Episode 597: The Krugersdorp Cult Murders Part IV - The Werewolf of Wall Street
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There's no place to escape to. This is the last podcast.
On the left.
Speaker 3 That's when the cannibalism started.
Speaker 3 What was that?
Speaker 3 Cruger's door opened the house.
Speaker 2 Cruger's door.
Speaker 2
Let's wrap this werewolf up, baby. Dude, so much shit.
Yeah, we're turning this werewolf into a GD mummy. Hell yeah.
That's what we're doing.
Speaker 2
Oh my God, could you turn a, can you imagine a werewolf mummy? Oh my God, having a werewolf daddy. Actually, you son of a bitch.
You hang on the last podcast in the last guess what?
Speaker 2 Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately, brat season is officially over. Oh, man.
Speaker 2
My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Henry Zabrowski.
What do you think about werewolf mummies or a mummy Dracula or a werewolf mummy blue lagoon monster?
Speaker 2 I am actually thinking about about bigger, more important things, Marcus. Bigger, more telling things about the very center of our country, like who am I and where am I right now?
Speaker 2 I hate to continually call you wrong, but it's the Black Lagoon. Thank you.
Speaker 2
It's true. It's true.
My mind is too addled by the Monster Mash to think correctly, and I'm here with Ed Larson.
Speaker 2 I haven't gotten over the Monster Mash.
Speaker 2 I'm a werewolf. Well, if you are a werewolf, then you should probably go to jail for many crimes
Speaker 2
because werewolves intrinsically commit murder. It's during the day no one knows it's me.
You're just a big fat man.
Speaker 2 Just a hairy fat man.
Speaker 2
So here we are. Cougars DARP, part four, the conclusion to this series.
Now, you're going to see why we took this long to get through this much collect material. No, you won't.
Speaker 2 But we're hoping that their audience does because obviously we woke up today in a new fun world. Yeah.
Speaker 2 And we are just rolling with it because we just are so upset that Quincy Jones isn't going to know the end of the Kruger's George drama. Nobody tell Jimmy Carter what happened.
Speaker 2 So when we last left the members of Electus Perdeus, they had just killed their fifth and sixth victims.
Speaker 2 But these murders had very little to do with the motivations behind their first four killings, which were committed ostensibly as a righteous act to battle the forces of Satan.
Speaker 2
The murders of Joan and Peter Peter Meyer, however, the latest victims, were simply the result of a robbery gone wrong. A robbery did wrong.
Yeah. That's what I would put it that way.
Speaker 2 Did wrong and gone wrong.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Anyway, you know, you're also robbing people of that money.
Yeah. Oh, no, that's what I say.
Those, the first ones, the Meyers, they were wealthy.
Speaker 2 They were wealthy, but they didn't have cash on hand. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Of course not. No wealthy person has cash on hand.
They went through the pain of an entire pitch meeting in order to get nothing.
Speaker 2 They listened to this man talk about a South African water park for 45 minutes. And over here, what we'll have is the crocodile area.
Speaker 2
I'm not against a zoo. It's all zoo.
And over here, we've got all area with bots of monkeys. And over here, you got all areas with lots of zabras.
Speaker 2
We're going to have a lazy river so lazy that it's a lake. It's already sitting in the pool of water.
Actually, it's so lazy, it's just sand. It's
Speaker 2
dirt. It's not dirt.
Very hard-packed dirt. Tired water.
Speaker 2 see, the leader of Electus Perdeus, Cecilia Stain, had commanded her cult to somehow find money for the fictitious American orphans that had become the focal point of the group.
Speaker 2
But this was only after the group had been quiet for two years. Maybe they were quiet.
Maybe.
Speaker 2 Also, remember, just to set the context again, the fictitious American orphans were the orphans, the babies of witches that were supposed to use those babies in rituals where they were supposed to carve up those babies and turn them into potpourri for Satan.
Speaker 2 And then, but instead, these wise witches that are so indebted to the power of Satan, but they don't want to give up their child for some reason, they still then will put this child in a very special orphanage-like system that is still being attacked by the powers of Satan from outside of it because those kids were lined up to be sacrifices.
Speaker 2 And instead, what they did was take a bunch of Virginia hams, put bonnets on them, and put them in the grinding machine.
Speaker 2 Well, the reason why the cult reactivated was because their breadwinner zach valentine had quit his lucrative insurance agent job to start his own business as a stockbroker and he had failed miserably i had a listener point out something that i can't help but feel that i'm i've been dragged into this just because of my who i am is that in the year that i believe this happened in the year 2012 right
Speaker 2 2013 this was more 15 yeah so this came out right after Wolf of Wall Street.
Speaker 2 And if you look at Zach Valentine and I watched a bunch of court footage of him,
Speaker 2
you could tell he's a man that might have much. And I love being in Wolf and I love being a part of the legacy of Wolf.
Great movie.
Speaker 2 But it did inspire some less than fun guys
Speaker 2 to do stuff. that they shouldn't have been doing.
Speaker 2 And then Zach Valentine probably saw Wolf of Wall Street and in his mindset was like that's amazing you know what i mean like that's exactly what i want to be because he only watched the first turn it off that's how it always is they watch the first two hours and you're like that's incredible and then they get bored when everything gets all the with the repercussions show up yeah maybe it was the werewolf of wall street
Speaker 2 you ever think about that don't you make fun of the only good thing i've ever been in besides pretty face
Speaker 2 don't make fun of it
Speaker 2 Because Zach had failed so miserably, they had to keep Cecilia Stain lifestyle going somehow. Somebody's got to keep that, man.
Speaker 2
She ain't paying for extra large sweaters and hair gel by herself. Yeah, man, someone's got to pay the bill at Limelight.
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2 But the problem with that robbery, the one in which they killed Joan and Peter Meyer, was that the crew had come away with just a hair over $40 for the whole operation.
Speaker 2 And it involved costumes, backstories, financial plans. Now, after the robbery double murder was ultimately a net negative to the cult, they decided to enter the world of insurance fraud.
Speaker 2
Man, I got to say this again, guys. Remember, insurance fraud is hard.
It's so hard. It's hard to get done.
Dude, think about it. It's hard to get an insurance payout even when something real happens.
Speaker 2
Just know that. That's how they get you.
Yeah, it's better than committing murders like sketch comedians, though.
Speaker 2 Nothing, absolutely. Nothing makes it more unforgivable than the fact that they brought props and costumes.
Speaker 2 I've been it for so many years and I was so embarrassed each time to think that you did that to bring it to fight Satan you thought that that's what you're gonna need is props well the thing is that they really didn't have the imagination nor the desire to plan a scheme that didn't somehow involve killing someone now after Zach Valentine's wife Michaela was murdered by the cult after she tried to leave Zach changed the main beneficiary on his life insurance policy to Cecilia Stain meaning she would be the recipient of over $200,000 upon Zach's death oh yeah and she was in that D, and she was scrubbing that P, and she was rubbing that B up and down his M.
Speaker 2
Was she? Yep. Wow.
But the plan wasn't to kill Zach. Instead, Alectus Perdeus were going to fake his death and use another body in his place.
Speaker 2 Now, for the body, Alectus Perdeus chose a 41-year-old black man named Gerard Jackson, who lived at a nearby shelter with his pregnant wife.
Speaker 2 The cult had recently befriended him, and because of his station in life and because of his race, they figured correctly that his disappearance wouldn't be investigated. So, was Zach black? Oh, God.
Speaker 2
No, no, no. Oh, God.
No, absolutely not. But oh, Marcus, he was extremely tan.
Speaker 2 If you saw him in the, and if you see him under the right, maybe the right light and a shadow, or if you cover him in like brown makeup,
Speaker 2 he would look so black
Speaker 2 that you'd be, you'd assume
Speaker 2
they're all white, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah.
I just wanted to double-check. Oh, yes.
His name is Zach valentine
Speaker 2 yeah you're right i'm sorry
Speaker 2 and so the manipulation began in the typically byzantine electus per deus fashion every plan they have is so fucking complicated it's because they got they just do meth and sit in an apartment all day yeah well in early december 2015 cecilia stain hired girard to clean a storage room in her apartment complex then told girard and his wife that they could then live in that storage room rent free okay the only catch besides the fact that it was just a fucking fucking room without a bathroom or a kitchen.
Speaker 2
It's a storage unit. You keep saying storage room.
It's a unit. Very different.
No, it's at the apartment complex, so it is a room. But it's a unit still.
You know what I mean?
Speaker 2
Like a window. No, or a bathroom or a table or it's not a room.
Yeah. Well, it's a room.
Speaker 2
It's four walls. Yeah.
No, a unit is a part of a larger complex. It was a part of a larger complex.
But of other units. It has to be solely units for it to be a unit.
Speaker 2 I think that if it comes down to choosing a room, we're not.
Speaker 2
Rob, you lived in a studio for a while. You know the true difference between a unit and a room.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
One love can live in and one can't. Yeah.
You go crazy in one.
Speaker 2
Yeah, you go crazy in one. You know what you do? You get that fake window.
You know, you just buy blinds and staple them to the wall.
Speaker 2 Nothing is more, nothing makes me more comfortable than a plastic sheet looking like sun and trees.
Speaker 2 Well, the catch was that Gerard and his wife needed to be locked inside at night so the other residents of the complex wouldn't stumble upon them. Poor and desperate, Gerard and his wife agreed.
Speaker 2
And you'd think that this had something to do with the plan. Nope.
But it had nothing to do with the plan at all. She loves improvising.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 After four nights of sleeping in the box, Cecilia lied and told Gerard and his wife that they had been caught and they had to leave. Wouldn't they know? There's no place for them to go.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, they would know if they got caught. Yeah, our friend was not.
The one door would open.
Speaker 2 Yeah, our friend Mike Lawrence definitely knew he was caught by my landlord when he was fucking sleeping in our first studio, which was also the cellar in my apartment building. He got caught.
Speaker 2
He knew he was caught. and he was gone while I was at the, I went to the grocery store and he was gone when I got back.
I can't believe that he was found in that dungeon.
Speaker 2 Like people actually went down there.
Speaker 2 He was the Elizabeth Fritzel of the early New York comedy scene.
Speaker 2 The fact that he was kept down there and it really changed his entire composure and it changed his, because I just remember him sitting in his whitey tighties, playing with his action figures.
Speaker 2 And then, God, how surprised your Hasidic landlord must have been to see that large man in there.
Speaker 2
Sleeping on the couch while we did roundtable. Oh, yeah.
Dirt floor. Is it over?
Speaker 2 Well, what Cecilia told them was that she had found a cheap room to rent for Gerard and his wife just a block away.
Speaker 2 But at the same time, in preparation for the eventual murder, after which he'd have to hide, Zach paid for a week's stay at the nearby Herberg Hotel under the name James Vermock.
Speaker 2 And this was a bit of a, this is kind of arrogant because James Vermock was the guy who'd recorded confessions at the so-called satanic murders and had gone into witness protection after nothing happened.
Speaker 2
Why don't they just make up a name? I know. That's what I don't get.
I think it's well, it's with these types of people, they like to do the thing that's evil.
Speaker 2 Like, oh, how evil is it that I'm using James Vermock's name? But it's funny because it's evil in the name of Christ.
