True Crime Campfire - Until the End of the World: The Children of Thunder, Pt 1

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

Being part of a society means that for the most part you follow its rules, often without thinking about it at all. And those rules, those strictures of what is right and wrong, good or bad, are frequently dumb and sometimes awful—human societies are not utopias, after all, they’re messy and loud and full of argument. But some shared consensus on the boundaries of behavior is necessary if people are going to live together in something approximating peace. So what happens when a group of people give up on the idea of right and wrong entirely, and surrender all their free will and moral judgment into the hands of madman who thinks he was born to save the world? Nothing good, that’s what. Join us for part 1 of the story of Taylor Helzer, a narcissistic man who was raised to think he had the "gift of revelation" and was destined to be a prophet--and the impressionable people he gathered around him to do his deadly bidding. Sources:Unholy Sacrifice by Robert ScottInvestigation Discovery's "True Crime With Aphrodite Jones," episode "The Children of Thunder"Follow 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/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become 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. Being part of a society means that for the most part, you follow its rules, often without thinking about it at all. And those rules, those strictures of what is right and wrong, good or bad, are frequently dumb and sometimes awful. Human societies are not utopias, after all.

They're messy and loud and full of argument. But some shared consensus on the boundaries of behavior is necessary if people are going to live together in something approximating peace. So what happens when a group of people give up on the idea of right and wrong entirely and surrender all their free will and moral judgment into the hands of a madman

who thinks he was born to save the world. the world. Nothing good, that's what. This is until the end of the world. Taylor Helzer and the Children of Thunder. So campers, for this one, we're in the lazy winding waterways of the California Delta, just east of San Francisco Bay. August 7, 2000. It was a gorgeous day, and Stephen Seibert was having a blast out on his jet ski. That is, until he slowed down and saw something dark, half submerged in the water ahead of him. Curious, he steered closer.

It was a duffel bag, and Stephen could tell it was full of something, the way it was kind of sagging in the water. He dragged it to shore and opened it up, and inside he found a horror show. There were severed human body parts, jumbled together with the smell. that hit him like a slap. And although Stephen certainly didn't investigate enough to find this out, the parts were from more than one person. In the following days, nine more duffel bags would be found in the Delta, each with the same kind of grizzly cargo.

The medical examiner would determine that the remains came from three people, a young woman, an elderly man, and an elderly woman. They'd been stabbed, beaten, then taken apart with knives and saws. To even attempt to understand what happened here, we have to start back at what might seem like an unlikely point of origin, a middle-class Mormon family in the small California town of Pacheco. In 1970, Jerry and Karma Helzer had their first son, Taylor. Another son, Justin, followed a couple years later, then a daughter, Heather. Right from the start, the differences between the two boys were like day and night. Taylor was bright and charming, and even when he was young, could quote,

scripture with a precision that impressed his devout family and others in the Mormon community. As he grew older, he became the central focus of the Helzer family, the golden boy of whom great things were expected. Justin, on the other hand, was awkward and shy and almost friendless, always in his brother's shadow, always following in his footsteps. Justin tried not to be noticed, which was tough because by the time he finished homeschooling and started junior high, he was already over six feet tall. At one point, the hells or kids were sent to live with their maternal grandfather, Doyle Sorensen, an extremely religious man who claimed to one time have seen Jesus Christ out in his front yard. Doyle went out and chatted with Jesus for hours, supposedly, although we don't

know about what. Doyle's beliefs were out there on the fringes of Mormonism, and Taylor, whose own beliefs were getting a little weird, even in his teens, admired him, and possibly modeled some of his own behavior after him. From the age of 14, Taylor began to hear voices. Well, maybe, sort of. Much later, his brother Justin would say, Taylor didn't really hear voices, they were thoughts. And I don't think this necessarily means that Taylor was faking it.

If you're raised in a culture that accepts divine revelation as real, and you start to have intense, clear thoughts on religious matters, you might describe that as hearing voices, especially if you're as dramatic and as in love with attention, as Taylor. Taylor claimed the spirit was talking through him, and the people around him told him this meant he had the gift of revelation. So you've got a charismatic teenage kid who's been told he's special all his life, and now you're telling him that God thinks he's special too. Great adulting there. Adults, that's going to work out. Great. Yeah, so far we're just on an extra

cringy show on TLC or something. It'd be called Prophet Baby, and it would have millions of viewers. unfortunately, including myself. I would totally watch that. By this point, despite being a teenager, Taylor was basically the head of the household. Dad Jerry was laid back and mostly just kind of let things happen, and Mom Karma was all in on Team Extra Special Taylor. He didn't exactly shine, either academically or athletically in high school,

