CLOSER LOOK, E3: Understanding The Why and How

When this case first broke, I was relieved that Arvan Shreeve confessed that he told his followers

to come in, and that in all 12 predators ended up convicted. At the time, it felt like a real victory, and in some ways it was. Many of the children had already been treated harshly by defense attorneys during those preliminary hearings, so the guilty please spared the children from being forced back onto those witness stands to relive some of the memories that would haunt them throughout their lives.

What happened mattered then, and is still matters now. But over the years, I've not been able to shake the feeling that Arvan Shreeve may have been playing a longer game, even if it ultimately backfired on him. After Arvan spoke to us that night, Jackie and I had a sleepless night, and we decided that we were going to move.

So we talked about how we were going to do that.

“And I remember that Arvan had said that he had wanted to develop or purchase that entire”

block, so where he could have women come and stay, and start to develop his society, I guess, his science, his society, and his sexual way of life, so we wanted no part of it, but we knew that our house was one of his prime homes that he had discussed. So I went over to Arvan's house, I think the next day or the next, and spoke with him, expressed to him that what he had told us was not all right with us, and it was not of

my beliefs and teachings, of which he tried to tell us that it was celestial law, and not this carnal law that we live here on earth. Anyways, I told him that we were moving, and that he had an opportunity to buy his house if he wanted to. A couple of days later he got back with me, said that he was going to purchase the home, for the price that I'd asked. When I said, okay, he last thing he said to me, he says, you know Ron,

you really can't hurt me anymore, so there's really not much you can do to me, but I fear for my children.

Don't hurt my kids, and I said, I don't know what that means, I've never hurt your family,

“and he said, well, I think you do know what that means. You can't hurt me, but you can definitely hurt”

my kids. But I could still remember Arvan in his meek. A little boy, so only this time, he seemed more stern, more upset and wasn't the good old Arvan that for 19 months, 18, 19, 20 months, that we'd learned to know who he was. He wasn't that gentle, kind, loving little old man that we had come to like until then, and then we really started to see the fangs of them, whatever you want to call it, come out, and he started to portray who he really was.

When he was first arrested, he asked for an attorney, then he changed course. He confessed, and later directed his followers to come in and plead guilty. Looking back, I think he understood exactly how this might appear in the public, and that he might appear cooperative, remorseful, even protective of the children, though I don't believe that he cared about them one bit. One moment from Shreeves confession is stayed with me. After admitting to more than 30,

sexual assaults against children, Shreeves casually said that the children were the ones encouraging the sexual activity. That arrogance still bothers me, in fact it still angers me. And when he later asked me to stand next to him while he was being sentenced by the judge, after pleading guilty to four felony assaults against children, I came to see that differently too.

“I believe he was still trying to manage the room, still trying to leave an impression that he was”

cooperative, repentant, rehabilitated, and somehow misunderstood. By securing guilty pleas from the Zion Society members, they avoided something else as well.

They never had to sit in an open courtroom and face the full testimony about what they had

done to these children. The dozens of witnesses who would have testified never had the chance to place their accounts fully into the public record. And the story never came out in court with the force that it might otherwise have carried. So while Arvan Shreeves and his followers were

largely hidden. They entered prison. Shreeve would die in prison, and the others would eventually

“earn parole without the public ever hearing the whole story. Inside prison, Shreeve tried to rewrite”

his history, recasting himself as a misunderstood religious leader. And for a while, it may have worked, but then Andrea and Amber came forward. They were trying to make sense of the memories that they couldn't reconcile. They wanted help understanding what happened to them, and they wanted a voice. Through this podcast and through my book deceived, their voice, along with many other survivors

of the cult is finally being heard. So here we are, 35 years later, and I'm still facing the same

question. What is it to draws people into an orbit of a coercive co-leader like Arvan Shreeve? How does a man like that recruit followers? Hold their loyalty, and persuade seemingly intelligent people

“to set aside their own judgment and take part in wrongdoing? That's where I want to begin with”

this episode, because this one is about two things. First, how a co-leader can recruit maintained control how they can use fear, beliefs, and manipulation to get people to surrender to things more than they ever imagined they would. And second, how did the Zion society take everything from the survivors? And why did they do that? Why did they take their safety, their identity, their voice,

their memories, and still they failed to take the part of them that ultimately mattered the most.

