S5 E5 - Deliver Us From Evil

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So go to Dutch.com and use code "nightmares" that's Dutch.com promo code "nightmares." Some of the subject matter in this podcast is difficult, including sexual abuse of adults and children. While the more graphic details will be left out, the specifics can be triggering. Please take care when listening.

Those yards were such perfection that it's hard to even describe, and it's just so perfect and spotless and trying to think about the horror that happened inside there, inside those homes with such a pretty facade. It just didn't make sense, such a ugliness covered by such a beauty. It was a still summer night on August 2, 1991, and Detective Mike King was lying in his bed,

staring wide-eyed at the dark shadows the moonlight cast on his bedroom ceiling, while his alarm clock ticked faintly and relentlessly through the night. Past midnight, past 1am. He glanced over at his wife soundly sleeping, wishing he could do the same. It had only been 24 days since Aaron Anderson walked into the Ogden Municipal Building,

and first told him of the abuse occurring behind the closed doors of the Zion Society called. 24 days of working in virtual secrecy for 16, 18 hours a day, alongside his two partners, Detective Dave Lucas and County Attorney Reed Richards, building a case that would stand up in a court of law so that when they could finally go in and rescue those children, they

would stay rescued, never to return to their tormentors.

And now, in only a few hours, Mike King, along with a SWAT team, a cadre of social workers, and two-thirds of Ogden's entire police department would descend on nearly a dozen Zion Society homes, just as the sun's first light began to crest over the peaks of the looming Wassatch Mountains, a surprise raid at dawn. I knew in the morning that we would either rescue 32 children and take them away from

this abuse, or we would make a huge mistake and they would continue to be involved in a cold that was a weight that you cannot describe. As he lay awake, Mike's mind reeled. He thought about his own children, three of them, who happened to be the same age as many of those in the Zion Society.

There was something he thought about a lot.

him over the last three weeks, the atrocities, happening every day within the Zion Society.

Things, like rape in the dark.

“One day early on, one of the girls came up to me, and she said, "We're going to play”

some games downstairs, do you want to come?" These are Aaron's words from one of her interviews with Mike, read by a voice actor. I got down there, and they were about six girls wearing just negligence, little flimsy nighties. The game was called "Rap in the Dark."

The lights were off, and they were sitting in a circle with a red candle, and each girl had a card. Some card said "Rapest" on it, and if you're the rapist, then you try to kill everybody else, and the last person out, you get to do whatever sexual act you want to them. It was kind of like a twisted version of musical chairs.

So they would start by holding hands, and the rapist would start squeezing a number of times, five times, the next one would squeeze, four, the next one, three, two, one, till

“that person was out, and they would like keep doing that until one person was left.”

The group was a mix of adult women and under-aged girls, two of whom were sisters. After the last person had been decided, and the sexual contact began, Aaron ran crying up to her room. Nobody came up to console me, it had probably been two hours.

Finally, Arvin came over, and the girls that were downstairs came up, kneeled around my

bed, and prayed for me. Aaron told detectives, games like this were extremely common. She spoke about entering one of the other houses and seeing girls ages 7, 9, and 10, dressed in lingerie, playing a less than innocent game of spin-the-bottle on the kitchen floor. Another disturbing incident occurred when Aaron was in the home Arvin shared with his

loyal lieutenant, Carla. I was teaching Carla's daughter how to type. She was 14 at the time. It was just she and I down there, and Carla came into the room and shut and locked the door behind her.

She started lifting up her dress, touching her legs. By the time she got on the floor, she had all of her clothes off, except for her bra. I'm going to stop there, but Carla's show continued. And when she was done, she grabbed her dress in the stereo and said, Arvin said to be bold and daring, but not dangerous, and left the room.

Carla was willing to commit sex at, in front of her own children. The belief that he brainwashed us toward was just be a sexual being. That's Andrea, whom you've heard from several times already. She was in the Zion Society from ages 12 to 17. Like his tagline for the sexual way of life was be ready, willing, and able at all time.

“So be a f*** bunny, because that's what God loves, and that's what I love.”

So it was just be a presentable sexual being literally 24/7, and I was well-trained. Andrea grew up isolated, homeschooled with no TV and rarely left the house. When her family moved to Ogden in August of 1986, when she was 11 years old, her mother had already been a polygamist. She treats cult like a drug, and she's an addict, and she just needed a better cult,

like a higher charge, because it wasn't getting her high anymore, and it wasn't a big enough hit, and it wasn't getting her enough, having fast enough. And then, because my mom was plugged in to all the home school people, and all the fundamentalist people, someone just introduced her, they said, "Well, there's these Zion society, they're really living the Word of God, and they've got beautiful

grounds, and I think you'd really like them." So just a couple months after I turned 12, this I distinctly remember this, just my sister, and I, and my parents, drove and had us sit down meeting and sat and listened to all of Arvin's teachings, and my mom was hooked within one meeting and stuck with one meeting.

