Scary Terri | 2. The Last Will

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Before we get started, I just want to let you know that we do discuss suicide in this episode, so please listen with care. Devereux Cleaver left behind a grieving family, but she also left behind a will that she'd written herself in her own handwriting.
She was 13 years old when she apparently decided it was time to write her last will and testament. I give, devise, and bequeath all of my property, including all rights, titles, and interests of whatever character I may own.
The document said, In and to any property, real, personal, or mixed, wherever situated, to Terry Johnson, who has been to me like a second mother. Terry Johnson, otherwise known as Terry Hoffman.
Sandra's friend, Terry. And here's what's strange.
The document was dated August 1978, six months before she died. The will indicated who would get Dev's basketball, her rock collection, but also the family trust.
Devereaux had a $200,000, I believe, trust fund from grandparents. Terry would have made quite a cleanup.
The money was to go back towards Terry's organization, Conscious Development of Body, Mind, and Soul, Inc. 200,000.
That was a lot of money back then. Almost a million bucks today.
How the hell, in all the 171 million acres of Texas, does a teenager find themselves compelled to sign a will? And why Terry Hoffman? Both Chrissy and Gail believe that she created the will because her mom wanted her to. But I wonder if it's more complicated than that.
What if Sandra didn't walk unwittingly into the water? Maybe she knew a swim on the peninsula that day was a death sentence. The question of why she'd signed a will was unanswered, incomplete, like an unsigned check she'd left on the kitchen table.
Turns out that will didn't really hold up. It isn't legal in Texas, of course.
But in the midst of their grief, it did hang in the air, the question of the will. Did somebody put her up to this? It was a wild and dangerous thought that bounced around in their heads like a caged animal.

They just couldn't shake this feeling that maybe Sandra had convinced Ev to sign this will. And that even if she hadn't, Sandra might have known Terry had it out for their daughter.
And if Terry could get Sandra to let go of her daughter, what else could she get her to let go of? These shark eyes. Those cold, dark eyes.
The most sophisticated sociopath I've ever observed. Left behind a series of bizarre diaries and writings associated with Terry Hoffman and a group she founded called the Conscious Development of Body, Mind, and Soul, Inc You really see how evil she really was, like heartless.

Are those items that are used to control and combat

shield against Black lords?

I invoke the Fifth Amendment.

That it was a cult? I didn't know that.

From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Scary Terry. I'm Jonathan Hirsch.
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The Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. A beautiful, otherworldly stretch of park.
Almost 500 acres of craggy red rocks that stretch across the foothills surrounding the town. From the tops of the mountains, you can see never-ending peaks and valleys of tall aspen trees.
Here you could climb above the earth and everything in it. Terry had purchased land in this area, further up the mountain near Cripple Creek, as a future site of a center for CDBMS.
In 1981, just two years after Dev's death, Sandra wanted to go see their new property. And she asked her childhood nanny, Louise Watson, known as Wheezy, to tag along.
Wheezy did not want to go on that trip to Colorado. But Sandra convinced her that it would be good for her and it would be a wonderful experience.
And Wheezy didn't want to go. At this point, Wheezy was older.
She may not have felt like she could say no to Sandra. Sandra was in her 40s, but Wheezy was 78.
Why? Why? Why? But then, as we got to thinking about it, Louise was very dependent on Sandra, and of course was elderly. And I'm sure in some bizarre way, Sandra couldn't leave her alone and was convinced it was better for Louise to go with her.
In the Garden of the Gods, narrow, dramatic roads encircle the mountains winding up and up into the sky. It was around one of those turns that Sandra Cleaver and Louise Watson, Wheezy, were driving in September of 1981.
As they turned one of the corners along that twisty road,

their car went flying off the side of the cliff and into the valley below.

According to the police report, there were no tire marks on the pavement,

no sign of hesitation, no pumping of the brakes. The car simply took flight towards the horizon and into the Garden of the Gods, along with Sandra Cleaver and Louise Watson.
No one survived. We were sick to death about Louise Watson, of course.

She was just a lovely, beautiful lady.

And Chuck just couldn't get over the fact that,

why would Sandra do that to Louise?

So, did Sandra mean to die that day?

Had she made some kind of sick promise to Terry?

And when you found out about the death of Louise and Sandy,

how soon before you started to suspect that this had something to do with Terry?

