The Park: An Interview With Deborah Thibodeau Part 1

Good night. Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org, and with me I have my co-host, researcher, minister, and friend, Charles Paisley, the founder of Christian Gospel Church.org.

And with us, we have our very special guest, Deborah Tibado, the author of The Serpent's Tale. And together we're examining the history and the intersections in history between William Brannum and other key figures that either influenced or were influenced by the post-World War II healing revivals.

Charles, Deborah, it's so exciting to have everybody together today. I've actually been waiting for this for a very long time because there are so many secrets that were held back from us and, you know, in the message.

This thing that went on in the park is, I remember whenever I first published the park video years ago on the old YouTube site that got taken down, it was the number one most watched video that I had put out.

It actually, the traffic to my website exponentially increased whenever I published the park. And I read your book, The Serpent's Tale, and I'll be honest, had you not written it in the poetry style that you did, Deborah, I honestly, I don't know if I could have finished it.

It was so, so traumatic, even just reading it, and I can't imagine even experiencing it. And in the last episode, Charles and I started going through some of that history, and Charles actually has filled me in and some of the secrets that my sect of the message did not have.

And we've been piecing it together, and now I'm so excited to have you on the show, and I know Charles is as well. And we'd like to get into this history so everybody can learn what actually happened in the park.

Yeah, I am so excited, John, to also have a chance to talk to Deborah, welcome, Deborah. Author of The Serpent's Tale, everybody, please buy this book. This book is fantastic. If you want to know what happened in the park, which we talked a lot about in our last episode, this book is a must read, Deborah, your voice is very important, very powerful, and I'm really thankful.

your technique, the opportunity, and we have the opportunity to chat with you today. I went to church with several survivors from the park and have heard stories, but to be able to record an episode with one of the survivors, I'm really thankful that you are willing to do that for us.

So Debra, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your book and how you came to be in the park? Okay, I'll do that. Well my family, I've written the book under the name Debra Adolten-Tibedo, and my father was Ed Dalton, who was a recipient of the promise from William Brannum that all of his children and grandchildren would be saved, and that happened August 5th of 19th, no August, somewhere in 1961, right after my sister and I were born, that particular promise came about.

Dad had 12 children, and now dad had been a wild man, as a young man, irreverent, always in trouble, and he got saved when he was about 26 just before World War II. And when World War II, when Pearl Harbor happened, Dad and Mom were married and had three kids at that point in time, and felt like things were going to get bad, and Dad was immediately drafted into that war.

By then he had become a Christian, and he felt like that Christianity and that salvation got him through World War II, because he felt like no one could take his life unless it was God's will.

After World War II, he came back home and then got involved with William Brannum's ministry. Ultimately, he was going to churches all over the South, looking for the word that he could follow. And when he met William Brannum, he quickly became an ardent follower.

And then in the course of that, he met Leo Mercier and Gene Goad. Now those men are of an age to my older siblings, so they were younger men than him. And I think that at the point in time that he met them, Dad was a respected man who spent a lot of time in William Brannum's ministry, but the way things went after the part developed is that Dad was taken down a notch or two, and the younger men kind of ran things.

So my sister and I were one when Daddy finally decided to make the move. Daddy had been resistant initially, because... William Brannum was in Indiana most of the time. And he could kind of follow his church and revival meetings there.

So when William Brannum bought a home in Tucson, that suddenly put another idea in Dad's head about Arizona. So at that point, he decided to make the move and he brought us all there.

Now at that time, my twin sister and I were one year old. And we had our second birthday in the park. So, and I think one of the things I tried hard to describe was the vision that these people had.

They, my father, my mother, the people who came to the park, they wanted something beautiful. Their intentions were good. But when you give one man all of the power and all of the control, then that man stains everything that happens there.

And I don't think that my family understood some of Leo and Gene's proclivities. It would have never occurred to my father at the time that they were, and I'm not sure if he had ever even heard that they were homosexual men, although it got said frequently even around the message as far as I know.

So when they built the park, it was, it was an insidious development because initially, and you can see from some of the photos in the book, the second edition, you can see the happiness in all of the people sitting in the dining hall and talking and laughing.

