True Crime Campfire - Demon in Disguise: The Cult at Angels Landing

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

Most of us go looking, at one point or another in our lives, for something…more. Something to give us a purpose. Make us feel like we belong here. For some of us, it’s friends or family. For some, it’s art, or music, or helping people. But then, some of us take a wrong turn on that quest for fulfillment. Come up against just the right kind of charismatic personality—one who makes us feel loved, needed, special…chosen…and we can lose our compass. It’s scary, how much sway one person can have over another. And how quickly we can give up our own sense of reality for somebody else’s dark vision. Sources:NBC's Dateline: Angels and DemonsOxygen's "Deadly Cults," Episode "Angels Landing"Investigation Discovery's "My Murder Story," Episode "The Devil's Angels"https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2015/02/20/358230.htmFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Most of us go looking at one point or another in our lives for something more. Something to give us a purpose. Make us feel like we belong here. For some of us, it's friends or family. For some, it's art or music or helping people. But then, some of us take a wrong turn on that quest for fulfillment, come up against just the right kind of charismatic personality, one who makes us feel loved, needed, special, chosen. And we can lose our compass. It's scary how much sway one person can have over another, and how quickly we can give up our own sense of reality for somebody else's dark vision. This is Demon in disguise, the cult at Angels Landing. So, campers, we're in Wichita, Kansas, 2003. Detective Ron Goodwin of the Sedgwick County PD got an intriguing tip.

The tipster didn't see. say a whole lot, just that Goodwin should look into a guy named Lou Castro and a place called Angels Landing. Angels Landing turned out to be a sort of compound just north of Wichita. Several families had built homes there, million-dollar homes, and seemed to live together as a sort of collective. None of them were Wichita natives, and they clearly had a shitload of money. In addition to the fancy houses, the people at Angels Landing had a collection of expensive cars, corvettes, range rovers, Dodge Vipers. The kids had their own horses. They flew pricey model airplanes.

So we're talking about well-to-do folks here, but the thing was there was no obvious source for all that money. Now, that campers is a red flag for a detective, especially one with experience in narcotics like Detective Goodwin. The whole thing smacked of drug money. Yeah, money doesn't just come out of nowhere, so investigators look for money that appears to just exist for no reason. If a forensic accountant looked at my bank account,

account, for example, they'd probably be confused with how much yarn, ethically sourced animal bones and anime merch I buy. But the source of that money is traceable, so they wouldn't be concerned. I'm not going to necessarily agree with you that they wouldn't be concerned. Ethically sourced animal bones, you said. It's like peeling onion with you. Just one fascinating layer after another. Anywho, so Detective Goodwin's spidey senses were on instant alert and he started Diggin. On paper, the homes and acreage at Angel's Landing were in the name of a woman named Patricia Hughes, but the scuttlebutt around town was that the leader of the group was this guy Lou Castro, the one the tipster had mentioned. Castro was flashy, driving around town in his

zippy little sports cars, sometimes giving a lavish donation to the city, and nobody seemed to know where he'd come from. And another odd thing, all those expensive cars had vanity plates, and they all said angel, angel one, angel two, all the way up to angel eight, angels landing. What was the angel thing about? Detective Goodwin started to feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up a little bit. There was something kind of culty about the whole thing. He didn't have any proof of that, obviously. It was just a feeling.

You know, it's very vindicating to learn that our opinions on vanity plates are supported by law enforcement. Yeah, definitely. But let's put a pen in that for a bit and talk about a couple of kids named Sarah and Emily. In 2001, Sarah and Emily were 16 and 10 when their mom, Jennifer Hudson, met Lou Castro. Jennifer was a real estate agent. She met Lou and his best friend Patricia Hughes when they came to her for help finding a parcel of land outside Wichita. They and some of their friends wanted to build homes there together. Jennifer was fascinated by Lou and Patricia, or Trish, pretty much from day one.

and soon their relationship progressed from business to friendship. And then one afternoon, driving Sarah and Emily home from school, Jennifer suddenly said, Hey, so what do you think of Lou? Don't you think he's pretty special? Emily said, sure, you seem nice. And then Mom Jennifer launched into a bizarre speech. Lou was very special, she told them. In fact, he was a seer.

Which meant he could tell the future. He could heal people and animals. He could even bring people back from the dead. Why could he do all this stuff? Well, Lou wasn't really human. He was an angel. And Lou Castro was just his current body. Now, Jennifer had always believed in angels,

and she'd always taught Sarah and Emily that they were real and that they lived among us humans to watch over and protect us. She'd say, angels are living among us. So the stuff about her new friend Lou was surprising, You know, not exactly what you'd expect to come out of your mom's mouth as she's driving you home from school. But it wasn't completely out of character for her. And when you're a kid, you tend to believe whatever the adults in your life tell you. So Sarah and Emily were skeptical at first, but when they saw how completely their mom accepted Lou's powers, they came to accept it too.

And I mean, when you're a kid, what could be cooler than being friends with a legit angel? It would be like knowing Superman or something. Absolutely. Jennifer wrote in her diary about her growing fascination and friendship with Lou. She said, The first time I met Trish, Brian, and Lou, their innocence, trust of people in situations was a little alarming to me. I began to sense that I needed to watch out for them more than I did for other people.

It was like I developed an instant bond or connection with my sole purpose being their protector. Brian was Trish's husband, by the way. So when Lou and Trish invited Jennifer to move to the new compound with them, she was enthralled with the idea, especially since they were calling it Angel's Landing. So Jennifer divorced her husband, packed up her girls, and followed her new Guardian Angel. God. You know, this is obviously an extreme case, but you'd be surprised how often people just lose their damn minds and do shit like this. I don't know if it's a midlife thing.

