CULTS: The Cult That Mummified Its God: Love Has Won Pt. 2

Hi everyone, it's Vanessa Richardson. Real quick before today's episode, I want to tell you about a show I host with forensics psychologist Dr. Tristan Engels. It's called "Serial Killers and Murderous Minds". Every Monday and Thursday, we take you deep into the psychology of the most chilling murderers and uncover what drives them to kill. The most serial killers and murderous minds available were ever you listen to podcasts. Amy Carlson came to Colorado looking for enlightenment and instead created a dark hole of conspiracy theories and fear-mongering instead. Still, her followers worshipped her as a god, even through all of the bigotry, the chaos, the abuse. And they were willing to do anything she asked, because she was mother god after all, even drink colloidal silver, or move to Hawaii, or make her meatballs. Not even Dr. Phil could put an end to the chaos that was the love as one cold, and instead, it ended with a corpse being driven across state lines. Welcome to Crimes of Colts. I'm Sabrina Deanna Roga. I'm Karin Vienne. And this season, we're exploring the intersections of faith and manipulation of hope and fear. It is about the world's most dangerous cult and the charismatic leaders who promised salvation and destroyed their followers' lives in the process. Subscribe now and step inside the world of Crimes of. If you're loving Crimes of, please follow rate and review us wherever you listen. It helps us build this community and we love hearing from you. To get early access and ad-free listening, subscribe to the Crimes House Plus community on Apple Podcasts. And you can also catch us on YouTube where we include visuals that bring every case to life. Part two on the case of Amy Carlson and the love has one cold starts now. Okay, so last episode, we talked about Amy Carlson's troubled upbringing and the circumstances that led her to create the love has one cold and crest-tone Colorado. So we highly recommend if you're just now tuning in, go back to the last episode and listen there if you haven't yet. Yes. Okay, quick recap. Amy spent much of her adolescence repressing some really tragic and bad memories and saw love in all the wrong places as a young adult. By 2007, she had three children with three different men and was really struggling. So one night, she got up from the dinner table and left, like literally left everything behind, leaving her children behind and never looked back. She abandoned her young children for a life in crest-tone Colorado. And at first, Amy was all about peace and love and living your best life, but soon her alcohol and drug abuse and unresolved traumas grabbed hold of her and she turned into something unrecognizable. Her followers stayed by her side through it all, including four different father gods to Amy's mother god. And where we last left off last week, the fifth father god, Jason Castillo, had just come into the picture and he was about to take the cult into a very dark new direction. Just looking at his record, he, yeah, he's trouble. So he had charges for drunk driving, breaking and entering neglect of a child. And then when he showed up in the commune in 2018, after getting pulled in by Amy's online presence as everyone seemed to be, he brought all of that baggage and rap shoe with him. Yeah. Almost immediately he acted like the place was his, it was his house, his rules. And not before long, he stepped right into the role that Amy had set up for him, which was father god. So he took that title gladly and he ran with it. Yeah, very different than the previous ones who were like father god, but willing to kind of be second to Amy's mother god. He was like, no, it was almost like they were just like another cult participant, but they got to have sex with Amy, right. But this guy is like, I'm going to take the power and abuse it. Yeah. And that is exactly what he did. He barked orders. He drank constantly. He had a very serious temper. And remember Amy, like you were mentioning in the last part that Amy was not the kind of drunk either. And at one point, he physically forced a new recruit out of the house. The next day that man was found wandering alone in the wilderness, naked, dehydrated with cactus needles stuck in his feet, horrible. But still Amy, she's seeing all this and she's like, oh, it's fine. She adored Jason because probably she was contributing to the chaos and anger too when she was drinking. Yeah. Probably. Until the galactics didn't. And in case you forgot, the galactics were essentially this like spirit guide army, the Amy had, which included mostly dead celebrities like Robin Williams and John Lennon. So according to Amy, at some point, the galactics came to her and were like, hey, Jason's energy. I'm just picturing Robin Williams's voice, saying it. It's too intense. Yeah. He's got a little slime buddy with it. Oh. And the galactics told her that because his energy is too intense that she needs to flee the property along with snake river in Oregon with hope and John, so two of the followers, which she did, but that separation did not pass on. Just three weeks later, Jason showed up at Amy's front door in Oregon claiming that he traveled 500 miles with only 11 cents in his pocket just to find