Dragged Into the Light E-Book

Tony Russo

• Herausgeber: Secant Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 367

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

As Seen on VICE TV's “The Devil You Know” Season 2

A prophet. A dysfunctional romance. A gunshot.

A decade before QAnon mushroomed into the headlines, Ohio housewife Sherry Shriner was tilling the same fertile soil. She attracted thousands with feverish conspiracy theories concocted from the New World Order, shape shifting reptilian overlords, and end times Bible prophecy.

She kept them hooked by playing into their fears of persecution and she made a tidy living out of it. But paranoia was rampant among her followers, and expulsions from the online cult were common.

In the early morning of July 15, 2017, police in Pennsylvania responded to a 911 call and charged Barbara Rogers with the murder of Steven Mineo. Mineo had been one of Shriner’s favorites. But Shriner had prophesied his destruction at Barbara’s hand. And now he was dead.

Journalist Tony Russo follows Shriner’s cult, digs into its bizarre beliefs, and reports on the shredded lives and reputations surrounding an Internet evangelist who claimed to be God’s mouthpiece on Earth.

Leseprobe

Copyright © 2021 Tony Russo

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher, except for brief excerpts used for purposes of review. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

Secant Publishing, LLC

P.O. Box 4059

Salisbury, MD 21803

www.secantpublishing.com

The names of principal characters in this book are those identified in court and police records. The names of some cult members may be aliases or online personae.

ISBN: 978-1-944962-93-7 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-944962-94-4 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-944962-95-1 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021907488

Book cover design by ebooklaunch.com

For my wife, Kelly

Contents

Introduction

1 He said, “Here! Press this here,” oh, my God!

2 I know full well this is crazy.

3 Hey, Pastor, did you ever look into the reptiles running the whole planet?

4 You’re a fundamentalist freak show, and I’m not interested.

5 Sherry gives a lot of truth.

6 We were all angels with missions.

7 Jesus said that I have to help you no matter how expensive it is.

8 I’m off to fulfill my destiny.

9 Murdered by a NATO death squad.

10 This is insanity! What are you doing?

11 I found a purpose in my life.

12 If there are any aliens, time travelers, sliders, or ESPers here, come join me.

13 Bring it on, scumbags! War is heating up.

14 I sense we still have leaks . . . they will be outed.

15 We love our orgone, man.

16 Thank God it wasn’t the real Sherry that actually betrayed me.

17 I’m not sure all the money was going toward orgone.

18 Demons come and attack those who are angry.

19 I’m surprised your vampire whore hasn’t soul scalped you already.

20 Have fun drinking the Kool-Aid you cult members!

21 Police say shooting may be tied to cult.

Apocalypse

Notes and References

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

“And if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light,

let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

Plato, The Republic

I want to implicate you in this story the same way I was implicated. I want that realization to come to you the same way it came to me. I wasn’t drawn to this story; it was suggested by a colleague. I’d just come off more than two years interviewing combat veterans for the This Is War podcast and was looking for something else to write about.

“Have you seen this Sherry Shriner reptile thing?” the colleague asked.

I saw Sherry’s story as an introduction to a larger story about for-profit cults and internet scammers. When I dove deeper, though, her story’s implications broadened as QAnon and other conspiracy actors and theories bubbled up into the mainstream.

Anthony Warner, the 2020 Nashville Christmas bomber, who espoused many of the beliefs I’m about to discuss, was reported to have written, “They put a switch into the human brain so they could walk among us and appear human.” It’s a description of the reptilian conspiracy espoused by the people I’ve dubbed the Shrinerites, nearly down to the word.

I watched a conspiracy theory-driven mob take over the US Capitol, I imagine, the way a true prophet might see their vague notions solidify, shadows of inklings emerging from the gray. Worse, I saw, and still see, the ripples. The obvious responses and reactions. Finger-pointing and think-piecing about how the internet breeds these beasts.

I’m here to tell you that the internet doesn’t breed monsters any more than a coop breeds pigeons. We breed the monsters; the internet just lets them thrive. And as we wring our hands about what the internet does as if it has volition, we avoid responsibility. We avoid the truth. In this case, that conspiracy theory culture is a symptom of our crumbling belief in religion’s ability to salve, and the farce of professional political discourse.

In many cases, the people who are most susceptible to these conspiracies and cults are those who believe most in God and country and are heartbroken by their betrayal. It’s not just that religious and political figures dodge leadership responsibilities. It’s that their lies have cast the idea of safety, or even of stasis, into serious doubt.

