The Binge Cases: Scary Terri - I Am Rama | 5. Brenda

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

A young woman follows Rama to New York, and mysteriously vanishes, leaving behind many to wonder what happened. In this episode, people who knew and loved Brenda Kerber piece her story back together.�� If you have any information about the death of Brenda Kerber that wasn’t reflected in this episode, please contact the White Plains Police Department in New York at https://whiteplainspublicsafety.com/submit-a-tip/ or 914-422-6111.  A Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment production. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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A quick heads up, this episode deals with a number of difficult topics, specifically including suicide. Thank you for listening. It's January 28th, 2021. It's a chilly morning in White Plains, New York, about 25 miles north of Manhattan. And for the first time in over 20 years, Rama's name was in the news again.

New York government inspectors were waiting in the Mascout Reservoir, part of a study of the reservoir's bottom. And while doing that, they stumbled on something else, something long missing. A 1982 Ford Granada station wagon. The last time anyone had seen this car was 1989, over three decades earlier, when the car's owner was reported missing. She'd vanished, leaving everything behind. Credit cards, diaries, two kids. From interviews with her children, and after reading police reports,

an essay written by her parents, and news articles in Wired Magazine, the Washington Post, and the Daily Mail, we've come to learn the following about Brenda Kerber's life in the late 80s, and her disappearance. At the time, she'd gone to a number of Rama's seminars, but it was unclear whether she was a student of his. She had been among those who had followed him

all the way across the country, and in her case, she'd given up almost everything to make that journey. There was speculation that they were connected, her devotion to Rama and her disappearance. But over 30 years, no one really knew what happened to the owner of that 82 Granada. Could she still be alive? Did she start a new life? The loudest question of all, from the news reports and from her family, was,

did her disappearance have anything to do with Rama? Decades passed, and the questions remained very much alive. Her case, though, had been deemed cold by the White Plains investigators who'd first looked into her disappearance. That is, though, had been deemed cold by the White Plains investigators who'd first looked into her disappearance. That is, until now. I do believe that somebody knows something out there about her final day or days, and that part nags at me. But in January of this year, her family finally got some closure. Police didn't just find her car inside. They found the woman who vanished with it. Her name was Brenda Kerber.

And in this episode, we're going to try to find out what happened to her. I'm Jonathan Hirsch from Neon Hum and Smokescreen. This is I Am Rama, Chapter 5, Brenda. This is I Am Rama, Chapter 5, Brenda. When Brenda's body was found, I went in search of the people I'd imagined would want the answers most about her disappearance. The people who could hopefully bring me answers, too. Dave and Shannon, her kids. We had animals at the house. We had animals at the house. We had ducks. And she was always trying to bring in some kind of spiritual element to anything, whether it was nature.

I mean, she really liked to go hiking. Brenda divorced her first husband when Shannon was pretty young. She eventually remarried and had Dave when Shannon was eight years old. There was a time when we were macrobiotic. And I don't think I knew what that was. All I knew is I felt like all we ate was brown rice and vegetables. Yeah, I was not allowed to have chocolate. I was only allowed to have carob.

And, you know, you couldn't have ice cream. You could have frozen yogurt pops. Frozen yogurt pops. Yuck. Anyway, Grants Pass is where they lived at the time. It was an interesting place. I always describe Oregon as a land of hippies and survivalists and rednecks kind of peacefully coexisting for the most part. It was a town that had, you know, two main streets that people would go cruising up and down.

It felt like it was a capsule of the 1950s in both the best and the worst ways. It was the kind of area where large-scale social experiments could take place, even if most of the locals wanted nothing to do with it. The compound where I lived as a teenager in Northern California possessed similar social and economic dynamics. I related a lot to Shannon and Dave's story, it turns out. In the Kerber family, Brenda stood out.

She was the free spirit, outgoing, curious, arguably flighty. She was eager to embrace a new age lifestyle. You know, when she was younger, she was academically very curious. She was very bookish. She liked to learn things, know things, and have experiences. So much so that it sometimes backfired. You know, she was oftentimes a little bit gullible. What her kids remember so many years later is the good side of it all.