her. Their love, their connection, that is like such a triggering abusive relationship. Amy took that as some sort of divine sign and actually welcomed him back in. But the other 20 or so cult members that were left behind in Colorado because she left and now Jason's tracking her down, Amy didn't really seem too worried about them or seem to care about them. Honestly, kind of a pattern. She just demands people. But it's so interesting. This is one of those moments in the story where I'm like, it doesn't seem like Amy's intending to start a cult. Like she kind of just like does whatever and she's floating people are following her. Right. She does other things that do really. She's like inviting people in and then saying, yeah, if you want to be here, then you have to, I have to take all your money and have to believe in yourself, mother God. Yeah. I feel like that's, it's very complicated and nuanced. But yeah, you're right. Like it doesn't seem like she's coaxing anyone or begging anyone to stay or like actively doing that much to recruit. It's more about just her having a platform to be celebrated as mother God. But then she was recruiting people to come live there. Like one day she wants to be a cult leader and the next she's like, I just want to go live along the Oregon River. It's very confusing, regardless. When Jason and Amy reunited, it kicked off the sort of like honeymoon phase in them again. And in some ways, it kind of looked like the original Commune back in 2007 that she had created with a marathon, the first father God, their little Commune of two. And so they spent their days making music and catching catfish in the lake and just blazing away, very peaceful, very lovely. And then in July of 2018, 42 year old Amy told one of her followers to burn sage in the house to cleanse it of any negative energy. And instead of cleansing the house with like sage or something, the house burns to the ground in a blazing fire. They tried to cleanse it with sage, but they burned it to the ground, yeah. Which I'm like, how? They were probably on drugs. And in this moment, this is like a great example of how much people were expected to just like dote on Amy and do everything for Amy and abandoned everything for themselves. So the fire is blazing and hope is told to leave all of her belongings behind, but to go grab the bottle of vodka for Amy from the firey house. A bottle of alcohol, which is highly flammable right in a fire. It's her priority. It's so wild. So the fire forced the Oregon group, this like smaller offshoot to head back to the main group in Crestown. And once they got there, a new routine started to take shape. Amy and Jason would sit on the only bed in the house while everyone else sat in a circle on the floor, writing down every single one of Amy's moves in notebooks, like 24/7. It became a full time job. People were hardly sleeping, actually, in fact, sleeping was banned. Members were getting less than four hours of sleep a night. And the notes they took about Amy, like they read like a love struck middle school diary. There were like hearts over the eyes and everything. One entry said that Amy sneezed at 8.25 AM. Another says, took two mushrooms and trips, but the love has won members to them. These were like sacred texts. They were chronicling mother gods day-to-day moments. They referred to these notes as the Bible and they believe they were documenting the true story of Jesus. And most of the Jesus just sits around drinking and going on, like, acid trips all day. And sneezes, because she's human, but no, Jesus sneezes too. A lot of this was also about what Amy ate. One page was titled Five Protocols for Cooking for God, and it laid out the rules. Pray to Amy before, during, and after cooking. Play her favorite music as loud as possible in front of the food. And then this one's important. Have her weed two hours before the meal. And of course, food, as we know in Amy's life, was a very sensitive topic, and it also was a very sensitive subject around the entire cult. Amy told members that the less you ate, the higher your vibration got, and the closer you could be to God, which is also a very similar thing, like, in nexium and a lot of other cults, where, like, leaders monitor what you're eating, when you're eating. How much you can eat? Yeah. 4.32. Control. You can go to the bathroom. as members are basically being starved. They were giving tiny portions of oatmeal and not much more. There's one example that's just really, it's so sad. So there's this woman named Sarah who joined the group after surviving a 10 day coma and racked up half a million dollars in medical bills and probably sought out Amy to help heal her. On her first day in the commune, she asked if she could order pizza. And everyone just stops and says that her and it's like, "What blasphemy did you just say, Sarah?" Then Michael, who was still controlling the money, went off on her saying how sinful it would be to spend money on food for yourself. All the money, he said, was to go straight to mother God. So from the outside looking in, I think it's very clear we can point this all back to the food issues that Amy had from growing up and all her unresolved traumas. And now as an adult, she was taking it to such an extreme. She was