Sound familiar? That's exactly how Jeff Peterson described his and his then-wife Carlos, first visit with Arvin. Although they lived in another part of Ogden, Andrea's mom started spending more time

in the Northwood subdivision, oddly, they never officially joined the Zion society as a family.

Instead, Andrea and her sister began getting their own visits from some of the women in the cult. Like, they truly kidnapped us where they just kind of sort of inviting us over for long weekends, and then one time we just came and collected all my belongings at the house that we lived in, and then we just never went home.

My parents eventually bought a house around the corner, but we were never their daughters

again ever. Andres chances of escaping were bleak.

“So once Arvin and his women had trained me, like, it took maybe weeks if even shorter”

for us, my sister and I to just see my parents as just other group members. Your eternal family is your family. This was the case for many, if not all, of the Zion society children. Very few spent any time with their parents, even if they were cult members too. And nearly all of them lived locked away together inside the house they called the Children's

Dormatory, where they were shown pornographic images and movies and taught how to perform

sexual acts on adults and each other. Help was going to have to come from outside the group, but how was anybody, especially law enforcement, supposed to breach the cult's cloak of secrecy to reach them, detective might King had a plan.

“But that plan depended largely on making sure he got a hold of critical evidence inside”

of those homes, evidence that not only proved Arin Anderson's testimony, but that he also used to justify ordering the impending raid on Northwood. Unfortunately, it was exactly the type of evidence Arin had seen them destroy several

months earlier, back when she was still in the group, and Jeff Peterson was fighting to

get his son and daughter away from their mother, Carla. Arvin was sure there was going to be a police raid. I came home from work one night and it was fairly late and I came in to tell them I was home, and there was Arvin and Carla in the basement, with I mean, boxes and boxes of things, and they were just throwing them in the stove and they were just burning things left

and right, and said that they needed my help. They were burning Arvin's pornographic training materials, what he called his volumes. Everything was in a manual form, pages and plastic covering, and I had to take the pictures out of the plastic covering, and all it was was, I mean, it was just pictures and pictures of girls in different positions, you know, out of magazines.

Mike needed to get inside and recover proof of the crimes that would hopefully put Arvin in prison, but it's not as simple as just barging in and taking a look around. It's illegal for law enforcement to enter a home without a warrant, and to get one, an officer has to go before a judge and convince them to sign off on it.

“When you approach a judge on a warrant, you have to give the judge a probable cause that”

you are on target with what you have, and then you have to establish where individual crimes happen to tie in to that place that you're trying to serve the warren on. So everything has to be connected to the crime. So there are people that are going to listen to this story that go, you have an eyewitness telling you that kids are being sexually abused.

Why can't you just rob some folks together and run in there? Frankly, just going to a judge and saying, hey, someone said they saw something, isn't enough wait to get a judge to say, I'm going to let you kick the doors down on 10 homes, raid 100 sleeping people and take children away. You have to have more than just I saw something happen. And then you have a court system that's going to demand certain elements of a crime be proven.

But keep in mind again, in many cases, a search warrant is served on one criminal event. And in reality, we were looking at hundreds and hundreds of events. So when he submitted his request to judge W. Brent West two days prior on July 31st, Mike had to be very specific about why they needed to access each home and what exactly it was they were looking for. And if that evidence didn't turn up or any number of the myriad things

that could go wrong did, the results could be catastrophic. Judge West signed and approved search warrants on 7 of the 10 houses Mike requested, meaning there were going to be a handful of homes that remained inaccessible. More on that later. With papers in hand, Mike headed straight for the office of Ogden Police Chief Mike MP. He showed him the sign warrants and gave him a brief rundown on the case.

Chief MP immediately picked up the phone and called in two officers to help plan this raid in less than 48 hours. Imagine the the pressure of knowing that you're sending 70 police officers into what potentially could be an armed conflict. Imagine that you are hoping to recover 32 children who by all accounts are being sexually assaulted daily if not

that kind of behavior continues. Perhaps under a much heavier cloak of darkness but

“but that that might continue. All of those things are on your mind constantly.”

