The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - The Mysterious Death of Devereaux Cleaver

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

In 1979, 14-year-old Devereaux Cleaver vanished at sea. Was it an accident? Or part of a sick and deadly conspiracy? After her death, something suspicious happens that points the finger at Terri Hoffman. Binge all episodes of Scary Terri, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Cases show page on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Oh, yes, we do. We'll speak with industry insiders, celebrities, and our close friends. And give all our honest and unfiltered thoughts always. Listen to Lipstick on the Rim now on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. When I started looking into a string of mysterious deaths in Dallas, Texas in the 1970s and 80s, I had no idea what kind of madness, carnage, and darkness I'd find there. I also didn't think I'd stumble across another Charlie Manson.

Devereux Cleaver had just turned 14 when her mom, Sandra Cleaver, invited her to go on a vacation to Hawaii. Her mom's fiance, Lynn Fairchild, would be there too. And her close friend and mentor, Terry. Devereux's stepmother, Gail Cleaver, remembers her as a bright girl, sweet and shy, tall. Long, beautiful, curly, blonde hair. Like Chuck used to say, she had legs all the way to Bakersfield. She loved animals and basketball

and her new step siblings. Gail had a son and two daughters from a previous marriage. They were this Brady Bunch type family, a friend of hers told me. Devereux was excited to go, but Chuck and his new wife Gail were worried about the trip. They really didn't care for the people Sandra hung around with,

especially her friend Terry, to whom she was practically attached at the hip. But spending quality time with her mom was something Devereaux didn't get to do very much, and Chuck and Gail didn't want to get in the way of that. The Wailupe in Oahu. A windy peninsula southeast of Honolulu. It means literally kite water, on account of the breezy Pakita coastline where they could take flight and nearly touch the sky. You can see them today, guiding surfers across the water like disembodied souls under the bright sun. Hawaii was an exotic wonderland for Devereaux.

Far from the dusty horizon, the muscular cloud clusters miles high and the hot blanket of air draping Dallas like a set piece in a movie. Chuck and I had been out at a couple friend of ours that night and we'd gotten home late and we crawled into bed, but it was about 1.30 in the morning. And I answered the phone.

There was a woman's voice on the other end of the line. I handed the phone over to Chuck. and the next thing I remember hearing was, and he sat bolt right up in bed and said, what do you mean she's missing? I'll never forget that as long as I live. Sandra and Devereaux had gone swimming that day after lunch. Just 20 or so minutes from their hotel in Honolulu was a beach, more like a lagoon actually. It was ankle deep for about a half mile out from the shore. An odd choice for swimming. Lynn, Sandra's fiance, stayed back, napping off one too many

glasses of champagne after lunch. Go on, have fun, he told them. lunch. Go on, have fun, he told them. Suddenly, underneath them was a patch of coral reef, tough and sharp, like knives and sandpaper. The water was deepening now, too. That far out, it's hard to gauge the size of a wave. That's when one wave came roaring past, knocking them off of the raft. Another wave, and she was gone.

Sandra looked over and couldn't see her daughter. She'd been swept under by the current. She dove underneath, looking for her. She'd been swept under by the current. She dove underneath, looking for her. She couldn't find her. That's where Sandra's account trails off. She awoke later on the rocky shoreline, calling for help. Meanwhile, Lynn woke up from his catnap, recognized something was wrong. He alerted authorities on the beach who dragged Sandra back in.

They had gathered Sandra up off of a coral reef, bleeding all over, but Devereux was missing. Chuck got out of bed and headed towards the airport. missing. Chuck got out of bed and headed towards the airport. It was like an eclipse flashed across the sky. A dark pall covered their world. A chill shot through them that they would never be able to shake.

We've lived in the darkness of how this hovered over our lives. Their daughter was gone. Life would never be the same. And from the moment their phone rang that awful night, Gail had a creeping suspicion that would soon overcrowd everything. This wasn't a freak accident. My theory is my brain, what I think was supposed to happen. This is just me and my brain thinking.

It's not a fact. I think they were both supposed to die that day. Devereaux and Sandra were collateral damage in a sick and deadly conspiracy. And the terrible truth is, I think Gail was right. These shark eyes, those cold dark eyes. The most sophisticated sociopath I've ever observed. Left behind a series of bizarre diaries and writings associated with Terry Hoffman and a group she founded called the Conscious Development of Body, Mind and Soul, Inc. Really see how evil she really was, like heartless.