Like, when we were talking about this earlier, it didn't sound like you'd had anybody go quite off the rails like this in your life. But give it like about 10 or 12 years, and I'm telling you, I personally have. known several people who, after a lifetime of just being perfectly normal, non-bug-nuts individuals suddenly up and did shit like, for example, secretly quit their job and leave their wife of 15 years to go start a new life as a yogi. And this dude had barely even done yoga. Like, it's not something he was practicing in his entire life. It's just the weirdest shit I've ever seen. He just randomly decided this is what he was going to do with his life. Or get so caught up in a multi-level marketing scheme

that they alienate all their friends and blow their life-saving secretly again behind the husband's back on materials. This one has happened to people I know. That's not... Yeah, those MLMs are like... That's how they get you. Don't get us started. Randomly decide their husband must be cheating on them with one

of their friends, which he absolutely wasn't, and demanded divorce with like zero evidence. Decide out of nowhere that they want to become a professional dominatrix and have an open marriage, just all kinds of wild stuff. And you say, I'm an onion. You have all these crazy friends.

I said they were friends. I said they were people I know. Okay, that's fair. But that's fair enough, yes. Jennifer's husband was baffled and devastated. And he didn't want to be separated from his daughters, so he packed up too and moved to a house not far away from Angel's Landing. For Jennifer, this was a new beginning, a chance to be part of something magical and special. She had a ready-made new family, too.

She wrote in her diary. Trish used to say, you can't choose your family, but that's what we did. You could come with us. I thought she must be joking, but I was amazed at myself because that's exactly what I was thinking as I stared at each one of them. For Sarah, the 16-year-old, it was all a little less romantic. She mistrusted Lou in the beginning. She felt like he was trying too hard to win the kids over. And just, hey, like a note, perhaps create an environment where your kids feel comfortable,

telling you when they don't like someone, their voices matter too. Yeah, and, you know, it reminds me a lot of Karen Reinerd in season one, the 11-year-old who immediately figured out that her mom's new boyfriend, Bill Bradfield, was a phony. I mean, sometimes kids can be pretty perceptive. Yeah, they're not quite socialized in shutting down the alarm bells. It's an important tool for kids to have, and it's a pity that Sarah didn't feel like she could tell her mom. But if Lou didn't win Sarah over right away, both the girls' adult.

adored his best buddy Trish. And it was quickly obvious that Trish was sort of the head mom of the compound. She and her husband Brian were fun, super friendly, and social. And Trish was a born nurturer. She'd been close with Lou since they were kids. And if anybody had doubts about Lou's claims, that he was an angel, that he was a thousand years old, that he had the ability to predict when you were going to die and bring you back afterwards if he wanted, Trish would reassure them. She'd witnessed Lou's powers. firsthand. Trish told Sarah that Lou had died once and come back to life. She said she'd seen him bring animals back, too. Sarah might not have liked Lou much, but she loved Trish. If Trish said it,

it had to be true. So because of the women she loved and trusted, her mom, and her new surrogate mom, Trish, Sarah tamped down on that little voice in her gut that told her that Lou was bad news. We do this all the time, and we usually come to regret it. Yeah, never trust anyone that tells you they know when you're going to die, because either they're lying or they're plotting something. Yep. And there were perks to living at Angel's Landing. Lou threw a lot of money around.

Their new house, and the houses where Lou, Trish, and Brian lived were amazing. They had a big, beautiful swimming pool. Everybody had fancy cars. The kids got literally anything they wanted. When Emily asked for a horse for her birthday, not really expecting to get it, she got three. Wow. Who gets three horses for their birthday at 11? Holy shit.

Little Katie is just so green with jealousy right now. And there were puppies and kittens to play with two and ATVs to ride and lose state of the art and bottle planes. Trish and Brian and their baby daughter weren't the only other folks at Angels Landing either. There was also Dave Quiring, a big teddy bear of a guy who worked in construction. He'd met Brian at work, and Brian had invited him to a barbecue at the compound. They had lots of barbecues. David met Lou and Trish and hit it off with everybody. It was just what Dave was looking for at the time.

His wife had died recently, and he hated being alone, so when Lou invited him to move to the landing, he was only too glad to go. See, Lou targeted people with vulnerabilities like that. People who were lonely like Dave, people whose marriages were in the process. of ending like Jennifer. And he also provided for them financially, so they would be less likely to want to leave. And I mean, life was pretty much a non-stop party at Angels Landing.

The adults threw lots of big, extravagant shindigs with lots of drinking and music, while the older kids watched the younger ones. They'd invite people from around town. Even a couple of local cops became regulars. In fact, Lou seemed to court the local police. At one point, he donated $19,000 for a new police vehicle. He got a ton of kudos from the city council for that one.

But as we all know, campers ain't no such thing as a free lunch. And each new member of Angels Landing would eventually find out that there was a price to be paid for every bit of Lou's generosity. On June 26, 2003, Lou sent teenage Sarah to go wait for him at a car dealership so they could buy yet another new car. Everybody in the compound had the car dealership owner's number on speed dial. The guy always started salivating at the sight of Lou. So Sarah and Lou had just met up at the dealership when Sarah's cell phone rang.

It was 11-year-old Emily, and she was hysterical. She said, you have to get home right now. Trish fell in the pool. Sarah rushed home to a nightmare. Police and paramedics were already there, and Emily was in tears holding on to Trish's toddler daughter. Trish was dead. Emily said it happened so fast. The little toddler had fallen into the pool, and when Trish ran down the pool steps to try to save her, she hit her head and drowned.