Speaker 2 So it's this almost perverted sense of what a Christian's duty is supposed to be that we're still dealing with today. It seems to be in many a way
Speaker 2
dealing with that. It seems to be a microcosm of the issue that we're currently having.
Christian duty.
Speaker 2
See? The main issue. The main issue.
The main issue. You know, they say it was like 45% of people didn't read a book, Lester?
Speaker 2
I read one. Now I know.
That was about the whale. Yeah, you did.
And
Speaker 2 that's why we're the good.
Speaker 2
We're the chain. Yes, that's it.
And so after Gerard's pregnant wife was presumably rehoused to the cheap room, Zach asked Gerard to go for a drive.
Speaker 2 Cecilia, meanwhile, had prepared three bottles of juice, two orange and one mango. But she filled the mango bottle with 20 sleeping pills.
Speaker 2
The plan was to knock out Jared, then kill him so his body could take the place of Zach's. But it can only work if Zach then does blackface from here then out.
No.
Speaker 2 Which I do think that could have been.
Speaker 2 Very edgy.
Speaker 2
Could have really played to a lot of different audiences. Alectus Perbdeus very much did enjoy being edgy.
Oh, they did. Yeah.
Speaker 2 Now, when it came time to take the drive, Gerard found that this had turned into a group outing.
Speaker 2 Zack picked La Rue for his murder buddy, and the two of them loaded up Zach's BNW with kerosene and gasoline before picking up Gerard.
Speaker 2 But there was also another car, which was driven by Mirinda Stain and the cult's newest member, John Barnard. They would assist once the scheme was played to its conclusion.
Speaker 2 And so, with everything planned out in advance, the best their idiot minds could handle, Zach and LaRue picked up Gerard and the two-car caravan headed towards a town called Petrus Stein.
Speaker 2
And Stein, I found out, is a very common word. It's like Steiner-Smith, kind of, right? Stein is the same.
It's the Afrikaans version of Stein.
Speaker 2 Now, once they were all on the road, LaRue, sitting in the back seat, handed Gerard the bottle of drugged mango juice, saving the orange for himself and Zach.
Speaker 2 Why is mine different?
Speaker 2 Shut it
Speaker 2 Gerard soon passed out, and once he closed his eyes, LaRue brought out a blue nylon rope and strangled Gerard to death while Zach continued driving.
Speaker 2 After pulling over, Zach and LaRue were joined by Mirinda and John, and the four of them put Zach's BMW into neutral and gingerly pushed it off the road with Gerard's body still in the passenger seat.
Speaker 2
After dragging the body over to the driver's side, they slipped Zach's silver Adidas ring on Gerard's finger to help identify the body as Zach. He's a black man.
I don't, I'll never understand.
Speaker 2 Did Adidas make rings? Yeah, it's a whole
Speaker 2 bunch of things.
Speaker 2 In Europe, things get weird with the sports brands. Yeah.
Speaker 2 Then to make sure the Benz was correctly identified, they removed the license plate and tossed it away from the car, thinking that no one would find it odd that the license plate had unscrewed itself and wandered a few yards away all on its own.
Speaker 2 It was the power of
Speaker 2 Should have signed the back of it.
Speaker 2 But now we get to the part where we see why it didn't matter if Gerard was black or not. The cult doused the car in kerosene and gasoline and lit it aflame.
Speaker 2 desperately hoping that whoever found the car would just assume that the body behind the wheel was Zach Valentine's and wouldn't ask questions about a car that had seemingly pulled off the road and spontaneously combusted.
Speaker 2 They must have done a quality amount of sins there because of their hating goal wouldn't have chosen a car to blow up because it happens randomly all the time.
Speaker 2 I mean, one time I was thinking about cheating on my wife and he made my cigarettes all melt. I'll remember that noises like, oh, he's got something to do with Christ.
Speaker 2 I can't do that cross-watching.
Speaker 2
Cross-watching, I keep really cross-watching my shit. You finally get the accent out in this last episode.
That's what it's all about.
Speaker 2 It's all about, hey, I just don't, I just want our country to get used to it. I get good at it when it's too late.
Speaker 2 But that was their plan is that the body would be so charred and unidentifiable that they wouldn't say like, oh, this is a black guy. It would just be a crispy corpse.
Speaker 2
It just doesn't really work out like that. And they wouldn't be able to tell that he was strangled? No, they would tell everything.
No, they wouldn't be able to tell. Well,
Speaker 2
unless he broke the hyoid bone. But that's also assuming that they looked for such such a thing.
Yes.
Speaker 2 And so Zach was driven back to the Harbourg Hotel with the plan to hide out until the life insurance policy paid.
Speaker 2 I am, however, a little fuzzy on the details as to what Zach was supposed to do after that. They thought that he would just come back to the house and no one would know the wiser?
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, Krugersdorf is a relatively small city. It's roughly the population of New Orleans.
But from what I know in New Orleans, everybody's fucked everybody and everybody knows everybody.
Speaker 2
Exactly. Yeah.
Now, before the car even burned out, police had arrived on the scene.
Speaker 2 And because the license plate was thrown from the blaze, the car was immediately identified as belonging to Zach Valentine.
Speaker 2 But what police also immediately noticed was that the car was not on fire as a result of an accident, but had rather been cautiously pushed off the road because there were no indications of a crash, like skid marks or broken glass.
Speaker 2 And cars usually catch on fire because they've flipped over. Yeah, some like catastrophic thing that would happen to the fuel line that would then go into fire next to the fuel.
Speaker 2
You push it off a cliff or something. Do anything.
Yeah, it's like that fucking that scene of The Simpsons where Carp Hans Moleman's car goes off the road and it taps a tree and then blows up.
Speaker 2 I will say
Speaker 2 they have a pretty good strong record of understanding that the
Speaker 2 South African police don't really do a heck of a lot.
Speaker 2 So I think that they push it off pretty lazily and didn't even think about it because they, you know, I guess the police just show up and say like, well, priests do stuff like this all the time.
Speaker 2
Could have found out whether the man had some form of like wearing mixed linens or something. Or maybe when he drank the wrong kind of wine or something.
So can't be. They carefully push it off.
Speaker 2
Yeah, priests skate. They push the car off a little bit onto the soft shoulder and they sit it on fire.
They just sit him right to hell right on earth. Should have just blown up the gas tank.
No.
Speaker 2 Why do you need kerosene if you got gasoline? Bigger, you got the kerosene there. And what he does is then you can directly affect the sinner, right?
Speaker 2 Who goes right on the sinner and you get, because you know, you didn't do nothing, leather exterior. Cows are innocent.
Speaker 2 He's the sinner. Sinner got burned.
Speaker 2
You gotta go take big dip top flammable chemicals to put right on there. Thank you, Jesus.
Thank you, Brace.
Speaker 2 Well, regardless of all the obvious signs of criminal wrongdoing, the South African police once again gave the situation an old-fashioned, what are you gonna do? Hey, it's hot out. Yeah, and they're
Speaker 2
fire. It's dry.
And they just moved on with their day.
Speaker 2 As far as Gerard's wife went, Cecilia told her that before Gerard even got in the car with Zach that day, he'd crossed the road to where two Nigerians were sitting in a white car.
Speaker 2 Oh, God, not in Africa.
Speaker 2 She was told that after a brief conversation, her husband got in with the Nigerians and drove off. Wow.
Speaker 2 But when Gerard's wife called his mother with this news, Gerard's mother pretty much said, oh, yeah, totally sounds like something Gerard would do. I wouldn't worry about it.
Speaker 2 Man, nobody's got any faith in anybody in Proof's door. Everyone's been like, yeah, that's to be expected.
Speaker 2 So Gerard's wife, completely powerless, just had to accept the story for at least the time being, although she had strong suspicions that something terrible had had happened to her husband.
Speaker 2
She was living in a storage unit. Yeah.
Things were going poorly. And I think that this just adds to the pile.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 Meanwhile, a medical examiner had looked over Gerard Jackson's charred corpse and immediately decided that there was no foul play involved, solely because there weren't any bullet wounds or obvious injuries.
Speaker 2 But one thing that the doctor was interested in was determining the race of the body, because even though it was charred, it still looked a lot like it belonged to a black guy.
Speaker 2 And Zach Valentine was lily white. Let's check its butt.
Speaker 2 Let's see if it got to the other, to the cool sun.
Speaker 2 To head off this discovery, Miranda claimed that Zach was her brother and demanded that the body be immediately released to her care so she could cremate it as soon as possible.
Speaker 2 So, by either being a huge pain in the ass or, most likely, by making a couple of well-placed bribes, Mirinda was able to get the body released and transferred to a funeral home with the oddly informal name of Martin's Funerals.
Speaker 2 Hey, I'm gonna get my mom and dad wrapped up at Sal's Fast Time Funerals, and I don't want to hear any problems with discount funerals. It's a lot of fun, it's just a slide into a pit of lie.
Speaker 2 I'm gonna take my body to Martin's because he's so crazy. He's crazy!
Speaker 2 My dad's
Speaker 2 funeral!
Speaker 2 It would be a lot better if it was Crazy Martin's funeral.
Speaker 2 Come on down to Crazy Martin's funerals, and we'll get you a funeral for half the price of any other funeral home and die. Are you dead? Are you looking for a discount?
Speaker 2 Come on down to Crazy Marty's funerals.
Speaker 2 Well, once the body was there, Mirinda brazenly demanded that the cremation be done as soon as possible so she could finalize paperwork on an insurance claim.
Speaker 2 She totally, she told him, straight up, this is what I'm trying to do. The funeral director, however, was a man of protocol and soon saw through Cecilia's lie about being Zach's brother.
Speaker 2
Think about this. The only person that pumped any sort of break was the funeral home.
You know, that's hilarious. Like the whole police, everybody's looking over their fellow neighbors.
Speaker 2 The family members of the victims are all like, what are you going to do? Meanwhile, like finally, the land of the dead,
Speaker 2
the most morbid person in town is like, I think that there's something fishy with this corpse. I can't just burn it.
Much to my displeasure.
Speaker 2
Well, that's also the life insurance is usually how funeral homes get paid. Of course.
And that's how, and that's always where, as soon as the money's involved, that's where they really give a shit.
Speaker 2 Well, even if he wasn't a man of principal, I'd imagine that the cult spent all their bribe money on the medical examiner.
Speaker 2
So Cecilia called Zach's parents and told them that their son was dead and she needed them to approve the cremation. All in one conversation.
Hey, you know, hey, how are you doing?
Speaker 2 Big ups with the sucker match,
Speaker 2 Zach said.
Speaker 2 We want to turn him into a powder. Can we do it now? Can I do it today?
Speaker 2 Amazingly, they agreed.
Speaker 2
Yep. Oh, yeah.
I expected to get this call. Yeah, absolutely.
Can we be there? I'm going to bring some towels.
Speaker 2 And they said they'd come to Martin's funerals the next day to pay for the cremation themselves. As far as
Speaker 2
we all take cash. Come on down to Marty's funerals because we take cash and I take blowjobs.
I'm just advertising.
Speaker 2 At this point, I'm just advertising. Tell me to come down there, have sex with old Marty, and you get yourself a free casket for your beloved mother.
Speaker 2 Well, as far as everyone else in Zach's life went, Electus Perdeus quickly spread the word that Zach had died in a horrible fiery car accident.