It was now 245 a.m. on August 2nd and Mike King was still staring at the ceiling. He decided sleep just wasn't an option that night. So he quietly got out of bed, showered and dressed in the dark making sure not to wake his wife and he then made his way toward the front door, tiptoeing past his children's bedrooms. He drove to the police station in silence down dark and empty streets. The traffic lights that hung above every other intersection along

Washington Boulevard bathed the road in red, green, and amber as he thought through every facet

of the plan in his mind over and over. As he pulled into the municipal buildings nearly empty parking lot, Mike could feel his adrenaline start to kick in. There was no turning back in no room for error. I'm Aaron Mason and this is Gardens of Evil inside the Zion Society cult. Episode 5 Deliver Us From Evil Well hey folks, Mike King from the top rated true crime podcast Profiling Evil.

During my career, I sat across the interview table from some people who looked pretty ordinary, but warned. Those experiences made me ask some hard questions about what really defines a predator. How do they pick their victims and what allows them to hide and plain sight?

“That's why I wrote Wolves In Sheep's Clothing, a book about understanding criminal behavior”

the charm, the manipulation and the quiet warning signs that most people miss until it's too late. I wrote this book for you and for anybody who wants to protect the people they love. Once you recognize the patterns, you won't just see evil differently, you'll spot danger sooner. You can pick up signed copies in the [email protected] or you can get a worldwide of Amazon and don't forget to download Profiling Evil wherever you get your podcasts.

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For less than the cost of an exam, you can get a full year of backup anytime and anywhere. So go to Dutch.com and use code Nightmares. That's Dutch.com promo code Nightmares. Mike King sattelone at a table in the Ogden Police Department's briefing room surrounded by piles of papers, plans and pamphlets to be handed out to the various teams of 70 or so law enforcement personnel to prepare them for the morning's raid. A raid they still didn't know was happening.

“Remember, all any of them knew was that a call went out the evening prior to be in the police”

briefing room with your gear at 0400 hours tomorrow morning. Up until this point, Mike and his partner Dave Lucas, County Attorney Reed Richards, and recently police chief Mike MP, were the only people who knew about the Zion Society case. But just prior to the raid,

they let two others in on the plan. First was Ogden Police Captain Marlin Balls. He was a

assistant police chief at the time and ran the OPD whenever the chief was unavailable. A seasoned commander, Captain Balls had worked just about every kind of assignment policing had to offer. He was calm and levelheaded, well respected among the staff, and he was particularly savvy when it came to communicating with the press, which they knew would swarm in once the word got out. The other was SWAT Team Commander Sergeant Don Moore. Moore was a six foot four,

former Army Green Beret, with an intense laser-focused personality. During Mike's years on the

Their plan focused on three main goals. Secure the children, secure the evidence, and then arrest Arvan. But if we had to wait on the other adults, we were okay with that because we knew that first and foremost, we had to disrupt the organization by getting the leader. Get the head of the stake. Something that was not a part of law enforcement's mission that morning was arresting the adult

members of the Zion Society. I asked Mike about that. Are you concerned in a case like that where

“maybe those people are going to pack up and skip town and you'll never see him again?”

Yeah, always, always concerned about that. We didn't want to have charges against people

that we weren't fully ready to file on because a court could then throw those out if we weren't truly ready for trial. As for a M began to approach, Mike started to hear the familiar sound of metal doors in the nearby locker room, clicking open and banging closed, infused in bleary eye officers started trickling in. Some of them murmuring about having to cancel personal plans or complaining that they had been given so little notice and not told

why they had to be there. It's such an ungodly hour. I was greeting him as they came in and there were a lot of pretty unhappy faces in there and I remember hearing one of the old salty cops that

I had worked with for many years saying that this is probably parade duty today or something like

“that. And as they sat there kind of theorizing what was going on and why they were there,”

the police chief walked in the room and they all sat a little taller. Chief Mike MP was followed by swat sergeant, Don Moore, Captain Marlin Balls, and County Attorney Reed Richards, the tone of the room shifted dramatically. That same salty old cops set out loud what they were all thinking. This is no parade. County Attorney Reed Richards. This group was prepared for some type of insurrection. We'd been told by many of the

contacts that we'd made that they had a big stop pile of weapons that if they were given the

chance could create a real mess. We're not talking about some place out where they're all by

themselves and the only ones involved are going to be there. I'm like some of these cult groups have been. This is an area right in the settled part of Ogden. So it's not a place you want to have a shootout. You don't want to have a shootout anytime, but you certainly don't want to do it in a place where you've got all sorts of neighbors living in very good federal close proximity. In order to avoid a catastrophe, this operation would have to move like clockwork.