I'm Mike King, and this is Gardens of Evil, a closer look inside the garden, understanding the why and how. The Zion society began with an evil that was disguised as faith. Arvan Shreeve took something that should have been sacred, a person's belief in God, in conscience, in moral agency, and he twisted it into a tool of fear, obedience, and control. Zion should mean refuge, holiness, restoration, and joy. But under Arvan Shreeve,

it became a nightmare. The predatory pedophile would die in prison. His group would collapse,

and the survivors, after years of pain and hard work found healing and they found their voices,

they are the true victors in this story. The predators will simply fade into nothingness, the thing that they spent their lives trying to outrun. Well hey folks, did you know that three out of four homes in the US have toxic chemicals in their tap water, and the unsettling part? You wouldn't know it by looking at it. Water can appear completely clear while still exposing you to contaminants linked to fatigue, hormone disruption,

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drawn into the Zion society? Now, the children are a different matter. They didn't get to choose any of it. They went where their parents took them, and they were forced to live inside of a world that they didn't build. That is, they were forced to live there until the raid. But when

“it came to the adults, I kept coming back to the same question of how does something like this happen?”

How does a person slowly hand over judgment, relationships, money, conscience? How do they give

studied the work of Dr. Yania Lollidge, one of the world's foremost experts on cults and coercive

control. Her research has helped put language to what so many of us saw in this case but struggle to explain. Much of what I learned from Dr. Lollidge and cult experts like Rick Ross have helped guide my own theories. Dr. Lollidge once remarked that cult leaders don't want projects. They want people who can contribute to the growth of the cult to run its businesses or manage its followers.

“That's what made the cult especially dangerous. It didn't present coercion as coercion.”

It presented it as holiness. Religious language was used to recast submission as virtue, cruelty as correction, and exploitation as a divine order. And by the time the followers began to see the harm clearly, many of them had already been drawn into a closed system of belief that weakened independent thought and normalized the abuse. Now before I go any further, I want to say this as clearly as I can. The Zion Society was not just a cluster of criminal acts. It was a coercive

system built to control human lives and it worked by eroding identities, controlling relationships, punishing resistance. All of this was meant to shield the man at the center of it, Harvin Shrieve, and the damage that system caused, the damage that he caused was profound.

When people think about cults, they usually think first about the visible markers, the strange rules,

the fear, the punishment, the loyalty tests. But one of the most revealing tactics is quieter than that. It's the attack on the identity itself. High control groups strip people of objects, of routines, of relationships, and even the language that connects them to the life outside the group. That's not happen chance, it's strategic, because memories and identities are often tied to sensory cues to meaningful objects, keep stakes, even a doll. Those items help a person

“remember who they are, what they valued at one time, and where they felt belonging.”

Coursive systems try to disconnect those reminders and replace them with new loyalties, new relationships, and their own view on everything. Andrea was pulled from the home where she lived with her parents and her family, with their permission, and placed into the children's dormitory of the Zion Society cult. She was only 10 years old, and they'd only been there for a few days. But that's where the grooming really took hold. That's where she began to be shaped by the cult's

ideology, taught what to think, how to behave, and eventually how to see herself through the group's religious lens instead of her own. And that really matters, because the cult wasn't just trying to control Andrea's behavior. It was working to control her identity, and it used religious language to make that control sound righteous, like surrendering pieces of herself that somehow that was what God wanted. Well, that is how these systems work. They take something sacred like faith or obedience,

spiritual longing, and they use it as a way to twist the child or the adults mind to cooperate in their own erasure of what they knew before, and now believe. I want to share with you a comment from Andrea, but I want to point something important out. The pre-teen years are when kids start figuring out who they are in very normal and everyday ways. It's through their friends, the school they go to clothing, hobby, sports, music, crushes, the little creative choices that may not

“seem like much to adults are really big to a kid. That's how a young person starts building a”

sense of self. They start figuring out what they like, who they want to be, how they're going to fit inside the world. And within days of moving in, her parents put her in another home, under the control of other women who began to teach her the cult's ideology.