Speaker 2 In reality, though, Zach was hiding out at the Herberg Hotel, where the cult brought him insulin, food, and smokes.
Speaker 2 At night, however, he would sneak out to Cecilia's apartment, albeit heavily disguised. Blackface.
Speaker 2 My true form.
Speaker 2 Later, during the trial for Gerard Jackson's murder, Zach would try to flip the whole thing back to Cecilia, saying that he only went along with the life insurance scheme because he was still too distraught over Michaela's death.
Speaker 2 And he believed that he was doing what he needed to do to protect the rest of his family. Zach can go all fuck himself.
Speaker 2
During the whole court case, he completely denied everything. He didn't flip it all.
He's a fucking piece of shit. Yep.
The police, however, were finally doing something,
Speaker 2 although they were doing it slowly. And when I mean slowly, I mean very,
Speaker 2 very slowly. See, before Gerard's body could be cremated, an investigator managed to halt the process so they could take a DNA sample.
Speaker 2 The body was transferred back to police custody where a sample was taken, and by June of 2016, they said, they could properly identify the corpse.
Speaker 2
Problem was, June was six months away. Jesus Christ.
And Electus Perdeus would murder three more people in quick succession before those results came back.
Speaker 2 Now, as far as the insurance claim went, that was hitting Roblox as well. Because while Electus Perdeus had proved themselves to be effective killers, they were terrible criminals.
Speaker 2
As most killers are. Yeah.
Killers on the whole are extremely bad at it. At crime.
At crime.
Speaker 2 And there's because I do believe that now I'm starting to kind of see that the same gap in understanding that allows you to do these types of impulsive crimes also keep it.
Speaker 2 It obviously is the same thing as problem solving or like there's something in there that the lack of impulse control keeps them from also being good at it.
Speaker 2 I think that's why they call it organized crime. I just realized
Speaker 2 exactly why they call it organized crime because they need a hierarchy for it to work.
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Speaker 2 Well, a competent insurance adjuster noticed a lot of red flags surrounding Cecilia's claim.
Speaker 2 They noted that Zach's policy had been taken out pretty soon before Zach had died, which is, you know, pretty strange for a young guy like Zach Valentine.
Speaker 2 And the person who was so anxious to get the payout was quite close to the person who was so anxious to cremate the body. And that same person had lied about being Zach's relative.
Speaker 2 Additionally, Cecilia had made a payment on the policy two days before Zach's supposed death because the policy was already past due. I mean, it was the extreme, it was extremely suspicious.
Speaker 2
The whole thing, the account had went completely fallow. It was gone.
I think it was like no payments for two years. And then one day she paid a payment of like $12,000 to get it all back up to date.
Speaker 2 And then he died two days later, like a fucking moron. Yeah.
Speaker 2 And so since the payout was held up, and since Zach was now actively costing the cult money, because he can't work if he's in a hotel, they're fucking, they're paying for the hotel, they're paying for smokes, paying for food, they're paying for insulin.
Speaker 2 He's just hanging, he's having the best week of his life being dead. He's hanging out listening to Reggae, fucking eating his insulin, smoking his food, having so much fun.
Speaker 2 Because all this, Cecilia once again got nervous. And when Cecilia got nervous, people usually died.
Speaker 2 Now, once the cash reserves ran low, Cecilia returned to her old tricks by once again making herself the focal point of the cult's mission, forgetting about the orphans completely.
Speaker 2
Oh, yeah, the orphans are gone. Yeah.
Cecilia created a satanic witch named Jane, who was in mortal danger because she had stolen money from the satanic church to give to Cecilia. My most
Speaker 2 toxic trait as a witch is that my boobies are always wet.
Speaker 2 I'm a big, mean satanic witch, but I don't want to be anymore. I want to be in love with Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2 I just hope Jesus will take my lithe satanic body and my wide, wet pussy, ready for his fillings. This is why we need an HR department.
Speaker 2 Very uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 Well, if that money that Jane took and gave to Cecilia, if that wasn't returned, I suppose before the church's satanic accountant noticed it was missing.
Speaker 2 You have no idea what Satan's comptroller is like and what he does when you're overdue. He might take it out on my beehive.
Speaker 2 I do math for a Lucifer. Yeah, he does.
Speaker 2
Wait a second. What if I just fucking press my top balls into your bottom balls? Will that give us a little leniency, Mr.
Satan's accountant?
Speaker 2 Well, I would see if as long as I put a period here and I carry the cock.
Speaker 2 What's interesting is that Satan's accountant is Protestant.
Speaker 2 Presbyterian. Presbyterian.
Speaker 2 Well, if that money wasn't returned, Cecilia said that both she and Jane would be hunted down and killed by Agents of the Devil. Asians of the Devil are some of the most sneaky versions of it.
Speaker 2
Oh, agents. Agents.
Oh, Agents of the Devil. Yes.
Asians of the Devil are. Oh, it would be a great Japanese metal band.
Speaker 2 So the only way to keep Cecilia safe was to commit more robbery and murder.
Speaker 2 Now, it had never been the plan to kill Joan and Peter Meyer, but Cecilia convinced the cult that it was actually safer to murder the people they robbed, because then you got no witnesses.
Speaker 2 And since this was all supposedly for the greater good, greater good being save Cecilia, then there was really no crime here in the first place. Yeah, we're saving Cecilia.
Speaker 2 Cecilia's got to be saved. Look at her.
Speaker 2 Africa's never going to get their water park. No, no,
Speaker 2 this was really the nail in the coffin. Actually, I did get nailed.
Speaker 2 There are water parks in Africa. Are there?
Speaker 2
But in South Africa? Yeah, but it's mostly you go and you get it to drink it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not like the slides don't have water as much as it's just like covered in WD-40.
Speaker 2 And so the cult went back to their newest member, John Barnard, the only real criminal amongst them, so he could choose the next victim.
Speaker 2 He settled on a tax consultant named Glenn McGregor because Barnard had heard that Glenn was the type of guy who kept all his money in his house because he didn't trust banks.
Speaker 2 How is he a tax consultant if he doesn't trust banks? This is another problem. Yeah, what if he doesn't trust the banks? How is he the guy consulting about with who?
Speaker 2 Who is he talking to? All right, the first thing you want to do is take all your money, change it into silver, and put it under your mattress. That's number one.
Speaker 2 Number two, give me that silver and the mattress. Number three, I'm going to fucking punch you in the face because you're a moron.
Speaker 2
And so Cecilia told Miranda to make an appointment with Glenn McGregor under the veil of solving Miranda's tax problems. She did that.
And I'm just now fucking realizing how stupid it is that
Speaker 2
the tax guy keeps all of his money at home. How does he pay his taxes? It doesn't make any taxes.
Did he send them a big fucking package of cash? What does he do? Oh, here's an IOU.
Speaker 2 You're going to want to keep that one. Like, is it now?
Speaker 2 Well, advantageously for the cult, McGregor just happened to live on a small, isolated farm outside of town.
Speaker 2
And so on January 27th, 2016, the cult sent out a larger crew than normal, which included John Barnard, Mirinda, Marcel, and LaRue. Their X-Force.
Yes.
Speaker 2 Well, armed with a.22 revolver, tape, rope, and rubber gloves, Alectus Perdeus headed out to Glenn McGregor's farm with the explicit purpose of committing their eighth murder.
Speaker 2
We're going out to murder. We're going out to murder.
We're going out to murder tonight. Oh, but
Speaker 2 after they arrived and chatted with Glenn for about 10 minutes to put him at ease, Mirinda pulled out her revolver. Why put him at ease?
Speaker 2
What is he doing? I guess he must be suspicious. He's a tax consulter who doesn't do his job.
So he must be actually quite paranoid. So now that you're calm, stick him up.
Speaker 2
Well, perhaps not knowing what else to do, because I guess they did put him in ease, Glenn started laughing. Ah, you crazy people.
He was a bunch of children. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Because you have LaRue is super young. Marcel is super young.
You've got John Barnard, who just arrived here. Well, he's a, I mean, he's an older man.
He is.
Speaker 2 But then Mirinda, I actually now, even watching a lot of the court footage of Mirinda, you can kind of like,
Speaker 2
she had an interesting presence. She definitely was an English teacher all the way through.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 She was teaching English.
Speaker 2 Whole time. Killing people on
Speaker 2
all of this shit. Whole time.
Wild. Yeah.
Yeah. There's no school teachers on meth out there.
No, I've never met one. I've never done drugs with teachers before.
Speaker 2
Well, once Glenn realized that this was serious, he tried lunging for LaRue. But as soon as Glenn moved, Mirinda shot him three times.
Damn. Twice in the stomach and once in the side.
Speaker 2 Glenn then fell to the ground where he was tied up by Marcel. Mirinda doesn't give a fuck.
Speaker 2
She is just a fucking cold-hearted, low-running, fucking doldier, dude. That's what Graydon Papers does to you.
It just makes you so crazy. She's been like, I'm sick of syntax.
I want to see blood.
Speaker 2
Oh, I hate adverbs. I want intestines.
Did you ever watch The Last of Us TV show? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. You remember that? I remember the gays kissing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was beautiful.
Speaker 2 But remember the episode where they get to this town and
Speaker 2
the woman in charge of everything is a fucking demon. And then you find out that before all this, she was just a regular fucking person? Yeah.
That's who Mirinda is. Yes.
Yes.
Speaker 2
And really, that does make sense because Cecilia has created an environment in which Mirinda does believe that everyone's trying to kill her. Everything is dangerous.
There's Satanists everywhere.
Speaker 2 So she creates these conditions for people to turn.
Speaker 2 And I felt bad for her maybe for a little bit, for a while, in terms of being brainwashed until I watched the court court footage and then what they did. We'll talk a little bit more.
Speaker 2 Oh, no, I don't feel sorry for her in any way whatsoever for being brainwashed because it means she's fucking moron. No, well, Miranda is literally the exact person we're currently dealing with.
Speaker 2 You know what I mean? Like it's the exact, that is the exact person that we are dealing with in America currently is this style of person who's just looking for permission to be an animal. Yep.
Speaker 2 Well, immediately the crew ransacked the house looking for money and valuables, but again, found nothing. Turns out he was a tax consultant and he did actually keep his money in a bank.
Speaker 2 Although he was bad at it.
Speaker 2 Well eventually they did. Yeah, I imagine him here being like, where's the money? He's like, invest it.
Speaker 2 It's earmarked for taxes. Trying to tell you.
Speaker 2 I wanted to tell you guys. You came to me for advice.
Speaker 2 Eventually, they did find a locked cabinet. Paid dirt at last.
Speaker 2
But we're disappointed to find it. Fuck just child pornography.
Well, it wasn't child pornography, it was just pornography. It was Glenn's, it was Glenn's pornography collection.
Speaker 2 And it's all just tax porn.
Speaker 2 Accountants lay it right and like, oh, someone's, it's time to peg the IRS.
Speaker 2 Sex by numbers.
Speaker 2
It's the most boring board. It's all just like itemized lists that like equal out.
And he's just jerking off like a 69 times 69. Nice.
Speaker 2 Fuck yeah. No tits, only papers.
Speaker 2 Well, after that, Miranda asked Glenn again where his money was.