Emily had jumped in and saved the baby, but she was too small to do anything for Trish. She tried, but she just couldn't do it. She was beside herself, poor kid. And it certainly looked like an accidental drowning to the first responders. Trish had a wound on her forehead which seemed to corroborate Emily's story about her hitting her head on the way into the pool, but Detective Goodwin was suspic. Those spidey senses were really tingling now. Goodwin reached out to the FBI to try and get some dirt on Lou Castro,

but they came up with a big fat bunch of nusson. Zilch. Not even a birth certificate. Dude was a ghost. No paper trail? Yeah, that's a red flag. This whole thing was just fishy as hell. Reeked worse than the dumpster behind red lobster.

Isn't that gross? It's really gross. Goodwin decided to do some surreptitious digging. He was expecting this to turn into a narcotics case, his bread and butter. He began by collecting the discarded trash bags from the Angels Landing homes and looking through them. This is legal. Once you put your trash out on the curb, it's no longer your property. I'm sure it's also, like, super gross, but Goodwin felt pretty sure he'd find something in there

to either incriminate Lou or give him more info about who the guy was. But sadly, he got bupkiss. Just had to sift through a lot of yuck for nothing. Ew. Meanwhile, back at Angels Landing, everybody was gutted by Trish's death. She'd been such a loving, nurturing presence for everyone, not to mention a ton of fun. Sarah and Emily were especially crushed. But Lou just kept insisting that they shouldn't worry that Trish wasn't really dead dead.

She was going to come back. So they hoped for that, and they waited. But Trish's husband Brian, suddenly a single dad and widower in his late 20s, was completely devastated. He walked around like a zombie, he cried, he slept with their wedding picture, which just shatters my heart to think about. Lou reached out to Brian more and more as he grieved for Trish, started spending a lot more time with him, in fact, than he ever had before. Lou told him, look, going over to the other side, it's a good thing. No one can hurt you, you feel peaceful and at ease and protected. He talked like this a lot. Crossing over was the ultimate goal in life.

He told Brian, you'll someday get your chance to go to the other side. Whether this comforted him at all, we have no way of knowing. After Trish died, Brian was just sad. He took care of his daughter and he went to work, but the light had gone out of his face. If you were an observant outsider and you were paying close attention, you might have noticed that after Trish's death, Lou stepped up his extravagance. more expensive cars, more parties, more, more, more. Luce swanked around town in his sort of Johnny Depp the boho years cowboy hats and

snake-skin boots and treated himself to whatever he wanted. At one point, he met a woman and moved her in, and they got engaged and had a baby together, and so life went on at Angel's Landing. Fast forward a few years after Trish's death, March 2, 2006. Brian, who worked as a diesel mechanic and was always incredibly safety-conciliation. was away visiting family in South Dakota, and he was working on a truck there when the unsecured jack slipped, and the truck crushed him dead. Oh, God.

Sarah, Emily, and Jennifer thought maybe it was suicide. Brian had never seemed to fully recover from losing Trish. They knew he could never be careless enough to forget to secure a truck like this. He was an experienced mechanic, so if the jack wasn't secured, could it be because Brian intentionally left it that way? The story around the compound was that just a few hours before they got the call about his death, Brian had called to talk to Lou. They'd had a fairly long conversation, then Brian had asked to speak to his daughter.

And according to the rumor, he told her goodbye. Hours later, he was dead. To Detective Goodwin, who was still keeping an eye on Angel's Landing, the death of Brian Hughes was just one more creepy thing to add to Lou's scorecard. Either this guy was the unluckiest person on earth, and the people he cares about keep dying, or he was involved somehow. Goodwin looked into the backgrounds of all the Angels Landing residents, and he found an interesting little tidbit of information. They all had substantial life insurance policies. Trish's had been for $1.4 million with Brian as the beneficiary.

Brian's beneficiary? Angels Landing. I want to look at that. He noticed. that every two and a half years or so, Lou's bank account would start to dwindle a bit. And then, lo and behold, someone at the compound would have an accident. And magically,

Lou's financial situation would be peachy keen once more. He thought about all the angel imagery, those vanity plates that said Angel 1, Angel 2. He thought about a bunch of grown adults living in a compound together with a charismatic leader calling the shots. Yeah, I would say generally avoid, living in something called a compound that's not going to end well it just never does anytime you hear about a compound it's always like scary ass people you know and somebody is and ends up

being a standoff with like the FBI or some shit it's just not good and there's yeah compound is not good no no thank you just say no just say no kids to compounds just say no to compounds And so Goodwin was sitting there, and he was like, there's just something culty going on. Yeah, it just was this feeling he had. It just felt culty. It feels culty. It does feel culty. I have to give it to him.

Now, Goodwin had the idle thought one afternoon. Could Lou Castro be somehow brainwashing his followers to kill themselves so he could cash in on their life insurance money? It was a pretty far-fetched idea. but it kept nagging at him anyway. It wouldn't leave him alone, especially since all of the, quote, suicides looked like accidents. But Goodwin still didn't really have enough to investigate properly. They hadn't even been able to score a fingerprint for Lou Castro, even after pawing through days' worth of his trash. One day, Goodwin was driving around and spotted one of the cars with the angel vanity plates, so he followed, and watched as Lou and one of his followers stopped at a

restaurant to eat. Goodwin followed them in, got a table nearby, and after Lou and his little minion left, Goodwin asked the manager if he could take the silverware and cups in for DNA and fingerprint testing. This again is legal. So if you're ever under investigation and you don't want them to have your DNA, you better have your head on a swivel. That's all I'm saying. Wear gloves, burn your trash, and always assume you're being followed. Trust no one. The truth is out there, Scully. Unfortunately, though, the lab couldn't get a single damn fingerprint or any usable DNA off any of the stuff from Lou's lunch. Goodwin could just not catch a break trying to figure out who he was dealing with here.

