Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Big Blow for Sheriff Mickey Stines in Judge's Shooting

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Shawn "Mickey" Stines is charged with murder in the shooting death of his one-time boss and friend, Judge Kevin Mullins. A surveillance camera in Mullins' chambers recorded the shooting in September 2024. Now the judge presiding over Stines' case has issued a number of orders on motions for change of venue, whether Stines should receive bail and the Commonwealth's request for a second mental health evaluation. Law&Crime's Angenette Levy goes through all of it in this episode of Crime Fix — a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.Host:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guests:Dave Aronberg https://www.youtube.com/@MKTrueCrimeCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Van DinhGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I definitely think that this family seems like some kind of single family cult. Mystery surrounds the Ciders family, a family of 16 children who prosecutors say were kept hidden from the outside world. But now one expert is making a disturbing claim. She believes the Ciders family may have been living in a cult. I'm Ann Jeanette Levy, and this is Crime Fix. For years, four adult members of the Ciders family lived together under one room. they lived as a family. Gary Seiders Sr. and his wife, Christina Siders, and their son, Gary Siders, Jr., and his wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Siders, as we've been telling you, married into the Siders

family at the tender age of 15. She likely became pregnant with her first child when she was 14. So she and Gary Jr. were dating when she was 14. She's married at 15. She has her first child a couple of months later, and as we now know, she gave birth to 17 more after that. It seems like Elizabeth was a breeding machine. Did she want this? Did she want so many children? Her lawyer told a media outlet that she was open to having a large family, but 18 children? Tommy Stolley also said in the same interview with 10 TV that Elizabeth told him that all children are a blessing from God. Wouldn't you like to know what else Elizabeth Cider said? Did she willingly get pregnant so many times?

Did she want to be pregnant every year since 2008? Was she being manipulated? Was she forced? Was Elizabeth brought into a cult? Daniela Mestinek Young believes so. She's an expert in cults and their dynamics and will join me shortly to discuss cults in this case. Elizabeth's lawyer has serious concerns about her mental health.

What has he observed and what has Elizabeth told him? Last week, Tommy Stolley asked Judge Rogers to order a competency evaluation for Elizabeth and in the alternative an evaluation to determine whether she is not guilty by reason of insanity, meaning does she have a mental condition that would make it so she didn't understand the difference between right and wrong when her children were being mistreated. Now Judge Rogers has ordered both evaluations to be conducted in the next 30 days. Once the evaluations are complete, a hearing will have to be scheduled. Similar examinations have been ordered for Gary Sr. And competency evaluations have been ordered for Christina and Gary Jr. There is something the defense attorneys have seen that has prompted them to request these evaluations. And let's say one or more members of the CITERS family are found to be incompetent to stand trial.

It doesn't mean their competency can't be restored with therapy and medication. Competence means a person can understand the proceedings and assist with his or her defense. If you love digging into the details of crime cases as much as I do, you have to download the Law and Crime Plus app. If you haven't checked it out yet, here are three reasons why you need to jump on board today. Number one, you get complete access. Watch the best shows from law and crime and court TV completely ad-free.

Number two, the case files. Get deep dive access to raw trial evidence, including body cam video, 911 calls, crime scene photos, and much more. And finally, number three, it's free for 30 days. We are giving all of our viewers a full month to test it out completely risk-free. Head over to law and crimeplus.com, enter promo code crime fix and start exploring today. Now back to the Ciders family dynamic. We know Elizabeth was married at 15. The Galea County Local School District was notified that Elizabeth was withdrawing from school to be homeschooled at that time. How was a 15-year-old new mom being homeschooled? I know that I'd like the answer to that question. Was Christina Siders,

her new mother-in-law, homeschooling her? If so, what was the curriculum? And was religion a part of that curriculum? Christina Sider's Facebook pages have religious imagery, crosses, and depictions of Jesus. This was a family that spent a lot of time together, a family that the prosecutor says hid children together. And we know from the superintendent of the Gallia Local School District that Gary Siders Jr. never attended the school district. There's no record of him there. And the six oldest Siders children were enrolled in online school in Galia County on August 26, 2020 for the 2020 school year. The next year, they were supposed to attend Atteville Elementary School, but they never showed up for school. Not once, not one day. And they were never seen in Galia County again.

There was no notice provided to any school district that the children were being homeschooled. Instead, the prosecutor said they were hidden, living in insular life, living in squalor. The question is why? Why was this family set on being alone by themselves, aside from the obvious that they may have been trying to escape children's services caseworkers? Was something more going on? Elizabeth's brother, Jeremy, posted on Facebook shortly after her arrest that she had been indoctrinated, He didn't say into what, but he claimed she had chosen the ciders family. Were the ciders functioning as a family who refused to live apart?