There was just a real sense of openness on her part to following, seeking. She needed something. She was always searching. Brenda's open-minded nature didn't exactly jive with her husband's. He was more conservative, a salt-of-the-earth homebody type. Whatever the reason, they fought a lot.

Just wasn't working. Eventually, they divorced. Shannon was in high school, old enough to live a more independent life, but Dave, about eight at the time, remembers watching his mom emerge from the grief of losing another marriage, trying to move on. Every Sunday, Brenda would take Dave to some sort of new church for Sunday school. Sometimes Catholic, sometimes Protestant, both traditional and non-traditional. Brenda, true to her nature, was always seeking. They eventually settled on one church in Grants Pass. Where my mom was recruited into following Frederick Lenz.

Frederick Lenz, Rama. Someone was talking of Rama all the way in Oregon, at a place called the Church of Religious Science. Rama all the way in Oregon at a place called the Church of Religious Science. It was, as best as I can tell, 1984 when all of this was happening. I've talked to many of his students from those days, and to the best of my understanding, while Brenda and Dave were hearing about Rama in Oregon, most of Rama's students were in LA, Boston, or Colorado. So what was happening in Grant's past then? Brenda never actually met Rama in the town where she lived, but she heard about him, learned about him, a lot, from someone else.

At that point, she had met Tony Chester at this sort of church of science. At some point in 1984, Dave says Tony Chester became involved in their mom's life. And once he did, he was a fixture. You know, my sense was that Tony was recruiting on behalf of Frederick Lenz. He was bringing people into the group. But it didn't take long for Tony to take a bigger role in Brenda's life. And then soon, it became very clear that they were involved in a romantic relationship. And that became very intense. Intense. It's a word that you might not have used up to this point to describe Brenda,

but this getting involved with Tony changed that. To Shannon and Dave, at least, this was a turning point. This was the moment their mom started to disappear. Gradually, at first. They were skeptical about their mom's boyfriend from the beginning. He drove a yellow Honda Prelude. Red flag. There was something very midlife crisis about him, too.

There was something a little too warm and effusive and glowy about him, that there was a kind of shystery, con artistry about him. I remember as a kid, you know, not liking him one bit, and I couldn't figure out why. I just didn't trust him. You know, I mean, this is just a terrible description, but my first thought of him was he was just this flaccid person. He was just this spiritual blob

that she seemed to really be enamored with. Brenda was spending a lot of time with Tony and Dave was spending a lot of time with Tony and Dave was spending a lot of time away from his mom. So there's a lot he didn't know about Tony and Brenda's relationship. What I do know, Tony

is how Brenda first learned about Rama. Still, a lot of the particulars of this part of Brenda's story are hazy to Shannon and Dave. Early on, I tried to email Tony, but didn't hear back. Despite the haziness, one thing was abundantly clear. Brenda wanted to study with Rama.

And after Tony lost his job at the church in Grants Pass and left town, Brenda decided she was going to get out of town too. In the fall of 1985, she left Oregon and moved south

to Northern California, near one of the places that Rama taught. We didn't have money, but we were living in Menlo Park, which, you know, if anyone knows that part of the Bay Area, Menlo-Atherton is one of the most affluent communities in the United States. It was a hard transition, Dave remembers. We rented out rooms because we couldn't afford a full house down there. They were just trying to get by. Brenda got a job at Stanford University nearby,

working for a professor who worked in disease prevention research, and got a second job too. Along with rent, Brenda was also trying to make more money to keep up with the ever-increasing cost of learning from Rama, to be able to afford the seminars, the meditations. And Dave, even at that young age, recognized something about his mom's priorities. of learning from Rama to be able to afford the seminars, the meditations. And Dave, even at that young age, recognized something about his mom's priorities.

