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For more than half a century, the people of Easter Island lived under an oppressive colonial regime. Then a schoolteacher sparked an unlikely revolution.  

By Mike Damiano

SECRET

TO: VALPARAISO

FROM: EASTER

… THE SUBVERSIVE MOVEMENT IS MUCH MORE SERIOUS AND GRAVE THAN BELIEVED ON THE CONTINENT … THE SCHOOLTEACHER IS PREPARED TO GIVE HIS LIFE TO WIN FREEDOM … TO AVOID FATAL CONSEQUENCES URGENTLY SEND A SHIP TO RESTORE ORDER

Chapter One

No one in the Rapu household could sleep. It was early March 1955, and in the family’s three-room home in the hills above the village of Hanga Roa, Reina Haoa busied herself sewing clothes. Her husband, Elías, paced. The couple’s four eldest boys—Alfonso, Carlos, Sergio, and Rafael—huddled together in the living room watching their parents worry. There was not much to say. In the morning, 12-year-old Alfonso would leave Easter Island on a cargo ship called the Pinto. He would travel to the port city of Valparaíso, Chile. His parents could not tell him when he’d return home or when he might see them again, because they did not know. They also could not tell him much about where he was going. Neither of them had seen land beyond Easter Island’s shores.

The Pinto came once a year to deliver basic supplies: soap, flour, sugar, fabric. For the Rapanui, the annual arrival was bittersweet. Though other ships occasionally visited the island, they brought few if any of the necessities needed to sustain life. By the time the Pinto came in late summer, the pantries of Rapanui families were bare. Construction projects had stalled for lack of materials. The Pinto, the Rapanui’s only regular physical contact with the outside world, brought relief.

But for many, the ship’s arrival also provoked a simmering sense of dread. Along with supplies, the Pinto brought disease. Each year, in the weeks after the ship unloaded, kokongo—a catchall term for whatever germs the Chilean sailors were carrying—swept through Hanga Roa. It was common for kokongo to infect as much as half the population. By the time it abated, it usually had left several families grieving.

There was no one to complain to about these epidemics, at least no one who would listen. For several decades, the authorities on Easter Island had been foreigners who represented their own interests by keeping the Rapanui under their thumb. In 1898, a decade after Chile annexed the island, the Rapanui were rounded up and resettled on a few square miles of the western coast, centered on Hanga Roa. A network of fences known as the Wall, built by Rapanui men for menial wages, kept them there. Passage beyond the Wall—to visit ancestral lands, to explore or cultivate the countryside, or to leave the island entirely—was only possible with written permission from the island’s governor.

Over the decades, some Rapanui managed to leave the island, usually by taking jobs on the mainland with the Chilean military. Others resorted to more desperate measures. Some built rafts and set off over the horizon for Tahiti. A few of them made it, navigating the thousands of miles of ocean between Easter Island and French Polynesia by the stars. But the great majority—dozens of men—vanished in the vast Pacific.

Reina and Elías were born within the Wall, like their parents before them and their children after. There had been no way for them to leave. Their family grew almost every year, until Alfonso was the eldest of 11. He played soccer with friends and attended school most days. Like other young Rapanui children, he also spent long hours on his family’s plot of land, cultivating taro and sweet potatoes. Since there was no running water in Hanga Roa—and no ponds, streams, or lakes—the Rapu family collected rainwater in a cistern. It sometimes fell to Alfonso to skim the dead bugs and mold off the water’s surface.

There were other things—more brutal ones—that Alfonso accepted as normal at the time but would haunt him later. At the schoolhouse, nuns who delivered lessons in Spanish, a language their students barely understood, punished children with canes. At home, Elías was a menace. He chased Reina through the house and hit her. The children usually cowered; when they tried to intervene, Elías struck them. Domestic violence was endemic in Hanga Roa. A peaceful home was the outlier.

There were other horrors, including the constant threat of leprosy. When telltale sores appeared, breaking out on a temple, a forearm, or a bald scalp, the afflicted person was removed from the village and quarantined permanently at the island’s leper colony, at the base of the Terevaka volcano. When Alfonso was a child, his uncle worked at the colony, and sometimes brought him along to help. He got to know the place and the people condemned to live there. One man, Gabriel Hereveri, who had lost both hands and an eyelid to the disease, befriended Alfonso and told him stories of life on the island before the Wall went up, when the Rapanui were still free.

Alfonso had never seriously contemplated a life beyond the island. To the extent that he thought about his future at all, he imagined it taking place within the Wall. But Reina hoped for more. When she learned of a new program for educating Rapanui children in Chile—a humanitarian effort organized by the government—she lobbied her brother, who worked for the Navy, to ask his supervisors for a favor. Could they get her eldest son onto the list?

The supervisors said yes. Reina only found out the night before Alfonso was scheduled to depart on the Pinto.

The next morning, Alfonso and his parents went to Hanga Piko cove, where local fishermen launched their boats. The three gathered by the water’s edge, alongside 11 other children and their parents. Like Alfonso, these children, ranging in age from 12 to 15, were set to depart for Chile. They would be placed in boarding schools or with host families and enter the Chilean education system. They were the second cohort to participate in the program, and their families considered it a privilege.

Alfonso hugged his mother, who was weeping. When he turned to his father, he found that Elías was crying as well, which unsettled him.

Alfonso knew in a technical sense that he would board a ship, that the ship would sail over the horizon, and that he would disembark in a new land. But he had no ability to picture Valparaíso, a modern city of 400,000 people. He could not conceive of a journey of 2,300 miles, the distance to Chile, when the greatest expanse he had ever reckoned with was 14 miles on Easter Island—from the Poike Peninsula in the east to Rano Kau, a volcano, in the west.

Aboard the Pinto, he stood on the aft deck. As the ship shuddered and began motoring east, he kept his eyes fixed on Easter Island. For a couple of hours it receded. Then it disappeared over the horizon. All he could see was water. He broke down and sobbed.

In 1898, a decade after Chile annexed the island, the Rapanui were rounded up and resettled on a few square miles of the western coast.

Valparaíso came into view on the seventh day of the journey. As the Pinto approached, the city seemed to rise up over the ship. One of the busiest and richest ports in the Western hemisphere, Valparaíso buzzed with the activity of industrial cranes, thousands of car and truck engines, and the constant interchange of sailing ships, tankers, and tug boats. Ten-story towers and hulking neocolonial government buildings stood on the flat land at the water’s edge. The rest of the city—wealthy neighborhoods of Victorian houses and poor slums of multi-colored shanties—clung to the coastline’s steep hills, which residents ascended via funiculars.

Alfonso Rapu took in the staggering sight from the Pinto’s deck. He was about to set foot in a new world.

After a train ride over the foothills of the Andes, he arrived at a boarding school in downtown Santiago de Chile, a dense urban hub that was home to the president’s sprawling mansion and the headquarters of Chile’s banks and copper-mining corporations. The next several months were lonely and difficult. Rapu lived in a dormitory full of bunk beds, which during the week were occupied by children but sat empty on weekends; most students returned home to their families then, leaving Rapu alone. Yet even on weekdays he was isolated. He barely spoke Spanish. When teachers called on him in class, his speech was halting and accented. His classmates snickered and called him indio—Indian—a pejorative for anyone with non-European blood.

A 26-year-old social worker, Guacolda Zamorano, noticed Rapu at the school and worried over him. On weekdays, she checked on him during her breaks. On Friday afternoons, she left him with enough home-cooked meals to feed him through the weekend. Still, Zamorano felt she wasn’t doing enough. In the evenings, at her house in a suburban neighborhood, she talked to her husband, Manuel Nova, about Rapu. The boy needed more help, she said. He needed a home.

Early in the winter of 1955, Zamorano instructed Rapu to pack his things. She told her husband that the boy would be living with them for a while. He stayed for nearly nine years.

Rapu was given his own bedroom, a new wardrobe of chinos, button-downs, and loafers, and a makeshift family. Zamorano became, in every meaningful sense, Rapu’s second mother. She was warmer than Reina, who had always been protective of her children but came from a culture that tended not to shower them with affection. Children were liabilities and laborers; they were expected to fend for themselves and contribute what they could. Rapu had sometimes felt like a piece of property, particularly when his parents loaned him to the neighbors in exchange for an ox. The neighbors used Rapu for a day of labor in their field, while Reina and Elías used the beast to plow theirs. No one thought anything of the arrangement; it seemed like a square deal. But now that Rapu had seen something else—another life, another way to be a child—the memory rankled.

Zamorano tutored him in Spanish, and he made steady progress. Within a few years, he spoke the language fluently. He strove to catch up in other subjects, too. Every morning as he walked to the bus, he added up the numbers on his neighbors’ mailboxes to practice arithmetic. At school he started sitting in the first row of desks, focusing his attention on the teacher to help him ignore his classmates’ taunts, until finally, gratifyingly, they stopped.

As Rapu grew, his station among his classmates changed. By the age of 16, he had transformed; the scrawny child had become tall, muscular, and handsome. He was a capable soccer player and charming, with a winning smile and a quiet sense of humor. He had girlfriends. One summer he befriended the daughters of senator Salvador Allende. He spent afternoons with the Allendes by their pool. Once he even wore the future president’s swimming trunks.

For the first time in his life, Rapu had options, opportunities, and frivolous diversions—he had developed a weakness for orange Fanta. But in the midst of bourgeois bliss, something gnawed at him. He had not forgotten where he came from, and in a cruel way, the more comfortable he became in Santiago, the more distressed he felt whenever he thought of his family back on Easter Island.

One summer day in 1958, Rapu boarded the Pinto again in Valparaíso. He was headed home for his first visit since leaving the island three years earlier. After a weeklong journey, Rapu looked out over Hanga Roa bay as the ship’s crew dropped anchor. In the water below, he saw Rapanui men in white button-front shirts paddling fishing boats out to greet the Pinto’s sailors. This was a Rapanui custom that dated back centuries. When Dutch explorers first happened upon the island, men in canoes greeted them.

Rapu had watched this ritual from shore in his childhood. He knew these men; he had called some of them koro, a term of endearment that means “grandfather” in Rapanui. But now, as they approached the ship, he was startled by their appearance. He remembered them as strong and vital; these men looked hollowed out.

On shore, his parents and siblings greeted him. Reina and Elías looked unchanged, but his brothers and sisters were all new versions of themselves, some taller, some wider, some thinner. He had a week to spend with his family, the time it would take the Pinto to unpack its supplies and load up the annual production of wool from the sheep ranch that foreigners managed in the island’s interior. He spent most of his days with his brothers Carlos, Rafael, and Sergio. They had been his closest allies during his childhood, and he had missed them fiercely. But now that they were reunited, Rapu felt a distance between them that was difficult to bridge. When they asked him what life was like in Santiago, he didn’t know what to say. How could he explain attending soccer matches at Santiago’s 40,000-seat stadium? What could he tell his brothers, who were confined by the Wall, about weekends spent at his host family’s country cottage? What bothered him most, though, was that his brothers thought they were fine, that life on the island didn’t need to change. He had thought the same thing before he left.

Back in Santiago, Rapu spent long nights awake, staring at the ceiling of his bedroom, worrying about his brothers. As he neared adulthood, he also contemplated his future: which profession to pursue, where to live, what to make of his life. He decided to become a teacher.

As he neared university graduation in the early 1960s, Rapu considered various teaching positions—in Santiago, in the Lakes Region of southern Chile, and even one, offered through a U.S. State Department program, that would provide educational opportunities in the United States. But he could not push from his mind the circumstances of his brothers and the rest of the Rapanui. He had begun to wonder if there was something he could do to help.

He was still considering his options when he returned to Easter Island a second time, in 1962, and made a terrible discovery. The Rapanui community had suffered yet another trauma, and this one struck close to home.

In 1888, a Chilean delegation landed at Hanga Roa bay. They had come to lay claim to the island, one of the last uncolonized territories in Polynesia. There was a reason European powers had passed it over. It was distant from everything: 4,400 miles from New Zealand, 2,600 miles from Tahiti, 4,500 miles from Hawaii, and more than 2,000 miles from the South American ports of Valparaíso and Callao, in Peru. The island also seemed to hold little economic potential. The land was dry and hard to cultivate. There were no natural resources to speak of. And the population was too small—the number of Rapanui had dwindled to fewer than 200 by the time the Chilean delegation came—to be exploited as a labor force.

