Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - The Rajneesh Movement

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

In 1981, a spiritual leader named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, known as the "sex guru", moved thousands of followers to an abandoned ranch in rural Oregon and built an entire city from scratch. In the first part of our 3-part series, Katie Ring traces the origins of the Rajneesh movement, the woman who really ran it, and how a town of 75 people was legally taken over and renamed.Follow America's Most Infamous Crimes to hear the rest of the story: https://pod.link/1882861002If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

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Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh sold his followers on a vision of Paradise on Earth. And in the summer of 1981, thousands of them packed up and moved to an isolated community in Central Oregon to make it happen. The locals didn't know what to make of them, but they were polite, at least at first.

Within a year, those same peaceful newcomers would do something almost no one saw coming, leading to the largest bioterror attack in American history. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring, and this is America's most infamous crimes.

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Most Infamous Crime Show page. This is the first of our three episodes series on the cult known as the Rajneesh movement. Today, I'm starting at the beginning, with the guru who built it, the right-hand woman who ran it from the shadows, and the year a town in Oregon disappeared from the map. With Instacart Shopper notes, you can get specific about your groceries. Take strawberries. You don't want just any strawberries. You want the ones that took their time, grown slow, the ones that weren't in a rush to get

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It sits in the dry rolling hills of Wascoe County and in the 1980s, it was a ranching town of about 75 people. Most of them were older or retired and loved the area for its peace and quiet. And then Baguan Sri Rajneesh showed up with buses full of people. He was born in Chandra, Moan, Jane, on December 11, 1981 in a small village called Kuchwada in central India. He was the oldest of 11 kids and spent a lot of his early childhood living with his maternal grandparents. And he seemed to make quite the impression on them. Apparently, his grandpa called him Raja, the Sanskrit word for ruler, and that nickname turned into Rajneesh when he registered for school.

From early on, Rajneesh set himself apart. He was a rebel at heart and even said he was an atheist, which came as a huge shock growing up in a deeply religious country. Rajneesh pushed against every rule that was imposed on him. He was so stubborn that he reportedly had to transfer colleges after clashing with a professor. but he didn't let that stop him. Eventually, Rajneesh earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and then a master's. Along the way, he developed a real talent for public speaking,

lecturing at large interfaith gatherings while he was still a student. He clearly liked an audience and they liked him back, but it wasn't all smooth sailing for him. As a young man, Rajneesh was miserable. He was hung up on self-doubt and it wasn't ordinary 20-something soul-searching, more like deep depression and debilitating headaches. When modern medicine didn't help, Rajneesh tried other coping mechanisms, like running 10 to 16 miles a day and meditating for hours on end.

And then, by his own account, something changed. On March 21st, 1953, at just 21 years old, Rajneesh said he was sitting under a malchree tree in a garden when he achieved total enlightenment. The way he told it, the breakthrough came only after he gave up. Seven days earlier, he decided the whole struggle was hopeless and he just stopped trying. And in that surrender, it all clicked. The headaches were gone, so was the doubt.

But that clarity didn't lead to any major lifestyle adjustments, or at least not yet. Rajneesh finished school and got a job teaching philosophy at the University of Jabalpur, where he stayed for the better part of nine years. But somewhere along the way he found his voice, giving lectures on the side and the people wanted to listen. If you had to boil his philosophy down to two words, it would be question everything, from religion to tradition to authority.

He even criticized Gandhi. Rajneesh argued that glorifying poverty and self-denial was a mistake. To him, true spirituality didn't come from denying yourself. It came from experiencing life completely. Pleasure wasn't something to feel guilty about. It was something to embrace, including sex. Rajneesh told his audiences that sex was a divine, natural part of being human, and that it should be celebrated, not repressed.

In conservative 1960s, India, his beliefs were pretty scandalous, and it earned him a nickname he'd carry for years, the sex guru. It also drew crowds, especially wealthy, educated men who liked the ideas, of a spiritual path that didn't ask them to give anything up. By 1966, the lectures had gotten big enough that when Rajneesh was asked to resign from the university, he was able to support himself with speaking engagements. And his audience kept expanding, not just across India, but internationally, especially with Westerners drawn to the new age movement of the late 60s and 70s.

