns, it’s … it can be done … it’s
mind control
. We
know
about Russia, we know about their ESP program. They’re so far ahead of us it isn’t even funny. As an example, when the space program first started, Russia was ahead of the United States, and then, all of a sudden, it ceased to be.”

Patrick thinks that the Russians have taken their money out of space and poured it into psycho-political experimentation. “Their ESP program: They have the largest budget in the world. It’s already been tested.
You can control a man’s mind one thousand miles away.…”

As I understood Patrick, he was telling me that the Jesus sects were the first tentacles of a new strategy devised by the international communist conspiracy. And because so few see the danger, because our leaders are so weak, the responsibility of saving America from Jesus-tainted communist mind control has fallen on Ted Patrick’s willing and patriotic shoulders. He has been working—often seven days a week, sometimes around the clock, accepting only expense money, logging over three hundred thousand air miles in the last six months—to keep America free.

There is a tendency to regard the increasingly bizarre events of the holy conflict as an amusing diversion, something like toting up the bodies in a Mafia war. But the people primarily involved, the parents and children, are not criminals, and with the mounting number of confrontations, there is the distinct and bloody possibility of a disaster neither side wants. Both groups feel that they have God on their side. Both know the others are possessed of devils. Chances are great that a member of either group, cornered
or trapped by people whom he feels are capable of murder, may react with mortal violence.