Richards began briefing everyone by laying out the case, explaining the complexity of the situation and what exactly they were going to be doing that morning. Yeah, anytime you stay an administrator out of bed that early, you know something serious is going on. That is David Weeloth. In 1991, David was a detective in the major crime's bureau, as well as a member of Ogden PD's SWAT team. What these types of groups, they have some interesting ideologies sometimes. Sometimes that can be

extreme. So we were there to provide security for that worst case scenario. The SWAT team would be on site as a backup measure. In case the cult decided to turn their vast array of weapons on law enforcement. With the information we were given, you know, we're pretty on edge about what we may be facing when we get there and start serving warrants. Detective Marcy Korgansky was one of the officers at the briefing. I'd worked the streets and I had also worked in narcotics for five years at that

time. So I've been involved in quite a few raids and all of those were relatively small and comparison to this. This was huge to be involved in that and to be a part of that and to, you know, to know that we were going in a place where a lot of children were being abused. We took it so seriously and we were just flabbergasted by how horrible it was and we just wanted to do everything exactly right and not make any mistakes. They also heard from multiple sources that AK-47 assault

“rifles were hidden in secret compartments throughout the various residences. There were 14 homes”

in this community that were interconnected by alarm systems by a communication network and guarded by centuries who watched over it. We knew that most of those homes had fortifications on parts of the homes like windows with bars on those or metal doors or multiple lock systems on a door. Each team of four or five officers including a team leader was assigned to a particular house.

listed specific evidence Mike believed was in each home that each team was responsible for finding.

“Pornographic material, sexual stimulation aids, see-through lingerie,”

four of the homes specified videos that depicted unclothed children. And although they couldn't enter the homes they didn't have warrants for, officers were still needed in those locations to make sure they could respond if anyone decided they wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. There were crime scene investigators, evidence collectors, social workers, paramedics, two canine officers to back up the SWAT team. Six patrol officers

were assigned to traffic control to shut down access in and out of the neighborhood and to keep

the media at bay. But none of this would work if it didn't all happen at precisely the same moment

and that wasn't going to happen unless everyone knew exactly what to do. We broke off into smaller groups, we spent almost an hour and a half just prepping and reviewing aerial imagery and other kinds of things before sending them out. Aerial imagery gave them the layout of the neighborhood

“and could be used to determine the best way to approach each home. But what was waiting for them”

on the inside? I'll attach to the warrants in every team's packet where copies of maps of each home that Erin Anderson had hand drawn online notebook paper. She knew every nook and cranny, closets, doors, furniture, hidden gun compartments, secret door alarms, which windows had bars on them.

And interestingly, there was another person who played an unknowing role in preparation

whom you've met before, although he didn't even realize what he was doing at the time. I'd have to have the clue, then I just worked Gray Verde's and I don't even know who was included in the raid to be honest with you. Ron van Beacon and his wife Jackie moved into the northward subdivision next door to Arvin's son way back in episode 1. You'll remember they eventually fled leaving the neighborhood and the Zion society behind them, but in the ensuing years, Ron got

“a job with the Ogden PD. But he had no idea about the investigation or the secret raid that was”

being planned right under his nose. Ron worked overnight at the time with the graveyard shift. Apparently, someone had found out he had lived among Arvin and his group a decade or so earlier. One of the team leaders from SWAT took me one graveyard night and asked me to show him the homes and then asked me to give description of the inside of the homes. Not really realizing what was going on and I thought, well, I don't know, that's weird. So he got in my patrol car and we drove

around and looked at it and I'm like, okay, and that was the end of it. Or so he thought. Ron did not participate in the raid. He worked his regular overnight shift completely unaware until like we saw it on the news. At the conclusion of the morning's briefing at around 530 a.m., the teams quietly made their way out into the darkness, toward the designated meeting spot and parked lights off just south of the only entrance into the northward subdivision.

As six o'clock ticked ever closer, Mike made his way from team to team, car to car, making sure everyone was crystal clear on the plan and that they had their warrants in hand. Mike told me that later he learned a member of the Zion Society had just left for work moments before they started staging. If they'd been spotted, that person could have made a phone call or turned right back around and locked it all down. All it would have taken was the wrong

early morning jogger or dogwalker to have ruined everything. David we love and the other members of the SWAT team were on standby in their windowless van a block away. You're sitting there with eight or ten other team members just waiting and is it going to end peacefully or are we going to get the call that shots have been fired officers or down citizens or down suspects or down. And yeah, it's very tense and again waiting is the hardest part. The trap was set. The spring

coiled and ready to pop. All the runners were at their places, feet on the starting block, muscles tense, focused. Their heart beats pounding in the empty silence, waiting for the crack of the pistol in three, two, one. The clock struck six, the police radio crackled and the voice of Captain Marlon Balls broke the

were covering, which window they were covering and that everyone had to go in immediately and

“simultaneously and that really was probably the most stressful few moments in time.”

