Apostates and their Role
in the Construction of Grievance Claims
against the Northeast Kingdom/Messianic Communities
by Susan J. Palmer
The Northeast Kingdom Community Church, on first acquaintance,
bears a close resemblance to other Christian sects and revitalization
movements emerging out of the Jesus People Revolution of the early
1970s. And yet it will stand out in the history of the church-state
relations as one of the first religions in the United States to
be accused of collective child abuse, and to endure a mass raid
on it's children. Due to extensive media coverage, the main events
of the controversial Island Pond raid are well known.
On June 22, 1984, 90 Vermont state troopers arrived at dawn in
their cruisers at the homes of the Northeast Kingdom Community
in Island Pond, Vermont, armed with a court order and accompanied
by 50 Social Rehabilitation Services workers. They searched the
households and took 112 children into protective custody. The
parents were allowed to accompany their children, and the families
were bussed 20 miles to the courthouse in Newport. District Judge
Mahady, after holding 40 individual detention hearings in one
day, ruled that the search warrant issued by the state was unconstitutional.
All the children were returned to their parents without being
searched for signs of abuse, and the legal process ended abruptly.
In spite of this auspicious victory, the Northeast Kingdom Community
Church (henceforth referred to as the "Church" or the
"Community") is currently besieged with custody disputes
and continues to weather Social Services investigations.
In searching for the forces underlying this dramatic church-state
confrontation, the researcher is faced with an apparently innocuous,
not atypical communal and millenarian sect; the group adheres
to fundamentalist Christian beliefs has never seriously challenged
the laws or norms of society. They do not stockpile weapons, resort
to aggressive evangelical strategies, use drugs, nor advocate
sexual license. Their founder has made no extravagant claims to
be the messiah, nor even a prophet. The group is not large, rapidly
expanding, nor wealthy. Nevertheless, a study of their history
demonstrates an extremely high level of conflict with society.
Aside from a few minor complaints of truancy in the local schools,
of practicing medicine without a license, and of neglecting to
register births, the major grievance claims have always pointed
to the discipline of their children, despite a paucity of evidence
that members discipline their children any more frequently or
severely than other Christian fundamentalists (Ellison and Sheikat
1993).
In responding to external pressure, the Church has exacerbated
tensions with society by refusing to conform to mainstream child-rearing
methods, but it is important to understand the religious motivation
behind its passive resistance. The Church manifests classic sectarian
characteristics, which serve to protect its budding culture from
external assimilation and secular influences. On the one hand,
elders encourage members to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's"
and to aim for a peaceful coexistence with society by following
the guidelines laid out by American patriot Roger Williams, on
the separation of church and state. On the other hand, they regard
society as dominated by sin, due to its refusal to be "covered"
by "Our Father." Parents in the Community have come
out of the wilderness of sin and crossed over into the sacred
realm to become the first generation of a new Order. Children
play a vital role in their parents' eschatology. They are instrumental
to realizing the utopian ideals and millenarian expectations of
this fledgling religion. The elders interpret the Bible passage,
"the sins of the fathers will be borne until the third and
fourth generations." Thus, they expect each generation to
be less prone to sin than it's parents within the next 70 years
they hope to be able to send out 144,000 pure virgin males to
preach during the final ingathering of souls before the advent
of Yahshua (Bozeman and Palmer).
In pursuit of their ideal of Restoration, they eat healthy food,
wear modest dress, and cultivate selfless and loving relationships.
Thus, it is essential to protect their children from secular influences
that will necessarily undermine their utopian vision and cause
them to "die" through sin. For this reason, when they
resist cooperation with authorities, they are resisting demonic
forces. When secular authorities seize or seek to control their
children, they are attacking the deepest, most fundamental logic
whereby this child-centered community defines itself. They are
assaulting the Community's very spiritual identity and it's most
passionate religious aspirations - those invested in their children.
The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of apostates'
testimonies on the trajectory of this sect's escalating church-state
conflict. There appear to be three phases to the conflict between
the Church and the oppositional coalition, which is composed of
various interest groups that formed a network in a common mission
to rescue the putatively abused children of the "cult."
This coalition depended heavily upon ex-members' testimonials
to provide the rationale for the moral campaign against the Church.
Apostates - both writing and unwitting exerted a strong influence
on the ongoing battle which might be compared to the game of chess.
The "moves" of apostates resemble those of the knight
in a chess game, who is able to leap over the enemy line in zigzag
fashion and win new territories. There were various types of apostates,
however, and their atrocity stories were used strategically during
different phases of the "game." The Church's apostates
can be classified as follows: (1) Activist Apostates; (2) Passive
Apostates: and (3) Resurrected Apostates.
The three phases of conflict will be elaborated below, but first
we will look at this new religious movement and it's epic confrontation
with the state over the custody of children a confrontation that
cast Vermont in the national spotlight.