Immediately. Immediately.

Immediately.

Immediately. Because it had happened again.
Two suspicious deaths, and both women drafted wills. Luis and Sandra had seemingly prepared for a worst-case scenario, and Wheezy, too, had signed up for a life insurance policy.
Terry had both wills. I guess there was some serious money in Sandra's former family.
So clearly there's a target here for Terry. Wheezy's will gave everything to Sandra.
So, in the event of both of their deaths, there would be the same beneficiary. This was beginning to look like more than coercion.
This string of deaths seemed to be premeditated. Sandra had a lot of personal jewelry with her at the time.
And it was in a suitcase. but that suitcase apparently was left with someone that knew Terry and knew Sandra before they went off the cliff.
And that's not all.

In the year before her suicide, Sandra's brother Krum had all but lost track of his sister.

He told me, and I get this, he was a thousand miles away. He had kids and a life.
His sister didn't want his help, despite the multiple tragedies that had beset her. A couple of months before she died, Kroom's son received a phone call.
It was his aunt, Sandra.

She called simply to tell him that she had chosen to leave everything to Terry and that if she died, this is what she wanted. There was a defiance in her tone.
Like, fuck you. No one is going to tell me what to do.
Croom's wife, Meriwether, said they had no idea what Sandra was even up to. I remember when we got the call, a friend of ours from some other place heard about the accident that Sandra and Louise had, it came out of the blue.
I mean, it was so bizarre. She'd slipped so far away from them by then that Croom and his wife weren't even the first ones to know about her death.
But from the moment he heard about his sister's death, Croomon was also suspicious. Especially when he found out that his sister and Louise had left everything in their possession to Terry Hoffman.
We ended up, you know, talking to the state police and all of that. Terry was going to get everything.
Kroon contested the will. A trial ensued.
He wished to recoup in the civil proceedings, property he felt was the rightful possession of the Beatty family. Terry obviously had strong influence over Sandra, and I didn't realize that about Devereaux until the trial.
But when Louise and Sandra died, Louise left a will to this woman. Sandra was under the influence.
Now, how she got under the influence is what you're trying to drive at. It is a disturbing and puzzling part of the story.
How does one become influenced in the way some of the victims' families alleged their loved ones were? I found these tapes of Terry. Tapes of her getting prepared for this trial.
And boy, are they something. Did she ask your advice at that time? Yes, she did.
A man named Ken Fairchild is walking Terry through how best to respond to allegations that she was liable for Sandra's death. Did you offer her guidance? I told her that she had to make up her own mind what she wanted to do.
And she had already made up her mind. She had begun proceeding for a divorce.
So Terry Hoffman is often heard on the tapes, suggesting she has no influence over anyone, least of all Sandra. Did she ask your advice before you were in the divorce? No.
Not directly? No. In these tapes, Terry would have the court believe that she's nothing more than a gal pal, a friendly ear.
Terry wouldn't even admit she was Sandra's spiritual advisor. This advisor, Ken, seems to be reminding her that her freedom is on the line.
They could lose this case. If he could get somebody on the stand who would talk about you controlling their lives, about you telling them, don't be a grieving friend.
Her voice doesn't waver. Terry's advisor tells her to avoid words that indicate she had any control.
So, Terry suggests that Sandra made her executor of her will of her own accord. Did she discuss it with you before she did it? Well, as a matter of fact, no.
One day she just told me that she was going to. Incredibly, Terry tries to argue that she found out after the fact.

While the trial to contest the will was set against Terry,

Croom and the Cleavers wanted law enforcement

to launch a criminal investigation into her.

Thank God, Sandra Cleaver's brother, Croom Beatty, contacted Dallas, District Attorney's Office. The assistant DA was a guy by the name of Cecil Emerson.
He very much wanted to pursue a criminal investigation, despite the fact that Terry was not at the scene of either supposed crime. She wasn't at the beach when Devereux drowned.
She wasn't in the car when Sandra and Louise drove into the Garden of the Gods. Cecil was sympathetic to the family's concerns, but he was hamstrung as far as prosecution goes.
Because while it seemed as clear as day to Gail and Chuck and Kroom, that Terry Hoffman had played a role in these three

deaths, there was no smoking gun. There was motive, for sure.
For days, there was motive. But there was no note from Terry promising Sandra that she would be reborn after death.
There was no recording of Terry saying that Devereaux needed to go. Dev died in what came to be seen as a tragic accident.

