Joshua Crefield led a Corvallis cult enforcing naked prayer, incest, and total isolation, while police inaction allowed vigilante "White Caps" to tar-and-feather him before his eventual arrest via coerced affidavits. Despite a 17-month sentence, Crefield returned to declare himself Jesus, leading a starvation march until George Mitchell killed him in Seattle; however, Mitchell's acquittal sparked Esther's revenge shooting, resulting in the asylum commitment and deaths of Maude Hurt and Esther, exposing how gender norms and institutionalization destroyed these survivors. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Women Take Matters Into Their Own Hands00:14:24
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
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Cool zone media.
Okay, dope.
Robert's just like dry eating.
Like a whole piece of paper-sized sheet of seaweed.
Yummers.
Like I have tin of them.
I don't even think you've chewed.
You're just inhaling the seaweed.
Oh, no.
Seaweed turns to a sweet, sweet liquid in your mouth.
That's good stuff.
Thanks for that.
Yeah, that's going to really piss off a significant chunk of the audience.
Speaking of a significant chunk of the audience, Matt Lee.
Hey, I'm back, baby.
Wow.
Got another thing.
Wow.
Thank you.
I was really, really had, we've been waiting for years to have Nick Cave come in as a guest on our podcast and just thrilled to have him.
Thank you, Nick.
Oh, I love, I love that you, yeah.
Great.
I watch Peaky Blinders.
Oh, man.
That's such a banger.
Oh, Nick Cave, just a ton of bangers.
I'm always a murder ballads guy, but I mean, listen, he's a very talented, talented, deep-voiced man.
Yeah.
But Peaky Blinders, now that's a goddamn, that's a great show, man.
Yeah.
Peaky Blinders, which is about children, right?
It's about, you know, Roma people, but there are children in it.
There's children in it.
And there's also children in Portland.
And you can help them have access to a museum by texting bastards to 50155 to donate to the Flip Museum.
I could have helped you with that transition.
No, no, no, no.
I think it worked.
I think it worked.
I think it was happening, but I was like, whoa, I mean, it's all really well, children.
I just decided to get Bedantic at that moment.
Yeah, there's kids all over the place in most places.
Except for in this cult, which is, well, actually a lot of them are children.
Yeah.
But, you know, let's get back to the story.
So Joshua Crefield, as we kind of closed out the last episode with, I don't really feel strongly that he was necessarily worse than the surrounding society.
This is one of those cases where not really a clear good guy.
Right.
But he was a pretty, he was still an abusive cult leader, right?
Right.
Because he's a cult leader.
All that goes with it.
I think not a good guy is kind of relative, but cult leader, I think we can say, you make your judgment for yourself.
Yeah, yeah.
So one of the things about him as a cult leader is that he decides after he starts having sex with everyone that he has been given, quote, the authority to regulate the details of their daily life.
Now, his first new rule is, quote, everything except the light of the day is eschewed, which means no lamps, no fires, and no electric lights, right?
Nothing but daylight, anything else, and you're angering God.
I think it might have been still okay to navigate via like the fires caused by lightning strikes, but I don't know if this ever got brought up to him.
Not a lot of lightning in Oregon.
Right.
I mean, and also how often are you going to be put in that position?
Yeah, right.
So Joshua had also declared back on the island that sins had to be atoned for by having his followers roll on the ground until he ordered them to stop.
This is incorporated into their day-long prayer sessions.
Crefield also started telling his followers that God only would speak to them when they were rolling around on the ground and that the way to like welcome him in was to shout prayers as loudly as possible while again, rolling around.
And if you don't do this, then God's going to smite you.
And again, these are like 24-hour sessions.
Now, you probably won't be surprised to hear this makes quite a ruckus.
And it was noted that like neighbors as far as a quarter of a mile away from the Hertz house could hear them rolling around and screaming all night long when they would do these day-long sessions.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's not exactly an inconspicuous way of praying.
No, no.
Joshua next announced that he had to sanctify their food by touching it with his hands.
He exercised extreme discrimination in what was worthy of sanctification, though.
So not only did he have to sanctify your food, but he would decide what he was willing to sanctify.
And if he didn't sanctify food for a week, you couldn't eat.
No, that's my hamburger.
Let me touch it.
No, God doesn't want you to have this.
Yum, I love it.
He's just everyone's big brother.
Yeah.
He's just jacking their food.
He's just stealing from them and saying, God doesn't want to do that.
He's the professor from that I think you should leave.
Give me that.
Give me that.
Oh, I should have got that.
Yeah, that is exactly what he's doing.
God, that is, that is quite funny.
So if he doesn't sanctify food, then you can't eat, right?
So like one week he'd be like, God has only approved me to sanctify bread and water because he wants you to know what it's like to be hungry.
And then the next week he's like, you don't know enough yet.
So I'm not sanctifying everything.
You can't even have water.
And then when people will be like, but we, we want water.
Please don't, why are we, why are we starving and ourselves?
He would be like, if you don't do this, God's going to take me away.
Like he'll make me leave.
If you guys don't starve yourselves this week.
So God will get rid of the last good dick you've ever seen.
They're like, oh, fuck.
Yeah.
Can't let the dick kind of where this is headed because next from Holy Rollers, quote, Joshua ruled that men, women, and children were all to sleep together on the floor in the same room while wearing little clothing.
They were to do this so, according to Joshua, they wouldn't know cold or so they would know cold.
Joshua established rules about whom they could communicate with.
If someone wasn't one of God's anointed refused to accept the gift of spirit, Joshua told them to have no dealings with the infidels, even if the infidels were members of their own families.
So he's isolating everybody.
He's now much more directly breaking up families.
And this creates a problem because Crefield and his cult are now living at the Hurt family house.
And while Maude and most of the rest of the Hurt family, you know, Maud, her brother, one of her sisters, her mom, they've all joined Joshua's cult.
Their father, the patriarch of the family, Ovi Hurt, and the owner of the house, has not joined the cult, right?
He has refused to.
He's letting them all crash here because he doesn't want his daughter to like freeze to death in the woods.
But he is not in the cult.
And Crefield has just said, you have to like shun everyone who's not in the cult.
And this is kind of, it's kind of sad because like in our whole story, Ovie Hurt is the only nice guy.
Like everyone in town basically agrees.
He was just like a really helpful, kind man.
And he, again, he had agreed to let the cult live on his family because he loved his family so much.
And he's like, I don't understand what you're doing, but I don't want you to die in the cold.
Please come live with me.
Sure, I'll take your cult leader too.
And Joshua.
We call that enabling.
That's he is enabling.
And Joshua punishes him for it because he's like, I know that we're living in his house, but you all have to shun your dad.
Don't call, you can't call him dad.
God's the only father.
Yeah, there's only one daddy here.
It's me.
Call him the black devil.
Yeah, very wild shit.
And he's like, you need to tell him whenever you have a chance that God's going to kill him, right?
Like, don't call him your dad and let him know he's being, he's going to be punished.
Yeah, call him a black devil and that God wants him dead.
Yeah.
But, you know, have a regular relationship.
I don't want to.
Yeah, otherwise, sure.
Don't be.
Yeah.