but he seemed to know and be friends with everybody. Justin, by contrast, was a ghost. The teachers who remembered him at all recalled him as docile, just waiting for somebody to tell him what to do. After high school, Taylor joined the National Guard and was shocked to find out that his fellow young guardsmen

like to smoke and drink and screw around. Keeping his mouth shut wasn't something Taylor ever did, so he tried to preach at him about the error of their ways. You can imagine how that went, right? Most of the guys just rolled their eyes, but he apparently did make a few conversions in the guard. Again and again throughout his life, people would describe how charismatic and persuasive Taylor could be,

skills that he also brought to bear after he left the National Guard and went on a church mission to Brazil, which is something a lot of Mormon teenagers do when they turn 19. Taylor did well in Brazil, as you'd probably expect a charming, enthusiastic guy to do, and he bonded with another young missionary called Jonathan. They were both really interested in scripture and religious doctrine, but Taylor was already getting kind of weird about it.

He'd stay up all night reading the Book of Mormon, trying to find hidden meaning in the words. His attitude about it was almost like a conspiracy theorist, where nothing is just as it seems and there has to be some vast hidden secret that most people aren't smart enough to figure out. Yeah, that shit never ends in tears, right? Right. So, Mormon missionaries are supposed to follow a set curriculum, but Taylor liked to concentrate on his own personal interpretations of the cataclysmic latter days where technology would fail and the church would split into groups led by warrior prophets. I bet they were really excited about Y2K.

Oh, I'm sure. It's coming. You know, I lived in a neighborhood with a bunch of Mormons around the time. I never even noticed it. Yeah. Huh. I'll just ask my mom. We did have neighbors that, like, did around, like, 1999 start stockpiling.

killing like survival meals and MREs. So I'm now, oh yeah, a lot of people did. I'm now thinking that maybe it was, it was connected to. Yeah, it must have been. The end of days. It must have been. I mean, I was a full grown adult. Well, not totally. I was still in college, but I was pretty worried about it for, you know, minot there. And for the record, by the way, the only reason it didn't happen is because a bunch of very smart people came together and made sure it didn't. It wasn't something. Because like, I don't know, sometimes people were like, and then it just went away. It didn't happen. We were wrong. I'm like, no, it would have. prevented it. It would have happened. Like, that's the whole problem. Oh, man.

As Robert Scott put it in his book on Holy Sacrifice, Taylor, quote, envisioned a sort of madmax world with bands of people led by warrior priests. And he had his own Taylor trademarked view of the story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge. Basically, Taylor believed that because the human idea of right and wrong had come from the devil, then we should be able to reject it entirely. So basically, we can just do whatever we want. I'm no theologian here, but that seems kind of convenient. And as y'all are going to find out, Taylor really took this idea and ran with it. Taylor would always get irritated when people didn't accept his ideas. Whenever he read something written by senior Mormons that he didn't agree with, he just decided

that meant one of two things. Either these people were ignorant and he didn't have to accept their authority, or they were lying on purpose, which also meant that he didn't have to accept their authority. Like you said, how convenient. Taylor's belief that he was always right was absolute and unshakable. I mean, come on, he had the gift of revelation, and he was also mommy's special little boy. And now you're going to tell him he's wrong about something? How absolute dare? Back from Brazil, Taylor found time amidst his theological angst for a little romance. At the movies one night, he ran into a girl named Anne he'd gone to high school with. He was interested right away, but the problem was Anne wasn't Mormon.

Taylor didn't even want to date her until she converted. And somehow, he talked her into it. I know we keep coming back to how charismatic and persuasive this dude was, but apparently he really was. and it's probably the most important thing about him in this story. Anne was baptized into the LDS Church, and she and Taylor went on their first date right afterward. They got married in 1993.

But the honeymoon phase didn't last any longer than the actual honeymoon. They started marriage counseling right after they got home. They were already fighting because Taylor had to have everything his way and utterly refused to accept that he was wrong about anything, ever. And outside of the controlled environments of the National Guard and his Mormon mission house, this was the first time Taylor had ever lived outside his parents' home. They hadn't let him watch TV, so now that he was free to do what he wanted, he'd be glued to the TV all night. Then he'd get up off the couch and go to work at 6 a.m. on zero sleep.

Sometimes he'd go to the video arcade after work and get so caught up playing that he wouldn't come home for dinner. He was 23 years old. This is what happens when you deny somebody something 100%. They will just obsess about it the second you turn your back. Moderation, folks. That's my parenting advice. More parenting advice from the childless me. Now, if there was one thing Taylor wanted even more than Street Fighter 2 or NBA Jam,

it was sex of a particular type. See, Taylor, the Mormon golden boy who'd scolded the other guardsmen for their sinful ways, was obsessed, obsessed with porn. Now, I'm not going to guess how many y'all are shocked and how many are rolling your eyes and saying, of course, he was, but I suspect most of you are walking through door number two. I guess Taylor was more of a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do, kind of preachy guy. Now that he was married, Taylor wanted Anne to have sex the way women in his porn tapes did.