Leo and Gene were there. My sister and her husband were sitting right next to him, and they looked so happy. They were just radiantly happy to be in this place where they could commune with God and raise their children without the influence of the world.

So it started as a good thing. And my references and everything I talked about in the book, I tried to be pretty careful to tell only my story and what I actually witnessed with my siblings.

There are so many stories I didn't tell, and so many things that I couldn't tell, because I didn't have the permission of those particular people. Although many of them have contacted me and said, it's about time that this silence was broken.

And during the course of the time we were there, we were pretty well known in town as... the Jesus freaks across the creek. You know, we dressed from the left of me. We all in the trailer park.

And that trailer park was owned by a man named Mr. Kaywood when we got there and there was no development on the west side of the trailer park. So he let the men there create their own lots put in their own water and electric and eventually we had a full blown little commune there and I in my head the picture of the park is still there all the way from the first trailer which was Hugh Shantz all the way down to the last trailer which was the Wallace's. That is fascinating. I remember whenever I first began you know publishing information and it was about

the point I got into the Jim Jones research. I had a person contact me and the park episode that I mentioned earlier had already been published and I was getting into what I thought was the second of only two communes and I learned you know later there were more but I remember somebody telling me that there was another William Branna message cult commune. I think it was in either Kansas or Arkansas. I can't remember exactly where but they were describing similar to what you described in the layout and it was very vividly burned into their memory. So I imagine the traumatic

effect probably played a part in this but yeah it's it's fascinating to think that all of these migrations were happening and you have to ask yourself why. It is fascinating how so many people made this move out there and it's amazing also how vivid your memory is of it all. I kind of know what you mean. I had a big move when I was just a young child too and a lot of those things just stay in your mind because it's such a huge thing to move you know a thousand miles away which basically is what your family did. It's just amazing to me how these things you know people

in our support groups they tell us that the the trauma of some of the experiences they had just stay in their memories and some people have dreams or you know recurring nightmares from it. Did you have any experience like that? I occasionally have flying dreams and but the odd thing to me when they happen is that I am always flying over the park and I'm always looking down on it and I feel like that stems from those early childhood dreams of being left behind of everybody going up to heaven and that frantic awful fear that you've already encompassed as a small child that

you're not good enough to go. So That piece had a huge influence on my life, and I feel like my first five years there were pretty, they were happy years. We were with mom and dad, and we hadn't really come into focus, and I had older siblings.

My older siblings were very much a part of the organization there. The siblings, my family, to describe my family, I would have to say that we were like two families. We had my father and mother and the older siblings, and then there was a five-year gap, and then we had a whole set of younger siblings.

So the younger siblings were the siblings who really suffered in there. Although my two brothers, who were somewhat older than us, ran away from the park several times, and always ended up being brought back.

I don't know a lot of the circumstances of that except that they ran away several times, and got all the way to Kentucky at least once before they got turned back. So they were experiencing things at that point that I don't know a lot about.

I do know they were getting their heads shaved regularly. In the 60s, the 50s and 60s, that wasn't cool. So it sounds like that was one of the early abuses that started there was the shaving of the heads.

The two older brothers, who were just a little older than Esther and I, they suffered a great deal that I didn't really know anything about until I sort of found out accidentally some of the things that were happening to them.

The first time that I challenged Leo Mercier verbally, my life just went right to hell, and I was maybe five, six years old. It was because of the kind of brain I had. It wasn't because I was defiant.

It was because I had the kind of brain where you couldn't tell me something, and then do something, do that in front of me. You couldn't tell me this is wrong and then do that in front of me.

I would go, I would say, why did you do this? Or I would question, and I think some of my first, we learned to be very, very afraid of Leo Mercier. And because that man had so much influence on my entire life and what I came to understand is that I felt like being...

able to forgive all of them helped me move forward in my life. But I had never recognized how that park experience from one year to 14 years framed my entire life

and all of my life decisions afterward. All of my fragilities, all my insecurities were developed right there. And because you can forgive and move on with your life, does not necessarily mean that you are not going to have those post-traumatic responses to things that mess up your own life, that frustrate your own life.