The History of the Messianic Communities
The Northeast Kingdom Community Church (now known as the Messianic
Communities) was founded by Elbert Eugene Sprigs ("Yoneq")
in 1972 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It's roots are in the Jesus
People Revival, and its belief stem remains very close to Christian
fundamentalism. The communities adopt the name of their local
town; members are given Hebrew names and identify with the "lost
and scattered tribes" of the Jews in Diaspora and with the
early Christian communities. By renouncing the world and sharing
all things in common, members become part of the "body of
Messiah" and hope to avoid a physical death. They believe
church is the "pure and Spotless Bride" awaiting the
advent of her Bridegroom, Jesus, whom they call by the name of
Yahshua. Through increasing their ranks and "raising up a
people" defined as three generations they prepare the way
for the Jubilee horn that heralds Yahshua's return.
Communities now exist in Londrina, Brazil; Navarrenx, France;
Sydney, Australia - but the majority of members live in New England.
The Church numbers around 2,000 and roughly half are children.
Children are home-schooled and television and fantasy toys are
banned. The youth are integrated smoothly into daily chores and
are dressed like the adults; girls wear long braids, long skirts
or bloomers, and boys wear jeans, homemade shirts, and headbands.
The Church's guidelines for parental discipline stipulate that
children who do not obey upon first command must be punished.
The millenarian rationale behind this is that children must be
alert and ready to respond to Yahshua's call. Chastisements must
not be performed in anger, and usually consist of a few blows
with a flexible reed, such as a ballon stick, on the palm of the
hand. It must be the child's own parents who decide on and administer
the punishment. The notion is that through discipline the child
will achieve eternal life; otherwise they are "dying"
into sin.
Phase One: The Origins of Conflict
In Chattanooga the group's first conflicts occurred at the grassroots
level, mainly with worried parents of youthful converts, rival
restaurateurs, and ministers of local congregations. These tensions
drew the attention of the anti-cult movement to the sect. The
first anti-cult organization, FREECOG's bureaucracy expanded and
it was superseded by the nationally based Citizen's Freedom Foundation
(CFF), the concept of a "cult" and theories of "brainwashing"
were developed, and information was collected on other new religious
movements (NRMs). The Community in Chattanooga bore a superficial
resemblance to the Children of God, since both were millenarian,
evangelistic communes and emanated from the Jesus People movement.
Both groups recruited middle-class youth from the counterculture
who "forsook all for Jesus." Ted Patrick kidnapped eight
of the Chattanooga Community's members between 1978 and 1980.
Four deprogrammings were "successful," resulting in
defections, but four members returned to the group. Three of the
defectors assisted in future deprogrammings.
During the Chattanooga phase, the "cult-labeling" process
focused on the founder, Elbert Eugene Spriggs. He was condemned
as a self-proclaimed "Apostle" who exerted "total
control" over his followers and molded them into religious
fanatics who held themselves above the law. He was said to employ
"mind-control" techniques to enlist his followers in
communal and voluntary labor that undercut local businesses (Beverly
n.d.). Spriggs has often been described as a former "carnival
barker" - a colorful term that conjures up images of the
American frontier snake-oil salesman, the charming charlatan with
a fast patter. In fact, Spriggs was by profession a high school
teacher and fairly successful travel agent/tour guide who worked
for one day in a carnival, but not as a barker.
During this phase, the Community's reaction was defensive. They
withdrew from the world, ignored the deprogrammers and negative
press as much as possible, and relocated to Island Pond in 1979.
In Vermont, media stories and grievance claims began to focus
more narrowly on their methods of child rearing and discipline.
Allegations of abuse first came to the attention of the authorities
in 1982 in connection with custody battles involving three families:
the Gregoires, the Alexanders, and the Mattatalls. In May 1983
the court awarded custody of the eleven children to the three
fathers residing outside the community rather than allow the children
to be "subjected to frequent and methodical physical abuse
by adult members of the community, in the form of hours-long whippings
with balloon sticks" (Gregoire v. Gregoire). Judge Mahady,
who presided over the Gregoire case, expressed his opinion that
the children were trapped in "some sort of holy war"
(Gregoire v. Gregoire) between the parents. Out of one, the Mattatall
case, the career of a formidable "arch-apostate" was
launched.
Juan Mattatall was a Chilean hippie "head" and successful
soft "dope dealer" in the 1970s counterculture. According
to an elder's account, he had formed a band of hippies called
the Lighthouse Family … [that] made and sold jewelry at crafts
fairs across the country. He met the Community in 1976. His declared
motive for joining was to cement his relationship with his 15-year-old
girlfriend, Cindy, who lived with her mother and was expecting
their second child. The elders approached Cindy, who first visited
the Community and then joined. She and Juan reconciled and were
married in the Community in 1976.
The elders described Juan as independent and unpredictable, but
a valuable asset to Community life ("we loved the guy! He
was very talented, charming - a real natural leader"). The
trouble started when two little girls complained to their parents
that he had made sexual advances toward them as they were sleeping.
The elders confronted Mattatall with the allegation; when he denied
it, he was ordered to leave. He went to Florida for a few weeks;
upon his return he confessed to engaging in adulterous relations
with many women. He was sent to live with the Community in Boston.
According to an elder, "he was under a discipline and we
worked with him, but he never did quite come clean. He confessed,
but he always tried to rationalize it." His wife refused
to take him back, and he blamed the Community for separating him
from his family. He reportedly told Spriggs: "I will destroy
the Community!" just before he left.