Speaker 2 But after being told, ain't no money in the house, Miranda told Glenn that she'd call someone to help with his wounds if he gave her his PIN number.
Speaker 2 He complied, and Miranda, through a banking app, transferred $345 to her personal account, writing the phrase, excellent fuck in the transaction comment to make it look like he'd paid her for an excellent fuck.
Speaker 2 That's all the poor know that got her excited.
Speaker 2 Gave her the idea. Now I see what you like, and I'll have you know you'll never see my boobies.
Speaker 2 And I know you want to, and that's why I flagrantly will steal almost $350 from you.
Speaker 2 And your untimely corpse will have to see my bush hell.
Speaker 2
But as soon as that was done, Miranda gave a signal to LaRue. It was this one.
Yeah. Thumbs up.
Thumbs up.
Speaker 2 And LaRue had apparently inherited a taste for murder from his mother.
Speaker 2 What gives me this feeling is that after the murder of Gerard Jackson, remember he strangled him from the backseat of the car, LaRue actually gave a name to his strangling rope.
Speaker 2
He called it his chokey chokey. He used the same rope? Every time.
Yeah. Get a new rope.
It's happening. It's his rope.
It's a chokey chokey. And it's everywhere.
It's his chokey chokey.
Speaker 2
It's his chokey chokey. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
He did, like, that's the thing. He gained like like a sort of attachment to his murder weapon.
You don't have like a thing right in your home.
Speaker 2 Like, we have like a shit stick
Speaker 2
that we use to get like, so sometimes when the dogs go on the astro turf. I've got a shit knife.
Yeah, right. I got a specific tool that I use each time.
There's no reason for it.
Speaker 2 It's an old scraper and I use it to get old dried wet shit out of the astro turf plates, right? I have to go and I got to scrape it out. And it's not like I get some new stick each time.
Speaker 2
It's my stick. It's my shit pokey stick.
And everybody's got something like that. We've been using my shit knife for years.
But it just becomes a default thing that you're just using from then on out.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, using the chokey chokey, LaRue strangled Glenn to death.
The only thing I have like that is my, I have one can opener or one bottle opener, my popiner. It's a pope, John Paul II.
Speaker 2
I got it from my friend Joe Garden, our friend Joe Garden. Love Joe Garden.
Yeah, that's the Popiner. I still have it to this day, and I refuse to use anything else to open a bottle in my home.
Speaker 2
Why would you? Because that's it. And it does its function.
Yeah. All right.
The key, though, is that the thing does its function, but almost poorly but you continue to use it that's the key
Speaker 2 to be one of those objects but that's the thing is that the chokey chokey actually did a very good job because it never failed to chokey chokey someone to death it seems that a chokey chokey is one of the most reliable things that anybody can have in their home it's just like why is the cute name i guess they use cute names for everything out there oh yeah have you ever when you went to auschwitz don't they call it like oh the smelly house Didn't they call it something like
Speaker 2 a go take a smell? Oh yeah, yeah, the bernie burnie. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah. We're using the chokey chokey.
LaRue strangled Glenn. I'm sorry, I just couldn't think of anything.
No, no, it's chokey chokey.
Speaker 2 We're using the chokey chokey. La rue strangled Glenn to death, then helped his sister drag Glenn's body to the bathtub.
Speaker 2 Again, they believe that by putting the body in water, it would make the time of death harder to pinpoint while also washing away their fingerprints. Wrong!
Speaker 2
The cult then left Glenn's body to be found the next day. Freeze.
The key is to freeze. That is how you'd figure out whether or not that's how you muddy up when the actual day is.
Oh, really? Yes.
Speaker 2
Freeze the body. I didn't know that.
Yeah. Well,
Speaker 2 a lot of times the way that they tell the time of death is by looking at the insect eggs that are laid within the body after
Speaker 2 the body expires, because you can tell by the life cycle of a larva how long the body has been dead. Cool.
Speaker 2 Well, that's one of many ways to check someone's
Speaker 2
time of death. You just lick it.
Or sometimes you do the thing, too. You know how you do them with medium rare and meat when you do with your own.
Speaker 2
It's the same. Yeah.
Someone get me an entomologist
Speaker 2
to find out when this lady died. Don't worry.
The medical examiners know all.
Speaker 2 Now, since the take was again quite small, Zach, the cult's new financial burden, was moved to a small farm that cost much less than the hotel. This guy's living the dream.
Speaker 2
Though there, he again used the name James Vermock to take another run at the stock market. Again, he failed.
He's very bad at it. You got to read the trades? You know what I mean?
Speaker 2
You got got to look at the cycles. It's very difficult.
It sucks. Yep.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 And the thing is, I don't think Zach's living the life because all he's eating is instant ramen because that's the most the cult could afford because they still had to satisfy Cecilia's every financial demand.
Speaker 2
Which is Terminus not doing anything all day. Yeah.
And just hanging out. He was more living the life in the apartment, in the hotel, when he was getting all the insulin.
Speaker 2
But now I feel like, yeah, this might now. He'd be like, well, I kind of want to be murdering again.
Yeah. I mean, after a while, the farm got to be too lonely.
Speaker 2 So Zach returned to the Herbert Hotel in Krugersdorp.
Speaker 2 Now, as it turned out, Zach's sacrifice had been all for naught because on February 9th, 2016, the suspicious claims adjuster not only denied the payout, but also opened an investigation.
Speaker 2 The adjuster, however, a bulldog named Shane Chetzkelowitz, did not call the police and instead took on the burden of investigation himself. The true knights of justice.
Speaker 2 The insurance adjusters.
Speaker 2 It's true.
Speaker 2 During an interview at Cecilia's apartment, in which he grilled both cecilia and la rue shane noticed that cecilia dressed in an oversized tracksuit and a hat pulled low over her eyes he noticed that she giggled and cracked jokes with whoever happened to be in the room
Speaker 2 have you seen the footage
Speaker 2
So the guy wore a cam. They videotaped this whole insurance investigation when they went in to go talk to her.
And she dresses like Gypsy Rose.
Speaker 2
Like, because at the time, what she's doing is we forget one of the games she's playing. So we have, she's doing so many different games to other people.
I think we also have to remember.
Speaker 2 So she's doing the I am a former Satanist that is beleaguered, right? And there are people coming to kill me.
Speaker 2
She is doing the I'm a werewolf. I'm a werewolf.
She's doing that. Which ties into the Satanist thing.
She's also doing the I have multiple personality disorder or DID, which is also a part of it.
Speaker 2 But the other thing too is pretty much she has cancer.
Speaker 2 That is another thing that she was a line of thought during this time period that she's also telling people that she has terminal cancer and she only has a period of time. So what she's also doing is
Speaker 2 shaving her head and losing weight purposefully and she's wearing oversized clothes. Like if you see the saying, she's like, I don't know what happened.
Speaker 2 I don't know. Like she does the whole Gypsy Rose, I'm Dying voice thing.
Speaker 2 And then what the, but then you have like this shady ass motherfucker, like they're all like squirreling around like a bunch of meth head spiders behind her.
Speaker 2 And it's just like, you wonder why the insurance broker meeting didn't go well. Well, Shane, of course, came to the immediate conclusion that anything that came out of Cecilia's mouth was a lie.
Speaker 2 To test this, Shane asked Cecilia questions that he already knew the answers to, just to see what sort of bizarre story Cecilia would tell.
Speaker 2 When asked about Michaela Valentine's death, Cecilia said that it was two Zimbabweans.
Speaker 2 Some kind of Zimbabweans that did it.
Speaker 2
Some kind of Zimbabweans. Literally point at every other country, like the Nigerians.
Anybody else? Yeah. Anybody.
But she said that they'd been deported instead of being charged with murder.
Speaker 2
Everyone knew that. Yeah.
Yeah. Not true.
Speaker 2 When asked about the supposed death of Zach Valentine, Cecilia said that his wedding ring and medical paperwork had been in the car with him, which they weren't.
Speaker 2 And she'd claimed that the car had flipped during the accident, which is why it had caught on fire, which it hadn't. I thought the ring was in there.
Speaker 2 Adidas ring.
Speaker 2 Not his wedding ring.
Speaker 2 God. Yeah.
Speaker 2 Well, I think that Cecilia was so used to having her lies immediately accepted by the members of her cult that she thought that she could say anything to anyone and they would believe her because she was just that good.
Speaker 2
Or she may have also completely lost her grip on reality. I think that that's a, I think that it's two.
I think that it's a two-folded thing.
Speaker 2 Because for a while, she really did have a foot outside.
Speaker 2 Like we talk about this a lot with cults, which is how long does the leader have a foot?
Speaker 2 outside of the cult so they can understand that what they're doing is a scam and that they don't necessarily start getting high on their own supply.
Speaker 2 Because that's what normally like they have to do in order to stay in control, they have to also have a bird's eye view of the situation so they know how to make moves.
Speaker 2 If they are too lost in the sauce, they can't make the big like timeline moves to hold the cult together. So, now I think that she has she's way overconfident to a
Speaker 2 manic mental health version of overconfident, Whatever she's. She's gotten away with nine murders, delusions of grandeur.
Speaker 2 That, yeah, she can do it, but it's only just because she's operating in a very she's operating in the perfect environment for him.
Speaker 2 Yeah, and I think Cecilia, like one of the things that I realized over the last couple of days thinking about this, is that Cecilia's cycle at this point in time is that it kind of mirrors what you see with serial killers.
Speaker 2 Is that she is, even though she is not committing any murders herself, she's still getting a charge every time someone is killed, every time she convinces these people to go kill someone for her.
Speaker 2 And what we see with serial killers again and again is that the less that charge gives them, the more they want to kill. And the more often they kill, the higher the stakes they make for themselves.
Speaker 2
And the sloppier they get. Yes, they do have to make the stakes very high.
That's how it is with me and marijuana. I don't get high like I used to, but so I smoke way more.
Speaker 2 And then, you know, I go to sleep and there's another day.
Speaker 2 But the difference between us, truly, the difference between us and people who do sexually motivated crimes, Eddie, is the fact that I could just stop smoking weed for three days and it just goes back.
Speaker 2 Yeah, you know what I mean? These guys, they stop killing, they stop raping for like six months and they feel it just as bad as before.
Speaker 2
It's like with it's honestly closer to nicotine, it's closer to what Marcus is dealing with still being on the patch. Yeah, 10 years on.
I quit smoking over 10 years ago now.
Speaker 2
Step one of the patch, still right here on the left arm. He's eating them.
My boy, patches.
Speaker 2 Patches, I'm depending on your son.
Speaker 2
Remember that? The forced patches? Patches. I'm depending on your son to pull the family through.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 Is that the sequel to Christmas Shoes? Nope. It sounds exactly like Christmas Shoes.
Speaker 2 Patches are part of an extensive list of story-based songs that have been throughout all the 1970s, much like The Night Chicago Died.
Speaker 2 Much like, yes, those types of songs. Patch is the song about
Speaker 2
a boy that's left behind to run the farm after his diddy dies. Gordon Lightfoot.
Patches. Actually, I don't remember who sings Patches.
Clarence Carter. Clarence Carter.
Speaker 2 Clarence Carter, the same guy who did stroking?
Speaker 2
Backdoor Santa? Yeah. Stroking.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 Yeah, wow, it is. Wow, it is.