Conspiracy theories replace their perceived chaos with order, their dissembling with fixed truths, and give lie to their claims of higher service. That’s the appeal. To dismiss large communities of people as unwilling slaves to the corporate internet misses their search for certainty while relieving our complicity. Accepting their striving to understand as genuine, rather than as a result of some deeper madness, helped me understand the people in this story better.

The short answer to why they cling to their beliefs is the same as the reason you cling to yours: it is comfortable and safe. How and why they choose their beliefs is where we feel like we can step back and judge.

That was the hardest realization for me in reporting this book, and at times I fail to suspend judgment. It is so difficult not to be dismissive once we realize that, in the conspiracy theorist’s reality, incompatible or inconsistent claims live together happily. Orgone, a mystical substance invented from whole cloth by a respected psychologist, stands out as the most impenetrable idea in this story. It works under such conditional rules as to be baffling in its meaninglessness. Yet people’s lives have been changed and ruined by it.

Another difficulty was the temptation to understand and refute the conspiracy theories or to dismiss them out of hand. I tried to find middle ground where I understood well enough to explain without getting caught up in what I knew was utter nonsense. For example, I struggled to navigate the murky rules for how and when reptilians take over a person’s body, but since that doesn’t ever happen, I leave the nebulous reasoning untouched.

The conspiracies for me are a distraction from what’s going on, which is a predictable amount of religious charlatanism feeding on soul-crushing fear and loneliness.

What I’ve come to discover is that beneath the accounts of crazy beliefs, ritual shunning, and tragic deaths is a look at a dying culture. In a time when it is common to talk about two Americas, I worry that we are talking about two realities. We can agree to disagree about whether or not there’s a God, but we can’t agree to disagree about whether or not I am possessed by an evil spirit.

All the Christian Truthers in this book believe in literal demonic possession. Many believe demons pop in and out of bodies, using the people around the target as hosts while they execute their torment. If you say I’m possessed, we don’t have a difference of opinion. We’re occupying two realities.

Plato’s allegory of the cave in his Republic is supposed to praise the search for truth, but the line I borrowed at the beginning of this introduction has always been the takeaway for me. People want to be safe and comfortable in their beliefs and their lives. On the face of it, this is a story about when death is preferable to trading a certain reality for an uncertain one.

What follows is my account of and attempt to come to terms with both what happened and why things happened as they did. As loud as they tend to be, the old-time religions are dying, or at least changing. Reality is raining down upon them. Since so many people are seeking justification where none can be found in accepted reality, they’ve carved out their own—where the God of the Hebrews and science fiction cohabitate, and the truth is what you say it is.

1 He said, “Here! Press this here,” oh, my God!

Barbara Rogers stood screaming over the fresh corpse of Steven Mineo. The scene was too vivid, as if it were staged. Ignoring the brain matter on the bed, Barbara shook Steven again, begging him to wake up as she choked back another wave of panic. She wanted more than anything for him to get back up, to relive the last moments of his life, of their life together, and prevent this from ever happening. Maybe they had gone to bed as she wanted to, and she was just dreaming. Maybe this was one of the alternate realities Steven was obsessed with, and somewhere in another dimension none of this had happened.

She looked into his empty face, his head lolled back as if he were dozing, but his open eyes told a different story. The agony was gone, but so was the humor, the defiance, and the adoration they’d contained before the gun went off. She looked again at the fresh bullet wound in the middle of his forehead, and the screams returned. Barbara Rogers checked out.

The next few hours were just snapshots. A frantic 911 call telling the dispatcher that Steven had put the gun in her hands and then to his own head. “He said, ‘Here! Press this here,’ oh, my God!”

Steven’s limp body as she looked around for the gun at the dispatcher’s request, the foul smell of cramped living and gunpowder.

The patrolman coming around the corner, backlit by the blue and red lights of his cruiser in the humid, predawn Pocono Mountain summer.

Sitting handcuffed in the back of his cruiser, cuffs tight against her thin wrists, pinching and discomforting, as more police arrived.

The long, dark ride to the Pocono Mountain Regional Police Department as the sun threatened to break over the Pocono Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.

Sometime after she was handcuffed and before her interrogation started, Barbara knew her old life was over, but she could not fathom why—only that it all started with Sherry Shriner.

* * *

The crime scene was a disaster, a homicide in the back room of a trailer that had been converted into a studio apartment. The victim, identified as Stephen “Steven” M. Mineo, a thirty-two-year-old New Jersey man who shared the space with the suspect, forty-two-year-old Barbara Hellen Rogers, sat on the floor, hands at his side, legs crossed at the calves, head back on the bed. The star-shaped powder burn around his head wound suggested the gun had been pressed against it, or at least quite close, before discharge.