Oh, God, right? Please don't learn about sex from porn. Please don't learn about sex from porn. Please don't learn about sex. from porn. Another PSA. Anne wasn't comfortable with any of this, but Taylor pressured and poked her constantly into trying new sex stuff, which I'm sure totally got her in the mood, right? Because there's nothing sexier than a grown man whining. I don't get it. I mean, I can't imagine anything more awkward and embarrassing than sex was somebody who doesn't want to be there. But the answer

to that, of course, was that under all that charm and religion, Taylor was 100% pure unadulterated narcissist, and what other people wanted or enjoyed didn't matter much to him. And of course, it didn't take long for this to do major damage to their marriage. But despite the cracks in the relationship, the couple had two daughters, and as you can imagine, the added stress of parenthood didn't do the marriage any favors. Anne would later say that she actually trusted Taylor's brother Justin more with the kids than Taylor, because he was a great uncle, and Taylor was usually too self-absorbed to notice what was going on around him. Taylor was doing well at his new job, though. Anne's uncle worked at Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter and got Taylor a gig as a financial

advisor trainee. Yet again, Taylor's charm and charisma paid off. He was a natural salesman, willing to make the kind of cold calls his coworkers hated. When he was hired full time, he gathered a couple hundred clients and made friends with a lot of them. As had always been the case throughout his life, his employers saw great potential in Taylor. He was clean cut and eager and would come in in the morning and tell everybody how much he loved his job. Nerd. Pretty much a dream employee for a couple years anyway. By 1996, though, Taylor had started smoking.

He grew his hair long and started coming into work worn out from clubbing the night before. Kind of normal behavior for a college student away from home for the first time, but not what you'd really expect from your 26-year-old Mormon salesman with a wife and two kids. His boss had a talk with him, but Taylor just turned on the charm. smiled and said he could handle both work and clubbing, just fine. Campers, when your boss calls you in for a meeting like that, it's not just a friendly suggestion that you rethink your life. It's a warning.

But Taylor was oblivious to that. What's the opposite of paranoid, pronoid? I think that's what this guy was. Like, he couldn't imagine anybody actually being upset with him. Not mother's special little man. Justin, always following in his brother's footsteps, also joined the National Guard after high school, becoming a military policeman assigned to Germany. Polite and always ready to follow instructions, Justin did well in military life,

although he was still extremely sheltered, and the other MPs sometimes had fun with that, like one time slipping pictures from a porno magazine into a military manual and having him read it. When Justin got to the picks, he covered his eyes with his hands. My eyes! My eyes! I'm blind! But as one of his fellow guardsmen said later, he was easy to tease, but he got along. After the guard, Justin came back to the States and started an Associates of Arts degree at Diablo Valley College. That's a great name, Diablo Valley. He was careful and meticulous, but not a super fast thinker.

He did get good grades, but it took him six years to graduate. And that's usually like a two-year program for an associate's degree, right? So he'd call him a gradual student, I guess. No shame in that. you know, take your time. While Justin was mosey in his way through college, Taylor's life was falling apart. By 1997, he was drinking a lot and clubbing all night, trying out weed, Coke, mushrooms, and ecstasy. Again, this is a grown-ass man with two children. He was pretty much torpedoing his marriage, and this only deepened his cynicism about the mainstream Mormon church.

He'd followed their rules, so why wasn't he happy? Taylor not getting everything he's he wanted all the time, meant, of course, that his whole religion was flawed. Here finds me so much of Elliot Roger, this guy. Mm-hmm. He was totally following the rules. Mm-hmm. I know, right? That was his outlook on it anyway.

Oh, my God. Taylor started telling anybody who would listen, and quite a lot of people who wouldn't, that the Mormon Church had shifted too far from the intentions of its founders. Because, you know, I'm sure those guys would have been just fine. with Taylor prancing around in clubs with a glow stick, coked off his nut and watching enough porn to keep Louberdorm in business. And, meanwhile, was trying to live a normal life and looked after the kids while her man-baby husband was out partying.

And then Taylor's mom, Karma Helzer, went through a self-help program in Utah called Impact. And she was so moved by the experience that she encouraged the rest of the family to go to. Now, this thing sounds like an absolute health. scape nightmare. And also a crash course in rapid indoctrination. In the first stage, people in a group had to reveal personal stuff about themselves and then got mocked and abused because of it, especially the women. If the group leaders considered a woman overweight, they'd make her

wear a cow costume and a bell around her neck. And buckle in because it makes me want to set someone on fucking fire. If a woman revealed that she'd suffered childhood sexual abuse, she'd be laughed at and called a slut. Holy shitballs. And by the way, this is like so similar to Scientology. It just blows my mind. Like the steps are just lockstep, just parallel. It's wild.