Now, as you probably would not be surprised to hear, this is kind of a bummer for OV, right?
Not a happy way to live.
So by the end of October, he gives in and he's like, fuck it.
I'll join the cult.
What else am I going to do?
Life is terrible otherwise.
He quits his job.
He sends them like his two weeks notice and he's like, I now realize I've been living in sin and I'm going to go join a cult.
And he puts a note on his front door that says positively no admittance except on God's business, which I also have on my front door.
Different God.
Sure.
Different God.
Think deeper, think older, more underwater.
Anyway, the holy rollers are overjoyed that Ovie has joined them.
And like all of us, they knew the best way to express their joy was by lighting shit on fire.
Hell yeah.
Which they did, using all of Ovie's possessions as kindling.
So they take everything.
Once he joins, they take everything he owns, his carpets, his beds, his sheep, his like precious family heirlooms, his like things he'd inherited from his dad, family photos, and they light them on fire.
They build a big bonfire and they're like, this shit's carnal.
So we have to burn it.
God damn it.
You just want to be what is it?
This poor motherfucker.
Now, Frank, the guy who had made the newspaper because he rode his bike to Oregon City, he throws his bike on the pyre, right?
Because he's in the cult.
So he has to burn his bicycle as carnal.
And once they finished with the furniture, the cult digs up all the flowers and grapevines and fruit trees, their garden, and they burn that too.
Last, they take all of the family livestock, their chickens, as well as the pet cat and dog, and burn them alive.
Yeah.
All right.
I officially don't like that.
Yep.
Now, now we're on to the monster part, right?
Listen, you can fuck my wife all you want, but you leave my kitty cat out of this, you son of a bitch.
Yeah.
So that's good.
Although there's some debate as to whether or not the animals were alive when this happened.
So I don't know.
Imagine that it's the less horrible option, I guess.
Yeah, they're both pretty bad.
I like him again.
He can be fucking my wife.
So they decide next that they should march on another family home, the Hartley residence.
Warren Hartley is again not a follower of the cult, but his wife and daughter are.
So like his wife and daughter, well, he's like away at work, start lighting his shit on a fire.
And when he comes back, he like gets a shotgun.
He's like, fuck you guys, right?
And so this whole brouha ha obviously makes the local papers kind of a kind of a wild thing to happen in your small city.
Did he shoot anybody with the gun?
He doesn't shit.
No, he should have.
Yeah.
But he does not.
Probably because it was his family doing a lot of the burning.
Right.
So this becomes enough of a story that like thou, like several thousand Oregonians travel from nearby to like drive and walk past the house where this is all happening just to be like, maybe we'll get to see a crazy person.
You know, there's not much going on in Oregon at this point.
Very boring.
We can't stress this enough.
A guy burning a bunch of shit with a shotgun nearby is like literally watching 1997's The Titanic.
Yeah.
Hey, honey, you know how our lives are unendurable drudgery?
Let's risk them by traveling 18 hours by foot to look at a crazy man.
Wow, look at him burn.
This was worth both of our sons dying of tetanus on the road.
I ate my child, but it's fun to see that that lady has almost got her titties out.
She's dancing.
Oregon.
So this had all gone so, oh, sorry.
So yeah, this becomes like a whole thing.
And a rumor starts to spread, right?
Based on the fact that they burnt their pets on this pyre, that an adopted child had also been like, because the Hurts have a kid they adopted, and no one is able, like, no one's seen the kid in a while.
So they're like, oh, shit, did the cult light a baby on fire?
Because Crefield has been preaching that this adopted child, since they like, you know, you spend some money on the adoption process, right?
So that makes this child profane and of the world and thus not worth living.
Dickhead.
Yeah, he's really made a heel turn now.
Yeah, I don't like him.
Yeah.
Good stuff.
So Crefield has not gone that far, thankfully.
No, no children get lit on fire as far as we're aware of.
No kids die in this story, in fact, which makes it fairly rare among behind the bastards.
The Kid Is Not Dead00:03:59
Yeah, I know.
This is new for you.
Yeah.
Celebrate a kid not dying in this by donating to the Portland Children's Museum.
Yes, please.
Right?
Yeah, 50155.
Text there.
Then you can donate.
Bam.
Now that's a fucking plug.
That was it.
Well, Crefield has not lit a baby on fire.
The rumor is widely believed enough that the police have to make a welfare check.
And not very pro-police here, but like, yeah, you probably want to check up on that.
Yeah, it seems like a child.
If they're lighting cats and dogs on fire, they might kill a baby.
There's no way to know.
I mean, what else is your job?
You know what I mean?
Right.
It seems like that's a part of it.
Is like, hey, we got a loose cannon in the neighborhood fucking all the wives, burning all the pets.
Maybe we check.
Maybe we take a look at this.
Yeah, let's just give a little knocky knock on the door here and see if they show up at the Hurt House and OV lets them in.
And they enter to find the house empty because everything's been burned.
All the furniture has been burned.
And all of the rollers are lying near naked in a pile in an empty room, like weeping.
Some of them are crying.
Some of them are laughing.
All of them are chanting loudly in prayer.
A lot of them are rolling around.
They seem kind of like manic and crazy, right?
Sure.
None of them have eaten in days.
They all look exhausted and like starving.
So the police are like, well, yeah, this does seem like it could be a problem.
But OV takes them to the adopted daughter.
And so like, well, the kid's not dead.
And so next they're like, did you guys kill your pets in a bonfire?
And Frank Hurt, who's Ovie's son and also in the cult, is like, we killed a dog and cat, I admit, but we did so because we wanted to get rid of them but failed.
Yeah.
No, no, no, no, that's better.
Yeah.
Listen, we tried to get rid of them.
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Involuntary Commitment Looms Large00:13:30
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The cat came back.
You know the song.
And sometimes the cat comes back and you got to burn it.
Yeah, they did a real homeward bound thing.
So we had fucking light them on fire.
The alternative ending to homeward bound.
That would be a really different movie if at the end of that the family is like the director's cut.
The animals followed us.
Sometimes the video note is useful.
So, um, yeah, the cops that ask, did you like, did you sacrifice these animals?
And Crefield was like, no, no, we didn't sacrifice the animals.
No, that would be weird.
Yeah, yeah.
And Frank says, we have no laws except the Bible.
You find nothing like that in the Bible.
And OV is like, yeah, we killed the dog, but it was like a bad dog.
It wouldn't obey orders.
And so we had sentences to death for its disobedience, right?
Yeah, that was prior.
Right.
Yeah, we had a trial.
We had another dog as judge.
It was a jury of its peers, a bunch of other dogs barking and shit.
And this is, this is, this concerns the sheriff because, again, OV is this nice man.
Like, he's not the kind of guy to murder his dog.
But, you know, he's a nice guy, you know, not the dog murdering type.
Yeah, he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would kill his dog on a fire.
Who would characterize?
Yeah, seems kind of weird for you, man.
Which I guess it's nice to be known as not the kind of guy who would do that.
No, I'd love that.
Yeah.
Put that on a resume.
Yeah, probably not the kind of guy who would light a dog on fire.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So the police ask next, hey, if God told you that you were supposed to murder your small adopted child, would you do that?