And in 1970, when he was 38, Rajneesh formalized everything. He gave his philosophy a name, the Neo-Sanias International Movement, and the next year he took a new name for himself, Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, which translates roughly to the blessed one. He initiated his first disciples and he opened an ashram, a spiritual community near Bombay, where his students could come to learn from him directly. A few years later, he moved it to the city of Pune and the ashram turned into a true destination.

Westerners made the pilgrimage by the thousands, A lot of them never fully went home again. And that's where Rajneesh unveiled the technique that made him famous, dynamic meditation. It was pretty much the opposite of what you'd imagine meditation to be. It wasn't quiet contemplation. It was chaos by design. Sessions started with people jumping, shouting, breathing hard, and dancing until they were completely exhausted.

Then, once they were drained of everything they'd been holding in, that's when they'd sit down to meditate. Some sessions went even further than that, people screaming, hitting one another, even engaging in group sex before settling in. It clearly resonated. Tens of thousands of people came to learn at Rajneesh's Ashram, and they were happy to help support him. By the late 1970s, Rajneesh wasn't just a humble teacher going against the grain. He was the leader of a religious organization worth millions of dollars and had followers on multiple continents. His teachings had also made him deeply controversial in India, where established religious figures

condemned him, and where eventually the government would take a hard look at all of that tax-free money, an operation that beg needs someone to run it, and that's not what Rajneesh was interested in. So he handed the business side of his empire to one of his most devoted students. Her name was Ma Anand Shila, and all of that darkness that followed could be traced directly back to her. Like so many of Rajneesh's followers, Ma Anand Sheila was a woman searching for meaning.

She was born in 1949 in Baroda, India, and when she was 18, she moved to the U.S. for college. Sheila married an American in around 1972. She and her husband traveled back to India together on a kind of spiritual journey, which is how they first found Rajneesh. Sheila was hooked almost immediately. She became one of his men.

most devoted followers, took the name Ma Anand Sheila, and quickly rose through the ranks. Within a few years, the guru had put her in charge of the money. Sheila was sharp, fearless, and completely devoted to Rajneesh, and she was also very, very good at getting things done. When Rajneesh needed someone to handle the world while he handled enlightenment, Sheila was the obvious choice. And by 1980, the world was closing in on him in India. Officially, the reason for leaving was Rajneesh's health.

He was only 49, but he had a long list of serious conditions. Diabetes, asthma, a prolapse disc in his spine, and he wanted high-quality medical care that was available overseas. But there were other pressures, too. The Indian government had started challenging the movement's tax-exempt status, arguing it didn't qualify as a religious or charitable organization. They wanted a fortune in back-taxies. and they were threatening to shut the ashram down.

On top of all of that, most of the movement's wealthiest followers were in the West, which meant going to America meant going straight to the source. So on May 31, 1981, Rajneesh, Sheila, and about 20 disciples quietly left India and flew to the United States. Sheila was a U.S. citizen, and she'd arranged a medical visa for Rajneesh on the grounds that he needed treatment.

Once they arrived, she used the movement's money to set him up in a mansion in Montclair, New Jersey, near where she'd gone to school. And while the official story was that Rajneesh was gravely ill and needed serious medical care, by some accounts, he was up and walking around just fine within about a week of landing in the U.S. Whatever the real story was,

the East Coast was never going to be the final stop. He said the New Jersey air wasn't good for his recovery. So Rajneesh sent Sheila back out to find somewhere permanent. She was looking for somewhere with a dry climate that was better for Rajanishu's health, and she wanted space, somewhere remote, isolated, and where the outside world couldn't interfere. After a few months of touring properties across the western U.S., she found it. A 64,000 acre spread in central Oregon called the Big Muddy Ranch that sat more or less abandoned for two decades. In the summer of 1981, the movement bought it for four.