There is no doubt that she killed. Are those items that are used to control and combat, shield against black lords? I'm about the Fifth Amendment. Why do you think it was so difficult to tie Terry to these deaths? Because there's no smoking gun. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Scary Terry. I'm Jonathan Hirsch.

Chapter One. The mysterious death of Devereux Cleaver. Chuck and Gail were the perfect match. An all-American couple. Chuck was tall and muscular with a gentle smile and wavy brown hair. Played college basketball. Work worked in commercial real estate. Gail had fine blonde hair, high cheekbones, a model. She in fact was one in those days for a chain of department stores in Texas. But the couple also came together with history.

Kids from another marriage, previous relationships. The biggest challenge in their young life together was no doubt sharing Devereaux with Sandra. Because it always felt to them like they weren't just sharing Devereaux with Sandra. They were sharing her with Terry, Terry Hoffman. She was impacting their lives big time. Terry was a kind of spiritual life coach. their lives big time.

Terri was a kind of spiritual life coach. She'd recently started a group she was calling Conscious Development of Body, Mind, and Soul. We'll call them CDBMS for short. Under this name, she hosted group meditation sessions where she would also give lectures to a growing number of people in Dallas about things like reincarnation, the soul, and the hidden energies that inform and power our world. She'd host these events around North Dallas, often on the campus of Southern Methodist University, and Sandra was one of Terry's first disciples and a close friend. Sandra had had a tough few years and was searching for meaning in her life.

Her vulnerability hit her terribly. She lost her father in an airplane crash and she lost her 16 year old sister, younger sister in an automobile crash, uh, within a two year period of time. And with those consecutive losses, a window opened up in her heart. She'd do anything for relief. Take any advice that seemed to get her to a better place. Terry was a heavyset woman in her 40s,

round frame, lumbering, big piercing brown eyes, and tough black hair often pulled back into a bun. She didn't on the surface appear to be particularly charismatic, but it was her words that captivated people. Oh, it's hairy. Yeah, you know, the more I get to know about this is just drawing to think of all this help and... It is nice.

And I know what's so sad, is that not more people in the world, you know, have any access to it. There are few recordings left of Terry, but this is from one of these counseling sessions she gave to her students. Her voice is slight, with a thick Texas lilt. She was gentle and nurturing to her students. A divine mother, one former disciple told me. Life, Terry instructed her earliest acolytes, was a journey towards spiritual evolution.

And she was there to help you advance, to cheer you along as you became more spiritually aware, but also to encourage you to eliminate things that weren't serving you. At any point in time in your life you've been negative, then what happens is you attract negative elementals and elementaries to you when you're negative. This all sounded too kooky for Chuck. and elementary to you when you're negative. This all sounded too kooky for Chuck. He stayed out of it.

His wife was slipping. He didn't approve of this new relationship, which was taking time away from raising the family and also costing them. She was buying up expensive jewelry from Terry made of semi-precious stones she claimed would provide spiritual protection. When Sandro started writing checks for several thousand dollars made out to Terry's group, Chuck had enough. They were at an impasse.

That's when he met Gail. Both of them had been invited to a minister's home. I was still married to my Lutheran minister husband, and we used to get together with a bunch of other ministers every now and then because they knew each other, the wives liked each other. And one time we went over to a pastor's house here in Oak Cliff Dallas. One of the other couples had invited to the party. Chuck Cleaver and his present wife, Sandra Cleaver. It was the first time Gail met Sandra. She was very intelligent, very pretty, and she was very different.

Different. Like, she marches to the beat of her own drum. Eccentric. And she was telling the women in the kitchen, two of them being ministers' wives, I wasn't in the kitchen at this time, but she was telling them that she could change the wine back into water. It took the women a minute to realize she was being serious. Yeah. Whereas Jesus, of course, changed water into wine as his first miracle on earth.

She said because of her power, she could turn the wine back into water to which, of course, the minister's wife said, please don't. And I'm sure it felt unsettling to the other women in that room, these relatively well to do Christian women chatting in the kitchen of a Dallas suburb, 1972. I didn't know their marriage was going to heck at that time, but I soon found out later from one of the other ministers that their marriage was not looking good.

