Prologue

On Super Bowl Sunday, three weeks into the 1980s, Dave Cherry had the house to himself. The 15-year-old was sprawled out on his parents’ gold bedspread watching the game, but on the list of things he cared about—Led Zeppelin, the possibility of alternate dimensions, acquiring and inhaling tremendous quantities of weed—football barely ranked. Inertia, a sense of having nothing better to do, was the only thing that kept him watching.

Above: Dave Cherry in July 2021.

When the game ended, the network cut to Dan Rather, his posture as rigid as his hair. Rather introduced the subject of that week’s 60 Minutes episode: the Palmer Drug Abuse Program. “Few people outside of Texas had ever heard of PDAP,” Rather intoned, “until People magazine reported that Carrie Hamilton, the 15-year-old daughter of TV star Carol Burnett and producer Joe Hamilton, had become a drug addict, and that her parents had sent Carrie to PDAP, where she kicked her habit.”

Cherry, who lived in the suburbs of St. Louis, wasn’t familiar with PDAP, nor with Carrie Hamilton’s recovery, despite Burnett and her family making the daytime talk-show rounds—Dinah Shore, Phil Donahue—to praise the program and its founder, a recovering addict and alcoholic named Bob Meehan. “Some see Mr. Meehan as a miracle worker,” Rather said, “bringing God and clean living back into young people’s lives. Others say he gets those youngsters dependent on him and PDAP in place of their former dependence on drugs and alcohol.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, resources are available from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, including a 24/7 national helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357). Additional information on rehab abuse is available via Breaking Code Silence.

Meehan appeared on screen, looking like someone’s hazy misconception of 1970s cool: wide white sideburns, bushy blond goatee. Fury seemed to flash behind his orange-tinted aviators. Cherry, the son of strict Southern Baptists, was suddenly interested. Meehan was precisely the kind of guy his parents would despise.

“Now, I’m saying, this program works for a group of people. If it doesn’t work for you, try another one!” Meehan told 60 Minutes. “We’re not controlling you in any way, shape, or form. You don’t like it, leave!”

Meehan called his method of treating substance abuse Enthusiastic Sobriety, or ES. It was a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for teenagers; it emphasized community and spirituality, but also insisted that participants needed to have fun. Cherry watched footage of cozy group confessionals and larger meetings that looked like pep rallies. Kids traded shoulder squeezes and looks of fervent understanding. A pretty woman, maybe 20 years old, cradled a younger boy’s head as another woman thanked him for filling a void in her life. “I love you,” she said, prompting claps and cheers from the people gathered around her.

A lonely kid, Cherry felt a stir of longing.

Meehan was so animated that, beside him, Rather looked like an expensive wax statue. When Rather questioned him about his $100,000 annual income, a combination of his PDAP salary and payments from a company that ran hospitals where PDAP referred teenagers for inpatient treatment, Meehan grinned. “If I wasn’t making money, you wouldn’t be here today, partner!” he said. Pressed for evidence of the high success rates PDAP touted in its advertisements, Meehan delivered a wandering monologue on the perils of methadone and the definition of success before telling Rather that if 60 Minutes or its host would like to give him $75,000 to conduct a study, he’d be happy to take it.

“Are you saying to me that you don’t have any data to back up your claim that you’re 75 to 80 percent successful?” Rather asked.

“The data we have is quite different from data anybody else has,” Meehan said.

“But when you boil it down, what you’ve got is a guess,” Rather pressed.

“Oh definitely,” Meehan said, inscrutable. “Definitely a guess.”

Rather presented dissenting opinions, from sources who described an environment that seemed designed to keep PDAP participants in thrall to Meehan. A mustached man in a tan leather jacket said that people were being “led to believe that we can’t make it without the program,” prompting Rather to remark, astonished, that this would make participation “never-ending.” Confronted with the notion that PDAP was manipulative and opportunistic, Meehan became even more energetic. “I’ve been a con all my life,” he told Rather. “Just, now I’m using it in a good way, see?”

The segment was in no uncertain terms a takedown. It aired on the highest-rated news program in the country, directly after the biggest event on TV. It should have been Bob Meehan’s undoing. But it wasn’t.

Over the next 40 years, Meehan proved to be a skilled shapeshifter and profiteer. Enthusiastic Sobriety, which as it turned out was even more destructive than 60 Minutes revealed, spread well beyond PDAP. It evolved, taking various names and forms; when one door closed, Meehan found another to open. Recovery programs that he ran or wielded influence over enrolled thousands of young people across the United States. Today, ES outfits run by members of Meehan’s inner circle still exist in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, and North Carolina.

ES also ensnared staff and some clients in what people who’ve abandoned it now call a cult. Meehan and his closest confidants—a group dubbed the Family—controlled every aspect of members’ lives. The story recounted here draws on interviews with 65 former clients, counselors, and loved ones of people involved with ES from its origins in the 1970s through to the present day. Their experiences echo those described in an active online community of former ES followers, who use Facebook and other social-media platforms to tell their stories. Some subjects spoke to The Atavist Magazine on condition of anonymity.

Flopped on his parents’ bed in 1980, Dave Cherry couldn’t have guessed the outsize role he’d one day play in ES, or the extent to which Meehan would come to dominate his life. Years would pass before the two even met. All Cherry knew on that Super Bowl Sunday was that he liked the guy. He thought Dan Rather had given Bob Meehan a raw deal.

Part One

Hard facts about Meehan’s life before PDAP are scarce, but he always told a compelling origin story—how he first shot heroin at 16; how the habit soon compelled him to pawn his parents’ furniture; how they committed him to a psychiatric ward; how he escaped and spent the next ten years on and off the streets, using not only heroin but also codeine, quaaludes, cocaine, speed, and alcohol. During this period, according to several people who knew Meehan, he claimed to have robbed several pharmacies, killed several men, and played drums in several small-time jazz ensembles.

Above: Bob Meehan on “60 Minutes,” along with transcripts from the segment, and the issue of “People” magazine with Carol Burnett and her daughter touting ES.

In Meehan’s telling, his luck changed in 1971. Released from a Kentucky prison cell, he wound up in Houston, digging ditches for Rice University. At 27, he was mostly toothless—he wore dentures—and bald, save for a grimy curtain of hair running from the peak of his scalp down to his shoulders. A Fu Manchu mustache drooped past his chin. He’d mostly stopped using drugs but still wrestled with booze, and after another short stint in jail, this time for burglary and public drunkenness, he began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church.

The gatherings were presided over by Father Charles Wyatt-Brown, a soft-spoken priest beloved by his community. Wyatt-Brown took a liking to Meehan, who was outspoken in meetings. The two began having lunch together. Wyatt-Brown soon hired Meehan as his church’s janitor.

Teens made regular use of the church in those days, playing Frisbee on the grounds and popping inside to use the bathroom. Some of them were drug users, and Wyatt-Brown encouraged Meehan to befriend them, hoping he might set them on a better path. In fact, Wyatt-Brown said, Meehan’s attention was better spent helping children than vacuuming hallways.

Meehan was singularly charismatic, a perpetual motion machine with a comic’s timing and a gift for connecting with kids. It helped that he chain-smoked, cursed incessantly, and had a vast supply of dirty jokes and prison yarns to keep them entertained. Soon, with Wyatt-Brown’s permission, six young people began meeting regularly with Meehan in the church’s basement. They played cards, complained about teachers, talked about crushes. Sometimes Meehan took to the piano, leading sing-alongs. Within six months, the group’s ranks had expanded to 40, and Meehan was formally promoted to the role of youth counselor. Another six months later, attendance had reached 250, and Wyatt-Brown established the Palmer Drug Abuse Program as a nonprofit, with a board of directors to facilitate the program’s growth. Meehan was made director.

Meehan didn’t have formal qualifications to run a drug-treatment program. What he had was life experience and an eye for demand. White middle-class Americans shaped by the promise and comforts of the postwar era were terrified that substance abuse would steal their children’s future. The war on drugs began in 1971, with Richard Nixon declaring illegal substances “public enemy number one.” Within a few years, the so-called parent movement, which preached zero tolerance of marijuana, narcotics, and alcohol, would spread across the country. But Meehan recognized that a top-down approach wasn’t likely to appeal to kids. What rebellious teenager does what their parents or president tells them to do? 

Meehan started developing Enthusiastic Sobriety, which was both a theory and a practice. In order to entice teens, he believed, clean living needed to be just as fun—and just as reckless—as the alternative. If teens wanted to grow their hair long, smoke cigarettes, stay out all night, or even drop out of school, parents should let them—whatever kept them off drugs and alcohol was a good thing. Thus liberated, kids could enter the alternate social world of PDAP, which had its own dances, campouts, and house parties, all of them substance-free.

Spirituality was part of PDAP’s deal; much like AA, the program was rooted in the possibility of redemption. If that didn’t seem cool to teenagers, Meehan would be the first to tell them they were wrong. He believed that peer pressure was what drove young people to experiment with drugs and alcohol, and he aimed to use the same tactic to keep them sober. As soon as they walked in the door of a meeting, PDAP newcomers were smothered in hugs and people saying “I love you.” The tactic, called “love bombing,” is now widely recognized as a method for luring people into cults. One PDAP participant recalled thinking, “These guys are like the Hare Krishna or something. They’re going to try to make me sell flowers at the airport next week.”

In the program’s early days, Meehan met and married Joy DeFord, a diminutive, dark-haired divorcée who ran Palmer Memorial’s Alateen program, for teenagers who had alcoholics in their families. Joy came across as a polished Southern belle, a calm counterpoint to her manic husband, though she had quirks of her own, including an interest in hypnotism and homeopathy. The Meehans had a daughter and informally adopted a PDAP participant named Susan Lowry. Joy began running PDAP’s parent group, which held meetings each week. Hers was an essential role—PDAP’s smooth functioning depended on parents buying into the developing ES methodology.

PDAP could be a tough sell for parents. Beyond the smoking and the late nights, there was the fact that PDAP’s counselors looked like they could have been former drug dealers. Some of them were former drug dealers. One young man showed up for his first PDAP meeting, struck up a conversation with a counselor, and quickly realized that he’d “bought dope from the guy before.” When the adults balked about who was supervising their kids, Joy calmed them down. A common refrain was “Would you rather they were dead?”

PDAP was free, funded entirely by community donations. Participants had to commit to 30 days of sobriety, during which they would attend frequent meetings. They could keep coming to PDAP after that—in fact, they were encouraged to make the program the permanent anchor of their existence. Meehan, a fervent follower of AA, implemented a version of the 12 steps in PDAP. Participants made moral inventories and direct amends to those they’d hurt, and they admitted that substances rendered their lives unmanageable. Meehan put his own spin on other steps. His second one was “We have found it necessary to ‘stick with winners’ in order to grow.” To keep old friends around—especially if they used drugs or alcohol, but often even if they were sober—was to court relapse or worse. Once someone had PDAP, they didn’t need anyone else. In the words of one former participant, PDAP was “a whole group of people who were just like me.”

PDAP became so popular among local teens that some faked or exaggerated drug problems to get in the door. Not everyone who joined was even a teenager. The ages of PDAP participants ranged from 13 to 25. Minors were part of what was called Younger Group, and those 18 or above were in Older Group. (Some participants were over 25, and a few were in their thirties; they were known as Over the Hillers.) Many of the joiners were misfits, young people with growing rap sheets or a hostile stance toward authority—what their parents might call a bad attitude. Some had sought treatment for substance abuse before but felt patronized by medical professionals.

PDAP meetings were serious business. An atmosphere of total transparency prevailed: Participants shared stories of sexual assault, domestic violence, and intravenous overdose. Some of the most vulnerable exchanges occurred at Round Robins, where participants were kept awake all night, divulging deep secrets in a state of sleep deprivation. Sponsors and counselors dispensed advice to newcomers on how to dress and whom to socialize or sleep with. For many in the program, their guidance was gospel. “They always told you God spoke through other people, and you needed to listen to your sponsor,” a former participant recalled, “because God is speaking through them.”

Kids who adhered most strictly to the ES ethos—who stayed sober, avoided people outside PDAP, obeyed staff, and stuck with the program long-term—were elevated to the prestigious steering committee, which helped guide meetings. From there, many became counselors themselves. Acolytes believed that the program had saved their lives. Soon they were spreading the word across Texas and beyond. Counselors traveled to other states, praised Meehan and the ES method at town halls, and raised funds to open new chapters of PDAP in local churches. “We all worked for next to nothing,” a counselor from the early days said. “We were in it for the love of the job.”

Even Meehan didn’t earn much money at first. His house and furniture were in disrepair; his old Ford barely worked. Then he went into business with a man named Fred Kotzen, who managed a handful of Houston-area hospitals. In the past, when PDAP kids required more serious drug treatment, Meehan had sent them Kotzen’s way. In 1975, Kotzen offered Meehan a hefty consultant’s fee—$50,000 a year, as Dan Rather would later report, or about $250,000 in 2021 dollars—to more formally integrate PDAP with his business. (On 60 Minutes, Meehan insisted that he was paid solely to give Kotzen advice. Kotzen passed away in 2014.)

Kotzen opened PDAP wings at his hospitals, where parents—or their insurance companies—paid to send young people for inpatient care. While nurses and doctors were present and signed off on paperwork, the wings were primarily staffed by Meehan’s counselors. According to one source, Kotzen soon began paying directors of PDAP chapters in other cities to funnel kids into his Houston hospitals. Counselors felt pressured to fill the wings. “They started urging us to put kids in the hospital programs,” a former counselor said. “These are 14-year-olds who are smoking pot. They don’t need to go to the hospital. They’re not shooting heroin.”

This was the first iteration of a business model that would serve as the backbone of Meehan’s operations for the next half-century. Kotzen’s hospitals made money off the kids referred from PDAP, and the fees Kotzen paid to Meehan helped PDAP grow. “We were able to expand throughout the country very quickly,” a former counselor recalled. According to 60 Minutes and another source familiar with the program, PDAP wings at various Houston hospitals were, at their peak, treating somewhere between 450 and 600 patients at a time.

“They started urging us to put kids in the hospital programs,” a former counselor said. “These are 14-year-olds who are smoking pot. They don’t need to go to the hospital. They’re not shooting heroin.”

A 1978 Associated Press profile described Meehan as the “Pied Piper of Houston, leading a parade of drug abusers in search for a place in the sun.” Soon after, Carol Burnett sent her daughter to PDAP. Meehan personally oversaw her experience with the program, and his efforts paid off. Hamilton sobered up in one of PDAP’s hospital wings and began attending meetings. Meehan earned the loyalty of her mother, one of the most visible women in the country. “My parents believed this person was a godsend,” said Jody Hamilton, Carrie’s sister. “He saved their daughter’s life.” (Carrie Hamilton passed away in 2002, at the age of 38, of complications from lung cancer. Burnett declined to comment for this story.)

A caravan of counselors led by Meehan eventually took a trip to Los Angeles, hoping to enlist the troubled children of other Hollywood elite into his program. They made use of Burnett’s mansion while getting PDAP L.A. off the ground. Two counselors were even married on Burnett’s tennis court.

At the time, celebrities rarely spoke openly about substance abuse in their families. Burnett broke the mold: There was the story in People, followed by numerous talk-show appearances. The effect on PDAP was immediate. “Man, people were dropping out of airplanes into Houston!” a former counselor said. “Every parent across the country that saw her on television with her daughter was going, ‘Well, I got one of those. I’m calling them up.’ And the counselors in Texas would just go, ‘Send them down! We’ll try to help them!’” To accommodate the influx, new arrivals who didn’t go straight to Kotzen’s hospitals were taken in by families with children in PDAP.

The explosive growth—and lucrative hospital arrangements—allowed Meehan to swap his rundown Ford for a luxury Lincoln. According to colleagues from that time, he took to wearing ostrich-skin cowboy boots, thousand-dollar suits, and gold jewelry. One former PDAP counselor recalled him claiming that, if given the chance, his Enthusiastic Sobriety method could bring peace to the Middle East. When 60 Minutes began reporting on PDAP, it was the messianic version of Meehan that the show caught on tape.

Acolytes around the country gathered to watch the news segment on Super Bowl Sunday. Everyone assumed that it would glorify Meehan and the ES method. Initially, the show had planned to do exactly that: An early memo written by a producer described PDAP as a force for good and Meehan as “ebullient, funny, caring.” But during the reporting process, that view changed considerably. In a later memo, the same producer wrote, “All the people I’ve talked with who have left the Palmer Drug Abuse Program agree on two things: that Bob Meehan is a superb con man, and that he’s dangerously unstable—‘a fanatic, a psychopath.’”

PDAP’s most dedicated supporters lived in a bubble; for them the program was self-evidently righteous. They dismissed criticism from former Meehan followers as the sour grapes of people who couldn’t hack it. More often they didn’t come in contact with those opinions at all. People who divorced themselves from PDAP were systematically shunned by friends and colleagues who were still in the program. So the tone of the 60 Minutes segment came as a surprise. “We just sat there in total shock,” a former PDAP staff member recalled. Another, who watched it in Los Angeles, could think only one thing: “We are going down.”

PDAP’s board of directors was livid about the segment’s revelations. They wanted accountability. But rather than apologize or agree to look for possible problems, Meehan turned combative. He insisted that footage had been edited to make him look bad, and that old colleagues were out to ruin him. Paranoid, he hired a security detail.

He also started a band, called Freeway, whose songs centered exclusively on the joys of sobriety. Its first and only album was produced by ZZ Top’s Frank Beard, whom Meehan had helped get off heroin. “Bob wanted to be a rock star,” a former colleague said. Meehan booked Freeway at the Houston Astrodome and rented a private plane to fly PDAP participants in from Los Angeles to attend. Carrie Hamilton, an aspiring singer, was the opener. One staff member recalls Meehan and his entourage arriving in limousines. According to several former colleagues, Meehan funded the event by clearing out the bank account of PDAP L.A.—an estimated $50,000 to $100,000 in charitable donations. After the Houston show, Meehan took Freeway on tour through the Rocky Mountains, playing at various PDAP branches. That trip was also allegedly bankrolled with the program’s money.

Meanwhile, the bad publicity from 60 Minutes was making new fundraising difficult. According to one PDAP higher-up at the time, presentations at Rotary and Kiwanis Club meetings, once filled with questions about how PDAP might be able to help a troubled nephew or daughter, were now dominated by concerns over Meehan’s character. Was what they said on TV true? Why should parents trust him?

The situation grew increasingly tenuous. At a heated three-day PDAP board meeting in late 1980, nearly a year after the 60 Minutes segment aired, Meehan was booted from the organization.

After the 60 Minutes segment aired, a former PDAP staff member recalled, “We just sat there in total shock.” Another, who watched it in Los Angeles, could think only one thing: “We are going down.”

In the fall of 1982, Dave Cherry arrived for his freshman year at Webster College, outside St. Louis. Depressed from a recent breakup and self-medicating with weed, he promptly failed all his classes. Webster kicked him out after five months and Cherry moved back home. He spent his days on one knee, fitting pumps on women’s feet at one of his father’s strip-mall shoe stores. He thought his parents pitied him, which he hated. In the evenings, he hung out with friends at a nearby lake, where they passed a bong around and came up with stupid songs. “It’s hard to even express what a miserable-feeling human being I was at that time,” Cherry said.

One night he got a call from a friend’s mother. “John’s been sick,” she said—that was code for “drinking again.” John, who’d recently been through rehab, needed to go to an AA meeting that evening, but his mother couldn’t drive him. She asked if Cherry would take him. Cherry’s parents had confiscated his car keys—“I kept getting in wrecks,” he said—but he’d secretly made a copy, and his parents weren’t home. He said yes.

When Cherry and John arrived at the meeting, they found it filled with grizzled bikers and hippies, the kinds of people Cherry’s mother reflexively sneered at. But just like she did, they professed an abiding faith in God. Listening to their stories, Cherry sensed a common denominator: These people had been lost right up until the moment they accepted their disease. He felt lost as well. To his surprise, Cherry found himself speaking. “I think I’m an addict,” he told the room. If Cherry had any doubts about the truth of this statement—he drank and smoked, but no more than many of his peers—they were swept away by the applause that followed his confession.

His dad was waiting in the driveway, arms crossed, when Cherry pulled in later that night. Before his father could say a word, Cherry blurted out that he had a drug problem and needed to go to rehab. Within 48 hours, the doors of Weldon Spring Psychiatric Hospital closed behind him.

Barely an hour had passed before a 16-year-old girl—tan, blond, and blue-eyed—strode up to him and complimented his earring. Her name was Melissa; she was brazen, voluble, a whirl of hand gestures and blunt remarks. The two became inseparable. One night, Cherry connected two Dixie cups with string and snuck across the hall to hand one to Melissa so they could “talk” all night. Before Melissa left the hospital—her release date was a few weeks earlier than Cherry’s—the counselors staged a mock wedding for them. They used scraps of leather for rings.

One day, on temporary leave from the facility, Cherry drove by a fundraiser where several pretty girls his age were washing cars in bikinis. They were raising money, he learned, for the St. Louis branch of PDAP. He remembered the name from 60 Minutes. When he told them he was sober, he was promptly love bombed, a process to which sex appeal was central. Multiple former ES leaders said that they consciously recruited attractive, popular teens, who in turn would entice more teens.