My experience of, you know, once I started to see that my mom was on this journey is I made myself smaller and smaller. Dave would pack his own lunches, do his own laundry, get homework help from his neighbor. The only time I ever had to come to my mom is like we need to go to the grocery store like my shoes have holes in them things like that and i always felt terrible asking for anything from her because i knew that it was less

money that she would have to spend on the cult dave says it was a wholesale change. Like she'd become a different person, withdrawn. She became very sort of in her own world, almost as if I didn't recognize her anymore in a lot of ways. And I remember feeling very much that I was a weight on her, that if I were not there, she could go seek the things she wanted to seek. I was a pretty sensitive kid and could understand certain things. And I knew that I needed to take care of myself because she was on this journey and kids weren't part of that journey. And it's something I've been thinking about a lot, a major difference, what it meant to grow up when your mom is a student of Ramas,

and what it meant for me to grow up with parents who followed Adida. Because for me, if your parents were in Adidam, so are you. My childhood was Adida. That was my community and where I made friends my age. Ramas group wasn't like that. My mom made it very clear that, you know, I was not sort of on this journey with her. I was not welcome in. I was kept separate. There were signs that Brenda was conflicted, that she still wanted kids in her life in some way. At night, she'd try to get Dave to meditate next to her, and she confided in Dave, treated him more like a confidant than a son. It was only later,

when Dave was an adult, that he'd fully understand what was going on for Brenda at the time. She desperately wanted her family to give her the sign-off to acknowledge that what she was doing was okay, and that they supported it wholesale. You know, I've read her diary entries, and she was very, very upset that her dad and her mom just couldn't understand what she was doing and that ultimately, because they couldn't understand it, they couldn't be in her life anymore. Brenda was spinning out, struggling to get affirmation from her parents.

These were problems Dave was not equipped to deal with. And she would share, you know, adult problems with me that I remember as a kid thinking, I have no idea what to say to this. This is not for me. It felt so unnatural. It felt so desperate. And I just remember feeling deeply, deeply uncomfortable and having no idea how to help my mom,

who was clearly in some kind of trouble. Trouble that Dave could only watch. Until one day, that trouble could separate Dave from his mom. Hi everyone, this is Jonathan Van Ness. Clean water, fresh air, our health. Electricity, honey. We tend to take for granted the things that matter most, like the separation of church and state. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been

on the front lines defending your freedom to live and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Most folks don't see how church-state separation affects our daily lives until that freedom is gone. The separation between church and state covers many core freedoms like civil rights for LGBTQIA plus people, women and racial slash religious minorities, or reproductive justice and freedom. But those rights are not a given.

Every day, Americans United works at the state and federal level to make sure these freedoms and more are protected for every American to enjoy and benefit from. They can't do this alone though. Join Americans United for separation of church and state and growing the movement because church-state separation protects everyone. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more and get involved at au.org slash curious. Hi everyone, this is Jonathan Van Ness. Clean water, fresh air, our health. Electricity, honey.

We tend to take for granted the things that matter most, like the separation of church and state. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been on the front lines defending your freedom to live and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Most folks don't see how church-state separation affects our daily lives until that freedom is gone. The separation between church and state

covers many core freedoms like civil rights for LGBTQIA plus people, women, and racial slash religious minorities, or reproductive justice and freedom. But those rights are not a given. Every day, Americans United works at the state and federal level to make sure these freedoms and more are protected for every American to enjoy and benefit from. They can't do this alone, though. Join Americans United for separation of church and state and growing the movement because church-state separation protects everyone. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more and get involved at au.org slash curious. Brenda struggled to make ends meet.

She wasn't skilled at computer programming and she still had a kid living with her. So when I imagined Brenda hearing sometime in late 1988 that Rama was leaving for New York, I don't know whether to imagine excitement or dread. Was she going to pursue this thing and go all in? Or was she going to try and be a mom and live this sort of normal life? Brenda made a call.

She said, I'm moving to New York to follow Frederick Lenz. I want you to decide if you want to come along with me or if you want to go live with your dad, which is a very terrible thing to do to a kid. But I knew at that point that I was actually a financial burden to her. that I was actually a financial burden to her. You know, I was about 12 at the time, and money became really, really, really tight. Dave was much closer to his mom than his dad, but he knew she couldn't really take care of him anymore.