It was my first experience ever being around classmates and socializing with kids,

and so it was my first opportunity to have a female friend or to have a crush on a lawyer to care what I wore and be worried about people's thoughts. And so I had started to develop an

soccer and being in competitive sports that I've never experienced with things as I've never

left our tiny town of paradise and I've never gone to school. So I was having a very I mean, a school experience of socialization and developing an identity that was cut dramatically short as an event of people. Well, I had been feeling since I was a child, so I was always sewing, making something for myself or altering clothing. And I did have a pair of jeans that

“I sewed myself to be facing anything. And I remember that like I was a skinny little 11 year”

12 year old, but I loved having them and just feeling like I was cool because I had a

fun sense of style of the time. I was never introduced to any type of clothing that was

hip or of the time and mostly what I wore was just from garage dolls. So looking back at photographs, I just looked like a foreign boy, and she piloted with random clothing. When Andrea was moved into the cult, the control began immediately. The women stripped away everything that Andrea had that reminded her of who she was apart from the cult. And again, taking her possessions wasn't presented this cruelty in her case, it was dressed up in the language

“of obedience and spiritual submission. When the women of the group kidnapped me from my parent's”

rental and then at the way, when I was moved into the neighborhood, I had a belief that my things would go with me. And so I had a collection of Norman Rockwell prints that I was super excited about. I was going to get them framed and I had some momentals from childhood and my jeans and my clothes. And the women that was there, you know, packed me up and moved into the neighborhood told me that I wouldn't need any of those things, so we were going. And I, you know, I kind of just accepted

that that moment knowing that God is the more important thing. But I don't know at what point it wasn't in that moment, but it was definitely a disaster. All of my belongings that I thought that I was taking with me, just completely disappeared. So any sense of identity or self

“or any momentals of nostalgia or identity is just one white screen from my life?”

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Those kinds of moves by the cult leaders was never about organization or simplicity. It was all

about control and it was about cutting Andrea off from the reminders of who she had been. What she loved, what she hoped for. They severed her connection to her family and to the world that existed outside of the group. It was a time of confusion, pain, humiliation, and sadness. An Andrea takes it one step further because she doesn't just talk about what was lost. She explains what the lost truly meant to her. It was very confusing actually because I at the time felt some sort of pride

in having a sense of self and caring about things and investing my energy into things and being excited about creativity and you know, do the sign my environment. And so when I was told

it as okay. This was God wants to remember that was the number one thing on my mind because

“of my 12 years of prior training from my mother. I was just willing to do that because that was”

the number one thing even if I ignored Aquil, texture for number two, but still number one, so she's gone and he didn't want me to have them. And that was a little confusing to understand what was wrong with them and I wanted my other belonging clearly understand that it was just the way of wiping away any of them. But I have to have my future life or future self or have to do the family. What Andrea is describing is the destruction of who she was. The objects weren't

necessarily valuable. They weren't expensive, they weren't rare, but they held great value to Andrea

because they connected her to her family, to her memories, to the identity that she had that was developing. The theft of these things gave the cult complete control, the control that they wanted. And it prevented things that they didn't want like a reminder of life outside of the cult or any hope of an independent future. The cult wanted to define everything for her moving forward. They would tell her what was good or evil, what was holy or sinful, what mattered and what didn't.