The show of affection had its intended effect. Cherry wanted to feel like he belonged somewhere. After he was released from the psychiatric hospital, he and Melissa became regulars at PDAP meetings.

Since Meehan’s ouster, PDAP had instituted a more professional, evidence-based approach to teen sobriety. But the efforts at reform hadn’t been entirely successful. Many Meehan acolytes remained on staff at PDAP branches or had taken leadership roles since he was fired. According to Cherry, the director of PDAP St. Louis, talked about Meehan as if he were “almost a God.”

Cherry had left the hospital with a newfound sense of purpose—he wanted to help people who felt as bad as he once did. PDAP was the ideal outlet. Weaving parables and jokes through his life story, Cherry could light up a room. Soon, local church ministers were calling him for help with troubled teens, and he began carting aspiring teetotalers to PDAP meetings. He was added to the branch’s steering committee, and then became a staff member.

Not long after, PDAP St. Louis reached a crisis point when two directors quit in quick succession. The higher-ups in Houston seemed willing to let the branch wither, but one person was willing to step in: Bob Meehan.

From a new home base in San Diego, Meehan had recently started another program through which to apply the ES method. He’d named it after his band. Freeway was established with funds donated by actor Tim Conway, whose son Meehan had treated; like PDAP, it was overseen by a board of directors whose local prominence and connections brought legitimacy—and fundraising opportunities—to the organization. By 1983, some 500 young adults were in regular attendance at Freeway meetings. But whereas in Houston Meehan had referred clients to hospitals for a fee, in San Diego he cut out the middleman: Freeway participants whom staff deemed in need of something more than counseling and community were sent to the Sober Live-In Center, or SLIC, a crumbling, rented compound outside Escondido also known as the Ranch. A 30-day stay cost upwards of $5,000, according to several people involved at the time.

When Meehan caught wind of the problems in St. Louis, he saw another opportunity. He quickly persuaded the board there to split from PDAP. When Meehan flew to town to for the formal announcement, Cherry was dispatched by his father, who sat on the St. Louis branch’s board, to pick him up from the airport. Meehan was waiting in a blazer and a dress shirt with the top few buttons undone. He wore a gold chain with a heart-shaped pendant, initialed with an S and an R for “SLIC Ranch.”

Cherry was starstruck. He chattered incessantly all the way to the PDAP office. There, Meehan was the one who did the talking. Holding forth to the threadbare group of participants and volunteers who constituted the program at that point, Meehan was on fire; antic and foulmouthed, he preached the ES gospel like it was a stand-up routine. “Have you ever tried to PISS before you CRAP?” he asked—references to the ES concepts of Properly Interpreting Social Situations and using Communication to Resolve All Problems.

As his talk wound down, Meehan discussed business. St. Louis, he announced, would no longer be affiliated with PDAP. He would now be in charge, running operations from San Diego. The day-to-day work of the program, which soon changed its name to Crossroads, would be overseen by a man named Frank Szachta, who had gotten sober at the St. Louis branch and would soon move home to take the job. In the meantime, Dave Cherry would run the show.

Cherry, who learned this at the same time everyone else in the room did; Cherry, who was barely out of his teens. Meehan didn’t ask him if he wanted the job, but he didn’t have to: Cherry was willing to help however he could.

When Cherry drove Meehan to his hotel, Meehan asked him inside to talk. They munched on Tastykakes and tortilla chips slathered with Easy Cheese in the dim light of Meehan’s room. According to Cherry, Meehan opened up about 60 Minutes—he said that he’d played cards with the cameramen, that he’d been sure the show would portray him positively, but that when you’d treated as many kids as he had, some were bound to end up bitter about one thing or another.

Meehan then invited Cherry to join him on the floor. They sat cross-legged facing one another, their knees nearly touching. Meehan told Cherry that he knew him better than Cherry knew himself. That he loved him more than Cherry loved himself. All the things Cherry had done to himself—flunking out of school, wrecking his life with drugs—Meehan would never have done to him. Try to run your own life, Meehan said, and you’ll just get hurt; turn it over to God and you’ll never be hurt again.

He asked Cherry to look into his eyes, to see the love that he had for him. Cherry complied. After five or six minutes Cherry began sobbing uncontrollably, but he didn’t look away. Meehan tilted his head. “I really get you, man,” Cherry remembered him saying. “I really get you.”

When Cherry left, the sun was coming up. He cried all the way home. Meehan, he knew, was going to save the St. Louis program. More than that, Meehan was going to save him.

Part Two

Unbeknownst to Cherry, at the time of his visit, Meehan’s latest venture was on the brink of collapse.

Above: Meehan with images of his book and the cover and song list of an album by his band Freeway.

The Ranch in California was the rehab equivalent of a roach motel. It was spread over several sites, and, according to people who spent time in them, the facilities were infested. Upwards of 20 clients at a time, some as young as 12 or 13, slept on mattresses scattered on the floor or in a mildewed trailer. The Ranch’s counselors lacked even basic credentials. According to Jenny Gaines, who went through treatment at the Ranch twice, clients knew to hide if they heard a knock at the door, “because it could be licensing [officials], and we had to protect Bob.”

Most of the staff weren’t equipped to handle teens in genuine medical distress. Gaines remembered a girl who arrived catatonic after a bad acid trip. “She couldn’t talk, she couldn’t clean herself,” Gaines said. The other young women in residence bathed and fed her for the duration of her stay. Meehan, who dropped by regularly to “connect” with the clients, told them to pray for the girl.

Before long, aggrieved parents who didn’t like the way their kids had been treated found one another and rallied the press to their cause. Meehan, they said, had convinced them that their children would die unless they got help from the Ranch. Terrified, they’d emptied savings accounts and taken out second mortgages. Many now found that their children refused to speak to them, citing the tenets of ES. Meehan “wanted to get them away from their family,” said Don Ceplenski, who has two children who spent time at the Ranch. “The girls were like Manson girls—really, really loyal. Meehan convinces them he’s saved their life, that their families and society really screwed them up.”

Freeway, the ES program through which kids were funneled to the Ranch, was likewise under attack. It was accused, as the Los Angeles Times reported, of leading its members to exchange “one addiction—to drugs and alcohol—with another addiction—to a lifestyle of self-gratifying antisocial behaviors, dependency on one another at the expense of their home life, and a cult-like adoration of Meehan as the most important person in their life.” As with PDAP, many Freeway acolytes seemed to believe that they would die without the program.

The criticism grew so intense that Freeway’s board of directors voted to disband the program. Not long after, a former executive director claimed that the program had sent clients to the Ranch whether they needed treatment or not, and the San Diego district attorney opened an investigation. “These are stupid accusations,” Meehan told the Los Angeles Times. “People want to blame me because their families aren’t working right. I’m a good man, a reputable man.” Soon the Ranch was also under investigation for housing minors without a license. Meehan, while conceding that some of the center’s clients were under 18, insisted that the Ranch was simply “a boarding house for young people” in need of a positive sober environment.

Two weeks after Freeway was dissolved, Meehan started a new ES program called Good Company. City licensing officials learned about it when a reporter called them with questions, prompting yet another investigation. Meanwhile, the parents hounding Meehan in San Diego flew to a SLIC Ranch he’d opened in Phoenix and related their horror stories to the board there. In the space of a few weeks, Good Company, the Ranch, and the Phoenix SLIC were all shuttered by state authorities on the grounds that Meehan was, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “not fit to operate them.” One San Diego official told the press that Meehan would not be eligible for a license to operate treatment programs there if he reapplied. “He’s not a person who would respond to regulation,” the official said.

St. Louis, then, presented the right opportunity at the right time. Meehan needed a new program, kids to populate it, and, eventually, a place to send them for treatment. Built on the remains of the PDAP branch, Crossroads was a modest operation, but Meehan didn’t need much to get his business model off the ground. A willing counselor or two would suffice.

“The girls were like Manson girls—really, really loyal. Meehan convinces them he’s saved their life, that their families and society really screwed them up.”

When Frank Szachta moved back to St. Louis, six weeks after Meehan’s visit, Cherry drove to meet him. The two twentysomethings prayed and talked excitedly about the work to come. Soon they were fixtures at local high schools, running workshops during the first few class periods, then holding court in the cafeteria at lunch. They regaled students with stories—some true, some exaggerated—about their dissolute pasts. Attendance at Crossroads meetings surged.

In those days, Cherry literally sang on his way into work. He and Melissa had been on and off romantically, but their relationship was now growing more serious. His goal, Cherry often told her, was to become the best drug counselor in the world.

One day, according to Cherry, a call came in to the Crossroads office. The man on the line introduced himself as Art Peiffer, owner of a company called American Healthnet. Though based in Arlington, Texas, the company had recently purchased Forum Hospital, a 60-bed inpatient treatment center in St. Louis, located just a short drive from Crossroads. According to Cherry, he and Szachta consulted Meehan, who told them to give Peiffer whatever he wanted—and what he wanted was for Crossroads to refer its participants to Forum. (Peiffer, it turned out, had helped structure Meehan’s earlier hospital deals with Fred Kotzen, in Houston, though neither Cherry nor Szachta knew this at the time.)

Crossroads began making referrals to Forum, and it wasn’t alone in doing so. A Meehan loyalist named John Cates was working for Forum while overseeing the opening of new ES programs around the country. Each chapter was its own LLC, informally connected to an organization called John Cates Associates (and, later, Lifeway). These programs also began funneling kids to Forum.

Although Meehan had no formal stake in the programs, he was essential to their steady flow of referrals. According to Cherry and two other people involved at the time, Cates and Peiffer paid Meehan a consultant’s fee to tour ES programs and hype counselors on the mission of sending kids to Forum. Under Meehan, this became a spiritual matter. Social worth within the ES world, and the chances of promotion within a given program, became closely tied to how many young people counselors sent for a hospital stay.

Meehan’s sermons worked, and business took off. According to Cherry, inpatient treatment at Forum typically lasted 30 to 45 days, at a rate of $1,200 per day. Insurance companies covered the bill. Some of the clients who spent time at the hospital went on to become ES counselors themselves, and in turn referred other young people to Forum. The excitement around Meehan’s method—what it could do for kids, their families, and ES staff—was palpable. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted, Forum’s First National Super Session for Drug-Free Youth, an event held at a local Sheraton and hosted by former Dallas linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, “resembled a high-spirited pep rally rather than a session on drug abuse.”

The arrangement with Forum was just a few months old when Cherry was offered a new job: inpatient program director. He would set the course of care, run group therapy, and coordinate a daily schedule for Forum’s clients. Cherry was hesitant—he’d recently reenrolled in college—but accepted the offer. Cherry often worked through the night. When he didn’t, he slept with a pager by his bed. He juggled his classwork with running a rehab program full-time. He was 21.

The job brought Cherry close to Cates, who became a mentor, advising him on his relationship with Melissa and introducing him to the works of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. (Cates declined multiple interview requests for this story. “I have no desire in any way to revisit these painful times,” he wrote in an email.) In the 1970s, Cates taught grade-school math in Houston, until he began using heroin and was arrested for trafficking the drug. Meehan helped him get sober. Now in his late thirties, Cates’s style was an amalgam of country and heavy metal: He wore cowboy boots and fringed leather jackets, and his black hair had a blond stripe.

According to Cherry, Cates summoned him to a hotel room at the annual Crossroads banquet in 1987. “How’d you like to go to Atlanta?” Cates asked. A former Crossroads client had recently moved there and was running unofficial ES meetings out of his parents’ basement. Ten or so teenagers were in regular attendance. Cates hoped to grow the program by the usual ES strategy—recruiting a base of charismatic teens and building from there—and then enroll some of the kids in an intensive outpatient program, or IOP. The IOP model would be somewhere between a stint at Forum and run-of-the-mill ES participation, which typically entailed a few meetings a week. Instead of checking into a hospital, IOP clients would attend meetings six hours a day, for six weeks, while living either at home or with a host family. Their progress would be overseen largely by teenagers and young adults whose sole credential was being ES believers. The one-time fee for the program could run upwards of $3,000, according to several former staff.

In Atlanta, Cherry would have to find and lease a building suitable for IOP work. He would need to navigate the byzantine process required to offer treatment services: establishing an LLC, finding a clinical supervisor, assembling a comprehensive policy and procedure manual. And he would be responsible for recruiting five or six counselors to help him get the operation going. 

Cherry told Cates no. He had no desire to drop out of college again. He didn’t want to move—he and Melissa were recently engaged. Besides, what if the business failed? What would he do then?

Cates insisted that Cherry take the job. It was, Cherry recalled him saying, the best wedding present a guy could hope for. When Meehan entered the room, Cherry repeated his concerns. But Meehan, Cherry said, wouldn’t listen. Going to Atlanta, Meehan said, was what he had to do.

Cherry agreed to at least go for a visit. The trip didn’t change his mind, but when he got back, he found that Cates and Meehan were acting as though it was a done deal. “I felt like I had no choice,” Cherry said. So he quit school and moved south.

He was scared. He had just enough money to pay the security deposit and first month’s rent on an apartment. He delivered pizzas to support himself as he labored to get the new program off the ground. Somehow he managed: Within a few months, there were enough IOP clients to make the Atlanta outfit self-sustaining. The local press took notice. Cherry, described as “a bearded, 24-year-old former Missourian with longish brown hair who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day,” was quoted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explaining the ES ethos. “One of the things we teach people to do is to dance sober,” Cherry told the newspaper. “They know how to dance loaded, but they have to know how to dance sober.”

Around this time, Cherry was summoned to St. Louis to testify in front of a grand jury: Forum had recently shut down, and its former administrator, a man named Charles Butler, was under investigation for insurance fraud and for overbilling patients. Cherry said that he confirmed the prosecution’s findings, but that he didn’t know what Butler was doing was against the law. He was assured that Meehan, Peiffer, and Cates were unaware of any illegal activity. To his mind, ES was a spiritually pure endeavor—the program’s leaders would never do anything unethical. Butler was indicted and eventually sent to prison. A hospital administrator interviewed for this story described him as a “fall guy.”

Forum’s closure forced a change in the ES business model. Cates and Peiffer started a new company, called International Healthnet, that would design in-hospital ES programs and populate them with patients for a per-person fee. The two men quickly struck a deal with a hospital in Houston, and Cherry was asked to move there. This time he didn’t bother resisting, even though his success in Atlanta hadn’t made him any more confident. “I would take on these things and feel there was no way they could ever work, that I was going to fail and end up living on the streets,” he said. He went to Houston in 1989, sending for Melissa—whom he’d married by then, in a church packed with ES followers—once he’d found a place to live.

Cherry often worked through the night. When he didn’t, he slept with a pager by his bed. He juggled his classwork with running a rehab program full-time. He was 21.

At first, business in Houston boomed. ES clients arrived at the hospital in batches. “Not one or two kids,” a former counselor recalled. “Dozens at a time.” Some teenagers showed up on the flimsiest of pretexts—usually it was something that had surfaced during an ES meeting. “If the kid said, ‘I think I had a dream that my grandfather touched me inappropriately’—boom, off to the hospital they went,” the former counselor said.

As it turned out, this was part of a wider trend of people exploiting the lax regulatory environment of the late 1980s. A 1991 Houston Chronicle series called “Profitable Addictions” exposed some of the worst offenses. Between 1984 and 1989, the number of private psychiatric hospitals in Texas nearly tripled. To fill what the Chronicle referred to as the “glut of hospital beds,” facilities contracted with headhunting firms, which referred patients for a fee. The Chronicle described headhunters infiltrating AA meetings, getting well-insured members drunk, and depositing them at hospitals; probation officers accepting bribes to refer patients; hospital staff combing through the records of public high schools, looking for potential clients. A committee chairwoman in Congress would call it “one of the most disgraceful and scandalous episodes in the history of health care in America.”

As investigations played out on front pages and in government hearings, ES evaded scrutiny. But a subsequent raft of anti-headhunting laws in multiple states complicated things for Meehan and Cates. Meanwhile, insurance companies began tightening restrictions, too. In Cherry’s experience, this meant that providers went from covering as much as six weeks of inpatient treatment to just three or four days. Steadily, the money from the ES program-to-hospital pipeline dried up. Everyone was affected: Cates and Peiffer, who created the pipeline; staff like Cherry, who managed it; and Meehan, the mastermind and hype man, who got paid to keep it flowing.

In 1992, at an ES retreat in California, Meehan took on a protégé who would soon help him reinvent himself once again. Dave Larsen had revered Meehan for years. It all started at the age of 15, back when Larsen was a six-foot-tall, 200-pound Satanist with 63 unexcused absences from school and citations for shoplifting, vandalism, and drug possession. “Honestly,” Larsen said, “I just really wanted people to be scared of me.” A bad acid trip landed him at an ES meeting in California, and a month of exposure to the method was all it took for him to shed his tough-guy persona. “I sat in those meetings and I cried,” he said. Like Cherry and other devout believers, Larsen decided to dedicate his life to ES.

By 22, Larsen had a wife, a child, and a job as director of an ES program in Dallas. His reputation was as a beacon of positivity, someone who took a gentle approach with clients. At the retreat in California, Meehan took a liking to him. According to a former ES counselor, Meehan described Larsen as “the second coming of Christ.” When Larsen let slip to Meehan that he was applying to run a new ES chapter in Phoenix, Meehan immediately put in a call to Cates, who was overseeing hiring. A few days later, Larsen had the job.

Larsen quickly grew the Phoenix program, and soon Charter Hospital came calling. The medical facility offered to pay staff members’ salaries, plus a flat rate of about $6,800 per month to Meehan in exchange for running a recovery wing. Larsen went to Meehan, who according to Larsen told him to run the idea by Cates and Peiffer. But the two men wanted more than Charter was willing to pay. Negotiations stalled.

Meehan eventually called Larsen with a plan. Cates, he said, had a counseling degree, and Peiffer had a PhD. But Meehan? He didn’t have anything except ES, which was his creation. Meehan flew to Phoenix and, with Larsen’s help, took the Charter deal for himself.

According to Cherry, Cates and Peiffer were apoplectic. They would soon have reason to be angrier still. The new Meehan Recovery Center at Charter Hospital needed patients, and Cates wasn’t likely to allow referrals from the ES chapters he oversaw. So, according to multiple sources who ran them at the time, Meehan set about systematically usurping the programs. He traveled from city to city and persuaded leadership to come under the umbrella of a new organization: the International Coalition of Chemical Abuse Programs, or Icecap. (“International” referred to Canada, where Meehan had opened a few programs, though his efforts to launch one had ended with allegations that ES was, according to the Vancouver Sun, “a cult.”)

In the minds of many ES staff, the decision whether to follow Meehan wasn’t hard. For one thing, Cates had stopped paying them. In Houston, Cherry’s staff were selling tie-dyed T-shirts to afford food. Even more salient was the fact that, although program directors and counselors respected Cates, they revered Meehan. In a pre-Google world, the 60 Minutes segment and Meehan’s various business failures hadn’t done serious damage to his reputation. Meehan was friends with rock stars. He was a frequent guest on Oprah, giving his views on youth and addiction. His book Beyond the Yellow Brick Road: Our Children and Drugs had received glowing media attention when he self-published it in 1984, and it was now the bible for ES programs everywhere. Meehan’s visits to the branches were sacred occasions. “He really was a celebrity in our lives,” Larsen said.

Meehan couldn’t offer the struggling ES programs any money; the Charter deal would only be enough to cover his work. But as the source of all ES teachings, he could offer unparalleled guidance. And maybe that would be enough to save the programs from collapse.

Larsen, in Phoenix, signed on with Meehan, as did program directors in Atlanta and St. Louis. But Cherry, who was offered the job of running the Meehan Recovery Center, wavered. “At that point,” he said, “I wanted to get out.”

In an effort to persuade him to stay on board, Larsen flew Cherry out to Phoenix. The two men sat on a hilltop overlooking the city and talked about the future. Larsen tried to sell him on what they could build together. Cherry already knew Dave’s wife, Wendy, another ES acolyte who had once worked at Forum Hospital.

Cherry had been involved in ES for a decade. Nearing 30, he had no college degree, no savings, no prospects outside the ES world. Recently, the police had shown up at his house in Houston when a check for groceries bounced. Soon he was forced to give up the house—he and Melissa couldn’t make the mortgage payments. Cherry daydreamed about moving to California and starting a band.

The Larsens had recently paid a visit to Southern California, to see Meehan and his inner circle, known among ES followers as the Family. In addition to Meehan, his wife, Joy, and their biological daughter—also named Wendy—the Family included their informally adopted daughter, Susan, and her husband, Jeffrey Hamilton, who was Carol Burnett’s stepson. There was also Jake Conway, the son of the TV star who’d once funded Freeway, and his wife; as well as a couple named Byron and Renae Smith. Many of them lived within a few minutes of each other in Escondido, north of San Diego. The Meehans’ home had a vast yard that they’d converted into a kind of park, with footpaths and a Zen garden.

Increasingly, members of the Family were interested in New Age mysticism, and the Larsens had returned from their trip with a pack of Medicine Cards, which, like tarot cards, were supposed to provide insight into an individual’s life. During Cherry’s visit, the Larsens used the cards well into the night. When Cherry drew a card depicting a whale, the Larsens told him it symbolized all the latent wisdom waiting to flow out of him. Cherry was tired and overworked. “I’d been getting the shit kicked out of me,” he said. To hear someone highlight his strengths energized him.