With surgical precision, each team approached its designated home and knocked on the door. You know, they were pretty calm for us coming in and bursting into their house in the early morning hours. That's detective Marcie Korgenski again. Usually if their children involved on any kind of a search warrant, there's a lot of screaming and crying going on and people are upset and they're hurling insults and all kinds of derogatory comments at the police officers and none of

this happened. As each team made their way inside their assigned homes, the residents gathered in their living rooms. Except for a few of them who spoke with police, most of the adults and children sat quietly on the couches or on the floor. They seemed very compliant. They just seemed

“like nice people and so it was a conflict in my mind that these really nice people had”

do such horrific things to these children. Detective Korgenski had gone inside one of the homes along with another detective, a reserve officer, and a child protective services worker. They were upset. The children were upset and mother was upset about the situation and they knew it was a search warrant and the children were being removed from the home and they wanted to pray about it. So we decided to go ahead and let them do that. Anything to make the children feel better.

You know, we knew they were already had been victimized so much so they prayed and the other detective that was with me spoke with the father and I spoke with the mother. Then she was taken aside by the social worker who had been talking with the children.

“And there were some comments about some marks on the upper inner legs of these children.”

A number of these children had these little swords on their legs.

So Marcy mentioned them to the mother. And I'll just I just never forgot it because I was just so

surprised by her answer. I said, are you concerned about these little swords on something to that effect? And she said, "Oh, they're just herpes." And I said, "They're just herpes or they're what?" And she said, "They're just herpes." And I didn't know initially what she meant by that. Those little marks on their legs were herpes. And they didn't understand the gravity of these little all of these little children having herpes sexually transmitted disease that would

go with them throughout their entire life. She had no idea how serious what that was on their legs. It was just unbelievable to me and I just never forgot that comment from her always just herpes. And I just I felt for those children. The Zion society children who were there that day were taken from the cult's home and put into the hands of caring professionals. We started putting the children into the custody of child and family services, the protective

social workers who put them into vans and took them to the children's advocacy center, which we call it a children's justice center. They were safe for now. Ultimately, all of the planning and professionalism paid off. Within three minutes every home had been reported secured. So within that hundred and eighty seconds, every home, every individual inside those homes was secured by those

bus teams, which is just phenomenal. Here's Swats David Weeloth. It's planned for the worst and hope for the best. And you know, we're in that vans sitting and waiting and I was waiting for the worst case scenario that we're going to exit the vans and we're going to be neck deep and something pretty ugly. So yeah, there was a relief.

Aryan goal is always peaceful resolution. But it was a close call. I had conveniently

the morning of the raid had the left for work just minutes before the raid. Andrea, who you've met, this is her older sister Laura. Laura was 19 and had a job at a hotel where her shift began early in the morning. She's the one I heard about later, who nearly missed running into everyone staged outside the neighborhood moments before the raid began. Somehow the dominoes in my life felt that direction that day for whatever reason. So I don't have that trauma of a raid and sitting for hours

law enforcement was able to breathe a small sigh of relief. But the work was only just beginning.

My job as the lead investigator was not only to find Arvan, but to go from house to house and

“make sure that we were hitting all of the key things that we needed to hit in order to satisfy”

the search warrant and the criminal cases that I'd build. But so far, no sign of Arvan Shreeve. So the initial wave of officers dealt with the people on the premises and remember the only arrest warrant that day was for Arvan. So none of the other adults were taken into custody. But now it was time for Detective Dave Lucas and the various evidence teams to begin searching the homes

and taking photograph and video evidence of what they saw inside. The place was spotless with no

clutter anywhere. This is a voice actor reading from an email sent to Mike King from Ogden Police Sergeant Blaine Clifford. I observed in the storage room downstairs that all of the food storage and other items were also very organized and in a specific order. With most interest to me, was that each storage shelf was covered with handmade curtains that covered that specific shelf. It was spotless. I also became aware that the other residences were similarly arranged.

I've seen pictures and every single item, every bag, every bucket, every can was organized and arranged meticulously so that each label faced straight outward like a perfect grocery store display

that had never been touched. Also, what stood out to me was that in the dresser drawers specifically

the Pani drawers, there were what seemed like dozens of pairs of sexy panties. Each was very neatly folding and arranged neatly in the drawer overlapping but not covering so that you see exactly what type it was without rifling through the items. Apparently the volume of neatly organized

“lingerie stood out to other officers as well. It's so, oh my goodness, what is this for?”