I mean, different theology, but very similar methodology. And if anyone protested, staffers would surround them and try to bully them into getting with the program. If they wouldn't, they'd get kicked out. It just sounds to me like a bunch of local sadists found a way to get their rocks off and get paid for it. But supposedly the theory was to break down barriers to make a, quote, person hate themselves until they learn to love themselves and other similar bullshit.

What abusing and exhausting people actually does is make them vulnerable. So when they move on to the love bombing stage of the program, they'll be more receptive to whatever the organization is selling. Hey, that horrible thing you just went through had a purpose. we don't hate you. We think you're great. It's deeply manipulative stuff. And, you know, it's not a fucking accident that they make you tell them your most vulnerable secret at the very beginning. They're going to hold on to that at fucking information. Sorry, I might actually commit arson after this. It makes me so bad. It's awful, awful.

At the center of the abuse phase was an authority figure called the facilitator, which sounds like a sci-fi villain, but okay. It absolutely does. It sounds like something from Black Mirror. Jesus. The facilitator is watching. Yep. Yikes. All the staffers jumped to do his bidding, and he was stern and commanding,

the one who got in your face and forced you to reveal things. And while most people with a real sense of self would tell him to fuck right off, this was a self-selecting pool of victims. They all paid hundreds of dollars to be here, and almost everybody else in the room was going along. The core of Impact's belief system was purported self-awareness. Right and wrong didn't exist, and believing in them got in the way of knowing yourself.

All that mattered was what worked for you. Groups and society mattered far less than being true to yourself. I guess a lot of people are willing to invest time and money just to hear that it's okay for them to be an asshole, but pouring this nonsense into the ear of Taylor Helzer was like throwing gasoline onto a fire. Gee, no shit. Dude already had semi-mescianic delusions of grandeur and was kicking against the structures of society that prevented him from doing whatever the hell he wanted. And hey, here was this little microcult telling him he really could do whatever the hell he wanted. Now, so far, we don't know for sure if Taylor's nights out clubbing included screwing around on Anne. Although given his absolute commitment to self-indulgence, I'd put $50 on hell yeah. Yeah. But any doubt about it disappeared in 1998 when he sat down for dinner at a restaurant and met a young waitress called Carrie Furman. Carrie was blonde and really pretty. She'd had a tough childhood and had just gotten out of an abusive relationship. So basically, she was vulnerable. And I'm guessing this is probably what caught Taylor's attention. You can't be a successful missionary and salesman without being able to read people. Taylor turned on the charm and after the meal, instead of a tip,

he left his business card and his credit card, telling Carrie to buy herself something nice with it. God, that's cheesy blech. What a gross move. She didn't buy anything, but she did call him up the next day. Soon they were dating and living together in a rented house, along with Justin and a couple of roommates. Taylor was still married to Anne, by the way. Seems like he just discarded her without a second thought. Carrie, who'd come from a kind of uptight family, hadn't ever experienced the kind of open affection that went on in that house. Everybody was always hugging each other. Taylor was always telling her he loved her,

making her feel pretty and special. Definitely a lot of love bombing. Campers, I don't know about you, but with the busy fall season already in swing, you, like me, might be looking for. for wholesome, convenient meals for jam-packed days. I'm literally sprinting from appointment to appointment to meeting to meeting these days, and I can barely catch my breath.

Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal kit can help you fuel up fast with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved, ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. You'll save time, eat well, and stay on track with your healthy lifestyle. Adjust your stride this autumn without missing a step. Choose from 34-plus weekly flavor-packed, fresh, never-frozen meals ready to eat in two minutes. My faves are the red chili pork tamale bowl and the loaded shredded chicken. So freaking good. Level up with gourmet plus options, prepared to perfection by chefs and ready to eat in record time. Treat yourself to upscale meals with premium ingredients like broccoli, leeks, truffle butter, and asparagus.