five foot four into tall. She weighed just 100 pounds and her BMI was only 17. She was extremely unhealthy. I can't even imagine. But she was proud of it. She had been 100 pounds since I was on fourth grade. No, it's awful. And she happily announced that Robin Williams, the leader of her galactic team, which are her spirit guides, had given her the name Princess Annarexia. Oh. So she's aware that this is a, it's a problem. And she's trying to make it be something celebrated. Yeah. It's horrible. Which also her mom kind of celebrated that too was like, is a 14 year old girl putting her on these like diets. Yeah. But we all know what happens when you don't eat and that is that your attitude can be a little cranky because you are struggling and your body needs food starving. Yeah. Yes. And Amy was very cranky because she wasn't eating enough and she was also a full blown alcoholic at this point, which means her mood was even worse. She was known to be very angry on alcohol. She was taking a ton of drugs and she went from being this sort of like rude and offensive person to just straight up abusive at this point. So a lot of that was caught actually on live streams that she did. And a lot of them are included in the documentary on HBO and it's shocking to watch. And one of these live streams, members are huddled around a couch, taking turns, confessing 10 sins that they've committed against Amy, like basically like a church confessional in like a really weird twisted way. So weird. The one that really sticks with me is when Amy asked for chicken Parmesan, but a member brought her meatballs instead and Amy lost her goddamn mind, like screaming at him, calling him a fucking whore, all because he cooked meatballs instead of chicken Parmesan. And this is caught like you can hear it on one of these live streams of there's just something about that one that really sticks with me like she wanted chicken Parmesan so badly. Yeah. It just feels so outrageous. At first, I'm like, are her hormones, but I'm like, nobody's hormones can be that intense where she's like screaming bloody murder on a live stream. She's an alcoholic and starving herself. And also is very can be have some weird behaviors and like control around food. And if she's controlling her food and that what she set up for herself is chicken Parmesan, and then she's given something else and expected to eat that probably triggers a lot in her tail. Again, goes back to mental health issues. Yeah. One member got labeled a quote decor just for not bringing her tequila quickly enough. Another regular thing in the group was criticism sessions and this is where basically all the members was like roast or like bullying really because they would just choose one person. All the members would pile on like everything like bringing up every single mistake that this person had ever made basically berating this person until they break down into tears horrible. So messed up, but this is actually a pretty well known cult tactic that we've seen in some of the episodes so far basically like to overwhelm someone with criticism until their confidence is shattered and their entire sense of reality starts to fall apart and that they can only find happiness and small moments given to them within the cult, I guess. Yeah. So this is usually called the hot seat technique, but Amy preferred a more graphic name. She called it find the whore. It's just so wild because it's like she doesn't seem likeable at all. She started so charismatic. Yeah. Everyone's falling in love with her. And then it's when she drinks and then but it's abuse right with an abusive relationship where they abuse you and then the next day they like act like none of that ever happened. They make you feel like a million bucks and like you're super special. So soon Amy's abuse progressed beyond her own members too. So it's spread to pets and kids who lives at the commune and in one video Amy was caught calling a pet cat a bitch and holding it at the throat while it was crying in pain, just so awful. It's so awful. And the cult was very quick to defend her too when people were upset about this because it's online. Like, you can see it. They were exposing so many cults are so secretive about everything. She's live streaming everything. She's like publishing everything on the internet. It's so wild. But they told the online followers that as God, it was Amy's job to punish, quote, "resistant animals". There was also an alleged incident where she locked a member's child in a dark closet and screamed at them to surrender to her. That's messed up. That's messed up. And at that point, it doesn't really feel like any of this is about her being God at all. It's very much just Amy shitting on everyone around her. Yeah. That's kind of how things went for years. In love has won. The group kept itself afloat with non-stop live streams selling whatever they could and everyone was surviving on almost no sleep, barely any food all while Amy ruled with an abusive iron fist with her abusive father God by her side doing the same. And while the members didn't seem to push back, things did start to take a toll on Amy and slowly the whole thing caught up to her. So there's only so much a body can handle, especially when you're mixing heavy