To Chile, though, the island had special value. Since the country had won its independence from Spain, it had strived to establish itself as a modern Western power. Chile’s elite—Spaniards and Italians with few familial ties to indigenous Americans—were expansionists and industrialists. They had turned the country into a mining behemoth and pushed its national boundaries south to the tip of the continent, taking land from the Mapuche people as they went, and north into territory seized from Bolivia and Peru. Now they were looking west. They wanted an offshore colony, a hallmark of the European powers they emulated. Easter Island was the best—really the only—option.

The leader of the 1888 delegation was a Navy captain named Policarpo Toro Hurtado, who was intent on colonizing the island. He had taken his case directly to the president, leaning on a combination of hyperbole and fantasy. In a report, he wrote that the island’s “fertile shores” would become Chile’s “Oasis in the Ocean,” even though the soil was volcanic and nearly barren. He claimed that the island lay in transpacific shipping lanes, which would make it a valuable stopover; in fact, Easter Island was hundreds of miles out of the way. The president had no way to verify what Toro said and didn’t care to. Now Toro had arrived to seize Easter Island for his people.

Chile’s first act of treachery on Easter Island was its first act of any kind there. Toro had brought with him two documents—one in Spanish, the other in a hybrid of Rapanui and Tahitian, the latter of which was commonly used in legal documents in the Pacific. The papers were intended to lay out an agreement between the Chilean government and native leaders. But the two texts didn’t match. The Rapanui and Tahitian words described a congenial alliance: Chile would become Easter Island’s protector and “friend of the land.” But the Spanish text said something altogether different. It stated that the Rapanui would cede the “full and entire sovereignty” of Easter Island to Chile, “forever and without reservation.” In front of Hanga Roa’s Catholic church, beneath a flagpole flying both the Chilean and Rapanui flags, the island’s king, Atamu Tekena, and a dozen other local leaders signed the Rapanui-Tahitian document with crosses drawn in black ink.

When Toro sailed off, he left behind three Chilean families. They were to be the first Chilean settlers on Easter Island, the foundation for the new colony that Toro envisioned. But things did not go as planned. The settlers’ crops failed, and they discovered that the only reservoir of fresh water on the island was inside the crater of Rano Kau, a four-mile climb up from Hanga Roa. They refused to ask for help from the Rapanui. After a disastrous year, two of the families abandoned the island, fleeing on a Chilean battleship. The third stayed behind but soon died. And just like that, Chile’s dream of a thriving colony in the Pacific collapsed.

Chile soon developed a case of buyer’s remorse and sought to offload its new territory. The Easter Island Exploitation Company, a joint British-Chilean venture, was glad to oblige. Under the terms of its long-term lease, the Company, as the Rapanui came to call it, could do as it pleased with the island and its people. Within a decade, the Company had confined the Rapanui, and leprosy, which had arrived with the Chileans, was spreading within the community.

In the summer of 1898, the Rapanui’s new king, Riro, marched to the Company’s island headquarters, a one-floor house with a wraparound balcony on a bluff outside Hanga Roa. Riro carried with him a list of grievances. He met with the Company’s manager, a Chilean named Alberto Sánchez Manterola, and demanded better pay and working conditions for the Rapanui men employed at the Company’s sheep ranch. When Sánchez refused, Riro asked for passage to Valparaíso. He wanted to appeal to higher authorities. Fine, Sánchez said—if he wished, Riro could even meet with the president of Chile.

A few weeks later, Riro departed for Valparaíso aboard the annual supply ship. He never returned. Nor did he ever meet with the president in Santiago. Upon Riro’s arrival, a Chilean employee of the Company took him drinking in Valparaíso’s taverns. The next day, the king died in a Navy hospital. The official cause of death was alcohol poisoning. The Rapanui, when they learned his fate, concluded that it had been poisoning of another kind. But no one would ever know for sure: Chilean Navy personnel dumped Riro’s body in an unmarked grave.

Riro’s death ended the first effort by the Rapanui to make their grievances heard in Chile. In the following decades, the government largely ignored Easter Island. Every ten years or so, a report about goings-on there, written by a passing explorer or a shipwrecked sailor, would make its way into the Chilean press. The dispatches described bleak conditions: crushing poverty, harsh discipline, disease. Next came a flurry of concern, often from Chile’s more humanitarian-minded Catholics: newspaper editorials, vows by politicians to aid the pascuenses (the Spanish term for the Rapanui), and recriminations against the Company. In 1947, a group of Chileans formed the Society of Friends of Easter Island to advocate for better conditions for the Rapanui. Members of the society lobbied the government to evict the Company from the island. In 1952, Chile did just that.

In the Company’s place, Chile installed the Navy. Now, instead of a corporate manager ruling the island and overseeing the sheep ranch, there was a naval governor. Usually a young captain looking for adventure, the governor served a term of one or two years, and he lived at Mataveri, the bluff outside Hanga Roa, in the same house the Company manager had occupied. During his tenure, the governor had total control over the island: He was ranch manager, police chief, mayor, judge, and jury.

How the Rapanui fared from one year to the next depended almost entirely on the current governor’s temperament. Some governors—the better ones—focused on ranch operations and mostly left the Rapanui to themselves. Others were cruel. In 1961, a particularly brutal governor arrived. A tall, fair-haired Chilean of British descent, John Martin viewed the Rapanui as disobedient charges who needed to be kept under control. Like the worst of his predecessors, he ordered his men to shave women’s heads as a form of discipline and locked men in the House of Stone, a small, square jailhouse that looked like a medieval castle in miniature. Martin let it be known that he would not hesitate to use violence as punishment for insubordination.

By the time Martin took command of Easter Island, Alfonso Rapu had been in Santiago for a few years. His brothers were now young men. Carlos, in particular, had undergone a dramatic change. At 15, he was the island’s star athlete. Fast and muscular, he was formidable on the soccer pitch. He was also a fitness buff. When he wasn’t playing soccer, he ran sprints. The Navy’s dentist on the island, a lieutenant named Julio Flores, took notice. Flores also passed his time working out—what else was there to do on Easter Island? Soon, Flores and Carlos were training together.

Reina and Elías were pleased. It was always good to have Chilean friends, who had access to better food and coveted goods, such as fabric and lumber. Once, Flores gifted the Rapus a radio, so they could listen to music on the island’s lone station. A relationship with a Chilean could also offer protection; the authorities were less likely to mete out capricious punishments to a Navy man’s friend.

Flores was charming, kind, and solicitous. His only quirk was that he disapproved of Carlos’s relationships with girls. When Carlos started dating a classmate, Flores complained to Reina that her son was spending too much time away from home, with his girlfriend. Reina figured Flores was just a traditional type who disapproved of frivolous romance.

But then strange things started happening. Once, Flores invited Carlos to go with him to Anakena, a beach beyond the Wall. Carlos jumped at the opportunity. But when he returned and Reina asked him about the excursion, he withdrew to his room and changed clothes. When she asked what was going on, he wouldn’t give an explanation. Another time, at a party, Flores hugged Carlos in a way that made the teenager uncomfortable and Carlos snapped at him. Later, Carlos told Hanga Roa’s mayor that Flores was a homosexual.

When John Martin heard of the accusation, the governor ordered his men to lock Carlos in the House of Stone. Here was an indio smearing the reputation of a Navy man; the governor wouldn’t stand for it. Carlos’s crime was lying. The next day, Martin’s men dragged Carlos out and beat him with a baton, just a few hundred feet from the Hanga Roa market, in full view of passersby.

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Rapu’s visit to the island, shortly thereafter, would prove to be even more impactful than the first. His family told him what had happened to his brother, and Carlos showed him the wounds from the beating.

Back in Santiago, Rapu was haunted by the image of his brother’s scarred back and by the question of what he should do. He looked for answers in the university library, reading newspaper clippings about revolutions and civil rights movements around the world. He borrowed a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, whose model of anti-colonialism—nonviolence combined with an inclusive form of nationalism—especially appealed to him. There were people elsewhere who had been oppressed and then freed, or who had freed themselves. Why not the Rapanui?

In 1963, after Rapu had completed his studies, the Ministry of Education appointed him to serve as Hanga Roa’s schoolteacher. He would be the first Rapanui to fill the role, if he accepted the post. Rapu decided he would. He did not want to make a life for himself in Chile or the United States; he wanted to return home. A few months later, in January 1964, he boarded the cargo ship bound for Easter Island. This time, his passage was one-way.

Chapter Two

Rapu moved into his parents’ house and started making a new life for himself. Every morning, he walked out of the hills to the schoolhouse in the village center, where he gave lessons in Spanish and math. His students included both Rapanui and Chileans—the children of Navy officers and government functionaries. The students loved him. He taught bilingually so the Rapanui students wouldn’t fall behind. He connected with the Chileans by sharing stories from his life in Santiago. He was different from his predecessors in never striking his students. He considered himself a pacifist.

Rapu ate lunch with the nuns who ran the schoolhouse. They were not the nuns of his youth. These were young women in their twenties and thirties, and they became some of Rapu’s closest friends on the island. After almost a decade in Santiago, he felt that he had more in common with them than with his fellow Rapanui. The nuns could speak about politics and world events. Rapu was grateful for the camaraderie, but it pained him that he couldn’t find the same bond with the men and women he had grown up with, however hard he tried. When he tried to strike up conversations about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or the fractious politics of mainland Chile, his Rapanui friends steered the conversation back toward familiar ground: fishing, the harvest, village gossip.

Rapu came to realize that he no longer fully belonged anywhere. He had been a foreigner in Santiago, and now he was an outsider on Easter Island.

He decided that the best thing he could do was educate people, and he wasn’t only thinking about children. If circumstances were going to improve for the Rapanui, he believed, they had to be literate in Spanish. Colonizers had deployed written language against the Rapanui from the beginning, when Policarpo Toro Hurtado used it to deceive the king. It was the secret code that had enabled generations of Company managers, in their frequent reports and telegrams, to represent themselves to the Chilean government as benevolent and responsible caretakers. Even visitors who had meant well—explorers and scientists, mostly—had described island life in their own terms, leaving the Rapanui voiceless before the wider world.

So in the evening, after the children went home, Rapu opened the schoolhouse to adults for literacy classes. These were well-attended, rowdy affairs. Fishermen, farmers, and homemakers packed the rows of desks. Rapu wrote Spanish words on the chalkboard and called on people to read them. When someone made a mistake, the class heckled them, but the mood was collegial. The adult students, Rapu saw, were like family to one another.

After class he trudged over the hills, exhausted, and collapsed into bed. During his first few months back home, this was all he did: fish, teach, and sleep. Was it what he had come back to do? Perhaps. But was it enough?

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While Rapu settled into his routine, another young man, Jorge Portilla, was establishing his own domain at Mataveri. Portilla was the island’s new naval governor, replacing John Martin. He had arrived just two months before Rapu, in November 1963, accompanied by his wife and three young children.

There was no special reason that Portilla was chosen for the role. A third-generation Navy man, Portilla had joined the service as soon as he was able. Now 34, he had risen to the rank of captain. When he heard that the Navy was looking for applicants to serve as governor of Easter Island, he thought he would give it a go. He had always found the distant colony intriguing. Here was his chance to see it, and to have one last adventure before settling into midlife.

During their first months on the island, Portilla and his wife held court at Mataveri, hosting barbecues primarily for Chilean officials, though sometimes they invited Rapanui. Portilla joined the Navy soccer team—he played goalie—which consisted of officers and their Rapanui employees. On weekends, they faced off against Rapanui teams.

Portilla was a less fearsome leader than Martin had been. Under his administration there were no Navy-sanctioned beatings or head shavings. But he wasn’t a reformer. He was a paternalistic authoritarian. No Rapanui could go beyond the Wall or leave the island without his written permission. In Portilla’s view, this was how things should be.

Every Monday morning, dozens of Rapanui men amassed outside the front door of Portilla’s office in downtown Hanga Roa. They wore work clothes and milled about, waiting. To an outsider they might have looked like day laborers hoping to secure an honest wage. But here the men knew they would not be paid. They were partaking in a ritual known as State Mondays, the polite term used to describe weekly forced labor sessions.

