Nearly every detail concerning the religious group Lisa Webb’s family belonged to was hidden from the skin world. Its followers met in homes relatively than churches. Its leadership structure was hard to discern, its funds opaque. It didn’t even have an official name.
But for a long time, no secret was as closely guarded because the identities of the sexual predators contained in the group often known as the “Two by Twos.”
Now a growing variety of public allegations from world wide have prompted a broad investigation by the FBI and placed an uncomfortable highlight on the long-quiet Christian sect. Survivors say the group’s leaders protected child-abusing ministers by pressuring victims to forgive, ignoring legal reporting requirements and by transferring abusers to latest locations to live with unsuspecting families.
Ministry leaders have publicly condemned the abuse but several declined to reply questions from The Associated Press.
For Webb, who was sexually abused by one among the group’s ministers as a toddler, the eye has brought an unexpected sense of “strength in numbers.”
“There are so many who’re frustrated and disheartened,” said Webb. “But there’s also camaraderie in that, and support.”
An internet site, a hotline and social media pages established by victims have documented allegations against greater than 900 abusers, with survivors in greater than 30 countries and cases continuing to emerge. In the past 12 months, news stories and a Hulu documentary have focused on the sect’s predator preachers and the leaders who enabled them.
While perpetrators have been sentenced to prison in isolated cases, the sect has largely avoided legal repercussions, protected by its decentralized structure, hidden funds and state laws that limit the timeline for criminal charges.
The secret sect’s origin story
The sect, also known to its members as “The Way” or “The Truth,” was founded in Ireland in 1897 by William Irvine, who railed against the existence of churches. The only option to spread Christianity, he argued, was to do as Jesus instructed within the Book of Matthew: to send apostles out to live amongst those they sought to convert.
The sect grew as volunteer preachers — often known as employees — went “two by two” to live within the family homes of followers for days or even weeks at a time. Sect historians say there have been as much as a couple of million members just a couple of a long time ago, but current estimates put the figure at 75,000 to 85,000 worldwide.
Unlike the Boy Scouts or the Catholic Church, which have paid out billions to sex abuse victims, the sect’s aversion to property leaves it without apparent assets that may be used to pay settlements, legal experts say.
Workers are imagined to shun worldly possessions, counting on followers for food, shelter and transportation. But that also ensures abusive employees have access to potential victims.
Webb was abused by a preacher who stayed along with her family in Michigan when she was 11. The man, Peter Mousseau, was convicted much later — after he expressed an interest in visiting her in 2008 and she or he decided to pursue charges. A regional overseer to whom she previously reported the abuse was later convicted for failing to report abuse allegations against one other local employee.
“You have this mindset that they’re angels in your private home. They can do no fallacious, so that you don’t have any form of wall up,” she said. “It was just the proper storm created, the proper recipe for this sort of behavior.”
Abusers live amongst their victims
Sheri Autrey had just turned 14 when a 28-year-old employee moved into her family’s home in Visalia, California, for 2 months.
He began abusing her immediately, sneaking to her room at night and taking her for daytime drives. He turned up the radio each time the Hall & Oates song “Maneater” got here on, singing: “Watch out boy, she’ll chew you up.”
When Autrey revealed the abuse to her mother a couple of years later, her mom reported it to the sect’s regional overseer, who was in command of all the employees in the world.
The overseer refused to warn other families. Instead, he sent the employee back to Autrey’s home to apologize.
Autrey, raised to be meek, erupted. Her family took her to the district attorney’s office but declined to place her through a prosecution.
“I’d have to elucidate, explicitly, what happened,” Autrey said. “And I used to be under no circumstances prepared for that.”
Decades later, Autrey was at a baseball game when “Maneater” got here on. She needed to walk across the stadium to calm herself down, and she or he resolved to send a letter concerning the abuse to a whole lot of sect members.
“I wanted anyone else who was a victim to know she just isn’t the just one,” Autrey said. “She must know there’s help.”
Many more cases of abuse
One employee from Peru, Americo Quispe, was sent to Garland, Texas, within the early 2000s after facing allegations of inappropriate behavior in his home country. He soon found latest victims, a few of whose families went to police. He returned to Peru before he could possibly be arrested.
Quispe was later convicted of molestation in Peru and sentenced to 30 years. He has never faced the costs in Texas.
Another employee, Ruben Mata, abused dozens of boys, amongst them 10-year-old Douglas Patterson, who was lured away from his family during a sect convention within the early Nineties. Patterson said he kept quiet about it because he feared his family would go away the sect — and thus be barred from everlasting salvation — if he told.
Mata was eventually convicted in 2006 in a separate sex abuse case. He died in a California prison.