Steven’s bulletproof vest was open in the middle of the floor not far from his body. Given the close quarters, though, everything in the room was near the body, yet the room felt smaller than that. Steven and Barbara stuffed all their possessions into this space, piled high in closets and spilling from drawers, stacked on the cheap entertainment center, and in loose piles. Steven’s phone was on the bed, silent.

There was evidence of heavy drinking in addition to a technically legal drug called Kratom. A bevy of prescription pills, some labeled, some not, all would be identified as Barbara’s. In the yard, fewer than thirty yards from the scene, not far from the small wooded area the trailer bordered, police found four spent rounds. Five shots had been fired from the gun. There was a casing missing. On its face, this was a domestic incident gone wrong. One of them was cheating or leaving or being abusive, a handgun came out, end of story.

What the authorities didn’t know at the time was this was the latest in a series of destroyed lives at the hands of Sherry Shriner, an internet preacher and rural Ohio housewife spreading hate, paranoia, and doomsday prophecy.

Sitting at her computer, the air stale with grease and cigarette smoke, Sherry commanded an army of thousands, each warrior desperate to fight in the impending War of Armageddon. Each assured they were under personal attack from the reptilian forces of the New World Order (NWO), and exhorted to take the fight to the enemy—the pop stars, actors, and world leaders who were secret lizard people bent on world domination.

The initial story, on the local news stations and in The Pocono Record, said a woman killed her boyfriend because he asked her to, claiming it was his only escape from Sherry Shriner’s cult. According to police, Steven believed the cult leader had turned into a reptile. The fervor lasted a couple of weeks, getting legs from the bizarre and the clickable headlines it provided, many taking the form of “Man Begs to Be Killed to Escape Reptile Cult.”

Think pieces about internet cults and the pervasive and ill effects of YouTube conspiracies rose and fell as they tend to in a media sensation’s death throes. After all, the upshot was one crazy person killed another crazy person for no reason. It’s a story with limited appeal. It certainly hadn’t appealed to me.

I didn’t get wind of Sherry Shriner for more than eighteen months after Steven’s death, and even then it seemed like a shallow story. I was a freelance journalist searching for a story that was true crime-adjacent to turn into a podcast. I was developing one about religious scammers with a convoluted belief in the economic reset. I wasn’t compelled by a guy who was in a crazy reptile conspiracy cult and got offed.

But what I would come to discover is that these weren’t crazy people. They were part of a Christian subculture where aliens disguised as humans fight on the side of evil and New World Order cabals trade in pedophilia and mass cannibalism.

Followers accepted this for the same reason most of us believe whatever we believe—someone they trusted told them or personal experience did. It’s less mental illness than an oversensitivity to disinformation. The people I’ve researched and spoken with are victims of a crumbling power superstructure, one where the old guard can’t be trusted to uphold traditional morals and where government officials have dropped the pretense of public service. They are not wrong, but they can’t cope with the banality of that truth.

I started looking into Steven’s death in 2019. For more than a year, I was drawn into a world where the official story was always a lie. I spoke with people who I came to discover didn’t just have fringe opinions but inhabited a different reality. One where Lucifer operates with impunity and his minions can possess or even replace any person at any time.

Among the thousands of pages and files in the court records, I discovered audio files. As it would turn out, Steven Mineo preferred to communicate by sending audio messages over Facebook Messenger. Many of his interlocutors followed suit. As a result, I got to hear their tone and the utter sincerity with which they professed their beliefs to one another. I listened, stunned, for hours.

When I stopped gawking at all the absurdities (and it was difficult to look away sometimes), I saw the lengths to which people go to protect their fragile reality and wondered how I would respond if someone tried to tell me that nothing I believed was true. Not just about God, but about my self-image and my experiences. I understood Sherry’s followers were fighting like mad to keep from realizing theirs was a false reality, choosing instead to add layers of even less credible explanations than they’d begun with.

I learned about orgone, a powerful spiritual force the government doesn’t want us to have, and about shapeshifters and clones (shapeshifters are individuals who can change their form at will). I learned how organized religion came to be under Satan’s thumb and about the very real occurrence of spiritual warfare. Mostly I learned how one rural housewife with the sheer audacity to double down on every lie could make a small fortune baiting the lonely, gaslighting the paranoid, and ruining so many lives along the way.

2 I know full well this is crazy.

Kelly Marie Pingilley concentrated on Sherry Shriner’s voice and kept typing. God only knows what time it was, not that it mattered. Kelly was a being outside of time. She knew that now. Sherry had taught her that. Everything in Kelly’s life made sense now. The attacks, the years of torture in the bowels of hell, the inability to connect to her Lutheran community in any way.