Cherry agreed to move to Phoenix, but he still had concerns. He told the Larsens that he was worried about Meehan. Eight years had passed since he’d sat across from the ES founder in a St. Louis hotel room. Since then, Cherry’s reverence had been tempered with something like fear. He’d seen how the love and understanding Meehan promised his followers could contort into coercion and control.

Part Three

Upon its inception, Icecap consisted of five programs: Crossroads in St. Louis, Insight in Atlanta, and Lifeway, which had branches in Dallas, San Antonio, and Phoenix. Soon they would be joined by a Colorado program, which at first was called Alpha, and later Cornerstone. Formally speaking, Meehan didn’t own or even run these programs. He received his money from Charter Hospital, income that he augmented by hosting paid seminars. When Meehan visited an Icecap program, he conducted two talks—one for clients and one for their parents. Everyone was expected to pay $50 to attend.

Above: Dave Larsen in July 2021.

Nonetheless, local leaders were expected to call Meehan daily to consult on their operations. Meehan also dictated who in Icecap worked where, often moving counselors across the country with little advance notice. As a staff-retention technique, it was perversely effective. Stationed in strange cities, with few or no contacts outside ES, counselors weren’t inclined to leave the world Meehan had built.

In Phoenix, Dave Cherry was happier than he’d been in a long while. Larsen drove him to work at Charter every morning; the friends spent the commute getting excited about the noble work of helping kids stop using drugs. Both had newborns, and in their free time the two families roamed together in a park near the Larsens’ house, a desertscape of red sandstone and saguaro cactus. Some nights Cherry and Larsen—the two Daves—would drive around for hours, talking about God, fatherhood, and ES.

Cherry liked his new job, despite some distinct challenges. Whenever Meehan visited the recovery wing at Charter, which he did frequently, he terrorized the unit’s doctor, according to Cherry. “You take the fucking medications!” Meehan once shouted after the doctor tried prescribing an ES patient psychiatric drugs. (According to Larsen, “any kind of psychiatric medication was a deal breaker” for Meehan; the ES method was supposed to be enough to keep people on an even keel.) Meanwhile, the wing’s staff—most of whom were ES counselors, some as young as 18—were constantly forgetting their badges and keys, creating a hassle for hospital personnel. They had trashed the hospital’s van, used to ferry clients to ES meetings; the interior was covered in graffiti and cigarette burns. At times, when Cherry was chastising his staff and cleaning up after them, his job felt more like parenting than running a hospital unit.

Larsen kept busy expanding the ES program in Phoenix, which at some point was rebranded Pathway. He required counselors to make at least three community contacts each week, by calling or visiting therapists, treatment specialists, family doctors, government officials, probation departments, and drug courts in search of new participants. He estimated that 200 to 300 kids were soon in regular attendance at Pathway meetings, and that, of those, 70 percent paid to go through ES treatment at Charter.

As ever, enjoyment was paramount to the program. Counselors organized tricycle races, DIY game shows, and mock Olympics, in which some participants wore rented sumo suits. There were drug-free raves or dances every weekend, and twice-yearly Round Robins, where attendees were together for 12 hours straight. They were told it was all in service of keeping their demons at bay. Not everyone was an addict, but those who were had an incentive to exaggerate their experiences with substance abuse. As one former client recalled, the most popular kids had been “the most fucked up” and “made the biggest turnaround.”

Some young people passed through ES and continued on with their lives. Others were elevated to the program’s steering committee or staff, entering a world with Meehan and the Family at its center. They were indoctrinated into the belief that Meehan was a spiritual titan, the man who’d invented the philosophy that had saved their lives. Now he was both their boss and adviser. Pleasing him—and his wife, Joy—was both a professional imperative and a way to progress along the path to enlightenment. So when the Meehans insisted on controlling their staff’s personal lives, people went along with it. Joy viewed exercise as an expression of vanity, so ES insiders didn’t work out unless instructed to. Bob, meanwhile, believed that it was disrespectful for men to pee standing up, because they might splash the seat, and were instructed to relieve themselves while sitting.

More significantly, according to multiple sources, ES staff were expected to date one another. Once they were married, women were discouraged from working—for an ES program or anywhere else. They were urged to stay home and raise children. Anyone who resisted the Meehans’ wishes could face their wrath.

Not everyone was an addict, but those who were had an incentive to exaggerate their experiences with substance abuse. As one former client recalled, the most popular kids had been “the most fucked up” and “made the biggest turnaround.”

Cherry began to notice that people at work were acting differently around him. Larsen stopped calling to hang out. Colleagues went silent when he entered the room. He even convinced himself that Melissa was freezing him out: When he tried to talk to his wife, he detected an eerie, curt formality. Cherry racked his brain for what he might have done wrong but came up empty. “I was starting to get scared,” he said.

One Friday afternoon, Susan Hamilton, the Meehans’ adopted daughter, stopped by Cherry’s house while visiting from Escondido. She was a surrogate when Meehan wasn’t present; her words were a reflection of his will. But unlike Meehan, she never yelled or stomped around. “Her demeanor was always very calm and very gentle,” Cherry said. She smiled and tilted her head like a well-meaning social worker. “Pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, until you break,” a person who once knew her recalled.

Hamilton gave Cherry a perfunctory hello and proceeded to the backyard to talk with Melissa. Cherry watched them through sliding glass door while his daughter zoomed around in her diaper. As Hamilton spoke, she repeatedly glanced toward him. When he stepped outside, the women stopped talking. Cherry returned to the kitchen. The dread he’d felt for weeks grew palpable, choking him. After Hamilton left, he was too frightened to ask Melissa what she’d said.

That evening, the Cherrys went to the Pathway office for what was known as a Purpose meeting. Every other Friday night, the staff of each ES program gathered for what were ostensibly forums to work through personal issues—to help one another the way they helped clients. Wives were expected to attend as well. When Cherry arrived, Dave Larsen was already there, and he pulled Cherry into his office.

“Look, man,” Larsen said, “tonight’s Purpose is going to be about you.”

Cherry didn’t know what that meant. Purposes weren’t typically about individual people. Larsen kept talking, matter-of-factly but not without kindness. He said Cherry didn’t have to go through with what was coming next. He could just leave—both the meeting and ES, forever.

Cherry said a silent prayer before stepping into the low-lit meeting room. He saw roughly 15 friends and colleagues seated in a circle of metal folding chairs. The group consisted of Cherry’s entire social world, save the Meehans, who weren’t present. Two seats were empty—Cherry’s and Melissa’s. His wife, Cherry was told, was in another room, talking on the phone with Joy Meehan. Jeffrey Hamilton, Susan’s husband, was at the Cherrys’ house, babysitting their daughter. Cherry was sure that if he got up and left, he would return home to find his daughter gone; she and Melissa would be kept in the ES fold no matter what.

For years afterward, Cherry assumed that Melissa had known what was about to happen. But Melissa said she wasn’t told that her husband would be targeted at the Purpose until she arrived. She also remembered several parts of the night differently than he did. For instance, she didn’t recall Susan Hamilton talking with her privately, nor Jeffrey Hamilton babysitting her daughter.

Dave Larsen was the first to speak. “There are some things that people want to say to you,” he told Cherry. “We just want you to listen. Don’t say anything back.”

A torrent of criticism followed. Someone brought up how, at the hospital, Cherry had chastised the staff about trashing the van. He’d hurt their feelings. “That’s powerful,” Susan Hamilton said, nodding. Wendy Larsen related that she’d once come across Cherry on a cold day. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and she told him he might get sick. Cherry replied that colds aren’t caused by the weather, but by viruses. Cherry wanted to explain—he hadn’t meant anything by it; he just thought it was an interesting fact—but Larsen had directed him not to respond. He heard one of Meehan’s oft-repeated refrains in his head: “If you can’t see how fucked up you are, you’re more fucked up than I thought.”

Everyone in the room piled on, picking apart what felt to Cherry like everything he’d ever done, and tracing each instance back to his fundamental brokenness as a person. Cherry lost track of time. “They tore me to the ground, to the point where I felt like I didn’t even have a right to live,” he said. “I was toxic. Anywhere I went things turned to shit. I would harm people just by being near them.” When the momentum slowed, Cherry recalled, Susan Hamilton encouraged people to speak up.

At one point, Cherry felt as if he were gazing down at his own body. He was terrified. If the group decided that he was too broken to fix, and that he was no longer welcome in ES, he worried that he’d lose more than just his family—he’d almost certainly end up dead. He was an addict, and ES had taught him that this was the defining fact of his existence. Without ES to guide him, he was sure he’d overdose in some dark alley, alone and unloved.

The Purpose lasted several hours. The participants finally filed out of the office close to midnight. According to several people present, the Meehans orchestrated the entire thing—from the meeting itself to some of the things people said. Larsen said that, to this day, he isn’t sure why it happened. Though people had complained about some of Cherry’s behavior, it was the first time the Meehans had ever taken so personal an interest in confronting a staff member. “I just took directions,” Larsen said.

Several people there that night said they believed Cherry might kill himself. But the Purpose compelled Cherry to double down on his commitment to ES. “That was the thing that changed me from a person who might question Meehan,” Cherry said, “to someone who was fully in.”

If the group decided that he was too broken to fix, and that he was no longer welcome in ES, he’d lose more than just his family—he’d almost certainly end up dead.

Targeted confrontation became a regular feature of life in ES. This extended beyond Phoenix to every city where Meehan’s programs operated. The atmosphere at Icecap’s branches was soon laced with terror. Everyone knew they could be next, that the slightest mistake might one day be weaponized against them.

Eventually, word came down that the Family would move to Phoenix full-time. According to Larsen, Meehan described what they’d build there as “the front of all human spiritual evolution.” Larsen remembered Meehan talking for a time about visiting a Zen monastery in Japan, then deciding it would be pointless. “What could they teach me?” Meehan said.

News of the move to Phoenix hit Cherry hard. He was still recovering from his Purpose, and still believed what he’d been told that night. “I thought something was wrong with me, and that Bob and especially Joy could see that,” Cherry said. Many people in ES believed that Joy could read minds and even enter their dreams.

By then the Meehans had built a system of total surveillance and control based in part on the tenets of AA. ES branch directors were sponsored by Meehan, their wives were sponsored by Joy, counselors were sponsored by directors, and clients were sponsored by counselors. AA’s fourth step (and ES’s fifth) reads: “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Accordingly, each ES adherent was expected to provide their sponsor with a detailed account of their secrets and fears, as well as their failures to abide by ES orthodoxy. In turn, that information was used to manipulate the individual and their relationships. Jacqueline Leibler, a former ES counselor in Atlanta and co-founder of the advocacy group Enthusiastic Sobriety Abuse Alliance, recalled entering a romantic relationship with a coworker simply to get her boss off her back about dating within the program. When she refused to sleep with the coworker, her boss and his wife—who was also Leibler’s ES sponsor—told her, “You need to at least give him blowjobs.” Leibler caved so that they would leave her alone.

For his part, Cherry was forbidden from watching television or reading books other than those sanctioned by Meehan or AA. He was prohibited from making purchases without first consulting the Meehans. And he was told that he could no longer speak with his parents. Were Cherry to break any of these rules, he could expect Melissa to let the Meehans know about it, possibly prompting another Purpose and risking exile. When Cherry’s father knocked on the family’s door one day—he’d flown from St. Louis after months had passed without word from his son—Melissa and their three-year-old daughter cowered in the bathroom until he gave up and drove away.

But even as he did everything he was told, Cherry kept getting the same message from the Family: Something was wrong with him. Just as they had in Escondido, the Meehans had a Zen garden in the backyard of their Phoenix home, and senior ES staff were permitted to visit it whenever they liked. At times of acute anxiety, Cherry sometimes went there to think. He always hoped Meehan might step outside, pleasantly surprised to find him there. He pictured Meehan sitting beside him and telling him that he was OK, that he was safe, that he wouldn’t find himself the subject of another Purpose tomorrow, next week, or ever.

Cherry sat in the Zen garden for more hours than he could count. Meehan never came.

Cherry was forbidden from watching television or reading books other than those sanctioned by Meehan or AA. He was prohibited from making purchases without first consulting the Meehans. And he was told that he could no longer speak with his parents.

“I’m in love.”

That’s what Wendy Meehan, Bob and Joy’s daughter, told Wendy Larsen one day when they were out for a drive. The Meehans’ only biological child was in her early twenties, and it was common knowledge that her parents were trying to find her a suitable husband. Recently, at an Icecap convention in San Diego, Wendy Meehan had connected with Clint Stonebraker, who ran the Atlanta program. Stonebreaker had come to ES in his mid-teens. He was svelte, clean-cut, and unfailingly cheerful. In a social world notable for the zeal of its converts, he stood out for his fervency. “Bob Meehan Jr.” is how one former ES counselor described him.

Stonebraker and Wendy Meehan had struck up an intense phone correspondence and even met for a first date. This was unsettling news for Wendy Larsen. She’d been involved with Stonebraker in the past—a three-month fling when they were both working in St. Louis. At a team meeting shortly after they broke up, she mockingly stuck her tongue out at him. Stonebraker reportedly stormed across the room and whipped her across the head three times with his “monkey fist,” a small metal ball encased in leather and strung on a necklace, given to ES members after 30 days of sobriety. A source present when this happened confirmed the incident; both Dave Larsen and a onetime member of the Family who asked to remain anonymous said they heard about it after the fact.

According to Wendy Larsen, she told Wendy Meehan about the attack, who in turn told her mother. Joy questioned Stonebraker, who denied hitting his ex. When asked about the matter for this story, Stonebraker wrote in an email, “If Joy and I had that conversation I did deny it because the incident with Wendy didn’t happen.”

A month after their first date, Stonebraker and Wendy Meehan were engaged. Bob and Joy asked Dave Larsen to hire Stonebraker in Phoenix so that he could move there to be with his fiancée. When Stonebraker arrived, Wendy Larsen apologized for provoking him all those years ago in St. Louis. She said that he refused to acknowledge that he’d hit her. (Stonebraker would neither confirm nor deny that the conversation took place. “Wendy Larsen and I had a good relationship during my time in Phoenix,” he wrote in an email.)

Dave Larsen had always seemed like the natural successor to Meehan, and he’d been groomed accordingly. But once Stonebraker was in Phoenix, the perception of Larsen began to change. The idea trickled down from the very top of the ES hierarchy that Larsen was, in recovery-speak, “self-will run riot.” Not everyone understood the shift in opinion—a former Family member said, “I never understood what Dave had done wrong.”

The eventual, inevitable Purpose remains one of the most traumatizing events of Larsen’s life. People’s ferocity in attacking him seemed linked to the relief that it wasn’t their turn. Afterward, Larsen fell apart. He stopped showing up for work. When the Meehans asked him to hand control of Pathway over to Stonebraker—to give up everything he’d built in Phoenix—Larsen didn’t resist. He believed the things he was told. “I didn’t want to hurt the program,” Larsen said. “I felt like I was doing the right thing—protecting it from me.”

In short order, he was sent to run a struggling ES program in Colorado, taking his family with him. Before he left, Larsen was given one last major task: securing a horse and carriage to surprise Stonebraker and Wendy Meehan with at their wedding.

“I didn’t want to hurt the program,” Larsen said. “I felt like I was doing the right thing—protecting it from me.”

Cherry was working 80-hour weeks at the time, still laboring to get back into the Family’s good graces. He continued to run the Meehan Recovery Center at Charter Hospital, a full-time job. In addition, he made sure that various ES programs complied with state law and other regulations. It was something of a specialty of his. He’d reviewed the coursework for the Meehan Institute, a new “school” in Phoenix, where aspiring counselors were versed in the ES method; he’d done the same with the protocols for Step Two, a residential rehab facility modeled on the failed SLIC Ranch in California. The day Cherry finished that project, he was summoned to speak with Meehan at the Stonebrakers’ house.

The Meehans and the Stonebrakers lived next door to each other. Most ES staff made do with cramped quarters—a consequence of their low salaries—but not those two families. They owned homes with swimming pools, formal dining rooms, and multicar garages. In the Stonebrakers’ backyard, a brick path led to a garden bench, which is where Cherry met Meehan that day. Meehan’s legs were crossed, and he was cradling a large stick stripped of its bark. “I just knew he was going to hit me with that stick,” Cherry recalled.

Meehan instructed him to come close. “You’re afraid,” Cherry remembered Meehan saying, “and that’s a problem. You’re run by fear.” A thwack landed on Cherry’s side. “The pain you’re feeling now—that’s real,” Meehan said. “Everything else, all your fear—it’s in your head.”

The solution, Meehan continued, was a week alone in the desert. At the time, the yet-to-open Step Two was nothing more than a double-wide trailer on the edge of the San Tan Mountains. Meehan told Cherry to use that as his base camp—a place to sleep and use the bathroom—and to spend the rest of his time outdoors, getting in touch with his “true, sociopathic male self.” When he was out there, Meehan said, Cherry would be afraid. Afraid that the Family had his wife fucking some other guy. Afraid that they had shipped Melissa and Cherry’s daughter off to another city. Afraid that he’d come home to an empty house. Cherry needed to rid himself of these fears, Meehan said. In fact, he needed to rid himself of all feeling.

Meehan instructed him to drive home, pack some clothes, and tell Melissa that he’d be back, but not where he was going. Cherry did as he was instructed. Then he drove to the Step Two trailer and, for reasons he couldn’t articulate to himself, decided to dig a grave. Outside the double-wide, he found a shovel; moments later he was making a hole in the ground. The grave would be for his parents—he’d decided to kill the part of himself still attached to them and bury it forever. But the dirt was hard, unyielding. So he flung the shovel aside and ran, as if trying to outpace the images swirling around his head: a moving truck, Melissa packing up their photo albums and their daughter’s toys, the Family’s laughter as they sent her off with another man.

While he ran, an idea descended on him. He would build his own Zen garden, like the one in the Meehans’ backyard. It was suddenly very important that he find the right rocks, three total—one for him, one for Melissa, and one for their daughter. The hunt led him deep into the desert. The sun was setting when he realized that he was lost. His panic spiked with thoughts of scorpions and spiders. He heard the yips of coyotes. He gathered a bunch of small rocks—potential weapons, he thought—and climbed atop a boulder. He spent the night up there, crouched and fearful, only setting out to find the trailer when the sun came up again.

After that night, Cherry lost his fear of nature. He slept outdoors and spent his days running, smoking, and writing in the sun—he’d brought a little notebook and filled it with memories. One night he thought about how, on his way to the desert, he’d stopped at a roadside shop for some food and bottled water. The woman behind the counter had been in a buoyant mood, smiling and making conversation. Meehan always told ES staff that they were the luckiest people on the planet, the only ones who were genuinely fulfilled. And yet Cherry realized that he was miserable. The woman at the store seemed happier.

“I’m thinking, there are millions of people out there, and they’re not going through the shit I’m going through,” Cherry said. “They’re sleeping sound. They’re getting up and sending their children to school. They’re not worried about a bunch of people packing their wife off to live with some other guy.”

A thought—wholly contrary to why Meehan had sent Cherry to the desert, and terrifying in its implications—took shape over the next several hours: Meehan was just a man. He couldn’t take anything from Cherry if Cherry didn’t let him. By the time he drove back to Phoenix, Cherry was determined to get out of his predicament—to leave ES for good.

The grave would be for his parents—he’d decided to kill the part of himself still attached to them and bury it forever.

Despite the prohibition on exercise, Cherry was allowed to rollerblade. He did it at night, after Melissa went to sleep, exploring his neighborhood’s shortcuts and byways, seeking the quickest path to the Meehans’ house. He found that he could get there and back in 17 minutes: Melissa would never know he was gone. He got several mason jars, which he hid in some bushes. Now he needed gasoline. The Meehans, he knew, kept their kitchen door unlocked and slept in separate beds, each with a fan facing it. He decided to go inside their home one night, light Molotov cocktails, and hurl them at the couple’s headboards.

Cherry believed that there was no other way of leaving ES with his family intact. With Melissa under the Meehans’ sway, he couldn’t persuade her to go with him. One night he came home to find large red dots plastered around the house. Joy, he knew, had instructed Melissa to put them up, as reminders of something. When he asked what they were for, Melissa told him it was none of his business.

In the end, what stopped him from trying to kill the people who controlled his life were the headlines that kept flashing in his head—the media holding up Meehan as someone who had devoted his life to helping others, only to be murdered by a man he’d tried desperately to save. Cherry didn’t want that. Meehan didn’t deserve a glowing postscript.

But the reasons for Cherry to leave kept piling up. Despite their pious front, the Meehans routinely ridiculed religious people, and one night they led Cherry to their bedroom and made him drop to his knees and renounce God; later, Bob Meehan told him that “the closest thing you have to God in your life is me.” An ES counselor who’d pleaded in vain for help with a depressive client was later blamed for the client’s suicide and subjected to a damaging Purpose. Another got pregnant and, according to a half-dozen people with knowledge of the situation, was coerced by the Meehans into getting an abortion. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Hamilton, Susan’s husband, became gravely ill with hepatitis C and needed a liver transplant. The Meehans insisted that the operation would damage him spiritually; they prescribed cleanses and the 12 steps to get well. When her husband died, Susan was excommunicated from the ES world—apparently, near the end, Jeffrey had seen a doctor with her encouragement. (Multiple people I spoke to believe Jeffrey would have lived were it not for the Meehans. Susan Hamilton did not respond to requests for comment.)