Mattatall filed for divorce and subsequently sought out Suzanne
Cloutier, a nurse working for Social Rehabilitation Services (SRS)
in Island Pond. Upon hearing his stories of abused children, Cloutier
quickly became a formidable opponent of the Community. Mattatall
also contacted Galen Kelly and Priscilla Coates of the CFF. With
their support, he won custody of the five children in 1982. His
youngest daughter Lydia, however, was overseas in France. Cindy
Mattatall, pregnant with her fifth child, had allowed the childless
Spriggs to take Lydia to live with them in France. Juan accused
Spriggs of kidnapping Lydia, and Cindy appeared before Judge Mahady
in a series of hearings. He repeatedly asked her if she could
produce Lydia, and she replied in the negative. She skipped the
last hearing and made secret arrangements to fly with her children
to Europe. The CFF helped Juan track down her passport number,
date of departure, and address. According to a Church elder's
version of the story, "the New Jersey State Police, Juan
and some people from the anti-cult movement came in and held her
at gunpoint in the middle of the night and took the kids away,
even the baby who was nursing when they broke in" (Personal
Communication).
Lydia was found in 1982 when the Spriggs returned to North America
and arranged to meet Cindy in Nova Scotia. Suzanne Cloutier had
already appeared in the area and delivered lectures on child-beating
in cults. Canadian deprogrammers cooperated with the CFF in "staking
out" the house in Cape Sable Island. The Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, which arrived at the scene, followed the Community's
cars as they left the house, and alerted the RCMP. Lydia was taken
into custody at a roadblock and handed over to her father.
Juan Mattatall moved to Burlington, and a story appeared on the
front page of the Burlington Free Press showing the triumphant
father reunited with his five blonde, mop-haired kids. He hired
a nanny and began attending a local church; from the pulpit he
described the rescue of his kids from the "cult," and
declared that his next step would be to save his wife. He brought
the children to Island Pond to visit their mother on two occasions,
after he received a court order. However, he arrived in a camper
with CFF workers and parked right outside the Island Pond Maples
household for the night. He handed out whistles to each of the
kids and told them to blow the whistles when the abuse started
so that they could be rescued.
Mattatall was soon in trouble again. The nanny he hired in Burlington
became concerned about his sexual activities with the little girl
next door. Her complaint to the authorities launched an investigation.
Juan then moved to Orlando, Florida and placed his children in
the Baptist Christian Home, where they resided from 1982 to 1990.
During this time he was reported to the Adam Walch Center in Orlando
for sexually abusing a local prepubescent girl, but he arranged
a plea bargain to lesser offence and was placed on probation.
The director of the Baptist orphanage, who had warned that the
mother was in a "dangerous cult," cooperated with Juan
in blocking access to the children. Although Cindy had a court
access order granting her permission to see her children, every
time she traveled to Orlando she was turned away. She finally
gave up visitation attempts and remarried, clinging to a hope
that some day she might regain her children. In 1990 she learned
that Juan had been shot dead by his own mother. This event was
reported in the Clark's Harbour, N .S. Guardian (12 June 1990,
p.1):
"A well-known defector from the Northeast Kingdom Community
Church Juan Mattatall, 47, and his 74-year old mother, Maria Palmer
were found May 7…by his step-father, Pernard Palmer. Juan
Mattatall charged that Albert [sic] Spriggs had sexually abused
his daughter Lydia while he was her captor, but Juan himself later
faced two charges of child sexual assault… Palmer, …
said… his stepson's life had been a non-stop series of problems
with children and the law. He speculated that his wife foresaw
that Juan's problems would continue and so she shot him to save
him from the grief that seemed destined to continue."
Mattatall fits the model of the active, and activist, career
apostate. Through his testimonies he defined the deviant aspects
of the 'cult' for its social audience. He started out as a 'whistleblower'
(literally handing out whistles to his children) and then sought
out and brought together a coalition of disparate interest groups
to support his custody case. Initially, he and the other early
apostates were the "glue" that bonded the interest groups
into one coalition. As the coalition gathered strength, the portrait
of a Subversive group was constructed. However, grounds for legal
intervention were lacking, a situation opponents attributed to
the secretive and self-contained nature of the sect. Apostates
were invaluable, since they had crossed the line between the sect
and society; they brought with them vital information that could
be fashioned into "evidence" to rally law enforcement
agencies against the "cult."
Wright (1995) traces the influence of different interest groups
that formed alliances in order to lay grievance claims against
David Koresh. A similar process began to take shape during Mattatall's
court case when various interest groups responded to his initiative
and began to form a network dedicated to the common cause of "saving
the cult's children." The most important participants in
the network were local businessmen, journalists, and anti-cult
organizations. This network gradually constructed a portrait of
a dangerous, child-abusing "cult" around the Northeast
Kingdom Community Church. For each interest group it was expedient
to participate in Mattatall's initiative.
Local businessmen found their trade was suffering from competition
with a communal organization based on volunteer labor. Countercultists
found the elders' doctrinal innovations and Apostle Spriggs' charisma
offensive. Social services personnel, who were assigned to protect
children, were naturally suspicious of "cults" that
made a policy of using corporal punishment to discipline their
children. Suzanne Cloutier of Social Rehabiliatation Services
embarked on a personal crusade to "save the children."