Did they have a belief system that tied them together? Or were they, as some experts have suggested, a type of cult? So to really dig into this issue of what makes a cult a cult as it relates to the ciders family, I want to bring in Daniela Mestanek Young, she is a survivor of a cult, and also has written a couple of books on the topic. Daniela, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. Daniela, first of all, tell me a little bit about how you would define a cult.

What makes a cult or makes a group of people labeled a cult? So the very simplest definition of cult, I would say, is a group, which has to be two or more people. and you can have a two-person cult, but it's a group that is using coercive and manipulative tactics in order to exploit you. Interesting. That seems very simple. It's interesting to me that it can be two or more people.

So you could have a cult that maybe is even three people. You can. You know, in my book on cult tactics, one of the things I talk about that so many people relate to is that you can have a one-one cult, something that's often called an abusive relationship, where there is the same amount of control, the same amount of engineering of sort of a fake world for you to live in and worldview for you to believe in, you can have single family cults as well. And the Westboro Baptist Church is one of the most famous examples of that. Yeah, very interesting.

You know, I think often when we hear about cults, you know, you think of a cult, as something like, you know, the Branch Divideons. Remember that, you know, Waco back in the 90s. Charles Manson would be considered a cult leader. You know, he had his so-called family. So you think of these figures who have some level of charisma. But does the leader of the cult always have to be a charismatic figure? So when we look at the term charismatic authority and where it comes from, it simply means we have decided to give someone authority over us.

So there's really kind of only two versions of having authority over someone. It's authority by force and authority by choice. And I like to explain this as the difference between parenting a toddler who you can pick up and move and parenting a teenager, who you have to convince to do what you're you want to do. I have a 10-year-old right now, so I'm right in between those two. And when we choose to give someone authority over us, it is usually because that person has used some sort of charisma to convince us that they should be an authority over us. So yes, usually there is a personality trait called charisma involved in the charismatic authority. I want to talk a little bit about your background and what you can share with us about what makes you an expert in this area.

Talk to us about how you survived being in a cult. Yeah, so I was born three generations into a cult called the Children of God. The Children of God is the cult that used prostitution, religious prostitution, and ultimately promoted pedophilia amongst its members, all while posing as this. just sort of evangelical Christian missionary group that was preparing the world for the end of days. So I was born in, my mother was only 14 when she got pregnant with me, she was born in, and my grandfather was high up in the leadership, still currently runs the money for what is left of this cult. And I never really believed in any of it. and I sort of just felt the need to survive these people until I was able to engineer getting kicked out at the age of 15.

And I did that very dramatically by climbing over the commune wall and going out into the world. We were in Mexico at the time in order to see a boy. And, you know, big, bad rule of cults is fellowshiping with the outsider usually. you know, isolation is a big part of controlling people. And so I was kicked out. I was sort of tossed into a completely different world with a older step-sister in Houston, Texas, who was kind enough to take me in, and just sort of had to figure out the world as it was coming at me, went from like never being in school before to 4,000 student high school, very, very intense. By the time I graduated college, I had decided to go into the military. This was in part because of a one one cult that I entered into in college. You know,

something that tends to happen to us when we get out of high control environments is often we go looking subconsciously for this same kind of high control environment and leader who's going to fix us or help us. And so I felt prey to a very toxic relationship in college. And I also think I just didn't know how to be in the world on my own. And so looking at the military felt very appealing for me. And I went into the military. I became an intelligence officer, which is the expert on the enemy. And we were in the so-called war on terror.

And so I was trained in anti-terrorism. I deployed twice to Afghanistan and ended up spending six and a half years as an officer in the military. When I left the military, I would also say I saw the parallels the whole time, right? like first day of basic training, I was like, oh, this is a cult. Okay, I get what we're doing here. I'm going to be good at this. I just need to buy in. I need to be a group player, tamped down my individuality,

all of these things that I knew subconsciously but didn't know actually as an expert yet. During COVID, I decided to go back to graduate school, and I ended up going to Harvard and getting a degree in organizational psychology. and I really focused on cults and military, and in this process, understood that I was an expert on bad leaders and bad groups, and I wanted to keep doing that. And also, I would say I've been reading everything I could on cults since I was 22 years old, because I was just trying to understand what had happened to me and what I had been through. and that was when I also started noticing all of the patterns. So today I'm an organizational psychologist. I've written two books about cults,

which is my memoir uncultured, where I parallel growing up in the Children of God cult to then being in the military, and then the culting of America, and this is my research book that I did, which is I have a 10-part definition of cult, 10 parts of group behavior that cults use to manipulate you, but I show it to you in cults in the military and then in a lot of American groups because we have a lot of coercive tactics going on in our society, whether we choose to label something a cult or not.