Not long after, Sandra asked Chuck for a divorce. Then the reason for their divorce was because Terry Hoffman had told Sandra that Chuck was impeding Sandra's spiritual growth. Who was this woman? She'd wrestled her way into the center of a marriage and managed to convince Sandra that to evolve, her husband had to go. She had spiritual practices to pursue or whatever, and Chuck was getting in the way.

At the same time, Chuck had started this new blended family. Gail was Devereaux's stepmom, and Devereaux now had a stepbrother and stepsisters close in age. He was concerned about Terry's influence on his daughter. He fought to have full custody of Devereaux. He was about to get custody, and not only his attorney, but Sandra's attorney came to him and said to him, you are about to get custody of your daughter. Chuck's lawyer was scared.

Sandra had espoused some pretty out there ideas, which she seemed to be absorbing from her friend Terry. But the first time that Sandra Cleaver has visitation rights, we fear for your daughter's life. Chuck's attorney feared that Sandra was being influenced, that she might do something she'd later deeply regret. If you move forward and get full custody, his lawyer said, which it looks like you can get, you will win the battle, but you're gonna lose the war. They had joint custody then, but Devereaux lived with Sandra.

Gail and Chuck, in the middle of all this, did their best to provide a loving home for Devereaux and to keep the kids insulated from any of the weirdness going on with Sandra and Terry. They were sort of dancing around Sandra, trying to stay connected to Dev without getting too involved with her. It felt precarious, unstable.

And now lawyers on both sides of the custody dispute were telling them, it could be dangerous. Welcome to Origins with me, Kush Jumbo, the show where the biggest names in entertainment tell me the stories that made them who they are today. Origins is a conversation about my guests' early inspirations and growing up. Guests this season include Dame Anna Winter, Poppy Delevingne, Pete Capaldi,

and Golda Rushaval, aka Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton. I only discovered my sexuality when I went to drama school. Join me every week to hear where it all began. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Origins with Kus Jumbo. Infamous is celebrity gossip, but smart. It takes you deep into the stories that we just can't stop ourselves from following.

From who Meghan Markle really is... Apparently ambition is a terrible, terrible thing. ...to the scandal at Lululemon. You've got this man saying that his yoga pants don't work for women because they're too fat to wear them. We've got over 100 episodes ready for your binging pleasure. Listen to Infamous, the gossip show that's smart. I've got my daughter Kristen sitting right next to me, Jonathan, because she was just

two months different in age than Devereaux when Devereaux died. Chrissy can also tweak my memory if I forget anything, but I'm pretty good at memory on this. Chris is Gail's daughter from her previous marriage. She was closest in age to Devereaux. Seeing Gail and her together, she's a carbon copy of her mom. Silvery, blonde hair, high cheekbones, perfect teeth. Chrissy loved Devereaux.

Oh, just like a sister. Amazing. Loved her. She was certainly more soft-spoken and more shy than I am, but so kind and just the all the things that a young girl would love and we met her friends that were at grain hill and just awesome friends. A few months before Devereaux took that trip with her mom to Hawaii, she'd asked her sisters to stay the night with her at Sandra's. It was Sandra's turn to have her, but she'd also planned to host a conscious development meeting at the house, which made Devereux uncomfortable. She didn't want to be there alone. We loved Devereux so much.

My sister and I were like, absolutely, we'll go spend the night. Kristen figured it'd be your typical teenage sleepover. Junk food, manicures, movie marathons. It was anything but. So we went over to spend the night. I will never forget this. And we were in Debra's room. The house on Manning Lane in Dallas

was just a five-minute walk from Terry's. A big front yard with a paved walkway towards the door, large, sleepy oak trees hung over the walkway on either side. And inside the house, in the living room, all the people from CDBMS were there. From Deb's room in the back of the house, the girls could hear all of their voices. They were a little creeped out by the whole thing, but also curious. voices. They were a little creeped out by the whole thing, but also curious. Devereaux at one point said, you know, let's go see what they're doing. They agreed to go check it out. We literally crawled on the hallway floor and opened a door to peek through and they were all sitting in a circle. Men and women from

all walks of life were gathered around to listen to Terri. Preppy academics, long-haired hippies, young wide-eyed seekers, and seasoned spiritualists. And we couldn't see exactly, but we heard some discussion about how somebody's blood was evil. Wait, what? And that was enough for me.