Cherry was determined to find a way to get his family out. Driving home from work each day, he put on a Deepak Chopra tape and prepared himself to pretend, for Melissa, that he was still fully immersed in ES. He also went against the Family’s edict and bought a book by an outsider, Combating Cult Mind Control, by Steve Hassan, hoping it would provide guidance on how to reach his wife. Cherry scrawled excerpts from the book on slips of paper and kept them in his pockets to fortify his resolve. The book advised seeking opportunities to discuss what life was like before a person joined a cult, but that was difficult for Cherry, because communication in his marriage was conducted through the Meehans. “Melissa talked to Joy, Joy talked to Bob, Bob talked to me,” Cherry said, and vice versa.

He hoped to have more luck with another of the book’s suggestions: waiting until your loved one is at odds with the group, then broaching the subject of leaving. Months went by before Cherry had his chance. He and Melissa wanted to have a second child, and Melissa asked Joy for permission. She returned from their meeting crestfallen: Joy had said no. Cherry decided it was time to make a move.

“I don’t feel any passion anymore,” he said. This felt safe. Depending on Melissa’s reaction, he could pull back—writing off what he’d said as just thinking aloud—or go further.

“I feel the same way,” Melissa replied.

Soon after, the couple decided to depart ES together. The plan was to leave Phoenix behind, go somewhere else, figure out a new chapter for their lives. It all started simply enough: Cherry told Meehan that he was quitting his job at Charter Hospital, and he gave 30 days’ notice. Meehan took Cherry’s resignation calmly, almost like he’d expected it—or didn’t believe it was real.

A few months prior, Meehan had decided that he wanted to get a new Icecap branch off the ground in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Cherry was supposed to handle the licensing. After announcing that he was leaving, Cherry repeatedly asked Meehan if he’d informed the families in Pennsylvania, who’d offered support for the planned program. Meehan kept putting it off, so Cherry took it upon himself to call the main contact.

The man listened to Cherry’s explanation, then said, “How about you come out here and run the program yourself?” Cherry tried clarifying—he wasn’t just leaving Arizona, he was leaving ES. The guy cut him off midsentence. He understood, but he still wanted Cherry to come. The program wouldn’t have to be a part of Icecap. It wouldn’t have to be linked to Meehan in any way. It would just be a recovery initiative for teens in need.

Cherry took the job, working out the logistics in secret. He would call Allentown from unoccupied rooms at Charter, worried that Meehan had tapped his phone. In 1998, the Cherrys gathered up their belongings and quietly left Phoenix. ES insiders interviewed decades later still believed that the couple had fled without warning in the middle of the night.

Part Four

For five years, Dave Larsen didn’t know where the Cherrys had gone. It was as if they simply vanished. No one told the Larsens anything when they visited Phoenix from Colorado a few times a year, and they never asked.

Above: Meehan and ES-related mementos given to program participants.

During one trip, in 1999, Wendy Larsen was lounging on a couch, catching up with two female friends in ES, when a turn in the conversation caused her to sit up straight. The women were talking about Clint Stonebraker. This in itself was risky—he was part of the Family, and gossip always seemed to get back to them. Since the Larsens’ move to Colorado, Stonebraker had settled comfortably into power: In addition to taking over Pathway, he now ran the Meehan Institute. “To talk about Clint was terrifying,” said one of the women who spoke to Wendy that day. “It could’ve been the end of me.” But the women talked anyway, and what one of them related left Wendy aghast.

The woman, who agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity, said that Stonebraker’s verbal attacks on his colleagues had become relentless. He would seize on some perceived character defect and probe it relentlessly. “Somebody who sneezed or made a sound, for weeks, months, he would make fun of them for it,” the woman said. She also said that Stonebraker had accused her of using her “tits to get attention.” Taking issue with the way she dressed, he’d deputized his wife to prepare daily instructions of what to wear and how to do her hair and makeup.

Multiple sources echoed these claims about Stonebraker’s behavior. Jacqueline Leibler, who worked at Insight in Atlanta, said he “would just find any vulnerability, anything you felt insecure about, and he would voice it in front of the room.” She recalled Stonebraker mocking her for crying in a Purpose meeting. According to several people, he screamed at women and called them names. Dave Larsen remembered him using “hideous misogynistic terms” in conversation, including “slam holes” and “cum dumpsters.”

After a teenaged Pathway client named Shelly Mason was in a terrible car wreck that necessitated air evacuation and a six-week hospital stay, she was summoned to Stonebraker’s office, where he berated her and insisted that she’d crashed because she was spiritually sick. According to Mason, she was instructed to view the accident as a “relapse” and told to persuade her parents to put her in treatment at Step Two, at a cost of roughly $10,000. Mason, who is diabetic, said that Stonebraker also told her that she’d willed her disease into existence, and that only if she got rid of it would she be allowed to attend the Meehan Institute when she turned 18. (She didn’t enroll at the institute.)

When she heard about Stonebraker’s behavior, Wendy Larsen was furious. She had warned the Meehans about him. This time she wasn’t going to be cowed. She asked her husband to address the issue, and Dave called in Frank Szachta, the longtime head of the ES branch in St. Louis and someone the Meehans trusted. Bob and Joy, when told about their son-in-law’s behavior, agreed that action was needed. Stonebraker was subjected to a Purpose that was as brutal as any Dave Larsen had seen. Afterward, according to a source present at the time, Szachta “facilitated several discussions” with ES staff about Stonebraker’s conduct, “making it clear that these things were not OK.”

Stonebraker spent some time off—a week, in his recollection. “I was definitely overly aggressive at that time,” he wrote in an email, in which he also denied specific allegations made against him, including his treatment of Shelly Mason. When Stonebraker returned to work, he delivered a round of personal apologies. But soon after, according to multiple former colleagues, he was back to his old self.

Meanwhile, rumors began to circulate about Wendy Larsen—that she was messed up, sick, a bad mother. According to Dave Larsen, Meehan told him that for one year, he was to leave for work early, come home late, and stick to superficial conversation with his wife, as punishment. “They told me not to talk to her about anything real,” Larsen said. The same tactic had been used to break up other couples, according to former ES followers.

Wendy Larsen was growing sick of ES. She was also bored. “I felt like, is this all there is?” she recalled. She dreaded going to even one more Purpose. She felt her husband pulling away but didn’t know why. So she turned her attention to her own needs. She joined a church orchestra and took hot-yoga classes, both of which lowered her even further in the Family’s esteem. When she told her husband privately, in their kitchen, that she didn’t want to be like the Meehans—“I don’t want to have their marriage”—he told her not to say that sort of thing out loud. The Family might hear somehow.

The Colorado program that Dave Larsen had been sent to run was booming. The Family knew this because Renae Smith, one of its members, handled the books for some of the Icecap branches. Larsen had been paying Meehan a few thousand dollars per month—a consultant’s fee—but when Meehan realized how well things were going in Colorado, he insisted that he receive an additional $40,000. Meehan called it a “sacrament,” Larsen said. Larsen gave him the money.

Things took a turn for the worse in 2003. While Larsen was visiting the Family, Joy told him, “You know, there are other ways out of that marriage besides death.” Slowly, the Meehans worked to convince Larsen that his marriage was tainted, until finally he agreed to leave Wendy. He cried night after night, so Bob Meehan suggested that he spend ten days in St. Louis talking to Frank Szachta. Before leaving, Larsen stopped by his family’s home to pack. He and Wendy talked briefly, and Larsen felt a flutter of uncertainty. Then, in St. Louis, while Szachta was extolling Meehan’s virtues for the millionth time, Larsen had an epiphany at odds with the Family’s plans for him. What ES provided wasn’t love, he thought. It wasn’t even real.

Larsen raced back to his family—he drove so fast from the airport he was pulled over for speeding. “I want to be home again,” he told Wendy when he arrived at the front door. She agreed. He held his family in an embrace. That night they decided to leave ES.

When Larsen’s friends had fled or been excommunicated, he’d never thought to track them down. According to Meehan, they were dangerous; contacting them risked courting spiritual infection. But with ES in the rearview mirror, Larsen knew he’d been wrong. “It was immediate,” Larsen said. “I wanted my friendships back.” He got online and started searching.

Joy told Larsen, “You know, there are other ways out of that marriage besides death.”

For months after Dave Cherry left ES, he’d worried that the Family would send someone to Allentown to kill him. He barely slept—he still believed Joy could enter his dreams. His anxiety made it difficult to function. He would go to the grocery store and an hour later realize he was standing in an aisle with an empty cart. It was like he’d gone into a fugue state. Once while driving, he summoned the courage to call a hotline for cult survivors and managed a few barely coherent sentences before he rear-ended another car. “I just knew the reason I got in that crash was that I’d ratted out Bob,” Cherry said. “I’d taken Family stuff outside the Family.”

Eventually, Cherry sought help from a counselor. As they talked, Cherry noticed that the man was always a step ahead of him. He seemed to know where all of Cherry’s stories were leading. The counselor specialized in the care of people who’d left cults, and it turned out that there were legions of Bob Meehans out there and even more Dave Cherrys—charismatic, monomaniacal, abusive leaders, and the followers they brainwashed. The clinical literature was vast, and Cherry tore through it, finding a language for everything he’d been through.

In 2003, Dave Larsen found Cherry online and called him. They had years of their lives to catch up on. Their families decided to vacation together in New York City. Once the two Daves were back together, it felt like no time had passed. They talked for hours about their respective ordeals, but Larsen visibly winced when Cherry used the word “cult.” In Larsen’s telling, “I thought Dave was being a little dramatic.”

It wasn’t until Larsen found the cult expert Steve Hassan’s work that he understood what Cherry was talking about. Hassan laid out criteria for what makes a group a cult, including regulating an individual’s physical reality, minimizing or discouraging access to non-cult sources of information, ritualistic and sometimes public confession of sins, and financial exploitation, manipulation, or dependence. ES met all the criteria. “It blew my mind,” Larsen said. “This wasn’t 80 percent—this was 100 percent.”

By the end of the New York trip, the friends had decided to go into business together, to start a new kind of teen treatment program, a rebuke to ES. They would do recovery the right way. The Cherrys, who by then had a second daughter, would relocate to Denver. The families would support each other. Within two months, the two Daves had leased an office.

Right before the move to Colorado, Cherry was doing something he often did: searching the internet for information about ES that reflected his experience and coming up empty-handed. No one, it seemed, had ever been able to expose the abuse and control that sustained the world Meehan built. Together, the Cherrys decided to create a website that changed that. Melissa suggested the name for it. Meehan often told his followers that, in prison, if you wanted to signal sincerity, you’d say you were “on the emmis.” (Emmis means “truth” in Yiddish, though it’s unclear if Meehan knew that.) The phrase had become ES slang, used when someone wanted to emphasize that they weren’t joking. “For real, man, this is on the emmis,” an ES acolyte might say.

OntheEmmis.com went live in the spring of 2004. Larsen, once feted by Meehan for his promotional skills, called and emailed other people he knew who’d escaped the Family’s gravitational pull, encouraging them to go to the site. In “no time at all,” Cherry said, roughly 100 people had submitted personal stories. Former ES believers used the site’s message boards to vent or reconnect; parents used them to track down kids they’d lost to Meehan’s pull. “It was a period of empowerment,” Larsen said. “We wanted some justice. We wanted to stand up to these fuckers and say, ‘We’re not scared of you anymore.’”

The website attracted the attention of journalist Abbie Boudreau, a reporter for an ABC affiliate in Phoenix. She crisscrossed the country interviewing people for a segment. Larsen and Cherry spoke to her. Boudreau also cornered Meehan on his way to an AA meeting in Atlanta, where the Family had relocated a few years prior. Meehan turned, saw the camera, and hustled into the building. From there the news crew drove to the local Icecap branch, still called Insight, and knocked on the door.

“We’re looking for Bob Meehan,” Boudreau said.

“OK, um … no comment,” a counselor in the doorway said.

Inside, a Family member looked frantically for Clint Stonebraker only to realize that he wasn’t there. Apparently, he’d been alerted that the crew was coming and had slipped out to avoid the cameras. (Stonebraker said he didn’t recall Boudreau coming to the office.)

As with the 60 Minutes episode 25 years earlier, Boudreau’s 2005 segment aired immediately after the Super Bowl, albeit only in Phoenix. The bulk of the segment consisted of footage of Meehan shot years earlier by Bob Warren, an ES follower who later left the program. “Supposedly, I was making training tapes. Well, they were terrible training tapes—they were just Bob spouting bullshit,” Warren said in an interview for this story. “He illustrated himself real well. So I sent the only copies of those tapes I had to Dave Cherry, who sent them to the TV station.”

Whittled down to a handful of damning sound bites, the footage presents Meehan as demented and bigoted. Wiry and energized, with close-cropped patches of white hair on either side of his head, he tells people training to be counselors, “Don’t think about what’s going on at home. Let those crazy motherfuckers eat their own shit.” At one point he sings the words “White woman with a n—er, white woman with a n—er.” He insists, “We don’t have fat people here. There are no fat people on staff.”

When Cherry saw the segment, he threw his fist in the air. “I was just in heaven, man,” he said. “I was so excited.”

No one, it seemed, had ever been able to expose the abuse and control that sustained the world Meehan built. Together, the Cherrys decided to create a website that changed that.

Stonebraker was furious. Soon after the exposé aired, he reportedly smashed a sack full of home movies with a hammer in the Insight office. “Why do we have these fucking VHS tapes?” he screamed, according to one staff member present that day. Stonebraker had found them scattered around the office and was worried, the staff member said, that more footage of Meehan would leak. (Stonebraker denied that the incident happened.)

There may have been other information the Family wished to keep private. Multiple sources said that racism had become an increasingly pronounced part of ES culture because of Stonebraker. “It permeated everything,” Dave Larsen said. “It wasn’t just incidents—it was at the core.” According to several of Stonebraker’s subordinates at the time, he’d wanted to move to Georgia’s Forsyth County because, he claimed, it was the whitest county in America. (In 1912, the white population there waged a campaign of terror that drove the entire Black community out.) According to Larsen, when a Family member who was Native American talked about having a child with his wife, the Family maneuvered to break them up, because Stonebraker didn’t want children who weren’t white in his neighborhood. Stonebraker allegedly kept a collection of slave figurines on prominent display in his living room, which according to several sources he called “my little n—ers,” and he once had Insight T-shirts with Confederate flags on them made for every staff member.

Former colleagues claimed that, in addition to routinely disparaging racial minorities, both Stonebraker and Meehan owned guns and encouraged ES followers to do the same. “It was very, very survivalist—us against them,” a onetime counselor recalled. Multiple sources described a Christmas party at the Stonebrakers’ house during which a few Black teenagers were spotted on the street outside. Stonebraker and Meehan allegedly grabbed handguns, yelling about “these dirty n—ers.” In the end nothing happened, but staff trainees at the party were so rattled that Stonebraker later apologized to them.

When asked for comment about these claims, Stonebraker wrote, “There are terms I have used in the past which I regret. I have learned a lot through the years and have changed that behavior.” He insisted that “racism is not a part of the culture at Insight,” and denied the specific allegations against him. He said that the Insight T-shirts were printed with the Georgia state flag, which from 1956 to 2003 included an emblem of the Confederate battle flag. He also said “race was not involved” in the incident at the Christmas party. “There were people … who felt threatened by a group of young people who did not live in the neighborhood,” he wrote. “A couple of people went outside to investigate the situation, and the police were called.”

The trainees at the party were from the Meehan Institute, which was flourishing. It, too, had relocated from Arizona to Georgia. Tuition was $4,000 per person. The trainees were former ES clients. Many of them went from an ES program to the institute, with little intervening time in the outside world.

Under Stonebraker, several former trainees said, the institute’s curriculum focused less on bolstering people’s counseling abilities than on teaching techniques of persuasion. Once they were counselors, they would need to coax people not only into sending their kids to support groups, but also into paying for more intensive treatment. “They were teaching you how to find an objection, how to overcome it, how to convince someone to do something that wasn’t financially viable for them at that moment,” a former trainee recalled. The goal was to create a sense of urgency in the parents.

Meanwhile, a onetime trainee said, entire days were given up to discussions of “how homosexuality is evil and unnatural.” Another former student at the institute recalled Meehan coming to class one day and running down a long list of groups ES believers “don’t accept”: Black people, gay people, poor people, Mexicans. One ES client from this period, who is half Hispanic, recalled a counselor turning the rest of her support group against her and two other clients who weren’t white, calling them “illegals” and “wetbacks.” She said that, as she cried, “they would be laughing at me, saying I’m not American, I don’t belong there, and I’m like, ‘Hello! I was born here!’”

“They were teaching you how to find an objection, how to overcome it, how to convince someone to do something that wasn’t financially viable for them at that moment.”

Within days of the news segment airing in Phoenix, someone hurled a brick through Pathway’s window. The building was also graffitied. A follow-up report on the local ABC affiliate noted that, in just two weeks, OntheEmmis.com had received some 300,000 page views. The segment concluded with a note from Meehan’s lawyer indicating that his client had decided to retire. “It is unfortunate,” the note read, “that a proud and proven legacy is being attacked at its twilight by a few disgruntled former employees who themselves were able to kick their habits with the help of Mr. Meehan.”

What, though, did retirement for Meehan really mean? In practice not much. He stopped hosting talks and seminars that people paid to attend, but according to former program staff he remained the ES guru. His book was still pushed on clients’ parents as a how-to manual. He still sponsored branch directors. And Stonebraker, the most powerful of those leaders, was still Meehan’s son-in-law.

ES staff went to great lengths to project normalcy, though the damage inflicted by the news segments and OntheEmmis.com grew. A former ES staff member recalled finding a scrap of paper with the URL written on it tucked under her windshield wiper one day. Purpose meetings turned into “witch hunts,” the woman said, with higher-ups trying to determine who was to blame for declining attendance at program meetings. By 2009, ES employees around the country had stopped receiving regular paychecks. Many of them kept working anyway. It was the culture Meehan had created. According to Jacqueline Leibler, ES taught people to think, “If you’re having money problems, it’s actually a spiritual problem and you need to deal with the spiritual problem.”

ES leadership seemed confident about the future. After all, Meehan and his method had weathered bad press before. What didn’t dissipate with time avid believers could work to suppress. The mother of one ES client recalled her daughter being told that if she watched the Phoenix news segment on YouTube, she would relapse into substance abuse.

Meek Publishing, a small imprint run by the Family, issued a revised edition of Meehan’s book in 2000, and a year later it published a new title. Bumper Stickers: A Simple Process to Self Improvement promised easy ways “to guarantee that you are going in the right direction based on your own definitions.” Meanwhile, Stonebraker rebranded himself as an all-purpose self-help guru. He hosted paid seminars and published a book titled Relationships for the Intimately Challenged (in later printings, Connected: The Art of Building Relationships). One section of the book seemed intended to telegraph his—and perhaps the entire Family’s—reaction to the efforts to expose ES spearheaded by Cherry and Larsen. The section describes a man named Chris, a drug-recovery counselor who is “very angry all of the time.” After resigning from the treatment facility where he worked, “he wasn’t satisfied with simply moving on with his life.” The book continues:

He held others responsible for his plight in life and was determined to make others pay. He found other disgruntled former employees and made it his mission to bring the facility to its knees. His plan failed, and he will continue this unhappy life until he understands it is his flawed belief systems and his inability to take responsibility for his own decisions and actions which created the situation and relationships of failure and dissatisfaction.

Part Five

One night in December 2017, Lanie Murphy watched her best friend die. They were street racing—Murphy, then 17, was in her car, while her friend was on his motorcycle—when a driver ran a red light. The car slammed into the motorcycle, killing the rider instantly.

Above: Cherry in July 2021.

For Murphy, who already struggled with substance abuse, the next 20 days were a blur of blackouts and arrests, pain pills and PCP. Her parents turned to Google for help, and soon sent her to a rehab facility in Gilbert, Arizona: Step Two Recovery, the same place where 20 years earlier Dave Cherry had tried to dig his parents’ grave. The program was still part of the ES empire, which in recent years had grown once again.

The bad press and backlash had been all but forgotten. Insight was still going strong in Georgia, as was Pathway in Phoenix and Crossroads in St. Louis. Between 2016 and 2020, new ES outposts opened in Sacramento, California, in Tampa, Florida, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in Peachtree City, Georgia. Preparations soon began for one in Nashville, Tennessee. Additional ES programs have opened under the umbrella of a nonprofit called Full Circle; they’re run out of Catholic churches in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, and Missouri.

Icecap was dissolved after the ABC segment in Phoenix, and the existing ES programs don’t advertise their organizational connections. But they form an ecosystem of sorts. Stonebraker sits on Full Circle’s board and runs six ES programs; the rest are run by Meehan acolytes involved with ES for decades. Counselors started out as clients and were trained at the Meehan Institute. They routinely send teenagers to ES residential centers—there are a total of four of these in Georgia and Arizona, including Step Two. All of them are owned and operated by Byron and Renae Smith. 