Just these drawers and drawers of laundry neatly folded in their own little place every single one and just so much of it, it was just a lot. For six hours, teams scoured every inch of every home they could and what they found was just what they were looking for. Mike felt like he dropped a sledgehammer on the Zion society and smashed the cult to pieces. Well, thankfully we recovered a boatload of evidence to support the crimes that we were alleging had occurred. We recovered

pornographic material. We recovered video audio. We recovered print form pornography, print manuals as part of the doctrine that they were teaching. We recovered sexual stimulation aids. We recovered clothing that was intimate and built for children, not adults, all kinds of

“evidence. Remember when Aaron walked in on Arvan and Carla heaving piles of pornography into the fire?”

That was only a few months prior, which really brings up an interesting question. If they literally burned boxes and boxes of pornography and we recovered boxes and boxes of pornography and it can only make you wonder what must have been inside those homes. Another interesting question, why hadn't the cult members used their guns to try and repel the police? They had the fire power, maybe it was because their profit wasn't there to lead the charge. Was there anything you

were looking for that you didn't find when it came to evidence? The only thing we didn't find was Arvan's leave. While he had what he needed now to move the case against the Zion Society forward in court, Mike didn't have the man he was after. The head of the snake, as he put it, and if he didn't find him, what would stop Arvan from picking up shop and moving his perverted empire further out of civilization deeper into the shadows? This is not over. Mike was still on a

mission, and with the children now in protective custody, he turned his focus, hunting down, and apprehending Arvan's dream.

Zion Society children. Kids who had been brainwashed into accepting abuse and social workers who,

“because of the investigations intense need for secrecy, were only informed the previous after”

noon that they needed a plan to handle them all. And it wasn't easy. It was pretty obvious to everyone that they'd been coached on what to say and how to act if they were ever questioned. Some of the teenagers seemed aloof, standoffish, or even combative. Andrea was 17 on the day of the raid. And it's hard to convey what my psyche might have been doing, kind of realizing to some degree what was actually happening. The bad guys had gotten us,

had found us out, but there were still bad guys and it was so very scary, so I wasn't going through,

oh, I've been, I've been saved. I'm getting like released from my capture. You have the terror,

the office of terror. So I just probably just shut down. I sat there on the couch and just shut down.

“I distinctly remember what I was wearing that day. The lingerie that I was wearing when I was”

pulled out of bed. I remember very little else about that day. I remember sitting across like it on the couch and just probably disassociating significantly. I don't remember my, I don't remember anything else. It's the weirdest thing. When the Zion Society's doors were open and the outside world, Babylon, as Arvan called it, started looking around, it was the beginning of an intense period of discovery. The outside world was about to learn of the Zion Society.

And although there would be articles in newspapers and reports on TV,

what you're going to hear now on this podcast is something you would have never heard then.

A first-hand account of day-to-day life inside the cult. Here is Andrea. I think the number one goal was just to keep us busy constantly and it wasn't just like, "Oh, you know, do stuff as soon as you wake up. It was an extremely militant environment." Like, same as a military. Like, you get up at this moment. You more or less "sh*t" at this moment. You go "E", you know, you make your, you know, everything was on a clock.

I think it was every 15 minutes, every 30 minute blocks. You were either bathing yourself, which was twice a day, cleaning the house, sewing clothes for yourself, Bible study, child care, lawn care. Our venue that if someone had too much time to think about what was happening, they might come to a conclusion he didn't like. So that kind of thing was tightly controlled.

“Well, the only thing that where the clock stopped is when someone was going to introduce a”

sexual assault, then of course everything else out the window, because that's the number one priority. So if someone was to a proposition you then, you know, if they under calendar, it's okay if you skip that. But oftentimes the sexual assaults were also just planned on your calendar. When Andrea says sexual assault here, she's referring to his sex between an abuser and their child victim. And I can't wrap my head around what it must have felt like to live with the anxiety

that at any moment something awful was going to happen and often did. I wasn't aware of that. Obviously at the time, as I was so shut down as a sociologist, I couldn't be aware of that panic. That was in denial for several years until I really got into therapy like ten years later. But that kind of panic fear of the world like something bad could happen any moment has been my baseline my entire life up until a few years ago. So it just stays

in your psyche of the world as a scary place and that people are bad and they will do bad things to me. And that's kind of what it's like to live with like that kind of trauma just that fear it stays in your body. When it came to bodies, Arvan had rules about them too. He would justify his pedophilia by saying their earthly bodies weren't their true selves and that their spiritual bodies were closer in age. But that didn't mean he was unconcerned with

their earthly bodies. Quite the contrary. Each girl had daily weigh-ins. There was a scale in every house of course, but we went across the street to the house that Arvan lived in because one of our sister wives who was in charge of, you know, taking the hammer down and writing it on a chart, a public chart that everyone could see, of course, she lived there so you just ran across the street