I scurried on back to Devereux's room with my sister and we were so freaked out. Chrissy never forgot what she heard that night. It was over 40 years ago and it seared into her memory. How can someone's blood be evil? Why were these adults acting like that was a perfectly normal thing to be talking about? Chrissy could tell immediately

something wasn't kosher about the whole thing. And we never, ever went back again. Never went back to the house Dev shared with her mom, Sandra. For a sweet kid, Dev had to deal with some pretty heavy stuff. At her dad's, she had the stability of a big family, a two-parent household, but she still very much loved her mom. One thing I always noticed with her, she loved her daddy.

She thought he was the best. And I also saw in her a great desire and need to please her mother. And she had told me on an occasion, all she wanted was her mother's love. Chrissy told me that love seemed directed towards somebody else. I feel like she never felt like she had her mother's attention and her mother's love that most people would perceive as normal at the age that she was. And I think my mom filled in the gap a lot of that for her, but it was on more than one occasion. She said, I just wish my mom would do this with me,

or I just wish my mom would not be around these people so much or I just wish my mom would, you know, attend this or see this or I feel like she always felt like these people were more intrusive and demanding of her mother's attention than her own daughter. And as time wore on, Terry roped Sandra more and more into her group, conscious development of body, mind, and soul. Terry wanted her to help make and sell her jewelry, made of precious and semi-precious stones, that they believed to have special spiritual qualities. They would travel for days at a time, leaving Devereaux with the family nanny, Louise Watson.

Then Sandra invited Devereaux on the trip to Hawaii. It was a bit of a surprise, but here was a chance for mother and daughter to spend time together. Terry would be there too, but that didn't matter to Devereaux. Sandra had in fact paid for the trip, as a honeymoon present for Terry and her third husband, Ben Johnson. The invite put Chuck and Gail in a tricky spot. Chuck was very cautious. He did not like this, but Devereaux really wanted to go. She wanted to go with her mother. And here was Sandra doing what everyone noticed had been lacking,

spending quality time with her daughter. And they might have been doing weird stuff in the living room and talking about blood, but Debra wasn't involved in any of that, right? She had no undue influence from Terry Hoffman, as far as anyone knew. Chuck and Gail told her it was okay to go. Chuck and Gail told her it was okay to go.

Very shortly before they were to take off, I'll never forget this either, the doorbell rang, Chuck wasn't here, he was at work, and I went to answer the door and it was Debra. And I said, sweetheart, what are you doing here? And she said, she was over visiting her friend Carolyn. And since it was going to be so close that she was going to be leaving, she wanted to come over and give me a hug. And I was getting ready to go someplace that night with her father, so I invited her in and I brought her back into my bathroom because I was getting ready, and she sat there on the closed lid toilet, and we talked and we visited. And it was just very unusual for her to show up

at my front door unannounced or without her father picking her up. It was the last time Gail ever saw that young girl. The one she raised and loved was her own. I have remembered that often. She knew she was going to Hawaii soon, and she wanted to say goodbye. That night, Dev showed up unannounced to the house. She boarded a plane with her mother, Sandra Cleaver, and Terry Hoffman to Hawaii.

They'd be there for a week. They had gone for a picnic. February 25, 1979. The picnic by the beach at Wailupe Peninsula. It was clearly not a safe place to be swimming. And they went to the windward side of the island. And as it turns out, there were posters all over that beach marked,

do not enter the water, no swimming. It's the kind of detail Gail has played over and over again in her mind. Why would Sandra choose to take Devereux swimming there? Unless she knew it was dangerous and did it anyway. But Devereux and Sandra went out holding hands, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, which was Devereaux's favorite song from Wizard of Oz.

That long walk to the edge of the water towards a senseless tragedy. A senseless tragedy, the Cleaver family now believes, was no accident. Lynn Fairchild had heard his fiance Sandra's cries for help and alerted the fire department. Two people went out into the water that day and only one returned.

And then that night, with Devereux missing, the phone rang at Chuck and Gail's house. Gail answered and a woman was on the other end of the line. Wasn't Sandra. It was Terry Hoffman. See, we'd gotten the phone call at 1 o'clock in the morning. I answered the phone, and she asked for Chuck. And I said, who's calling?