Speaker 2 He contains multitudes.
Speaker 2
I love that song, Patches. Yeah, and I love that song, Strokin'.
I'm a Backdoor Santa man.
Speaker 2 I'll be stroking. Now, for Cecilia, the cult's financial problems were not a result of her spending too much money on dumb shit.
Speaker 2
Instead, she told the cult that it was all their fault because they weren't bringing in enough money. She's not wrong.
Yeah, no, there's plenty of them.
Speaker 2
If they all got jobs, they all just got legit jobs, they might be able to do this. Well, the thing is, they do.
Like, they do all have legit jobs, except they just don't pay very much.
Speaker 2 And, you know, and Cecilia is, at this point, she's created this story where she has all these financial burdens, like these medical burdens, like I'm dying of cancer.
Speaker 2
She also said my kidneys are failing. I have to pay for medicine and dialysis.
And, you know, I have to pay for psychiatry appointments for it, my DID.
Speaker 2
So she's created so many bills, and she can't say at this point, like, oh, my kidneys are fine now. Or, oh, I don't have DID anymore.
She has to keep that story going, you know?
Speaker 2 And at the same time, she's just filling up her bank account and fucking having, you know, fucking the most expensive top shelf margaritas that the Limelight Pub and Girl can offer.
Speaker 2 Because you know those silver dollar margaritas at the limelight have to be the woo man oh man. They fucking catch up.
Speaker 2 Well, if the cult didn't hop to it and turn on the cash bigot cecilia told them that she was going to be killed by satanists as far as the orphans went that pretense was dropped altogether or at least it faded into the background they aged out yeah they they uh they grew up
Speaker 2 and so just thinking an adult orphan yeah well i mean she could say anything because you know at this point it's all magic you know she's also just they you also when you get it down to people just this is how i operate on a day-to-day basis and this is what i now consider my life.
Speaker 2
And I'm doing this. I'm just used to this.
This is the temperature to which I have grown accustomed. And I am just going to keep going.
And it doesn't really, you've already made your choice. Yep.
Speaker 2
Either way, though, the only thing on the cult's mind was getting money for Cecilia. Now, their first plan was to kill Zach Valentine to lesser their financial burden.
Great idea.
Speaker 2
Because that's the thing. I mean, they're looking at it.
They're basically looking at a budget. And they're like, well, we could get rid of Zach.
You know, that'll save 40 bucks a week. Yeah.
Speaker 2
But after they voted that down, they decided. Oh, wow.
See, it didn't pass Congress. Just banish him.
No, they got to kill him. They already said they can't leave witnesses.
Speaker 2
After they voted that down, they decided robbery and murder really was their only option to make a quick buck. Tell me about it.
So Cecilia had LaRue draw up a list of potential victims. Oh, man.
Speaker 2 My list of victims is getting
Speaker 2
because that's next. That's a 2026 budget for LPN.
Now, they figured that financial advisors would be good targets because they often held appointments outside outside of their own office.
Speaker 2 You want to make money killing a South African, Dave Matthews.
Speaker 2 Or a police officer.
Speaker 2 Much the same.
Speaker 2 But having appointments outside the office, that would be key in luring targets into a situation from which they couldn't escape. So Miranda suggested her own financial advisor, Anthony Schollenfield.
Speaker 2 These poor fucking business managers and accountants are all just like, why do you think
Speaker 2 I have money on hand?
Speaker 2 All I do is tell people to not have money on hand.
Speaker 2 The difference between meth heads in South Africa and America is in Africa they have financial advice.
Speaker 2 How do they have all this staff? Do they even have teeth? Yeah, like
Speaker 2 well, LaRue called Schollenfield under the name Rouen Schuman. My name is Rouen Schumann.
Speaker 2 And I am the man of shoes.
Speaker 2 Please, I have to talk about you at a certain laces investment.
Speaker 2 That I am.
Speaker 2 You know, he was just like looking down while he was making up the name. He's like, I'm
Speaker 2 shoe man.
Speaker 2 Mr.
Speaker 2 You call me Mr.
Speaker 2 Laptop Cup Man.
Speaker 2 Laptop.
Speaker 2 He's very Dutch.
Speaker 2 I'm born Dutch.
Speaker 2 LaRue set up an appointment for the next day, May 10th, at at the Key West Shopping Center, ostensibly for advice about life insurance and investment. Yep, absolutely on my way.
Speaker 2 But a couple hours before the meeting, LaRue called Anthony Schollenfield and told him that he couldn't actually meet at the shopping center. So maybe you can come meet me at my apartment instead.
Speaker 2 So Anthony, the accountant, is going to bring with him to your apartment. All his money.
Speaker 2 That's what he's going to do. Well, the reasoning behind this runaround was that the cult believed that financial advisors kept paperwork about where they went for their meetings.
Speaker 2 So if they changed the location at the last minute, then the paper trail would lead police to think that Anthony had simply disappeared somewhere between his office and the shopping center.
Speaker 2 I thought the point was to get money. Yeah.
Speaker 2
So the idea of all this, like they do all these planning, being like, we're going to get money this way. And then it's just murder.
Well, it's murder with money.
Speaker 2
We'll talk about the money here in a second. It is interesting that they keep choosing financial advisors.
It's like, you know,
Speaker 2 you would think that more murderers would have done this. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you don't think that accountants would always be strapped and like falling everywhere with security?
Speaker 2
They were the number one money holders of people walking around. Like, I just, yeah, it's truly stupid.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 Now, when Anthony showed up to the cult's apartment complex, he ran into Mirinda, not knowing that Mirinda was LaRue's mother.
Speaker 2 So, Mirinda, LaRue, and Anthony walked into Mirinda's apartment, apartment number 17, where John Barnard and Marcel were waiting.
Speaker 2 After LaRue turned on some loud music, Miranda pulled out her pistol and told Anthony, this is a stick-up, see? Yeah, see?
Speaker 2 LaRue, embarrassed by his mother's old-timey vernacular,
Speaker 2 you are the most ignorant bitch.
Speaker 2 This is not a stick-up.
Speaker 2
It is a hold-up. Yes, he said, Mom, it's a hold-up.
Jeez. It's a hold-up, not a stick-up, mama.
Okay, and soon it will be. I just can't believe this is a detail that was in the court.
Speaker 2 Dude, this all comes out of the court case. All of this is in the testimony.
Speaker 2 And so LaRue tied Anthony's hands and feet with tape and was strong enough to pin Anthony to the floor when the 60-year-old man tried wiggling away. I mean, again, they asked for his pin number.
Speaker 2 And once Anthony's bank cards were in their possession, Marcel and John ran out to the ATM to take out money.
Speaker 2 And as soon as they were gone, LaRue pulled out his chokey chokey and strangled his third victim to death. I tell you what, unfortunately, you will not be okey-okie once you meet my chokey-chokey.
Speaker 2 And that basically solidified LaRue as the new chief executioner of Electus Perdeus.
Speaker 2 And pogs.
Speaker 2 I love pogs.
Speaker 2 Everything gets there 10 years later.
Speaker 2 Brand new thing, it's little discs. Have you tried them with a slam air?
Speaker 2 A little disc, the ultimate thing, combat,
Speaker 2 engagement
Speaker 2 with your fellow men.
Speaker 2 As far as the body went, the cult wrapped it in plastic bags and put it in the trunk of Anthony's Honda.
Speaker 2 They then drove it to an elementary school and parked it in the lot with the keys in the ignition, hoping that someone would steal it and take care of the body for them.
Speaker 2 But Anthony's wife immediately noticed he was missing when he didn't show up at home that night. And after she called the police, Anthony's car and his body were found immediately.
Speaker 2 But finally, after all those years, a piece of hard evidence was created that linked Electus Perdeus to a murder.
Speaker 2 When LaRue took almost $1,000 out of Anthony's account at a local gas station ATM, a CCTV caught him on camera.
Speaker 2 That, however, brought the police no closer to actually finding Alectus Perdeus because the CCTV footage wasn't clear enough for a full identification.
Speaker 2
And so, celebrating a win after three goose eggs, Electus Perdeus immediately began searching for another target. But the win was just a thousand dollars.
Yeah, no, it's not good.
Speaker 2 I mean, compared to 40 bucks and change,
Speaker 2
it's not bad. It's still nothing.
It's still not worth a human life. Yes, that's at least 25k.
Speaker 2 I was going to say 12, so
Speaker 2 but you know, you pay me.
Speaker 2 Live from North Wind.
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Speaker 2 Well, after finding an insurance agent named Kevin McAlpine, LaRue, using the stupid alias of Ruan Schumann again, made an appointment at the same shopping center, then again changed the location at the last minute to his mother's apartment.
Speaker 2 Kevin McAlpine's murder went down pretty much the same as Anthony Schollenfield's, but this time, after bringing the body down to the victim's car, they drove it to a bad part of town to hopefully guarantee a theft.
Speaker 2 But after Miranda made two ATM withdrawals for $75 each, because these withdrawal amounts from the ATMs in South Africa are fucking insane. Oh, you know what it is?
Speaker 2 It's the, yeah, it's the exchange rate.
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. So they're taking out like 4,000 rand.
Yes. Yeah.
It's the dumbest fucking name for a currency I've ever heard. What are you talking about?
Speaker 2 Wiemongs you, our best, most powerful fighter for liberty in our country or Rand. Paul.
Speaker 2
Everlick's favorite. Well, Kevin.
Miss him, huh?
Speaker 2 You know, I almost forgot about him. Yeah, is that funny?
Speaker 2 But after Miranda made two ATM withdrawals for $75 each, Kevin's wife shut off the car because she, too, immediately knew that something was wrong.
Speaker 2 The slightly revised plan of parking the car in a bad neighborhood didn't work either, because shortly after Kevin McAlpine's wife called the police, they found his car and his dead body.
Speaker 2 Now, it seems like the pace of murder for Electus Perdeus didn't really change depending on how successful a score was. If the score was good, they were excited to try it again.
Speaker 2 If it was bad, then they needed to do it again as quickly as possible to make up for the loss. But either way, Cecilia made sure to pressure her people as much as she could to commit more murder.
Speaker 2 Possibly because she was, as I said earlier, ramping up like many serial killers do before they get arrested, or this is also an option because she didn't want her people to have time to think about what they were actually fucking doing.
Speaker 2 Yes, I think that it had a lot to do with that. I think it had a lot, like, also watch now, because remember where all this started?
Speaker 2 This started with a bunch of people believing that the literal physical power of Jesus Christ that could change other people's lives.
Speaker 2 And then what and it went from this truly lofty war against satanic forces. And now we are actually just killing people for money now.
Speaker 2 Now we went from any form of messianic version of crime to full-on just murder for cash. And it is amazing how quickly that slope
Speaker 2 goes and how fast you can go.
Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, now you're just murdering for hundreds of dollars at a time, which is far less than we pay our wonderful private contractors at BlackRock and stuff like that, which is just they could be doing so much better.
Speaker 2 Well, and that's the thing is that it's not only like, it's not just murdering people for hundreds of dollars at a time.
Speaker 2 It's murdering people and thinking that there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. That what you do is justify.