And Crefield's like, well, you know, it's impossible for me to sin since God is scripting every action that I take.
So if I were to burn a child, it wouldn't be wrong.
Now, he tells this to the cops?
He tells this to the cops.
Dude, I like it.
He's going for it.
He's going for it, right?
He's going for it.
He's going to get away with.
That is unsettling.
And honestly, probably should be cause for some sort of action being taken against you.
But it's not illegal, right?
The cops are like, well, he has not committed a crime.
Right.
Like, there's nothing illegal about killing your own pets.
And there's nothing illegal about saying that it wouldn't be wrong for you to murder a child if you haven't murdered the child.
You're like, I don't know if it's, I mean, I guess it's a First Amendment issue here.
Yeah.
There's a lot going on here.
I mean, I'm a free speech absolutist.
Obviously, we live in Oregon.
We're a little bit of like whites-only whatever.
But I don't know.
So 1903 not being a high point for animal rights, there's nothing the police can do legally here, right?
Now, obviously, the Oregon police have acted illegally an awful lot in this period.
Most of them are in the KKK in like 10 years or so when that comes through.
So like they're part of why they're not willing to do this is like, these are white Christians, right?
So like, what are we supposed to do?
So instead of doing anything, the cops are like, well, we can't arrest you, but like we should let you know all the men in town are really angry and they are talking about forming a posse and maybe tarring and feathering all of the men running this cult.
So, you know, heads up.
And you will not be surprised to hear Joshua does not change his behavior as a result of this warning.
Because again, part of like what he's been preaching is that once we start teaching the true gospel, all of the, everyone's going to hate us, right?
This is within his religious cosmology to be expected.
Right.
And the negative attention guy.
The more negative attention he gets, the more he's like, I'm right.
Yeah.
They're trying to cancel us for stealing the colour.
This is cancel culture where you can't just burn your pets and fuck everyone's wife.
You know, politically correct.
Man, Portland, Oregon town.
That's, you know what, Matt?
That's a great new don't tread on me flag.
Like you still have the snake in the middle, but instead of don't tread on me, it's like, kill your pets, fuck your wives.
Good stuff.
Good stuff.
So after this point, after this police visit ends in nothing, harassment of the cult begins by locals, right?
Gangs of men in the night start running up and like hurling rocks through the house windows, banging on the door and then running off.
One father kidnaps back his daughter.
Now, when I say he kidnaps her, she is 22 years old, right?
So assuming now, legally, women are not independent in this point in time, right?
They can't even vote.
So I don't know what the law would say about this, but like she's 22 years old and has decided she wants to be here.
He does steal her, right?
Right.
And he ties her to her bed in his house to keep her from going back.
She spends days like not sleeping, screaming, refusing to eat.
But like it's, it is pretty bad.
Again, not a clear good guy in this story.
Yeah.
And tied her down so she can't even roll.
Yeah, she can't roll, right?
God's going to be pissed.
Yeah, she's like going through DTs from not rolling.
Yeah.
So eventually Crefield and one of his top men, Brooks, flee, like flee town to try to avoid because they think they're going to get murdered and try to shack up at a random house in a nearby town called Rin.
And they're like knock on this old lady's door.
News does not percolate quickly.
So she doesn't know who they are.
She just sees two dirty guys coming off the road being like, hey, we need a place to stay for the night.
You know, we're starving.
And, you know, being a nice person is like, of course, you can sleep here tonight.
Right.
Crefield, as soon as she like invites him in is like, hey, you got any pets?
Yeah.
I'm God's prophet.
Will you cook me dinner?
Now, I don't know much about this lady other than this, but I like her because as soon as this guy says, hey, I'm God's chosen one, make me dinner, lady.
She's like, oh yeah, of course.
I just got to go to the grocery store real quick.
So she rolls down to the grocery store and then finds the nearest group of armed men and is like, hey, I need you to deal with this guy for me.
And so a bunch of like lumberjacks show up with weapons and are like, we're going to make this a problem if you don't get the fuck out of this lady's house, which is pretty cool.
That's pretty based.
That's a good story.
This lady, you know what?
She's got a good head on her shoulder.
Yeah.
Smart.
She saw the red flags and said, I got to get lumberjacks.
Yeah.
I need some lumberjacks and salt.
She's got a dick like a tree trunk.
We got to get some lumberjacks here.
There you go.
So Crefield and this other guy return to the hurt house, right?
Because they can't make it in Ren. O.V. Hurt by this point has gotten tired of being in the cult.
He was never really into it.
He just didn't want his wife and kids to hate him.
So a friend of his is like, hey, you seem really depressed and you lit your dog on fire.
You want to like go to Portland with me for a week, you know, just kind of clear your head, right?
And he's like, yeah, that actually seems like a good idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
And then this friend is his daughter's former fiancé, James, right?
The guy, the rich guy we heard about earlier.
So James is like, why don't we take a drive?
You look like you need it, man.
You look like you need some air to not be around the ashes of your former wife.
So as soon as he gets away from this, he's like, oh, fuck, I don't want to be in a cult, man.
This is terrible.
I've made a horrible mistake.
And yeah.
So he returns home, now de-radicalized, I guess, just in time to learn, like everyone else, that God has given another message to Joshua Crefield has anointed.
Great.
And I bet you're not going to be surprised to hear that message is, you should marry a 16-year-old.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's going.
That's always where this was at.
That's always where it was going to end up.
There's a lot of roundabout ways that people try to eventually marry a 16-year-old.
And this is one of them.
And that's the thing for all of the enjoyment that I have about the concept of sex cults.
Whenever you're talking sex cult, there is a moment in which the leader's going to marry a 16-year-old.
That's every one of these stories.
I've read a lot of them.
It always goes in that direction.
And it just like every single time, you've ruined sex cults for me.
Yeah, exactly.
It's really, we need a new non-problematic sex culture.
Honestly, it's like an ethical sex cult where, you know, consent is key.
Yeah.
And there's none of this.
And let's just say minimum age, 28.
Right.
We're really going to go in above the line, you know?
Right.
I think this is, I think we could make a lot of money.
Let's do it.
Let's get that island, Robert.
Let's do it.
This is a good idea.
This is a good idea.
Don't say.
So, yeah, the 16-year-old that God has told Joshua Crefield to marry is a cult member named Esther Mitchell.
And so he's like, yep, we're going to get hitched.
God says it.
She's going to be the new Mary.
But before this can all happen, Esther's sister commits her to an insane asylum in Portland.
Which is, again, everything about all of this story is problematic, right?
Like involuntary commitment is a huge part of what's going to happen, not just to Esther here.
Now, the asylum, because she's too young for the straight up insane asylum, she's sent to the Boys and Girls Aid Society, which is both like if you're an orphan, if you're like a homeless youth, it's where you'll go, but it's also where kids who are declared insane go because they can't go to the adult asylum quite yet, right?
Right.
This is, again, a lot that's problematic about this.
And Esther fights like hell as soon as she's institutionalized.
For days, she would refuse to eat.
She would just shout glory to God and other such things.
Her brother, this is one of the, her brother George visits her and is like, hey, me and your other brother, we really love you.