drinking, drugs, starvation, sleep deprivation, and throwing in toxic amounts of silver on top of it. Because keep in mind, they're still drinking colloidal silver. And she's drinking so much of it that she developed a rare condition called aragira, which is where silver builds up in your body and turns your skin, your eyes, your nails, and even your internal organs, a weird blue gray color. That's also one of the most horrifying images of this entire story that if you've seen the documentary, if you've seen images, she's discolored. Yeah. Like, beyond, because when I first thought of it, when I first heard of this, I was like, oh, it's like a corpse or something, but like, no, before she was a corpse. She was. Well, like, I thought she would look like a corpse. It looks off alien like family blood runs deep. It binds, but getting along is an easy when jealousy and hunger for power take over. Killer kin from ID explores real cases about family members who turn against one another. Unleashing betrayal and violence from the inside, here investigators, experts and family members try to understand what actually happened and how kinship can unravel into terror. Does evil run in the family? Listen to killer kin wherever you get your podcasts. So all that combined sent her body into a total tailspin. She was vomiting constantly. Her skin was breaking out in boils and her weight dropped to just to below 90 pounds. So it kept snowballing, but where she felt the more she leaned on alcohol and drugs to cope, which obviously only made everything worse. So she came up with an explanation for all this. She claimed that her body was processing the pain of all eight billion people on earth, meaning that she was taking on all of the suffering. And that is why her body was shutting down. Oh, and not that she's choosing poisons to ingest every single day. Right. Amy was dying. And at a certain point, she did have to start to back pedal. She'd have panic attacks. She even started screaming that she wasn't God and that she'd made the whole thing up. And I guess at one point, she called her mom crying and begging her to come pick her up from Colorado. But Linda was so scared of what her daughter had become that she didn't. Yeah. I also am curious Linda's connection to her grandchildren. Was that decision made because she was like, I don't think it's safer for the kids? Yeah. It gets to a point where Amy is health is so bad that she did something that shocked the cold. And remember for a year, she had been like basically talking about how like all these alternative medicines were the cure. She all of a sudden is like, I want to go to the hospital. She clearly knows she's dying. Yeah. And she's scared. And her panic about it. But everyone in the cult refused. They said her mind was being hijacked by the cabal and that the real mother God would never say something like that. So instead they gave her more colloidal silver and more vodka. This is like so you dug your own grave sort of thing. Yeah. They had genuinely reached a point where they believed so deeply in the message that they kept doing the things that she had been preaching for years even though it was medically killing her. Well, and she's so frail and weak at this point that she, like there's no, she's dependent on their choices about her. Yeah. So Amy's condition kept getting worse. She couldn't walk on her own anymore. Eventually she disappeared from the group's social media completely. And people noticed right away that she was missing from social media. But as usual, the group had an explanation ready. They told the online followers that Amy couldn't appear on camera because her presence was so powerful that it would literally make the viewers bodies explode. Which is wild because for years she had been in the video. So it's like, oh, all of a sudden she's even more powerful that even just witnessing her would make you explode. Yeah. Yeah. It's for your own good. Why aren't they exploding? - They see her. - Anyway. - 'Cause they were the chosen ones. - Not everyone bought it as you could imagine. - Yeah. - Hope's mom, who had been watching these live streams every day started posting on Reddit. She was convinced the group was going to all end up dead. Like this was, she was seeing, - I mean, the signs are all there. - Yeah, the signs. She, her mom contacted the FBI, who sent out search helicopters, and another ex members family called Colorado Police, almost weekly asking for wellness checks, which went nowhere every time to feel so helpless, like trying to grab your rating. Anything to like save your loved one. - Yeah. - And close our very scary too. Like you can't just show up at the door and say, - Hey, I'm gonna pop you up. - Yeah, so when the police would go, 'cause it's not like they just didn't do anything. They actually did go and do the wellness checks, but they would knock on the door, and whoever answered the door would politely just say, oh, Amy's not home and the officers would just be sent on the right. - Right, because they're doing wellness checks. If everyone there says they're fine and everyone's doing well, there's nothing they can really do. - No, there's not. All the police attention finally caught Jason's eye, and he knew that they could not stay in this area