Almost from the moment Lanie Murphy entered Step Two, she was hooked. “I fell head over heels for it—all the attention and the love,” she said of the ES method. By the end of her stay, she had resolved to become a counselor. In June 2019, she was invited to join seven other trainees in Georgia for the Meehan Institute’s summer session. “I thought my life’s dream had come true,” she said.

The three-month training included long days of ES instruction—how to sell a parent on the program, how to guide a client through the steps—cut with rushed, perfunctory dips into more mainstream treatment methods. What distinguished that summer session from the many that had come before was that it would be the last time Meehan made an appearance at the institute. Nearing 80, he wasn’t dying, but he wasn’t well.

The trainees were familiar with the Meehan myth, and his visit occasioned great excitement. “Everybody was freaking out in my class, like we were meeting Kim Kardashian or something,” Murphy said. The young women in the program woke up early to do their makeup and worry over outfits. The meeting would be held at the Step One house—Step One is similar to Step Two, but for clients over 18—and the entire facility was scoured clean before Meehan’s arrival.

When he appeared, he was an old man with a portable oxygen tank and a tube hooked to his nose. He asked the trainees what he’d asked thousands of young people over the previous four decades: their name, age, and pick of poison. They rapped for a few hours, and then Meehan hugged every trainee, sitting down between embraces to catch his breath. He looked into each person’s eyes and said, “I love you.”

After graduation, Murphy was assigned to work in Georgia. Based on her account and those of more than a dozen recent ES clients, the program’s methods have changed little. Parents are pressured to enroll their children in the program; clients are encouraged to cut ties with friends, and occasionally with their own families. Teenagers with mental or physical illnesses are told that their problems are fabricated or symptoms of addiction. One client recalled being made to quit taking antidepressants, another her thyroid medication. Young people who open up about being sexually assaulted are blamed for what happened to them and discouraged from going to the police. Clients who’ve attempted suicide are berated for selfishness. (Stonebraker denied these claims, as did Renae Smith.)

It was the program’s hostility toward LGBTQ clients in particular that bothered Murphy. Some of the clients she counseled struggled with their sexuality, and she felt unprepared to help them. Multiple ES clients, from the 1970s to the present, said they were taught that homosexuality was a symptom of addiction. After Step Two opened, if a kid in an ES program was openly gay, or was suspected of being gay, they were referred to the center in Arizona for treatment. Meehan himself allegedly counseled some ES insiders about their attraction to members of the same sex in what amounted to conversion therapy. (According to Renae Smith, Step Two does not view being gay as being a symptom of addiction and “does not discriminate on the basis of sexual preference for admission to the program.”)

Eventually, Murphy wanted to leave ES, but she had no savings. She made $180 a week for upwards of 110 hours of work. The free room and board intended to justify these low wages were squalid. Initially, Murphy slept in a smoke-stained room in Step One’s basement, until a pipe leaked and caused ceiling damage. After that she slept on someone’s living room couch. Meals rarely rose above dorm fare—ramen, SpaghettiOs. In spare moments, Murphy wondered where all the program’s money went. (According to Renae Smith, as of 2021, a 45-day stay at Step Two in Arizona cost $16,500.)

Purposes were still venues for targeted psychological terror. Contact with people outside ES was tacitly forbidden. Murphy secretly made some friends on Twitter, and on one occasion she drove to a car show to hang out with them. When she returned, she was met with accusations that she’d gotten high. That she must have done drugs. That she was hiding something.

For many staff, a vicious cycle set in: Without money, they were stuck, even if some or every part of them was desperate to leave. “Your life is in their hands,” Murphy said. “Are you going to risk losing your job and having nowhere to go and no savings, or are you just going to be compliant?”

Then Murphy caught a break: The first $1,200 government check sent during the COVID-19 pandemic was her ticket out. She fled the ES world in May 2020.

Since leaving, she has linked up with a community of disaffected former clients and staff. A Facebook group, created in November 2020, now has more than 700 members, who share stories and provide support. Clients from the 1980s and ’90s commiserate with their 2010s counterparts, marveling at how little has changed. Many posts mourn people who overdosed: ES, it seems, keeps genuine addicts off substances only as long as they’re inside the bubble; it doesn’t necessarily give them the tools they need to stay sober when they leave. Numerous clients who were in ES programs over the past decade said they wanted to talk for this story because they couldn’t stand to see any more tragedy. “It’s been too much death, man,” one source said. “I don’t want to see any more dead kids.”

Recently, an offshoot of the main Facebook group began organizing. In Zoom meetings, its members coordinate complaints to state agencies and investigate other modes of redress. One of the group’s most active members is a 21-year-old named William Young, who left Cornerstone, the ES outpost in Denver, in 2018. He’s been working through what his time there did to him ever since. At his darkest point, not long after his departure, he sent a Facebook message to a stranger he thought might be able to help.

“Long shot,” he wrote to Dave Cherry, unsure if he would get a response, “but OntheEmmis?”

“It’s been too much death, man. I don’t want to see any more dead kids.”

After he moved to Colorado, things didn’t turn out as Cherry had hoped. He and Dave Larsen started the Family Recovery Center in Denver, and in 2007 they brought in another former Meehan disciple, a man named Andy Avirett, to help run it. But as it happened, a trio of deeply traumatized former cult members didn’t make great business partners. Larsen and Avirett soon quit and started a second, affiliated program—Family Recovery Center South—about 50 miles away. Not long after, Avirett left that one, too. Still, the men remained friends, and when Larsen decided that he was finally through with the recovery business, he handed off his program to Cherry for a dollar.

Cherry never got the chance to grow the businesses on his own. On New Year’s Eve 2007, his family was gathered at home, cooking pizza rolls and potato skins, when Cherry broke out in a cold sweat. Melissa drove him to the hospital, and an X-ray revealed that his colon had ruptured. He was in septic shock. Cherry was sent to another hospital, where he arrived so severely dehydrated that the doctors struggled to find a vein for an IV. They pumped him with fentanyl through an opening in his thumb and sent him into surgery. Cherry left the ordeal with an ileostomy bag, thankful to be alive.

But the bag became a professional liability. It broke open at a lunch meeting. It ruptured while he delivered a lecture. Cherry spent a lot of time in bed, which caused the arteries in his leg to clog. As he tried to recover, Cherry came across Stonebraker’s book online and read the section about an angry former employee named Chris. Cherry’s response—written in a kind of trance, and posted in installments to OntheEmmis.com—exceeded 40,000 words. He’d wanted to be a writer once upon a time, before Meehan convinced him to drop out of school. The posts formed a memoir of sorts, a feverish account of his experience with ES, interspersed with melancholy epigraphs from Jackson Browne and Gregg Allman. Later, he posted the whole thing to Blogspot, with the title “how i was spiritually raped and left for dead.” Former clients and counselors still circulate the link when trying to explain ES to outsiders.

In 2008, Cherry went to St. Louis for surgery to help clear his veins. The surgeon told him that the procedure would take 90 minutes; it lasted five hours, during which Cherry’s triglyceride spiked, triggering acute pancreatitis. When he emerged from the ICU 15 days later, he moved in with his parents for a month. He missed Melissa and his kids. The loneliness was crushing. When he finally got back to Colorado, the financial crisis was just beginning. The Great Recession proved too much for Cherry’s rehab businesses. He closed the doors for good in 2009.

When Will Young found him nearly a decade later, Cherry was open to talking about his experience with ES, and to learning about Young’s. “I realize that asking you questions about your involvement may trigger feelings of paranoia or apprehension,” Cherry wrote in one message. “That’s pretty common. I’ve been out since 1997, been through cult specific therapy, educated myself on the dynamics of cults and thought reform, and spent a number of years working as an anti-cult advocate and I still feel a touch of apprehension when I get an email or message asking about the cult. All of that even after responding to well over a thousand former members and their families.”

The two men kept up a correspondence and even talked about meeting up—they both lived in Denver, after all. But Cherry proved elusive. Sometimes he dropped out of touch for months at a time, without explanation.

The posts formed a memoir of sorts, a feverish account of Cherry’s experience with ES, interspersed with melancholy epigraphs from Jackson Browne and Gregg Allman. Later, he posted the whole thing to Blogspot, with the title “how i was spiritually raped and left for dead.”

Early one morning in 2018, Dave Larsen received a troubling text: Emergency, he recalled it saying, come get me, I need help. The text was from Cherry. (When asked about it, Cherry said he had no recollection of sending the message.)

It had been a difficult few years. Cherry had reenrolled in college, studying video production. Then, in 2014, Melissa told him she didn’t want to be married to him anymore. Cherry was blindsided. Much of his time and energy was redirected toward navigating his place in his daughters’ lives. They moved back to Phoenix with Melissa; Cherry was granted joint custody, allowing him to have the girls on holidays and over the summer.

Larsen’s first reaction to Cherry’s text was, despite himself, irritation. Their friendship had survived ES and a fraught business partnership, but the divorce put it to the test. Melissa was all Cherry wanted to talk about, and he seemed to call only when he needed a ride or some other favor. The two men had stopped talking for nearly a year. Then Larsen started getting calls from Melissa, asking if he knew Cherry’s whereabouts—other friends hadn’t heard from him and were afraid he’d killed himself. Larsen managed to track Cherry down, but they soon fell out of touch again. A year had passed without the friends seeing each other when Cherry’s urgent text arrived.

Larsen called 911 and requested that someone check on Cherry. The woman told him to hold a moment while she typed in the address. “Oh,” she said. “That’s Dave Cherry. He’s fine. Might just need some support.”

At the time, Cherry was broke. He’d been laid off from his job as a stage manager at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and had recently pawned some of his furniture for $50—he needed the money to buy food. “It was clear to anybody looking in from the outside that I wasn’t going to make it,” Cherry said. His eldest daughter had made him a Tinder profile, and he’d gotten into a relationship with a woman named Teri. They’d broken up after a year or so but remained close. Shortly after Cherry sent the text to Larsen, Teri persuaded him to give up his apartment and stay on her couch until he got his finances straight.

Three years later, Cherry is still there, though he now kicks in $500 a month for rent. When his daughters visit, he sleeps on the floor so they can have the couch, or he rents an Airbnb for short periods. In 2018, he took a job as the manager at a Starbucks kiosk in a local Safeway.

Many of the latest wave of former ES followers eager to expose the program’s abuses are familiar with Cherry and his story. But amid his personal struggles, he’d never heard about them. When I texted him about the organizing on Facebook and elsewhere, Cherry was floored. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything of substance on the cult that I wasn’t involved [in],” he replied. “Man, that really lifts a burden for me. I’m here at work and fighting back tears. For years I felt like I was screaming into the wind.” He admired what the new generation was doing. “I know that the cost of being a Meehan victim is incalculable,” he wrote. “I also know the cost of a little bit of activism.”

Even more than 20 years after he left ES, there are moments when the identity Cherry fought so hard to forge for himself slips away and he finds himself ruled by fear. He’ll walk by the Safeway manager’s office, see him talking to the regional Starbucks supervisor, and think they’re plotting against him. Am I about to be railroaded? he’ll find himself wondering. Am I about to end up in another one of those Purposes?

After learning about the online advocacy, Cherry said that he’d be taking the next week off, something he hadn’t done since starting his job. He wanted time to think. He still believed he was capable of more than life had allowed him to achieve. “My plan isn’t to devote that time to a bunch of tasks, or getting back to people, or even spending time with my kids,” he said. “I’m just going to give that week to myself to figure some shit out.”

Joy Meehan passed away in 2020, and Bob Meehan died in June 2021, a month before this story was published. Stonebraker confirmed Meehan’s death in an email, and it was the topic of intense conversation online among former ES participants. As of this writing, an obituary has yet to be published.

When Cherry thinks about Meehan—the man who changed and then ruined his life, whose legacy is one of destruction for so many people—what he feels now is pity. “At the end of the day, he created this group of people who were afraid of him,” Cherry said. “He believed they loved him, and they believed he loved them. But there was nothing there but fear, man. Both ways.”

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In 2005, a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz was stolen from her hometown in Minnesota. Who took the iconic shoes, and where did they go? In an eight-part narrative podcast, two journalists search for answers.

No Place Like Home

Prologue

They were supposed to be silver—silver slippers on a golden road. That’s how Dorothy’s shoes are described in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But in the film version, the color changed. A screenwriter hastily crossed out “silver.” Technicolor was about thinking brighter. The shoes would be ruby instead. 

The Wizard of Oz had five directors over the course of its development, which resulted in a carousel of auteurial visions. The design for the slippers changed, too. First they were simple, then ornate, then somewhere in between. The final version started out as white silk pumps, manufactured by the Innes Shoe Company in Los Angeles. They were the type of shoes a woman might wear to work, priced at around $12. At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio behind The Wizard of Oz, the costume department wrapped the pumps in red netting, then hand-stitched sequins onto them with silk thread. There were thousands of sequins, made of clear plastic with burgundy paint applied, so they’d appear bright red under the studio lights. The last touches on Dorothy’s soon-to-be-famous shoes were pronged rhinestone bows. 

How many pairs were made? Some film historians say seven, because actors’ contracts stipulated a clean costume for every day of the week. But there may have been more, or fewer. Shoes for close-ups, sparkling and pristine. Shoes for dancing and skipping, with felt attached to the soles to muffle any scraping and tapping. Slippers for Judy Garland, with her name written on the tan leather interiors. Slippers for her stand-in, who was on set until the last possible moment before a take, while Garland did schoolwork in her trailer. Garland was only 16, but so talented that she could nail a dance sequence on the first try as if she’d been rehearsing it all day. 

When did you see The Wizard of Oz for the first time? Christmas, maybe—your cheeks flush from a cozy fire, crinkled wrapping paper scattered around you on the living room floor. Film critics and historians have described it as the most American of movies: Home is in the heartland; evil emanates from the East and West; the city is all smoke and mirrors. The film offers comfort but also excitement—it’s an adventure into literal color. And it all begins with the slippers. 

The conversation between Dorothy and Glinda in Munchkinland is surprisingly short. Where is Glinda going in her glowing bubble? Why isn’t she more helpful? The Good Witch warns the girl who fell from the sky never to remove the red shoes that have suddenly appeared on her feet. “Keep tight inside of them,” Glinda chirps before she vanishes. “Their magic must be very powerful.”

Do not for your life let go of the shoes. Dorothy doesn’t. One step, then another, with an elegant flick of her foot. Her world is widening with every skip and stride. 

The ruby slippers became iconic. Ask anyone who cares about them why they do and they’ll echo Glinda: magic.

Four known pairs remain in the world. One was given away by MGM in 1939, as part of the promotion for the film’s release, to a lucky woman in Tennessee. That pair was later sold at auction, and then again to an anonymous buyer. The shoes haven’t been seen publicly since 2000. Rumor has it that a major celebrity—someone like Oprah—is probably their owner now. 

Another pair was sold in 1970, at a first-of-its-kind Hollywood memorabilia auction intended to clear MGM’s backlot of what executives had decided was mostly junk. A young man named Kent Warner felt differently; he believed MGM was sitting on a gold mine. He was hired to sift through piles of props and costumes and to catalog the items suitable for auction. According to industry legend, Warner unearthed at least three pairs of the ruby slippers in MGM’s wardrobe storage, high up in a warehouse. One set became the star of the auction. Warner presented the shoes to prospective buyers on a velvet pillow. They sold for $15,000—nearly $100,000 today—and then were donated to the Smithsonian a few years later. Now people line up to see them behind glass at the National Museum of American History. They’re the most requested item on view; visitors arrive at the front desk and ask, “Where can I find the slippers?” When they see them, glittering in their display case, some people cry, like they’ve encountered the Shroud of Turin. 

Another pair Warner kept for himself, and MGM didn’t stop him. These are the nicest slippers, in the best condition. They may have been used in the close-ups at the beginning of the film, when the slippers sit on the stockinged feet of the witch crushed by Dorothy’s house. In the telling of Rhys Thomas, who wrote the definitive history of the shoes, their allure began to overwhelm Warner. People came to his house to see them instead of him. As Thomas put it, “The charm of the slippers plain wore Kent out.” Warner sold them in 1980, perhaps to pay for his medical treatment: He died four years later of an AIDS-related illness. Warner’s pair was eventually acquired by Leonardo DiCaprio and Steven Spielberg, who plan to exhibit it in the yet to open Academy Museum of Motion Picture Arts. 

This podcast is about the last authenticated pair of ruby slippers that Warner found. He sold them for about $2,500 to a friend, a child actor turned memorabilia collector named Michael Shaw, who’d become entranced with The Wizard of Oz when he was under contract at MGM. For more than 30 years, Shaw took his shoes on the road, lending them to museums and showing them at charity events. They became known as the Traveling Shoes. 

In 2005, these slippers made their way to Grand Rapids, Minnesota, Garland’s hometown. They went on display that summer at the Judy Garland Museum, a quaint, kitschy landmark attached to the movie star’s childhood home—a white clapboard house with a porch. The museum advertised the slippers like crazy, and people came in droves to see them. Kids often arrived in costume. There were a lot of Dorothys.

The shoes were supposed to be in Grand Rapids until Labor Day. But late one night that August, someone broke into the museum and took them. All that magic—and the millions it was worth—disappeared in an instant.

Where did the ruby slippers go? And who took them? Finding the stolen slippers became a matter of cultural resurrection and, for some people, an obsession. 

Welcome to No Place Like Home.

—Ariel Ramchandani, Writer and Cohost

Seyward Darby, Cohost

Binge the full season on Apple Podcasts.

No Place Like Home is a production of C13Originals, a Cadence13 Studio, in partnership with The Atavist Magazine.

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Cat and Mouse

With dozens of felines turning up dead around London, a pair of pet detectives set out to prove it was the work of a serial killer.

By Phil Hoad

“You have to look!” Johnnie Walker commanded. “Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes.”

—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

I.

It was the body on the south London doorstep that got everyone’s attention. On the bright morning of September 23, 2015, a woman walked outside her home to find a cream-and-coffee-colored pelt, like a small furry Pierrot. It had dark forelegs, and its face was a smoky blot. It was a cat, slit throat to belly; its intestines were gone.

The woman rang the authorities, who came and disposed of the body. Three days later, she looked at a leaflet that had come through her mail slot, asking whether anyone had seen Ukiyo, a four-year-old ragdoll mix whose coat matched that of the dead cat. The woman broke the bad news to Ukiyo’s owner, Penny Beeson, who lived just down Dalmally Road, a nearly unbroken strip of poky, pebble-dashed row houses in the Addiscombe area of Croydon.

Beeson was inconsolable. “I shook for the whole day,” she later told The Independent. 

“R.I.P ukiyo I feel devastated,” her son, Richard, posted on Facebook. “Hacked to death and left on someone’s doorstep. Some people are so sick!”

A few days later, Addiscombe’s letter boxes clacked again as another leaflet was delivered. This one warned that Ukiyo’s demise wasn’t an isolated incident—there had been a troubling spate of cat deaths in the area. The leaflet was printed by a local group called South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty, or SNARL.

Tony Jenkins, one of SNARL’s founders, had recently become his own master. At 51, with a reassuring, yeomanly face and a golden tinge at the very tip of his long, gray ponytail, Jenkins was laid off after 25 years working for a nearby government council. He hadn’t gotten along with his boss, so getting sacked came as something of a relief. With a year’s severance in his pocket, “I was enjoying my downtime,” Jenkins said. That included being with his girlfriend, a 44-year-old South African who went by the name Boudicca Rising, after the first-century Celtic warrior queen who fought the Romans to save the Britons. Among other things, Rising and Jenkins shared feelings of guardianship toward animals. Their homes at one point housed 34 cats, a dog, two gerbils, and a cockatoo between them. The couple had formed SNARL together.

Scanning Facebook one day in September 2015, about a week before Ukiyo was found dead, Jenkins stumbled upon a post from the nearby branch of the United Kingdom’s largest veterinarian chain, Vets4Pets, that described four gruesome local incidents in the past few weeks: a cat with its throat cut, one with a severed tail, another decapitated, and a fourth with a slashed stomach. Only the final cat had survived. Jenkins told Rising about the post. “That doesn’t sound right,” she said. “We need to do some digging.”

Digging was her forte. Always impeccably dressed, with an ornate gothic kick, and unfailingly in heels, Rising was a multitasking demon on a laptop. By day she worked for an office management company. By night she was part of the global alliance of animal rights activists. She was one of many people who used small details in online videos of a man torturing felines to identify the culprit, a Canadian man named Luka Magnotta. He was reported to police, who didn’t take the allegations seriously, and Magnotta went on to murder and chop up his lover in 2012—a crime recounted in the Netflix documentary Don’t F**k with Cats.

On the heels of Ukiyo’s death, Rising and Jenkins distributed SNARL’s leaflets throughout Addiscombe, warning of the threat to local felines. While to an uninterested eye some of the attacks might have appeared to be the indiscriminate cruelty of nature—the work of a hungry predator, say—SNARL believed they might be a series of linked and deliberate killings. Whether the crimes were perpetrated by an individual or a group SNARL wasn’t sure. It hoped the leaflets would help turn up more information. 