It was just incredibly frustrating. Yeah, it was one of those old school, like, cups with the pebbled exterior, so they couldn't get anything off of it. So we've already talked a bit about what life was like for the denizens of Angels Landing. And so far, it sounded pretty sweet, except for the deaths, of course. Yeah, that little. You've got all this extended family, lots of companionship and support, fun parties, fancy cars. But turns out, there were also some less palatable aspects to living under the eye of Lucastro.

Turns out, he could be anything but angelic. Yeah. At Angel's Landing, it was Lou's way or no way at all. Okay. I mean, you've already bought into the fact that this man is a centuries-old angel, so why wouldn't you listen to us? Right, and he could be bossy and imperious if anybody tried to disagree or challenge him about anything, which is always super fun. Then there were the family meetings he liked to call. He'd give everybody their marching orders to do whatever he needed done around the place,

and then, more often than not, he would just lay into people. He'd scream and yell and tell everybody exactly what was wrong with them, according to the wisdom of Lou. He'd basically make you feel like a complete piece of shit. It was awful, and because everyone, was genuinely buying into the angel routine, it apparently never occurred to anybody to stand up and say, you know what? I don't need dollar store debt giving me life lessons. Fancy cars ain't worth this. I am out. Nobody ever said that. So everybody just sat there and took it. Then there were the angel personalities. There were three of them. Arthur was mean and aggressive and scary. When Arthur inhabited him, Lou would get a look on his face

that people described as demonic, evil. He had this cold, sedent. distic smile that would snake across his face while he said the kind of stuff that just cut you to the quick, and not just to the adults, the kids too. Daniel was the kinder one, the most angelic of the angels. And then there was Amber. Amber was the angel of death. She knew when people were going to die. She'd stare at you without blinking as if looking directly into your soul.

Yeah. One of the worst things the angels did was threatened to take you to purgatory, where your soul would stuck in limbo forever. If you disobeyed Lou, Arthur would come out and threaten you with eternal torment. Pretty damn good incentive not to disobey, I bet. Sarah and Emily have since said that the thing

about the angel personalities was, when they yelled at you or threatened you, it wasn't Lou who was doing it. It was the angels. So later, when the tantrum had passed, Lou would apologize profusely and comfort you. Oh, no, honey, I'm sorry Arthur scared you, and et cetera, et cetera.

So, you know, they feared Lou, but they loved him, too. The angels were scary, but they were also a big part of his magic, part of his enormous power over the people around him. And, I mean, when you take all the angel woo-woo out of it, that's pretty much exactly the dynamic of an abusive relationship. Oh, sure. I mean, despite having the least angelic names on the face of the planet. I know, Arthur, for God's name. Amber. The personalities were just a stroke.

a fucking genius for him. Yeah. It gave him both deniability and authority. He could eat his cake and have it too. Very Machiavellian, actually. It really is. Yeah, he's definitely an evil genius in that respect. And sometimes teenage Sarah got rebellious, as teenagers tend to do, and dared to suggest that Lou might not be right about absolutely everything.

You know, how dare. And how did his divine chodeliness react? Well, obviously, he would scream at her. Uh-huh, sure. Well, that's in the Bible right. after love thy neighbor. Oh, yeah, yeah. Scream at teenage girls for acting like teenage girls.

Amen. Amen. I suspect Lou always sensed that Sarah didn't entirely buy into his bullshit, at least not as much as her mom and little sister did. I think he knew she loved him because they all did, but she was a little bit wary of him, too. Her worship of him was not absolute, and man, a narcissist can sense that a mile off.

Oh, yes. Because he was a lot harder on her than he was on anybody else in the compound. He used to tell her she was broken. Now, coming from a divine being, that hurts. Hurts coming from anybody. And when a kid gets told that over and over again, they eventually start to believe it. But Lou assured her that he could fix her. He said, you can either be broken for the rest of your life or I can fix you.

It's the only way you'll be able to get married and have babies. Now, I have a feeling you've already sensed this based on what I just told you, but I want to throw a content warning out for this next part because we're about to get into some talk about sexual abuse. Now, we're not going to share any details, just the basics, but we understand if you need to skip it. And it's going to pop up, unfortunately, off and on for the rest of the episode, but as I said, we won't get into any specific details at all. So, when Sarah was 17, was when Lou Castro started sexually assaulting her.

After the first time, Sarah asked him, am I fixed now? And Lou said, no, you'll never be fixed. I'll always have to have sex with you to keep you fixed. And he said, almost casually, if you ever tell anybody what goes on here, I'll make your worst nightmare come true. I'll kill your dad. Sarah had always been a dad's girl, so she was just petrified at the thought of that. He's just a subhuman piece of shit, ain't he? I can't even tell you. He's a disgusting waste of space and air. I think we need to invent a new device to deal with this one. Oh, yeah. Like a combination woodchip or guillotine, maybe.

Anything else would be too good for him, I think. Absolutely. I like that with chipper guillotine. It gets worse, campers. It's unclear if Sarah realized it at the time. I don't think she did. But she wasn't the only one he was abusing. Almost from the time they arrived at Angels Landing,

he had been abusing Sarah's younger sister Emily, too. He told her he had to do it in order to survive. Angels had to have sex with pure. young girls in order to live. Oh, God. He made it seem like a huge honor. It was a way for Emily to help him with his important mission here on earth. And Emily, well, she loved Lou.