And the one thing that mattered was strict obedience. And this is what makes Andrea's story

so important because it's one of the clearest examples in the entire case of how cult leaders

try to erase not just possessions, but one's identity. And they did it while using religious language to make that a racer sound like it was somehow virtue. Back in episode one, you met Ron and Jackie Van Beacon. They lived through the early years of the Zion society cult. They got out and they rebuilt their lives. Years later, Ron became an augmented city police officer. And that's where this story took an unexpected turn for me because I was actually Ron Van Beacon's field training officer during

his rookie year. At the time, I had no idea that Ron had any connection to the Zion society. In fact, I didn't even know the cult had existed at that point in my life. But when I look back on it now,

“I think about the remarkable path that Ron and Jackie have traveled. They lived through coercive”

control through manipulations, through spiritual abuse. They lived through a time of deep confusion. Years later, I worked alongside Jackie. I watched Ron build an honorable law enforcement career. They became my friends over the years. What became clear over that time was that they had built a life defined by courage, by service, by their marriage, their family, their moral clarity. All of that came after they left the Zion society. You know, that's one of the reasons I wanted them in

this closing episode. Their story reflects both the injury and their agency. The cult damaged their lives deeply, but it didn't get the final word. In episode 7, you heard Arvin Shrieve speaking from prison to a room full of police investigators during a training seminar that I was conducting

“on ritual crime. And that's what have solved an awful lot of problems in the past and you're”

going to be facing a lot of these communities. Maybe one more point, do we have the time that I could make one brief point? If we see properly, the economic situation which is shaping up in the world, we may be in for an economic squeeze in this country before it's over with. And what does that mean in relationship to groups? People tend to band together when you've got economic problems. You think you've got groups now? If this thing tightens, where do you see what happens?

I used that same audio clip years later when I was visiting with Ron and Jackie Van Beacon about this podcast. I wanted to understand what it would be like for them to hear Arvin Shrieve voice once again after all those years. When they heard him speak, I could see the discomfort rising so I stopped the recording after just a few seconds. Even though Ron and Jackie had done nothing wrong and even though they had built this strong and healthy life afterward, hearing the

leader's voice once again brought back to the surface feelings that they and certainly I did not expect. The reaction was immediate. It was physical. It was emotional. It showed in a very human way how deeply coercive control can lodge itself in our memories. Trauma can come from words that are

happened. That's the kind of thing I saw in Ron and Jackie and it reminded me that even decades later the residual of controlling systems can still surface in an instance. Not because the survivors week, but because it happened to them and it was real. You go for it. It got my gut being kind. It just brought back. Nothing good. It did not bring back anything good. It just brought back just I don't know how to explain it. It wasn't a good feeling. And that is what makes the next

moment so important because Ron and Jackie had already done the hard work of building a life outside

of the cult's control. But healing doesn't always erase the emotional force of a trigger.

Just to hear in his voice gave me anger, gave me fear, gave me like oh, I mean it was like it's him again. It was almost like it was scary because it's like and you kind of get emotional because you're like oh my heck 30 years later there's that voice and it was scary and it was fearful and it was anger and it was like hatred but yet the same thing though but then you look at it and say the man is so and I immediately knew that the man was so evil and I then I got to feeling

that I'm just glad where we're at. But when I first heard that voice it was almost like I

almost started to cry and I almost then it was like the anger and the hatred all hatred is

“pretty and it was all these emotions built up and I think the biggest thing that hit me was”

a voice was like that's that voice. That's that voice that pounded on us for a year and a half of nothing but BS and it's like he's still here it's still that voice and it was it was it was a shock it was like oh my gosh you know and the first time we heard that voice of Arvins again after so many years it was a horrible feeling I got sick to my stomach it felt like the blood was draining out of my body just a horrible feeling couldn't keep the tears back they were tears of

I guess happy that what we felt and got out and tears for other people that were there and

so thankful we got out of there I hope I will never have to deal with Arvins again but obviously