SNARL soon had reports of more incidents in the area, for a total of seven: one cat missing, two with what SNARL subsequently described as “serious injuries,” and four dead. Rising said that vets who saw the deceased cats’ bodies told her the mutilations had been made with a knife. On September 29, SNARL sent out an alert on its Facebook page saying as much. The cats’ wounds, the group insisted, “could only have been inflicted by a human. Their bodies have been displayed in such a way as to cause maximum distress.” 

That was SNARL’s official line. On Rising’s personal page she went further, emphasizing her belief that Addiscombe was dealing with a serial killer. “This is a psychopath,” she wrote.

“That doesn’t sound right,” Rising said. “We need to do some digging.”

On the afternoon of October 24, 2015, two miles southeast of Addiscombe, 47-year-old Wayne Bryant picked his way over the fallen leaves of Threehalfpenny Wood, named for a 19th-century murder victim found there with that sum of money in his pocket. The dry autumn air kept Bryant alert as his wide-spaced blue eyes scanned left and right and he listened to the wind hissing through the oak canopy. Bryant’s cat, Amber, like many domestic felines, kept regular hours with her comings and goings, but the previous day she hadn’t returned in the mid-afternoon as she usually did. When Amber didn’t show up the following morning, Bryant and his wife, Wendy, formed a search party.

A few years before, Bryant had suffered a serious spinal injury at work, causing a leak of cerebrospinal fluid and, eventually, several hematomas. Animals had always been a big part of his life—he and Wendy had a menagerie of rescue pets, from dogs to guinea pigs to lizards—but as he struggled with memory problems and long-term unemployment, the emotional support they provided became irreplaceable. Bryant had had Amber for eight years, since she was a six-week-old kitten. “A friendly little thing,” he told the website AnimalLogic. “A little curtain-climber.” 

As they searched the woods, Bryant’s wife called to him. In a small clearing off a path, sheltered by a cluster of exposed tree roots, the ball of black and orange fur was unmistakable. But Amber was headless and tailless, except for that appendage’s very tip, which had been placed on her belly. The couple were sickened. They shrouded their beloved pet in a towel and took her home. Then Bryant remembered an article in the Croydon Advertiser about a group convinced that several recent cat killings were all connected.

A couple of hours later, Jenkins and Rising were at Bryant’s door. “I remember Wayne’s first words to me: ‘Ain’t no fox did that,’” Jenkins told me. “If I ever write a book about this, that’s what I’d call it.”

It was the first time either Jenkins or Rising had come face-to-face with a suspected cat killing. Neither of them had any forensics training. Unwrapping the towel that held Amber, they noted the clean severing of her head and tail, which seemed to corroborate Bryant’s view that no animal could be responsible. They asked the family to show them the crime scene. There was no blood on the ground, meaning that either her injuries were inflicted after death or Amber was killed elsewhere and moved to the spot in Threehalfpenny Wood where her owners found her. Rising and Jenkins took Amber’s body to a vet for further examination.

Bryant gave a statement to the police, and Rising went to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), the UK’s main animal welfare charity. She later claimed that a representative brushed her off, saying that a fox probably killed Amber. Besides, the RSPCA dealt primarily with instances of cruelty in which the victims were still alive: It received more than 11,000 complaints a year in Greater London alone.

Jenkins was incredulous when he heard about the RSPCA’s response. “Although Croydon’s got a bad reputation, a lot of crime, I don’t think our foxes carry knives. And foxes certainly do not kill cats,” he said. At least, “it’s very, very rare.” He doubted that scavenging creatures would be interested in removing and eating feline heads and tails. Rather, they’d go for the nutritious internal organs, and SNARL hadn’t seen that kind of damage in any killing other than Ukiyo’s.

In October, there was another suspected cat killing in Croydon. Then SNARL began to get reports from farther afield, one in neighboring Mitcham and two in nearby West Norwood. Nick Jerome’s cat, Oscar, was found headless on his street. “None of us went to pieces over it, but it was obviously distressing at the time,” he said. In Coulsdon, on the southern edge of Croydon, David Emmerson discovered his cat, Missy, decapitated and tailless. His 18-year-old daughter, already struggling with the loss of her aunt the previous year, was devastated. Emmerson never told his autistic son the full story of what happened. The truth was too ugly. “I never grew up as a cat person,” he said, “but maybe because we got her as a kitten, she became one of us. Mine was the lap she chose to sit on when she sat down. I’m not sure why. I adored her.”

The RSPCA had its party line and wasn’t getting involved, but that didn’t stop the local press, which knew a good story when it heard one. By mid-November, reporters had made a lurid christening: The Croydon Cat Killer was on the prowl.

Jenkins and Rising turned to the law for help. They met with officers in Croydon’s branch of the Metropolitan Police Service, who claimed not to have any cat killings on record. Rising referred the officers to reports the police had in fact handed to owners, and the vet records that had been filed in some of those cases. “They seemed clueless,” Rising said of the police. “Outside on the steps we realized: It’s going to be down to us.”

SNARL’s founders decided to muster evidence to present to the RSPCA and the Met. They arranged for a vet in Addiscombe, Deane Braid-Lewis, to conduct postmortems on ten cat corpses, including Amber’s. It cost £5,000—nearly $7,000—all of it raised on GoFundMe. Braid-Lewis concluded that only a “large sharp blade” could have made such clean incisions. He found no sign of bite marks that would suggest predation or scavenging by other animals. He couldn’t state with certainty that the same hand had wielded the knife in all ten cases, but he believed that the perpetrator’s skill level had improved over time. Amber had a fractured spine and generalized bleeding in the thoracic cavity, both signs of blunt-force trauma that he found in many of the other animals he examined. SNARL believed this meant that the killer was bludgeoning the pets to death, maybe after luring them with food. Braid-Lewis also found an unknown substance under Amber’s claws: Had she scratched the killer? Might it contain DNA?

According to Rising, Andy Tarrant, the borough commander for the Croydon police, initially refused to test the sample. He told her that Amber’s body had been handled by too many people to produce a conclusive result. When eventually it was tested, the material proved to be carpet fibers. (The Met wouldn’t let individual officers comment for this story.)

Skeptical cops like Tarrant might have been reliving memories of Operation Obelisk, a four-month Met investigation in 1999 focused on a run of cat killings—it produced a frenzy of media speculation about satanic rituals, only to end with an announcement that, indeed, foxes had been scavenging roadkill. But even if the authorities got on board with SNARL’s hypothesis, the law didn’t exactly guarantee a harsh outcome if the killer was found. It’s not illegal to kill an animal; without carefully worded language, such a statute would have the awkward side effect of making every slaughterhouse the site of mass murder. Despite the UK having some of the strictest animal welfare protections in the world, the maximum sentence for cruelty is still only 51 weeks behind bars, a fine of £20,000 (about $27,000), or both. In practice, any sentence is usually six months or less, because crimes involving animal cruelty tend to be treated as minor offenses. The killer, if he existed, might be sued for criminal damages, as pets are property. From a police perspective, the prosecution options, let alone the evidence, didn’t merit the time or money that a serious investigation would require.

But members of the British public wouldn’t let the cat deaths go quietly. On SNARL’s Facebook page, people commiserated and provided comfort.

“Poor baby, and their fur parents!” 

“Furbabies need a human voice sometimes—no more than now.”

“Run free at Rainbow Bridge poor puss” (a reference to “crossing the rainbow bridge,” a description among animal lovers of what happens when a pet dies).

Some of the bereaved cat owners accompanied Jenkins, Rising, and a number of SNARL volunteers to an open Q&A with the Met at Croydon College on the evening of Wednesday, December 2. Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, commissioner for the whole of London, fielded questions on community matters as Tarrant moderated. When Tarrant announced that he was about to take the last question, someone pointed out that SNARL’s founders and supporters had had their hands up the whole time. Tarrant called on one of them. “Are you aware that someone is going around London killing cats, decapitating them, and leaving their remains to be found?” asked a SNARL volunteer. Horrified, Hogan-Howe said that he knew nothing about it and, according to Jenkins, shot an admonishing look at Tarrant. “Of course we need to take this seriously,” Hogan-Howe said, adding that someone who harmed animals might very well move on to humans.

He was referring to a corner of what criminologists call the MacDonald triad. In a 1963 article entitled “The Threat to Kill,” New Zealand–born psychiatrist John Marshall MacDonald suggested that extreme animal cruelty is one of three adolescent behaviors that increase the risk of homicidal tendencies later in life. (The other two are obsessively setting fires and persistent bedwetting.) The FBI claimed to  corroborate the triad with case studies of serial killers, including Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, who, among other malicious deeds, tortured animals as youths. Some criminologists now question the theory.

Ten days after the Q&A, a few dozen SNARL supporters and worried pet owners presented Tarrant with a petition signed by some 45,000 people. It called for a formal investigation of the cat killings. Tarrant informed the group that, as it happened, Met officers were now on the case. Operation Takahe, a name randomly generated by a computer program, had begun. Jenkins and Rising were invited to participate; the pet detectives were deputized.

II.

Animals didn’t rule his life when Tony Jenkins first met Boudicca Rising. He’d had a fairly average pet quotient—two cats—when he was married and living in Stoke Newington, on the other side of London. Then his marriage fell apart, and he spent five years living in the spare room of his own home. He would leave the window open at night and wake up with “his cat”—Mabel—on his chest, after she’d returned from her nightly adventures.

“Morose and pissed” one night on Facebook, as Jenkins later recalled, he friended Rising—under her real name, not the nom de guerre she later adopted while battling animal abusers, in order to shield her from harassment and threats. With one marriage behind her and fresh out of another relationship, Rising was sick of “creeps” hounding her on social media. Based on Jenkins’s profile picture, she wrote him off. But the pair started chatting, and it became a regular thing. They had a natural affinity—“anti-racist, anti-fascist, kind of unconventional,” as Rising put it. She found his attitude refreshing. “He never tried it on, never showed any dick pics,” she said. They refrained from meeting in person—she wasn’t sure he was her type. Jenkins had his reservations, too. “You’re not going to turn me into some crazy animal-rights person, are you?” he once asked her.

When they finally did meet, Rising consigned Jenkins to friends-with-benefits status, but by August 2012, she had to acknowledge that they were in a relationship. Finally divorced, Jenkins was looking for a house of his own. With London in its post-Olympics property boom, he realized that he would struggle to buy anything in the city’s north big enough to put up his two teenage sons when it was his turn with them. Down south, near Rising, houses were still affordable. The couple agreed that living in separate places worked best. “If we had an argument, I could just fuck off home, or she could. Job done,” Jenkins said.

So Jenkins moved to south London—“the badlands,” as he called it—on December 21, 2012, the final day of a 5,126-year cosmological cycle in the Mayan calendar. The world’s gonna end, of course it is, Jenkins remembered telling himself. And I’m moving to fucking Croydon.

Rising lived in the South Norwood neighborhood, and she was a regular in the pubs and shops of Portland Road, which is more lively and multicultural than the sedate streets of Addiscombe to the south. She had lived in the area since 1996, and one reason she had a big social network was that she’d been rehousing animals “for donkey’s years,” she said. “I never felt the need to call myself a rescue. It was just something I did.”

Rising found her way into activism in what was then a world capital of injustice: her birthplace, South Africa. Her father worked in the oil industry and tried to use his power to help others—he once shielded a white employee who was threatened with blackmail after marrying a mixed-race woman. Rising’s father also worked with rescue dogs and occasionally brought them home, including Pingo, a Keeshond mix who walked in circles. Pingo joined a couple of other dogs, plus Suzy, a cat, in the family’s brood of pets.

Rising’s mother was an organizer for the apartheid opposition, the Progressive Federal Party. She also worked with the party’s Unrest Monitoring Action Group, which compiled statistics on state-sponsored violence in townships. Rising got a job with the group at 17, helping people escape the country and sheltering victims of police brutality. “It was really dangerous,” she said. “The only reason we didn’t die is because we were white and well-known.” After Nelson Mandela was elected, Rising moved to London for six months, hoping to take a break. She never left.

And now she was dating Jenkins, who one night walked tipsily to her house after a night at the pub with a friend. A kitten had followed him.

“What’s that?” Rising asked when she opened the door.

“It’s a cat.”

“I bloody well know it’s a cat. But what’s it doing here?”

It was an odd question coming from a woman who had nine of them. Despite their efforts to keep the kitten in the garden, it slipped past them into the house, hissed at the felines in residence, and made itself at home on Rising’s bed. Discussing the interloper the next morning, the couple noticed that it had no collar and hadn’t been microchipped. Rising speculated that it had escaped from a nearby cat breeder who refused to have her animals chipped—“in which case, fuck her.” If no one claimed the kitten, they decided that Jenkins would.

Jenkins named her Daisy. He felt guilty about leaving her alone in his house while he was working, so she was soon joined by Ozzy, a black rescue cat from east London. “I called him that because I liked rock music. The Prince of Darkness!” Jenkins said.

Rising was well on her way to making Jenkins a “crazy animal-rights person.” The next step was transforming him into a saboteur. Animal rights activists meet regularly in the winter months to disrupt countryside fox hunts, which still occur in the UK, despite having been banned in 2005. Some “hunt sabs,” as they’re called, sport a tattoo of a running fox. One of Rising’s friends asked if Jenkins would like to come along on a sabotage mission. After that, Jenkins spent many weekends in a Land Rover ferrying protesters around. They used horns and citronella spray to distract packs of hunting dogs. On occasion things became confrontational with the landed-gentry types who ran the hunts.

The adventures were a break from the growing cat menagerie in Jenkins’s house. He and Rising took in strays and rehoused many more. “We got to the point where we’d run out of friends and family to foist cats onto,” he said. The mission creep toward Dr. Dolittle territory was documented on ASBOCats, a combination blog and exercise in avant-garde anthropomorphism written by Rising in the voice of her pets. “I kept on pesticatting and pesticatting and by mistayke jumped on Daddi’s fayse and made him yell and sware,” one post reads. “Almost as much as Mommi, who ebentually tucked me under the cubbers and sed go to sleep.”

In the autumn of 2014, Jenkins and Rising put an official name on their shared, consuming passion. The acronym SNARL was Jenkins’s idea—“I thought it was catchy”—but Rising suggested the L stand for “liberty,” not “liberation,” as Jenkins originally suggested. The latter was too militant sounding, she thought. The couple couldn’t have guessed that, a year into SNARL’s existence, they’d be distributing leaflets about cat murders, or that just a few months later, they’d be working with the police on the first UK investigation in which the authorities clearly stated that they were pursuing a serial killer who targeted pets.

“You’re not going to turn me into some crazy animal-rights person, are you?” Jenkins once asked Rising.

Detective Sergeant Andy Collin stood in front of a BBC camera crew and stated categorically that a human killer was responsible for the animal deaths reported up to that point. It was 2016, and the toll now included other fauna—foxes and rabbits, for instance. “Whoever’s doing this is good, seemingly, at what they do,” Collin said. “There is planning and thought involved.” 

Working out of Croydon Police Station, Collin had been appointed by the Met to lead Operation Takahe. His team would eventually include four detective constables and ten officers. In his early forties, with a small, gnomish face and a bluff air, Collin was a local boy who had worked street-gang and organized-crime cases. That didn’t stop him from taking this oddball assignment seriously. Rising told me that she was sold on Collin from the beginning. “Andy was really special in that he really cared,” she said. “Cops who really care have this kind of lazy charm about them. They don’t take themselves seriously, but they take cases seriously. It’s a hard thing to describe, but when you see it in a copper, you know they’re actually half-decent.”

Collin set about ordering the investigation—pinpointing which reports of dead animals strongly suggested human involvement and then trying to discover which human. Rising admitted that, as the death toll rose beyond 50 animals in the early months of 2016, it was hard to find a consistent modus operandi: “Some were heads cut off. Some were tails. Some were heads and tails. Some were a back leg and a tail.” With such a variety of injuries, SNARL and the police weren’t sure if they were dealing with one killer or a group. “We were really working blind,” Rising said.

The investigation’s first port of call was a forensics lab. Twenty-two animal cadavers, including four of the ten already autopsied by Braid-Lewis, were delivered to the Royal Veterinary College for examination. The Met shared the expenses with the RSPCA, which had come around and now wanted to resolve the mystery of the dead pets once and for all.

A young veterinary pathologist named Alex Stoll was assigned to look at the cadavers. A high-achieving postgraduate, Stoll had performed his first piano concert at age six, held a pilot’s license, claimed to be learning nearly a dozen languages, and had appeared as an extra in several Harry Potter films. Still he found time to probe around inside dead animals. A paper Stoll coauthored for The Journal of Animal Welfare Law argued in favor of systematic use of forensic expertise in the investigation of crimes involving animals, for which there was little protocol. 

Stoll’s verdict on the 22 dead pets was that they’d all succumbed to blunt-force trauma, and that the decapitations and other mutilations had been performed with a sharp knife or, in some cases, a hinged instrument like garden shears. He admitted that he was uncertain about the kind of blunt force that took the creatures’ lives—it could have been, say, a collision with a car. Stoll didn’t test for human DNA, because he believed the corpses had been handled by too many people for that evidence to be useful. He swapped notes with Braid-Lewis, whose conclusions he broadly corroborated. Stoll even went a step further. “I’d be fairly confident in saying it’s the same person performing these mutilations across these animals,” he later told the BBC.

So police, pathologist, and SNARL were united in their opinion about the killings. With the investigation gaining steam, Takahe meetings were convivial and productive. Collin, Jenkins, Rising, and RSPCA chief inspector Mike Butcher met monthly to review recent incidents. Jenkins was amused to suddenly find himself a collaborator with the authorities. “First time I’ve been in a police station without handcuffs,” he joked. His hyperactive rescue dog, Toffee, mauled rugs during meetings and once snuck off to have a stealth poo during a lecture SNARL’s founders were asked to give at the Royal Veterinary College. Meanwhile, a network of volunteers and animal rescue groups were on high alert for reports of pet deaths, and PETA offered a reward of £5,000 (nearly $7,000) for information leading to a conviction. 

SNARL was soon swamped with reports about new killings, including ones outside London. The police logged them all, but officers could only be present on the ground according to their priorities on a given day—crimes involving humans took precedence. For their part, SNARL’s founders attempted to visit every reported crime scene. Jenkins and Rising often spent three or four hours comforting traumatized families and doing forensic work. (Jenkins admitted most of his knowledge came from watching episodes of CSI.) They only had the capacity for about two calls per day.

A surge of attacks around Addiscombe Railway Park in autumn 2016—after the area had gone quiet for most of the previous year—suggested that the killer might have a thing for anniversaries. Other times the perpetrator appeared to go on what SNARL called an anger spree, hitting two or three animals in a single day. The fear that the killer might escalate to targeting people lent the hunt an undeniable urgency. “If this fellow started going out and doing the same thing to humans, I’d get kicked from here to Chelsea,” Collin told the BBC. “It’ll be: ‘Why didn’t you deal with it while it was at a low level?’”

By Christmas 2016, a year after Operation Takahe began, SNARL and the police had a general grasp of how and where this predator killed. But they were nowhere near having a description of their nemesis, let alone a name. So Rising and Jenkins coined their own. Bedwetter and Turdburger were two early attempts before they nailed the moniker, which Rising shared in a Facebook post over the holidays: “Christmas brings those losses into sharp relief and tonight we can’t help but think of all of the people and animals we have met over the past 15 months who are still processing and coming to terms with the loss of their companion animals due to Pooboy.”

Jenkins admitted most of his forensics knowledge came from watching episodes of CSI.

The SNARL founders weren’t the only ones with a nickname for the killer. “Jack the Rippurr” was dreamed up by Britain’s leading tabloid, The Sun. By early 2017, the idea of a prolific pet murderer was piquing media interest worldwide. Most British newspapers and the BBC followed the case, and it was eventually covered in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed News, and several French outlets. Vice would release To Catch a Killer, a noirish half-hour documentary, in 2018.

The case also attracted celebrity attention. Martin Clunes, an actor who went to school in Croydon and who is best known for starring in the 1990s sitcom Men Behaving Badly, wrote to the Met early in the investigation. He begged the police to catch the “sick individual” who was responsible and end a spree that was the “stuff of nightmares.” The lead guitarist of boy band the Vamps offered free tickets to anyone who helped catch the killer. Even loudmouthed Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson—a man not exactly noted for his sensitivity—lent support in the pages of The Sun, albeit begrudgingly. “I’m not a cat fan by any means—they give me asthma—and I can’t think of anything worse than spending time in the company of an animal-rights person called Boudicca Rising,” he said. “The case makes my blood boil because I am a dog fan. And if someone poisoned mine, I’d capture him and force him to live for a year with Boudicca Rising.”

There were those who accused SNARL’s founders of trying to get famous or rich. But Jenkins and Rising didn’t ask for a fee when they were called to handle dead pets. The only payment Jenkins received for his media appearances was a per diem when he went on This Morning, a daytime TV program. His severance had run out, and he was financially dependent on Rising and public donations to the SNARL website. Money was tight. “The public don’t cover stuff like clothes. Which is why he looks like shit!” Rising once joked. “We get stuff from charity shops. Neither of us is particularly materialistic.” 

Jenkins worried that, too often, the media furor minimized the impact of the killings on pet owners. “I had one police officer who went, ‘Waste of my time—it’s only a cat.’ I said, ‘Excuse me? It’s only a cat?’” Jenkins told me. “Imagine you get married, and your wife gets a cat. You then have a child, and your child at the age of six has grown up with it, adores it, sleeps with it. And one morning your wife gets up, opens the curtains, and there’s your cat with no head, and no fucking tail, and your daughter’s about to go out and play. And you tell me it’s just a fucking cat.”