She believed in his powers. She didn't like what happened behind closed doors of his bedroom, but she wanted to do what she could just to help him. Bless her heart. Meanwhile, when he wasn't abusing her, Lou treated Emily like the princess of the compound. She was his special favorite, and everyone knew it. It was only much later that Emily realized how evil he was,

and that this was the vilest kind of abuse. And where the hell their mom was for all this, I have no idea. That hasn't been entirely clear in any of the sources that we have used for this. The sisters have said that at the time, they felt like Lou was really good at hiding the abuse and that none of the other adults knew, but I find that really tough to swallow. I mean, Emily says there were a lot of nights when she, She slept in his bedroom with him. Like, how did her mom not realize that when she's 12 years old?

But, of course, her mom literally believed he was a divine being. So maybe it just never occurred to her that anything bad could be going on. I don't know, but I'm telling you I'm mad about it. Just a note, again, parenting advice. There's no reason an adult needs to be alone with your child, period. No. Nope. Absolutely not.

I'm sorry. I don't care what your relationship with that person is. They don't need to be alone with them. Fuck off. No. You can tell I'm mad because I'm pissed. So very much on purpose, I'm sure. This began to drive a wedge between the two sisters. Sarah didn't understand why she was treated so badly while Emily was seemingly treated so well. Distance grew between them until they were barely talking at all. And child abusers do that a lot, actually. Oh, yeah, definitely.

They treat one much better so they have, they can kind of isolate the way. one that they treat badly. There was something else that contributed to the gulf between the sisters, too. Emily had a secret, something she'd been holding inside since she was 11 years old. A secret, so deep and dark that sometimes it threatened to swallow her whole. But we'll get to that in a bit. This was life for these two girls for years. And on top of all of that, they had to deal with losing first Trish, then Brian. Fastly. to September 2008. One afternoon, Lou just came

into the living room, sat down next to Sarah and Emily on the couch, and said, it's Jennifer's turn to die. Jennifer. Their mother. Sarah jumped up. No, it can't be my mom. She takes care of everybody.

We need her. You have to pick somebody else. Emily started crying. But Luke, just kind of shrug. He said, No, it's got to. be your mom. Amber, the angel of death, had spoken. There was no argument. It was divine well. Now, remember campers, Lou had placated the girls for years by assuring them that he could bring

Trish and Brian back from the dead. They'll come back. Don't worry. They'll come back. But Trish had been dead for five years now. Brian for almost three. So when Lou said, it's time for your mom to die? Both the girls assumed she wouldn't be coming back. After Lou left, Sarah ran to her mom. She begged her, Mom, you can't die. You can't leave us. And in Sarah's words, Jennifer basically blew it off. I'm not going anywhere. Don't worry.

It's going to be fine. Fine, yeah. Well, a day or two later, on September 22nd, 2008, 911 got a flurry of frantic calls from drivers who had just witnessed a woman in an SUV. crossed the center line and drive full speed head on into a dump truck. The witnesses all said the same thing, that there's no way in hell the woman hadn't seen the truck.

It looked like she'd driven right into it, on purpose. It was Jennifer Hudson, of course. Her car was totaled, and she was pinned underneath the steering wheel. When first responders got there, she still had a faint pulse, but she was pronounced dead soon after. I haven't been able to find out what happened to the dump truck driver. hope they didn't die to, but I don't know for sure. That wasn't in any of the sources that we used. Back at Angel's Landing, Lou told Sarah, Jennifer's been in a car accident. She's dead.

But he wouldn't give her any more detail than that. Sarah stormed after him as he tried to walk away. She said, what did you do to my mom? But of course, Lou wouldn't tell her. When Detective Goodwin got wind of Jennifer Hudson's accident, it hit him like a freaking wrecking ball. This was exactly what he'd been afraid of, that somebody else was going to die, and he quickly realized that the pattern he'd discovered years ago that someone from the compound died every two and a half years or so had held. It had been two and a half years since Brian Hughes' death. Lou's bank accounts must have been running low again. When he checked, he wasn't the least bit surprised to find out that Lou was the beneficiary of Jennifer's hefty life insurance policy.

So here we go again. Could you imagine how horrible this would be for a detective? Like, you know perfectly well what's going on. It's obvious that this little cowboy hat wearing shit goblin is either murdering people or coercing them to suicide. It's obvious he's doing it for money, and there's fuck all you can do about it. Because not only can you not find any hard evidence against the prick, but you can't even seem to identify him. You know his name's not really Lucastro. You can smell sleaze all over him, but you don't know who he really is. And the group at his creepy little compound is so insular that you don't have a prayer in hell of getting anybody to talk to you.

Just, ugh. But he wanted to habeas grab him so bad, so poor Goodwin and his partner were determined not to give up. And they decided to try yet again to get this fucker's fingerprints. And they came up with, I think, quite a smart little ruse to do it. They printed

up some glossy photographs of wanted criminals in the area, and then they headed out to Angels Landing under the pretense of asking their residents if they'd seen any of these near-do-wells. So, glossy photograph apparently are a perfect venue for nice, easily lifted fingerprints. So they were hoping that Lou would leave some. But when they handed him the Manila envelope full of photos, Lou took it very carefully

with like his palms without putting his full fingertips on it. And then he tipped the photos out onto a pool table and proceeded to sort through them using only his fingernails. Like you do. Perfectly normal every day, not at all sketchy behavior, right? Yeah. Way to stay under the radar, man. Well played. It was blatantly obvious that he knew exactly what Goodwin and his partner were doing, and that made the hairs on the back of the detective's neck stand up. It was just eerie, watching him carefully move those photos around without putting a single print on any of them. It was one of those, I Know That You Know, kind of moments. Creepy.