Violent seas swept away. of Terry saying that Devereux needed to go.
Dev died in what came to be seen as a tragic accident.

Violent seas swept her away.

The motive to have access to her money was clear,

but the actions tying Terry to her death

were flimsy at best, non-existent at worst.

Something I've been thinking about time and again in this case. You can't have a smoking gun when you die by your own hand.
And so there was little the DA could do. The trial to decide what would happen with Sandra's will began in 1982.
We had a very good lawyer who, at the very end,

said that I should go ahead and settle,

which we did. So Terry got

half of it, and I got half of it.

And that was it.

You know, we proceeded

to move on with

our life. They moved

on and left Sandra's sordid history

behind them, just as

the Cleavers had tried to after Devereaux. And in each tragedy, the money flowed to Terry.
A reporter covering the Terry Hoffman story in the 80s said to me, there was a lot of smoke. The challenge was always determining whether it was all coming from the same fire.
Terry was described as having a soft and gentle demeanor. But could that unassuming woman be a mastermind? In the beginning, it was hard to imagine she could have anything to do with these tragedies that surrounded her.
This poor orphan from far west Texas, who'd been introduced to mystical ideas from a Lutheran

nun at an orphanage. It was time to dig deeper into Terry's history and into her group.
Past is

prologue, as they say. A prologue to a story darker and more terrifying than I could have possibly

imagined. When I went in search of who Terry was before Devereaux's death, before Sandra drove herself and Louise off a cliff, I knew I had to talk to someone from those early days.
That's when I met Janine Snyder.

By the time Janine crossed paths with Terry, she was in her 20s and had a small child she was raising on her own. She just moved to Dallas.
For as long as she could remember, Janine knew she could see things others could not. I'm one of those weird people who was always psychic, was always intuitive.
As a newcomer to the city, Janine was struggling. She knew she was different, sometimes made her question her sanity.
And that's when a friend told her about Terry's meditation group. The classes were held at the Church of Religious Science.
I remember walking out of that service feeling, finally, I found somebody I can ask questions. Just like, oh, I'm not alone, and there's this person that knows, and yay, I want to know.
Terry was heavyset with a wide gait. She wore loose-fitting clothes, drapey gowns or muumus.

Her whole face would draw towards her brow when she frowned or looked serious and snap back into an overly tight expression when she smiled.

She was not striking or welcoming, really.

But I guess that, in a way, made her feel authentically motherly to some.

Her public persona,

when we had 50 to 100 or 200 people in a room

when she was speaking,

was this radiant mother figure, the divine mother. And she would say just enough to that vulnerable part of every human being in the room wanting to know more.
She was so skillful. I'm beginning to see what made this woman appealing.
In a deeply conservative town, here was this raggedy prophet who gazed lovingly on you, who promised a brave and spiritually minded path and a circle of friends to do it with. Janine met Sandra there too, perhaps the person most close to Terry in those days.

Terry was sitting in a chair, big wing chair, all regal, right? And everyone was sitting on the floor and sitting on the couches, and we were all huddled around. It was very intimate.
and she was talking about the reason we had incarnated and that we had come as individual masters to help in all these ways. Janine told me she didn't feel crazy anymore.
She had a deep longing to be okay. Terry had this way of meeting students where they were and helping them to see their life in a new way, one that made them feel understood even when they were in crisis.
Sandy Cleaver, who had just come out of a divorce, a very contentious divorce. He had chosen another woman, Devereaux.
She was raising Devereaux. She felt controlled by her parent, her estate.
She felt controlled by others. This was a place where Terry would use that and give you explanations for these contextual karmic explanations that got you off the hook if you were thinking you were the bad guy.
Janine got close enough to Terry to realize she could be different things to different people. She had many personas.
Many. We're not talking one.
She was so skillful.

For those under her spell, she was almost godlike, a guru of sorts.

Terry G.

It was baffling to people on the outside.

In photos, she appears nervous and unhealthy.

Janine said there was an excuse for that.

The fat, the excess weight she carried, was there to carry all the energy. It was necessary.
The energy she apparently absorbed from her followers. This was also why Terry wore semi-precious and precious stones.
Stones that she sold to her followers. They were spiritual protection and apparently absorbed bad energies, too.