$5.75 million, more than $20 million in today's dollars. Within days, a small group of Rajneesh's followers arrived to get things prepped for the guru's arrival. They had a name for their new home, Rajneesh Puram. It was supposed to be a place of peace, love, and harmony. And at first, the neighbors didn't know what to make of it. There was only one road that ran through the town of Anilope, so the locals had a front row seat to the comings and goings of Rajneesh and his followers. Within weeks, hundreds of people were passing through on their way to the ranch, and they were easy to spot. Per Rajneesh's instructions, his followers all dressed in the colors of the setting sun,

red, pink, and orange. Locals started calling them the red people or Rajneeshis. The followers themselves preferred the word sinyossins, a Sanskrit term for those who have renounced selfish desire. With that kind of mission statement, you think most of them would be lost kids, or people drifting through life. But that wasn't the case. The average Rajneeshi at the ranch was around 34 years old,

and most were upper middle class professionals. Think accountants, lawyers, architects, doctors, and college professors. They were people who'd read about Rajneesh in a magazine or taken a meditation class and decided they were done with the rat race. They were people with usable skills, and they were about to use them in a big way. Four years, Rajneesh had taught that hard labor was its own form of meditation. His followers had a saying, work is our worship. At Rajneesh Borum, they put that to the test.

Between 1981 and 1983, about a thousand of them worked 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week turning an abandoned ranch into a functioning city. And it's honestly impressive what they built. The ones trained in agriculture cleared more than 3,000 acres to plant wheat, sunflowers, and vegetables. The engineers built a 400-foot dam that created a 45-acre reservoir for drinking water and irrigation. They built roads, houses, a sewer system, a 10-migawatt electrical substation, a recycling plant, and an airfield. To move people around, they brought in a fleet of 85 school buses, which at one point made Rajneesh Puram the fourth

largest public transit system in the entire state of Oregon. There was a hotel, a meditation hall, the size of an aircraft hangar, restaurants, a post office, even a fire department. By 1984, the population would hit roughly 7,000, and the leadership was dreaming even bigger. They talked about a city of 30,000 or more, and the people who lived there were taken care of, three vegetarian meals a day for free. Rent-free housing and shared a-frame homes, clothes and toiletries were also provided, an exchange you gave your labor and your devotion. In just a couple of years, a thousand people had willed an entire city into existence, and they'd done it for the man most of them couldn't even speak to. Shortly before leaving India, Rajneesh had told his inner circle he was taking

a vow of silence. His reasoning was spiritual. He claimed that a key, part of enlightenment was releasing worldly attachments, and he'd grown worried that his followers were too fixated on his words, and that they'd form an unhealthy attachment to him. By going silent, he hoped to break it. But based on the way he was treated at Rajneesh Puram, you wouldn't know it. Rajneesh lived in a compound at the center of the community, surrounded by fruit trees. Every day at 2 p.m., everyone in Rajneesh Porum would stop working and line the road. Then Rajneesh. Rajneesh would ride slowly through the streets in one of his Rolls-Royce limos. As each car passed, his followers would bow and murmur the greeting namaste.

But despite all of that, for a lot of the people who lived there, the early years of Rajneesh Puram were the happiest of their lives. They were doing meaningful work alongside people who shared their beliefs and building something real with their own hands under the wide open Oregon sky. There was dancing, music, celebration, a genuine sense. of having finally found your people. Even now, a lot of former members will tell you that they don't regret it. And while Rajneesh enjoyed his quiet contemplation amongst the celebrations,

Ma Anand Sheila was running everything. She was president of the Rajneesh Foundation International, the tax-exempt organization that collected donations from followers around the world, and she had full control over its multi-million dollar budget. She was the de facto mayor of Rajneesh Borum, running the community from a luxurious house right next to Rajneesh's. And she didn't run it alone. Through a network of mostly female managers, coordinators, and spies,

Sheila kept tabs on everything and everyone. And she was good at it. She was quick, combative, and completely unbothered by what anyone outside thought of her. If you've seen the Netflix series Wild Wild Country, you know the version of Sheila that lodged in the public imagination, sharp-tongued, defiant, almost daring the world to come after her. Rajneesh Puram was a city of thousands built on devotion, run entirely by one woman. She was speaking for a man who no longer spoke at all, and it turned out she had a lot to say.