Eventually, Portilla walked out his front door, stood on the building’s single step, and assessed the crowd. Then he broke them into several groups and gave orders for the day. Some Rapanui would do road repair work. Others would mend fences or storm damage to Navy buildings. The tasks varied according to the needs and whims of Portilla and his men.

Occasionally, the Rapanui grumbled about the work. Though technically any resistance was grounds for imprisonment, Portilla instead offered the men a brief pep talk. The labor was for the good of their own community, he said; the Rapanui were improving the island for themselves. His comments never addressed how exactly spending a Monday afternoon gardening in a Navy official’s yard for no money would help any Rapanui.

Rapu was exempt from State Mondays, as were all Rapanui men who had jobs at Navy headquarters or on the sheep ranch. But the sight of his friends, uncles, and cousins trudging to Portilla’s office every Monday distressed him. It wasn’t dignified, he thought, to be forced to work under threat of imprisonment. Rapu was reminded of how he had felt on his first visit home from Santiago, that something here was not right. His people, he now believed, had been beaten down, and they had lost sight of who they are.

So Rapu embarked on a new mission at the schoolhouse. He wanted the Rapanui to remember where they had come from, that they were the descendants of a great civilization, one that had learned to survive on this inhospitable island and built its famous moai statues. By 1964, most of the moai lay toppled and covered in lichen, surrounded by grazing sheep. Rapanui farmers plucked rocks from the ahu—the platforms the moai once stood upon—to build walls around their fields.

Rapu wanted to remind his people that the statues weren’t just ruins that littered the coastline. They were relics of a proud history, sacred monuments to the Rapanui’s ancestors.

He wanted the Rapanui to remember where they had come from, that they were the descendants of a great civilization.

Around a thousand years ago, a double-hulled sailing vessel ran onto the beach at Anakena Cove, on Easter Island’s northeastern coast. White sand formed a crescent around the bay. Beyond the beach stood a dense grove of towering palm trees.

The people who stepped off the vessel were the first to set foot on Easter Island. They were Polynesian scouts sent on a mission of exploration by their king. Finding the island was a stroke of luck. It was uninhabited and big enough to support a settlement. The scouts returned home to report their discovery. Sometime later, according to oral tradition, a small fleet landed in the same spot at Anakena, this time carrying not just young men but also women, children, and older male leaders, as well as seeds, plants, pigs, and chickens. This was the Rapanui’s ark.

Over the subsequent centuries, people fanned out across the island. They organized themselves into a network of cooperating clans, each controlling one slice of the island and the natural resources it contained. One clan had the best fishing cove, another the best pasture. Yet another looked after Rano Raraku, the volcano—also known as the quarry. This was where workers carved the moai.

In the Rapanui cosmos there is no heaven or hell; souls do not relocate after death. They inhabit grasses, mingle among their living relatives, or—in the case of exalted ancient leaders—take up residence in the moai. The moai thus had power, mana, over earthly events, which may explain why over time the people of Easter Island made them bigger, taller, and more ornate. At the peak of moai production, the statues were towering monuments. The biggest stood 30 feet tall, with a highly stylized face: a sharp jawline and an overlong, flared nose.

Sculptors carved a moai out of porous volcanic rock, right where it had hardened to the earth. When a statue was complete, they pried it from the ground and, with a system of ropes, stood it upright. Then they jostled it forward, a few feet at a time; men tilted it left while others tugged it forward on the right, and back and forth. With this technique, they transported statues weighing as much as a commercial airplane across the island. When they reached the coast, they used levers and ropes to hoist the statues onto the ahu.

The moai always faced inland, watching over the population. There was no reason for them to look seaward. For centuries no ships came over the horizon. Easter Island was like a lone planet floating through space.

Then, in 1722, three ships appeared. They were sent by the Dutch West India Company, and they marked the beginning of a new era. Over the next century and a half, until Chile’s annexation of the island, commercial ships, explorers, and settlers periodically landed on the Rapanui’s shores. Sometimes they engaged in trade, but more often they delivered calamity. The first three ships set the precedent: After sighting the island on Easter Sunday—hence the name they gave it—the crews landed, and the captains took a tour, guided by Rapanui leaders. When they returned to where they had left their men, the captains found carnage. Sailors had opened fire on a crowd of Rapanui men, killing nearly a dozen and wounding many more.

Later ships brought smallpox, and Peruvian slavers abducted men and transported them to South America. In 1868, a French pirate named Jean Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier set about transforming the island into his own personal fiefdom. He won some Rapanui allies, armed them, and terrorized a band of Jesuit missionaries who had settled in Hanga Roa, driving them and their followers from the island. Dutrou-Bornier ruled with impunity until one day, in 1876, three Rapanui men bludgeoned him to death.

Twenty-five years later, after the Company had taken over, the Rapanui attempted to topple a manager named Percival Edmunds. Led by a Rapanui woman named Angata, who claimed to be a prophet, a band of men slaughtered the Company’s cattle and marched on Company headquarters. As Edmunds bunkered at Mataveri, fearing for his life, a Chilean Navy ship landed. The sailors arrested two of the revolt’s male leaders and carried them back to Chile, breaking the spirit of the movement.

The assassination of Dutrou-Bornier was the first Rapanui uprising against a foreign authority. Angata’s revolt against the Company was the second. Alfonso Rapu, the quiet schoolteacher, would soon lead the third.

Chapter Three

Rapu started looking for ways to expand programming at the school, with an eye toward teaching Easter Island’s history. He partnered with Luis Paté, a popular fisherman, known to everyone as Papa Kiko, who had made it his life’s work to keep alive traditional songs and dances from the precolonial era. Papa Kiko and Rapu founded a dance troupe of children and teenagers. On weekends they met at the schoolhouse to craft traditional clothes—grass skirts, headdresses made of dried reeds—and to rehearse Papa Kiko’s music and dance steps.

To naval authorities the activity seemed innocuous, a way for the Rapanui to keep themselves busy. For Rapu it was a way of reintroducing himself to islanders, regaining their trust after so many years away, and reasserting his Rapanui identity. He was also creating a sense of community. In short, he was organizing.

Another center of influence had emerged at a campsite on the edge of Hanga Roa. In February 1964, a 40-foot schooner dropped anchor near the village. It belonged to a French adventurer, Francis Mazière, and his Tahitian wife, Tila. They had come to Easter Island, they said, to carry out a major archaeological research project. Without asking many questions, the Chilean government granted them permission to do their work, and Portilla and his wife gave them a dignified reception. But the Mazières did not socialize with the Chileans much after that. They were put off by the way Portilla stressed Chile’s European origins, as if to distance himself and his country from the indigenous people his country had displaced and dominated, including the Rapanui.

The Mazières were more interested in spending their time with locals. They set up camp and hired Rapanui men and women to help them with their fieldwork. Soon they were hosting campfire soirées, where they dropped hints that they might have a solution for the Rapanui’s problems: Leaders of several French Polynesian islands, including Tahiti, were working to form a new nation, the Polynesian Federation. Perhaps, the couple suggested, Easter Island could break away from Chile and join.

Rapu, who rarely attended the Mazières’ campfires, didn’t share the prevailing sentiment at the gatherings: He was not hostile to Chile, where he had spent so much of his life. His hope was not for Easter Island and Chile to separate, but for them to draw closer—for all Rapanui people to experience the privileges and freedoms he had enjoyed in Santiago. He wanted civil rights, not secession.

What’s more, he believed that the Navy had a role to play in bringing about change. In his view, John Martin, the governor who had ordered his brother beaten, was a bad actor, but that didn’t mean that the Navy itself was rotten. Rapu hoped Portilla might become his ally. Rapu taught the governor’s eldest daughter at the schoolhouse—she was an excellent pupil—and he found Portilla to be a responsible and engaged father. On the soccer pitch, their competitions were friendly. But Portilla soon disappointed Rapu by stymieing an initiative at the schoolhouse.

From his own experience, Rapu knew that young Rapanui children were often left alone while their parents worked. So he told the school’s head nun, Sister Petronila, that he wanted to create a kindergarten. It would give parents a place to deposit their kids during the day, and it would give Rapu and the nuns the opportunity to start educating children early. All Rapu needed was a field: Since the temperature on Easter Island hardly ever dropped below 60 degrees, and the schoolhouse was occupied, the kindergarten would be outside.

Sister Petronila explained the proposal to Portilla and asked for a plot of land. Portilla agreed, but the land he offered was a scrap of dirt, covered in low brush, at the edge of the village. It was too far from the school, and not nearly big enough to give kids room to play. When Rapu complained, Portilla didn’t budge.

Rapu next asked Portilla for better personal accommodations. He had learned from the nuns that there was a house in Hanga Roa, a few hundred feet from the school, that was officially designated for the island’s teacher. By rights, the Navy should have handed it over to Rapu. Instead, a Navy officer had made it his own.

Sister Petronila sent another petition to Portilla, who, sitting alone in his office, viewed it as reasonable. But he was nothing if not deferential to the chain of command, and he was unwilling to evict a fellow officer from the house without consulting his superiors in Valparaíso. In late August, he sent a telegram asking for guidance, and in response Valparaíso rejected Rapu’s request. Because he wasn’t married, authorities determined, he could remain with his parents. Portilla, ever the loyal Navy man, presented the decision as if he fully endorsed it.

Rapu was incensed and began reassessing his view of Portilla. The governor was mild mannered, yes. But in his official acts he was imperious, just like his predecessors. Rapu concluded that the governor didn’t regard the Rapanui as fellow citizens; he saw them as serfs.

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On October 31, 1964, Guido Andrade, the Navy’s doctor on the island, threw a party. He had invited practically everyone in Hanga Roa to his small house, which he shared with his wife and daughters. The crowd overflowed from the living room onto the front stoop and into the street.

Andrade was perhaps the only person who comfortably straddled the divide between the Chileans and the Rapanui. If he received an invitation for a social engagement—a Navy dinner party or a backyard curanto, a communal cookout where pigs and yams were roasted in underground ovens covered by banana leaves—the answer was invariably yes. He could always be counted on to stay late and bring booze. And if he had once had a dalliance with a Rapanui teenager, well, most people chose to look past it. Life on the island could be monotonous, but Andrade never was.

No one else could have assembled the group that showed up that night. Portilla was there alongside island elders. Chilean sailors and young Rapanui men jostled for a spot near the bar.

At the end of the evening, Andrade quieted the crowd to give a speech. The intended audience, it seemed clear, was Andrade’s Rapanui friends, not the Chileans, much less Portilla. “Mi querido pueblo pascuense,” he began—my dear Easter Islanders. He had good news to share, he said. A new president had been elected in Chile. Eduardo Frei Montalva of the center-left Christian Democratic Party had promised in his campaign to be a reformer, and had even referenced the antiquated system of governance on Easter Island. The Rapanui should hope for a brighter future, Andrade said. Soon they might get relief from the “deficits of liberty” they had long endured.

Portilla, listening among the crowd, was furious. The next day, he summoned Andrade to his office.

“What are these deficits of liberty?” Portilla asked.

“There are many,” Andrade replied.

Portilla felt that Andrade’s speech was an act of insubordination. To Rapu it was an opening. It was the first time he had seen someone so brazenly defy naval authority. The episode made Rapu wonder what other kinds of resistance might be possible.

Germán Hotus, another guest at the party, had the same thought. Hotus had been a regular at the Mazières’ campfires, where he spoke openly of the Rapanui’s oppression and the need for reform. Throughout 1964, Hotus had spent many evenings visiting Rapanui families in their homes, listening to them talk about their hardships and telling them that life on the island needed to change. In the weeks after Andrade’s party, Rapu and Hotus met regularly at the schoolhouse or at Hotus’s home. They didn’t agree on all matters: Hotus was sympathetic to the Mazières’ separatism; Rapu still felt himself to be Chilean. But they shared the conviction that the Rapanui deserved a better life.