I won't he's just an evil man he always was and it like I don't like him at all. And this is where the survivors of the Zion Society teach the rest of us something important because they moved forward and they built productive meaningful lives in spite of the evil designs that set out to hurt them for some that strength came through years of therapy for others it grew through deeper relationships with their faith tradition and for many it came through some

combination of therapy and time loving companions who knew when the listen and when does just

“be present and I think you even caught on it a little bit because I think you turned it off”

rather quickly and said well we don't need to play that much more because you might have I don't know if you saw the shock in our faces or what we saw it it was just an emotional almost an emotional breakdown but it was also thankful that just hearing that voice and seeing that because I hadn't seen him and heard him in 30 years and then all of a sudden I see that and like it was all sent and I came back to day one and right from the beginning thinking oh my gosh

how did we how did we fall for that it kind of like shut it that was the final chapter we knew he was gone he's dead he's gone he that was the end and you can't hurt it that was just kind of shut down

“that era and I believe the shock it was I could hear and you know I thought I could have the”

everything and I you know I probably could have listened to more but but it was a necessary but just hearing that voice again I just thought oh it smokes 30 years later and that's that his it's that voice we won we won you did that last we won and that's no grateful and for Jackie because she was she started the conversation and and I'm so thankful for her

it doesn't mean every memory is going to come back in perfect order or in complete detail

“trauma memories are often fragmented sensory emotionally charged and that's not a flaw”

rather it's a well-recognized feature of how overwhelmingly these experiences are stored and then later recalled what the trigger tells us is that the experience was likely real and that it carries fear helplessness coercion or domination cues that hold real emotional weight that is why the questions people sometimes ask survivors of why didn't just say more or how could you still be reacting like that now they missed the point destructive control

systems work by confusing and isolating and overwhelming the people inside of them especially

with children and that brings me to Amber the first survivor I heard from the the woman that you

met in episode one who emailed me asking if I could help her make sense of the memories that were beginning to surface in her mind now if Andrea showed us anything about the identity cues

“and how they can strip away things that are so important to them or if Ron and Jackie showed us”

how a familiar cue can stir up buried fears decades later Amber story is going to tell us something even more intimate a handmade raggedy and all that meant far more than most people would ever imagine because this is where I want to share one of the most personal stories in this entire series for me Amber Don Lee in a raggedy and all now I know some of you listening right now might be thinking why is this guy spending so much time talking about a doll and it's a fair

question on the surface because it can sound like a small detail but it wasn't not in this story and certainly not for Amber so stick with me for a moment because this is about much more than a

“doll story it's about identity comfort attachment and what a doll can mean to a child who lost everything”

and how it helped them feel safe seen and loved for a child living with instability with hunger or emotional neglect and confusion and fear a single object like a doll can become a lifeline not because children are simplistic but because they're adaptive they find a place to put love and places to share their grief especially when the adults around them are not protecting them months before the cult to cold of her life Amber received a handmade raggedy and doll during

a period of time when her family was struggling moving place to place a times living out of their car they lacked heat in their home they didn't have electricity and they barely had enough food to eat and one day a wrap gift appeared on the front stoop of their battered apartment I asked my wife to read Amber's account of that special day one afternoon when our family came home we saw a package sitting on her front porch

well my sisters and I ran to see what it was I picked it up and ran inside with it my mother struck a match and lit the carousine lamp that we had yes our electricity had been turned off again there was a little note scotch tape to the package that said two Amber from someone who loves you I was giddy I tore the package open and found a box wrapped in Christmas paper but it wasn't December really very carefully open the box and saw the most beautiful handmade

raggedy and doll she had black yarn hair which I felt was just for me because I had black hair