If Rajneesh Porum had stayed inside its own fences, it might have lasted. The problem was that it couldn't. Legally speaking, a community that size was a brand-new city. a city where one wasn't supposed to exist. Oregon has some of the strictest land use laws in the country, and they exist precisely to stop someone from dropping a city onto farmland. So in 1982, the Rajneeshisys found a workaround. They got Rajneesh Puram, incorporated as an official city,

a status that let them issue their own building permits and operate with far fewer restrictions. The main requirement at this time was a minimum population of 150, which was no problem at all when you can simply bring in more followers. And on May 18, 1982, Rajneesh Puram became a city. But incorporating their own land didn't solve a bigger problem, getting along with the neighbors. The people of Antelope had not signed up for any of this.

They lived there for the silence. And now they had a steady parade of trucks, construction equipment, and busloads of strangers rolling through town at all hours. And according to people who were there, the real friction didn't start over the big philosophical stuff. It started over local politics. Rajneesh's followers started asking about vacancies on Anelope's school board, whose main job was overseeing the town's tiny one-room elementary school. The followers had their own school at the ranch, and there were zero intentions of sending their kids to the local one.

To the old-timers, that was the tell. These newcomers weren't trying to join the town. they were trying to run it. When Rajneeshis started showing up at city council meetings, the locals did the lawful thing. Antelope's town council filed lawsuits trying to get county and state officials to pull Rajneesh Puram's building permits.

That made Sheila furious and she was not subtle about it. At town halls and in the press, she insulted the residents of Antelope directly, calling them rednecks and bigots. In an open letter to the governor, she described Antelope as a place where, in her words, unproductive, indolent old people went to wait around until they died. But the insults weren't the dangerous part.

The strategy was. Ahead of Anelope's local election in 1982, Sheila started buying up properties all over town and moving Rajneesh's followers into them. The math was simple and brutal. Antelope had about 75 residents. The movement had thousands. If enough Rajneeshis' establishes. residency in town, they could legally outvote everyone who actually live there.

But the old-timer saw it coming, and they tried something almost unheard of. In April of 1982, the original residents tried to disincorporate Antelope to dissolve their own town entirely, just to keep it out of the Rajneesh's hands. They were willing to erase their town off the map rather than watch it get taken, but it didn't work. By then, there were already enough Rajneeshi voters to defeat the measure, so the town survived on paper, but fell into the hands of the people the locals were trying to stop. When the election came, the Rajneeshis won. The mayor and the entire town council were voted out and replaced.

The new council immediately dropped all of Antelope's legal challenges to Rajneesh Porum. Two years later, they officially changed the name of the town. Antelope, Oregon was renamed Rajneesh. After that, most of the original residents did the only thing left to do. They sold up and moved away. A few stayed and dug in, but the antelope they'd known was over, and the rest of Oregon noticed. When the Rajneeshis first arrived, Sheila had worked hard to charm people throughout the state.

She invited reporters, lawmakers, and curious locals out to the ranch for tours, led by the most attractive, charismatic members. So for about a year, a lot of Oregonians outside Wasco County had a more or less positive view of the newcomers, but the takeover of Anilope ended that. People read Sheila's insults and watched a determined group essentially absorb an entire town through the ballot box, and all that goodwill turned into alarm. By now, the story had stopped being a local zoning squabble and became a statewide obsession, and increasingly a national one,

especially because of the scale of what was happening out in the Oregon High Desert. Every year, Rajneesh Puram hosted an enormous festival, a world celebration that drew tens of thousands of red-clad visitors around the globe to a ranch in the middle of nowhere. To the Rajneeshis, it was a joyful gathering of the faithful. To county officials watching buses pour in by the dozen, it looked like an army assembling. The bigger and bolder the community got,

the more the outside world braced for something to go wrong. And here's the part that made it so hard for anyone to fight back. Almost none of it was illegal. The Rajneeshisians hadn't stormed the town. They registered to vote, established residency, and won an election. On paper, it was democracy working exactly as designed. It was ingenious and terrifying. The state did have one card to play, though.