for much longer, they needed to leave Crestown. So he ran it up the group, literally carried Amy onto a flight, and they headed to Hawaii. It's August, 2020, right around the time that they touched down in the island of Kauai. This is when Linda, her mom, starts thinking, okay, I don't feel right about what's going on with the Amy. Maybe I should do something about this. Maybe I should act on this, but like, now they're in Hawaii. It's even harder to reach her. - Right, and I think she knows that she couldn't do anything by herself, like even if Linda had shown up to Crestown to try to help Amy, like everyone involved and Amy herself were too far gone, but like what could she do by herself? - Right. - So she calls upon Dr. Phil, and that is how Amy and the love has won cold and Linda and Amy's like family end up on Dr. Phil. - Honestly, it's kind of a genius move because Amy's so obsessed with celebrities. - I know. - But like getting to be a celebrity on a celebrity show with this celebrity doctor. - And it worked because for months, Amy hadn't been on the live streams, right? But when she's asked to be on Dr. Phil, she does agree. She agrees to go on it again virtually because she's in Hawaii. But when the episode comes out in September of 2020, that version of Amy, who had called her mother for help, had been asking to go to the hospital, had been like crying, is nowhere to be found. She is reverting back to the Amy, who's buying into everything that they're doing. She shows up wearing a giant JoJo Siwa style bow and spent the hour on Dr. Phil, basically saying that she remembered being crucified as Jesus and that as Amy, in this current life, she had performed over 100,000 successful brain surgeries virtually. - Can you imagine just like being in the audience and hearing this? - It makes her great TV. I mean, if you watch the episode, it's wild. - And it's also so heartbreaking from like Linda and Amy's family's perspective. Like they really thought that this would help. - Yeah. - And it's just so clear how far gone Amy is. And Amy wasn't the only member from the cult who appeared on the episode. It also featured four members who said, Amy subjected them to unpaid labor, emotional manipulation, via sleep deprivation. So there's like this massive juxtaposition where like, Amy is saying, I'm helping everyone. Four members are saying like, no, no, like this was very violent and toxic. One man that you're hearing a so called God, talk about her loving, peaceful religion, then the next you're hearing about how she was actually an abusive monster. And what was supposed to be a chance for Amy to get real medical help, and maybe a chance for the other members to break free, ended up just putting a spotlight on how bad things really were with no sign of it actually ending. While she was on Dr. Phil, she and the love has one group were living in Hyena, a really beautiful, tight knit community that's deeply rooted in native Hawaiian culture. So when the locals saw that they were living there, once they were airing on national TV, they were not too keen on it. And things got worse when after the episode aired, Amy announced both online and to people in the community that she was, Pele, the goddess of fire, a deity in indigenous Hawaiian religious groups. - That it's like so offensive. - It's so offensive. - A lot of things that she said is offensive. But yeah, for some context, Pele is considered the creator of the Hawaiian Islands. You're supposed to ask permission to travel through Pele's lands. So when she is claiming that she's Pele, - It's so disrespectful. - It's so disrespectful to the local community and locals start protesting outside of the groups of rental home every single day. At one point, someone smashed the window in Jason's car and other people are yelling at Amy to go back to home, back to the kids that she's abandoned. - Wait, speaking of, this is the part that really blows my mind. On Dr. Phil, she said, like Dr. Phil asks her about like, if you're all about your family and being mother God and creating peace for everyone, like how could you leave your children? How could you abandon your children? And she was like, it was the hardest thing I had to do. But as God, like I couldn't pick those children over all my other children of the world. It's so upsetting. - I feel like I'm more mad at her than a lot of other cold leaders, even though some of the other ones are killers. - They're all bad. - They're all bad. So, there's cold activity. The group is also ignoring COVID protocols at this time. And so the situation's pretty quickly escalating. The mayor actually steps in and convinces them to leave the island and head back to Colorado. And just like that, Amy, still in the middle of her painful physical demise, was left without a real place to go and no clear future. And even after the fallout in Hawaii and all of the backlash from the Dr. Phil show, which there was a lot, Amy didn't really change anything about how she was moving forward with life and how she treated her followers or her own body. - Yeah. - She stuck with the same dangerous mix of alcohol, starvation, colloidal silver. And by this point, her skin had turned such a deep shade of silver. It almost looked like she was shimmering. - She looked