I wonder how did this person know that I was always self conscious about having dark hair

my sisters were blonde and and I wanted to look like my family but I didn't that doll looked like me she had blue eyes and and wore a dress made out of shiny satin with an apron and even lace bloomers underneath I couldn't believe it I searched all over the doll for a clue as to who may have given it to me but there just wasn't one there was just a heart to made of string on her

she was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me at that time

“I asked my stepmother if she thought my real mom could have left her for me and all she said was”

no and I'm your real mom I corrected myself and told her I meant my biological mom all she said was your biological mom was a drug addict oh my dad had been watching me and he got up to leave the room and said isn't it fantastic well I was smiling laughing and crying all at once with happiness everything in my life at that moment felt perfect and whole I had no idea who'd given me that gift but it was just perfect and at the

perfect time I had spent so many nights crying myself to sleep but that night I didn't I held that doll

“close and thought someone loved me enough to do this for me somebody really loved me”

well this kindness affected me so deeply because I had always felt different and lost

uncomfortable in my own skin that doll filled an empty space inside me well in the months that followed the rate on the Zion Society cult I interviewed Amber in another state where she was living she had been moved there by the cult to get her away from any influence that law enforcement might have over her it had been about six months of separation from the cult but still she held tightly to the indoctrination refusing to tell me anything that

happened to her in the northward subdivision but even then one detail slipped through and I recorded

that in my investigative report not because it helped solve the crime but mainly because it broke my heart Amber told me about losing her doll after moving into the Zion Society well as that doll symbolized a lot for me she was a mother father she was a protector she was my

“secret keeper I was living in a very traumatic the existence because of the choices of the adults”

around me so I found a lot of solace in that doll and also I was even with the emotional abuse that I also had I felt very worthless and to have something they came just for me with for no reason it it it was you know just not even knowing who it could be it it kept me more open to somebody out there does love me I don't know who but somebody loves me so if something abusive happened to me again instead of pulling that abuse more inside I was able to

go to my doll and be like well it's okay because somebody loves me now from a legal standpoint the doll didn't prove any elements of a crime and it certainly didn't warrant inclusion in my report but as an investigator a human a dad her story revealed the environment of control that she was in how power was being used and how these predators stripped their followers of their identities the doll was part of Amber's emotional world and it became a part of mine at that moment

I noted the description of the doll in fact back then I even wrote down the color of hair black the design of the dress and the special stitching that was on the message on it all of this sat in my police report for 30 plus years so and at you know I cried a lot of tears into that doll and you know took her with me on a lot of journeys and and then we were you know and in the group and because I had such an attachment to my doll and I was you know intended to be a

profits wife as a child they took my doll away from me so that I could not have any worldly or outside connections they called them a carnal connection which meant that the devil was

me it was quite the opposite so that was the time when I really you know I lost a lot of faith

“you know went into a very deep and defiant depression”

well just a few years ago Amber told me that Carla had stripped that doll from her as she spoke about that horrifying memory that stirred up my memory of my earlier police report I couldn't shake the story from my mind so I decided that I would find that doll for her at least I would try to find that doll in my research I learned that the raggedy and doll company had gone out of business

and after searching online for weeks I was resigned that I might never find a doll that matched the

description that Amber gave of her special doll. Sure there were plenty of red-headed dolls but not the one that Amber had described. Well after weeks of additional research I discovered the

“name of a woman who had once worked for the raggedy and company as a seamstress. I shared Amber story”

with her along with a laundry list of details the dark hair the style the look the feel of what Amber remembered. The seamstress's name was Lucille she wanted to help and several months later I received a package in the mail with a beautiful doll and a tender note. What you're about to hear is what happened when this handmade raggedy and doll was delivered to Amber and it wasn't by me I actually asked one of the other child survivors of the Zion Society cult to deliver the doll to Amber.