We want you to come home.
And she was like, you are only my brothers in name.
Yeah.
That'll definitely fuck you up.
That is not a cool thing to say.
Yeah.
Well, you're a fucking bitch.
That's what I would have said.
Yeah.
Well, you're fucking stupid.
Yeah, she has reason to be angry.
Let's not pretend.
Anyway, it's messy.
So Esther may have been the most dedicated of Crefield's believers.
One night she told the matron of the facility that she's stuck at that God had started speaking directly to her.
And the matron, for whatever, whatever she says, the woman who runs this is like, I think she is going to murder one of the other children.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not unfair.
Like, I don't think she's unreasonable.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So all of this enrages the community even more.
Like, this is not, nothing is fun about this anymore.
This is like a virus sweeping through our young women.
That's how the men are treating it.
And like, we need to fucking do something here.
And Sophie Koe, one of the reasons I like her essay here is that it does a good job of describing how a lot of this anger comes not just out of the fact, not out of the fact that like aspects of what Joshua's doing are really abusive, which they are, but out of the fact that Joshua has made the local women ungovernable, right?
And here's what Sophie writes.
The Corvallis Times reassured the public of their feelings, saying that they had good reason to be against Crefield for leading women, girls, and others into delusions and unnatural conditions, into a state of mind where there is more frenzy than reason, more folly than since.
People were not angry that he had female followers, but that they were only female.
The Corvallis Times also explained why this aspect was so significant, claiming that the idea of women freely running around and abandoning their husbands, fathers, and brothers was what made it so maddening.
She was out of the world and he was of the earth and she would have nothing to do with him.
The fact that women were engaging in such wild behavior without men threw off the balance of Corvallis, both in perceptions of social roles and in daily life.
Crefield was altering the community already and this was just the beginning.
So I love that that, of course, that's the main issue of these men is they're just like, listen, I have no problem with like, you know, you guys fucking like, like, you'd fuck my wife, but like, I have to watch.
Yeah.
I like, that's my thing, bro.
Like, the fact is, is that like, it ain't fun if the homies can't have none, dog.
You're just doing some real selfish shit.
Well, and you're letting them, you're letting them dress slutty.
You're letting them like their heads aren't covered.
They spend a lot of time about how these women do not wear hats.
Oh my God, they're not even wearing a hat.
They're just showing their slutty ass hair.
That's crazy.
A Weird Org Chart Emerges00:05:34
Yeah.
Speaking of slutty ass hair, there's nothing sluttier than the sponsors of this podcast.
That's right.
When they show their hair, oh my God, does God cry?
God cries, the devil jacks off.
Great sponsors.
Yeah.
By the way, listen to Matt Lieb's new three-hour long Pentecostal sermon.
Wait, what did you say?
I said, God, God cries the devil jacks off.
Yeah, yeah.
God cries the devil jacks off.
Yeah.
Here's a little preview.
God cries in the bill jackets off.
See, so warm and soul.
Yeah.
Oh, right.
I'm sorry.
If you want to hear the entire long version of that, Matt is performing every night at Hillsdale College for the next 11 months.
So check him out there.
Check me out in Hillsdale.
All right.
Ah, we are back.
Back, baby.
That's right, motherfucker.
So, good night.
Bye.
Wait, shit.
Hello.
We're back.
So that December, Crefield addressed his flock at the Hurt Home and told them that God had given him a new message.
He strips in front of his cult after reading them the story of David and Bathsheba, and he tells them, Clothing was intended to cover up sin and shame.
And if the heart was made pure, there was no sin.
Therefore should be no shame.
So like you can be naked again, just like in the Garden of Eden, because you haven't sinned since you're following me, right?
Yeah, no, it makes total, it actually kind of makes sense.
It makes sense, but what it's the lead-in for, as soon as he's got them all naked, they all start having sex, right?
That is, that is the goal that he's leading them into here.
It's like, once I get them all naked, starting the orchie is going to be a lot easier.
Yeah, it's way easier when you don't have to fumble around with the fruit of the loom underloos.
Yeah.
As the book Holy Rollers describes, quote, and so orgies in the name of God and purification were held in Frank's house during the Christmas season of 1903.
Mothers were debauched in the presence of their daughters and daughters were debauched in the presence of their mothers.
And after all had been debauched, purified, Joshua instructed the women and girls to submit themselves to the lust of other men.
The only other men left in the flock were Frank Hurt, Charles Brooks, Samson Levins, and Lee Campbell.
All of them, that is.
But Sarah Hurt.
She refused to submit to him, to make love to him.
Joshua finally said that if Sarah would not submit to him, he would drive her out of the church and God would smite her.
All she would see in the hereafter was her soul plunging into an everlasting burning, seething hell.
So rather than risk eternal damnation, Sarah risked hell on earth and became a bride of Christ by making love to her son-in-law in front of her children, just as they had made love to others in front of her.
It was almost cool.
It was almost cool.
This is the first definite evidence I get that there was like a significant amount of coercion involved in at least some of these relationships.
I was like, yes, fuck yeah, Frank's gonna fuck, you know, Samson or whatever.
And then you said that part.
You should have just left that part out, man.
No, it's it's a lot.
It's pretty abusive.
It's pretty.
Now, I think it escalates in its abusiveness over time.
I think part of why these people get so into it is that for a while, it is much less abusive than aspects of their daily life.
Yeah.
But the clampdown has occurred by this point.
That's always how it goes, man.
You know, you start off, you're just like, you know, what's a little bit of just like a little porn here and there.
And then one thing leads to another, and you're like, have to have piss in it.
Everyone's pissing and pissing on each other.
And you're like, what if I become?
Is that relatable?
Yeah, that's very relatable, Matt.
So I'm glad that we've increased your backstory with that little anecdote.
I'm doing a lot of world building up.
The fans are really putting together a more complete picture of your life.
He's a heroin addict and he likes piss for what the fuck.
Yeah, of course.
That's like, oh, I don't actually want to continue that bit.
So after quite a lot of orgies, Joshua informed his followers of the new org chart.
God is, of course, the head of the church.
Joshua is the visible head.
Maude is now the spiritual mother.
And Esther, who is still in an asylum, was a saint and confusingly, now the church's spiritual god.
And that's a weird org chart.
I don't know.
That is a weird org chart.
I'm not sure how that graphs, but he tells them all that God has chosen Esther to be the mother of the new Christ.
Now, again, Esther is 16.
She is also institutionalized.
Crafield is still obsessed with her, though, because she is part of why, at least part of why the authors of Holy Rollers suggest he's obsessed with her is because at this point, she is the only virgin left in the church, right?
So he attempts to have several of his followers break her free of her asylum, but her mother, sensing this, being like, I'm pretty sure he's going to come for her and he might succeed, moves his daughter or moves her daughter to Illinois to be with her estranged father.
So daddy abandoned them a while ago, but she's like, hey, I need you to like do your job by keeping your daughter out of this cult.
Vigilante Justice Runs Rampant00:02:40
Yeah, like one thing.
One thing.
Just one thing.
You don't even have to, you know, kidnap her.
Yes.
Yeah.