Sherry knew all about it, had been through it, and came out on the other side anointed by Yahuah (God’s real name, according to Sherry) for her fidelity. Kelly felt privileged to transcribe Sherry’s radio shows, to listen closely and learn, sure, but to interpret as well. In some ways she was serving “Yah” through Sherry, but in other ways she was preparing for her own final transformation into an Angel in the Flesh.

Sherry Shriner’s ministry was a machine that burned human fuel. Like so many others, it depended on a lot of donations and even more volunteer work. As her radio show gained popularity, Sherry made calls for transcription volunteers, people to help spread her word to those who couldn’t or didn’t stream the audio. The genius of this can’t be overstated. It’s only in the last few years that podcasts have started posting transcripts to improve their search engine results. The transcriptions drove Sherry’s popularity, and Kelly transcribed dozens if not hundreds of her shows.

For most of her life, Kelly lived with her parents, her sister, Amanda, and her brother, Nate, in the Detroit suburb of Redford, Michigan. She was a quirky, silly, good-natured young woman, clear-eyed and fair-skinned with a tendency to comb her long brown hair in almost arrow-straight lines around her bangs, letting the rest frame her face and spill down her front. She looked younger than her twenty-two years, but not because she was petite as much as because she radiated energy, innocence, and enthusiasm.

Kelly devoted more than two years of her life to Sherry’s cause, volunteering full-time as a Sherry Shriner evangelist. She believed with all her heart that the more people she exposed to Sherry’s truth, the better. When she first stumbled upon Sherry’s teachings, however, Kelly had no idea she would be the latest in a litany of rivals and acolytes Sherry burned through in her rise to greater and greater popularity.

Kelly arrived in Sherry’s Facebook chat room the way so many others had, trying to reconcile the Illuminati, the NWO, aliens, and the Bible. She was bright and friendly, open to the new ideas she found as she started looking beyond her conservative Lutheran upbringing. To her, being more open-minded would help reconcile some of the questions she had about faith, salvation, and the end times.

Kelly was obsessed with being good from an early age. She’d confessed to her friend Rebekah Lasak that she needed to atone for her elementary school viciousness, to make an outward effort to be a better Christian, and to do more good. Long before she was fascinated by end-times prophecy, Kelly obsessed over all things soteriological. That is, she wanted to know the rules for getting into heaven, for being a good person, and for doing what God wanted of her. Religion was as much her entertainment as it was her ethical jumping-off point, and she believed the Bible contained answers for those willing to study and understand its hidden meanings.

Kelly’s curiosity about salvation and punishment seemed to revolve around an innocent fascination with sex. When she began wondering whether someone who was close to her had been intimate with their fiancé, it terrified her. What if they died before they got married? Would they go to hell? What if they broke up? It was a simple and natural curiosity that devolved into an obsession that only darkened over time.

It’s impossible to begin to comprehend the damage religious sexual prohibitions have done. There’s emerging evidence that conspiracy theory obsession with child-trafficking is tied to child abuse among the ultra-religious. Unable to come to terms with abuse in their own backyards, they invent an evil other to blame. A healthy attitude about human sexual nature isn’t part of the religious platform. As a result, there’s a breaking point for young adults where rules about sex weighed against the threat of hell lose their force and become an obsession.

Just as Kelly obsessed about premarital sex, another friend, Marcy Walsh, struggled with her sexuality. She thought she might be attracted to girls which, as she had been taught since she was little, was a direct ticket to hell. As bright, curious students in a conservative Christian high school, looking for answers in the Bible just seemed natural. Kelly and Marcy were young and naive when they started having adult conversations and searching for biblical answers, and as they got older each found different answers to nebulous questions about life and morality.

Kelly was one of a foursome that included Rebekah, Britt Simpson, and Marcy in one of those deep and admirable friendships that transcends religious differences and doesn’t rely on the past, but rather on a deep mutual affinity. These were four girls who leaned on each other as their worlds transformed, and relationships with their parents, other friends, boys, and spirituality became both more intricate and complex. All had serious adult-level struggles and felt as if they only had one another.

Rebekah lost her mother at the end of their freshman year of high school, Marcy struggled with her identity, and Kelly worried over her parents’ failing marriage. Britt switched to a secular school before long where she had her own adjustment issues. Although Britt bailed on conservative religion, it didn’t matter to the other three. They all leaned into nerd culture one way or another, each finding their preferred outlet, but they bonded over board games.