Okay so we're doing this little video this is for Mike King he he had a gift that he wanted to present to you what and asked us to wait no wait are you serious no oh my gosh I wasn't able to pay attention on what this was you were carrying around there I don't know I didn't have to come up with her name and her two in the mad. Yes, you're famous. No way no way no way no way no way no way no way no way no. I have chills oh my god it's just like

oh I got a one I was like crying oh Mike let's just exactly like her thank you there's a letter from the woman that made it in my dress is exactly like I reached out to that seamstress after Amber opened the package and I thanked her just a few days ago I contacted her and asked her if she would read what she wrote to Amber so that I could include it in this podcast this is the note that she tucked inside the box next to Raggedy Ann Amber I was asked to make this very special

doll for you and to stand your feelings for your first doll there's something almost magical

about a handmade Raggedy Ann doll I've been making them for 48 years the girls I made them for in the 70s and 80s and now grandma does and her ordering dolls for their granddaughters I love to sew since I was a child and I am 71 years old now and will continue to make dolls as long as I possibly can enjoy your doll with seal. Lucille's message wasn't about replacing the past it had nothing to do with that it was about honoring what had been taken away from a little girl it was about saying that I

see that this matters I believe it matters and I want to help bring one small piece of that story full circle. She's exactly the same doll exactly the same doll her name is Christine Ann which is like

“Raggedy Ann but different yeah so it's it's like a full circle you know life is always gonna end up”

okay so you know it's also very symbolic of the things that were taken away from me you know as a child and in that group and in that cult from you know the abusers and now I'm just as like taking back my life and being given a trophy for it it's good oh and that survivor who delivered the doll to Amber it was the same girl who Amber had once burned with a curling iron when they were just children inside that abusive system that was Dawn's voice that you heard handing the gift to Amber

Harvin Shreeve and those around him pressured families to trade safety for obedience they still

childhoods through repeated sexual abuse and they replaced agency with fear they took keep sakes and they tried to replace them with doomsday ideology and most disturbing of all they twisted an

“individual's trust and deity into submission to a predator. That's why this story was never”

about just one criminal leader doing terrible things it was about a coercive system who's effects

didn't end with the arrests the survivors were left carrying a heavy burden as the memories would

resurface at the worst possible times in their lives but here's the other half of the story the part the cult couldn't steal it couldn't take away the survivor's ability to recognize the truth to reclaim their lives and to build for a positive future. The Zion Society couldn't take away the

“survivor's courage to speak and it can't extinguish the human need for love. Harvin Shreeve”

couldn't take away the futures of these brave men and women who survived him and this story is a reminder to all of us in the true crime community that we can spend way too much time centered on the offender and not enough time on the survivor. We explain the crime we talk about timelines we talk about the evidence and everything else that matters but if we stop there we risk leaving the offender at this center of the story and they don't deserve that kind of attention so I

“want to close this series by putting the survivors where they belong at the center. In a text”

that I received from David one of the surviving spouses that you heard from earlier in the podcast he wrote quote Mike our conversations over the last 48 hours have helped be growing ways that I cannot define thank you. I came across to quote by the artist Terry St. Cloud if it's so many in the

Zion society story the quote was she could never go back and make some of the details pretty

all she could do is move forward and make the whole beautiful. Folks thanks for listening to Gardens of Evil inside the Zion society cult. If you're a survivor of abuse I hope that this podcast has offered you some hope. If you need help please reach out immediately and if you know someone who's experiencing sexual violence contact the rape abuse and insist national network that's a rain R-A-I-N-N dot org or you can call the National Sexual Assault

Hotline at 1-800-6-5-6 hope. Services are free they're confidential and available 24-7. These final episodes of Gardens of Evil inside the Zion society cult were written narrated and produced by me Mike King. They're based on my book deceived an investigative memoir of the Zion society cult. I hope that you'll continue to follow me on my podcast profiling evil you can find it anywhere you get podcasts and I'd like you to know that I'm donating all of my proceeds from the

book and this podcast to fund child advocacy efforts and to criminal justice scholarships. Executive producers are John Goforth and Jeremy Sinan. Gardens of Evil is a production of the gamut podcast network.