So by 2000, I think it was 2019, I think it was 2019, I felt like I just had to do

something about this. And my twin sister, and I think that you've read in the book, you can see kind of the differences in our two personalities. But we were just, we were twins, but Esther was fearful as a small child.

And she just, she seemed to be, she would get eric, she would be sick a lot. I was a big mouth, I feel like I was in trouble a lot early on as soon as I had a mouth that I could speak with.

And the things that we witnessed as children affected the two of us differently. I chose a way to compartmentalize it and push ahead, no matter what I experienced. In my own mind, I thought of these as bricks to help me build my own sanctuary.

But Esther was just open to all of it. And our lives as we became adults, it was very evident that, and one of the things I wrote in my book, something Esther said to me, because she was very addictive.

She had issues with, if she started smoking, she couldn't stop, if she started drinking, she couldn't stop, if she was doing something, she was this incredible, magical person, she was a dog whisperer, she was very capable, but she had a very addictive personality.

And in the point in time when I was at one point trying to help her stop drinking, she told me, she said, Debbie, we're all addicted to something. And you are addicted to being a control freak.

And watching her suffer the way we did as a children, and then seeing how she became as an adult. And then watching her die from cancer, that we had not had cancer in our family.

We had a lot of cardiac disease, we had a lot of diabetes, but we didn't have cancer. And I have very much wondered about the correlation between childhood trauma and disease. And I feel like Esther just absorbed these things into her body.

And when she died, I felt like I had a huge wrong to make right. And maybe being a twin made that as heavy as it was. Because my other siblings suffered there too, but losing a twin, and when you have shared a life with them from the moment that you were conceived, and everything in our life, we slept in the same bed, we shared the same pillow.

And I was sort of her wall. She would sort of stand behind me when we were little. And also in a family of 12 children to lose the baby of the family first. And nobody is asking why.

What got emphasized was her crazy issues, the fact that she was an alcoholic, she was smoking too much, she was living kind of a crazy lifestyle. But that wasn't the reason. And I was disappointed that nobody wanted to know why we lost the baby in our family first.

So that really spurred me to write the book. Now the book for me was a story that needed to be told without telling someone else's story. And without a lot of character development, because I didn't want to character develop to the point that people would absolutely know who I'm talking about.

Because this was a big first. And you know people have talked about the park all over the country, all over the world. People have talked about it and asked about it. And I wanted to protect the idea that we went there with and help people understand how quickly a good intention can be ruined and can turn into the very worst of possibilities.

So and writing in verse allowed me to do that. It allowed me to clip those little pieces of my memory, turn them into something that was readable without a complete character development. So that appealed to me, and I felt like if I can say everything I need to say with the fewest words and the smallest amount of character development, then I won't have people beating down my door because they recognize who I'm talking about.

And I did change a few names. And there's part of me that thinks the story is mine to be told. I should be able to say who did it and when they did it and how I felt afterward.

And yet I do want to protect the original idea that the people had. And my family, my older siblings and my family are still very devout followers of the message. So writing this book, and here we are a year later, and the world didn't implode.

Nothing terrible happened to anybody, although I sure had some terrible things placed upon my head. Yeah, Deborah, I know exactly what you mean. The way that they come and attack you, just for telling the truth, just for saying, hey, these things happen.

They don't even want the truth or the history of these things mentioned. It's like an affront to them. And then they get to the point where they start accusing you of blasphemy, just because you told the truth about things that happen.

And really, I mean, the truth is when they accuse us of blaspheming the prophet, biblically, you cannot blaspheme a prophet. You can only blaspheme God. So it's even based on their ridiculous deity of William Brannamide, somewhere in their mind, they are equating William Brannam to God to even be able to accuse us of blaspheming the prophet.

You can't blaspheme a prophet of God. I mean, that is just not even in the definition of the word. So just keep telling the truth. I really appreciate it. You're helping all kinds of people by sharing these stories, and God bless you for it.

Absolutely. Charles and I are heavily attacked, as you can imagine, and pretty much everybody that I know who has been vocal in speaking out against the cult and its splinter groups. They attack the character, and you can always tell something's wrong whenever a group or an individual attacks the victim rather than the victimizers.