She referred to her home as a "safe house" and sought
out defectors and invited them to stay with her. She taped their
stories, kept files, and organized and dated everything she heard
about the alleged abuse; she even invested around $5,000 of her
own money in "fighting the cult" (Harrison 1984).
Journalists, as always, were "in it for the story."
During Mattatall's custody suit, journalists from the CBC and
UPI had appeared in Island Pond and interviewed him in their camper.
Some went on to recruit more defectors, taping angry testimonials
and exchanging data with Suzanne Cloutier. The Cult Observer was
frequently quoted in news reports warning worried relatives of
some 200 pages of affadavits [that] tell us of systematic, frequent,
and lengthy beatings of children by parents and church elders
with wooden and iron rods and paddles, often drawing blood…
stripped naked and beaten for several hours" (Braithwaite
1984, p.3).
In one of the most lurid portraits, "the Children and the
Cult," journalist Barbara Grizutti Harrison (1984, p. 58)
claimed "the cult is robbing children of their childhood,"
and compared the youth of Island Pond to the telekinetic, extraterrestrial
children of the sci-fi film Village of the Damned. Invited by
the Community to "come and stay for three days," Harrison
was immediately on guard as "Three days is the standard period
for what is variously known as 'brainwashing,' persuasive coercion
or mind control" (1984, p.62).
Several Vermont Journalists assumed activist roles and were instrumental
in bringing about the raid (Bilodeau 1994, P. 36). Samuel Hemmingway
of Burlington Free Press admitted he "advocated for action
in his columns and hoped the coverage would bring results."
Mike Donoghue of the Burlington Free Press claimed he had covered
stories where he had "up to 18 subpoenas from lawyers for
his notes." The most intrepid activist was Chris Braithwaite,
editor of the Vermont Chronicle. He was approached by the Orleans
County State's Attorney, Phillipians White, to look at Cloutier's
files, and resolved to "get involved as a citizen."
He covered the Mattatall custody case, interviewed defectors and
outside relatives, and admits he "contributed information
that aided in getting a warrant to seize the children." Even
while the raid was in progress, Braithwaite (1983,p.1) felt he
was "objective enough to do the news analysis." He wrote
an editorial on the aftermath of the raid entitled, "Have
We Lost Our Children?" In an interview he admits "on
the emotional level I got very involved… I only know if I
was in the same situation again, I would do the same damn thing!"
(Braithwaite 1994, pp.36-38).
The least visible but most influential organization in this network
was the Citizen's Freedom Foundation, whose officials first visited
Burlington in response to Mattatall's invitiation. The CFF established
a chapter in Orleans in November 1982; they collected funds, contacted
the media, and appointed Galen Kelly, a deprogrammer, to aid members
to "escape from the cult." Posters appeared on the streets
of Island Pond warning residents: "The Northeast Kingdom
Community Church Abducts Children." CFF meetings were held
in Barton where townspeople were urged to stop buying the Community's
bread, and store owners were pressured to stop stocking Community
products. The night of the first meeting someone drove through
Island Pond and shot bullets through the windows of the Common
Sense Restaurant, the Maples household, and a gas station owned
by the Community. This event was not reported in the newspapers
nor investigated by the police.
Each of these agencies worked to protect the public's interest
and operated within the logic of their calling. Once united, they
were frustrated by the Church elder's refusal to cooperate and
by the inaccessibility of the children. Influenced by the widespread
concern about child abuse in our era, they accepted the likelihood
of child abuse occurring in a "cult setting."
Phase Two: Escalating Conflict
The second phase of this church-state conflict is marked by an
escalation in the conflict that culminated in the open confrontation
of the raid. This was brought about through a moral campaign in
which often passive or unwitting apostates were recruited and
stage-managed. The deviance amplification process began to operate
as Church elders began to suspect a conspiracy: their refusal
to cooperate or compromise in some instances reinforced the public
authorities' perception of them as deviant, evoking increased
punitive action.
The coalition was highly organized and independent of Mattatall's
leadership, and its leaders were waging their own moral campaigns.
They began actively recruiting ex-members and tailoring their
stories to win public support for their common mission: to rescue
the children. New defectors were encouraged to emulate Mattatall's
model and reiterate the areas of deviance and discontent he had
originally laid out. Some defectors, who were not particularly
disgruntled, were coaxed and stage-managed to appear on the scene
as ad hoc career apostates. Examples of these "stage-managed"
apostates were Michael Taylor and Roland Church.
Michael Taylor had left the Community and lived for several months
outside Island Pond before meeting Cloutier. She introduced him
to deprogrammer Galen Kelly, who set up a meeting with SRS official
Conrad Grimms and a police detective, who recorded his testimony.
Taylor was a single, childless member, unmotivated by custody
concerns; he later complained to the press that he was cued to
exaggerate the few chastisements he had witnessed. His tale appeared
in a Vermont newspaper, but when he went to the news office and
confessed that he had lied, the paper was not interested in printing
his retraction. In 1988 he returned to live in the Community,
but later defected once again.