And she said Terry Hoffman. She thought, why the hell was Terry Hoffman calling us? A long and terrible night of uncertainty followed. The next day, Chuck boarded the first plane to Hawaii in search of his daughter with his best friend, Gene Coker. He wouldn't let me go with him. Before boarding the plane, they got the word. Dev's body washed ashore.

Thank God had not been mutilated or eaten or anything like that because, oh my gosh, there's nothing worse than having your child missing and not knowing what in the world has happened to him. But she was found on the beach. Chuck arrived at the hospital by that afternoon, where Sandra was recovering. He said it was like the old Sandra when he was in that hospital room with her alone. And she was grieving and just kept saying over and over again, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. And so Chuck sat in the hospital room with his ex-wife.

All of his worst fears confirmed about letting his daughter go with Sandra and her weird friends on a vacation halfway across the world. How did they get to this point? A happy young couple once, a beautiful daughter, to this? For a moment, it seemed, despite the cavernous depths separating Chuck and Sandra from each other, that they would be able to grieve together, father and mother. That is, until Terry showed up. And he said when Terry then entered the hospital room, her whole demeanor changed.

That's right. I'll never... Yeah, I remember that. He said it was like a curtain came over her. She became a different person. Almost as if she couldn't show herself to her friend Terry in that moment. Couldn't appear to be the grieving mother she most certainly was. When Terry came in, she made some quick dismissive comments about their situation.

Chuck's best friend Gene was there too. He said a glaze came over Sandy's eyes. Communication was shut down after that. There was something weighing on Chuck's mind, a growing suspicion, a tangled mess of grief, fear and rage. He brought her back home to Dallas. And I guess it was on the same airplane as Sandra and Terry. His daughter's body in the cargo of the plane and a nine-hour flight to think about what had happened to her. Chuck knew he didn't have all the information yet,

but something wasn't right. He'd questioned why the trip was happening in the first place, and now this. Why did they choose to swim out there? And why had Sandra acted so strange when Terry came into the hospital room? Dev's body was transferred to the medical examiner in Dallas. The tox screen came up negative,

an autopsy showed no sign of struggle. Nothing strange. If someone had had a hand in Devereaux's death, it wasn't physical. She was then transported to a funeral home. Chuck wanted the girls to have closure, If someone had had a hand in Devereaux's death, it wasn't physical. She was then transported to a funeral home. Chuck wanted the girls to have closure, so he brought them all there to view Dev's body before she was cremated.

Gail remembers seeing her face like it was yesterday. There was still seaweed in her hair. But something altogether strange had happened while Chuck and Jean were in flight back to Honolulu. Gail got a call to the house. It was one of Terry Hoffman's children. They said they had a document they needed to show the family. A will.

Devereaux's will, a will that she had written that Chuck didn't know anything about. A couple of days after they'd been informed of the will, an unidentified woman entered a Dallas bank where Devereaux had an account and handed the teller the document. The woman was looking to make a withdrawal from the account

because, according to the will, this dead girl had given all of her money away to Terry Hoffman. Now Chuck and Gail knew there was no doubt in their minds what had happened to their daughter and there was nothing they could do about it. Why do you think it was so difficult to tie Terry to these deaths? Because there's no smoking gun. This season on Scary Terry, However, the string of death started in January of 1977. I go searching for answers.

I got through unscathed, mostly unscathed, but the rest of them, they just went down. Terry has already said she'll have my family killed, she'll have my children killed. A dozen people are dead. Their families allege that it was mind control and that Mrs. Hoffman had gotten them to drain their bank accounts and give her all their assets. How many more accidents would there have been? How many more accidental drownings? How many more people committing suicide, disappearing? Was Terry Hoffman the Charlie Manson you've never heard of?

I will be shocked if there are not more deaths than we know of. Unlock all episodes of Scary Terry ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of the show, but you'll get Binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts, all ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a Binge drop of a brand new series.

That's all episodes all at once. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple? Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. Scary Terry is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment. It was hosted and reported by me, Jonathan Hirsch.

Cooper Maul is our lead producer and co-reported this series with me. Catherine St. Louis is our story editor. I'm our executive producer. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. We use music from APM. Our associate producer is Zoe Kolkin. Our fact checker is Tracy Lee. Our production managers are Tamika Balanc-Galazny

and Sammy Allison. Our lawyers are Rachel Goldberg and Lauren Pagoni. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rosic, and Jamie Myers.