So the men of the town who'd spent weeks gathering at night and vandalizing the hurt house took to calling themselves the white caps because they are all wearing these hats to recognize each other.
And this ties into the fact that, again, like a decade after this, all of these guys are going to be in the KKK.
I was going to say it's huge in Oregon.
This is very much in line with that period of our state history, right?
Yeah, that's kind of where I was like, why do they just have white hats around?
Yeah.
They're very ready.
And let's bring wizards into this for some reason.
Yeah, these guys are so ready to be a vigilante mob.
Again, very there's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Levy, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
Mental Illness Seen As Evidence00:16:23
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
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Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Little is happening in Corvallis.
Yeah.
So yeah, these guys all eventually corner Crefield and Ovie Hurt's son Frank outside of the Hurt House and tar and feather them.
Sick.
Yeah, yeah, I don't have a problem with this.
They have that coming.
They've got it coming.
Yeah.
I've been asking for a tarring and feather.
Yeah, they have been begging for it.
Oh my God.
So one local paper describes the incident thusly, quote, there was no attempt at secrecy by those who took part in the affair.
None wore masks and none affected a disguise.
The identity of many of the party is known, and these are men of standing and character.
Not a boy or hoodlum in the party.
That's fun.
Good sense.
Upstanding members of society, you know, turning a weird, you know, rapist cult into little birds or whatever.
Yeah.
Is it supposed to make you look like a bird?
I never understood the tarring and feathering thing.
Yeah.
So it's not clear to me if the police refuse to intervene here because they supported the white caps in doing violence to Crefield, or if they're just like, if we intervene, our neighbors will murder us, right?
Both are plausible, you know?
Like either cowardice or complicity, perhaps a mix of the two.
Either way.
Cops to me.
Yep.
Yep.
Either way, nothing is done about this.
Crefield promises that he will not let the actions of criminals stop his preaching, but he's also smart enough to know that, like, well, if tarring and feathering doesn't work, they're going to try to murder me next, right?
That's the only place to go.
So I should probably take evasive action.
Yes.
So he has his followers clean him up, and then still reeking of tar, he gets married, right?
And after this, he announces that the cult will be moving to Portland together, inaugurating a grand tradition that continues to this very day.
Now, this pisses off the men of Corvallis, right?
Who see their chance to get their wives and daughters back from Crefield slipping away?
If he gets to this degenerate big city, right?
Then there will be nothing stopping him, you know?
Yeah.
And Portland is, you know, it's still a much more conservative place than it is today, but it is also the kind of place where maybe a guy like him could get away from the justice a bunch of drunk rednecks could right.
He's one of many sex cult leaders, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Get in line.
So fortunately for them, for the men of Corvallis, Joshua Crefield was incapable of exactly one thing, and that one thing is not being on his bullshit.
Soon, as soon as the cult moves to Portland, he tells them all that we're staying here until the annihilation of material things, which I think is going to come in a couple of weeks.
So we'll move to China after that to preach the gospel, right?
That's the plan.
Yeah.
Well, they wait for that.
He renews his relationship with the wife of Burgess Starr, one of his early followers who had left once, you know, the wife fucking started.
So Starr at this point goes to the cops because adultery is illegal in Oregon.
You can, you can, it's punishable by up to two years in jail.
So, and this is, it's very rare for this to get prosecuted, not because adultery is rare.
I think adultery is about equally common in every era.
It's because if you're going to press charges, you have to admit that your wife cheated on you.
And like, most men would rather die.
But it says something about the kind of guy Burgess is that he is willing to like kind of take this hit because a lot of men could press charges for this in Corvallis.
He decides to take this hit on himself, this burden, and report Joshua.
And this opens the floodgates.
Another 12 men who are all former cult members kind of like come up afterwards and make similar allegations.
And it's one of those things.
This is where things get fucked up.
Like, obviously, I don't think it's super fucked up for Burgess, given the situation, to do this.
But what is fucked up is what has to happen to his wife, Donna, as a result of this.
Because since he's making this allegation, for it to be taken seriously, Donna Starr has to testify that she has slept with Joshua Crefield.
And she is still very much in the cult.
So you might think that it'd be difficult, right, for her to get her to admit this.
But in this case, rampant sexism kind of comes to the rescue of the men of Corvallis once again.
So basically, Burgess brings his wife to the police station and the police are like, yeah, we need you to sign this affidavit saying that you've had improper relations with Joshua Crefield.
Well, we need you to sign this affidavit.
They don't tell her what it says.
They just tell her she has to sign it and she can't really read.
So they have her sign a thing that says, I fucked the prophet, but she doesn't actually know what she's signing, right?
Right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That sounds also like classic cop shit, right?
Very, very classic cop shit, very classic misogyny shit, right?
And yeah, a warrant is issued for Joshua Crefield's arrest.
So this police dragnet starts across the northern chunk of the state, northwest Oregon, but Joshua Crefield fucking disappears, right?
This guy who had been everywhere, who was a publicity hound, who's got all these cult members, suddenly nobody can fucking find him.
After a couple of weeks, locals assume, well, shit, maybe he just left the state, right?
And we're fucking done with him, you know?
So newspapers start publishing articles celebrating the end of Crefieldism.
We beat him.
He ran scared.
You know, we got it.
Hallelujah.
The cult is over, you know?
Yeah.
So the men who had had their lives upended by Crefield's cult, like OH Hurt, tried to move forward.
This also proved difficult.
His daughter Maude was still in love with Joshua and other cult members continued to congregate curiously at their house.
Maude still refused to call him father because that was reserved for God.
And so she started calling her father old man hurt.
She turned all of the pictures on their walls around, calling them vain, and she would fast for days at a time.
When she would agree to eat, she would demand that she be allowed to eat alone.
Other female holy rollers were similarly recalcitrant.
Newspapers complained that these women in the cult would, even now that Crefield was gone, were still parading around in public, quote, with hair unbraided and unkempt, flowing in tangled masses.
This was seen as evidence of mental illness.
The Albany Herald wrote, Sane people don't go bareheaded.
Yeah, I love that.
I love that there was a time where that was the hottest thing ever was just like your hair showing up.
Catless women.
Now, for the kind of sane people don't go bareheaded line, Sophie Koe provides some valuable context here in her paper.
Minerva Kaijer Reynolds explained that one day her and her family were shocked when we saw the women pass our house, their hair hanging down their backs, barefooted.
Because of how confined women were to their social roles, if they did not keep up their image, even to the smallest detail of tying up their hair, the public might believe they were crazy.
Some, including Esther Mitchell, were taken to other places by their families or partners to separate them from the lifestyle of the Holy Rollers and Edmund Crefield.
So, you know, bad, not great.
Maude Hurt gets institutionalized as a result of this behavior.
She is admitted about a month after Crefield disappears.
She is admitted to the insane asylum.
The intake paperwork declares that this is because she refused to wear, quote, any covering for the head.
And in fact, when was she was given bonnets and stuff, she would destroy them.
May Hurt was also committed to the asylum.
So was Sophie Hartley.
And eventually, basically, all of the Holy Roller cult are admitted to insane asylums.
God bless you.
Just for at least one.