So my target weight was insanely thin. It's like anorexic thin standards and at the time my

target weight was supposed to be between 105 and 108 pounds. So that became actually like a very large source of my psychological trauma of that terror of not being good enough unless that number on the scale was a certain number. And just the kind of the criticism and dialogue I would go on every day with what I was being in mouth and what I was going to weigh and I wasn't getting into heaven unless I was under a certain weight and it was just extraordinary. Arvan convinced 12-year-old

Andrea and the other girls in the cult that if they were more than a pound or two over their goal weight, the consequences would be eternal. So what would happen essentially is that Arvan didn't want to have sex with you unless your body was perfect and having sex with him was what got you

“into heaven because that's what he had trained us all to believe that the more you have sex with me”

and all the women, the more spiritual you are, thus the more God will love you, how let you into heaven. So to me it was a super easy equation I must be thin to get into heaven. So essentially he would stop having sex with you which you would seem like a positive thing but then you would have the extraordinary guilt of oh but now I'm no good I'm just like a dead weight to the family unit. Here again is Andrea's sister Laura. There was at one point that any of us that were over

our goal weight were moved into a what they dubbed the fat house. There was four bedrooms so if two of us shared a bedroom there could have been eight of us. My sister was with me during that time and that was one of the few times that we actually lived together. I believe they intentionally kept us separated from each other and not that any of us were fat. I look back at that it's ridiculous the the weight that we were given to maintain especially in those development years

of being a teenager and and whatnot. Andrea says all of that shaming eventually led to eating disorders. It wasn't like they said we need to be thin but let's help you and here's like your workout routine and here's a great diet to stay thin. No was really your own responsibility. So if you wanted to go binge behind closed doors you would go binge behind closed doors somehow

“and I did that's how I gained weight but then I would starve myself for days and like literally”

pass out from having food in my system. Pass out fall in the floor pass out because I have type of thy see me and I'm pretty sure all this stress and all that kind of binging and starving just exacerbated. I happily I see me just significantly more. The cycles of your body just

never kind of be finding a happy homeostasis with the food and just live in a sweet laxing. Of

course I couldn't relax. I was going to get assaulted any moment by any number of people. Arvan not content to only control and abuse her body and her psyche even found ways to manipulate young Andrea's heart. They paired us up where you kind of were forced to have a relationship with a sister wife just I can ongoing pairing where you were expected to kind of consistently keep building your sexual connection. The cult arranged a relationship between 14 year old Andrea and a woman

in her mid to late 20s and you were just supposed to like sleep with them and stay connected. Until they ended it and I actually got my heart broken because I did like kind of fall in love with one of my sister wives and then when they just ended overnight and like kind of access to her just got shut off I was like my first heart break at age 14 and I'm like this is sad and she didn't have the you know the emotional sensitivity to kind of handle it better and at the time.

Well things like arranged relationships happened occasionally. Arvan favored constant daily unreachable perfection to keep his followers in line. Probably as important as Arvan's sexual

way of life teachings it felt like the the second most important was the environment and I

forgot what he called that. He called it establishing a Zion level home. His mantra was there is a place

“for everything and everything is in its place. I will never forget that. In other words,”

thou shall not ever leave a mess anywhere on the premises ever, ever for any reason. You couldn't wash your hands with soap and then let like water or like squishy soap collect because that would be unattractive and not have the spirit. A bar of soap couldn't just be placed back on the soap

that you couldn't even leave your bed in the morning just to go like have your shower first.

If you had to make your bed the second you got out of it so that you would never leave a mess

behind anywhere. It was like everything was militant perfection and I'm not exaggerating that. It was like every little corner was tucked to military perfection. It was, yeah. Like you open our linen cabinets and it was storage for the apocalypse so that you'd see like a row of like pink towels all perfect, all exactly perfect. And there's not a thing that doesn't belong somewhere. There's no such thing as a junk drawer or just stuff that doesn't belong somewhere.

But like down to a label from a label maker that this pair of scissors goes here and nothing

else ever goes there. The entire house was that way. There was not anything that was not organized that way.

Arvan's quote unquote teachings about order and cleanliness weren't contained to just inside the homes. And his seemingly limitless perfectionism is something we can see prove of as far back as his 20s when he was designing Ogden's municipal gardens to as recently as each and every Zion society home in Northwood. Here again is Detective Marcy Korgansky talking about her experience

“on the day of the raid. Today's remember going out there and looking all around at all the yards”

and how perfect they were in beautiful landscaping and we were all affected by this for ever really. And I remember after that happened I drove through the neighborhood and looked at it. And then even a few years after I wanted to see how the neighborhood looked compared to when we were there that day. And I drove through that neighborhood and of course the yards just look normal again. And if people could see how those yards looked in all those houses looked. I mean it was

it was something else it really was. One of the ongoing themes in this series is that things aren't necessarily the way they appear. Sometimes there's something sinister lurking just under the surface and this is perfectly illustrated not only by Arvin himself masquerading as a kind grandfatherly type but also his gardens providing a facade for his foolish interior life. Those yards that were so admired by people from all over Ogden were Arvin's face to the outside