They also complemented each other. While Rapu could relate to the Chileans—and speak to them in Spanish—Hotus was a married father of nine who was employed at the village supply store. He was a man of the people. Rapu and Hotus became a team and started laying plans. They did not support violence, and neither aspired to be governor or king. Still, they believed that the Navy could be resisted, and that the regime on Easter Island could be prodded to change. They wanted to show the Rapanui how.

The Rapanui should hope for a brighter future, Andrade said. Soon they might get relief from the “deficits of liberty” they had long endured.

One day Rapu and Hotus learned that a Canadian naval ship had departed from Nova Scotia and was en route to Easter Island. Traveling on the Cape Scott was a team of scientists and physicians. They had received permission from Chile to land at Easter Island and study the Rapanui.

The whole idea bothered Rapu. What right did the Chilean government have to grant foreigners permission to inspect the Rapanui? But he and Hotus also sensed an opportunity. There was little that Chilean authorities and especially the Navy feared more than embarrassment on an international stage. With foreign observers on the island, Rapu and Hotus believed, the Navy would have to act with restraint, giving the two men more room to operate and to stage acts of defiance.

Rapu and Hotus began collaborating on a letter they intended to send to Chile’s new president. It would become a long document, incorporating the ideas of the men’s Rapanui allies: Rapu’s students from his night classes and Hotus’s contacts from his consciousness-raising tours of the community. It referenced Hotus’s interest in Easter Island seceding from Chile and joining the nascent Polynesian Federation, but it didn’t go so far as to endorse the idea. Longer passages were informed by Rapu’s Chilean patriotism, asserting a sense of common national identity and demanding full civil rights for islanders.

The men laid out the Rapanui’s grievances. “Mr. President,” they wrote, “what we want to say cannot be said here on the island.… We live under threat because if we speak freely the Governor says he will fire us from our jobs or send us to jail or that he’ll never let us travel to the Continent. This makes us live under a constant tyranny.” Their basic rights, they said, were infringed. They were not allowed to assemble without permission. Their Navy-controlled elections were not free and fair. They had been dehumanized by brutal punishments. They were confined to Hanga Roa. Their mother tongue was banned in radio communications.

In the face of these injustices, the letter’s demands were modest. They amounted, more or less, to a desire to be left alone. The Rapanui people, the letter said, were self-sufficient—“here, by our own initiative, we do everything.” All they wanted was a little bit of money to modernize. The funding should come from the proceeds of the sheep ranch, the letter said. The Rapanui would use it to buy machinery for a basic textile factory to avoid the cost of importing fabrics, for a woodworking shop to manufacture furniture, and for a cobbling facility to make and repair shoes. The Rapanui would also buy modern fishing and farming equipment. They would happily accept help from “civil, NOT MILITARY, technicians” to establish these new industries. Above all, they wanted the Navy to leave.

The letter was a cry for freedom. “We wish to be able to sing,” it concluded, “without being so ordered.” The plan was to smuggle several copies of the letter off the island and somehow, perhaps through the Chilean press, convey it to President Frei.

Rapu prepared the letter on a typewriter at the schoolhouse. Beneath the final paragraph, he typed the names of 45 influential Rapanui men; after each name he left a blank line. Then he sent two allies, Alberto Tepihi and Antonio Tepano, to collect signatures. He wanted the letter endorsed by the community’s prominent male citizens, which he hoped would make it more difficult to dismiss.

It was a risky gambit, because many of the men he listed opposed his vision for the future. Rapanui society was divided between those who wanted reform and those who didn’t. Some members of the Rapanui old guard, a contingent of men who held a variety of political sinecures doled out by the Navy, bristled at the notion of change. These men and their followers were a minority, but a sizable one, and they had access to more political power than Rapu’s supporters. Their leader was Hotus’s uncle Lázaro, the Navy-backed mayor of Hanga Roa.

Nonetheless, Rapu placed Lázaro’s name first on the list of signatories. He wagered it was worth a try to get the mayor and his allies to sign. Maybe asking them to sign a letter to the president would appeal to their egos. They might not even bother to read the letter—or they might not be able to. It was not lost on Rapu that, like the Chileans, he was exploiting his fellow Rapanui’s illiteracy, the very thing he was seeking to remedy in his evening classes. But in his mind, the ends justified the means.

Tepihi and Tepano spent a day crisscrossing Hanga Roa seeking out signatories. They added their own spin to Rapu’s plan: They told each man what they thought he wanted to hear. They told some that the letter was a New Year’s greeting for President Frei. They told others that it was a request for more resources for road construction. Around half the members of the old guard signed. When some, including Lázaro, refused, Tepihi and Tepano forged their signatures. When they returned to the schoolhouse, every signature line was filled out.

The next day, December 6, Hotus and Rapu convened a community meeting at the schoolhouse. They billed the event as an opportunity to discuss the upcoming election, scheduled for early January, for the positions of mayor and village councilors. All of Hanga Roa’s influential men showed up, including elders who supported Hotus and Rapu, and Lázaro’s cadre of loyalists. Lázaro opened the meeting. He listed the candidates—his political allies—who would be up for reelection, and who had been preapproved by Portilla. Then Rapu took the floor.

They should hold elections now, Rapu told the packed schoolhouse, and they should vote for whomever they wanted. When he asked the room who was in favor, almost everyone raised their hands. Lázaro tried to intervene, saying they couldn’t vote without the governor’s approval. Then Hotus cut in. The election, he said, was a matter for the Rapanui people and the Rapanui people alone. Never mind Portilla.

This was the second phase of Rapu and Hotus’s plan: to preempt the official election and hold a truly democratic vote. Hotus pulled out a page of handwritten notes and read the names of a new slate of candidates. They were fishermen and farmers, people who had attended Rapu’s literacy classes and the Mazières’ parties. Lázaro objected, saying that the new candidates were not suitable—they hadn’t been approved by the governor. Rapu backed up Hotus. The military, he said, should have nothing to do with the elections. Against Lázaro’s protest, the gathered men agreed to reconvene two days later for an election.

Lázaro marched to Portilla’s office and delivered a detailed report of the meeting at the schoolhouse. Portilla was alarmed by the Rapanui’s subversion of his authority, but he didn’t intervene. On December 8, Hanga Roa’s men returned to the schoolhouse to cast ballots. They elected the new slate of candidates and chose Rapu as mayor. Just as Rapu and Hotus had predicted, Portilla still took no action to punish them.

The Canadian ship was only days away. Nothing mattered more to Portilla than protecting the Navy’s reputation. He couldn’t lock up Hotus, much less Rapu. What would a team of Western scientists think if they discovered the island’s charismatic schoolteacher and newly elected mayor was a political prisoner?

On December 13, the Cape Scott dropped anchor in Hanga Roa bay. Portilla, accompanied by two military officials, greeted the foreign visitors. The expedition’s leader, Stanley Skoryna, would later write of how impressed he was by the young governor’s hospitality.

The next day, Rapu met Skoryna at the island’s naval hospital. As part of their research, the visitors wanted to conduct medical exams on every member of the Rapanui community. Rapu told Skoryna that he could help secure the cooperation of the village, as long as Skoryna agreed to some conditions: Women could only be examined by female doctors. All results would be shared with the subjects and their families. The Rapanui reserved the right to suspend the exams at any time. Finally, Rapu said, if the researchers wished to donate any supplies to the island as an act of goodwill, they should deal with Rapu directly, not the Navy.

A few days later, another opportunity to defy naval authority emerged. A cable from Chile’s Ministry of Public Works reached Portilla’s desk, requesting that the lone bulldozer on Easter Island be shipped to the mainland. The bulldozer had been brought in a few years earlier to dislodge a U.S. Air Force plane that had become stuck on the island’s dirt runway. Ever since, Chilean government functionaries on the island, alongside Rapanui laborers, had used the machine to build roads and boat ramps. The community had come to regard the bulldozer with a sense of pride: It was a symbol of modernity. No one in the Rapanui community would be pleased to see it go. Sure enough, as soon as Portilla instructed Navy officials to load the bulldozer onto the Cape Scott—the ship’s captain had agreed to transport it to Valparaíso—outrage spread through the village.

Within hours of Portilla’s order, Rapu told Humberto Paté, a Rapanui mechanic, to render the machine inoperable. The mission, Rapu told him, had to remain secret. That night, as Rapu taught his literacy class, Paté appeared at the schoolhouse door. The classroom went quiet. Paté held up a burlap bag.

“Teacher,” he said, “I’ve got the—”

Rapu cut him off. “Thank you, put it in the back,” he said. Turning to the class, Rapu said, “Humberto brought me some fuel.” In fact, the bag contained the bulldozer’s driveshaft.

The next day, when Portilla’s men tried to start up the bulldozer, they discovered that it was dead. Portilla was enraged. He had restrained himself up to that point, but he couldn’t tolerate sabotage. A few hours later, Sergio Piñeiro, the captain of the Chilean Air Force contingent on the island, approached Rapu outside the schoolhouse. “Teacher,” he said, “we’re going to Portilla’s.” Rapu got in the captain’s Jeep.

When he walked into Portilla’s office, Rapu found the room full. Portilla, two Navy officials, Lázaro, and two other members of the Rapanui old guard were seated around Portilla’s desk. Hotus was also there. Rapu sat down.

Portilla launched into a diatribe, accusing Rapu of inciting a “subversive movement.” Rapu argued that Portilla shouldn’t have authority in the first place. The leader of Easter Island should be a “native,” he said. Portilla was indignant. “I’m the governor,” he said. But now Rapu was picking up steam. The Navy had no business managing the ranch, he said; it should belong to the Rapanui. The Navy also shouldn’t occupy homes in Hanga Roa, including the teacher’s house; these structures belonged to the island’s people. The Rapanui must be free to move about, to visit the lands of their ancestors, to fish where they pleased.

Lázaro pointed out that people were already free to fish where they liked, as long as they got permission first. Portilla asked Rapu to consider how much the Navy gave the Rapanui, and how much worse things would be without Chile overseeing the island. “It is the bare minimum!” Rapu shot back. “The Navy is exploiting the ranch and keeping the profits!”

Portilla, flustered, tried to change tack. He brought up the bulldozer and its missing driveshaft. Rapu denied being involved and, seeking a way to escape the office, agreed to get to the bottom of the matter and help recover the part. Portilla extracted a promise from him: Rapu would deliver the driveshaft the next morning or there would be trouble.

The following day Portilla waited, but Rapu never came. It was the final straw. Portilla decided that, to restore order on the island before the situation escalated any further, he would have to call for help. He sat down at his desk and tapped out a telegram to Valparaíso. For the first time, he told his superiors that there was trouble on the island.

“We have discovered a subversive movement carried out by the islanders against the Navy,” he wrote. “The movement is led by the schoolteacher Alfonso Rapu (a native). … We suggest transport for the schoolteacher.”

The next day, Portilla got an answer. The message read: “The Commander in Chief of the Navy has approved the return of Alfonso Rapu to the continent aboard the Canadian transport Cape Scott.”

Rapu argued that Portilla shouldn’t have authority in the first place. The leader of Easter Island should be a “native,” he said.

On an evening in mid-December, shortly before the Cape Scott departed the island, there was a farewell party—a traditional Rapanui sau sau, with singing, dancing, an open fire, and a roast. The researchers who had come on the ship would be staying for a while, so the islanders were sending off the Cape Scott’s foreign crew, as well as Dr. Andrade and his family. People thought Andrade was leaving of his own volition; he and his family had long said they planned to move back to Chile when the annual supply ship came—the Cape Scott just let them do so a bit earlier.

In fact, Portilla had ordered Andrade to leave. He suspected the doctor of being a collaborator with Rapu, and he had already sent accusations of subversion to his superiors. Andrade knew he was in trouble, but he didn’t let on at the party. He drank and danced, wearing white slacks and a white linen shirt. He didn’t want to spoil his last night on the island with any bad news.

Rapu was in attendance. He didn’t know about Andrade’s situation, or that Portilla was working to have him shipped to Chile, too. But as he chatted with friends, he overheard snippets of other conversations nearby.

“…the people who believe they’re educated and superior…”

“…disappear from the island…”

“…going to scare them off like rats.”

He wasn’t sure what the comments meant, if anything, but he found them strange.