The investigation created a community of grieving pet owners and sympathetic animal lovers. On June 3, 2017, around 25 of them walked under the steeply gabled roof of the Croydon Quaker Meeting House, across the street from the police station. They were greeted by a table with a picture of a tabby and a white cat emblazoned with the words “My Little Angel,” flanked with two trays of glimmering tea lights. A service card explained the reason for the occasion: celebrating the lives of Pooboy’s many victims.

A harpist played, and the group sang the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Because the killer had hit what seemed like every cultural demographic, Rising didn’t want to alienate anyone in the audience. She opted to speak on a universal theme, telling the crowd, “Love will solve this.” Then she opened the floor to anyone who wished to talk about their pet. “Some owners want to shut the door and move on,” Rising told me. “But I have owners who still do memorial posts to their cats on the Facebook pages years later. The mourning process is different for everybody.”

By August 2017, SNARL had identified around 350 cases it thought could be attributed to Pooboy. To narrow down the scope of inquiry, Rising put her business-consultant cap on. She compiled a list of a dozen criteria, eventually expanded to 26, to determine which cases Operation Takahe should investigate. Incidents featuring blatant mutilations—missing heads, tails, or limbs, or body parts deposited at the scene—were given three points. Most other criteria—little visible blood, signs of the animal having been asphyxiated, the corpse being displayed near the pet owner’s home or in a public place—got one point. Negatively weighted factors were signs of contact with other animals, including bite marks or scratches (minus five) and scuff marks on claws (minus two; cats hit by cars tend to extend their claws in panic). SNARL attended any incident that scored five or more. Cases that seemed suspicious to Stoll or another vet were ultimately counted as the work of the serial killer.

SNARL presumed that Pooboy displayed the corpses and body parts out of enjoyment for the emotional distress it caused pet owners. The scenes sometimes seemed staged with a morbid playfulness—head, body, and tail lined up in a bloody ellipsis, for instance, or in the shape of a triangle. One local man emerged into his garden one day to find his cat set upright, apparently half-buried in a hole. When he picked it up, however, the animal had no bottom half. Sometimes remains were discovered weeks after a pet disappeared from home with few signs of decomposition, suggesting the animal had been kept in cold storage.

Forensics, though, offered few leads as to who the perpetrator might be. There was little to no blood at any of the crime scenes, a fact crucial to the hypothesis that a human and not another animal was inflicting mutilations after death. But nor were there fingerprints or DNA. A suspect had never been captured on CCTV, despite most of the killings taking place in one of the most surveilled cities in the world. The perpetrator’s skill at avoiding cameras was enough to make members of Operation Takahe’s task force wonder if their man was an installer of CCTV, burglar alarms, or some other security technology.

Outside London, there seemed to be runs of cases along travel routes, not quiet suburban areas like those the killer favored in the capital. For example, on a single night, killings occurred in Bedfordshire, Liverpool, and Sheffield—all locations to the north of London and within a few hours’ drive of one another. Curiously, no killings were reported in London that evening. It was as if Pooboy had gone on a little journey. SNARL speculated that the killer could be a delivery driver of some kind. Jenkins and Rising circulated maps showing the far-flung incidents on Facebook, in the hope that a visitor might identify somebody who had recently taken a trip along the routes. Nothing came of it.

As it searched in vain for answers, SNARL saw patterns where arguably there were none. A significant proportion of the owners whose pets were killed were blond women or police officers. Many of the dead cats had been autism companion animals. Several incidents coincided with classic-car exhibitions held nearby. There were a large number of killings that occurred in places with cat in the name, such as Catford and Caterham.

A town of 20,000 on a railway terminus, Caterham is a mix of black-beamed Tudor Revival architecture and modern buildings. Huff and puff some 20 minutes up a steep slope, and you’ll find Caterham on the Hill, a serene collection of low-rise residential houses wedged between patches of greenbelt and protected by a 25 kph (15 mph) speed limit. Not quite London, not quite countryside, this is liminal land. Cats scrabble over thin-paneled garden fences that back onto long alleys. When Rising showed me the incident map for the area, it was peppered with stars.

SNARL believed that because the streetlights went out at 1 a.m., Pooboy was given the cover needed to operate without detection. The Caterham police gave Jenkins and Rising the go-ahead to organize a night watch, roping in residents to keep an eye out for strange goings-on after dark. (When it first began investigating Pooboy, SNARL had similarly monitored the streets in Addiscombe, hoping to catch the killer in the act.) Close to 10 p.m. on August 22, 2017, a patroller was walking up the area’s main northbound road. He noticed a man leaning over a wall into a garden, making smoochy, here-kitty-kitty noises. A cat bell tingled nearby. When the stranger realized he was being watched, he hurried off, a dull light casting long shadows as he went—a headlamp, perhaps? The patroller immediately phoned Rising, who told him to follow the suspect, but the stranger vanished.

The following morning, a van driver made a grisly discovery on Addison Road, a few hundred yards to the west of where the shadowy figure had been spotted: a cat’s headless, tailless, eviscerated body. Its intestines had been draped over the shingle of a front garden. Nibbles had belonged to a woman named Debbie Dyer Spencer-Hughes. She came to a familiar conclusion: “There’s no way a fox could’ve inflicted those injuries.” (Another of Spencer-Hughes’s cats was killed the following April.)

Caterham went on high alert. In the early hours of August 24, one of Spencer-Hughes’s neighbors spotted someone with a headlamp peering into gardens on Addison Road. “He wasn’t casing properties. It looked like he was searching for something,” the woman later told Rising. When confronted, the man ran off. The woman cried out for help, and the neighborhood erupted into what Rising described as “pitchfork time.” Wielding a garden rake, the woman pursued the man up the street, where he managed to give her the slip somewhere near a connecting alley—but not before being seen by several other people.

Two days later, 11 miles to the northeast in Orpington, a resident saw a man on her street trying to lure her cat with biscuits. When she confronted him, he said he had mistaken her pet for his own, which had gone missing.

“What does it look like?”

“It’s a silver tabby,” the man replied.

“Well, my cat doesn’t really look like that. What else does yours look like?”

“It’s a silver tabby with white paws.”

“Which house do you live in?”

Number 32, he said. But the woman knew the people who lived there—he was lying. After the man went on his way, she rang SNARL. The man’s description of the silver tabby with white paws matched one that had been killed just a few hours before, less than half a mile away.

The man broadly matched the one seen by 15 or so witnesses during the pitchfork chase. SNARL, along with local police, released the case’s first suspect description: “If you see a man in his 40s, white, with short brown hair, between 5’8” and 5’11”, average build, possibly with some acne scarring to his face, dressed in dark clothing, with or without a torch, trying to coax cats with a toy or feed them or looking or entering gardens, please dial 999 quoting Operation Takahe.”

At last, a picture of the killer seemed to be coalescing in the suburban gloom.

III.

Tony Jenkins stood in a tight alley skirting a redbrick Baptist church, looking down in consternation at a dead fox. Buses gusted past within earshot on the A216, a single-lane highway. There was a gamy tang in the air. Dressed in a Black Sabbath T-shirt, Jenkins hunched to examine the animal. The fox had been completely bisected across the torso, like a magician’s trick gone wrong. The head and front legs were nowhere to be seen. A small brown organ peeked out from the edge of the cut. It didn’t seem possible that another animal could inflict such exacting damage, much less one of the same species.

Jenkins took a few photographs. There were no maggots yet. The corpse was fresh. Judging by its size, it wasn’t quite fully grown. Jenkins thought the fox was an early-born cub. “Poor thing,” he said.

It was June 2018, and the Croydon Cat Killer had long since outgrown that nickname, both geographically and zoologically. Besides Pooboy, another moniker making the rounds—the M25 Cat Killer, a reference to London’s ring road—didn’t fit, either. Jenkins mentioned to me a killing that had happened two days earlier in Southampton, more than 80 miles south of London—one of the many deaths that had been documented outside the capital. Only one descriptor fit the scale of what SNARL had seen thus far: the UK Animal Killer.

Jenkins continued to search the alley, but nothing stood out apart from a few tufts of fur. If the animal had been hit by a car, there were no signs of it dragging itself behind the church. There was, as ever, no blood at the scene. Jenkins was about to pocket a five-pence piece he found near the corpse when I suggested it could have a fingerprint on it. “It’s very unlikely,” he said. Eager to help, I also excitedly pointed out some dollops of excrement on the pavement around a drab community garden behind the church. “It’s not human shit though, is it?” Jenkins retorted. “I don’t think he takes a dump after he’s killed.”

The church had a security camera. Perhaps the killer had messed up this time and passed in front of it. Then again, the camera could be a dummy. Jenkins noted the church’s phone number.

He knocked on the front door of a neighboring house. Harriet Jarvis-Campbell, a slender twentysomething in a tracksuit, answered. She was the one who’d messaged SNARL first thing in the morning after spying the fox from her bedroom window. Now she and her mother, Catherine, leaning in the doorway, said that they were worried about the safety of their two dogs and cats. “Has he ever been known to come back?” Harriet asked, referring to the killer. Jenkins paused before answering. “I’ll have to tell you the truth,” he said. “We’ve got six or seven cases where he’s come back and killed a second cat.”

Harriet swallowed hard. Jenkins told the women to keep their pets indoors for the time being. He wasn’t sure the police would come, but the women should stow the fox in a cardboard box, he said, just in case. Jenkins offered his goodbyes and strolled back to his battered Ford Focus, scoping all the while for anyone loitering in the vicinity, part of his crime-scene routine. There was only the ceaseless passage of London traffic.

Only one descriptor fit the scale of what SNARL had seen thus far: the UK Animal Killer.

Months had passed since the suspect’s description was released to the public. There had been more killings but no viable leads—not until June 16, 2018, two days after Jenkins responded to the report about the dead fox. Around 5 a.m., the first rays of sun were catching the River Nene, thick with pondweed, in Northampton, 60 miles north of London. In a meadow overlooking the river, a young man was stretched out on the grass. He was watching a white tugboat-style barge that had been converted into a vegan restaurant called the Ark Café. Two of its windows were smashed; the wall and ceiling adjacent to one of the openings were blackened with thick soot.

The man, Brendan Gaughan, rolled over to find someone standing over him—a police officer. “The defendant wasn’t asleep, and the officer formed the view that he was hiding,” a subsequent court transcript reads. “Fire engines attending The Ark were still present and visible from the defendant’s location. The officer formed the view that the defendant was likely positioned there so he could watch the consequences of the fire. The defendant couldn’t explain his presence. He said he was relaxing as he had nowhere to live, and he was arrested on suspicion of arson.”

Under questioning, Gaughan confessed not only to setting seven fires in the area the previous night—including three at the Ark Café—but also to killing and dismembering seven cats in Northampton in recent months. His involvement was beyond doubt: Most of those animals, or what was left of them, had been returned to their home addresses in plastic bags. Fingerprints were found on one bag that matched Gaughan’s. His DNA was identified on another.

SNARL had looked into several of the incidents alongside the Northamptonshire police, and it had logged other killings in the city—a total of 13. Was Gaughan responsible for them all? Even more tantalizing was the notion that his hunting ground was wider than Northampton.

It soon became clear, however, that Gaughan almost certainly wasn’t Pooboy. His tidy plastic-bag presentation hadn’t been seen in any of the London cases, and Operation Takahe logged incidents in the capital on at least three of the seven days Gaughan had confessed to killing cats in Northampton. The 32-year-old seemed to operate only locally—indeed, apart from two killings on the other side of town, he committed all his butchery on or adjacent to his own street. Moreover, unlike Pooboy, Gaughan was careless. The night of his June arrest on the green, he was captured on CCTV. Earlier in the year, Northamptonshire police had arrested and questioned him when a witness followed him home after Gaughan committed arson. (It isn’t clear why he was subsequently released; the police wouldn’t comment on the case.)

Still, SNARL wondered, could Gaughan have been an apprentice of their serial killer? “We have speculated about the possibility of a joint venture,” Jenkins told me. “Unfortunately, we can’t interrogate him ourselves, but I’d certainly be interested.”

After Gaughan’s arrest, according to SNARL’s founders, Operation Takahe stalled. The Met announced that Collin would be taken off the operation, and he stopped taking calls from Rising and Jenkins. SNARL said it was never given an explanation—the group was only told that new officers were being assigned to the case. Rising dismissively called Collin’s replacements “career cops,” with no real interest in getting into the field. In retrospect, it seems likely that Collin’s transfer signaled the Met’s growing disillusionment with the operation.

SNARL had grown to 11 members by then, volunteers who gave their time to distribute leaflets, take calls, and attend crime scenes and stakeouts. Beyond that there were thousands of people who followed SNARL on Facebook—a horde of pet owners, vets, animal lovers, and internet sleuths who frequently supplied tips. But there were many critics, too, and they had mounting questions, namely about the total tally of probable killings. The figure was now approaching 500. Could that possibly be accurate? What were the odds that a person could get away with that many killings, especially with all the press the case had received? 

Mike Butcher was a member of Operation Takahe and the RSPCA’s longest-serving frontline officer—he had nearly 50 years’ experience when he retired in 2020. Butcher believed there was enough evidence from the original south London incidents to suggest a single person at work. “And then it got a bit out of hand,” he said. “It became a media-hype thing. Every single cat that turned up dead was a potential victim.”

The plug was officially pulled in September 2018. The Met released a press statement with the headline, “Scavenging by wildlife established as likely cause of reported cat mutilations.” The police claimed that “hundreds of reported cat mutilations in Croydon and elsewhere were not carried out by a human and are likely to be the result of predation or scavenging by wildlife of cats killed in vehicle collisions.” In short: A fox did it. The Met had spent 2,250 police hours and the resource equivalent of some $180,000—roughly as much as it had sunk into investigating a recent series of armed robberies—to announce that the culprit was orange, whiskered, and crafty.

Rising was sure she knew what happened. Like all British public services, the Met had been whittled down by Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity-obsessed government—its budget had been reduced by 20 percent since 2010. “When they realized it cost hundreds of thousands, they killed it,” Rising said, “and they killed it by trying to discredit us.”

The Met’s press release didn’t explicitly say that SNARL was wrong, but it did aim a broadside at the thesis of a human serial killer. The police’s verdict rested on four categories of evidence. First were six cat cadavers reexamined by Alex Stoll in August 2018, at which time he found puncture wounds he had previously missed and concluded that some of the animals might have been scavenged. Second was five cases—three cats and two rabbits—in which postmortems had recently been conducted by the head of forensic pathology at the Royal Veterinary College. She too found scavenging or predation-related mutilations and fox DNA on the wound sites. Third was three pieces of security footage that showed foxes carrying cat corpses or body parts onto two private properties and a school playground in Catford. Lastly, the Met’s press release cited “expert opinion,” namely a recent article in the New Scientist by world-leading fox behaviorist Stephen Harris. In the piece, Harris made reference to foxes’ “carnassials”—shearing molars they use to cut up prey—which leave clean-edged wounds that could be mistaken for knife work.

SNARL claimed that there were holes in the police’s reasoning, chiefly that the cases cited represented too small a sample size. Jenkins and Rising insisted the incidents had been cherry-picked to support the fox hypothesis and close the investigation. They pointed out that the presence of fox DNA did not preclude the possibility that a pet was killed by a human and scavenged later. The same went for the security footage of foxes moving body parts—SNARL argued that it was circumstantial, and that it didn’t eliminate the prospect of a human killer.

What’s more, Jenkins and Rising had reason to believe that Stoll’s U-turn wasn’t as clear-cut as the press release made it sound. This was thanks to Butcher, who despite his doubts about the death tally felt that SNARL was getting a raw deal. Stoll wouldn’t comment for this story, but Butcher said he was present at a meeting in which the veterinary pathologist avoided making a full retraction of his initial findings: “I was there, he said it: ‘In my view, those early cats were killed by a knife.’” Harris, the fox behaviorist, also declined to comment, but according to SNARL his research couldn’t account for suspicious circumstances in many of the incidents reported to Operation Takahe, such as the seemingly deliberate arrangement of dead animals’ body parts.

Then there was the matter of what Jenkins described to me as “signature injuries.” SNARL had never described them publicly. Wary of copycats who might further complicate the investigation, Jenkins and Rising were prepared to reveal details about only one of the injuries for this story: Many cats were found with their intestines pulled out through their anus, a circle of fur shaved off around the orifice, and the entrails displayed near the corpses. Jenkins estimated that around 5 percent of cases featured this mutilation. He was sure it was important. “The vets who’ve seen it have said, ‘Blimey, that’s actually quite surgically skilled,’” he said. “‘I can’t see a fox doing that, or any other animal.’” 

Adele Brand, another fox behaviorist who has supported Harris’s conclusions in the New Scientist, said she wasn’t convinced. Corvids, such as crows and magpies, might scavenge through the anus as a means of accessing and consuming soft tissues. “Bear in mind that in nature, they have larger animals to open up the carcass for them,” Brand said. “But if the body was intact, I can imagine a corvid displaying that kind of behavior.”

Jenkins and Rising insisted the incidents had been cherry-picked to support the fox hypothesis and close the investigation.

If SNARL had indeed overcondensed a bloody morass of incidents from three years into the work of a single killer, perhaps it was because Rising and Jenkins were fully alert to the scale of abuse inflicted upon animals. In the United States, the Humane Society estimates that a million animals are abused or killed every year as bystanders to human-on-human domestic violence. (In fact, police reports about such incidents are the primary verifiable source of animal abuse statistics.) The RSPCA received 1.2 million calls about animal cruelty in 2019. Experts believe far more abuse goes unreported.

Rising and Jenkins are plugged into networks that know animal abuse isn’t just a series of one-off acts. Consider the “animal crush” video trend, in which small animals are tortured on camera for sexual gratification. Luka Magnotta, of Don’t F**ck with Cats infamy, was one high-profile example of someone interested in such videos. Or take the so-called “horse ripping” mutilations—slashings of a horse’s neck and flanks—seen in England in the 1980s, Germany in the 1990s, and as recently as 2020 in France. Most of those crimes were never solved, but possible motives pondered in the press ranged from jealous farmers to satanic cultists to collective hysteria. And while SNARL searched in vain for Pooboy, there were many concurrent cases in the UK of individuals known to have killed multiple animals; Gaughan was one, and there were others in Brighton and Norwich. Similar sprees have been reported in France, Canada, and Washington State.

Cats seem to be especially prone to abuse. A 2005 paper by Randall Lockwood, senior vice president of the ASPCA, noted that because of felines’ association with female sexuality, they attract a certain kind of aggressor. “It is not surprising that both historically and epidemiologically, the principal abusers of cats have been young males, particularly those seeking to assert their authority,” the paper reads.

The kind of person who would torture or kill cats lurks at our cultural periphery too. Recovering addict Randy Lenz in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest offers a close psychological examination of a perpetrator. Lenz seeks “closure” for his emotional torment by bludgeoning cats on his nightly constitutionals in the neighborhood surrounding his halfway house. “He becomes a connoisseur of cats,” the book reads, “the same way a deep-sea sportsman knows the fish species that fight most fiercely and excitingly for their marine lives.” More cryptic is Johnnie Walker in Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel Kafka on the Shore. A cipher who dresses in the silk top hat and red tails of the iconic whisky brand logo, Walker says he is harvesting cats’ souls to create a mystic flute that will allow him to do the same to men. He seems to stand for the principle of savagery and naked power waging war for the fate of the world.

Pay close enough attention, as SNARL did, and animal abuse seems omnipresent. Perhaps Jenkins and Rising walked away angry from too many tearful families, took their awareness of animal suffering, and conjured up their own Johnnie Walker.

Or perhaps he was real.

On top of the grotesque, seemingly deliberate injuries and the reported glimpses of a suspect in Caterham and Orpington, two cases stood out to the SNARL team as reason enough to keep the investigation running after the Met called it off. Both happened in December 2017. Jenkins and Rising claimed that, following the discovery of a cat corpse at Lucas Vale Primary School, Andy Collin told them that security footage showed a human arm placing the animal’s decapitated head in the frame. (The Met disputed this, saying it didn’t even collect footage that covered the school grounds.) 

The other killing was of a rabbit named Clive, found decapitated and dismembered in his owner’s garden on England’s southern coast. Clive’s liver was found by the garden shed. Police asked the owner to keep it underneath a flower pot until SNARL arrived. The next morning, the organ was gone. In its place was the rabbit’s collar.

Without support from the police, SNARL decided it was time to shake up the investigation. “Is the logging of bodies and evidence actually helping catch him? Probably not. We need a different approach,” Rising said. The group brought on a geographic profiler from University College London’s Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, who attempted to map the deaths and draw up a profile of where thee killer might live or work. He was hindered by the massive quantity of data and SNARL’s diffuse criteria for counting cases. Early mapping efforts led to the theory that the killer was from South Norwood, Bromley Common, or Catford—which amounted to half of southeast London.