The thing is, is like some of the behavior feels like psych, like maybe psych word adjacent.
Like I would be like, yeah, maybe, you know, I don't know, get on a little bit of that Gabba Pensin, some of that Sarah Quill dog.
Like that, I think that that would help.
But it sounds like the reason they chose was just of the time.
Yeah.
You're not wearing a hat.
You're not wearing a hat.
You know what else has hair the pussy?
Put her in jail.
No, they are actually all very lucky that this was when it was, because if it was a little bit later, they'd have had their fucking brains scrambled by a lobotomist.
That's a very good point.
She's going around hatless.
Break her brain.
Yeah, break the brain.
The ice picker in the nose.
She's making me hoardy.
Take a little bit of that brain.
I should say, just to give you some context, they have institutionalized basically the whole cult at this point, which is fucked up.
It is worth noting that in this period of time, one out of every 200 Oregonians is institutionalized.
God damn.
Like they, a lot of people get thrown in crazy people jail.
And basically all of them for no good reason.
Yeah.
And like, but is it weird that I'm like low-key jealous of their robust social services budget?
I think you might want to Google a little bit about how institutions were in this period of time before you get jealous.
You mean they didn't have jello pudding pops and TV in every room?
I'll have to Google when Jell-O was invented.
Okay.
Well, we know TV was like 1700s.
Yeah, 1700s.
So like, yeah, I think all in the family is really big in this point.
Yeah, So, I mean, that's good enough.
That's not bad.
Yeah.
So that was invented in 1897, motherfucker.
Oh, yeah, they got jello, baby.
They got jello.
They got jello.
I take it back.
This is good.
This is fine.
Yeah.
This is fine.
So as the months after Joshua's disappearance rolled on, the scale of commitments expanded as cult members refused to turn away from their beliefs and reintegrate with society.
The last of the cult to be institutionalized was Sarah Hurt, Ovi's wife.
After he announced that she had been willing to sacrifice their adopted baby, he's like, hey, actually, you know, when I said we were never going to kill that baby, I actually had to stop my wife from killing that baby.
And when he wouldn't let them do it, Joshua was like, all right, well, we're not going to burn the baby alive, but you're not allowed to feed it or wash it.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Hurt later said, quote, my wife and daughters came to believe that I was defiled and that this little one was defiled.
At the suggestion of that viper, they talked of making the sacrifice of the child.
They would have burned her along with their clothing, their furniture, and the cats and dogs, which they declared to be of this world and unfit to live.
They were all crazy.
Yes, crazy.
I was pleading, threatening, and trying with all my power to bring my wife and daughters back to sanity, but without avail.
And again, this dude, who's generally considered to be like the nicest guy in town, is then like, I would like to hurt Crefield with a bullet if I could.
Which is such like such a childish way of saying I want to shoot a guy.
Yeah.
I don't want to kill him, but I want to wound him with a gun.
I just want to wound him, like in the knee.
Yeah, yeah, get him right in the knee.
The fleshy part of the thigh or something, but like, you know, I want him to be okay.
Yeah, yeah, I don't want him to die.
I'll take care of him after.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We could be friends.
I just think he deserves a little bullet bullet.
Just a little bullet bullet.
Yeah.
Now, after July, or like, so Crefield stays missing.
Everyone's fucking locked up.
And then on July 29th, when he's been missing like four months, something like that.
He bursts out of the center of the earth with the longest snow you've ever seen.
That you literally called it.
That is exactly what happens.
Yes.
So this is that's that's so funny.
So I feel like I've called multiple different like acts.
Break this is like this one is weirdly exact because what happens is the Hurts adopted son Roy is like looking for worms because he wants to go fishing.
And the best way to do him, he like goes under the foundation of the house to like dig for worms.
And he like, as he gets under there, he like looks up and he sees a naked, emaciated man with a wild beard, like staring at him with crazy eyes.
And eventually, because you know, Roy's family was in the cult, he's like, oh my God, that's Joshua Crefield.
He's naked and under, he's been living under our house, not eating for three or four months.
Just quietly whispering, bring me.
That's that's almost exactly.
So it turns out that Maude and May had been feeding him.
That's why they were like, they would starve themselves and be like, I'll eat, but only if you don't watch.
They've been giving him their food, right?
And then when they get institutionalized, he had started to starve.
Oh, no.
So Roy, obviously, having a good head on his shoulders, calls the cops and is like, there's a cult leader living under my house.
And the cops show up and they grab him.
And they're like, were you just going to like stay there until you starve to death?
And Crefield was like, I went under the house because I was told to hide away by the Lord.
I was crucified while I was there.
God came to me.
I was to suffer for my people.
I was to die from hunger and from the cold.
Someone's patting him on the back.
All right, buddy, sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
Let's get you somewhere else.
You hungry?
You hungry?
Let's go.
Well, they do feed him next.
Sure.
So he gets this is where I said you were exactly right.
They pull him out of this hole in the ground naked.
And in broad daylight, the men of Corvallis, who have assembled to watch this, get to see why he's so popular.
Because this dude is hung like a fucking stallion.
Like the sheriff's deputy describes it as wonderfully endowed by mother nature.
Oh, I love it.
Everyone just like collectively went, Oh, okay.
This all makes a lot more sense.
Oh, we should get my wife out of the insane assignment.
Oh, fuck.
They didn't say it was fucking massive.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
So he gets taken to Portland.
He's put in jail and like they feed him and stuff.
He's given some time to regain his strength before they put him on trial.
Sophie Coe writes: quote, appearing for Judge Alfred F. Sears, Crefield continued to speak as Joshua in court.
He claimed that he did not need a lawyer and that God would will whatever was meant to happen.
If he were found guilty, he would receive it joyfully.
Donna Starr admitted to the actions that Creffield was accused of, claiming that she was inspired by God and truly believed that relations with Crefield allowed her to purify herself.
Four other witnesses testified against Crefield, claiming that not only had he committed adultery with many women, but also that the reason that their mothers, daughters, and sisters were going insane was because he had made them brides of Christ.
The evening telegram described the courtroom as being crowded to all doors and all forenoon by staring, morbid crowd bent on catching a glimpse of the religious crank.
Now, just the whole jury and judge, while he's talking, are just staring at his pants, going, Come on, I want to see it.
I want to see it twitch like a cat's tail.
So he acting as his own lawyer and justifying his crimes by saying he had to make brides of Christ doesn't in a winning strategy.
It doesn't work out.
No, no, no.
Yeah.
Staring At His Pants In Court00:15:14
Crefield also refuses to call any witnesses in his defense.
And instead, he quotes the Bible repeatedly and describes his sex with Donna as a purification rite.
He is found guilty and sentenced to a bit less than two years in prison.
He serves 17 months and is let out early on good behavior and as thanks for performing community service.
While inside, he moderates his behavior slightly.
And some people started to think like, maybe he's turning over a new leaf.
But then as soon as he's let out, he gets right back together with his followers and the Hurt family.
They've all been let out of the institution now.
And he's like, hey, guys, let's all get back together, right?
God, I'm back, baby.
Yeah, yeah.
So he had, you know, he had married Maude since he couldn't marry Esther, but they got divorced while he was in jail.