It was really at that point that I knew I was kind of losing my mom. So Dave said goodbye to Brenda and moved to Oregon to live with his dad. And so in 1989, Brenda packed up the station wagon and drove to New York. And this is more or less where Dave and Shannon lost track of their mom. There were a few phone calls that spring and Shannon visited Brenda once in New York, too. When I saw her in New York, she seemed vacant. And I guess as an adult reflecting on that, what I would call that would be she seemed depressed.

Brenda's parents also visited and later wrote about that trip, another account of Brenda seeming like a different person altogether, telling them they wouldn't be hearing from her. Brenda cut off her family in 1989. All they had to go on were some of the diaries from that year. And that's almost all I had to go on, too, for this part of the story. Until pretty late in the process, I decided to try contacting the one person

who knew more than anyone else about Brenda's time in New York one last time. I'd reached out to Tony Chester earlier, like I said. He didn't respond. This time, in late April, Tony wrote back and agreed to talk to us. Soon after, I called him up. I'm doing good.

Doing all right. Tony's memories of Brenda lined up pretty well with what Dave and Shannon told us. Soon after, I called him up. I'm doing good. Doing all right. Tony's memories of Brenda lined up pretty well with what Dave and Shannon told us, though Tony had a lot more to say about his relationship with Brenda. Before they started dating, Brenda had been attending Tony's meditation classes. When Tony went through a breakup, Brenda took it upon herself to cheer him up. through a breakup, Brenda took it upon herself to cheer him up. And she came over one afternoon and said, let's go. She had two inflatable kayaks. And so we went rafting on the road and then we had dinner. And that turned into several dates, which ended up in a relationship. But it was really, she was really quite remarkable in a lot of ways. Tony and Brenda began to date,

and Brenda continued to study meditation with him and attend his church services. But there is something we should clarify here about how Brenda became interested in Rama. At the time, Tony himself wasn't actually a student of Rama's. He had been in the early 80s for a little while, but Rama dismissed him at some point. During that time when Rama let go of a number of students, Tony calls this the first Lakshmi purge. Lakshmi, you'll remember, was what the group was called back in those days. I was just astonished that I was kicked out because I really kept myself pretty clean. Still, despite being purged, Tony continued to hold Rama in high regard.

Nothing had changed, but my connection with Rama was still there. It was kind of an amazing thing to have a connection with an enlightened teacher like that. Tony even took Brenda and a few other students on trips to hear some of Rama's public lectures in LA and the Bay Area. That's how Brenda got into Rama. And when she was in Northern California, Rama announced he was moving to New York and there was an opportunity to apply to become a student. That's when Brenda decided it was time to head east. Tony decided to go too, even though he says it wasn't because of Rama. I was teaching. I didn't need to have, you know, I didn't need a teacher anymore. The logic behind Tony's move includes a bit of magical thinking.

He says it wasn't about Rama. It was his soul that was telling him to go. I knew I had to go to New York. I did not want to go to New York, but I knew I had to. He helped Brenda pack her things and then drove another student's van for her. Tony and Brenda caravaned to New York and soon after their arrival, Rama accepted them both as students. Up until now, I had heard that Brenda was not a student. Attending lectures maybe, but not formally involved. But according to Tony, he and Brenda were in the group. But pretty quickly, he was no longer in with Brenda. She said, I don't think we should continue our physical relationship.

And I went, oh, okay. Still they spent time together. All of us went to NYU together to learn computer science because that's the way you made money back in those days. That spring in New York, Brenda landed a good job as a secretary for a firm on Madison Avenue. And she was working under the CEO. She was the main person.

During this time, Brenda was still in touch with her family. Phone calls to Dave, visits from Shannon and her parents, but they all say that Brenda was different, not herself. From talking to Dave and Shannon and reading an essay that Brenda's parents wrote, it's clear to me that they felt that Brenda was slowly cutting them off after arriving in New York, eventually stopped speaking to them.