Rajneesh Puram's incorporation as a city was itself legally shaky, because the whole place was essentially a closed religious community. You couldn't really live there unless you were a follower. And in late 1983, Oregon's attorney general issued a legal opinion arguing that incorporating the city violated the constitutional separation of church and state. His position was that you can't have a government, a city with the power to issue permits and run a police force that's effectively an arm of one religion. It was a serious legal threat to the entire enterprise,

and it told the Rajneeshis that the state of Oregon wasn't just watching anymore. It was coming for the city's very right to exist, and they were ready to fight back. Rajanish Porum formed its own police department, the Peace Force, and its officers patrolled in red uniforms carrying submachine guns. There were reports of a growing armory and weapons being stockpiled, and the community even ran helicopter recon over the city. the ranch. From the outside, a place bounded on love and meditation was starting to look like something closer to a fortress bracing for a siege. And the more it armed, the more the outside

world feared it, which gave Sheila the perfect justification to arm even more. State and county officials had a very specific fear in the back of their minds. It had been only about five years since the cult leader Jim Jones ordered the deaths of more than 900 of his followers at his remote commune in South America, Jonestown. Now Oregon had its own remote commune, its own charismatic leader, thousands of devoted followers, and an armed security force. The officials watching weren't being paranoid. They'd seen exactly how this kind of story could end, and they were terrified of watching it happen again in their own state. But the people watching from the outside could only see so much. They could see the takeover of Antelope. They could see Sheila's hostility,

the buses, the lawsuits, the guns at the checkpoints. What they couldn't see was what was already happening behind the gates of Rajneeshporum to the believers themselves. Because the same tactics Sheila used to crush her enemies on the outside, she was about to turn inward on the very people who'd given up their old lives to follow her guru into the desert. And those people were about to find out that the hardest thing in Rajneeshporum wasn't getting in,

it was getting out. At the end of each episode, I'd like to take a moment to answer any questions you may have about the case and share my thoughts. So make sure to comment below. When I picture a cult, I picture vulnerable people getting pulled in. But you said these were doctors and lawyers. How did smart, successful people fall for this? This is definitely one of the more intriguing parts of this case, and I think this is twofold. First, I think a common misconception is that successful people can't be vulnerable, insecure,

or influenced by a charismatic person. Personally, when I look at some of the world's wealthiest men today, I see men who, despite having seemingly everything, are deeply insecure. The average Rajneesh Puram follower was 34 years old with a graduate degree and a career. Accountants, architects, physicians, these were people who, by every external measure, had it figured out. And I think that's exactly why they were vulnerable. You can have everything the rat race promised and still feel completely empty.

and Rajneesh spoke directly to that emptiness. The second thing is that a lot of people get pulled into trends, especially when it involves health, lifestyle, and going against the grain. And his teachings definitely went against the grain. His pitch wasn't give up your life, it was the opposite. It was, you've been denying yourself, and that's the problem. Come experience everything. For burned out successful Westerners in the 70s,

that was incredibly seductive. Watching interviews, I think the sexual freedom asked, of it was also a draw for many people. At the end of the day, dynamic meditation, community, and a sense of purpose have all been proven to be good for human health and longevity. In general, so I think a lot of people did feel good in that community. That's what makes Colts dangerous. It's a lot harder to walk away from something that gave you real relief. Let's talk about the vow of silence. Rajneesh frames it as this deeply spiritual thing, releasing attachment, but you can't ignore the timing. He goes to