So he remarries her as soon as they're out.
She seems to be down with this.
Maude is definitely one of the women who is all on board with this cult.
So is Esther Mitchell.
You know, she had been moved to Illinois to live with her absent and uncaring father.
And as soon as she hears that Crefield's out of jail, she moves right back to Oregon.
So she has become even more devoted in her time away and would now tell anyone who would listen that Joshua is not just a prophet, but God Himself.
Now, it's kind of unclear exactly how this all times out, but soon after this point, Joshua starts referring, stops referring to himself as an apostle, searching for the bride of Christ, and starts declaring himself to just be Jesus, right?
That's that's where we are now, right?
I am the second coming, all that good stuff.
Yeah, yeah, it's a third act, you know.
He's he's uh he's got to go there, he's got to go there.
There's nowhere else to go, but I am God.
And you know what else signifies that we're in the third act?
What our second ad break.
Oh, yeah, I love ads, man.
So do I.
I love when they tell me what to buy.
Oh, that's my favorite because I don't know what to buy most of the time.
No, no, well, it's like, I guess I'll just buy drugs.
Yeah, and they're like, no, have you ever thought of buying a lawnmower?
Yeah, a mealbox, a bed, a mattress, exactly.
Or online therapy.
Yeah, sure.
All that.
Check it all out.
All of it.
Buy everything.
We're back.
Back, bye, babe.
Baby.
So we're talking Jay Crizzy, Joshua Crefield.
So, yeah, he's back.
He's walking around, and basically, all of his cult members are like, Life sure has sucked without you because it's Oregon in 1906.
Can we join up again?
Yeah, nobody else here has a good dick, game.
Let's get back into it, right?
Sophie Coe writes: quote, As men were experiencing their wives and daughters abandoning them to follow Grefield for a second time, anger rose again among those in Corvallis.
Many were plotting against Crefield, some half-heartedly, and some very seriously.
Lewis Hartley, a father of one of the brides, attempted to shoot Crefield five times, but each time the gun failed to shoot a bullet.
Now there was a belief within the cult that Crefield, being Joshua, could not be killed.
So like that's not going to work out well.
I can feel that.
Nope, nope.
And this is, by the way, the fact that this guy fails to shoot him six times is less miraculous than it may sound because Hartley does not know anything about guns.
So he buys a .32 caliber revolver and then he buys 32 caliber ammo, but his revolver is a center fire revolver and he buys rim fire.32 caliber ammo.
And the difference between the two, so bullets have a thing called a primer in them, right?
And the hammer strikes the primer, the primer ignites the gunpowder, that makes bullet go, right?
Sure.
Most modern bullets are center fire.
So there's a little primer.
If you look at the back of a bullet, there's this little silver thing.
That's the primer in the back of the bullet.
Rim fire, it's on the rim.
So if you're shooting a rim fire bullet out of a center fire gun, the hammer, the firing pin is not going to hit the fucking primer, right?
It just won't.
Totally.
Yeah, no, I get it now.
Yeah.
I know about guns.
Yeah.
This is, this is, I just want to note, it's not inexplicable, right?
This guy bought the wrong bullets.
You're saying he's not God, Robert, because I'm saying have you ever noticed that he's got his hog?
Yeah.
He's got a God-sized hog, bro.
He does have a God-sized hog.
And fortunately, the men of Corvallis, not arms experts, which is really going to work out for him.
One God-size hog or a hundred hog-sized gods.
Oh, man.
Keep going.
I mean, if they're Javelina-sized, I bet repeatedly killing like God in Javelina form would be delicious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree.
Yeah.
Yummers.
Yummers.
So anyway, Crefield himself veers in this story between like, again, being this monster, abusive monster, and also being like kind of you have to, you have to accept, again, all of these women were freed and spent two years not under his influence.
And as soon as he came back, we're like, yes, this is much better than our lives.
Let's go back, right?
That's that's an undeniable aspect of this story.
Yeah.
He is, of course, also a giant asshole.
And one of the things that happens is they're all getting out of town together.
The city of San Francisco burns to the ground after the 1906 earthquake, killing a shitload of people.
And Joshua is like, I did that.
I was angry at San Francisco, so I killed them all.
We'll do it to Portland and Seattle.
If you fuck with us, I'll burn your cities down.
San Francisco was a warning shot, motherfuckers.
I love that.
He hears about a big fire and he goes like, hey, guys, remember when I made fire?
Yeah.
Yeah, that was me.
Yeah.
It's very funny.
So again, it remains up for debate how much Crefield really believed, but he seems to have been aware that this was a bluff because immediately after making this threat, he leads his cult on a starvation march out of town and towards a location on the Oregon coast along the Yatchets River.
Now, along the way, Crefield's preferences for nudity increased.
And so his followers basically don't bring any clothes with them.
They have like one blanket for the whole group.
And I don't know if you've ever been to the coast of Oregon, but in the dead of summer, it's not warm, right?
Like it's a cold beaches always.
Yes.
Yes.
It's not a warm place.
No.
And it's warmer today than it would have been in 1906.
So you have to think pretty cold, miserable to be a naked person on the Oregon coast in 1906.
So he leads them all to like literally the middle of nowhere.
They have nothing.
And then is like, all right, you guys stay here.
I'm going to go to Seattle with Maude and we're going to like, we're going to figure some shit out, right?
We're going to like start a band.
Yeah.
Just chill here for a bit.
I'm going to find you guys a new home.
Don't worry.
So by this point, the men of Corvallis are shitting themselves with rage.
Two men who had family in the cult, George Mitchell and Edwin Baldwin, arm themselves and set off on separate vengeance quests to kill Joshua.
Mitchell is the one who proves most adept at the task, tracking Maud Hart to Seattle and hurt to Seattle and sneaking around until he spots the Messiah and his wife outside of a convenience store.
So he's like milling around outside of the fucking well, it's uh, it's the Northwest outside of the plaid pantry.
And so I don't know if they have those in Washington, whatever.
Maybe it's 7-Eleven.
He pulls out a revolver and he shoots Edmund Joshua Crefield dead.
Like, oh no, you didn't get to eat those jalapeno cream trees rollers.
No, he sure doesn't.
He sure does.
He comes out.
There were two for 333.
They're really good, too.
He is not a good dude.
I should say this right now, Mitchell, because his primary complaint with Crefield is that by sleeping with his sisters, Joshua had ruined them, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So again, nobody's not, no, no clear good guy here.
Sure.
Sophie Coe, yeah.
Yeah.
One is worse.
One is worse.
Sophie Coe analyzes this further.
The fact that women were still considered the lesser sex created a role that helped make an enemy out of Crefield while withholding any power given to his female followers for straying from their social role.
Arguments of the time included that by leaving their home and husband overtaxed, their brains and their mental agitation caused wounds that would never heal.
Women were not blamed, however, for leaving their families in previous lives.
There was a general agreement throughout the public and press that these brides of Christ were not to blame for their misguided devotion to him because by nature, they were weak creatures easily led astray.
I mean, you know, show me the lie.
Yeah, where's the lie?
You know, wow, Sophie's giving you quite a look.
Just kidding.