Yeah, would fit in a Scorsese film, probably. Yeah, definitely. Of course, Goodwin freaked out. As they drove away from Angels Landing that day, they felt like they'd blown it. Castro knew they were on to him, and now he was probably going to take off and make sure nobody ever found him. Sarah remembers that day. She says as soon as Detective Goodwin and his partner left, Lou started acting all nervous and squirrely. He said, they're coming for me.

But he wouldn't specify who they were or why they were coming. But within a day or two, he took off for Tennessee to look at properties. It was time to move on. Angels Landing 2.0, here we come. Sarah, by this point, was 24. She just lost her mom. Her sister Emily wasn't really talking to her. So when Lou came back from Tennessee and announced that they were moving there, Sarah just point blank refused. She was not going. Lou ranted and raved and yelled, but Sarah was done.

She didn't want to leave her dad. So Lou and Emily went without her. And finally, for the first time since Lou had come into her life, Sarah felt free. She wasn't under his constant control anymore. He wasn't watching her. her every move, she started making friends going out and having fun. And one night at a bar with her girlfriends, she met a guy named Dan McGrath, and they hit it off hard. Big love when it's the real thing can be life-changing. Especially if you're used to the opposite of all this, having someone actually respect you and like you and validate you and treat you with kindness can really help you start to heal from whatever's hurt you in the past. And if you've been in an

abusive situation, it can help you kind of get the push you need to start exercising all those demons. That's exactly what happened with Sarah. She'd been with Dan for a few months when one day Lou called and started screaming at her over the phone. He still had his little fee-fees hurt by the fact that she'd refused to move to Tennessee with him. And every now and then, he called to let her know about it. Sarah was out on Dan's back porch, taking the phone call, and Dan heard her side of the conversation and came out to see what the hell was up. He mailed, just hang up on him. Well, I mean, that just seemed ridiculous to Sarah.

She said, it's Lou. Like, I can't. What? So Dan took the phone out of her hand, and he said, don't you ever call her again and hung up? Yeah. He said, I could tell their relationship was toxic. Something was up.

Dan had met Lou a couple times before, and he got bad. vibes for minute one. He noticed the inappropriate kind of proprietary way that Lou touched Sarah and Emily, like they were possessions. Dude was just oily. Yeah, and one time Dan had overheard Lou on the phone talking about using somebody else's identity to fly under the radar in Tennessee. That's not normal. So he already had concerns, and then Lou called up and had the nerve to scream at his girlfriend. Dan was fucking done. Yeah, in case you can't tell, we like Dan. Dan's a damn hero.

We stand, Dan. Dan is the man. We stand, Dan. And for Sarah, this was a turning point. Dan hung up on Lou. I would imagine it felt both scary and incredibly liberating. And this is one of the most powerful feelings in the world. If someone is messaging you or calling you, you don't have to interact with them. You can just block them.

The moment I figured that out, I felt like I solved cold fusion. It was like the most intoxicating feeling of relief of, oh, you mean I don't have to listen to this person sending me disgusting messages? When they went back inside, Dan sat her down and they talked about Lou. After a while, he asked, Sarah, did he sexually abuse you? And suddenly, for the first time ever, it clicked. in Sarah's head that that was what he'd done. She'd never really thought of it that way before,

because that was how powerful Lou was in that community. But now she got it. She'd been raped by this man for five years. He was an abuser, and none of this was normal. None of it was okay. Dan was pissed. He waited until Sarah fell asleep, and then he jumped on his computer.

He found the other. FBI's website, and he sent them an email. The subject line read, please read. Daniel wrote, My girlfriend Sarah Hudson is escaped from an abusive, cult-like environment and confided in me about it. And then he gave the feds something worth its weight in diamonds, something that would soon have Detective Goodwin drooling like a dog with a plate full of bacon. Dan wrote, Castro has acquired the identity of Joe Vanegas. Castro has acquired great sums of money from several life insurance policies and has threatened to kill people who talked about him. The deaths at Angels Landing are questionable. Ooh boy, Camper's, it was on now. So when the feds got this email, they

immediately tipped off Detective Goodwin. And it was like Christmas morning and his birthday rolled into one. I bet. For the first time, they had somebody who had something of an insider at Angels Landing and was willing to talk about it. Plus, they had Lou's new identity, Joe Vanegas. So Goodwin checked on Lou's bank account, and he found that the funds had recently been transferred to a bank in Tennessee to an account held by one Joe Vanegis. Can't you all just hear the hunting horn blowing here and hounds baying that Chase was on?

Goodwin pulled the security tapes from the Tennessee Bank for the day that Vanegas account was open, and cablamo. There was the artist formerly known as Lou Castro, opening a bank account under a fake identity, a.k.a. committing a nice, fat, juicy old federal crime right there on camera, with poor Emily standing right next to him, by the way. And by now it had been about two years since Jennifer's death, so Goodwin knew it was about time for the next one. They got to this asshole just in time. They got a search warrant and showed up at Lou slash Joe Vanega's fancy new house. Lou answered the door hold in his cowboy boots about to head out for the evening. Yeah, not going to happen, poo, because it is habeas gravis time. And now, hallelujah, Goodwin could

finally get his flipping fingerprints, like seven, eight years into this thing. So they printed our boy, they ran the prints through the system, and well, well, well, they got a hit. Lou Castro, aka Jovenegas, was an ex-con named Daniel Urive Perez, and he was wanted in connection with a child's sex crimes case in Texas from 1997. Between 97 and 2002, he'd collected a group of followers and had regular access to young girls. Gross. For now, they charge Lou slash Daniel with aggravated identity theft and social security fraud. He got two years for that, and that gave Goodwin some time to keep digging into the accidents at Angel's Landing. But he knew that in order to put this ass basket behind bars where he