Roland Church's grievance claim resulted in a court case that
provided a strong rationale for the raid. Church was an Amish
farrier from Maine who joined the Community with his wife and
two daughters. However, because he was on the road much of the
time plying his trade, the elders were dissatisfied with his community
participation. In 1983 his twelve-year-old daughter, Darlynn,
got into trouble for encouraging younger children to play sexual
games and the elders called Church to a seven-hour meeting urging
him to discipline his daughter. According to a Community member,
Church responded he was "so mad he was afraid he'd beat her
like a horse." He therefore asked Elder Wiseman to do it
for him. A week later Church left the Community and met Suzanne
Cloutier on May 21. They contacted the Citizen's Freedom Foundation
in Orleans, which recorded his complaint. Church charged Wiseman
with simple assault of his daughter.
On August 5, 1984, Roland Church recanted. He claimed to have
been pressured to lie to the "news media" by Suzanne
Cloutier (Harrison 1984, p.6.). "She called everyone in Vermont,
I guess," he complained. "She's the instigator of it
all." Cloutier, in turn, retorted: " I feel betrayed
by Roland Church. It bugs me out. God forgive me, I almost pray
a child dies. Nothing will happen until then - and they're all
dying a slow death!" The case against Wiseman was held up
in court and eventually dismissed in 1984.
The network then launched a search for more corroborating evidence.
Priscilla Coates of CFF met with the Vermont attorney general's
staff and provided names of defectors. SRS official Conrad Grimms
and Vermont State Police official Peter Johnson traveled around
the country between 1982 and 1983, tracking down ex-members in
seven different states to interview them for child abuse information.
These interviews were used in the 18 affidavits that became the
basis for the raid. One of these, the Moran Affidavit, featured
the stories of fourteen defectors. Six of these individuals, all
of whom had been deprogrammed by Galen Kelly, recounted stories
that were remarkably similar. This collection of atrocity tales
was used to convince authorities that the group was subversive
and a legitimate target for repressive action by the state.
Besides recruiting more apostates, the network directed its well-coordinated
stigmatizing efforts toward several families inside the Community.
Minor legal infractions blew up into major legal cases and personal
tragedies were suspected of involving criminal intent; the Church
soon again became embroiled in controversy. As the cases involving
the Chambers and the Campbells demonstrate, the process of deviance
amplification appeared to be operating in these escalating conflicts.
The first child of the Chambers couple was couple was stillborn,
and the local coroner agreed to issue the death certificate. However,
when the coroner called the state attorney with a routine question,
the latter immediately arrived at the scene and told the Chambers
there would have to be an autopsy. According to one of the elders,
Robert Chambers replied, "I refuse to have my daughter taken
to Burlington to be mutilated." The sheriff was summoned,
but Chambers refused to cooperate. While the sheriff was conferring
privately with the coroner, Chambers picked up his dead child
and drove to a field, dug a grave, and buried her. The state police
sent two squad cars through the town in noisy, but unsuccessful
pursuit. When Chambers returned home, he refused to reveal where
he had buried the body. He was thereupon arrested and charged
with transporting a body without a death certificate.
This conflict became a major media event. The "cult"
was portrayed as a fly-by-night secret society that refused to
register births or deaths and buried the bones of children in
unmarked graves. In fact, members did apply for and receive death
certificates on the rare occasions of a death. Nevertheless, this
gothic legend soon took on a life of its own, as in Barbara Grizutti
Harrison's article, "The Children and the Cult" (1984,
p. 6):
"They do not send their children to school, nor do they
register births and deaths. Island Ponders feed off the persistent
rumor that the cult has its own graveyard in which bones of children
were found. Bodies of children were found; one baby was stillborn,
another died, apparently, of spinal meningitis."
In 1983 another Island Pond couple, the Campbells, took their
ten-month-old baby to a doctor who found hairline fractures in
his wrists and ankles. Worried about rumors of abuse, he called
the SRS and diagnosed the limbs as "broken by force."
The parents then consulted a specialist in Newport who diagnosed
a rare from of rickets and prescribed Vitamin B. The doctor's
letter was sent to the SRS, but two weeks later the judge in St.
Johnsbury District Court granted the state temporary custody.
Troopers arrived at the Campbell's door and seized the baby on
grounds of medical neglect. The baby was then examined by four
doctors in a Burlington hospital who again diagnosed rickets ("Officials
Tell Why…" The Caledonia Report, 22 June 1985, p. 12).
These cases offer clear examples of the deviance amplification
process. It is important to understand that their response was
conditioned by the vulnerability of their religion, still in its
chrysalis phase, and by the role of children in their eschatology.
When Chambers, moved by the authority of his "lay conscience,"
resisted a perceived injustice, his action was interpreted as
further proof of his innate deviance as a "cult member."
While it appears the Community was clearly a victim of stigmatizing
efforts, it is also clear that they met these challenges with
a certain intransigence, and their refusal to compromise on matters
of child rearing has tended to reinforce the deviance amplification
process.
The Island Pond Raid and its Aftermath
By 1984 the network led by Cloutier, Braithwaite, et al, created
a portrait of a nefarious cult habitually cruel to children, but
they were repeatedly frustrated in their intervention efforts.