I didn't even see that the jewelry, that she was cutting all of us by selling us all this jewelry because it had purpose. Let me tell you, for a single mother to invest over two years of her life, $25,000 in stones that,

do you understand how important these stones were to those of us in the teacher's class?

By then, Terry had asked Janine to join a circle of teachers,

an exclusive group within CDBMS,

tasked with being sort of ministers of Terry's message. She could grift you over everything.
I mean, everything was a grift, actually. I mean, that's how intricately manipulative this person was.
$25,000 is a lot of jewelry today. Honey, I had strands of all the semi-precious.
I had an emerald. I had a ruby.
I had a sapphire. I had lapis lazuli.
So in addition to the lectures, Terry sold this jewelry, which was supposed to give you spiritual protection. She made these recordings of her lectures and did private, paid consultations.
She was carving out a nice little new age niche

for herself. Terry told followers like Janine that she was a living master from humble beginnings, could pick cotton in the West Texas sun.
She was Indian, Native American. She had been on the reservation, her mother was an alcoholic, or I think, or for sure, she was born

out of wedlock. She had other siblings from multiple fathers and that the masters had guided her to leave

and be on the

whatever, the street.

The orphan who saw the light through the wisdom of a Lutheran nun, the nine-year-old who was adopted by a Dallas family who'd lost their child to tuberculosis, the Benson family. And then the orphanage.
And then the adopted family. And then John Wilder.
Her first husband. He was a trucker.
She married him at age 15 in Oklahoma, where that was still legal. That part was true, or at least the public records support it.
But the rest of it? Highly unlikely. I pulled the vital statistics from

Pecos County, where Fort Stockton is located. She was born to the Bensons, a musician and a housewife, from Dallas.
Terry Lee Benson was not who she said she was. By the mid-70s, Terry's influence in the Dallas area was growing.
The people who came to her lectures, who paid for her consultations, they were from all walks of life. Students, professionals, you name it.
Some accounts had as many as 300 people attending lectures of Terry's at Southern Methodist University. She was good at it.
And you got to, I don't care who you were when you walked in the door. Three classes later, she had the ability to hook anybody.
Now, I've covered cults, new religious movements, for a long time now. I was actually raised in one, turns out.
Long story for another time. But I can tell you with confidence that I have familiarity with the New Age movement and the mystical ideas that informed Terry's philosophy.
This was not an organized spiritual worldview. More like a salad of different so-called mystical ideas tossed together.
Janine had quickly become a part of Terry's innermost circle. She actually helped name their budding group, Conscious Development of Body, Mind, and Soul, and wrote their handbook with Sandra and another follower on Sandra's typewriter.
This is the pure wisdom that comes only through self-unfoldment and conscious development. This is someone reading a passage from the original CDBMS handbook,

which I found buried in an archive of fringe religious groups at a California university.

Terry voluntarily accepted reincarnation for the express purpose of teaching those

who are sincerely ready for the highest spiritual teachings and who are willing to accept the moral,

mental, emotional, and physical disciplines necessary for self-unfoldment. Conscious development was about your personal journey towards spiritual maturity.
Terry was there to help you along, like a spiritual coach almost. She was in your corner.
She was cheering on her faithful, encouraging them to try new

things, to become a more advanced spiritual being. Sometimes that meant letting go of people who weren't serving your growth.
You have to understand she was the most, in my life, the most sophisticated sociopath I've ever observed. Because it always ended up that Terry would be the beneficiary of any of these karmic resolutions that she would guide you to understand were necessary in order for you to evolve.
Of course, that's not how Janine saw it at the time. She was committed.
She was raising her son, recently married. She had her own flock of students and community of like-minded friends in Dallas.
It was all she ever wanted until Terry came for her husband, Rick. We had a very passionate sexual connection, but he had lots of work to do.
It was a damaged human being, just as I was, but I was aware of mine. And so I asked her to help.
Rick later told me that in his consult with Terry that she had encouraged him to explore other relationships because that was a part of his learning. Because then he would feel more empowered to be with me, who he felt was a challenge.
I mean, she did crap like that all the time to people. Now, when I confronted Terry about setting up this mess with my husband, she said, he is not evolved enough for you.
Get a new husband. Rick did not like that Terry was encouraging him to cheat on his wife.
As far as he was concerned, that was it. And he cut bait.
I really was quite innocent. Yeah.
You know, I got savvy to darkness way later. The darkness that Janine's talking about, that all began when Terry started talking