This September, get factor and enjoy eating well without the hassle. Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh, flavor-packed meals delivered to your door. ready in just two minutes, no prep, no mess. Head to factormeals.com slash TCC50 and use code TCC50 to get 50% off. That's code TCC50 at factormeals.com slash TCC50 to get 50% off. In line with his firm belief, that he should be free to do whatever he wanted at all times, Taylor decided to sabotage his job at Dean Witter. He'd fake mental illness and claim disability. That was what he told his

friends anyway, and he went to great lengths to be convincing. He'd avoid the shower for days before seeing a doctor, and then prattle on about his weird, fringy religious ideas. One time when Carrie drove him to the hospital, Taylor hid in the bushes till somebody came out and got him. But there is some question about his mental state here. Some psychiatry, psychiatrist who saw him at the time insist he was genuinely mentally ill and lied about faking it out of embarrassment, which, you know, is possible, I guess, but he definitely wanted out of Dean Witter. If he was ranting about his actual religious beliefs to the docs, I would guess that he may have actually been mentally ill. Or, alternatively, that he knew they were bullshit in looney tunes enough

to get him labeled as crazy. Both are equally as interesting if we're thinking about his manipulation skills, in my opinion. I have a feeling he was malingering, and obviously I can't diagnose anybody and I wasn't there, but I'll just tell you why I think that, okay? Because for one thing, you know, at least in the sources I've seen, nobody else ever mentioned him doing anything as splashy as falling to his knees and talking to the angels, which was one of the things that this psychiatrist cited as a reason for thinking that he had delusions because they would go into his room and find him like on his knees listening to the angels.

Well, none of the roommates or friends or anybody that you went clubbing with ever saw anything like that, you know? And like for him to skip the shower and like tell his friends like I'm doing that so I can get disability. Like, I don't know. I just, it seems to me like. And also, I think that his official diagnosis was bipolar. And I guess some of this does sound like a manic episode, but nobody ever reported him having a depressive episode, right? And that's kind of hard to miss when somebody's. Yeah, sometimes the manic episode hits a lot.

harder than the depressed episode. I've known people with bipolar. I don't remember which one it is. It's one or two where their depressive episode, their manic episode is like very, very, very extended and their depressive episode is pretty short. I know it's supposed to be even, but in those cases it's just not. I tend to agree that it was probably malingering, but I do think it's fascinating that he went the religious angle. Yeah, it is. Because, like, I don't know if maybe he picked it because he knew so much about it, but it's also very possible that he was like, I mean, I have all this insane, insane stuff in my head anyway. I'm just going to use it to my advantage.

It's also possible that he just didn't think it was that weird. And when he was talking to this doctor about all this other stuff, he just talked about his religious beliefs because for him, they were actually, that's what he'd grown up in. You know what I mean? So it could be a lot of things. It's interesting. So he definitely wanted out of the job. We know that for sure. And this was allegedly his plan to, to do it. Being a financial advisor was boring and ordinary, and Taylor couldn't stand the idea of being boring or ordinary. In fact, he was starting to have some very grandiose ideas of what he wanted to do with his life, a purpose with a capital P, which we'll get into in a lot more detail later. Just as he'd been unwilling to date Anne before she converted to LDS, Taylor now insisted

that Carrie go through the impact program. Ugh. In fact, he pretty much tricked her into it, got her to go with him to drop a friend off at the place, then just more left shoved her out of the car and told her she was going to be staying too and then drove off and left her there. So I guess she was just like, okay. And she seems to have gotten something positive from the experience the way that she talks about it, although I cannot imagine what. Like I would literally rather you hit me in the kneecaps with a baseball bat and I am seriously not exaggerating. Like if it was between going to impact and getting hit with a baseball bat, I would go with the baseball bat. But, you know, good for her, I guess.

All the roommates in the house were working and making legit money and paying rent, except for Taylor. But despite all that, through sheer force of personality, he was the one in charge of the whole house. Everybody had to follow the rules of Mama's little hero, including when he decided that Carrie ought to send some naked pictures of herself to Playboy magazine. Carrie didn't mind the idea, but she wanted to get a breast enhancement first, which she couldn't afford yet. So she talked to Jerry, Taylor's dad. and borrowed half the cost from him, which is just, wow, you know, like, I mean, what dad wouldn't give his son's mistress money for a poop job? Like, what kind of Mormons were these? I'm so confused. Anyway, after her surgery, Carrie had a friend take some pictures of her out in the

backyard, and eventually Playboy got in touch and arranged a professional shoot, because again, this was a gorgeous girl. Disability wasn't Taylor's only income by now. He was also selling ecstasy at raves and he got Carrie into the scene too. He dragged Justin out one time and for whatever reason forced his little brother to watch him sell drugs. I'm so confused. Justin didn't like raves though. He liked to dress all in black and go to the goth clubs where being socially awkward was really more of a plus than anything, or at least it didn't make him stand out. But Taylor's drug and disability money didn't go toward rent or any other household expenses. Oh, no. He had to keep all that to finance his big plans, which were many and varied in

always changing shape. At first, he wanted he and Carrie to run something like impact, but for couples counseling, imagine what a freaking nightmare that would be. What that would look like specifically, I have no idea, and I don't really think he did either. His plans needed more money to get off the ground, though. So he talked the newly enhanced Carrie into stripping at a place called the Gold Club in San Francisco, where she make up to a thousand bucks a night. That wasn't enough for Taylor, though. He wanted Carrie to recruit other dancers

into joining a high-end escort service called the Feline Club that the two of them would run together. That is a great name. That is the best name for an escort service. Yeah, yeah, unfortunately, we got to give it. So, like, sultry. Yeah, we got to give it to them.