Interesting. What I found interesting when you're telling me about how you survived and escaped the cult that you were brought into, born into, which I'm so glad that you were able to escape that, the religious aspect of this. that religion is often used as a coercive means of maybe indoctrinating people. And so that brings me to the Ciders case in Ohio. You know, there's so much we don't know about the family right now. We do know the grandma, Christina, has a lot of religious imagery on her Facebook page, and that Elizabeth, the mother of these 16 children, married Gary Jr., when she was 15 and then had 18 children subsequently after that marriage. Do you look at this family, since they are a group of two or more people,

do you, from based on what we know, do you see some possible cult dynamics with this family, with the little bit that we know? I definitely think that this family seems like some kind of single family cult, although it is hard to tell who is, you know, who is the cult leader and who are the other adults who are enabling it. You know, what's important about religion is that cults absolutely do not require a religious worldview. But they get, they always give you some kind of worldview. There is always a worldview that you have to adopt in order to be part of this cult. And even in my own, you know, research and, you know, research and,

reading memoirs, I initially was focused on Christianity and thinking that that was the problem. And it wasn't until I read a memoir by someone who'd grown up in the Church of Scientology and in their inner cult, the C-org. And I recognized my pretty much exact same life. So I think it's important to understand that religions are worldviews and cults are groups. But it is also very true that many want to be cult leaders will grab for a monotheistic religion that started about 2,000 years ago. And I think that's just because most religions that we have today have some point of view where they can't explain things anymore. And so you're just supposed to take things on faith. You're just supposed to put logic aside and believe. And really what the process of brainwashing is,

is just getting people to put logic aside and stop asking questions. So, you know, I always like to be very clear that, like, religion might be its own problem, but it's not the problem when we're talking about cults. I mean, you really can just write a science fiction book and then make that your worldview, which is, you know, what Scientology did, which has been one of these really long-lasting cults. But a lot of times in a single family cult, the worldview itself is just focused on like our family is special. Our family does things a certain way. We have this mission.

We can't talk about it outside the house and or in this case not even letting the children go outside the house or be known outside of the house. And so it doesn't have to be a very overly developed worldview that is used to control people. Yeah, and what's interesting with this family, the prosecutor has claimed that these children were hidden. You know, I've traced the education records. As far as we can tell, you know, the oldest six children were not enrolled in school until August 26th of 2020 when the oldest was 12 and the youngest of the six was six, and they were enrolled in online school. But, Before that, there are no records of them being in school. And then the next year, they were supposed to be in school and never showed up. So these kids, according to the prosecutor, have been hidden. That's the word he used. Why would you keep kids at home? Like what could be going on there? And I know I'm asking you to speculate a little bit. But have you seen this with cults previously in your experience and in your research? So I've definitely seen it in that I experienced it.

Like in the children of God, we were never enrolled in outside school. And we were often hidden in a commune. And we mostly lived in countries where large plots of land with walls around them were common. I grew up mostly in Brazil. We had a large presence in India, places like that. And nobody from the outside knew how many children. we had on site. And we were exceptionally controlled and kept quiet and kept in line and kept marching like little soldiers so that nobody knew. The difference with the children of God and

some of these other separatist cults is we were brought out to perform when they wanted us to. You know, the children of God ultimately became like a performance cult. The larger thing about cults is cults are generally about exploitation of labor. And here I would say exploitation of bodies, which is usually for labor, for power, and for sexual abuse, all of which in the children of God was going on. We were absolutely the labor, both inside the cult, like home maintenance. I was the cook at the age of 11 for the whole commune. And then we were also selling labor and performing labor out on the streets. Usually when we find everything looks like a cult, we are going to find labor somewhere.

And in this case, I would definitely look at the mother, labored 18 times, right? Like having children, raising children is a big part of labor that women are often doing in cults. I don't know enough to know, like it seemed like these children were mostly kept and mistreated simply for the sake of power. because they were, it seems like, very developmentally delayed. You know, I don't know whether they were having the children do actual labor in the home, but I would not be surprised to learn that at all. And it can definitely be a lot of child abuse in cults has to do with controlling them and with the leader feeling a sense of power.

And children are usually very brutally controlled inside of cults. Oh, that's just horrible. Is it, is there ever like more than one leader in a cult or is it strictly like one person is the central figure? So there's almost always a hierarchy. You know, cults, I say those are very patriarchal, very hierarchical, regardless of, of which gender is at the top. Now, usually there is a leader and, and that person is followed relatively unquestioningly. But something we don't. talk about that much is that the charismatic leader of a cult can also be an idea. My best example of this is the United States military, which is the idea of the United States that leads the United States military is the Constitution and something that we see when presidents try to grab hold with the U.S. military and use it the way they want. They're usually not very successful because they are the senior person at the top of the hierarchy, but they are not the leader.