On four occasions they managed to obtain court approval to initiate
temporary custody proceedings; but only once (in the Campbell
case) was an order executed, and again no evidence was discovered.
From their perspective the impediments lay in the inaccessibility
of the commune, its "cultic secrecy," and in the collective
nature of the alleged abuse. Laws on child abuse were designed
to apply to individual criminal behaviour, so as to avoid both
the claim that abuse resulted from a child's environment and discrimination
against working class families (Richardson 1993). Moreover, current
laws are based on the assumption that claims can be readily investigated
by interviewing the child's teacher, friends, family doctor, or
neighbors - a situation not applicable to religious communes.
As Harrison complained (1984, p. 61):
"They've taken away all our normal ways to detect child
abuse. There are no teachers to report scars, no doctors to report
anything funny… The children are moved from communal home
to communal home… What this amounts to is that nobody knows
who is who, and it is this facelessness and anonymity that led
to the Raid of June 22."
Met with passive resistance, the network was unable to gather
evidence that would using force in its social control efforts
on behalf of the children. This is where the grievance claims
of apostates proved indispensable. Their atrocity tales provided
the ammunition to justify a legal intervention.
Three days before the raid, Attorney General John Easton summoned
seven Community elders into court, took them before the judge
one at a time without a lawyer, and asked them to name the children
they lived with. Each man replied that his conscience would not
allow him to reveal this information and was then jailed for contempt
of court. Hours later, Judge Keyser, an 86-year-old retired Supreme
Court Justice released the men, asserting that the court lacked
authority to act unless the state produced specific names of people
and specific evidence.
Frustrated by the failure of court actions and thwarted by Church
elders' unwillingness to cooperate, a network that included the
state's attorney general, a social services commissioner, and
a local newspaper editor took action. They met with Governor Richard
A. Snelling and Attorney General John Easton in Montpelier and
convinced them to approve their plan to take all the children
of the sect into custody simultaneously so that they could be
examined for signs of bruises. Cloutier's files and the police
investigators' reports were turned over to Phillipians White,
Orleans' County state attorney, who was sworn in as special assistant
attorney general. Judge Wolchik issued a search warrant that was
brought to Governor Snelling.
The input of the anti-cult movement was later revealed when Judge
Mahady asked whether the acting prosecutor had authority in Essex
County. The court was informed the attorney general's staff had
met with "cult experts" Galen Kelly and Priscilla Coates
of the CFF, who cited two cases of child-beating fatalities that
had occurred in two other "cults," to justify emergency
measures (Malcarne and Burchard, 1992, p. 82).
According to John O'Donnell, deputy human service secretary at
the time, a pediatrician and social worker involved in the Michigan
raid were called in for consultation. They compared that situation
to the one in Island Pond, concluding that there was a significant
potential danger to children at Island Pond.
The raid proved a baffling disappointment for the network intent
on rescue, who blamed the decisions of Thomas L. Hayes, chief
administrative judge for the Vermont courts, for its failure.
On the evening before the raid, Hayes pulled Wolchik off the case
and assigned Judge Frank Mahady to preside over the emergency
hearings with himself and another judge as backup. Once the search
warrant was served, state officials had to return to the court
to show they had acted within their authority and to request permission
to detain the children for another 72 hours. Deputy Attorney General
Bristow and others complained that it was "unprecedented"
to prevent Wolchik from reviewing the search warrant after it
had been executed. Orleans' County attorney White also argued
that Hayes wanted a judge who would reject the state's action,
and deliberately chose Mahady who had a reputation for being a
strong civil libertarian. The next day in court, Mahady reprimanded
Judge Wolchik for signing the search warrant, and Wolchik later
admitted at a 1986 confirmation hearing that he now regarded the
information on which he had relied on granting the search warrant
as unreliable and possible false.
In his written report, Judge Mahady pronounced the raid a "grossly
unlawful scheme" and commented that the state's motive was
not the issue, for "even when the state acts in a noble cause,
it must act lawfully." He criticized the language of the
original search warrant as "more general in scope than any
this court can find after careful research in the recorded literature.
It may, indeed, set a modern record for generality." He accused
the state officials of rounding up children to find evidence they
lacked; What the state really sought was investigative detention."
Phase Three: Decentralization and De-escalation
Phase three is marked by a sudden decentralization and de-escalation
of conflict. Events subsequent to the Island Pond raid follow
a pattern described by Richardson (Chapter 8 this volume) in cases
of other NRMs brought to court on slender evidence. Once the case
is heard in public legal proceedings, third parties are brought
in, and members of the group (previously ignored by the media)
are given a forum in court; a more realistic, rounded picture
of the NRM emerges. All these factors bring some "checks
and balances" to the situation and undermine the plausibility
of the portrait of the group as Subversive. Moreover, the relative
independence of the judiciary impedes future efforts of government
agencies or the anti-cult movement to bring sanctions against
a new religion (Chapter 8 this volume).