***

The Blue Roof Diner could’ve been a Howard Johnson’s back in the 1970s, an A-frame-style building with peaked awnings above the side entrances. It’s a classic suburban, alt-kid hangout situated along one of the arterial highways pumping sprawl from nearby Detroit. The girls would sit in a booth, playing euchre and occasionally succumbing to the perpetual aroma of coffee and French fries, the latter underdone, the former burned black, until all hours of the night. They were well-behaved kids too young to hit the bars, so this was a pleasant alternative to a night in anyone’s parents’ house. They came to the Blue Roof to laugh and to become better friends, and they succeeded every time.

Once, Kelly noticed an elderly man struggling with his meal. He was having trouble cutting his steak into small enough pieces. Kelly jumped up, crossed the aisle, and cut his entire dinner for him. She wasn’t showing off or being giddy, just striving to help wherever she could, but it’s notable how what Kelly saw as a self-imposed penance looked to everyone else like genuine Christian charity.

Although they drifted in their personal lives after graduation, each staring terrified into adulthood in her own way, the friendship endured beyond that summer of 2008. The next two years found Kelly drifting into a deepening depression. She’d done well in school but didn’t head straight off to college. Kelly was trying to find herself and fought to come to terms with her parents’ deteriorating marriage. Once her parents divorced, Kelly confided her relief to Rebekah and seemed to lighten after.

Kelly tried to be relentless in her optimism. She believed that if a person could act a certain way, they could achieve their goals, and her goal, it seemed, was making sure she got into heaven.

It’s naive to dismiss the mystical aspect of prayer as any different from spells. Many people believe prayers said in the correct way, with the correct attitude and intention, can sway their deity. The more Kelly studied the Bible and researched and interpreted what it was purported to say about salvation, the closer she came to Sherry Shriner’s orbit.

By 2010, she entered that mad gravity and would spend the rest of her life torn between the world she knew and the one she discovered. When Rebekah invited Kelly to come live with her in Adrian, Michigan, not far from Detroit, she’d already taken those first tentative steps into the mystical.

Rebekah had opened a Cutco cutlery distributorship, selling knives and hiring others to sell them as well. Cutco is a storied multi-level marketing (MLM) endeavor that’s had distributors selling knives door-to-door for more than fifty years. Rebekah hired Kelly to work for her, and the pair moved into a small apartment that acted as a combination office/bachelorette pad.

Kelly had a car and no job, Rebekah had a job and no car, plus they were best friends and it was an adventure—a couple of twenty-somethings test-driving adulthood. This almost certainly is where Kelly crossed paths with Sherry Shriner for the first time.

Adrian is a small Midwestern city or a large Midwestern town. It has the traditional storefront-with-upstairs-apartments downtown, a Methodist college, and a struggling arts scene. As late as 2010, it had a video store where Rebekah and Kelly would stock up on movies to try and mitigate the bleak evenings. They weren’t broke, but neither were they flush, and there was nothing for them in Adrian. Then, for the first time in their lives, Rebekah started butting heads with Kelly over religion.

Depression is a plague that grips some people worse than others, but it’s an aspect of this story I always see lurking in the background. Even as I fight temptation to cast everyone involved as suffering from depression and to attribute everything that happened to this low, black, empty feeling, it bears acknowledging. Without casting too much aspersion Cutco’s way, direct sales is a difficult and tenuous way to make a living, and it was all the girls had in their day-to-day lives, enduring long hours in the office followed by evenings in front of the television, watching whatever they could rent at the Adrian video store and waiting for bedtime.

Eventually, Kelly started breaking off a little early to go online, where she lost herself in Sherry Shriner’s blogs and YouTube videos.

Sherry was a fan of the conspiracy website Vigilant Citizen and happy to co-opt its videos to spread her message. Vigilant Citizen is a website that spews NWO conspiracies. Proof that they are out to get you. It’s garden-variety stuff, secret symbols in music videos, shadow police with superpowers kidnapping people in dark, grainy security footage. One thing that binds the conspiracy theory crowd is they don’t collect evidence; they collect proof. I suspect many of them do not know the difference between the pieces and the puzzle.

Sherry didn’t produce a lot of videos. Instead, she shared others’ as if they were textbooks she would be lecturing on. It didn’t matter whether she agreed with the person who made the video, only that there was a section in it she could point to and say, “This is what I had prophesized earlier.”

Kelly watched rapt as Sherry explained how rich and powerful celebrities and international politicians had all been, or were going to be, replaced by reptilians after having their souls removed as part of Lucifer’s end-times reign. Sherry would show how slow-motion video, sometimes from the Vigilant Citizen site, revealed skin moving on people’s faces—a telltale sign they were reptiles wearing human suits.