blue. - It is wild. And we'll have pictures in the YouTube video too. But like, it looks otherworldly. - If you saw the picture without context of like how she got to be that color. - Which people probably in the commune or in the cult probably made them believe that she was God even more. - Right, she was turning into something I don't know, they told it. (dramatic music) - One summer evening when she was 20 years old, something terrible happened to Vienna Luke. - I can't figure it out, but I do know that it was a violation. - Then people started asking questions. What a creep, who else knows about this? - From CBCs personally, this is Agent Leila. The story of how a victim went undercover. So bring it on, let's go, let's get a confession. - Available now on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. - So based on Amy's actions, it feels like she knew things were pretty bleak because on New Year's Eve 2020, she called her sister Tara and outright said that she was dying. About a month later, she even messaged her daughter Maddie, desperately asking her to reach out and telling her that she loved her. And then at the same time, she offered Maddie a place at the commune, which is like, clearly she's not thinking rationally. Meanwhile, Jason could also see the writing on the wall. And earlier, remember the police had been like showing up at the commune in Crestone. And so he felt like he couldn't stay in Crestone anymore. They had left Hawaii, went back to Crestone, but he was like, this doesn't feel like the safe place for us. So he again insists on moving Amy. This time, he rolled a bean bag into the back of his van, carried Amy out to it and drove to Ashland, Oregon. Once they got to their hotel, Amy started begging once again to be taken to the hospital. Jason refused and instead fed her a mix of Gabapentin, which is Xanax weed and more colloidal silver. Amy spent the next few days slumped over in the shower, saying the warm water helped with the pain. And in the love as one documentary, there's like video from these days in the hotel room because the members are documenting her life. It's really, really hard to walk. It looks like she's in severe pain. She's dying. Even the warm water stopped working and eventually with everything that Jason was giving her, she ended up paralyzed. And this is where we see Amy for who she really was. She was not mother god. She was a human and a human body can only take so much. By this point, she weighed only 75 pounds and had consumed a fatal dose of colloidal silver several times over. It was in this Oregon hotel room that the true mortality of so-called mother god became very clear. Around April 16th, 2021, 14 years after starting the love as one cult, Amy took her last breath. She was just 45 years old. - And this is something that you don't see very often with cults, which is what we were saying at the beginning in part one of this. - Yeah. - Because usually the deaths are the followers, like the followers end up in the body bags. - Sometimes with the leader, but right. - Yeah. - But this is just the leader who has died. So definitely more of a rare thing for a leader to actually become the victim of their own teachings and be the only victim of their own teachings in the sense of losing. a life over it. But it really shows just how strong Amy's influence was. Like there was nothing she could say to make her followers unbelievable. Unbelievable. She worked so hard to make them believe. So she had followers so locked in that even when she desperately needed help, they believed the hospitals were evil that she was God, that it didn't matter and that they wouldn't go get her the help that she needed. Yeah. In fact, they were so deep in it that even when Amy died, they still didn't believe that she was actually dead. Ah, Jason Hope and Aurora excitedly reported back to the group in Crestone that Amy's heart was beating. Her lungs were filling and her hand was gripping. They genuinely believed that she was still alive. And they acted like it. Like they were pouring water and silver down her throat. And even though it was like puddling and just going out the side of her mouth, they were like, Oh, yes, she's eating. She's drinking horrible. The hotel staff had been hearing whispers of like strange things happening in one of the rooms. So at one point, they knock on the door and ask, Hey, what's going on in here? And this spooks the group enough to be like, Okay, it's time to move Amy again. And that night in the cover of the dark, Jason Hope and Aurora snuck Amy's body into his van out the back of the hotel. So they were like sneaking through. I'm so curious if there's footage from the hotel. There has to be right? Probably. Yeah. So they're like sneaking her out of the room, a corpse, a corpse. They position her in the backseat like she was sleeping because they still think that she's alive. And then they start driving. And this part is wild. They get hold over while driving for a routine traffic stop. And as you can imagine, the people in the car were freaking out. They had wrapped Amy up in her hat and sunglasses. And the cop like comes up and is shining the flashlight into the backseat of the car. As you can imagine, I'm sure they're all like, Oh my God. Like, is