And I never will forget this person came to me who they had just escaped, and they weren't even really that vocal. Their character was being attacked, and in the Christian world, whenever they attack the sinner for somebody who's in a Christian church, it's just so ironic, because Christ came to save the sinners, right?

So the fact that they attacked the character instead of actually giving legitimate answers for the things that are very wrong. It's so eye-opening and hopefully you're able to just rise above it. I feel like I stopped learning to be afraid of those kind of denunciations a long time ago.

So as things progressed in the park, the first kind of thing that I really remember recognizing that Leo Mercier was the king in this situation was watching my dad whom I had never seen really answer to anyone.

He was always such a force to be reckoned with. And then as a child to see him completely controlled by this man who was younger than him, the closer an age to my older sibling, a little bit older than my older sibling.

And I think that they still sort of considered dad like an elder while they were in Kentucky. But that was, he was pushed into a different position once we came into the park. And then all of those men who were around the age of my oldest sibling became the elders in the park.

Yeah, it's just amazing to me how this works. It's fascinating actually how people can just ignore everything that's going on and then take an individual and put them up on a pedestal as though, like you said, he's the king.

It happens time and time again whenever you study the history of cults and how they work. And every splinter group that exists, I know that they've taken some individual and they've, like you said, they've made him the king of the camp.

But it's just fascinating when you think about it. Deborah, could you tell us how Leo managed to get even the more senior men, the senior elder men to surrender so much control to him in this group?

One of the statements I made in my book is that his plan was to diminish the elders, raise up the younger and give them control completely over the youngest. So a great deal of the trauma I experienced in my life came from my older siblings.

And it's because they were indoctrinated to believe that they were doing the right thing. So as we went onward, that was also a difficult piece to experience because as a very small child, I had these incredible memories of our family, my dad, my mom, my sisters, and their kids.

And I was raised right alongside several of my nephews. And then, you know, and there's this pre-operational stage where your construct is only based on what you've experienced. So, as you get older and you begin to take those experiences and dissect them a little bit, you start to question, especially if you have a curious brain.

That's incredible, Deborah. I can just scarcely imagine what that was like as a child. How did the abuses start for you and your twin sister there in the park? I think the very first really bad experiences my sisters and I had with Leo, Mercere, was just a day when we were playing with pine cones on our patio.

And we got called down to his bathroom. And, you know, that has got to be the strangest thing in the world that this man talked to God in his bathroom. And, you know, I know anybody who's been in his trailer knows exactly what I'm talking about. I had never seen a brown toilet, a brown bathtub.

You know, everything in the bathroom was brown and he had this kind of fancy countertop and a big mirror above that. And he would sit on the toilet and bring us in the bathroom and tell us what God had shown him.

And, as a child, you don't have a reference for this being just the weirdest thing ever. And he, you know, I was impulsive. I had a mouth and I would just say what I thought because I wasn't intrinsically a liar.

I became one, but I wasn't one at that point in time. And he asked us if we made a mess on our porch. And, you know, we were just playing. And then when we said no, he said, well, there's pine cones all over your porch.

And he then threatened to burn our tongue out with a red hot poker if we did not tell him the truth. So very young, we learned that you tell him what he wants to hear or you're going to get hurt.

So we actually learned to lie. And that experience, when I said to him, you don't have a fireplace because I had already recognized that the only person in the park who had this faux fireplace had a little set of a poker by his fireplace.

And I just said, but you don't have a fireplace and he smacked me across the room. And I think that's the first time I had ever been hit in the face like that. And he was just so calm, you know, just like a snake just whacked.

And we learned to be afraid of him, to be very afraid of him. And that fear just bloomed if we could smell him. He wore this, I think he used aramists, which is some kind of a cologne that he would then doctor.

I don't know exactly how he did it, but it was very identifiable. And he had a couple of whimeriener dogs. And their names were prints and boots. And they had these dog tags hanging on their collars.

And if we could hear him coming, we could hide. Because if he saw you, it was very likely that the Lord would show him that you were doing something you shouldn't be doing. So that fear began to grow.

And then when I began to notice that we were summoned for punishments is when I began to recognize that that's what had been happening to Johnny and Tony. So Debra, what does your family think about your book and everything that you're doing right now?