Like a junior editor at the Weekly World News, Sherry highlighted “unexplainable” bruises and scars indicating recent soul scalping, the process by which reptilians replace a victim’s soul. Using other people’s YouTube videos, she also showed her followers how prominent backward masking (the messages you can hear if you play audio in reverse) and arcane symbolism are in popular culture.

Eventually Kelly introduced Rebekah to Vigilant Citizen, showing her the satanic symbolism in Lady Gaga. Rebekah blew it off as a case of a crackpot on the internet, but Kelly objected.

“I know full well this is crazy,” Kelly said. “If I were you, I would also think this is crazy, but it’s totally true.”

What Rebekah would come to learn over those next weeks was that by “totally true,” Kelly meant that the information had been confirmed by Sherry Shriner, but it would be much longer than that until they both learned that Sherry Shriner was a bald-faced liar and a religious con artist.

3 Hey, Pastor, did you ever look into the reptiles running the whole planet?

Sherry Coberly was born in 1965 and raised in a conservative religious household, which, as it would turn out, wasn’t conservative enough for her.

Her father, Gary, worked as a salesman all of his life and spent a chunk of it as an active member of the Geauga County Republican Party, serving seven years as its chairman. Well-fed and ruddy, he’s not a hard guy to imagine: avid golfer, knows people by name, comfortable making deals and compromises in his professional and personal lives, apt to loiter after church to greet his friends and neighbors and ask after their families.

Although Sherry attended church as well as Christian schools, by adulthood she came to hate the idea of organized religion, considering it a New World Order front bent on destroying the Word of God. This isn’t uncommon among the conspiracy theory crowd. Such thinking has to do with a combined deep mistrust of authority and overconfidence in your own expertise. There’s no point in trying to break apart this constant, low-level paranoia with logic; it’s governed by fear and arrogance coalescing into a persecution feedback loop.

Insert here a bright and wily kid who gets a kick out of not just reading the Bible, but interpreting it, figuring out the real rules, and watching how deftly or poorly her elders deployed them. Sherry learned early in Baptist and evangelical circles that interpretation was a secret language where the speaker could finesse the rules to make a larger point. Revealed truth is just a matter of convincing people you’re right and have the authority to wield truth. If nothing else, that was the insight she took with her to Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she had designs on launching her quest to become a cable news star.

Later in her life, Sherry spoke fondly about working for Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, the political movement that launched evangelicals into the national spotlight.She covered Falwell for The Liberty Champion and met him occasionally. There’s no doubt she was impressed by him and influenced by his tactics. Beyond the paper, Sherry was involved with the radio station and in producing the yearbook. In photos, Sherry is the new face of the Christian right—the sharp tip of the new moral majority, unimpeachable and relentless.

It’s easy to look at a photograph of someone when they’re young and project the person they became onto them. It’s also not fair choosing a few milliseconds out of two years of experiences and using them to paint a picture, but there’s a marked difference between freshman year Sherry, posed to look angelic and hopeful in school-portrait grayscale, and the sophomore in the big-shouldered business blouse and slacks, formerly frizzy hair tamed into a gentle feather-back.

This Sherry is defiant, staring down the barrel of the camera with the rest of her newspaper staff. A jeer and a dare that belie the kind of mind that’s always plotting revenge for insults real and imagined, but easily could be interpreted as self-assured and jocular. Fair or not, because Sherry published so few photos, they’re always going to look indicative of the person she became.

People leave college after two years for lots of reasons, so it’s pointless to guess what sent Sherry back to Ohio after her second year at Liberty in Virginia. When she talked about leaving Liberty University to go to Kent State, that’s all she said on the matter in her website bio: “After two years in Virginia, I transferred to Kent State University where I was elected to become the director of their campus radio news department. During that time, I also took a job with a local newspaper focusing on political news. I graduated in 1991 with degrees in Criminal Justice, Journalism, and Political Science.”

Sherry was at Liberty for the 1984–1985 and 1985–1986 school years, and said she took her degrees in 1991. Sherry was nowhere near as prominent at Kent State as she was at Liberty, and we’ll have to take her at her word that she got all those degrees before she moved to Washington, DC, to get a job. And here, I can say with a little more confidence, she definitely couldn’t cut it.

I can’t imagine what life was like for a hard-core evangelical young woman who valued her own opinion and independence above all else. And that’s today. Drop that person into the sexist atmosphere of 1990s DC journalism and it’s not hard to see why she might get the opinion that the literal devil was running the country’s capital.