She was focused on her new life, focused on Rama. Dave and Shannon have read some of Brenda's diaries from that time. Here's Dave. She had essentially bet it all, and it was not going well. And Frederick Lenz, according to her diaries, was threatening to kick her out of the group because she wasn't progressing in her spiritual program, i.e. she wasn't bringing in enough money. The exact timing is hard to reconstruct precisely, but according to Tony, things were going well,

at least for a little bit. Brenda liked her executive secretary job and even completed her computer programming course. We graduated and she was able to she was able to immediately get good job offers. She got a job offer, the first one that was really paid pretty good, I think, but it was with Orion Pictures, as I recall. That, Tony said, is when things turned. Immediately upon getting in her cubicle, her boss started making demands on her and yelling at her and putting her down. And she would come to me very distraught. She says, she took a cut and pay from her job as

an executive secretary to take this computer job. And here this guy's yelling at her, he's screaming at her, he's making fun of her. And I told her, I says, quit it. Don't go to that job. Get another one. But she was so intent on being successful that she wouldn't do it. She just stayed with it. And then come to find out, after two months of abuse, he pulled her in front of everyone, yelled at her, put her down, and fired her. And that's when she collapsed. Under the pressure, Tony says Brenda kind of broke. She cut off contact with Tony for a while, but then reappeared.

It's a story Tony told that I almost didn't share here, but it's important because it's the last first-person account we have of Brenda alive. I should say the next two minutes include some material about a sexual experience between Tony and Brenda that I find difficult to listen to. If you'd rather not hear that story, please fast forward. Okay, so one day, according to Tony, Brenda showed up at the restaurant where he worked as a waiter. She demanded that he make up an excuse and leave work for the day. Brenda started telling Tony about how Rama would come to her in her dreams and tell her things. Things like she should have sex with other people as a conduit to having sex with Rama.

Tony says he knew that Brenda wasn't totally there. She was not quite right. Still, Tony says he decided to fake an illness to get the time off of work and go out with Brenda. And then go home with her. As he tells it, even though he knew she was not in her right mind, they had sex. Spent the night together. And then she got up the next morning and left. Yeah.

I mean, because you described like making, you know, having sex with her during that time. I mean, I'm just wondering if you were like, maybe I shouldn't, maybe this person needs some help or. I'm not going to play his response, but I'll tell you, it did make me uncomfortable. It felt glib, almost like a teenage boy bragging in a locker room to his friends. Tony does believe that Rama was contacting Brenda through her dreams. He claims he even planned to confront Rama about it. But I had determined that at the

next meeting, I was going to grab her by the hand and take her up and have, I was going to ask Rama, are you visiting her on the dream plane and telling her to do these things? Tony wouldn't get that chance. She didn't show up to the meeting. Nobody heard from her. And Brenda just disappeared.

As best I can tell, nobody ever saw her again. A little while later, sometime in the second week of October, Brenda's landlord reported her missing. Inside her apartment, she had left her wallet and IDs, and two diaries, the ones Dave and Shannon have now. For them, the next part is a blur. You know, I found out from my grandma. So that's her mom.

And we went out to, I think, White Plains to meet with the detective and do all of this. And, you know, I was really kind of tagging along with my grandmother who was leading it. I think it was pretty overwhelming to me. There was a search for a while. According to police reports, Brenda's parents hired private detectives and took out newspaper ads offering a thousand dollar reward. Her dad talked to the Washington Post and he had an opinion. He thought Rama had something to do with his daughter's disappearance. He told reporters he thought Rama was, quote, a son of a bitch, any way you look at it. Eventually, the search was called off. Brenda was gone.

Tony approached Rama about Brenda's disappearance after she'd been gone a while. Rama told me, he said, you've got to let her go. He said, I don't pick her up on the earth plane and I would not believe it. I couldn't just let her go. Rama said he was taking care of her on another plane, like in some other spiritual dimension. Tony struggled with that.

I would not believe that she was dead. For 32 years, every time I'd go through an airport or any crowded place, I would look for her. For 32 years. And I can't imagine what her mother and father or her children went through. This was a nightmare. 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.