silent right around the time Sheila takes over everything. Similar to my last answer, I think he definitely had reasonings behind this. In terms of cult leader ploys, this was actually a very smart one. Having this vow of silence gave him a sense of mystery, of wisdom. It made his followers yearn for his attention even more. They wanted to learn from him, hear him speak, and they were willing to stay in hopes of getting that from him. Other than a tactic to lure his followers in even deeper and gain their respect, it was a convenient way of maintaining plausible deniability in the operations of his cult. The most powerful man in the movement stops speaking, which means he stops being on the record. Every decision, every controversial statement, every order now comes out

of Sheila's mouth, not his. So when things go wrong later, who's holding the bag? Not the silent guru in the compound with the fruit trees. The silence gave him plausible deniability before there was anything to deny. I'm not saying that that was the plan. I'm saying it was a remarkably convenient outcome for a man who would later stand in front of the news cameras and claim he had no idea what his own organization was doing. Okay, I have to ask about the Rolls Royces, because it's the detail everyone fixates on. How do you square that with minimalist communal living? You don't. That's the answer. By the time it was all over Rajneesh's fleet was reported at 93 Rolls-Royces.

Ninety-three. And meanwhile, his followers are working 16-hour days, sleeping and shared a-frames, eating the same vegetarian meals, and owning almost nothing. I think his original line was that the cars were gifts

from devotees, a kind of spiritual lesson about non-attachment, that he could be surrounded by luxury and remain unattached to it. But in an interview I watched from him later on, when he was asked if he thought he was an extraordinary man, he said no. He pointed to his enjoyment of money and

material things as proof that he was not an extraordinary man. And his followers absolutely gobbled up every word he said. It's truly mind-boggling to witness. And hearing about the daily ritual where people who'd given up everything would line the road and bow as he was driven past in a car worth more than most of them had ever earned is unbelievable. It's just wild that people get so drawn into Colts and it becomes such a part of their identity that they don't even question these things. The Antelope takeover is wild to me because nobody broke a law. They just voted. Does that make it worse? Part of this case that was so interesting to me was that if Sheila didn't do the terrible thing she did, their way of life was actually kind of advanced and sustainable. If they were just able to get along

with their neighbors and coexist, I think this would be a very different story. But instead, they wanted to takeover and they used their educated followers to exploit legal pathways. Personally, I couldn't imagine a weird cult trying to take over the town I grew up in. We would not have received that well either, and it was unsettling that they were able to do so relatively quickly. They moved in, they registered, they outvoted a town of 75 people, and they renamed it. There's no statute against that, and the locals were so desperate they tried to dissolve their own town to stop it, and even that failed. I think it's genuinely chilling precisely because it is legal. It exposes something uncomfortable about how a small community can be overwhelmed by a determined, organized, well-funded

group. The law was no help because the law was being followed. Last one. Where is Rajneesh in all of this? Because everything we've described is Sheila, Sheila, Sheila. That's definitely by design. The narrative that gets handed down is that Sheila was the villain and Rajneesh was the dreamer who lost control of her. And like, Sheila earned her reputation. We'll get into exactly how in the next episode, but I'm not ready to give Rajneesh a pass. This was his movement, his followers, his name on the town. The man lived in the middle of the compound and was driven through it every single day. The idea that the takeover of an American town happened entirely without his knowledge is hard to believe for me. I won't tell you he gave the orders because I can't prove that. What I will say

is this when a leader builds a system where total power flows to one person and no one is allowed to question it and then claims ignorance when that power gets abused. I think the leader owns a piece of what happens. But we'll come back to that question because by the end of this series, it's its own whole ballgame. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. To enhance your listening experience, join Crimehouse Plus and get all three parts of each week's America's most infamous crime stories dropped at once every Monday and ad-free. You'll also get the rest of the Crime House lineup ad-free and early and exclusive bonus episodes.

To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free, at the top of the America's most infamous crime show page. Come back tomorrow for our next episode on the Rajneesh movement. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 racing. And Bubba Wallace. You know what's the worst part of a race? A rain delay.

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Every Thursday, I revisit a landmark homicide investigation in depth, with long-form storytelling built for your ears. Listen to and follow The First 48 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series The First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations,

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