Sherry variously said she left DC because she was called to higher things, because they gave her the runaround, and because they were all Satanists. I think she believed all of those things. There’s no telling how she was treated there, but one assumes not well. Whether she landed an internship or an entry-level job, Sherry wasn’t in a position of authority and could tell she never would be.

Sure, Sherry could have tried other cities and towns, which is the common way up in journalism. Two or three years in a small market and up and out from there, picking up experience and a better understanding of what counts as a source, as a lead, as evidence. Being a woman still would have been a huge hurdle all on its own.

Add in Sherry’s sanctimonious, Bible-beating aura and a personality that took a scorched-earth approach to disagreements, and I think she knew she was a long shot in journalism. There’s a certain way some people say “I’m a Christian” that implies they’re one of the only Christians. That’s how Sherry sounded to me. I think it was intentional.

Kent State isn’t far from Ravenna, Ohio, where Sherry made her early married life with Arch Shriner. Today’s Arch, gray-bearded and hollow-cheeked in the Facebook profile photo he took while looking down at the keyboard, wasn’t at all interested in speaking with me except to say that everything I needed to know about Sherry was in her teachings. I couldn’t tell if he was messing with me or not.

***

Let’s look at NESARA, or the economic reset that is alleged to be a secret government plan to erase all debt that was foiled by, as well as the reason for, the 9/11 attacks. In reality, the National Economic Security and Recovery Act was a proposal by economist Harvey Francis Barnard in his manifesto, Draining the Swamp: Monetary and Fiscal Policy Reform. It proposed a lot of Libertarian ideas, including abolishing the income tax and returning to the gold and silver standards.

Barnard sent a copy, which included wording for the proposed bill, to every member of Congress, where it was ignored by all. For reasons that will forever be unclear, it was seized upon by thieves and charlatans, claiming God wanted his followers to invest in NESARA and would reward them with returns of as much as 500 percent.

When scams were busted by the authorities, many of the victims refused to come forward, seeing it as a government ruse to cut out the little guy from the big profits. To this day, thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, believe NESARA was to be enacted on September 11, 2001, and the attacks on New York and the Pentagon were the NWO’s last-ditch effort to stay the economic reset. This culture of fraud and deceit spread easily from mail-order scams to the internet in the 1990s, and likely introduced Sherry to the possibilities of online ministry riches. NESARA was a theme in her early shows. Either way, it wouldn’t be long before Sherry dipped her toes into religious e-commerce.

If you have the fortitude and the luxury, it’s easy to turn up your nose at get-rich-quick schemes and MLM plans. Yes, broadly speaking, they’re a colossal waste of money, let alone time and effort, and prey upon people who can’t afford them. Lottery tickets get the same bad rap for the same reasons. While the world would be a better place if people didn’t scam one another, consider Sherry’s state: a college-educated housewife living in, as she put it, “the backwoods of Ohio.” She could have worked hard and become a retail manager, but that was her best-case scenario given her circumstances. If your odds aren’t great for being able to work your way up and out, it makes sense on some level to drop a couple of dollars on the long shots along the way.

Trying to understand why Sherry got to where she did gave me an in. There are so many “whats” in this story, and they are all so tempting and bizarre. There are serpent seedlines, hollow planets where aliens hide, evil cabals at every level of government trying to kill a housewife in eastern Ohio. When it comes to Sherry Shriner’s career, it’s hard not to get distracted and enumerate the fantastical. The “whys” and “hows” of Sherry’s ministry and the lives it crushed force us to squint against the sun of her audacity to even detect them. When we do, though, we’ll have a better picture of how it got so bright.

If Sherry had a gift, it was her ability to convince people of the war Lucifer raged against her, personally, her whole life. It makes it tough to say with any confidence what is true about her origin story and what she reverse-engineered to fit her myth and her vanity. Most of Sherry Shriner’s past is courtesy of Sherry herself, and it’s all her followers know.

By tracing Sherry’s claims between her spiritual dimension and real life, I felt something of a rising anger both at good people’s astounding credulity and at Sherry’s ability to exploit it without shame or mercy. For Kelly, the hook was orgone, a mystical energy that was a gift from God. Orgone became the placebo that kept Kelly’s desperation, loneliness, and, most important, demons at bay.

Orgone would power Sherry beyond anything she could have dreamed. It helped her grow an empire capable of crushing individuals and ruining families, but Sherry already had cultivated her reputation as a prophet before she stole her orgone theories. In fact, Kelly was still in grade school when Sherry lit upon The Bible Code as a key to unearned wealth.