In most of the cults that we see, you're going to have a cult of personality, which tends to be around one leader. But you always have a hierarchy. So, you know, we can think of Jim Jones toward the end game of the People's Temple. Jim Jones was not really functional. He was not really actually leading the cult. There was a whole group of people around him, including his doctor, who were keeping him hopped up on meds and able to sort of be physically present. inhabiting the role of the leader. But there's this whole hierarchy and there's a lot of different people who are benefiting from being in the leadership structure of a cult. Some of those people,

I think, know it's a game or it's a scam. And some of those people, I think, are true believers. Somebody who's young and impressionable, a 14-year-old girl, maybe somebody who can be drawn into something like this into a single family cult, especially because, you know, maybe their home circumstance isn't the best. Do cults typically look to recruit members who seem to have, you know, some type of weakness or, you know, do cult leaders exploit people who they perceive as being malleable and things of that nature? Yes. And also, and also, young people, right? The children of God famously was recruiting 13 and 14 and 15 year olds into their cult, as have many other cults, you know, the military recruit 16 and 17 year olds.

So getting people while they're young and very malleable is definitely a part of cult strategies, as is getting people pregnant, very, very young and multiple times, because it keeps you tied to the cult. And, you know, there's a stereotype that cults are recruiting weak-minded people, which most of us experts don't like because truly anyone can be manipulated by a cult. But one of the things I have found is that anywhere in the space of personal transformation, cults are going to, or abusive people, predators will show up. So when you have, and a lot of these happen when you're young, when you're leaving your parents home, when you're going to school, you're starting a diet or exercise program.

But basically, there's something about your life that you want to transform. A lot of predators will show up. And cults absolutely will focus in on what you are discontent about in your life and play that up as a big problem. And then they will sell you a solution. And so my personal experience, how I ended up in a cult, is my grandfather in the 70s had a bad LSD trip where he met Satan. And the next day, he was sitting in a park in L.A. with his head in his hands, as one does after they meet Satan, I presume. And along come, the happy, smiling, guitar playing children of God. Right. And that was his story that he told and he went off with them for the rest of his life.

but I always like to bring people's focus to the fact that those four happy, smiley cult recruiters were walking through a park looking for the guy with his head in his hands, right? They weren't looking for a group of happy, well-adjusted people. They were looking for people who they thought had a problem that they could then set up a solution to exploit. I mean, that makes total sense. It makes total sense. How do you advise people, like anybody watching this, how would you advise somebody to maybe recognize those signs that they are being maybe manipulated or recruited to become part of a cult and to maybe resist that? Yeah. So one of the things is just this statement. I try to tell people a lot that anywhere in the space of personal transformation, cults will try to recruit you.

You know, when you are trying to change yourself, you're already willing to change. And so it's easy for predators to zero in on that. And so you just need to be sort of on the alert all of the time. And I think one of the ultimate ways to protect yourself is to know that you can never devote yourself 100% to anything. Like you should not be devoting yourself 100% to any person, place, thing, or idea. outside of yourself. And I think that's hard because in American culture, we are told to devote ourselves 100% to things, 110% even. But really, in order to keep yourself safe, it's watch your time, watch your labor, and make sure that you're never 100% in anything

because that becomes isolation, it becomes exploitation, it becomes all of these other things. And this is, you know, this is, also why I wrote like a tactics manual. You know, in in this book, I have hundreds of things that cults do. And I truly believe that the label doesn't matter. You know, we only tend to be willing to call something a cult when it's in the news, when there are bodies that have been harmed that we can measure. But I think it's really helpful for people to understand the specific tactics, you know. Telling someone they're going to die if they're not in your group is a cult tactic. Controlling people's appearance is a cult tactic. Controlling people's attitudes and expressions is a cult tactic. And so that way, people can notice that stuff because there really are patterns that are set.

I really think there's only sort of one broad way to control people. And so I think it's just about recognizing those tactics. And I always say, you know, as a former intelligence, officer, it's never no threat. It's always low threat. You know, so you should never just believe that you're totally safe and you should really listen to yourself when you spot these red flags. Well, that's, it's fascinating. I'm so glad that you were able to escape your circumstances and that you've been able to write books, the culturing of America. You know, I've got a copy. I've been digging into it. I really appreciate you sharing your experience with us and your expertise.

Daniela Mestinek Young. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on. And thank you for looking at this issue and caring about this issue because it really affects a lot of people and matters to a lot of people. Yeah, no doubt. It's very important. Thank you. Now, I want to be very clear here. All of the members of the Siders family who are charged with child endangering have pleaded not guilty. Gary Jr., Elizabeth and Christina remain in jail. They have not been able to post bond. Gary Sr. is out of jail on a signature bond. He is wearing a GPS bracelet. And of course, we will keep an eye on this case and let you know how it turns out and all of the developments that come with it. That's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Yenette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me.

I'll see you back here next time.