That night around 11:30, on his walk home in the hills, Rapu saw a man coming toward him. In the dark, Rapu couldn’t make out who it was. When the man spoke, it was in a Chilean accent. “You need to hide,” the man said as he passed by and disappeared into the dark. Rapu was spooked. Instead of continuing home, he followed dirt trails winding through farm fields until he reached his grandmother’s house, where he had lived as a young child. He lay down on the floor with a blanket and went to sleep.

The next morning, Portilla ordered his men to find Rapu and Hotus, whom the governor also wanted to send to Chile, and bring them to the Cape Scott. Under normal circumstances, finding anyone in Hanga Roa was a simple matter. There were fewer than 2,000 people on Easter Island, and everyone knew everyone else. But as Portilla and his men canvassed locals, they found that no one knew where Rapu and Hotus were.

Juan Edmunds, a Rapanui man from the old guard, told Portilla that Rapu was hiding at his uncle’s house. Portilla drove across town in his Jeep, but Rapu wasn’t there. Another Chilean officer heard that Rapu was at the home of a government functionary, Nicolai Escalante, who was viewed as sympathetic to the Rapanui cause. Escalante, bewildered, pleaded ignorance. Meanwhile, Lázaro knocked on the door of his nephew’s home and demanded that Hotus’s wife turn him over. She answered, honestly, that she had no idea where he was.

Still bunkering at his grandmother’s house, Rapu sent his brother Carlos, who had joined him, down to the village to find out what was going on. As Carlos approached their parents’ house, he spotted Portilla, accompanied by several military men, at the front door. Hidden in the brush, Carlos watched Portilla talking to his mother. Then he raced back to warn his brother. The Navy was after him, Carlos said.

Rapu had been in a kind of denial—he had believed that if his intentions were pure, and people understood them, the outcomes of his actions would be just. Now he understood that the Navy meant to ship him off the island like the disappeared lieutenants of Angata, the supposed prophet, half a century before. He told Carlos to descend to the village again, carefully, to gather supplies and a few trusted friends. Then they would venture beyond the Wall, into the island’s interior.

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The Cape Scott departed on schedule, without Rapu or Hotus on board. Portilla had failed. The governor watched the ship leave, then returned to his office and notified Valparaíso. “It was not possible to embark the schoolteacher Alfonso Rapu,” he wrote in a telegram. “He is hiding, presumably on the island, protected by islanders. … The bulldozer was not sent to the continent [either] because it was impossible to move. … The situation is serious.”

Portilla wondered if the Rapanui who denied knowing where the men were had done so not out of ignorance but to deceive him. What if the whole village was behind Rapu and Hotus? Portilla’s fear only deepened when Lázaro came to see him and reported a rumor: Lázaro claimed that Rapu’s true objective was for Easter Island to secede from Chile. The schoolhouse election, the sabotage of the bulldozer, Rapu’s flight to the interior—these, Lázaro said, were the opening salvos in a revolution.

The accusation was false—Rapu had never sympathized with the secessionist agenda of the Mazières, who had departed the island in November—but the truth was not what mattered, at least for now. Portilla believed Lázaro’s claim, and it frightened him. It seemed clear to the governor that Rapu was the main instigator of the brewing rebellion. Now Portilla tried to mount a haphazard counterinsurgency campaign. He held conciliatory meetings with members of the Rapanui community at the schoolhouse and in his office. He hoped to show that he did care about the people, their well-being, their future.

But on December 23, after two days of these meetings, Portilla saw how futile his outreach had been. That afternoon a new rumor—another false one—spread through the village: Rapu had been detained, and the Navy was holding him as a political prisoner. By the evening, virtually every resident of Hanga Roa had heard this report, and Rapu’s supporters took to the streets. Wielding clubs and farm implements, they marched down the village’s roads. They descended on a government building where they believed Rapu was being held. In the dark, they shouted in Rapanui and Spanish, demanding the teacher’s release, until the crowd, realizing that Rapu was not there, dispersed.

The next morning, Portilla sent yet another telegram to Valparaíso. This time he asked for reinforcements. “The community supports the subversive movement,” he wrote. “The goal is to secede from Chile.” It was “necessary,” he went on, “to send a ship as soon as possible.”

Portilla did not know that another message was on its way to Chile. Sister Esperanza, a nun who was friendly with Rapu, had secured passage from Easter Island on the Cape Scott. She was carrying precious cargo: Sealed in an envelope and tucked in her bag was the letter addressed to President Frei, signed by Rapanui leaders, demanding liberty for their people.

Chapter Four

On December 26, in Valparaíso, second lieutenant Germán Goddard Dufeu of the Chilean Navy received word that there was trouble on Easter Island. The news was confusing—and alarming. There was talk of insubordination, foreign influence, and mutiny by a Chilean naval official (meaning Andrade). Dufeu and his crewmates soon received orders to prepare their ship, the Yelcho, and a contingent of marines to depart for Easter Island. At the Valparaíso barracks, men assembled supplies and armaments for the mission. Based on the little information available, they assumed they would ship out soon to quell a violent rebellion.

That same day, the news leaked to Chilean papers that there was trouble in the country’s island colony. Reporters in Santiago peppered government officials with questions. “Everything is normal on the island,” a Navy spokesperson said, insisting that the military was not in any way cruel to the Rapanui. The denials had little effect, and the news of turmoil on Easter Island soon appeared in international papers, including The New York Times.

On December 28, Frei met with his top cabinet ministers at his official residence. His administration was already under pressure from some domestic critics and a handful of international allies to reform the regime on Easter Island. The last thing Frei needed was a charismatic freedom fighter capturing news interest and intensifying these demands.

Another threat loomed—or at least the administration believed it did. Portilla had accepted as fact that Rapu wanted Easter Island to secede from Chile, and he had conveyed as much to the government. Now, in the December 28 meeting, defense minister Juan de Dios Carmona told Frei that a French warship was sailing across the Pacific toward Easter Island. It was a coincidence that the French vessel was in the ocean at the time, but that’s not how the government ministers understood it: They saw a provocation—a first move, perhaps. After all, Francis Mazière, one of the people who had encouraged the Rapanui to secede from Chile, was French. Maybe the ship was on its way to help the cause of independence.

Dios Carmona told the president the ship could not be allowed to reach the island. Frei ordered the Yelcho mission to proceed; he wanted troops in Hanga Roa as soon as possible.

The day after the cabinet meeting, the Cape Scott dropped its ramp onto a pier in Valparaíso. Reporters, Rapanui expats, and curious Chileans crowded the dock. As the press clamored for answers, Sister Esperanza emerged from the ship in her black habit. She ignored the questions shouted at her and advanced through the crowd, Rapu’s letter to the president still safe in her bag.

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Rapu didn’t know that he had sent his letter to a government that now viewed him as a secessionist, a traitor. Five days earlier, as the Cape Scott departed Easter Island, he had ridden into the island’s interior on horseback. He traveled with two of his brothers, Rafael and Carlos, and a friend, Sorobabel Fati, who had become a trusted lieutenant. With military Jeeps roving Hanga Roa’s dirt roads searching for him, Rapu decided that his best option was to disappear into the countryside. The Chilean Navy had never bothered to master the terrain. With the Rapanui confined within the Wall, and only a few government functionaries managing the sheep ranch, why would it?

Although confined for generations, the Rapanui still had knowledge of the landscape, passed down through oral tradition and preserved by whatever trips to the interior had been possible over the years. Rapu headed for the island’s caves. With the entrances hidden from view by tall grass, the caves were subterranean pockets in the island’s volcanic foundation. For centuries the Rapanui took shelter in them at moments of crisis: during the battles against the pirate Dutrou-Bornier, and during the Chilean crackdown following Angata’s revolt. Now Rapu needed them. He spent his first night as a fugitive in a cave just beyond the hills over Hanga Roa. (Hotus was hiding elsewhere, lest the two men be caught together.)

Down in the village, Portilla, Piñeiro, and their subordinates continued searching. Most of Rapu’s supporters didn’t know where he was—he’d kept his journey to the interior strictly need-to-know—but dozens of them decided to show their solidarity by setting up camp in his parents’ front yard. They held curantos, sang traditional songs, and debated the island’s political future. It was a kind of vigil, and also an act of resistance against the Navy.

Rapu moved to a new hiding spot every 24 hours. He spent one day at the base of the Terevaka volcano. The next night he trekked across the island and camped on the Poike peninsula. Friends shuttled food and supplies to him. During the first week, they also brought information, tidbits they’d gleaned from sympathetic Chileans who knew what was happening on the mainland. Andrade arrested in Valparaíso. Armed marines on the way.

In Hanga Roa, Rapu’s supporters sensed that a fight was coming. One evening, a Canadian doctor was walking with a Rapanui friend, a woman, when Portilla sped by them in his Jeep. The Rapanui woman gestured toward Portilla, as if holding a rifle. “There will be blood,” she said.

With military Jeeps roving Hanga Roa’s dirt roads searching for him, Rapu decided that his best option was to disappear into the countryside.

On January 5, 1965, the Yelcho anchored in Hanga Roa bay. The men on board were prepared for battle and its aftermath. Commander Guillermo Rojas would lead the contingent of marines onto the island. A Navy prosecutor, Aldo Montagna, was on hand to initiate criminal proceedings against any captured rebels. And John Martin, the brutal former governor who had ordered Rapu’s brother beaten in the street, was there as a purported expert on the island and a liaison to its people.

As the three men approached land, they heard singing. Drawing closer, they saw women on the coastline dancing in grass skirts. When they stepped onto shore, the women approached and hung flower garlands around their necks.

The Chileans were stunned, which was exactly what Rapu had hoped for. While in hiding, he had engineered the welcome party with the goal of psychologically disarming the marines. The plan seemed to work. Rojas took the welcome party as a sign that the Rapanui viewed him as their savior. “Extraordinarily affectionate reception for the Delegate,” he wrote in a report to his superiors, referring to himself. “Frightened community anxiously awaited [my] arrival.” (Rojas also concluded that Martin was “very loved” by the people.)

As the marines set up camp, Rojas marched into town. He had gotten wind of a meeting at the schoolhouse. When he arrived, he found the building full. Rapanui women and men—all supporters of Rapu—had gathered to draft a list of demands. When Rojas strode in, the room went quiet. He began explaining how he would solve the island’s problems. He would restore order and Navy rule. He spoke slowly, deliberately, as if to children. The Rapanui, he later wrote, lacked “sufficient mental agility to relate or comprehend multiple consecutive ideas.”

Rapu’s supporters responded politely and moved toward the exits. Rojas was pleased. “Very good disposition toward the Delegate,” he wrote in his report. “[The] meeting dissolved within five minutes once I explained how I am going to solve the situation.” Rojas concluded: “It appears the inhabitants do not desire laws that would deprive them of the Navy.”

Like his response to the welcome party, Rojas’s gullible reaction to the schoolhouse meeting seemed to lessen the risk of bloodshed. The next day, Rapu felt safe enough to come out of hiding for an interview with Rojas and Montagna, the prosecutor. Rapu still clung to the hope that if only he could explain what he wanted—integration with Chile, basic rights for his people—the authorities just might grant it. Perhaps, Rapu thought, Rojas’s mind had been opened by what he’d seen on Easter Island so far.

The men met at the courthouse. Rapu sat down across from Rojas and Montagna, and a Navy officer asked him to identify himself.

“Alfonso Rapu.”

“Twenty-two.”

“Single.”

“Literate.”

“Native of Easter Island.”

As the interview proceeded, Rapu presented himself as a leader of his people, but also as a good citizen not trying to cause trouble. “Throughout 1964, I carried out my work as the island’s teacher and met the obligations of my job in the normal manner,” he said. He emphasized that his loyalties lay with Chile. He had disliked the Mazières’ pro-Polynesian “propaganda,” because he viewed it as “anti-patriotic,” he said. Portilla, he claimed, was the true source of conflict, a volatile and paranoid leader who had brought Hanga Roa to the brink of violence. Rapu laid out some of the demands that Portilla had refused to accede to—demands, Rapu said, that came from discussions with his fellow Rapanui. Chief among them were that natives be allowed to move freely about the island, and that the results of their democratic elections be respected by Chile.

The interview ended, and Rojas dismissed Rapu. At the very least, Rapu felt that he had achieved a kind of détente, and he returned to his parents’ house to decide on his next move. Hotus was also interviewed by the Chileans and released.

