A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (7 page)

M
any people have theories about who killed Dian Fossey. When I heard the news I thought immediately of those stories I had heard drinking
pombe
under the park. Some men have been jailed in Rwanda, but no one really knows who killed Dian, or why.

The press reports and obituaries were appropriately respectful, though, slowly, some negative information began creeping into the reports. The
Philadelphia Daily News
ran an opinion piece titled (incredibly) “Dian Fossey Asked for
It.” Insisting that “arrogance gets conservationists nowhere,” the article claimed that Dian had alienated the local people and that she showed “a contempt for their existence.”

Shortly after that article appeared, I received a note from Dr. Shirley McGreal, chairwoman of the International Primate Protection League. “Dian is being murdered twice,” she wrote. “First her body, now her reputation.”

McGreal enclosed a copy of an
International Primate Protection League Newsletter
devoted entirely to the memory of Dian Fossey. Inside was a tribute from the government of Rwanda, a refutation of various attacks, and copies of letters from Dian that showed real affection for her African trackers and patrol workers. There was a funny story—bittersweet now—about Dian’s five-month-long quest to get one of her patrol men a decent pair of boots that fit. The man was a Tutsi, six feet seven inches tall with size fourteen feet that Dian called “gunboats.”

Dr. McGreal has emerged as one of Dian’s most ardent and eloquent defenders. Yes, she told me, her friend could be arrogant at times. “But you have to understand,” she said, “Dian lived up there, all those years, alone. Her friends were being killed.” There was emotion in Dr. McGreal’s voice. “She was a martyr.”

T
he graveyard lies beside the cabin at Karisoke. It is sheltered by great gnarled trees. Yellow-green moss hangs from the branches that shade the graves where Dian buried Uncle Bert, and Macho, and Digit. Now Dian is buried there, next to Digit.

There has been some talk of turning the cabin into a museum, the graveyard into a memorial. Perhaps, in another century, there will still be gorillas in Rwanda and people who will come to see them. The tourists—the hated tourists—will stand by the grave of Dian Fossey and a guide—speaking in English, or Japanese or Swahili—will tell them of the accomplishments of the woman who is
buried there. And the tourists will know that they are looking at the final resting place of a great hero. Not a saint. A hero.

Postscript:
The Karisoke Research Center is now funded by the Morris Animal Fund, which also administers the Digit Fund. The center is thriving.

As are the gorillas. In 1980, a census indicated that there were 254 gorillas in the Virungas. Today, that number is 290. There are, according to scientists in the field, “significant numbers of immatures,” indicating “a healthy population.” The biggest population increase has occurred in tourist groups. Dian’s fears that tourism would disrupt the animals’ breeding cycles appear to be unfounded.

The Mountain Gorilla Project’s approach to the problem is being emulated worldwide. It is a hopeful story.

S
augus, Calif.—Just up and over Soledad Pass, Sierra Highway drops into the Mojave: a spare, unyielding, unspectacular desert. And just over these bare hills, in Newhall, California, Charles Manson and his Family planned their frenzied armored dune buggy attack on all that was evil in our world.

Here in Saugus, a few miles to the north, there is another army of young hyperthyroid-eyed true believers. They belong to the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation and believe that Christ is coming soon—within ten to twenty years is a fair estimate. He will be a Christ of Wrath, and there will be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth. The Lord, in his Celestial Anger, will take the unsaved by the collar, jerk them heavenward until the whole of earth is a sphere in their eyes. And then Jesus Christ will have his Mighty Vengeance. He will hurl the unclean earthward as God once hurled Lucifer from his Heaven. Our planet will open and swallow its sinners into the fiery bowels where the Bible tells us hell is located. The saved, those of the Foundation, will be raised to the right hand of the Heavenly Father, who will direct them to actual physical mansions he has prepared for them: mansions perhaps not unlike the one
in which Tony and Susan Alamo live right here on earth.

We—writer Bill Cardoso and photographer Tim Page and myself—were driving up to Saugus, fifty miles north of the sprawling Los Angeles Basin, to plan an escape. I was going to infiltrate the Foundation to investigate the charges of a loose-knit group of broken-hearted parents organized under the unfortunate acronym of FOC, which stands for Free Our Children. The focus of FOC is a forty-three-year-old black man named Ted Patrick. Formerly a San Diego community relations consultant for California Governor Ronald Reagan and currently unemployed, Patrick is the tough, tireless “deprogrammer” of Jesus Freaks. He has been spectacularly successful in convincing young Christians that they have been duped by their leaders, that they are possessed by demons, that they have been involved in voodoo, not Christianity. He does this by having parents bring their children—sometimes, it is alleged, by force—to one of several designated motel rooms across the country called deprogramming centers, where the devout young are confronted by teams of parents, friends, and former sect members who counter their chanted prayers with reason: high-volume, high-pressure reason under conditions that would be called third degree if practiced in any police station in the country. The prayerful children are not allowed to “run away,” though the vast majority of them have been over the legal age of consent. Patrick claims 125 successful deprogrammings.

Tony and Susan Alamo, and the Christians of their Foundation, pray to Jesus that this Devil coming against the House of God will be stopped. Mike Pancer, a San Diego attorney and an unpaid panel member of the American Civil Liberties Union is, involuntarily, in the Lord’s Service in this matter. He is the answer to the Alamos’ prayers. Pancer saw in the papers that adults, the Jesus Freaks, in the process of being deprogrammed, were subjected to what looked like kidnap, assault, and false imprisonment. He contacted the Alamos and began an investigation. While eternal Vengeance belongs to the Lord—and isn’t long in coming—earthly justice, apparently, was in the hands of the ACLU.