Speaker 2 It just shows that it's a really good example of that i i i feel like the allegory of the frog in the water is you know like so overused but it's just the truth it's overused because it happens all the time you just get so used to a way of thinking that it doesn't really matter anymore also the meth gets you a little willy-nilly yeah but then i had some readjustment we were saying that the meth was way overboard then i saw some people saying that for a group of that big at four hundred dollars a week is kind of more normal i mean well it's four people i don't think marcel was doing meth no not as much you know i i don't think they were doing as much meth i don't know how much meth larue was doing i think it was zach and cecilia uh and possibly mirinda that were doing the majority of the meth yes it does seem like that and now i'm sure you'll get to this but where the is rhea uh oh she's gone oh she yeah rhea rhea has disappeared rhea moved to a new town that's changed her name and she's she's around though okay But just four days after the murder of Kevin McAlpine, Alectus Perdeus, who were basically a murderous criminal gang at this point, they made an appointment with a real estate agent this time, a woman named Hanley Ladigan, after seeing her in a RE-MAX ad.
Speaker 2 For some reason, Miranda assumed that real estate agents had cash on hand, more at least than financial advisors.
Speaker 2
That's the dumbest shit possible. Yeah, I don't know why.
Like, did they think that people were paying real estate agents cash for homes?
Speaker 2 What it also shows, if you're going to run a disastrous cult, I mean this, and this is to all of us now that are now in the midst of it, is that you should do some reading about how to operate your cult a little bit.
Speaker 2
I mean, like, you got to figure it out. You got to do some kind of due diligence.
Yeah, you want cash. You go to like blackjack dealers got cash.
Dude, yeah, like steal from drug dealers.
Speaker 2 Yeah, but the blackjack dealer only got cash when he's at work. Well, they go home with tips.
Speaker 2 Also, I feel like what they were doing, to be honest, is these are the higher echelon people that I think that they also thought that they could get pretty easily. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Because real estate agents work on their own and you can call them and single them out very easily. Oh, yeah.
That was the whole point. Yes.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 I mean, because at the end of the day, if they're just killing people, they'd get more money from a fucking waiter. Yes.
Speaker 2 Now,
Speaker 2 waiters make good cash. Make sure
Speaker 2 that I mean like
Speaker 2 a waiter might go home with sex workers, drug dealers, people that work in the black market, people that are outside of the system.
Speaker 2 That's why serial killers, that's why really good serial killers do that. They murder people that aren't connected to the system because then they take their money.
Speaker 2 This is a person that was really high up on themselves. Yeah.
Speaker 2 Well, because Mirinda assumed that real estate agents have more cash than financial advisors, she made an appointment where Hanley was set to pick her up across the street from Cosana Apartments.
Speaker 2 Meanwhile, Marcel was actually doing her best to try to escape the cult.
Speaker 2 While preparations for the murder of Hanley Ladigan were being made, Marcel was informed that she'd been admitted to study medicine at the University of Pretoria.
Speaker 2
But she's still doing college admissions. Yeah.
She's murdering people and still filling out essays and doing all of this shit. She'll push back on that.
Marcel never murdered anyone.
Speaker 2
She was just around. She was just watched.
She just got traumatized. Yes, over and over again.
But instead of being happy for her daughter, Miranda was incensed by the news.
Speaker 2 She told Marcel that she should just kill her like she'd killed Michaela for even thinking about abandoning Electus Perdeus and more importantly, abandoning Cecilia. Man, I'm so afraid of my mom.
Speaker 2 I can't imagine having, if I had to watch my mother, imagine Linda
Speaker 2 systematically killing just people, just being like, oh, you don't think I won't kill you?
Speaker 2
I could just see her being like, oh, the quilt murders. Oh, my God.
I can see her wiping out her quilt.
Speaker 2 Oh, dare you want us to move us in a modern direction. Catric Campbell lives forever.
Speaker 2 So Marcel.
Speaker 2 I got it from Vera Bradley.
Speaker 2 So Marcel resigned herself to tacitly participating in yet another murder. This time, however, their quarry got clever before she got killed.
Speaker 2 After she was lured into apartment 17 and told to transfer money to Miranda at gunpoint, Hanley instead transferred a large sum of money to her husband.
Speaker 2 This triggered an alert on her husband's phone, and after he called her in a panic and got no answer, he canceled her bank cards.
Speaker 2 This time, however, CCTV managed to capture a second member of Alectus Perdeus. Marcel was able to withdraw $172 American from Hanley's account and an ATM before all her cards were canceled.
Speaker 2 But after that, police had two suspects in what were now being called the appointment murders. But with Hanley, the crew tried a different plan in disposing of the body.
Speaker 2 After stuffing the corpse into a trash can for transport, because I suppose they were worried about neighbors seeing them carry a third body-shaped bag out of apartment 17.
Speaker 2 No one has seemed to give a fucking shit in this entire apartment complex. This is happening happening in an apartment complex.
Speaker 2 They chose Mirinda's car for disposal. See, Hanley's car was covered in RE-MAX stickers, which would make it even easier to find than the rest.
Speaker 2 So Hanley's body was wrapped in a red blanket and propped up in Mirinda's seat to make it look like she was sleeping.
Speaker 2 They then drove out of town past the sewage treatment facility, which South Africans disgustingly call those sewage farms.
Speaker 2 This is why I think there might be a misunderstanding about what a water park is.
Speaker 2 But after finding a remote spot, the cult dragged Hanley's body behind some bushes and just left it there.
Speaker 2 Then they drove back to Krugersdorf, throwing Hanley's possessions out the car window on the way back.
Speaker 2 Now, the one thing the cult didn't think about was that if they didn't use Hanley's car for disposal, then her very identifiable car would instead sit across the street from the very location where she'd been murdered.
Speaker 2 But when police came out to investigate, Cecilia arrogantly went out to chat with them about Hanley's disappearance under the auspices of being a concerned citizen.
Speaker 2 Again, like a serial killer, Cecilia enjoyed talking with the police about her crimes. Hanley's body, meanwhile, was found the next morning by a bunch of kids on their way to school.
Speaker 2
But still, no one was looking at Cecilia Stain for any of these murders. She was nowhere near connected to it, technically.
And she soon decided to start work on another insurance scheme.
Speaker 2 This time, the victim would be LaRue and Marcel's estranged father, who had just begun to reconnect with his children.
Speaker 2
He was taking them out on on like fishing trips and shit. Yeah, doing the divorced dad stuff.
You go to like the roller skating rink and you go to do all the things you never did before.
Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, now your dad's being nice and fun and he never was before. So, how's the church going?
Speaker 2 It is
Speaker 2 quite well.
Speaker 2
Daddy. Oh, Daddy, I have not seen you in so long.
Stick around.
Speaker 2 But before that murder came to pass, Alectus Perdeus would finally begin to unravel after 11 murders, all because LaRue Stain was not particularly good at crime.
Speaker 2 LaRue had used the same name to make appointments with murder victims Anthony Scholefield and Kevin McAlpine, in addition to using the same meeting location, which was the first clue that connected the appointment murders together.
Speaker 2 Additionally, LaRue had called to change the location of one of these appointments too early.
Speaker 2 Anthony Schollafield had written down the new address of the appointment, Cosano Apartments, which was the same same place that Hanley Ladigan's car had been found.
Speaker 2
So fucking obnoxious how long this took and how bad they had to be to do it. He also used the same rope.
He established it. It had a name.
The rope had a name.
Speaker 2 And once police canvassed the complex, they noticed that LaRue and Marcel looked similar to the people caught on CCTV footage using the ATM cards of appointment murder victims.
Speaker 2 The two of them were therefore arrested for murder, kidnapping, and robbery. Finally.
Speaker 2 And as soon as they were in custody, Cecilia Stain's fabricated world began to quickly fall apart. While in custody, LaRue cracked almost immediately
Speaker 2
and confessed to all three appointment murders. I think he was ready to talk.
Well, because he also knew that if he didn't, if he, they all like, I do think there's a cynical edge. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2
It's weird. Like, we call him the dumb one, but he seems to be the smartest now.
Well, you just need to be out.
Speaker 2 He understands that if I don't say everything that I know right the fuck now, I am going to be on hook for everything this is how this is why criminal organizations fall apart but that's the thing is that at at this point la rue is still saying i did everything yes he's not on his own at this point la rue is like me and marcel did it all you got us on camera we did it all yes but marcel stayed silent and wouldn't say anything until well into their trial this would prove to be a huge mistake Meanwhile, the DNA test results for Gerard Jackson had finally come back, confirming that it was not Zach Valentine who'd burnt to a crisp in his BMW six months before.
Speaker 2 Going off a tip from Gerard's wife, who popped back up, police found Zach at the headquarters of a group that organized Bible camps where he was surviving mostly on chicken livers.
Speaker 2
Okay. I hope they were fried.
Ooh, yeah. It kind of sounds good, you know? Yeah, but nothing but chicken livers.
Speaker 2 It would sour at some point.
Speaker 2
A meal of chicken livers I enjoy, but only twice a year. Yeah, like Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, the day after Christmas Day.
But if chicken livers are your entire meal,
Speaker 2
when found, Zach was quickly identified by his numerous horrendous back tattoos. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. In addition to his Electus Perdeus tramp stamp,
Speaker 2
Zach had a lion's head. Electus Perenus.
Yeah, Electus Perenus.
Speaker 2 Zach also had a lion's head, a dog paw print, the face of just some guy. No, that's Ernest.
Speaker 2
Ernest. P.
Wow. Look at him.
He's scared, stupid. Scared, stupid.
Speaker 2 Well, now he's going to jail.
Speaker 2 After he's gone to Africa. After he saved the camp.
Speaker 2
You also had a demon. Oh, yeah.
And a lot of random words and names in both English and Hebrew under the heading blessings. Blessings.
Speaker 2
Don't they hate demons? Well, I think it was a reminder that I do. I deal with demons.
I fight demons. This is a demon menu of demons I I have consumed.
Speaker 2 LaRue, meanwhile, was identified partly by his large back tattoo of a puppet that was very much in the style of Johan Vasquez, the Johnny the Homicidal Maniac guy. That is a very of its time tattoo.
Speaker 2 Yeah, in true emo style, the word puppet was tattooed above the image because LaRue said that his strings were being pulled by Cecilia and his mother.
Speaker 2 And I did not want anybody to think that the lines were either smears of saliva or some former 3D thing? So it's important for you to see it is a pop
Speaker 2 without the little joints. I would know.
Speaker 2 Now, once the connection was made between Gerard Jackson and Zach Valentine, a further connection was made between Zach and the appointment murders. And police rightly saw this as weird as fuck.
Speaker 2 So police started looking into all the other unsolved murders in Krugersdorf that had a bit of a twist.
Speaker 2 In the meantime, the leader of Alectus Perdeus and her number one woman were finally arrested in connection to insurance fraud related to Zach's supposed death.
Speaker 2
And so on July 29th, 2016, Marinda Stain, 50 years old, and Cecilia Stain, 35. Yeah, she's 35 and all that.
That's, she looks hard.
Speaker 2 I know.
Speaker 2
I know. God, she looks like a hard 48.
She does. Yeah.
Yeah. But they were finally put behind bars.
Speaker 2 And once they were in jail, police got an anonymous tip to search the high school where a Miranda taught English.