Within the Community, the Church elders abandoned their sectarian
huddle and sought to deescalate the conflict through legitimate
channels. Having experienced intimidating demonstrations of the
power and hostility of the state in the raid and Dawson's FBI
arrest - not to mention the tragedy in Waco in 1993 - they began
to reach out. They gained friends and supporters among members'
parents and local officials, won concessions from the Vermont
school board, and were interviewed by sympathetic journalists.
The Island Pond Community organized a voluntary diaspora, sold
most of their houses, and established small communal households
across the New England states. The Church strove to maintain a
more open and conciliatory stance toward the outside world.
For the oppositional coalition the abortive raid proved a major
crisis, causing a rift between the law enforcement agencies and
the social services personnel. To persevere in their mission,
it was necessary to adopt a new oppositional strategy. Since the
complexities of the case were too well-known in Island Pond, the
battle arena was broadened and decentralized. Small-scale skirmishes
are currently fought around the new households that begin to receive
negative publicity in the local press once the local social services
or (Canadian) Youth Protection agencies receive anti-cult literature,
prompting fresh investigations and fueling custody disputes.
Tension remains, as in the 1994 investigation into the Community
in Hyannis, Massachusetts that resulted in a hearing at the Barnstable
County Courthouse on June 20, 1994. Ironically, among the young
parents asked to identify their own babies were a couple who had
themselves, as children, been taken into custody by SRS workers
in the Island Pond raid of 1984. All cases were dismissed on November
4, 1994. During the same year, the Community in Rutland, Vermont
was implicated in a custody dispute over four daughters, who were
awarded to the father living outside the Community (even though
it is quite unusual for the courts to award custody to fathers).
Apostates' testimonies still provide powerful artillery for these
battles, although the tales are ten years old, heavily edited,
and "resurrected." A close scrutiny of the affidavits
submitted in recent court cases reveals how the raw material of
the ex-members is often padded, tailored, and recycled in order
to bolster grievance claims. Once recent defector, whose statements
were used as evidence against the Community in Hyannis, later
complained in an affidavit of the "underhanded operations"
of the Department of Social Services. She claimed that the SRS
sought her out in 1994, assured her they had substantial files
on the Hyannis families, and promised that everything she said
would be held in the strictest confidence, not to be used without
her prior knowledge and permission. Later, she was upset to find
her own name and her daughter's mentioned in an affidavit submitted
in evidence; no other sources on the Hyannis Community were cited;
and her statements were highly exaggerated. The Community's attorney
quoted her as stating that "[The DSS] stated I had seen bruises
and marks on the children, but I had never seen them! I feel like
I have been dragged on a fishing expedition!"
According to the Communty's lawyer, Jean Swantko, the same affidavits
that were used in the early 1980s (the Moran, Mattatall, Church,
and Taylor affidavits) keep reappearing in affidavits of the mid-1990s.
From a Community perspective (Johnson 1994, pp. 1-2) "repeatedly,
law enforcement personnel fail to respect court rulings or documents
in passing stale information on to other agencies." Further,
the Community's attorney alleges that there is a recurring pattern
whereby lawyers, who have been influenced by such information,
study previous dismissed cases and decide they had been "handled
wrong," and that they could "do it right this time."
As in all communal NRMs, custody disputes arise when one parent
leaves the group. Recently, two fathers living in the Community
chose to disappear with their children rather than trust the judicial
system that has always awarded custody to the outside parent.
Stories about the cult that abducts children have appeared in
the news, largely due to the activism of apostate Laurie Johnson,
who was briefly involved with the Community in Island Pond and
has been searching for her two missing boys, Seth and Nathan,
since they disappeared with their father, Steven Wooten, in 1989.
Seth and Nathan's faces have appeared on Child Find and Childseekers
posters distributed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children with the caption, "It is believed that the cult
is assisting in the concealment of these and other children sought
by custodial parents and authorities" (Vermont Times, November
19, 1991). Johnson also hired two private investigators from CRIB,
an agency operating out of Philadelphia that specializes in ferreting
out missing children. Community members complain that two scary
men wearing cowboy gear (including guns) constantly invade their
public dance celebrations by circling around on motorbikes peering
at the children, and handing out cards to visitors bearing an
insignia that closely resembles the FBI's. A search warrant was
served on the Community in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in February 1996,
and Laurie Johnson accompanied the police and social workers and
scrutinized the children - to no avail. As of May 1997, however,
Steven Wooten was arrested in Florida by the FBI, and the two
boys were given to their mother, who hired deprogrammer Rick Ross
as an "exit counselor."
The second alleged "abduction" occurred in Canada in
the 1987 Seymour v. Dawson custody case. Edward Dawson joined
the Community in 1986, leaving their 3-year-old son, Michael,
with his mother, Judy Seymour. After several months, she signed
a paper awarding custody to Dawson, who took Michael to live in
the Myrtle Tree Farm Community in Nova Scotia. In August 1987,
a police car and social workers drew up to the farm unannounced,
and Michael was [taken into] custody for 44 days. [After the court
ordered him returned to this father] Social Services officials
appealed the court's decision, and Dawson went to the Supreme
Court in Nova Scotia while his case was ongoing in the local Family
Court. According to Dawson's testimony, the Social Services agency
placed an ad in the Montreal Gazette in October 1987 to locate
the boy's mother. She was shown alarming testimonies of former
members, which prompted her to sue for the custody of her son.