I love it. It's like a fucked up multi-level marketing scheme. Like most of Taylor's plans, this went absolutely nowhere. But he really does seem to have thought it was a totally fresh and novel idea, like a light bulb flashed on over his head. And he thought, my God, some men might actually pay to have sex with women. Congratulations, Taylor. You've just invented what is literally called the oldest profession on earth.

It's like those kids on TikTok who thought they invented the milkshake or whatever. Oh, my God. Oh, it was the Coke float. The Coke float. They thought they invented Agua fresca. Like, it's every day. Oh, boy. Every day they think they invent something.

Specifically, Taylor wanted Carrie to have private dance sessions with men and then have sex with them, however they wanted for money. This didn't go anywhere either, but one time Carrie did hook up with a guy and Taylor was furious. Not because of the infidelity, but because Carrie didn't charge the guy for it. Wow. Carrie having sex with someone for money because he told her to meant he was. was in control. Carrie having sex just because she wanted to do it meant he wasn't. That's exactly what it was. That tells you a lot about him, doesn't it? Oh, for sure. And for the record, because I got to get up on my soapbox at least once every six episodes, contractually, this is what actual real

sex trafficking looks like. No Liam Neeson, no vaguely scruffy-looking strangers at Target, just a douche canoe boyfriend with some charisma and a dream. Yeah. And, you know, you're probably saying, well, Carrie agreed to it. She was into it. Sure, maybe. A lot of victims of sex trafficking do agree to it at first. That's the whole, that's how insidious it is. That's why it's bad. Well, and guess what? She, what she should have realized is that she didn't need him for any of it. If that's what she wants to do with her life, go for it. Like we've said a hundred times, but you don't need him and you certainly don't need him taking your money. No, you do not. Things were getting weird in the house, they all shared. Everyone except Justin was drunk or high,

most of the time. Taylor was taking, okay, it's a long list. It's not that long. Weed, ecstasy, meth, GHB, and special K. One time, Taylor had Justin come into the bedroom and watch him and Carrie have sex. And I feel like we should find something to say about that, but also I don't want to. That's your brother, dude. Gross. Oh, I can't imagine any scenario. I can't even say it out Don't even say it out loud. Don't even say it out loud. Don't even say it out loud. So gross. You brought it up. Justin was...

Well, no, Taylor thought it up. I'm just horrified. Justin was still quiet and polite, self-identified, nice guy, TM. Women liked him, but had absolutely no interest in dating him. Was he a nice guy? Well, he was certainly weirder than people realized at first glance. For one thing, there was the way he ate, which almost everybody who knew him had something to say about. Justin ate like an animal, just shoving the food into his face, chewing with his mouth open, and making big smacking sounds like a maniac. After a meal, his face would be covered in food, like a baby. Oh, my God, I would kill this man dead. The noise is alone. Oh, no.

Yeah, well, it gets worse. One of the roommates was dating a woman called Sarah, and one night, poor Sarah. came down to the kitchen to get a glass of water. And Justin was in there on all fours, eating off a plate on the floor. Oh, my. Um, yeah. So what the fuck this was? I have no idea.

But I kind of suspect it was some kind of fetish shit. Oh, God. He certainly wasn't getting any kind of regular action. He told Sarah he'd had sex with him. a girl one time in his mid-20s. He was 27 by now. And as much as I hate to say it, given what happens later, Justin was a good-looking guy. Plus, he was hanging out at 90s goth clubs, which weren't exactly bastions of normalcy and chastity. So if he wasn't getting laid, it was probably because he was putting out very weird vibes, like a radio transmitter.

Yeah, absolutely. When Sarah broke up with her boyfriend, Justin asked her out. She told him she only thought of him as a friend and he didn't take it well, said, well, I've only been friends with you to see if I could fuck you. Proto, Nice Guy, bullshit. Another time, he said he wanted to show her a new piercing and dropped his pants to show her his dick. There was no piercing. He just wanted to flash her. So, so much for Mr. Nice Guy, TM. Gross. Taylor's big plans were now swirling around something he called Transform America. Essentially, the plan was to set up his own version of the impact organization in a small town and add sex and drugs to it. It'd be so great and make everyone so happy that the town would offer Taylor 1% of its tax revenue. Oh, naturally,