These conversations convinced Rojas that Rapu was the leader with ideas and influence. Rojas wasn’t alone: Events on the mainland were raising Rapu’s profile—and changing the state of play on Easter Island once again.

On January 6, the Santiago newspaper Última Hora published the Rapanui’s letter to the president. “Exclusive! Pascuenses send a letter to Frei,” the headline read. “They describe abuses committed against them.” Along with the letter, the paper ran a glowing profile of Rapu. “Alfonso Rapu, a 22-year-old teacher, is the leader of Easter Island,” it declared.

The letter caused a sensation. In the following days, other newspapers in Valparaíso and Santiago covered it or ran excerpts. Inside the government, the letter heightened the sense of emergency. The schoolteacher seemed to have outwitted Frei’s administration, influenced media coverage, and shaped public opinion from 2,000 miles away. Among the letter’s accusations of head shavings, whippings, and other abuses, one line stood out to Chile’s leaders: “We have heard from people from other islands who share our Polynesian blood that our conditions would be better if we joined the Union of the Islands of Polynesia.” Rapu had tried to hedge, writing in the next sentence, “We don’t want to consider these propositions.” But it was the implied threat of secession—not the disclaimer—that attracted notice.

The Chilean congress passed emergency legislation that changed Easter Island from a territory into a “sub-commune” of the Region of Valparaíso. The new status was intended to more firmly attach the island to the country, making secession a complicated prospect. On the morning of January 8, word of the letter and the legislation reached Rojas on Easter Island via telegram. The message highlighted the risk of Easter Island joining the Polynesian Federation. It listed the name of every man whose signature appeared on the Rapanui’s letter. And it requested that Rojas and his men “investigate veracity of … the accusations” of abuse made against the Navy.

Rojas was blindsided. He had thought the situation on the island was under control. What the telegram reported was an outrage and a humiliation. The Rapanui were publicly questioning the integrity of Chilean officers, including John Martin, now serving by Rojas’s side.

When Rojas finished reading the telegram, he ordered his men to search Hanga Roa. They were to round up every Rapanui man who had signed the letter.

Within hours, officers were interrogating the men one by one. When Papa Kiko, the leader of the children’s song and dance troupe, was asked if he had signed the letter, he said that he had. Asked if the letter was accurate, he said that it was. Martin flew into a rage, his face turning red. He had known the Rapanui, and Papa Kiko in particular, to be docile, compliant. He was frustrated—offended even—that the old man had joined Rapu’s rebellion. “Now I’m hearing you’re with them, too,” Martin said. Papa Kiko refused to budge; he stood by the letter. The marines led him from the office and locked him in the House of Stone.

Other Rapanui men who affirmed their support of the letter were thrown in jail. Some disavowed it under pressure. And those whose signatures had been forged said as much—they blamed Rapu and Hotus.

Following the interrogations, Rojas sent a missive to Valparaíso. Rapu and Hotus were the authors of the letter, he reported, the contents of which were false. The signatures, he added, had been obtained “fraudulently.” Both Rapu and Hotus would be arrested.

Since his interview, Rapu had been at his parents’ house. On the afternoon of January 8, as Rojas and Martin questioned and jailed his supporters, Rapu received updates from friends. He saw that his options were narrowing. Judging from the reports he was receiving, the Chilean soldiers who had arrived on the Yelcho were becoming increasingly agitated. Even if he fled into the hills again, he could not hide forever. When the headlights of a Navy Jeep strafed his parents’ windows that evening, Rapu decided to turn himself in.

He walked out the front door to find Martin and a marine, both armed, waiting for him. Martin told Rapu that he was under arrest. The former governor also instructed him to summon his brother Rafael, who was only 17, but known to be one of Rapu’s most active and loyal helpers. The Navy wanted to speak with him, too. The two brothers walked down the steps from their parents’ patio and clambered into the Jeep’s back seat. As the vehicle rattled down the dirt road toward Hanga Roa, Rafael looked down at his elder brother’s legs. They were trembling.

When Rojas finished reading the telegram, he ordered his men to search Hanga Roa. They were to round up every Rapanui man who had signed the letter.

The Jeep rolled to a stop outside the courthouse. Martin escorted Rapu inside, to the same room where he had been interviewed before. Rojas and Montagna were there, and so was a Navy officer sitting behind a typewriter. (Portilla, whom Rojas had decided was an ineffective leader, had been sidelined.) Martin instructed Rapu to sit down, then Rojas placed a piece of paper on the table in front of him. It was the telegram Rojas had received that morning, describing the letter sent to Frei.

“Did you write the letter?” Rojas asked.

Rapu said that he had.

As the questioning continued, Rapu feared that it was little more than pretext, and that the marines would soon carry him to the Yelcho. He was certain that if he boarded the ship, he would never make it off alive. He imagined being thrown overboard, and the marines explaining themselves when they reached Valparaíso. They would say he leapt into the ocean like other Rapanui men before him, those who a century before had chosen death after being captured by slavers. Rapu would become a martyr to the Rapanui, but he would always be a fool to the Chileans, like Riro, the poisoned king.

After an hour, Rojas stood up. In the name of the government and the Navy of Chile, he said, “Lo declaro reo”—you are a prisoner.

Outside, unbeknownst to Rapu or his interrogators, a rescue operation was under way. After Rapu was arrested, his supporters had mobilized. Their plan was slapdash: The road to the government building where Rapu was being questioned was separated from the rest of Hanga Roa by a ditch dug into the street, with metal slats laid across it to allow vehicles to pass. Martin’s Jeep had trundled over them to deliver Rapu to Rojas. Now several of Rapu’s supporters pulled up the slats and threw them aside, leaving the road unpassable by vehicles. If the marines wanted to take Rapu to the Yelcho, they would have to do it on foot—and get past the Rapanui.

A mob of women, including Reina, Rapu’s mother, amassed behind the stone wall outside the courthouse. Their men stayed behind them; Rapu’s supporters had decided that women should form the front line, because the marines would be less likely to shoot them. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the women watched the building’s door, waiting for Rapu and his captors to emerge.

Inside, Rojas ordered two of his men to take Rapu to the marines’ encampment, to prepare for his removal from the island. As he was escorted toward the door, Rapu heard a murmur of voices outside. As soon as he walked out, the Rapanui women climbed over the wall and rushed toward Rapu and the marines, yelling. As the mob closed in, one woman, Herencia Teao, grabbed Rapu’s arm and pulled him toward her.

The marines tried to wrestle Rapu back into their custody, but the women struck them. One marine fired a pistol into the air—a warning shot—but the women did not relent. Keeping the marines at bay, and Rapu protected in their midst, the women moved as a group toward the coastline, until they reached the edge of the camp where the foreign researchers who had arrived on the Cape Scott were staying. This, the Rapanui believed, was the only safe harbor on their occupied island. As they pushed their way into the camp, chests heaving, several women told the bewildered researchers to start filming—the Rapanui were sure that the only thing that could protect them from foreign guns was foreign eyes.

Seconds later, a handful of armed marines came into the camp. One, brandishing a pistol, rushed toward Rapu. But Rojas, who entered the compound next, ordered the marines to stand down. Rapu, who had been hunched over catching his breath, stood up to face his adversary.

Rojas had two options. Outnumbered by the Rapanui, and in full view of Europeans and North Americans, he could try to take Rapu by force. Or he could deescalate. Rojas told his men to wait outside the camp and asked the foreign researchers to attend to any injured women. For the next two hours, Rojas and Rapu did a strange dance. Rojas walked through the camp speaking with groups of Rapanui, asking them to go home and assuring them that Rapu would not be harmed. Rapu, for his part, kept his distance. He did not want any Chileans to come near him. Eventually, Rojas sent Rafael Haoa—Rapu’s uncle, a Navy translator—to speak with him.

Were the rumors true, his uncle asked—did he want to secede from Chile? Rapu insisted once again that he wanted nothing of the sort. He wanted Easter Island and the Rapanui to be more Chilean, not less. The uncle returned to Rojas, conferred with him, and then delivered another message to Rapu. He was free to go, on one condition: He had to meet with Rojas peacefully the next morning. Rapu agreed.

Outside the camp’s rear gate, Rapu’s brother Rafael and another supporter were waiting for him with a horse. Rapu mounted it and rode out of the village alone, to spend one more night hiding in the interior. The next day, he had insisted, he would not go to the courthouse again. This time Rojas would have to come to him.

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Rojas arrived at Rapu’s parents’ house by Jeep, accompanied by Martin. Rapu told the men that Martin wasn’t allowed inside, so Rojas agreed to meet with him alone. The naval commander had come to make a deal.

The balance of power on Easter Island had shifted. The Chileans had guns, radios, Jeeps, and the only ship for thousands of miles, but Rapu’s little revolution had managed to render all these resources moot. It was clear he wouldn’t be taken without a fight, which was likely to create a political nightmare for Chile. The Rapanui wouldn’t stand for it, and the foreign researchers would bear witness to whatever happened. Plus, since the publication of the Rapanui’s letter, public opinion on the mainland had swung in the islanders’ favor.

Rojas told Rapu that he needed his help. Together, they had to turn down the temperature on the island, lest the circumstances become explosive. Rojas asked Rapu to reassure his followers that Rojas could be trusted. In return, Rojas would give Rapu something no Chilean had ever offered to the Rapanui before. “We’ll hold an election,” Rojas said, for local officials. If Rapu really represented the people’s interests, as he claimed, they could elect him mayor. Or they could vote for the old guard and choose the status quo. “We’ll let the people decide,” Rojas said.

The next morning, a Sunday, Rojas and Martin gathered the Rapanui community in the plaza in front of Hanga Roa’s Catholic church to make an announcement. Martin addressed the crowd in Spanish. New elections for mayor and three councilors would be held on Tuesday, he said. Any Rapanui could be nominated—no approval from the Navy was required. Then he described the qualifications for voting, including one important change: For the first time, Rapanui women would be allowed to cast ballots.

At eight o’clock sharp on the morning of January 12, voters lined up outside the schoolhouse. They wore their Sunday best: men in blue and tan suits, hair parted and gelled; women in dresses cinched at the waist. Each voter identified themselves, and then approached a chalkboard where a list of candidates was written. Alfonso Rapu was up there, as were Germán Hotus and Jorge Tepano, another of Rapu’s lieutenants. Representing the old guard were some of Rapu’s adversaries, including Felipe Pakarati and Miguel Teao. Each voter called out their choice, and a Rapanui official repeated it. A stick of chalk was used to add a mark beneath the candidate’s name on the board.

By four in the afternoon, there were 286 marks. Only four candidates had received more than ten votes. Pakarati and Hotus each had 56 votes, while Tepano had 65. Rapu, with 99 votes, had won decisively. He would be mayor, and the runners-up would be the village’s three councilors.

The next morning at the governor’s office, before a crowd of supporters, Rojas swore in Rapu as Hanga Roa’s first democratically elected mayor, recognized by the Chilean state. Navy officials hoisted a Chilean flag, and Rojas led a rendition of the national anthem. “Beloved homeland, may you be either a tomb of the free or a refuge from oppression,” the Rapanui and Chilean marines sang in unison.

When the anthem ended, Rapu’s supporters surged forward. Singing now in Rapanui, they embraced Rapu and threw flower petals in the air. Then they formed rows and, behind their new leader, paraded through Hanga Roa, singing songs passed down from their ancestors.

Chapter Five

The transition from military to civilian rule was not immediate. The Navy maintained some authority for another year, and there were setbacks even as the institution relinquished control over the island. In early 1966, a new naval governor, appointed by the Chilean government to replace Portilla, overturned the results of the mayoral election, the one Rapu had won, and installed Miguel Teao in his place. But the Rapanui wrote a new letter to President Frei, complaining of the usurpation, and Rapu won back his position in the next election.

No one accepted responsibility for the excesses of the regime. The only Navy men penalized for their conduct on Easter Island were Portilla and Andrade: Portilla for failing to control the Rapanui, and Andrade for supporting Rapu and his allies. (Andrade was convicted of mutiny and jailed; his son says that he was tortured in prison, and he later went into exile.)