he going to see, although they're convinced in this like weird mental trance that she's still alive? I don't know. But the cop lets them go. He believes that Amy is sleeping in the backseat. That is wild. That is wild. Like literally you came across a dead body. This group set up camp in the Oregon forest and they called the rest of the group to join them. And they treated Amy's body like it was still very much alive. She was just with them, just sleeping in the tent. And Jason kept reminding everyone that the galactics were on their way with a spaceship that was going to come any day now and pick Amy up and complete her ascension. And when that didn't happen, Jason moved to plan B and that one had a lot less to do with space travel and a lot more to do with tampering with the corpse. So he sent most of the cult away from the campsite to go do laundry, but he kept John behind. And he told him that Amy's spirit needed to make its way back to Crestown, a place where they first started the cult. And that is where everything would happen for her. They're in Oregon. You have to go to Colorado. You have to cross state lines. Yeah. That's a far drive and illegal. Everything about this is like, what is legal? Yeah. So Jason had been smart enough to move Amy out of Colorado before she died, knowing police were paying very close attention to them in Crestown and like what was going on there. So if she died there, I'm sure maybe we don't even know. But now he's convinced Amy needs to make her way back there. He's not really thinking about how much more attention this might grab. If police find out that she's dead, if answer turned to Colorado, and how she returned to Colorado, if she's dead. Anyway, he convinces John to help him wrap Amy's body and blankets and sleeping bags. And they tie everything together with battery powered Christmas lights. They switch the lights on. So she's like a glowing corpse now. Yeah. And this is basically like Jason's saying, like, oh, we're proof, like the lights prove that she's got. I don't know. I don't know. Again, we don't know what the thinking is. No, it's not rational. But it's like her body's decaying. She's going through the process of what happens after you die. And so she's she's smelly. It's been over a week, right? And like rigor mortis and the bloating and everything. They drive through Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado before they finally land back in the town, Creston. And once they got there, it became pretty clear that Jason was like in such a rush that it wasn't really about Amy's spirit at all, that it was about money. So Jason had heard that Michael who had been running things in Creston and handling the finances for years by this point had actually been moving massive chunks of money from the group's bank accounts to his personal one. And obviously that pissed Jason off. So Jason wanted to get back and like confront him about it because Michael had stolen more than a quarter of a million dollars, which is a lot. But Michael didn't show up at the Creston House until a couple days after Jason and John got back with Amy's body. As you can imagine, he walked in on April 28th, 2021 and found Amy's body truly half decayed, half mummified, propped up in her old bed like a possessed doll. He was a very taken aback. Amy was still cocooned in layers of sleeping bags covered in glowing Christmas lights. They had put glittery makeup on her face, built a shrine around her. And they were even like using EMF readers to like show that energy was coming off of her. But it was probably like the Christmas lights plugged in. Right. Yeah. Her lips were decayed. Her teeth were being exposed. Her gums were exposed. It was like very it was nightmarish. Michael was the only one for all of his faults. He was the only one who was like, I need to get out of here and call the cops. This is very, very wrong. He called the police. And when officers arrived, they quickly found Amy's body and arrested everyone inside, including Jason, John and five other members of the love has one cult who had all made their way back to Crestone with Amy. They were charged with abuse of a corpse and tampering with a human body. And disturbingly, one of those members had two young children living in the same house right alongside Amy's body. So on top of everything else, when honestly, I feel like it's, I mean, it's horrible, but good for the charges of this case. Like because of that, they were also hit with two counts of child abuse. I mean, it was absolutely horrific. And the condition of Amy's body was so bizarre that people started to wonder if she had actually been murdered. But there's an autopsy. And the autopsy told a different story. Amy died from long term alcohol abuse and organ failure. So not homicide. And while her death is tragic, any death is tragic. Amy's was very slow and very painful. Which is horrible. And also, it's like dead. It's often like the process of sad that she for so many moments of her, like pleading for help and to go be taken to the hospital. And then there's points where like she's not even doing the ingestion herself, forcing it to her. Yeah. So all of the charges against her and the seven members who were arrested were dropped, which left the group in a release