I'm going to keep my mouth shut.
So Mitchell used to.
You're so easily digmatized, bro.
Like, fucking clearly.
So, no, that's fucked up.
Mitchell goes on trial in Seattle.
And officials in Portland try to extradite him.
They're like, we should try him here because his crimes were mostly here, except for the murder part.
But like, you know, so they were like, yeah, they try to extradite him.
But everyone in Washington is like, no, you can't let them hold the trial in Oregon.
They'll just murder the man.
Everyone in Oregon is too lawless and anarchic for a real trial.
And in fact, there's a quote from some Washington prosecutors that in Oregon, lynch mobs and anarchy rule.
So again, nothing has changed.
Nothing at all has changed.
Yeah, it's all exactly the same.
So they have the trial here.
And despite the fact that Mitchell had absolutely committed the crime, he was declared not guilty.
Basically, because everyone in the jury was like, well, I would have done the same thing in his shoes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This winds up not being a good thing for George Mitchell, though, because the jury had been debating not guilty by reason of insanity or guilty, right?
If it had been not guilty by reason of insanity, he would have been remanded to state custody.
As it was, he walks out of court a free man, right?
This is going to be a problem for him because his sister is Esther, right?
Yeah.
And Esther, so Esther's like, hey, brother, let's meet up at the train station to talk about you killing my cult leader.
And so he had to know this.
He had to know.
So he shows up and Esther shoots him in the back of the head with a pocket pistol.
Just fucking guns her brother down.
Now, you won't be surprised to hear this becomes quite a story in the media.
Yeah.
In the newspapers.
Yeah.
They're finally.
They're like, finally, we don't have to write about a fucking bicyclist.
Yeah.
And it was, you know, the newspaper once the news keeps interviewing her.
They want her to say, God told me to do it or whatever, or I was in a religious frenzy.
But all she'll say is, like, I did the same thing my brother did, right?
The law is inadequate to the task of punishing a murderer because he was acquitted.
So I did the same thing to him that he did to Crefield.
And she uses kind of the same justification her brother has done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She'd also pointed out that like, my brother did what, like, my brother accused Jeff, like Crefield of making me into a fornicator.
But by claiming that, he did the same thing that he was saying Crefield did to me.
He got me branded a fornicator in society and ruined my reputation.
She insisted that Creffield never had sex with her.
And yeah, this is, she kind of has a point that, like, she does kind of have a point.
Yeah, like she is not wrong about this, right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's a hell of a way to make a point with her.
It is quite a point.
Yeah.
But she's not incorrect here.
I mean, listen, people, you know, have gone through far less to make an argument.
I'm glad that she went all the way there, I guess.
I guess what we're saying is we're proud of you, Esther.
Yeah, we're proud of you.
You stuck up for your man.
Yeah.
You stuck up for yourself.
Yeah.
I mean, bad pick on the man, but good on you for sticking up for yourself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And honestly, good for you for pointing out hypocrisy, which I think is always fun.
That's the most important part.
Esther refuses to claim insanity.
The state forces it on her anyway because we don't care what a woman says.
Right.
It's a woman.
They're like, of course, she's not going to say she's crazy.
We're the state.
She's showing her hair.
Yep.
So she gets committed to an asylum.
And yeah, eventually she gets out after a couple of years.
And she's, you know, living at a family friend's place after getting out of the asylum and takes a massive dose of strychnine and commits suicide.
Oh, geez.
Maude Hurt does the same thing, right?
Right after the trial.
So like the two women who are closest to Crefield kill themselves as soon as they possibly can.
And that's the end of the story.
And that is the story of Pete Davidson.
Yeah.
The man with the magic cock.
He would, Pete Davidson would have been murdered by a small town in Oregon if like if he was had been alive in 1906.
There's no other way.
There's no other way.
Probably would have been Corvalis.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's not even that funny.
Kate Beckinsale.
What the fuck?
No, people are reacting to him throughout the story exactly like I react.
It's exactly the same story.
As a new girlfriend.
Yeah.
I'm just like, that motherfucker better have 10 dicks.
That is like, that is such a wild story because of the fact that like the dick revealed.
All in a perspective.
Yeah, this mysterious man.
Is he a hypnotist?
I don't know.
And then you see his huge cock.
Oh, okay.
Oh, it's like, I love that they pulled out a really skinny guy and his massive hog and they were just like, he's the same size.
Like the whole crowd is silent.
And then suddenly like the town idiot's like, oh, because we all got tiny dicks.
I get it.
Oh, yeah.
Fuck.
Good morning.
Silent piece of shit.
But everyone's bad in some way.
Yeah, everyone's bad in some way.
Not all in this way.
Most not in this way.
Most not in that way.
Yeah.
I just like, I've yet to hear the story of the perfect sex cult.
Like so far, the closest is like being in like theater crew.
That's the closest to a sex cult that exists without all the, you know, just like, you know, join the theater program at your high school or college.
Join The High School Theater Program00:02:44
Oh, no, don't do not be telling our listeners to do that, Matt.
Well, if you're in high school, if you're in high school, join the high school in high school.
I thought that was implied.
No, I think the whole history of sex cults means that shouldn't be implied.
You're right.
You make a good point.
You make a great point.
You know, I'm saying join your local theater company and you don't even have to act.
You just run the lights and you'll that's like a sex cult.
That's what I'm saying.
Please do not just go to a high school and say Matt Lieb sent me here to join the cult.
Speaking of which, folks, you can buy our official Behind the Bastards laminated Matt Lieb sent me here cards for whatever you want to do.
Use them for anything.
Anything.
Anything you want.
Just pop them on top of, you know, anything.
Yeah.
Oh, fuck.
Anything else you want to plug, Matt?
Yeah, other than Matt Lieb's tips for how to join sex cults that are non-problematic, listen to my podcast, Pod Yourself a Gun, a TV rewatch podcast.
And it's, you know, wherever you get your podcasts.
And once again, tickets will go on sale soon for Sunday, March 17th in Sacramento at the Sacramento Punchline.
I'll be headlining with my wife, my wife, Francesca Fiorentini.
And finally, follow me on Instagram.
You know, there's a lot of things going on in the whole Gaza strip and Israel.
Mostly bad things.
A lot of bad things.
And as an anti-Zionist Jew, did I say Jus?
Yeah, you did.
You did.
As an anti-Zionist Jus, I have some thoughts on it.
And I've been making some videos.
And if you want to check those out, you can go to Instagram at Matt Lieb Jokes.
That's my account.
Gram him, folks.
Made yourself a sauce in Aju.
Yeah, exactly.
Ajus, yeah.
Au jus.
Speaking of sauce, if you want to provide the special sauce to children in Portland, the Portland Children's Museum.
Robert, Robert, Robert.
Okay, okay, okay.
Let's retake that.
You guys are not.
Not at all, speaking of sauce, the Portland Children's Museum, the Flip Museum, is raising money.
It's a traveling museum.
They provide mobile exhibits throughout the Portland metro area for kids.
It's a good cause to donate text bastards to 50155.
That's bastards to 50155.
All right, we're done.
Donate Text Bastards To 5015500:02:16
Go home.
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Or you behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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