***

Journalist Michael Drosnin’s book The Bible Code was a pseudo-academic work demonstrating that the “Jewish Books of the Bible” (meaning the Torah) could be used to reveal the future. It was based on a real scientific project wherein the Torah was laid out like a giant word find and investigators chose random patterns (the third letter on every fourth page, something like that).

To their shock, names like “Kennedy” and “Hitler” appeared. Criticism of the project reminded would-be prophets that any long work produced the same effect, but Drosnin ran with the debunked theory and even added his own twist.

An atheist, Drosnin didn’t believe that God wrote the Bible. In his view, the book likely was authored by time-traveling aliens who left clues about our history for us to discover. It’s a little amazing that an advanced species would take the time to jot down, say, the list of Adam’s descendants or prohibitions against homosexuality. Still, I like his theory because it explains why we don’t see the names and places involved with major events until after they happen, but people who took The Bible Code seriously took the hidden messages as prescriptive.

Sherry said God told her to buy The Bible Code computer program in 2001 (I would guess she bought it on Sept. 12, 2001). We know the events around the 9/11 attacks launched thousands of would-be doomsday prophets. The attacks begat the “Truther” movement (so named for the people who wanted to know the real truth about who was behind it all), which coalesced from far-flung corners of the internet before the fires in Lower Manhattan were out.

The events broke some people. I think we all know people who emerged from the fall of 2001 meaner and more afraid. By embracing the Truther movement, weak-minded people didn’t have to deal with the complexities of cultural and geopolitical change. America still was invincible to attack by external forces, but the deep state had become too powerful.

One dominant political message was “Everything Has Changed.” Another was “We Need to Get Back to Normal.” I think that opened a rational disconnect for people and dragged religious thinking deeper into secular life. The attacks spread paranoia on a mass scale. It was a disease from which not everyone would recover. The Truthers made 9/11 their cornerstone; they grabbed onto that fear and held fast as if to their faith. Then it became their faith. Sherry Shriner was a participant in this emerging religion and also a beneficiary of it.

The early Truther movement attracted every stripe of spiritual practice across racial and cultural divides and even included atheists. It reflected a bizzarro, utopian America. The only requirement for inclusion in the group was the confidence that all government information is a lie aimed at furthering a secret agenda. The internet facilitated a new culture where Truthers could set aside their petty religious, ethnic, and racial differences and get to work proving that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.

A new standard of proof emerged, and truth got a lot more slippery. Any explanation from an official source was a lie, but an explanation so crazy it just might be true had to be run down at any cost. The search for other worldwide cabals spread to become a magnetic hub around which frightening ideologies revolved, blended, and morphed. Think “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” where your primary enemy is the truth.

***

Sherry Shriner booted up her computer. A grid of Hebrew letters on digital parchment took up the center of the screen. She clicked on the search bar, blinking blue at the top, and began her keyword search. She typed out the words in English and the machine searched the Torah for her keywords in ancient Hebrew. Wherever they appeared, the program lit the letters and patterns up in red and blue. From there, Sherry had to divine how they related.

She threw herself at this new toy, discovering not only that she was God’s Ambassador on Earth, but also a direct descendant of King David (of David and Goliath fame). It was revealed to Sherry that she’d been anointed to bring God’s word to the people. Most important, The Bible Code, computer edition, revealed the alien agenda, the plan to replace all the world’s most powerful people with reptilians and kill and clone those they couldn’t soul-scalp.

I can picture thirty-something Sherry sitting in her cluttered kitchen, hunched over her computer, Judge Judy playing at a spectacular volume as she scrolled. She’s dressed for the occasion, maybe in sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, blondish hair drawn up and away from her puffy oval face, clipped just at the back of the top of her head. A cigarette burns in an ashtray, but never for too long without attention. More than a decade out of college, her four kids lurching toward adolescence, Sherry Shriner still hadn’t hit the big time.

Then, a flash. A soaring-score, sunbeam-breaking-through-the-clouds moment of pure inspiration. Anyone could buy The Bible Code, but there’s no way just anyone could use it. Sherry understood only someone anointed by God could understand the codes, as she called them. A simple dawning, sure, but also one that opened like a riddle you forgot you were struggling with, an intellectual “pop.”

Sherry’s first book, Bible Codes Revealed: The Coming UFO Invasion, chronicles God’s encoded messages to Sherry, including her Davidic lineage, the hierarchy of angels, and the coming end of times. Where Sherry seemed to distinguish herself, though, was a novel interpretation on the relationship between Lucifer and the coming alien invasion.