change place. Because now they're without their leader. And no one quite knew what would happen next. And I think a lot of their families were really hoping that like Amy's death would finally be the breaking point for whatever hole she had on them. And that they would finally like realize what was going on or like have something to like bring them back to their family is and bring them back home. But that is not what happened. No. Amy's brainwashing of them was so strong that almost all of the people in the group or that were in the group when she died still are believers two days actively. They don't all live together anymore. But they're still out there pushing the same ideas that Amy had about ascension all of that. And Jason and John are living together in Wisconsin and calling themselves father God and father multiverse. Yes. They now operate under the name joy reigns. So if you see that don't run don't go towards it. Yeah. And hope and Aurora are neighbors in Florida where they film near constant live streams about astrology and ascending into the fifth dimension. Another member has built up a pretty big following on telegram where he shares this mix of like love has one content with QAnon conspiracy theories. Amy's hold was definitely it's clear in the way that so many of her followers are like choosing what content they share and how to live their lives now. It's ongoing. It is. So even years after her death her message the same idea as the same manipulation. It's still reaching people today and they're still using social media to reach a lot of people. Yeah. It's so complicated and like when we've hinted at this but it's like confusing because sometimes it seemed like she was trying to build a coal and other times it just seemed like she was like at the whims of whatever thought came into her mind and it's so tragic. It is. And it's like the culmination of everything because I think if you take a lot of like the interest and ideas and like leave them in like that one genre like they can be normal interests. Yeah. But all together it's yeah. And the fact that it still exists in some form today horrible. Yeah. That's the case of Amy Carlson and the love has one cult. Highly recommend watching the love has one documentary on HBO. It's mind blowing. Yeah. It's hard to watch too because when she gets better sick it's just like hard to watch regardless of how you feel about like what she did or the people around her whatever it's hard to see someone sick because you see the actual footage. It's not like recreation. Yeah. Or people just talking about like you get to see actual video of it. Before we wrap up we want to share a few resources for some of the topics in today's episode. All the support we're about to share is free and confidential and available anywhere in the US and it's also in the show notes. Remember that you are not alone and there is always a way out. So if you or someone you know is struggling with Disordered Eating. The Now. National Alliance for Mental Illness has a help line for eating disorder support, which is available between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. Monday through Friday, called 800-950-6264 or text, N-A-M-I-262640. There are also resources available for people trying to leave high control groups or cults. If you or someone you know is a part of a group that controls your food and sleep or shows other warning signs that we did talk about today, you can visit CultRecovery101.com for more information and resources. Thank you so much for listening. We are your host, Sabrina DeAnna-Roga, and Karin Vienn. Join us next Tuesday for another peek inside another crimes of cults case. And if there are any cases that you would like us to cover, please let us know in the comments. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. And if you like what you heard today, please reach out on all social media at Crime House. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow CrimeZab wherever you get your podcasts, because your feedback truly makes a difference. Bye! Our Silent Cavals. Yes. The Court is adjourned. One of everything you learned in history class was only half the story. I'm Dr. Harini Bot, I start as a clinical pharmacist, and somewhere along the way, I became obsessed with the mysteries the history never fully solved. That's exactly why I created Hidden History, a rewind students' original podcast powered by paved studios. Every Monday, I go where history touches the unknown. Various civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. I'll give you historical context. I'll break down the science. I'll even interrogate the supernatural. I treat these moments like open case files, not miss, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look. And I'll ask the question, what if this happened today? Listen to and follow Hidden History available now wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening to this episode from Crime House. If you're looking for another show to check out, listen to serial killers and murderous minds. Every Monday and Thursday, Dr. Tristan Engels and myself dig into the most chilling murders and uncover what drives them to kill. Follow serial killers and murderous minds, available wherever you listen to podcasts.