belonged, like forever, he was going to need cooperation from at least some of Lou's followers. He reached out to Sarah first, and she came in willingly. She'd already made the leap that people in cults and other toxic insular communities all have to make before they can start to move on in their lives. And she trusted Goodwin immediately, and they're still friends apparently which I think is kind of sweet. And in a four-hour interview, Sarah laid it all out. Everything she knew about Lou, everything he'd put her through personally, it was rough. She also told Goodwin something she'd kept close to her chest before now,

that one of Lou's manipulations was to try to get Sarah to videotape young girls at the pool parties, like while they were changing and stuff. And when Sarah refused, he would punish her by sexually abusing her. Emily came in next. The detectives knew that she'd been the one to call 911 on the day Trish Hughes died. She was only 11 at the time. Now, Emily told Goodwin one hell of a story. On the day Trish died, they were all sitting out by the pool having lunch, Emily, Sarah, Lou, Trish, and Trish's toddler daughter.

Everything was normal, bright, sunny day, until Lou sent Sarah to drive to the car dealership. I'll meet you there in about 20 minutes, he told her. Once Sarah was gone, Lou got quiet, serious. Then he said, I had a vision from God. It's Trish's time to die. Emily started to cry, and Trish comforted her, which I find astonishing. Lou said, hey, don't worry. She'll come back, remember?

I can bring her back before long. But right now, it's her time to cross over to the other side. Trish got up from the table and walked out onto the diving board. And Emily, still crying, followed her. Terh said, don't cry is going to be okay, and hugged her right there on the diving board. And then Lou handed her Trish's daughter and said, go wait in the pool house. You can play with the kittens in there. I'll come get you in a minute. In a complete fog, Emily took the little girl into the pool house, and they sat there playing with the kittens, and after a few moments, Emily heard a splash, then a scream, and then nothing. And a moment later,

came into the poolhouse. He was wet, disheveled, panting a little. He looked kind of sad. And he said, Emily, I'm trusting you with this. I can't trust your sister, but I know I can count on you. He told her, wait 20 minutes, to give me time to go meet Sarah at the car dealership and then call 911. He said, be sure you and the baby jump in the water so you'll both be wet. And he told her the story she should tell, that the baby fell in, and Trish hit her head running down the pool steps to save her. Emily, 11 years old, having just lost her second mother, a woman she loved like family, did as she was told. And she held on to that secret for years. Goodwin later found out that Trish Hughes had been planning on leaving Angels Landing and moving back to Texas

to be closer to her mom. Guess Lou couldn't let his golden goose get out from under his control. time to cash in. Trish seems to have been willing to die that day, but Lou had most definitely made it happen as his wet, disheveled appearance at the poolhouse proved. Finally, after years of chasing this creepy bastard, Detective Goodwin was closing in. And as he continued looking into our boys' past, Goodwin dug up yet another bombshell. Daniel Perez had also been linked to three deaths when he was living in North Dakota in 2001. Before Angel's Landing was even a thing, a beautiful, free-spirited woman named Mona Griffith had met Daniel, already going by Lou Castro by then, I think.

Like Jennifer Hudson would be years later, she'd been taken with Lou and his handmade family. Mona was always the type to follow her heart's desire and act on a whim. Her marriage was already in the process of breaking up, so she took her daughter, Lindsay, who was in elementary school at the time, and she moved in with Lou and Trish and Brian. her son Cody didn't want to leave his dad so he refused to go he had no idea at the time what a huge deal that decision would turn out to be not long after she moved in with lew and company mona met a new boyfriend named jim chase jim was a pilot and for lindsay's twelfth birthday he and mona decided to take her on a little trip out of state jim would fly them there in his plane just like celebrities and you know they were all really excited but on the way there the plane went down all three of them died in the craft The plane was actually missing for quite some time, but even before it was found, Daniel Perez was calling Mona's life insurance company to ask about cashing in on her $750,000 policy, of which he was, of course, the beneficiary. Can we just take a moment to absorb the dipshittery of that, by the way, like to call before they found the missing people? Smooth, man, good job.

So stupid. It took Mona's son, Cody, years to fully absorb the implications. of all this. When the death said Angel's landing happened, he and his dad realized how likely it was that Mona, Jim, and Lindsay were Perez's first victims. Whether he sabotaged the plane somehow or just talked them into suicide, Cody is convinced that he was involved. Yeah, me too.

Me three. Goodwin had what he needed by now, and at long, long last, Daniel Perez went to trial on 28 counts, rape, child exploitation, fraud, and Patricia Hughes's murder. The trial began in February 2015. Sarah and Emily both testified, terrified, so much so that Sarah had to be helped to the stand, but determined.

We can't say enough what absolute badasses both these women are, by the way. They helped bring down a true monster, and they've both managed to make beautiful lives for themselves, despite all the hell Perez put them through. Throughout the entire trial, Daniel kept smirking and, quote, trying to hold power over his followers, according to reporters, pathetic. I love slash hate when they get pretentious and smirky at trial because on one hand, it brings me great, great pleasure to know that they don't have any idea what's coming. But on the other hand, it does make you want to hip-check them into oblivion. and Daniel testified on his own behalf

because of fucking course he did don't they all and he was about as convincing as one of those scam calls where they address you as vehicle owner and tell you your car warranty is about to expire get this shit he said he took the name Lou Castro