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It's coming back. So join us every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. Shannon began seeing a therapist who helped her learn to start dealing with her mom's disappearance. She had a small memorial for Brenda,

but Dave tucked it away for half a decade until college. I had to sit with myself and all of that stuff came out. And I went to a therapist for the first time to actually figure out what was wrong with me. I was having all these emotions and I didn't know why I was having these emotions. And it took a therapist all of 10 minutes to figure out what was going on.

Over time, they both tried to piece it all together. Shannon shared her theory of Brenda with me. I'd like to say I have a vision of my mom as a seeker all her life, wanting to find meaning, and that may be very true. wanting to find meeting and that may be very true and at the same time I cycle a lot of this stuff all the way back to her having very unmet needs from the beginning so I think you know parenting was imposed on her she got pregnant as a high school student right before she was due to, you know, head off to college. That was her plan.

The baby Shannon's talking about here, it's Shannon. So her life was derailed from the beginning. They didn't know for sure, but over time, both Dave and Shannon came to the same conclusion. I wasn't particularly surprised that she was gone. Because she was already gone slowly over the three and a half, four years before that. She was slowly disappearing from me. Still, it's not hard to try and find someone to blame. And that's the thing about Brenda's story.

We don't really know who the bad guy was. It's easy to look at Tony first. Police reports and Tony himself confirm that he was questioned after her disappearance. There's also a version of events that Tony's story backs up, that Brenda had a kind of twisted, one-way romantic attachment to Rama. We don't have Brenda's diaries, but according to the Washington Post, police discovered a diary after Brenda's disappearance that included a few lines, including this one about Rama. It reads, Rama is my true love. He makes me feel like an ass. And then there's this one. This is the end

of the fairy tale. Good night. But there's also a third version, really the core of Shannon's theory, where basically Brenda was trying to make up for lost time, but didn't have the tools to make it in the group she selected on her new chosen path to success. And that it brought out an anxiety, a depression, and drove her away from her family to her own death. I wonder if she was more isolated than even some of the rest of the group members. Shannon and Dave agree Rama's group wasn't right for Brenda. She found herself in a world where she didn't fit in. She didn't have the education, the particular background area of expertise to sort of have success in that group.

If, you know, he was sort of doing, you know, the way that a lot of people who are former members who fondly remember Lens is that they got a lot from it, that it really helped their professional experience, particularly in the tech industry. And my mom's experience was, I think she always felt like she didn't really belong. And she was sort of a fake in a lot of ways and was hustling to try and figure out the game and wasn't particularly skilled at it. Whatever story you choose to believe

about Brenda's last few years, though, there does seem to be a particularly thick cloud around her final days, even after I talked to Tony Chester. I mean, was Brenda really that isolated? Did nobody know she was on the brink of suicide? Dave, for one, doesn't buy it. I still do believe that the cult knew about it, though.

In my gut, I feel like either somebody knew that she committed suicide. I can't imagine her just going and not leaving a letter of some form. I do believe that somebody knows something out there about her final day or days. And that part nags at me and will continue to nag at me. Here's Tony again. We thought maybe she just ran away.

And the police detective that interviewed me, he said that people can run away and you don't see them for 20 years and then they show up. She just ran away. And the police detective that interviewed me, he said that people can run away and you don't see them for 20 years, and then they show up. I was always out there. I didn't change my name to my spiritual name for many, many years. I just put out Tony Chester because I wanted her to see me. I wanted her to find me.

Tony doesn't blame Brenda's parents for having felt suspicious towards him. All they know is that their daughter ran off with this strange teacher and then disappeared. I understand it. And I don't know what else I could say about that other than I'm very sorry for their pain. I have my own pain on this. I loved her. On that chilly Tuesday morning in January 2021, a team of police divers pulled the 1982 Ford Granada station wagon out of the Mascout Reservoir. After identifying the car, the authorities called the family. We have discovered your mother's car

and that we've sent a robot down there and it is, in fact, your mom's car and we're going to pull it up and we expect to find her remains. And then, you know, a few days later that they did find remains that were identified as my mom. I was glad mostly to be able to have her remains in a place in a way I would want them to be. But in terms of being surprised by it, no. None of it was a surprise. None of it was shocking. None of it felt like closure.