During the Family Court proceedings, Dawson made his son unavailable
to the court. He was held in contempt of court and put in jail.
After a presentation of belief in February, 1988, the Supreme
Court ordered his release and deemed him a fit father.
The case did not end with this decision, however. In 1992, Seymour
and her lawyer arranged an ex parte hearing with the judge in
Nova Scotia. The judge was receptive to a local deprogrammer's
argument that the Community qualified as a "cult," granted
Seymour interim liberal access for the weekend, and ordered Dawson
to appear in court the following week. Dawson refused to allow
Michael out of his sight, took him across the border, and lived
for a year in a Church household in California.
Mattatall's old tales resurfaced when a Vermont state trooper
sent a "Search for Lydia" news clip to California authorities,
and RCMP officer Wendell Murchison (who had starred in a television
documentary, Missing Treasures, dramatizing the search for Lydia
Mattatall) wrote a letter recommending that abduction charges
be laid against Dawson. Dawson was apprehended by the FBI in the
spring of 1994, led out of the commune wearing chains, placed
in a maximum security prison for three months, and charged with
abduction and contempt of court. The abduction charge was dismissed
in the 1995 trial, since custodial parents cannot abduct their
own children, but Dawson is still waiting to appear for a retrial
in the Supreme Court concerning the "contempt" charge.
Michael is currently living with his mother who has de facto custody.
The
child
abduction
theme
was echoed
in unfounded
but persistent
rumors
surrounding
the unsolved
disappearance
of Lyndon
Fuller.
The 24-year-old
son of
a local
farmer
escaped from the third
floor
window
of a
hospital
in Berwick,
Nova
Scotia,
in November
1988.
Rumors
circulated
through
the area
that
Fuller
had joined
the Myrtle
Tree
Farm
Community,
despite
the fact
that
he had
never
shown
any
interest
in its
religion
nor had
contact
with
any of
its members.
The farm
was searched
and placed
under
surveillance
for months;
helicopters
hovered
overhead
and the
Community's
double-decker
bus was
searched
on the
highway.
The case
remains
open
and rumors
still
abound
in Nova
Scotia.
Conclusion
In analyzing the effect of apostates' grievance claims on the
Community, one can observe their use in three phases of the Church's
conflict with the oppositional coalition. The first phase was
actively launched by Mattatall, who brought the different agencies
together and cemented their allegiance with abuse stories to further
his custody suit. Defectors during the second phase played a more
passive role. Sought out by CFF counselors, their anecdotes were
solicited, selected, even distorted to accommodate the anti-cult
theoretical framework and to produce a packet on the "cult"
replete with shocking stories. Once these packets were delivered
to SRS officials, a kind of circular logic ensued. New investigations
would be launched; journalists would then interview CFF "cult
experts," who would air their views on the "cult"
as if they had just descended from their ivory tower where they
"monitor such groups." The media would feed their corroborating
stories back to police, judges, ministers, and doctors, creating
the impression that the information was issuing from several different,
independent, and mutually corroborating sources, thereby enhancing
their credibility. Today these stories are widely dispersed, untraceable,
and unverifiable; they have taken on a ghostly life of their own.
While it is highly unlikely they will be used to construct another
major church-state confrontation, their stigmatizing power has
been directed into the narrow eddies of local newspapers, computer
networks, anti-cult literature, and court records.
The Messianic Communities movement is now beginning its third
generation; it continues to win allies and found new communes
and it still evokes controversy. The raid represented a resounding
victory for the Messianic Communities in a legal sense, and it
won sympathy among civil libertarians for whom the Church became
a test case. Paradoxically, however, it brought the Church an
even greater notoriety, setting it back in its larger struggle
for legitimacy. From the members' point of view, justice is not
forthcoming. Mattatall is dead, his pedarastic pursuits widely
reported in in the news; Church and Taylor have retracted; and
deprogrammer Galen Kelly, who had conducted the interviews for
the Moran Affadavit, is in jail. Moreover, the testimonies of
the children themselves contradict these grievance claims. Of
the eleven children awarded to their defector fathers in the early
custody battles involving the Gregoires, Mattatalls, and Alexanders,
ten rejoined the Communities when they came of age. Nevertheless,
these early, unreliable, and stigmatized testimonies continue
to be packaged, recycled, and widely dispersed. Several members
have placed the Church in a vulnerable position by choosing to
hide their children rather than submit to a judiciary that has
consistently refused to award custody to parents inside the commune.
The earlier tales of the apostate who has ventured across the
boundary of a "cult" to rescue his/her abused children
is now supplanted by a new suspenseful narrative, quite as frustrating
for both sides as the rumors of collective child abuse, for the
claim cannot be proven, disproven, nor resolved. This is the tale
of children who disappear into the mysterious center of a communal
society. While in both cases the fathers were the legal guardians
at the time of the alleged custodial interference, they were sought
out and arrested by the FBI and must now attempt to extricate
themselves from the tenacious web of willful inaccuracies spun
in the wake of Juan Mattatall.
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