In February 1966, Frei signed an act that came to be known as the Ley Pascua, the Easter Island Law. It granted the Rapanui the full benefits of Chilean citizenship and the same civil rights as those living on the mainland. The law’s passage marked the final triumph of Rapu’s movement: His people could no longer be abused with impunity. They could no longer be detained on their own land. They were no longer serfs.

One of Rapu’s first acts as mayor had been to install a freshwater well. He turned his attention to electricity next. Water, light, food—he started with the basics, eliminating the material deprivation that his people had long endured. After the Ley Pascua was enacted, modernization accelerated. The Wall, now an unpatrolled artifact of the old regime, was dismantled bit by bit and repurposed as fencing around Rapanui farmers’ fields. By the end of the 1960s, supply ships were arriving twice a year. The following decade, it was every three months. In 1984, the president of Chile appointed Sergio, Rapu’s brother, as the island’s governor—the first Rapanui to serve in the role.

By then, Rapu himself had long been out of power. After his two-year term as mayor, he had declined to run again, even though some of his supporters urged him to. He withdrew from politics and became a farmer.

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There is little trace of the revolution in present-day Hanga Roa. There is no Alfonso Rapu Avenue, no memorial honoring the women who rescued him in January 1965. It may be because Rapu himself simply got on with his life. His supporters did the same, or left the island for good. Germán Hotus was one of the first to go. After Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup, Hotus fled to Tahiti, where he lived the rest of his life in exile. Rapu’s brother Sergio eventually made a life for himself abroad, studying archaeology in the United States, before returning to the island and making major discoveries about its ancient history.

Some surviving members of the old guard eventually had a change of heart and decided that Rapu’s revolution was for the greater good. Others told me that Rapu “did things the wrong way,” and a few still insisted he was a separatist, despite all evidence to the contrary. Lázaro, Rapu’s onetime nemesis, was suffering from dementia when I met him in 2012. A niece tried to help us talk, translating between Spanish and Rapanui, but Lázaro grew frustrated: It seemed that he remembered the events I was asking about, but couldn’t form the sentences to describe them. Finally, he gave up and told me, haltingly, “You should go talk to Alfonso. He’ll tell you everything. But don’t tell anyone I sent you.”

When I arrived at Rapu’s address, I passed through a gate in a wall made of maroon volcanic stone. Inside was a courtyard bordered by banana trees. Rapu’s modest one-story home sat on one side; on another was a row of motel rooms. At the time, Rapu and his wife, Carmen Cardinali, rented the rooms to tourists who came to Easter Island, mostly to see the moai. Rapu, who at 69 was tall and tan, with a lightly weathered face and a slight stoop, emerged from a sliding door and welcomed me inside.

We took a seat at the kitchen table, and he poured me a glass of ice water with a pale-yellow tinge. He had used a pineapple shell to imbue the liquid with flavor, he said. He didn’t like to waste any part of the fruit that was his livelihood; Rapu now spent his days growing and harvesting pineapples.

Over the next several weeks, we met for hours at a time to talk. Rapu told me about the movement of 1964, but eventually he tired of sit-down interviews and said that if I wanted to hear more, I should join him on his farm. He could use another set of hands anyway. We would drive out to his fields after lunchtime. The route took us over the hills that border Hanga Roa and past his grandmother’s house, where he spent much of his childhood and first took refuge when the Navy tried to capture him. We rattled over dirt roads—Rapu drove a rusted pickup truck with barely functioning suspension—until we reached the low, rolling hills of the island’s interior. They were covered in high grasses; when the wind blew, they looked like waves. Before Rapu’s rebellion, this space was off-limits to any Rapanui not employed by the sheep ranch. (The ranch ceased operations in the 1970s.)

I asked Rapu if he harbored any resentment toward the people who had stood in his way. For instance, Lázaro could have gotten him killed—his whisperings to Portilla were a key factor in escalating the conflict between Rapu and the Navy. As we pulled up the weeds threatening to choke his pineapple plants, Rapu insisted that Lázaro and his ilk hadn’t meant any harm. “They were ignorant,” he said.

If his words sounded dismissive, he didn’t mean them that way. He was sympathetic to the Rapanui who had been trapped inside the Wall for generations with no way out, their only option survival by any means. They hadn’t benefitted, as he had, from leaving the island and seeing what was possible. “They didn’t understand what we were doing,” Rapu said.

We reached the low, rolling hills of the island’s interior. They were covered in high grasses; when the wind blew, they looked like waves.

One of the people who did understand was Cardinali, Rapu’s wife. They married in 1966. Like him, she had studied in Santiago, and returned to Easter Island to be a teacher. They had encountered many of the same difficulties: being an outsider on the mainland for years, only to feel alienation among their own people. During an interview in 2020, Cardinali lit up as she talked about their months of courtship, of falling in love. They married at Rapu’s parents’ house.

According to a relative, Cardinali’s mother did not attend. She found him rude, and brusque with guests, contrary to Rapanui custom. I always found Rapu to be deliberate but gentle—exceedingly so. Once I helped him lug a bucket of slop to a pen that contained a pig that must have weighed 400 pounds. “It was a gift,” Rapu said of the animal. He was supposed to have slaughtered it years before, for meat. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “He’s my friend now,” Rapu said. This was a man frugal enough to reuse pineapple shells, and so compassionate that he would commit to feeding a quarter-ton pig for life.

But he was also just that: a man. For all the ways that he had shifted the Rapanui’s political fortunes, he hadn’t escaped his people’s oppression, poverty, and trauma unscathed. According to three of Cardinali’s siblings, Rapu had hit his wife throughout their marriage, like his father before him. When I interviewed Cardinali, she was not living with Rapu anymore. After nearly 50 years together, she had left him.  

Rapu told me that he never struck Cardinali. In fact, he said, they had only one major argument in their marriage. When I asked Cardinali if Rapu ever hit her, she said that some things are private. “There are things that are mine that I don’t talk about,” she said, adding: “Nevertheless, I respect him.” Then she changed the subject—or so it seemed.

“A lot of people come to the island and ask for stories from before,” she said. “They ask about the society, the history, which is all fine and good. But they don’t ask about survival. Do you understand?”

I wasn’t sure I did.

“There is a sad story of water and survival here. I’m going to tell it to you. We had droughts. The earth became so dry that it cracked. The people had to go in search of water. I lived that, and it was a hardship.”

“We looked for water in the caves,” Cardinali continued, “where we knew there had been water before. But sometimes you had to search further, in other caverns, or in the crater of the volcano. Descend into the crater on horseback. Carry clothes to wash. Take water and carry it up again to the crater’s rim. It was a hard life. A mother would hand you a jar of water and say bathe yourself with this. You had to bathe yourself with that water. The scarcity of water—it was the most basic necessity.”

It seemed as though, for a little while, Cardinali hadn’t been talking to me exactly. But now she fixed her eyes on mine. “You realize,” she said, “this is true anywhere. If there’s no water, there’s nothing.”

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William Henry Lawrence was born May 24, 1868. He was one of 15 children, 12 of whom survived to adulthood. He was a middle child, with five elder and six younger siblings. His father was a farmer and a physician, and the family moved to Pinetucky when Will was a teenager. His father wrote dispatches about rural life that were published in the newspaper in Marion, the county seat. The lively accounts paint a picture of a large, close-knit family. In between reports on the peanut harvest and the weather are stories of rolling back parlor rugs for an evening of dancing, of grandchildren playing in the summer sun, of teenage boys returning triumphant from hunting trips.

Soon after Dr. Lawrence’s death in 1892, his widow, Louise, and the children who were still at home, including Will, moved to nearby Plantersville. Louise bought a farm, and several of her grown sons helped her run it. The 1900 census shows Louise as head of household and her profession as farmer. Her sons Samuel, Will, Charlie, Oscar, and Benjamin are listed as laborers. Will was 32.

By then the Lawrences had encountered their share of misfortune. In addition to Dr. Lawrence’s passing, Martha, the eldest sibling, had died in 1879, at the age of 25, of what doctors called “womb disease.” She left behind a husband and four children. In 1889, John, one of Will’s brothers, was murdered when he interrupted a burglary at the shop where he worked in Montevallo, Alabama. It was 2:30 in the morning, and John, who was 24, suffered a gunshot through the heart, which killed him instantly. His assailants fled the scene. A group of outraged white citizens searched the area, and two black men were rounded up. Before they could be questioned by authorities, the mob hung them from a tree. The event is known as the Montevallo lynching. A historical marker was installed in 2020 to memorialize the horrific event. It describes what occurred but says little about the victims. “Their names,” the marker reads, “are unknown.”

In 1905, Will’s younger brother Walter was put on trial for the murder of his employer, Harris Beiman. In addition to working in Beiman’s dry goods store, Walter boarded at his house. Walter admitted to shooting Beiman, but he claimed it was an accident. Eyewitnesses, however, recalled the dying man saying to Walter, “You shot me! I know you want to marry my wife!” Walter was found not guilty, and he returned to his position at the store, which Beiman’s widow had taken over. They soon married, and Walter began running the business.

The same year as the murder trial, Will’s younger sister Effie died from an unknown health problem that required several surgeries, the last of which she never recovered from. She was in her early twenties and had been married for only a year. In 1909, Clay Lawrence, the four-year-old son of Will’s brother Dawson, shot and killed his nurse while playing with a parlor rifle. Several more Lawrence siblings lost children or spouses before their time. Fannie, also known as Mrs. J. P. Haley, the woman who eventually identified Will at Whitfield, lost a two-year-old daughter. Sam, the eldest Lawrence brother, became a widower at 41 and never remarried. And a niece, Minnie Thompson, died by suicide in 1922.

When Will went missing in 1931, it may have seemed like just one more dreadful event in the family’s catalog of woe. Still, Fannie told We the People that Will’s relatives had tried everything they could think of to find him. “We notified police and missing persons bureaus,” she said on the air. “Every possible agency joined in the search.”

I considered how this search might have unfolded, logistically speaking. Prior to Will’s disappearance, he was living with George, his nephew, in Birmingham. George’s house, where Gratton B. Conwill played bridge with Will and other friends, was a modest single-story Craftsman bungalow with a poured-concrete porch. George and his wife, Ethel, didn’t have any children; nevertheless, the three-bedroom, 1,800-square-foot house was full—in addition to Will, two other boarders lived there. In April 1930, when a census taker came to the door, Will was unemployed. Sometime between then and May 1931, he decided to leave Birmingham. Reports from family members varied, but he may first have gone to Atlanta and then to Monroe, Louisiana. The last anyone heard from him was a letter he wrote to Ethel in which he said that he was going to Jackson. (On We the People, Fannie said that the letter was postmarked Jackson, and that Will wrote of leaving the city—both errors on Fannie’s part, or whoever wrote the segment’s script.)

If the family had notified the authorities about Will’s disappearance, it would have made sense to start in Jackson. In that case, the city’s police department would have been among the Lawrences’ first calls—the same department that had detained Mr. X and put him in the state hospital, and that eventually took his fingerprints and photographs to file with federal authorities. If those materials were subsequently distributed to police departments across the South, as newspapers later reported that they were, it’s possible they made it to West Palm Beach, Florida, where the sheriff at the time was William Hiram “Hi” Lawrence—Will’s nephew, who was named after him.

Why, then, had Will’s family been unable to find him?

A series of missed connections might explain it. The 1930s were a time of immense national precariousness, with economic conditions breaking families apart and hardship consuming many people’s mental resources. It was also well before the advent of technologies—Google and cell phones, for instance—that today allow the average person to track someone down. Perhaps the Lawrence family spoke to police officers in Jackson who happened to have no knowledge of Mr. X, or had forgotten about him. Maybe Sheriff Hi Lawrence didn’t see the identifying information about Mr. X that circulated among law enforcement. Indeed, it’s possible that outsiders had to get involved for Will Lawrence to be identified—that Ligon Smith Forbes had to put his story in the press, that Gabriel Heatter had to interview him on the radio, that Gratton B. Conwill had to recognize his voice.

But there’s another possibility: that what Fannie said on the radio wasn’t true. What if Will’s family didn’t try very hard to find him, or for very long? What if they didn’t search for him at all?