after being beaten into unconsciousness by a group of uniformed men when he came to Trish Hughes kept calling him Lou Castro. So he decided to go with that. Okay, I'm just going to blue sky this. Sure, sure. So his story here is that some uniformed men, we don't know what kind of uniforms could be police, could be Wendy's, beat him into unconsciousness, and then left him where they found him, presumably. And then for some reason, when he woke up, Trish was there. And she said

something like, hey, Lou Castro, what happened to you? Is that the story, Daniel? Yes. Seriously? Yeah, good one. Why would she call him Lou Castro if that wasn't his name? They'd known each other since they were kids. I just cannot with this dipshit. That is the most absurd story I've ever heard. Maybe she was like, hey, Lou Castro, wink. You know. For some reason, your name is now Luc Castro. Nudge, we have to change your name. While he's laying there beaten to a pulp. Yeah, I mean, those roving gangs of Wendy's employees, you can't. He got to watch your bag. He also claimed that he got all the money he used for his fancy lifestyle from a red duffel bag that Trish Hughes gave him. He said he wasn't 100% sure where it all came from. At the time, he kind of just assumed it was from the sale of a house and car he didn't know about or something. But he didn't ask, because why would he? Damn it, Jim, he's an amnesiac, not a doctor.

Well, it's convenient that the one person who could refute all this stuff happens to be dead, isn't it? it. And millions of dollars in a duffel bag would be just incredibly heavy. It's just, it doesn't make sense. Campers, if you're going to make up a lie, make it make sense. Okay, I have to apologize in advance for this one. He claimed that the allegations of sexual assault couldn't possibly be true because he had a dick injury from the 90s that made him unable to have sex forcefully. It would only work with the partner's cooperation, he said. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's not how any of this works, you absolute walking fucking nightmare. First of all, I'm sure his alleged penile problem is probably 100% bullshit.

But even if it wasn't, you don't have to achieve an erection to commit sexual assault dipshit. Yeah, especially not when your victims are members of a cult that you started and think you're a guy. thing, a thousand-year-old angel, and you've threatened to kill their dad. And one of them already watched you kill somebody else. Just, you know what, dying a fire, my guy, and I mean that sincerely. Oh, and it gets better. Perez said that when he told his followers he was a seer, they misunderstood. He, of course, didn't mean that he could see the future. That would be crazy. He just meant it as a metaphor. You know, a metaphor. Oh, I see why they were confused.

That explains everything. We should really just let him go. He also said that when he said he was special, he just meant that he'd had special education. Like, ooh, an ablest pedophile rapist. Everyone check your gutter slime bingo cards. We are definitely playing gutter slime bingo one of these days. So much. And of course, he never said he.

He could bring people back to life. That's absurd. Angel's Landing was not a cult. They were just a bunch of friends that liked, as he said, watching a lot of movies together and having fun pool parties. That's all. Come on, guys. Jeez.

At the trial, the woman who had accused him in Texas in 97 showed up to testify. She said that when she first reported the crime at age 14, the police acted as if they did. didn't believe her. It's just so, just charming. Love that. You love to see that. Love that from our law enforcement professionals. And she said he'd told her he had special powers and would kill her family if she told anyone what he'd done to her. Seems like this may have been the dry run for all the shit he'd pull at Angels Landing a few years later. Yeah. She was later told that Perez had gone on the run and died somewhere

in Mexico. Clearly, he'd managed to slip away into his new identity completely undetected. And this is flipping bananas. About ten years later, this woman's mom moved to Wichita, just totally by coincidence. And one day she was checking out a yard sale in her neighborhood

and she saw him. Daniel Perez, the man who assaulted her daughter in 1997, the man who was supposed to be dead. And right as she realized who he was, their eyes met. and he immediately recognized her, which I'm sure, like, made her blood turn to ice. And he got the hell out of there, and she thought about calling the police, but she just didn't think anyone would believe her.

So she didn't. But holy shit, it's like a moment from a horror movie. So anyway, fortunately for all of us, Daniel, go fuck yourself Perez, was found guilty on all 28 charges and sentenced to a hefty 80 years in prison. He's in Lansing Correctional Institution now, and he will come out of there in a body. bag, which is fine with us. The deaths of Mona and Lindsay Griffith, Jim Chase, Jennifer Hudson, and Brian Hughes are still considered accidental, because how the hell could you prove otherwise? But the people who love them, no better. Luke Castro slash Daniel Perez is a pure predator who saw people as tools for his use, and he used his charisma and his stories about angels to lure

in vulnerable people. Use him up, spit him out. Once he started running out of cash, your life was forfeit. And in the meantime, he'd abuse your children, too. All that mattered to this creature was money, sex, and feeding his ego. And I wonder who would have been the next victim if he hadn't been caught when he was. I'm sure that question has kept Emily up at night quite a few times, too. Definitely. So, yeah. Cults. Cults are bad, okay? If somebody tells you they're an angel, or a prophet of God, or an alien, or a deity of any kind, or a spokesperson for a deity of any kind, they are either in need of serious help, or they are lying to you. And they're probably lying for really bad reasons.

One of the things I've learned in my 43 years on Earth so far is that nobody has it all figured out, okay? Nobody can tell you the answers to all the big questions in life. Nobody else can hand you a purpose. We're just all figuring this shit out as we go along. So if somebody pretends to know all the answers, be very careful around that person. Or better yet, just walk away. way, because more often than not what's actually going on behind that beatific smile is a big

bag of hot nonsense and a whole bunch of gross, manipulative motives. Greed, sexual perversion, and ego the size of Mount Hood, whatever. But it won't be anything good, and it will not lead you to enlightenment, I promise. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe, until we get together again around the true crime campfire. and we want to send a shout out to a few of our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Shannon, Kelly, Rebecca, Donna, and Jen. We appreciate you to the moon and back.

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