Speaker 2 And we're quite surprised to find 3,000 rounds of ammunition and shotgun shells hidden in the Homex storage room. That's just funny.
Speaker 2
God, I don't know what to say about that. I know why a part of me thinks it's awesome.
You know, like, if you found out your English teacher was like that, you'd just be like, damn.
Speaker 2
Holy fucking shit. I guess I should have, we really should have thought about how close we all were to getting shot in the head.
But she used to give the bullets out for extra credit.
Speaker 2 Very good job. But before Miranda was arrested, she'd gone to the principal of her school and asked him to notarize a change in her will.
Speaker 2
After her, yeah, I mean, your principal, anyone can be a notary. My mom's a notary.
Absolutely, but it means nothing. You just stamp something.
Yeah.
Speaker 2
But you got to, you know, I don't know how she became a notary, but she's definitely a notary. You just pay for it online.
You can just delay. Yeah.
You fill out the paperwork.
Speaker 2
I think technically I can be a notary. Anyone else? Anyone can become a notary.
Because I have a pastor's license. Yeah, but you don't need to be a pastor to be a notary.
Speaker 2
I refuse to be separate. I must be a priest.
You are a notary. Yeah, but you're also only a pastor in New York State because that's where you married me and Carlina.
Speaker 2
I belong to the Universal Life Church. And that's state, that's countrywide? Yeah.
Yeah. I can be a universal life church.
You have to, every different state you have to. You have to
Speaker 2
Except for California. Anyone can get married in California by anybody.
Cool.
Speaker 2 Well, after Mirinda's kids were charged with murder, Mirinda had modified the document to cut them out and leave everything to Cecilia.
Speaker 2
Because at this point, they're like, all right, LaRue and Marcel are taking the rap for the appointment murders. We're cool.
We're fine. We're safe.
Speaker 2 But... After LaRue was shown the document cutting him out of his mother's will, he was finally done with Electus Perdeus, saying something along the lines of fuck her in regards to his mother.
Speaker 2 Instead of taking the full rap for himself, along with his sister, he told police about Cecilia and Miranda's involvement in the appointment murders.
Speaker 2 It's important to remember that if the cult you belong to believes that certain people are expendable, that means everyone is. Yep.
Speaker 2
So the closer you're in to the inner circle of the little cult that you belong to, the more likely you are to be on a chopping block at some point. Yep.
And they are unforgiving about it.
Speaker 2
And they're going to grind you up like a bunch of sausage meat. They really are.
Yeah, you got to be the guy who just comes to a meeting once a week.
Speaker 2
That's the cue. That's the thing.
If you're in the cult, getting ground up and getting thrown to the wolves is not only possible, it is inevitable. It's coming.
It's coming in a big way. Yes.
Speaker 2 Well, the last member of the cult to be arrested was John Barnard, who had stupidly taken his own phone with him to every crime scene. So his location at all times was easily determined.
Speaker 2 Barnard also very quickly confessed to his part in the appointment murders, but added the murder of Joan and Peter Meyer.
Speaker 2 And just to put all this into perspective, the period of time between the murder of the Meyers and the murder of Hanley Ladigan, six months. Yeah, you know, it was over years.
Speaker 2 And then like in a berserker mode, like with any other heavy hitter, they just exploded with activity because again, they weren't making enough money.
Speaker 2 There was still, however, the matter of what had come to be known as the satanic murders. That was the first cluster committed by Electus Perdeas.
Speaker 2 And those murders, by the way, those four murders, that was three months back in 2012.
Speaker 2 Well, it seems the only one who truly cared about the satanic murders was a man named Captain Buison, who'd made the connection between Zach Valentine and the rest of Electus Perdeus.
Speaker 2 He had an inkling that the appointment murders and the satanic murders were all committed by this same group of idiots.
Speaker 2 But when he went to review the documents concerning the murders of Natasha Berger, Joy Boonzayer, Pastor Reg Ben Dixon, and Michaela Valentine, he found that all of the police reports have mysteriously disappeared.
Speaker 2 Just gone.
Speaker 2 Now, it's speculated by author Jan Marks that three officers, known only as X, Y, and Z in her book, presumably because she was afraid of naming them, they were a part of a cover-up for the cult.
Speaker 2 As we've said many times before, this all probably stems from the fact that Cecilia Stain's husband was a cop.
Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, and what we've seen so far, it's just so hard to say that true corruption was not involved if they don't want people to know that these were not being done by a satanic cult, but in fact, were being done from within.
Speaker 2
I think it was down to pure corruption. Yeah.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 But. Officers X, Y, and Z tried covering their asses by claiming that they'd infiltrated the cult after the confession tapes made by James or Mock had been rendered unusable somehow.
Speaker 2 But no paperwork concerning authorization for undercover work nor any reports on what they supposedly discovered were ever found. Yeah, what in the whole living fuck were the embedded cops doing?
Speaker 2 Just murdering and being there?
Speaker 2 Just hanging out, watching fucking the Hulk and watching the End Northern Hulk and trying to think who else, all the other horseshit they just sat and watched in her stinky old apartment in townhouse all day?
Speaker 2
Well, the point is that they were never there. No.
They had never infiltrated the cult. They didn't even try to, they literally didn't even try.
Speaker 2 No, they covered it all up and tried to forget about it.
Speaker 2 But also the fact that having a, and I actually feel like in many ways it was beneficial for them to have a satanic cult still running around murdering because then that gave them a job security.
Speaker 2 That I will say, I will agree with that. A South African police official claimed that the offending officers did face disciplinary action and criminal charges for fraud and obstruction of justice.
Speaker 2
But there's no evidence of that either. And even if they did face charges, those charges certainly aren't equal to the crime of covering up four incredibly brutal murders.
No.
Speaker 2 But even so, there was enough evidence to link the satanic murders to the appointment murders. And Alectus Perdeus went on trial for all 11.
Speaker 2
Now, that fucking, and the court case in the trial was a fucking circus. Yeah.
A huge pain in the ass. I watched a bunch of coverage of it.
It was, it really was exactly because you have.
Speaker 2 The problem is at the center of it is Cecilia Stain, who is a fucking attention whore
Speaker 2
and needs it, loves it, wants it. And they're all like this.
They're all a bunch of weird little busybody shitheads that really were excited for
Speaker 2
having people hear them talk. Did she take the stance? Yes.
Yeah. Didn't she lie the whole time? Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Fuck you.
Speaker 2 You know, honestly, they.
Speaker 2
I did not change it at all. I find it refreshing because I hate it.
When Alex Jones busted character, I was like, what a fucking weak pussy. Right? That's a bussy.
Speaker 2 The idea that you fucking gave up the ghost to keep your kids.
Speaker 2
You're like, you don't care about your fucking kids. Like, you really don't care.
Like, the fact that you busted it, that's why I kind of, I almost admire Cecilia standing in her way.
Speaker 2 She stayed a fucking dumbass bitch the whole time.
Speaker 2 Now, as the state was building its case against Alectus Perdeus, they found that most of the people who could have been witnesses were too terrified of Cecilia Stain to testify, and some refused to even speak about her or Alectus Perdeus.
Speaker 2 I mean, they'd killed 11 people. Yeah, they were definitely, they believed that they were killing to fight Satan, but, you know.
Speaker 2 But in the end, Amber Dupreez and James Vermock came out of witness protection to help put their former cult away.
Speaker 2 And finally, Rhea Grunwald took the stand to repair some of the damage she'd done by contributing more than anyone to Cecilia's rise to power. She could still suck my fucking dick.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, she was the reason why all this happened. Yes.
Miranda, meanwhile, testified as well, but only to confess.
Speaker 2 She recalled all of the murders in great detail, including the satanic murders, and attempted to take all the blame because even after all this, she was still trying to protect Cecilia.
Speaker 2 Mirinda and Cecilia spent months coordinating their testimony with each other off to the side to try to put, because then Mirinda wanted it, like, that's what, in the end, like, of all of it, like, Cecilia aggravates me.
Speaker 2
And so, Mirinda scared the fuck out of me. Yeah.
On the stand. Well, she's a true killer.
That's a fucking psychopath, that woman.
Speaker 2
And the fact that she was, when she's on that track, like taking it all, just being like, I did everything. Yeah.
It was all me. It's a full psychopath who posed as an English teacher.
Speaker 2 She was, when she joined lectus perdeus she was like 45 yeah like 40 like I mean she joined in her fucking 40s can you imagine that like three years from now joining a fucking cult no no like not especially not of this kind like this is fucking insane yes I mean it just shows you what normal people are fucking capable of they're not even hot they're not even hot it's wild right because even the some of the manson girls were kind of hot yeah of course i remember in college when that chick tried to get you in a cult she was hot shelby was really very attractive.
Speaker 2
And she almost got me, man. That was a welcoming area.
She had a whole seat put out for me. She was so hot and showed there.
I was just so, I was so hungover that I was late for church.
Speaker 2 That's the only reason why they didn't get me. Like, why is this church at a La Quinta? Yeah, it was very.
Speaker 2 But then I also wonder
Speaker 2
how comforting would it have been? You know, I would have received my wife. I would have received my, since, because years later, it took years for the CIA to give us all the stuff.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 I could have chose God earlier.
Speaker 2
Now, that actually happened to me once in college as well. This cute girl invited me to a meeting.
That's what happened.
Speaker 2
But that's the thing is that I. They kind of knew my name when I arrived.
I had a feeling that it was going to be like bad. So I had my buddy Nick call me.
Speaker 2 It was like, call me 30 minutes after I get there.
Speaker 2
As a way out. And if I say, like, oh, no, the station's gone off air.
Like, because our radio station used to always go off the air. Yeah.
Then it was ready for me to come to Rome.
Speaker 2 Or if I would say, like, okay, everything's cool, bye. And yeah, I immediately like, oh, fuck, man.
Speaker 2 And he, I've never heard someone cackle so hard on the other end of the phone because he was the one who came up with the plan.
Speaker 2
He's like, dude, I'm telling you, man, you're going to get caught in a fucking Christian trap. You don't understand that that's what's happening.
You're just thinking about boobies. Yeah.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 And I completely ignored the conversation I had with the girl a couple of days earlier about how God had to exist because the human eye is too complex. We'll say anything.
Speaker 2 Penises will say that's penises talking. That's not
Speaker 2 a penis listening.
Speaker 2
So back in Tallahassee, I went to the church of Hooters. Yeah, so you did.
I remember that church. It was wonderful.
Those priests were great.
Speaker 2
But Cecilia, when she took the stand, all she would say is, I don't know anything. I wasn't there.
And I don't remember. It wasn't me.
Speaker 2 It wasn't me.
Speaker 2 She goes, that's your favorite song, dude. Yeah, it wasn't me.
Speaker 2
It wasn't me. Yeah, she did.
She just said it, but very seriously. Yeah.
Speaker 2 Zach Valentine likewise denied that he was involved, and Marcel said nothing until the week before closing arguments.
Speaker 2 But near the end of the trial, Marcel admitted that she was present for many of the murders and had technically helped with body disposal, but had done so only because she was rightfully terrified that her mother would actually murder her if she didn't.
Speaker 2 The judge, however, offered no leniency.
Speaker 2 While most of the rest of Electus Perdeus got what they deserved, the judge ruled that Marcel voluntarily associated herself with the group, even though she was only 14 years old when the murders began.