“world and he took immense pride in them but the truth is he didn't even do the work that beautiful”

landscaping belonged to the women and children of the Zion society and his taking credit was just another way he stole from them. Standing out in the sun for eight hours like probably like once or twice a week every summer you know for five years straight probably with no sunscreen boiling doing all that lawn work because it was extremely tedious because of how immaculate he wanted it. Andrea says the girls had to wear suggestive clothing while they did yard work short shorts in the

lake. They cut grass with push mowers and it had to be done in two different directions as per Arvin's exacting specifications. Once everything was mode and raked and all the things were done the final step was to take the hose attachment with a really sharp fine point and hose down the entire square footage of the entire yard so there was not one blade of grass left over anywhere in the gutter on top of the grass on the sidewalks. If things weren't perfect if you didn't follow his rules

the way he wanted you to. Arvin would call a meeting. When he'd plan a meeting we would you would like be in like dread, self-criticism mode until you know up until the minute you walked over into

“the living room because that's what he would use as opportunities just to you know just cut your”

down and make you feel like you were failing because it worked. He would you would kind of pick up the pace and do better. In Arvin was complaining on during a meeting how people were failing and

everything wasn't perfect and I volunteered to basically check inside people's closets and drawers

and report back to you. Andrea was able to find a bit of light even in the darkness. There was very few moments to escape and just kind of forget that you were on the clock and yard day was a little bit of the escape because you could just be outside you know kind of escaping

in your day. It's impossible to imagine how constant the abuse was. No freedom, no solitude.

Every moment of every day these children were observed and judged and living in constant fear of sexual assault. Andrea said even though she had been trained to want sex with Arvin and got that much desire dopamine hit whenever she earned his approval her subconscious was still protecting her by checking out. Of all the times that Arvin was on top of me,

“I don't remember them because I blacked out that much. I was actually more terrified”

like the anticipation of having to go visit him. The terror was more about knowing that I was going to have to leave my body than what he was going to do to me. That was just became easy.

That always happened but it was the terror of the associating that was kind of the ongoing terror.

We've all been in unpleasant situations where we choose to daydream ourselves out of it a boring meeting, a bad day at home. But how many of us have had it so bad that our bodies automatically do it for us and how many of those have been constant daily for years. It's a long road ahead for Andrea and many of the others who survived the Zion society.

“And to be honest, it's not a happy ending for everyone. That's just the sad reality of child abuse,”

not everyone finds healing. I just went to an intense air recession just yesterday

and ball most of the day because I'm still trying to rescue this little girl that thinks that she has to do everything right and perfect or no one will love her. I have a lot of compassion for her. Now there's a lot more we could talk about that at this point in our story almost no one outside the cult nose yet. The children's solo drives with Arvan to get ice cream where he'd make them strip for him in the headlights. Not allowing any of the kids to go to school and not

offering them any education. There's the five arts of stimulation and other sexual lessons the adult

“women taught to not only themselves but the young girls as well. But what matters is that the kids are”

out. This particular part of the nightmare is over for them. But unfortunately, as of this point in our story, justice has yet to be served. The police and county attorney are using the evidence they got during the raid to build a case against the Zion society. But there's one person who detective might king is determined to make pay for the incomprehensible damage they've done. That is if he can find him. If you or someone you know is experiencing sexual violence, contact the rape abuse and

incest national network at rain.org. That's r-a-i-n-n dot-o-r-g or call the National Sexual Assault hotline at 800-656-hope. Both services are free, confidential, and available 24/7. Guardians of Evil inside the Zion society cult was written narrated an audio produced by me, Aaron Mason, original music by Allison Layton Brown. The voice actors featured in this episode are Laura Scott and Matt Pittman. No generative AI was used in the writing or production of this podcast.

My sincere thanks to the entire Guardians of Evil editorial team. Your feedback was invaluable. Guardians of Evil is based on the book deceived, an investigative memoir of the Zion society cult, by Michael R. King, available at profilingevil.com on Amazon or Ingram's bark. Mike doughnuts all of his proceeds from the book and this podcast to fund child advocacy efforts and criminal justice scholarships. Check out Mike's podcast Profiling Evil where he explores

unsolved criminal cases from around the world and dives deep into the minds of predators. Find Profiling Evil on YouTube or wherever you get podcasts. Executive producers John Goforth and Jeremy