of course they would. And then he'd use that money to set up in another town, then another, and yada, yada, yada, peace and joy all across planet Earth. Orgies, probably. I'm pretty sure he was planted on orgies. The steps in between were kind of vague, but that really was. was the end point that Taylor was aiming at. Paradise on Earth to prepare the way for the second coming, so to speak. He estimated that he'd need at least a million dollars to get things rolling, and to get there, Carrie had to keep dancing, and Taylor had to set up a meth lab in the garage. How many religious leaders start this one? I wonder. Good God. Now, this drove Carrie nuts. She'd never gotten as deep into drugs as Taylor, stick into weed and ecstasy,

and for everybody in the house, a meth lab in the garage was a serious threat, both to their freedom and their health. But Taylor, of course, never gave a shit about anybody's opinion but his own. He wanted a meth lab in the garage, so he started a meth lab in the garage. But he couldn't get the production up and running, and that plan, like the rest of them, fizzled out. Good job, Walter Shite. And the same was true of his next scheme,

and thank God for that because it was a creepy one. Taylor would take Carrie down to Mexico and get hold of a bunch of 14 and 15 year old girls. How they would do this isn't clear, but Taylor seems like just the kind of dumb piece of shit who'd assume that you can just, you know, buy children outside convenience stores down there.

These girls would essentially be Taylor's sex slaves. He said he'd teach them how to please a man, like he was doing him a damn favor. Fucking creep. And then he'd dress them up as sandwich delivery girls and send them in with sandwiches to his old job at Dean Whitter, where they'd seduce young stockbrokers and invite them home for sex. Taylor, of course, would secretly film the sex, and the girls would then threaten Dean Whitter with a $50 million lawsuit. The company would, of course,

settle for $20 million, and transform America could continue its mission of creating heaven on earth, via human trafficking, sexual assault, and blackmail. Seems legit. Taylor even planned to give a a million dollars to the honey-trapped stockbrokers so that they wouldn't kill themselves. He didn't want anyone to die. He just wanted to potentially ruin their lives and reputations a little. It was a treat. Yeah, well, fuck them anyway if they fell for this. Because we're talking about 14-year-old girls. Ugh. So I guess it's kind of an achievement to come up with one of both the dumbest and most disgusting plans in history. So give him credit for being like the Ed Wood of Perverts, I guess, if nothing else. Taylor and Carrie did actually go down to Mexico, but all they came back with

was some rohypnal, which Taylor apparently just wanted to have around, like you do. As it does in many Christian faiths, the number three has a lot of symbolic weight in the Mormon Church. At the top of the church hierarchy are a president and two counselors, and Taylor wanted to replicate this, to create a close-knit group of three who would work together to bring Transform America into being. He would lead, of course, and and faithful Flunky Justin would be there, too. The initial plan was for Carrie to round out this Shmoli Trinity, but Carrie was starting to show some unwelcome signs of thinking for herself.

Not only did she question Taylor's foray into the wild world of meth manufacture, she also quit dancing at the Gold Club without asking his permission first. What a bitch, right? Taylor started shutting her out of secretive meetings with Justin. Carrie started to realize some things that would be completely obvious to somebody from the outside, but that were hard to see when you were stuck inside a weird group home with a messianic fruit loop who couldn't keep his trap shut for five consecutive seconds. Taylor's schemes cost everybody money except himself. Carrie was working her ass off

and it was all going to him. And again, she's making a thousand dollars a night. Like imagine having to hand all that over. That's just bullshit. I realized at some point that he was just a parasite, she'd say later. Yeah. Playboy wanted her to come down to Los Angeles for another shoot. It was looking like they were going to put her in the magazine, and a weird boyfriend who thought he was on a mission from God to employ underage sex slaves was probably not going to help her potential new career, to say the least.

His plans were just creepy. She wanted out. And Taylor wanted someone who he could fully convince of his divine mission, someone who would see him as a prophet. And he found her. At an LDS church in Walnut Creek, just a couple miles from Pacheco. Don Godman grew up out in the sticks in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, 45 miles from the nearest town. She was a lonely kid.

Most of her mom's attention went to Don's chronically ill dad, and even though she was a good student, she felt like none of her teachers paid attention to her. She spent a lot of time just wandering around the woods surrounding their home. When she was 17, Dawn got married. A year later, they had a son, and shortly after that, a divorce. She started studying nursing and got a job in a nurse. nursing home where she did well, but studying working and looking after a kid stressed her out to the breaking point and she started taking meth. Dawn, baby. Whatever the question is,

the answer is never meth. Soon, Speed became the most important thing in her life. She lost her job, her ex got full custody of her son, and Don went back and forth between living in her car and camping in the woods. She tried to end her life with an overdose at one point and was committed to a mental health ward for three days. So Don was about as low as a person can get when a friend gave her a copy of the book of Mormon. She read it cover to cover, then joined a local LDS ward. And you don't have to be a fan of organized religion to recognize that the church offered her something valuable. She'd always been an outsider and her life had spiraled completely out of control. And now she had a community who seemed to care about her and give her some kind of structure to her life.