about the Black Lords. The storyline at the time was that the Black Lords wanted to take over earth.
We needed to fight the battles against the darkness as agents of light. And Terry got sick a couple of times, and it was because the Black Lords were attacking her.
And we needed to protect her, and we also needed to take on the Black Lords to kill them. This Black Lords shit was getting weird.
The teachers began to perform detailed rituals designed to protect themselves from the Black Lords. They accumulated various tools, wands, swords, and these weapons alongside their spiritual energy would be used to battle the Black Lords.
We had our protection and we had our swords and our shields and all the symbols of the elements that had been empowered. So the groups of followers would be engaged in a choreographed battle, fighting the Black Lords with bronze talismans.
And the bloodletting was happening, but I'd never participated in it.

Wait, what?

Bloodletting?

I'd read and heard a lot of out there stuff

about Terry's beliefs at this point,

but this was a dark turn.

Terry believed that the Black Lords

were poisoning the blood of her students

and the only way to cleanse them,

and there's no easy way to say this,

Thank you. Terry believed that the Black Lords were poisoning the blood of her students.
And the only way to cleanse them, and there's no easy way to say this, was to extract their blood. I vaguely, vaguely remember that there was blood drawing with, you know, like you go have your blood test.
It was bizarre. Terry had seemingly crossed a line, and Janine knew it.
But also, nothing bad enough had happened to her to leave. She was a frog in boiling water.
I never doubted that she was a spiritual being. And even as she's invading my life and doing things, and then the Black Lords are taking over the universe and we have to go have these battles, and that it was a cult, I didn't know that.
It's probably hard for someone who hasn't been through an experience like this to appreciate how difficult it would have been to leave. Janine wasn't being physically harmed, and she trusted the path Terry had set everyone on.
She was smart and trusting. But that, I know for a fact, doesn't stop people from joining cults.
It actually makes it easier for you to rationalize weird and dangerous shit, because you can find a reason it might be good for you in the long run. The thoughts about leaving Terry were growing in Janine's mind, blooming out of a black seed.
A seed poisoned by a leader who now seemed completely divorced from reality

so as to be alarming.

Janine couldn't confirm for me

when she officially left CDBMS,

but it was in the mid to late 70s,

late 76, early 77.

And Terry did not take it well.

It really hurt me. It hurt my heart that she would do that.
When I walked away, they were, you know, she had told everyone in that group that were having the battles, that my son was a big, huge black lord. I've heard other accounts of Terry doing this, calling out specific members or enemies and announcing that they were a Black Lord, a danger to the group.
But now Janine heard her son was a target, a little kid. I drove an Oldsmobile and my son was only four and I was taking him to school and the door wasn't quite closed and I told him to grab it and close the door and it swung out.
I mean, I can see this in slow motion in an instant because it was so real. We were in a vortex of energy that had taken over and he was pulled by the door because he's a little guy.
I was turning the corner. I was telling him to close the door and he fell in right with his arm.
He fell on the ground and I literally ran over his arm with my Osmobile immediately put him in the car went straight to the pediatrician but the power of focusing that amount of negative belief and energy became real. To eliminate all doubt about what Janine just described, she believed Terry had marshaled dark energy from her followers, causing Janine to run over her son's arm.
That was when I wrote the letter and said, I love my son.

I brought my son into this world.

You will not harm my son.

And now that I know how to build shields

and defend against negative energy,

I assure you my son will be protected as long as I'm alive.

And you might want to go someplace else and harm someone else. And I meant every word of it.
I don't believe that Terry Hoffman, the person that I knew, was capable of honesty. That's really fundamental.
I don't think that this person was ever honest in my presence. Never.
There was always an agenda, a grift, manipulation to get something physical, intangible, money, food. Janine left Terry behind, moved on, and tried not to follow up on it all, she told me.
The rest of the members of CDBMS, they went right on into an alternative reality that didn't exist. Except for one person.
Terry's second husband, Glenn Cooley. Next time on Scary Terry.

Oh my God, this man just killed himself.

Their reality had been skewed to think that this is okay because of this,

because this is what we believe.

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