When Will went missing in 1931, it may have seemed like just one more dreadful event in the family’s catalog of woe.

Amnesia is a complicated thing. Memories are formed and stored across various parts of the brain, but of particular importance is the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped section situated deep in the temporal lobe. The hippocampus is crucial to the formation of long-term memories. From a physiological perspective, anything that impairs the functioning of this region can affect memory, and the results can be either temporary or permanent. A temporary loss of memory might be caused by a traumatic brain injury, a stroke, or an infection such as encephalitis. As the brain heals, memories are gradually restored, a process that can take weeks or months. If there’s permanent damage, memories can be lost forever.

Diseases that affect memory, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia, are progressive. A person loses cognitive function, including short-term memory, over the course of many years. The effects generally cannot be undone. Similarly, Korsakoff’s syndrome, a memory disorder caused by alcoholism or dietary deficiencies, is chronic and rarely reversible. Like a stroke, Korsakoff’s is usually accompanied by other physical problems, such as diminished motor skills.

None of these causes of amnesia seem to fit Mr. X’s profile. From the moment he was found on the street in Jackson, he was able to form new memories and retrieve them without difficulty. He showed no signs of poor health. His memory loss didn’t worsen while at Whitfield.

Memory problems can also be psychological in origin. A stressful event can trigger what’s called a dissociative fugue. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, the catalog of mental disorders used by psychiatric professionals, describes the phenomenon as “apparently purposeful travel or bewildered wandering that is associated with amnesia for identity or for other important autobiographical information.” But a fugue is usually a temporary problem, with the afflicted spontaneously “coming to” and finding themselves away from home, with no memory of how they got there.

The DSM-5 characterizes loss of autobiographical memory as “dissociative amnesia.” This is almost always localized—a person blocks memories from a certain period of time, usually triggered by psychological trauma. Generalized dissociative amnesia of the type Mr. X exhibited, encompassing a total loss of autobiographical memory, is extremely rare.

I spoke with Sonja Blum, the director of memory disorders and cognitive neurology at Marshfield Clinic Health System in Wisconsin. I described Mr. X’s case and asked how many like it that Blum had come across. She said that in twenty years of working in her field, she hadn’t seen or heard of one. She reiterated, for emphasis: “Never.”*

I contacted as many descendants of Will’s brothers and sisters as I could find, and a handful responded. Several of them, avid genealogists like myself, had come across newspaper clippings about Will’s amnesia, but they didn’t have any information besides what was on the internet. Only one remembered hearing stories of her Uncle Will as she was growing up. “I wondered if his amnesia might have been a fake,” she said, “and he was hiding from someone.”

This was an angle I hadn’t considered, that Will had disappeared on purpose. But the idea that he hid in the Mississippi State Hospital to evade someone conflicts with known facts—namely, Will letting law enforcement take his fingerprints and photograph, and his willing participation in the publicity campaign that led to his identification.

Still, that didn’t mean he wasn’t faking. There are other reasons a person might want to abandon their identity and live as though their memories didn’t exist.

Generalized dissociative amnesia of the type Mr. X exhibited, encompassing a total loss of autobiographical memory, is extremely rare.

In April 1939, two months after he was released into the care of his family, Mr. X returned to Whitfield for a visit. He said that he was homesick. He spent the day puttering around the greenhouse, playing cards with his old friends, and visiting the library. He met with Dr. Mitchell, the superintendent, and expressed his gratitude for the treatment he had received during his years at the hospital. “We certainly do miss you around here,” Dr. Mitchell reportedly told him. “But we are glad for your sake that you found your relatives.”

A month later, Will returned to the hospital for his 71st birthday. Since the date of his birth hadn’t been known before, it was the first time he was able to celebrate with his friends at Whitfield. Patients and staff, including Ligon, threw him a party. There was a dance, and the band played “Happy Birthday.” His family didn’t attend.

Decades later, I wanted to see the place that had meant so much to Mr. X. Though mental health paradigms have shifted away from institutionalization, the Mississippi State Hospital is still in operation. Its mission, according to its website, is “to help the individuals we serve achieve mental wellness by encouraging HOPE, promoting SAFETY, and supporting RECOVERY while utilizing RESOURCES efficiently.”

When I visited, a member of the staff kindly gave me a tour. The lobby of the administration building is grand and imposing, with a marble-inlaid floor, intricate crown moldings, and wooden cubbyholes—once the campus post office—nestled in a corner. In the basement of one building is a small museum chronicling Whitfield’s history. Group photos of employees line the walls. I searched for Ligon, but the faces were too small for me to identify her. I found her elsewhere: The rotogravure from the Commercial Appeal, the one about Whitfield that the paper published before it ran the story about Mr. X, was hanging in a frame. The headline read “Mending Broken Minds in Mississippi’s Modern Hospital.”

I wondered if that was what happened with Mr. X—if he was broken by the world and mended at Whitfield. Maybe he was hiding, but not from an enemy. Perhaps he was hiding from himself.

Here’s a theory.

What if, back in 1931, something happened to Will Lawrence that temporarily severed his connection to his past and his sense of self? A small stroke or a case of viral meningitis. A head injury. A dissociative fugue or memory loss from heavy drinking. Whatever happened, when he was found wandering Jackson, he either didn’t know who he was or didn’t want to say.

What if, as he recovered, he kept his memories to himself? Perhaps he felt no motivation to go back to his old life—unemployed and alone, with a family prone to calamity that couldn’t find him or possibly wasn’t trying. At Whitfield, life was pretty fine. He had friends, hobbies, meals, and medical care. As America staggered under the weight of economic catastrophe, he felt safe and loved. He might have felt he was better off as Mr. X.

If so, he remained exactly who he’d chosen to be until Ligon came along, eager to share his story. At that point, perhaps being the center of so much attention was worth the risk of being found. Besides, if his family showed up, Mr. X could always claim he didn’t know them. Surely Whitfield wouldn’t force him to leave with people he thought were strangers.

I put the question to Blum, the memory expert: Could Mr. X have been faking? “Sure,” she said. “Right up until the sodium amytal.” If he’d pretended not to recognize his relatives at first, Mr. X wouldn’t have been able to keep up the ruse when the drug altered his mental state and relaxed his inhibitions. After the sedation wore off, the jig would’ve been up. He’d have been Will Lawrence again, facing the brother and sister who’d finally come for him. He couldn’t have pretended to be a bewildered old man.

Whether he was faking or not, losing his place in the Whitfield community—going from permanent fixture to occasional guest—was surely a blow. Perhaps he wished to weave his two identities together, to be both Mr. X and Will Lawrence, but couldn’t find a way.

On my visit to Whitfield, I stood in the greenhouse and imagined him there, with his cuttings and flower pots. The space was overgrown and in disrepair. In fact, most of the buildings on the hospital’s campus had been decommissioned. Whitfield served only a few hundred patients now.

Will Lawrence couldn’t go back, and neither could I. The place he loved wasn’t there anymore.

As America staggered under the weight of economic catastrophe, he felt safe and loved. He might have felt he was better off as Mr. X.

In the end, Ligon was forced to leave Whitfield behind, too. Over the superintendent’s protests, in 1940, the new governor of Mississippi replaced a number of hospital personnel with appointees. Ligon moved in with the family of her sister Kitty, my great-grandmother, in a small town. She worked for the Federal Writers’ Project for a time, reporting on agricultural fairs and the local Choctaw community. Eventually, she wound up in Mobile, Alabama.

She died there in January 1949, of kidney failure. Her death certificate contains so many errors that it’s clear no one in Mobile knew her well. Her remains were transported home by train—just like Will Lawrence’s were a few months later.

After his 71st birthday party, the threads of Will’s life become hard to follow. At the time of the 1940 census, he was living with his brother Oscar. His employment status was “unable to work.” In February 1947, he was listed in his brother Walter’s obituary as a surviving sibling. But in September 1948, when his brother Sam died, Will wasn’t listed. Fannie later said that the family lost track of him. When they found him again, it was only thanks to his fingerprints.

It’s impossible to know what brought Will to Baton Rouge—the promise of work? a friend’s invitation? aimless itinerancy?—but that’s where he was in May 1949, when he was struck by a freight train. It happened on the railroad tracks that hug the eastern bank of the Mississippi River in the city’s downtown. The train was reportedly moving slowly, as trains do when passing through population centers. Will was decapitated.

Police were unable to identify him at first. No documents were found on his body. “I don’t want to die nameless and alone”—that was what Mr. X had said on the radio in 1939. It might have happened if police hadn’t taken time to check his fingerprints, found a match on file from his time at Whitfield, and notified his family in Alabama.

More than 70 years later, I stood on the tracks in Baton Rouge on a bright May day, trying to picture the scene as Will would have seen it. The casino just up the riverbank wouldn’t have been there, but the state capitol would; completed in 1931, the gleaming limestone tower is located close to the tracks. If Will had joined the ranks of unemployed men traveling by freight train, this would have been an odd place to jump out of a car or try to board one. The proximity to the capitol meant that police were likely in the area, and homeless men were easy targets for harassment.

Other questions fleeted through my mind: Why didn’t Will get out of the way? Surely he sensed the train coming—the thunderous sound, the ground trembling beneath his feet. Even at a crawl, a locomotive is a mighty force. But also: How does a slow-moving train decapitate someone, unless they’re already lying on the ground? Maybe Will fell on the tracks, hit his head, couldn’t get up. A tragic accident.

Unless.

Unless the train did exactly what he wanted it to.

Why didn’t Will get out of the way? Surely he sensed the train coming—the thunderous sound, the ground trembling beneath his feet.

Death is where the parallels in Will’s and Ligon’s stories—what inspired me to write about them in the first place—diverge most sharply. Not because of how they died, but because of how they were remembered.

Ligon’s family came from all over Mississippi for her funeral. The pallbearers were direct relations: nephews and cousins. She was buried in Roseland Park Cemetery, in Hattiesburg, next to her sister and her father. Today their headstones sit under a sprawling oak tree: polished stone carved with capital letters in the same crisp serifed font. Stories of Ligon’s life became her legacy, kept her vibrant.

Will was laid to rest in a place called Plantersville, located in the rolling landscape between Birmingham and Selma, where farmland is fringed with longleaf pine, cedar, and hickory trees. Plantersville is scarcely a town; a mini-mart, a high school, and a couple of churches are the only evidence you’ve arrived. The cemetery sits next to a field of grazing cows.

I almost missed Will’s headstone. It was made of concrete and looked like a piece of broken curbstone or a cast-off block. The surface had deteriorated over the years, blurring the letters “W H Lawrence.” The death date was an estimate, but likely accurate—authorities were sure of the day Will’s body was found, and that he hadn’t been dead long. More unsettling was the birth date. I knew when Will was born from various historical documents, including the press write-up about his birthday celebration at Whitfield. But the stone said May 27, 1873. Whoever commissioned it was off by five years and three days.

Nearby cows raised their heads at my presence, then lowered them again. It was a beautiful day, and quiet. I stood in the stillness, irrationally angry at the error before me, chiseled into stone. Didn’t anyone love him enough to remember the basic facts of his life?

Perhaps Will’s full story isn’t mine—or anyone’s—to know. Not now, ninety years after he first appeared on a street in Jackson. Maybe it was never knowable, because he didn’t want it to be. Like a mathematical function that tends toward a limit, it’s possible to approach the truth, but never to touch it.

Still.

Awareness of what we can’t see is a kind of knowledge—a sense of the space between what we comprehend and never will, between the facts of history and the fiction of it, between verity and meaning. And when we are gone, who are we except the knowledge of us that other people hold? We are seeds of memory, to be scattered and nourished, lest we be lost forever.

My grandmother entrusted me with her memories of her aunt, and for years they lay neglected in a spiral notebook. When I finally tended them, I revived not only my grandmother and Ligon, but also a stranger buried in Plantersville, Alabama. With time and attention, he unfurled, becoming familiar. So, too, did his shadows.

I knelt in the patchy grass of the cemetery and laid my palm on the rough face of the headstone. I paid my respects. Then I left Mr. X to his rest in the Alabama sunshine, carrying his memory with me.

*The language in this paragraph has been updated to more accurately reflect Blum’s assessment of the case.

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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

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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

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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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