Patrick was in good spirits Thursday of Holy Week when I visited him in his suburban tract house just south of San Diego.

“If we bust one of these groups, we’ve got them all,” he said. According to Patrick there was little difference among any of the sixty-one different groups he knows about. They all are guilty, he says, of “psychological kidnapping.”

“All these groups have the technique of hypnotizing a person on the street or anywhere. And they can do this within five or ten minutes. And they can talk about anything. If they know you are a reporter, they can talk about the news. But the key is to get a person to look you straight in the eyes. And if they can look you straight in the eyes for five or ten minutes, you’ll find yourself unable to take your eyes off of theirs. You remember Susan Atkins? She said when she first saw Manson and looked into his eyes, she couldn’t take her eyes off of his. All of the kids say the same thing. And I’ve heard them, heard kids give testimony, give testament of these various groups and they say, ‘Well, I was on my way home and I met this person on the street and I looked into his eyes and I couldn’t take my eyes off of theirs.… I left everything and went with them.’

“Of course these kids are programmed to use this technique, but they are not conscious of being able to use it. They are instructed by their leaders always to look a person straight in the eye. And they use certain Bible verses, and then they talk to a person, and after looking them in the eye for so long a time their subject will leave and go with them. And that is what we call psychological kidnapping.

“The person is taken to a bus, a van—most of these groups operate from a bus—and the first thing they do is give the kids either coffee, tea, or punch; cookies or sandwiches. And we have reason to believe that they have some type of mind-controlling drugs or herbs in this food or drink.”

Patrick was vague on the types of drugs used, though he mentioned that the police found “speed” in cookies given by a militant Christian organization in Bellevue, Washington. After being drugged and hypnotized, according to Patrick, the recruit goes through “an intensive questioning.”

“They ask them all about their family condition: ‘Do you have a car; is it paid for; is it in your name; do you have a bank account; do you own furniture … do your people have money; do they own a business?’ After getting all this information, they sign their whole life away. Everything they own; everything that they ever owned will belong to the leaders of this organization.”

Then, according to Patrick, there are the “brainwashing” sessions, lasting up to thirty hours apiece. “Two people work on [the new subject] at all times without food and maybe a little water and maybe a little rest. Somebody is constantly in there working and telling you we are the Leader, we are God, and all this jazz. And when they get through with them, they are zombies. That’s all they are, complete zombies. They destroy their minds. They take their minds completely away. They have no will to think whatsoever. And all the things they are eager to do are what they are programmed by their leaders to do.”

I asked Patrick if he felt he was engaged in a Holy War with the Jesus Freak groups. “I have nothing to do with religion,” he said. “These are not religious groups. These are more Satan groups than anything else. And I will stand behind this 100 percent. There is nothing religious about any of these groups. They … they’re more Satan and they know they are Satan. Because God does not lie and cheat and steal and even kill.…”

“These are strong allegations,” I said.

“You haven’t forgotten Manson,” Patrick countered sharply.

“No, I haven’t forgotten Manson.”

“These groups are the same. The Family looked on Manson. They thought he was God. All of these groups are
exactly
the same as Manson. Tony and Susan and all the rest of them are exactly like the Manson Family. Only thing is: they’re worse. They’re more dangerous than Manson. He had a small Family. But these groups—Tony and Susan—have five hundred or six hundred people, and they’re better organized. They’re more dangerous than Manson. These groups would do anything. Believe us.…”

Patrick’s charges strained my credulity, and I wasn’t about to believe much of what he said without documentation. He said he could prove his allegations, but—and here he gave me a squinty-eyed suspicious look, as if I might be a devious Christian spy—he wasn’t going to release the information to me.

I told him of my plans to infiltrate the Foundation and suggested that we talk at a later date. Patrick agreed but expressed grave concern for my safety. William Rambur, father of Kay “Comfort” Rambur, presently living in parts unknown with the Children of God, a militant Christian organization, told me that I was dealing with perhaps “the most vicious of the California sects.”

“Watch out for your mind,” he cautioned, adding that the brainwashing techniques used by the Alamos could be as fearsomely effective as those used against American POWs by the Chinese Communists during the Korean War.

“We’ve lost contact with many of the people who have gone up there,” he said softly.

“Are you suggesting murder,” I asked.

“We’ve lost contact with them. They haven’t called us. We can’t reach them. All I’m saying is that we’ve lost contact.”

So, during the Holy Hours of Good Friday, when Christians commemorate the agony and death of Christ on the cross—when the sky darkened above Golgotha and the earth shook—a Volkswagen containing three journalists was moving east out of Saugus, toward the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation. The town itself is not more than a few stores and a classic
High Noon
railway station. The Foundation is another ten miles up into the rocky hills, past the beer and burger roadhouses, past the tough-looking country music bars, past the auto graveyards.

It was
Grapes of Wrath
country, home of the thirties migration that didn’t make it to the Promised Land. It is a hot and tired land on the fringes of the Mojave, and it attracts failed cars: Corvairs and Edsels and Falcons haunt these holy roads. People in trailers own their own land, which they share with rattlesnakes and scorpions. Great steel pylons
carrying high-tension wires march two by two across the arid hills.

I experienced a definite tightening of the sphincters as we neared the Foundation. As the highway rose, the homes and trailers dropped away, leaving only a few widely spaced roadhouses. If there was a fence around the place, I meant to find a weak spot. I assumed that I could escape overland, avoid the snakes, and come out at a designated point somewhere below.