SNARL also connected with Super Recognisers International, which employed people with heightened powers of recognition in order to identify potential suspects who made fleeting appearances on blurred security footage. The company was founded by Mike Neville, a former Met detective chief inspector who had established a world-class image-recognition unit for the police. After leaving the Met under a cloud following anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant comments he made on Facebook, Neville offered his company’s services to SNARL for free. The few images Super Recognisers managed to find, however, were too grainy to determine whether any of the figures in them matched the description of the suspect.

Jenkins and Rising were effectively back at square one. Rising wanted to begin nightly patrols to catch the killer in the act, but Jenkins thought that would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. He was also exhausted from constantly attending crime scenes, work he’d come to feel was being palmed off on him by the rest of SNARL. He felt sidelined. “My opinion didn’t seem to count anymore,” Jenkins said. “I was just the bodies guy.”

A struggle for control erupted within SNARL. On WhatsApp channels, Jenkins sometimes got abusive, using what the rest of the group said was misogynistic language. Matters came to a head on New Year’s Eve 2018. Jenkins and Rising attended a crime scene that morning in West Wickham. It was, according to Rising, “a nasty one. The cat was carved up, there was not much left of it.” Once it was handled, Jenkins hoped for a break from the horror—he wanted to see 2019 in properly. “Get some wine in, have a snuggle and, you know, shag maybe,” he said. In any case, he wanted an early night so he could get up at 4 a.m. to go hunt-sabbing with friends.

Jenkins expected Rising at his place around eight or nine. She arrived at 11:50. After a glass of wine and a kiss at midnight, she said she was leaving. The cat owner in West Wickham was distressed; a second feline of hers was now missing. Rising was convinced that Pooboy would return to the house with the cat’s remains, and when he did, she wanted to be there.

An argument ensued. Jenkins insisted that it wasn’t safe to go on a stakeout alone. If she needed help, Rising said, she would knock on the owner’s door or smash Pooboy over the head with her thermos of hot chocolate. She made her way back to West Wickham and stood in a freezing alley for several hours. No one showed. The cat turned up, dehydrated but unharmed, two days later.

For Jenkins, Rising’s obsession had gone too far. When she didn’t apologize, he’d had enough. “At some point, solving the case became more important than having a long-term boyfriend,” he said. By February, the founders of SNARL had decided to go their separate ways, with more than a little regret. “I said, ‘We’ve let him win,’” Jenkins recalled, referring to the killer. “Because if he knew he’d split us up, it’s like a victory for him.”

If she needed help, Rising said, she would knock on the owner’s door or smash Pooboy over the head with her thermos of hot chocolate.

Four months later, in June 2019, Rising walked into a South Norwood shop one Sunday morning to buy cigarettes. SNARL was hanging by a thread, and she was feeling run down. She’d suffered from fibromyalgia since 2000, which made her prone to bouts of severe fatigue. Now she was oddly thirsty, as she had often been lately. She grabbed a Coke along with the cigarettes. 

The shop assistant held out her change, but for some reason Rising’s hand wouldn’t grasp it. She tried with her other hand, but it didn’t play ball either. “I thought, that’s a bit bloody odd,” she recalled.

The assistant asked, “Are you tired?”

“I think so.”

She looked down. The contents of her handbag were dumped on the counter. I must have done that, she thought. The assistant replaced everything. A queue of people was building up.

“I’m worried about you,” the assistant said. “Where are you going now?”

To a friend’s, Rising assured him. Over the road, that friend, Marion didn’t answer the door immediately, so Rising sparked up a cigarette on the stoop. “I didn’t feel ill, I didn’t feel uncomfortable, I just felt something was not quite right with me,” she recalled. She banged on the door again, and Marion’s husband answered. She walked straight into the living room, “and in my hand was a lit cigarette.” She hadn’t smoked in her friend’s house for 15 years, because Marion was a cancer survivor. “There’s no way I’d smoke in her house,” Rising said. “It’s at that point I knew there was definitely something wrong.”

Her friends noted that her speech was impaired and called an ambulance. The paramedics gave her a rudimentary stroke test, to determine whether she smiled symmetrically and could lift both arms. Her natural tenacity wouldn’t let her fail—and she didn’t. The responders suspected she might be having a panic attack; considering the stress of the investigation, Rising thought they could be right.

More tests were run at the hospital, but they were inconclusive. Eventually, the doctor asked Rising which hand he was holding up. “That one,” was all she could tell him. She was given aspirin and sent home, and an MRI was scheduled for the following week.

The scan showed that a blood clot had hit her brain stem and split, causing a series of strokes affecting both sides of her brain. That made what happened more difficult to detect—Rising’s condition lacked the lopsided effect many strokes cause. Marion told her, “Only you could have a stroke and nobody realizes.”

Rising wasn’t invulnerable. The fact that this had happened to her at 48 proved it. And the Pooboy investigation was at least partly to blame. “I’m aware now that life is short. If I went back in time and someone were to say, ‘You can take this case on, but it’ll cost you all these things,’ I probably would not have done it,” Rising said. “In fact, I know I wouldn’t. Nobody in their right mind would.”

IV.

“What gets to me is the innocence,” lamented Rob. He was talking about dead pets. As someone who led a rescue team into the carnage of Russell Square station after London’s terrorist bombings in July 2005, Rob is unfazed by human bodies. But as part of the breakaway group Rising had founded—the South London Animal Investigative Network, or SLAIN—he’d only been able to attend three calls to assess dead cats before he had to forgo any more of them. “It does make me feel like a bit of a wimp,” Rob said in a Cockney rasp. “You shouldn’t!” cooed his SLAIN colleagues.

Rob, Rising, and three other volunteers were sitting around a table in Rob’s back garden on a surprisingly chilly summer afternoon. An orange tabby with a stubby tail weaved among the group’s legs. Abbie, a 30-year-old legal administrator, did research online of possible Pooboy suspects. Sarah was a 60-year-old retired librarian who indexed data on the cases. Amy, a 44-year-old childcare worker, was a designated driver on night patrols. All of the members declined to give me their surnames—they were worried about online trolls, and about Pooboy identifying who was after him.

Despite the stroke, Rising had splintered from SNARL to form SLAIN in July 2019, with Rob as a key collaborator. A 56-year-old former security consultant and SNARL volunteer, he had become more proactive after the Met withdrew from Operation Takahe. Rob’s growing involvement had unsettled Jenkins, so Rob and Rising started their own thing.

Rising, sitting in a low garden chair, seemed more redoubtable than ever. She wore purple lipstick, which riffed on a purple lace-fringed dress, a neat blue blazer, and four-inch transparent heels. Aside from a slight nose twitch and the odd moment of hesitation before responding to a question, there was no indication that she’d suffered a major neurological episode.

For SLAIN, patrolling the streets was central to the strategy for catching Pooboy. Rising became dead-set on this method through sheer pique at missing an attack at the end of September 2019. After half a cat was found on a council estate in the area, she chose to spend the evening visiting Marion in the hospital, and the killer struck again that same night. “I was so fucking cross. I should’ve been up there,” Rising said. The fact that it would have meant patrolling a notoriously rough area alone after midnight was irrelevant, just as it had been the night her relationship with Jenkins fell apart. “I just want him caught,” she said. “If I get stabbed in the arm, I don’t care.”

One could say there was a certain territoriality behind SLAIN’s patrol schedule, which focused on areas where the group’s members lived: Penge, Orpington, Caterham, Beckenham. All of those locales had high concentrations of animal deaths. SLAIN was on Facebook and Twitter, but it didn’t post as frequently as SNARL had when Rising was still part of the group. The whole point was to operate almost clandestinely, to catch Pooboy off guard. Recently, Rising had become concerned that there was a mole somewhere in her network. “We’ve had some weird things happen,” she said, “where we’d say within the team that we’re in one place and he’d always strike in another.”

It was Rob who set the patrolling protocol for SLAIN. People went out in pairs, one driving and the other observing. He taught the group surveillance techniques: watching for movements in one’s peripheral vision, for instance, and “the three-corner trick”—if you think a car is following you, take three turns in the same direction, since people don’t usually drive in circles. Most important was the golden rule: Patrollers were never to leave their vehicle in pursuit of a suspect.

The whole point was to operate almost clandestinely, to catch Pooboy off guard.

“I’m thirsty as all fuck.” Two nights later, outside a Tesco supermarket on Portland Road in South Norwood, Rising was furiously decanting ice into a Coke-filled water bottle. Following her stroke, she suffered from chronic thirst. We were leaning against Amy’s lime-green Peugeot, waiting to head into a humid south London night. Rising, hair damp, in a ruched purple shirt and diamond-patterned skirt, had swapped heels for trainers—“in case I have to do anything semi-illegal.”

A few minutes later, back in the car, we were crawling slowly along a row of gently staggered, whitewashed houses on a residential street in Addiscombe. SLAIN wasn’t merely looking for suspicious behavior—it was actively staking out known suspects. By July 2020, the group’s list was a dozen names long. (By the time this story was published, it had increased to 14.) The names were compiled from tips about animal abusers, gleaned through Rising’s animal rights network and on social media, then cross-referenced with internet research about the individuals’ whereabouts at certain times and whether the police had properly investigated them. Did they have criminal records? Did their names come up in any of the 16,000 emails Rising had exchanged with the Operation Takahe team?

The Addiscombe street was home to one of SLAIN’s suspects. With a recent suspended sentence for possessing both child and animal pornography, and with records showing that he owned houses in two areas that SLAIN believed Pooboy favored, the man had been designated a top priority by Rising. It felt like she was trawling murky waters, however—the man’s name was given to her by another suspect on the list, and there wasn’t a shred of evidence linking him to any of the killings.

No lights were on at the man’s home. Rising craned her neck, looking up and down the street for a white van, which the suspect owned. By chronicling his movements and comparing them with the dates and times when animal killings occurred, SLAIN was hoping to firmly rule the man in or out as an investigative target. It had already done this with a few individuals; the group was steadily moving through its list. Rising said she was mindful of privacy issues when discussing suspects with the team. She never shared photographs with anyone, just names and general descriptions.

There was no sign of the van, and Rising wasn’t sure if the suspect had another vehicle. If she had been, she explained, “it’d already have a tracker on it.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” I asked.

“Yes.” 

We cruised to an auto repair shop nearby, apparently owned by the suspect’s brother. A walled compound, there was a light on in an outbuilding. Rising squirmed with impatience. “What we need is someone to break in—he’s hiding the bodies somewhere,” she said. That someone would be breaking the golden rule, I pointed out. Rising said theory is one thing, practice another—neither she nor Rob actually observed the rule. If they did get out of their vehicles, they livestreamed the sortie on a private SLAIN Facebook group. This was partly for their own safety and partly for legal reasons, should they end up in a confrontation. Rising had brought along a Kevlar vest, just in case.

It’s probably too much to say that a drift into vigilantism was inevitable for Rising, but staring out passively into London’s sodium gloom was never her style, either—she’s the kind of person who gets out of the car. And she wanted results. “I don’t want to still be working on this case in six months’, a year’s time,” she said. “I just want it to end. It’s wrecked all of our lives, and I just want it to fucking end.”

That night wouldn’t be the end, though. We eventually abandoned our surveillance and returned to normal patrolling—that is, driving around, looking for suspicious activity. Before we headed off into the direction of some estates, we made a stop at a grocer’s to pick up Turkish delight. Candy is a patrolling essential. If I hadn’t known it was a pet-protection outfit, I might have mistaken SLAIN for a confectionery addicts’ support group—one full of enablers. Amy opted for raspberry and pomegranate. “By the time this case ends, we’re going to have diabetes,” she said.

If anyone ever stole Tony Jenkins’s car, he’d have been able to trace it by smell alone. Its interior was an olfactory wormhole: clammy imitation leather and roll-up cigarettes, the ammoniac snap of urine, and an almost disturbing vulpine musk. The back seat of the silver Ford Focus—a former police car—held a cage for captured animals and a pole used to catch them. In the trunk were two 48-bag boxes of Sainsbury’s cat food, 12 cans of dog food, a sack of animal litter, and, in gleaming white-and-silver gift bags, the cremated remains of two cats. Jenkins was due to deliver these to their owners. He had been delayed by the pandemic.

Because I had begged for fresh air in the car, Jenkins was now leaning against the hood, a SNARL lanyard round his neck as he rolled a cigarette. It was a resplendent July afternoon, and he was responding to a call in Penge. In the back garden of a house, he had just wrapped a headless gray and white feline in a bath towel. She’d been found underneath a paper plant. Because she was microchipped, Jenkins had located the owner with the help of a contact with access to pet databases. They lived just a couple of doors down the road. Jenkins was about to do the dreaded door knock.

The number of deaths he believed were linked to Pooboy stood at more than 700. Jenkins’s hope was that the pandemic would reduce the killer’s movements to the point where he could zero in on the man’s whereabouts. But so far, there had been no eureka moment.

Where Rising was showing an unsettling determination, Jenkins had begun to sound desperate. He talked about the Operation Takahe shutdown being a cover-up of some kind. He wondered about how to get a message to Prime Minister Boris Johnson—he believed the former London mayor’s cat, supposedly mauled by a fox in 2013, might actually have been an early Pooboy victim. Jenkins was also considering releasing the full list of signature injuries, or even the security footage that Super Recognisers pored over, in a bid to open up new lines of inquiry.

Jenkins believed that a May 2020 case in a South Norwood cul-de-sac—involving both a decapitation and the signature anal evisceration—was a sign intended specifically for him, as it coincided with the second anniversary of the premiere of the short Vice documentary about the case. That sounded like confirmation bias, I suggested, but Jenkins doubled down with another example: A December 2016 case in Walthamstow, north London, the very first in the area, came just days after he had visited his two sons there. “The first possibility is that he followed me,” Jenkins said. “The second is that he could be tracing my phone, which is quite easy.”

Jenkins and Rising had initially agreed to share information about SNARL’s and SLAIN’s activities, but the arrangement quickly disintegrated. Jenkins complained that Rising was secretive. Now he was reciprocating, refusing to update Rising about the latest developments on SNARL’s end. Jenkins admitted that he was depressed and not sleeping well, dealing with the “psychological damage” of the investigation. More pressingly, he was nearly bankrupt. He could no longer make his mortgage payments, and reasoned the only reason his house hadn’t been repossessed was the pandemic. His mother and brother were supporting him financially, but it couldn’t last. (He eventually put out a call for support on SNARL’s Facebook page.)

I asked what his sons thought of the situation. “Kind of a mixture of they think it’s cool—it’s fun having their dad on telly and on Vice documentaries,” Jenkins said. “But at the same time, they’re like, ‘How long is it going to go on? You need to get a job, Dad.’” He had applied for one, driving an ambulance for a fox-rescue service. In the event that he landed it, he said that the “SNARL army” would step in to take over some of his work on the Pooboy case. “After five years of collecting bodies and gathering evidence and looking at patterns, none of us, including Boudicca, have…” His voice trailed off. “There are no patterns—it’s all completely random.”

Jenkins and Rising used to say that their story would make a great film. “I joked to Boudicca that I could play myself and Angelina Jolie could play her,” Jenkins said. He later downgraded that suggestion to Kathy Burke. Rising proposed Helena Bonham Carter. On a SLAIN patrol one night, she told me that she sees her part of the story, at least, as “Cagney and Lacey—the premenopausal years.”

There’s perhaps a more apt model for their saga. It’s the film Zodiac, directed by David Fincher, about the search for the infamous California serial killer that distends and finally wrecks the lives of everyone involved with the case. Physically battered, emotionally sapped by their obsession, they’re stripped to the raw sinew of who they really are.

“I don’t want to still be working on this case in six months’, a year’s time,” Rising said. “I just want it to end.”

That isn’t to say Jenkins and Rising haven’t done good with their investigation. Alastair Ulke, a journalist who covered Brendan Gaughan’s crimes for the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, said that the city’s police were suffering from general underfunding a few years ago and doubted that they were inclined to treat a series of mysterious cat killings with any great urgency. SNARL’s presence on the scene of various incidents, with the extra media attention that brought, may have persuaded the cops to take the cases more seriously and ultimately snag Gaughan. He pleaded guilty, and in December 2018, he was sentenced to 45 months for setting the fires, but no additional time for killing the cats.(Had the case gone to trial, however, Gaughan would have faced prosecution for them.)

A year later, Steven Bouquet, a 52-year-old security guard, was charged with killing nine cats and injuring seven more in a series of crimes that stretched from late 2018 to June 2019. (He pleaded not guilty.) SNARL didn’t investigate the incidents directly, because the rather frenzied attack style—some animals wandered home with their guts hanging out—didn’t fit with the clean killings it had seen elsewhere. But it may have helped the case that SNARL was involved on the periphery: It logged the incidents and stayed in regular communication with the pet owners. The Crown Prosecution Service is pursuing Bouquet not for animal cruelty but for criminal damage. The cumulative value of all the pets exceeds £32,000 (nearly $45,000), more than six times greater than the threshold at which a ten-year prison sentence can apply. “I’ve never heard of a case where they’ve attributed a cost to the life of a cat,” Jenkins said.

Rising, though, is ambivalent about their role in both cases. “Yes, it is a consolation, because we made a difference. However, there is an argument to say that both offenders might have been influenced by [the Pooboy] case and killed cats because they wanted to be noticed,” she said.

If nothing else, Jenkins and Rising are pioneers in deeming animals worthy of the sort of justice SNARL and SLAIN demand. That the Met got involved at all, if only for a while, was a victory. It was proof that crimes against animals could be addressed with a seriousness of purpose hitherto unseen in the UK, or anywhere else for that matter.

For the most devoted animal rights activists, there’s a long way to go. Laws tend to treat violence against animals, as well as animal smuggling and trafficking, as property crimes. Animals aren’t viewed as victims with defensible rights. The sticking point is that doing so would require recognizing them as sentient beings capable of perception and emotion. With sentience, of course, comes a whole host of legal and philosophical quandaries, not least whether modern society’s relationship with animals is entirely psychopathic. Still, animal sentience is slowly creeping into statutes worldwide. Article 13 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union recognizes it in principle. In the United States, the recognition of animals as legal persons appears sporadically, with highly limited scope, in state legislation—though only Oregon explicitly recognizes sentience. A proposed bill in the UK Parliament would enshrine sentience in law and increase the maximum sentence for animal cruelty to five years. Meanwhile, organizations like the Nonhumanrights Project and the Animal Legal Defense Fund are working to establish the legal personhood of animals but have yet to gain a statutory foothold.

Many people have argued that these efforts are misguided because animals have no conception of morality, but even this anthropocentric monism is being chipped away. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued for a different version of personhood, based on whether a sentient being has the freedom to be what it values in life. In the case of an animal, this could include the attainment of bodily health, the exercise of the senses, even the capacity to think. Meanwhile, one school of criminology offers a panacea. Non-speciesist criminologists believe that, as far as justice is concerned, there should be no distinctions between humans and animals. To borrow a dictum from the Smiths: Meat really is murder. Piers Beirne, professor emeritus of sociology and legal studies at the University of Southern Maine and a groundbreaking non-speciesist, has even proposed a new term for the killing of animals: theriocide, from the ancient Greek for “wild beast.”

Down among the hard-smoking theriocide investigators of Croydon, however, there is no naivety about whether a world where animals are treated as equals will ever exist. “We’ll never ever in a million years get that,” Rising said. “I personally view these deaths as murder. I would love to criminalize the killing of animals, but it won’t happen, because the meat industry would collapse overnight.”

The question remains: Is there a lone, implacable animal serial killer out there stalking the south of England? The early Croydon incidents remain intriguing, as does the spate of deaths around Caterham and Orpington, where a suspect was sighted. They suggest, at least, that there might be clusters of animal killings occurring, each perpetrated by an individual. And Jenkins and Rising still have supporters of their theory, including some in power. During a 2020 reading of the proposed animal cruelty bill, Parliament member Elliot Coburn asked for police to reopen the Takahe investigation, calling the Met’s fox theory “fanciful” and stating his belief that there existed a “systemic level of abuse.”

Man or fox, the resources required to answer that question once and for all will almost certainly never be available. Awkwardly, in November 2020, security footage captured what hadn’t once been glimpsed in the previous five years, and what SNARL insisted hadn’t happened: a fox decapitating a cat. “I have to admit, when I saw that footage, my first, overwhelming feeling was relief—that perhaps we did have it wrong after all and we could go back to living our lives,” Rising wrote to me in an email. But upon learning more about the cat’s injuries, and comparing them with the initial incidents in the Pooboy case, she noticed what she considered important differences. 

Jenkins, for his part, said that the footage plunged him into a miniature breakdown. Upon closer examination, however, he came to believe that the animal’s head was partially severed at the start of the footage. Pooboy, he said, may have let a fox finish the job on camera to deflect suspicion.

The hunt, then, would continue.

On a SLAIN patrol one summer night, we crisscrossed suburban estates on London’s outer edge after midnight, sluicing our way down rain-slicked arterial roads. The city, only just emerging from its first pandemic lockdown, was too quiet. Sinuous feline shadows darted from beneath cars; rust-furred canines on the tarmac feigned indifference but kept their distance. Every so often, twin pinpricks of light answered the beams of our headlamps—the eyes of a fox.

The humans on patrol claimed to be watching, but animals were, and are, the true sentinels of the city. They are the witnesses of its unconscious side—the ungovernable moods, the secret behavior, everything that happens at the margins, in the dark.

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