Members told to maintain abuse reports quiet
A number of months before Mata’s trial, the Saskatchewan, Canada, overseer, Dale Shultz, sent two letters to colleagues.
One was to be shown to any concerned members. It acknowledged Mata was a pedophile and that employees had been alerted to his abuse at the least thrice. The sect only notified authorities after Mata resigned, in accordance with the letter.
The second was for workers. It said no copies ought to be fabricated from the primary letter.
“The purpose of the letter is to assist those that have concerns, to not advertise a kingdom problem to those that either don’t find out about it or usually are not having an issue with it,” Shultz wrote.
In one other case, a regional overseer for Arizona, Ed Alexander, wrote a letter to a child-molesting elder in 2005 observing that “we love our people very much and don’t wish to report their misdeeds.”
The letter suggested the sect could fulfill its mandatory abuse-reporting obligations by recommending offenders get skilled counseling, because then the advisors — relatively than sect leaders — can be obligated to make the reports to police.
“They imagine that child sexual assault is only a sin. Like, you’re a sinner, they’re a sinner, it’s all just sin,” said Eileen Dickey, one among the person’s victims. She reported the abuse to sect leaders because she was anxious other children can be targeted.
“I used to be told never to speak about it,” she said.
Alexander wouldn’t speak with The Associated Press: “Unfortunately, the media coverage has been so negative and one-sided that I’m going to need to decline an interview,” he texted.
Former minister recounts culture of downplaying misdeeds
Jared Snyder spent greater than 20 years as an itinerant minister before becoming disillusioned and quitting. No one told him directly about abuse, Snyder said, but he occasionally heard rumors.
The sect’s culture — which makes gossip taboo and places tremendous pressure on members to be merciful — meant that misdeeds big or small were downplayed, he said.
“One overseer just explicitly told me, ‘The less you realize, the higher off you might be,’” he said.
As a employee, Snyder received no paychecks, retirement advantages or medical insurance advantages, and he was discouraged from using banks. But he was never without spending money: Followers frequently offer money to the employees, and Snyder said he steadily had hundreds of dollars in his pockets.
Most of that cash would get spent on constructing materials, food or other supplies at regional conventions, Snyder said.
The case that exposed the sect to more scrutiny
In June 2022, a regional overseer named Dean Bruer died in an Oregon motel room. Bruer, 67, had served in at the least 22 states and territories and 7 countries since 1976, in accordance with a timeline compiled by Pam Walton, a former member who has used historical records and pictures to trace the movements of predatory preachers.
Nine months after Bruer died, Doyle Smith, the overseer for Idaho and Oregon, wrote a letter to members. Evidence left on Bruer’s phone and laptop showed he had raped and abused multiple underage victims, Smith wrote.
“Dean was a sexual predator,” Smith wrote. “We never respect or defend such totally inappropriate behavior amongst us. There is a really united consensus amongst us that the one thing to do is to be transparent with all of you for obvious reasons, though this could be very difficult.”
That transparency didn’t extend to dealings with local police. It was only after Autrey, one other abuse survivor, and personal investigator Cynthia Liles — all former sect members — pressured Smith that he turned Bruer’s laptop over to detectives, Autrey told the AP.
By then, the pc had been tampered with, in accordance with records from the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon. The web browser search history was cleared. Bruer’s Apple ID had been modified and files transferred out of his DropBox account. Bruer’s phone was never provided to police, and the “Find My iPhone” feature had been disabled.
“What web browsing history was present on the laptop that somebody didn’t want anyone else knowing about?” Detective Jeffrey Burlew wrote in a police report. Unable to seek out any evidence of against the law inside its jurisdiction, the office closed the investigation.
Smith didn’t reply to phone messages from the AP.
Survivors and law enforcement dig deeper
Though Autrey and others had long sought reforms within the sect, Bruer’s death proved to be a catalyst. Autrey, Liles and one other survivor launched a hotline, website and Facebook pages for survivors.
In February, the FBI’s field office in Omaha, Nebraska, announced an investigation.
The outcry prompted some sect leaders to sentence the abuse and to ask consultants for advice on how you can higher protect members. But at the least some regional overseers have ultimately declined to adopt really helpful child abuse prevention policies — saying the one true code of conduct is the New Testament.
And some leaders still warn members against criticizing the sect.
At an August convention in Duncan, British Columbia, a employee helping to guide the event didn’t mention the abuse scandal directly but told members to put aside “evil speakings.”
“It’s simpler to be critical than to be correct,” preached Robert Doecke, a employee from Australia. “If you feed on problems, it is going to only make more problems. But when you give attention to the Lord, it is going to result in solutions.”