It just felt like, oh, this is kind of what I had expected all along. Police later ruled it a suicide. The recovery also led to some conversations within the family and revealed some information that was new to Shannon and Dave. The day Brenda went missing, she had placed a call to her work. I had to say, laugh, she would call in to say she wasn't coming into work

because she was going to go kill herself. I mean, she would do that. So I was like, wow. There was one other piece of new information that Shannon's aunt passed on. She was picked up maybe in the middle of the night, like early, early in the morning, one, two in the morning. And then again, a second time that same day. And that she was incoherent, almost as if she were on drugs. incoherent, almost as if she were on drugs.

In her last day, Brenda Kerver seemed both high on drugs and responsible enough to call in sick to her work. And then, as far as we know, she drove that 82 Ford Granada into the Mascout Reservoir and would never be heard from again. You know, my hope is that for people maybe hearing this or listening to this who have family members who are dabbling in some of that and they're feeling as though there's a disconnect, it's not their place maybe to say something, that they would feel encouraged to do so.

My mom was, you mom was a fairly normal person, and through some stuff that seemed fairly harmless at first, got sucked in very quickly to a world that led to her demise. I do think there is a great possibility that there are people out there or a person out there who knows more information that might help our family

come to an understanding. I would love for that to happen. If somebody knows, reach out to the White Plains Police Department. Rama presented people with a dream, with an idea of what they could be. Enlightened, successful, tech-savvy. I've heard that from some of his

most devoted students, he didn't want a lot of students. He wanted the right students. And being a student was a high hurdle to clear, one that seemingly just got steeper as the years went on. What should we expect of someone in Rama's shoes? Or maybe others in Brenda's life who knew her should have taken more responsibility.

Something I wonder about when I think about Brenda. And also when I think about the other students' deaths or disappearance that the press connected to Rama. Like Donald Cole, an early Rama student, died by suicide in 1984, Malibu, left a suicide note that addressed Rama. Or Jack Kukulin, found dead in his Pacific Palisades home of a heroin morphine overdose. According to the medical examiner, his death was ruled an accident. Another student, Patty Hammond, went missing in Northern Virginia around the same time Brenda did in the late 80s, according to the Washington Post and Wired magazine. As far as I know, she was never found.

We weren't able to independently verify that a woman named Patty Hammond went missing. To be clear, authorities never linked Rama to these deaths and disappearances, and he wasn't charged in any of these cases. But articles around the time connected Rama to these stories, making them part of a public narrative surrounding him. In the end, it's hard to know whether anyone is to blame for Brenda's death. But that doesn't change the fact that after Rama and Tony became part of her life, she went downhill. And Shannon and Dave would lose their mom twice, once to obsession, and then to suicide. Brenda's parents held out hope that she was alive, tried to find her. Even when it made sense to accept her as gone and to move on, they couldn't accept it and died some

years ago without getting any kind of closure, before they could find out what happened to their daughter, before they could bring her home. Shannon and Dave are trying, in a way, to right that. We're going to go reunite their ashes and then spread the remainder of my mom's ashes out at the Oregon coast, which was, you know, probably her favorite place to be. So I think, you know, that will provide some closure for our family. And, you know, actually the conversations around all of it have actually reintegrated some aspects of our family that's been really, really wonderful. So there's been a lot of good that's come of it, but I don't think it changes any of our expectations about what we thought we would find. If you have any information about the death of Brenda Kerber

that wasn't reflected in this episode, please contact the White Plains Police Department in New York. There's a link to their website in the show notes of this episode. I Am Rama is a Neon Hum original podcast reported and produced by Kate Mishkin and me, Jonathan Hirsch. Our editor is Vikram Patel. Catherine St. Louis is our executive editor. And I'm the executive producer of the show.

Follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Jonathan I. Hirsch. I'll be sharing tons of source material, photos, and other stuff related to our work on the series. So be sure to check it out. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Justin Klosko is our fact checker. Our production manager is Sammy Allison. So be sure to check it out. music, and you can even listen on your Amazon Alexa simply by saying, Alexa, play the podcast Smokescreen I Am Rama. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Thanks for listening.