Speaker 2 As a result, she received seven life sentences plus 144 years. Should tried harder to get out.
Speaker 2
I don't think. I mean, she was 14.
Yeah, I know. You got to run.
You just got to run for the hills. She
Speaker 2
stabbed one of them, right? Yeah, she had one. She had to.
Well, she tried to, but the knife didn't ever actually go in. Yeah, and then her mom had to do it for her anyway.
You know, that is.
Speaker 2
After at least 10 years. It's like me whenever I had a science fair.
I don't blame Marcel. Oh, mom's going to become a scientist this weekend.
Speaker 2
I don't blame Marcel at all. Oh, I don't blame her.
I don't blame her. It's not a blame.
Speaker 2
It just, you know. Yeah, getting out, I don't think, was really, I don't know if that was really an option for her.
No, probably not.
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I think that they were kind of embarrassed by how long it took them to figure this out.
Oh, they better. They just threw the book at everybody.
Speaker 2 As they they should have well they threw the book at everybody except la rue yeah
Speaker 2 because he actively participated with the state he's the only one that had enough cigarettes to be in prison
Speaker 2 i mean everyone else got pretty much the same as marcel cecilia mirinda john they all got multiple life sentences but la rue because he turned state's witness only got 25 years.
Speaker 2 And that's after he voluntarily and enthusiastically murdered four people with his chokey chokey. Get about six years per murder.
Speaker 2 Do you think that he can sleep now in jail without his chokey chokey or just
Speaker 2 like a little one that he can sleep with? It's hard to get rope in prison. It is.
Speaker 2 The only ropes are made by us.
Speaker 2 And that penis says,
Speaker 2 we joke off in each other, mix with love.
Speaker 2 Oh, you're talking about shooting ropes.
Speaker 2 Mikong.
Speaker 2 He talk about Mikong.
Speaker 2 But even though everyone in Electus Perdeus except LaRue will be in prison until the day they die, Captain Buison believes that there are more murders connected to the cult.
Speaker 2 I absolutely more than believe that there are more murders connected to the cult. At least two unsolved murders can credibly be connected to Electus Perdeus.
Speaker 2 And that's not even counting the story of Morin Harmse.
Speaker 2 See, in September of 2008, six years before Alectus Perdeus began murdering their fellow Christians, 18-year-old Morin Harmse murdered a friend and injured four others with a samurai sword at his high school in Krugersdorf.
Speaker 2
He did all of this wearing a mask that resembled the one worn by Corey Taylor, lead singer of Slipknot. You know, the most evil of, they are just pure evil.
They're definitely not a band.
Speaker 2
I hate that I don't believe singer's name now. I love Corey Taylor.
He's very talented. I love it.
I love me too. I fucking adore Slipknot.
Speaker 2
And that's the thing is that, like, Slipknot, they were easy to blame. They have the song on IWAD, the heretic anthem.
You You know, fucking, if you're 555, them 666.
Speaker 2
Love that song. It's great.
It's awesome. Yeah.
But as far as how wrong these people got it, I mean, I'll stand by heretic anthem as a positive outlet for adolescent rage.
Speaker 2
You would tell kids like me way back when that feeling isolated and different was a nor totally normal feeling to have. It's new metal at its best.
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 I thought I looked like one of the members of Slipknot because of my problems, my self-esteem problems. Did you look like the big fat clown?
Speaker 2 Yeah.
Speaker 2 That was the the one.
Speaker 2 You can tell by his tears.
Speaker 2 They're so thick. My tears are so big.
Speaker 2 How do I make my sorrow thinner?
Speaker 2
But I mean, that's why I love Slipknot. They were the fuck you to corns, fuck me.
I love Slipknot. It paired nicely with System of a Downs, more learned, fuck the system.
Speaker 2 System of a Downs, yeah, and Limp Biscuits, ultimately unhelpful message of fuck everything. Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 2
System of a Down and Slipknot, two best new metal bands out there, corn, close third. I love corn.
Yeah. Jesus.
Speaker 2 Have you ever listened to the original corn?
Speaker 2
When I was younger, I loved corn and I had the Maryland Manson CDs. I did not fall into the Slipknot era.
But System,
Speaker 2
I'm always down with System. Yeah, they're great.
But the boy with the sword, Morin Harmsa, he did claim that Slipknot made him do it.
Speaker 2 He said that when he listened to their music, he lost control of his body and his mind, and therefore he had to take a samurai sword and stab five people.
Speaker 2 Well, yeah, that's why I robbed that bank that one time as Michael Booblake.
Speaker 2 He did it to me. That's why I got that public masturbation charge because I listened to Strokin' by Clarence Carl.
Speaker 2 I'll be stroking
Speaker 2 to the east and to the west. Yep.
Speaker 2
Now, likewise, when police searched his room, they found the standard Ouija boards and so-called satanic spell books, which, of course, made this a satanic murder. Slap it.
That was their big thing.
Speaker 2 This is
Speaker 2
a satanic murder. But what police didn't know at the time was that just before Moran Harmse went on his stabbing spree, he was receiving so-called spiritual counseling from Cecilia Stane.
Yeah, dude.
Speaker 2 Presumably by way of the overcomers through Christ. And if Cecilia's about two years into the Overcomers at this point.
Speaker 2 And if you listen to the Devil's Door documentary, I found it a little bit hard to follow, but the ending also-the ending really illustrates that
Speaker 2 there were several other crimes that you could definitely tie to this crew. Like there is absolutely, there was another person that went missing that was a part of Overcomers Through Christ.
Speaker 2
There was another child that went missing. They have done, there is stuff that they did that did not come out.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 And so, while we don't know for sure that Cecilia Stain talked Morn into his attempted killing spree, I don't think it's a coincidence that wherever Cecilia went, murder followed.
Speaker 2 But it's important to note that murder only became an option after Cecilia's insane narrative was accepted and amplified by a group of fundamentalist Christians who so desperately wanted the myth of murderous satanic cults to be real that they accidentally created one themselves.
Speaker 2 Be careful what you pretend to be,
Speaker 2 because we are what we pretend to be.
Speaker 2 Kut Vonnegut.
Speaker 2 It's very true. And we are, it's important now to even think about how in South Africa, the occult crimes unit, there were the, that is still around,
Speaker 2 goes in and out of activity. One time
Speaker 2 there was definitely during the judgment, so there's no jury system in South Africa. So it's all done by judge.
Speaker 2 And the judge, who was interesting, was a black man, and he was trying to say that Satanism is now no longer illegal in South Africa.
Speaker 2 But in his judgment, he labeled Electus Perdias a satanic cult because of their activities.
Speaker 2 So what they did, instead of owning up to this and the South African public saying, what if there isn't a giant cabal of satanic cults that are ruining everything?
Speaker 2
And maybe we're just looking for them and applying that thought to everything. Instead of that lesson getting learned, they were just called a satanic cult.
So then it just became solidified.
Speaker 2
And then that line of thought continued on for a long time. And one of the things, I mean, it's continued on for a long time.
This is eight years ago. It's keep going.
It just continues to go.
Speaker 2 But one of the main things that it's hard is that the occult crimes unit is basically back as a way of working against these things called the
Speaker 2 Moody mutilations and Moody murders, where it's a rural,
Speaker 2 very rare, I guess, witchcraft activity, which involves the torture of young kids for various ritual purposes, which some shamans around the area say is relatively rare, but enough has happened that it has kicked up that occult crimes unit again.
Speaker 2 So they're still working on this thing in terms of occult-related crimes.
Speaker 2 And it's gone so far that it looks like old Donker Yonker might have sold a television show that is a new South African version of True Detective where they're going to go back and talk about all this.
Speaker 2 So now they're making money on it saying that it's real. And it's just important for us to see what happens when the government of a country decides that this stuff is real.
Speaker 2 and what it how it does trickle down like the way this trickled down was that straight up, 11 people got murdered that should not have gotten murdered because of the, because they were so up their own ass
Speaker 2 looking for shit that was not there
Speaker 2 or just not caring because they've already decided that this is some, this is like, I don't, God knows, but that it's some kind of fact of life that satanic cults rule the world and we have to fight them.
Speaker 2
I would say they're more of a Beth cult. They are.
They were.
Speaker 2
And again, remember, they weren't satanic. They were Christian.
Yeah. And they were doing it for Christian Christian purposes.
They were fundamentalist Christians.
Speaker 2
All of them except for Cecilia. And all of the satanic-based crimes seem to only happen as a result of having an occult crimes division.
And because it's the state viewed God as real,
Speaker 2 you know, which is extremely bad for people. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Because God's not real in that way. You know.
In any way. No.
But God can exist as a way to help you. But that's really as far as it should go.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 You know, it shouldn't be used as a way to justify murder or fucking with anybody else's life. Yep.
Speaker 2
God's been, so many people have been killed in the name of the world. Oh, very much.
I know. That's what I mean.
Speaker 2
It shouldn't be. It shouldn't have happened.
It shouldn't be. Hey, because it seems like the main guy that they all like used to be a hippie, but what do I know? They nailed him with a fucking stick.
Speaker 2
Yep. Killed him.
Murdered him. Murdered him.
So. Cougars Art Part 4.
Speaker 2
Over and done with. We did it.
We are moving into.
Speaker 2
A lot of shit, dude. We're doing the, the last thing we're doing is slowing down.
I'll tell you for fuck certain. We are fucking, we are rolling into this life.
We're gonna do this the same way.
Speaker 2 We've always done it. I'm gonna say this like I've always said this in every single time of Strife, which is you're gonna have to pull microphone from like cold dead hands.
Speaker 2
We have done this through a fucking plague, we've done these the worst parts of our lives. We're gonna continue to do the show at our utmost ability for as long as possible.
Any um hints on next week?
Speaker 2
It's gonna get weird, yeah, yeah, it's gonna get weird, yeah. It's gonna be some weirdo shit, yeah.
We've got some weird shit coming. I love it, that makes me so excited.
Yeah,
Speaker 2 patreon.com/slash last podcast on the left is where you can go to watch video episodes right now, including this episode. You can watch all the side stories episodes on YouTube completely for free.
Speaker 2 Speaking of free, you can also follow us at TikTok and Instagram at LP on the left. Don't forget to go check out all of our streams at LPNTV.
Speaker 2 And that's twitch.tv slash LPNTV. Free,
Speaker 2 you know, monetarily, but not emotionally. No, absolutely not.
Speaker 2
Absolutely. And we're on the road, baby.
We're going strong, man. We got a whole bunch of shit coming up.
Henry and I are going to come into Humboldt on the 23rd of November.
Speaker 2
And then we're going to be in New York City on the 7th of December at fucking King's Theater. And then we're going all over the place next year.
We got a bunch of great shows coming up.
Speaker 2 We got Atlanta, Dallas, Nashville, Detroit, and Toronto coming up in the first five months of next year.
Speaker 2
So go to LastPodcastonTheLeft.com and click on shows to see exactly when we're going to be there in your city or near your city. Hey, man.
Hail, sweet Satan. That's the only way out of this mess.
Speaker 2
I'm gonna keep doing it until the very end. And how gain, you fucker.
Hail, um, system of a down. Yes, yes, sir.
Speaker 2 I'm down with the sickness.
Speaker 2 You want it to.