Don was all in, with the intense devotion of a new convert. By 1998, she was a member of the church in good standing and even got to see her son on weekends. Her life was starting to get back on track. And then one night, she happened to go to a singles murder mystery dinner the church had organized and met Taylor and Justin. By this point, the Hellzers didn't fit in so great at Mormon functions. They had long hair and wore all black, and Don thought this was probably why the other people at the dinner were giving them the cold shoulder. Actually, the other people probably knew

that Taylor was cheating on his wife and probably a few beers short of a six-pack, but Don, who knew what it was like to be excluded, made a point of talking to the brothers. Justin gave Don his name and didn't say another word the whole night. Classic Justin. But Taylor turned on his well-practiced charm, and Don fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.

They became fast friends, and Taylor apparently spent every spare moment with Don, giving her his full attention and sharing his weird religious ideas. Dawn was pretty much the perfect target for all this intense attention from a handsome, charismatic guy. It was something she'd never had before in her life. Her newfound faith allowed for modern prophets

and who fit the bill better than Taylor. Her zealous devotion to the LDS church slipped seamlessly into zealous devotion to Taylor and his mission to transform America. By early 2000, after making her go through that god-awful impact training, Taylor had decided to invite Don to be the third member of his Transform America Trinity. Dawn, of course, was thrilled. The three of them started spending hours in secret meetings that Carrie was deliberately excluded from. Taylor would even point at her and yell, go to your room.

Fuck you. Carrie eventually had enough of this ever-rising tide of bullshit, packed her bags, and headed back to Southern California, where she adopted the stage name Carissa Fair and got to be. September's playmate of the month. Girl dodged a bullet, getting out when she did. Seriously, good for her. Man, I can't even imagine how this affected her later. Like, oh, I...

So now that Carrie was gone, Taylor poured all his grandiose plans into Dawn's ears. And you have to think this is exactly why he started going to those Mormon singles events in the first place, figuring correctly that it would be a great place to find somebody vulnerable enough

for him to overpower with his personality. escort clubs, sex trafficking, drug dealing, Don fell completely in with Taylor's belief that anything was acceptable if it served the ultimate goal of creating an earthly paradise. And violence? Sure, that was fine too. There was no right or wrong, after all. All that mattered was what worked to make Transform America reality. For Taylor, this also happened to include encouraging Don to ditch her conservative LDS clothes and start wearing see-through mesh tops, because, of course, he all. always wanted to change the world in ways that gave him personal pleasure.

Justin, meanwhile, while willingly following his older brother down these insane rabbit holes, had smaller ambitions for himself. In his journal, he listed his most important goals for the coming year. One, driver. Two, a sexual lover. Three, become a druid. Just take a minute to deal with that lit. driver, a sexual lover, become a druid.

And his specific definition of druid, by the way, seems to have come largely from Dungeons and Dragons. When they were younger, he and Taylor had once played the game for 25 hours straight, which is quite an achievement for people who weren't allowed to drink coffee. I mean, I've done that, but I could, you know, I could bump up with a little caffeine when I needed to. I don't know how a Mormon is going to do this. I'm not supposed to have caffeine.

How exactly you become a D&D character class, well, the Hells or brothers were never all that big on fleshing out the specifics of their plans. They were just idea guys, you know? One day, Taylor went driving with Dawn and told her, Spirit tells me it's time you got to know everything. He drove her to the grounds of the LDS Temple in Oakland. This is such a sacred mission.

I want the angels to protect us from Satan and his minions, Taylor told her. they can't overhear us here and there purportedly surrounded by angels he told her everything about transform america including the secrets he'd only shared with justin up to now before now he'd never come out and claim to be a prophet but now he told don that if she and justin would join him in his cause that's exactly what he would become he had a direct commandment from god to act and they had to act soon because the last days were coming and Transform America had to happen now. To make it happen, he was going to need Don's help, and it wasn't going to be easy.

They were going to have to kidnap people. They were going to have to kill people. These would be the necessary sacrifices to bring about Christ's millennial reign of peace. He needed Don's help to save the world. And Don said, Okay. So we're going to leave it there for part one, campers,

but, you know, we'll have part two for you. you next week. So for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Camp Fire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Catherine with a K, Laura, Jess, Andrea, Megan, Brenda, Bob, and Dave. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes even two, plus tons of extra content. like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions.

And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash truecrime campfire. And for great TCCC merch, visit the True Crime Campfire Store at Spreadshirt.com. And guess what? We have a website now. Truecrimecampfirepod.com.

Come see us. Thank you.