They're not completely happy about what I'm doing, but they were there and they suffered. I saw horrible things done to them. And while I want to protect people and I don't want to alienate my family, I feel that it's so important for people to understand how quickly a man can take your life and turn it into something that is his to control.

And from my perspective, William Brannum, whatever his intentions were, when he began having visions and preaching his sermons, his messages, he very quickly learned the benefit of control. And that passed right down to these men who then became the ultimate control in the park.

I'm curious and actually I've been asked this quite a bit, whenever you think about these two men, Jean and Leo, what was the relationship like between Jean and Leo? Interestingly enough, Jean-Gode did not have a huge factor in my life.

Leo Mercier was the serpent in my life and the man I was absolutely terrified of. Jean-Gode was not that man. He was the hunter, he liked to hunt. He seemed like he kept everybody's guns, whenever they were zeroing guns, they were with Jean-Gode.

He was helping them do that. He had a little den room where he had lots of weapons and things in there and he seemed to be the guy who managed that sort of stuff, but I feel like he was also very much controlled by Leo.

Leo was definitely the dominant and that's situation. So as things progressed and I could reference what was happening in my life, I started to recognize just everything about it that was wrong and to do what they did to me as a child to throw that whole sexual umbrella on me at eight, nine years old. You know, only I myself know how that affected my entire life because I learned to believe that as an eight year old child I was a deviant and he just, he just made it up. He just made it up and he turned

me into a deviant as a child in front of the entire place. It's amazing, Deborah, how you describe that. I mean, it is very true. The thing is that we experience as a child absolutely shape our entire life and when we grow up in a, I'm going to say a hellish environment like you grew up in Deborah. It's only natural that it's going to have a bad effect on somebody and it's amazing how you have overcome these things in your life in large degree and went on and had a successful life, successful marriage and family. But back, back when this was happening and you're being

subjected to this abuse by Leo, how did your parents react to that at the time? It's hard to describe the helplessness that a child experiences when they absolutely understand there's no way out your, your dad is in, your mama's in and this man is in control. Mom, so much of my life as a child, I just remember her tears. She cried, you know, they would beat us and these beatings, you know, you don't beat a small child like that and she would put us in a bathtub with warm water and she would just do what she could to comfort us but we knew really early that she couldn't stop

it and when she tried to, they threw her out of there and, you know, my dad let that happen. So I learned to see my, my dad in a completely different light. I learned to see him as someone who was going to do what he was told and not someone who would protect me. So that is a, that's a difficult day in the life of any child but if you're going to survive, you have to find a way to do that within your own mind. And so within my own mind, I learned to to believe that they can't really know what's up here in my head so I can think whatever

I want to and when and it felt like it's hard to describe what happens when you are recognized as a disobedient liar thief you know stubborn as a mule you know the things that you hear all your life that are derogatory if you're going to live through it you just have to keep moving it's it's like that old if you're going through hell just keep on going there's nothing else you can do but I do remember having fatalistic ideas of how my life would end up based on what I saw there so when I was I was very close to several of my nephews I was my nephew David was born in

July and my sister and I were born in August and my other nephew Mark was born in September and then we had several nephews and nieces who were all born around that same time frame so I was raised with them Danny and Mark were were like siblings I didn't I don't think I I recognized the their mother was my sister but to me they were like brothers and sisters we we did everything together so watching we only had each other for support when terrible things happened we didn't have any support from our families and I feel like there were times when we got punished or beaten

and then our families didn't even know about it until we went home covered with belt welts and so Danny and Mark were a big part of my life and my older sibling was married to a man that she met and married while they were still in Kentucky Kentucky he was in the Navy she came to the park with the boys and with my family and right around the time that William Branham was going to release marriage and divorce they pushed her into they pushed her into giving up her her parental rights to her sons and so Mark and Danny were suddenly just vanished from my life and sent to Florida to

live with their biological father and then married my sister was married to Roger Loker and that at that time and there's a part of me that's nervous saying these things but it's true it's true it happened that's something else Deborah I mean it's terrible Um, and I know you're telling the truth because I actually know, uh, I know one of the, the gentleman there that you, you mentioned, I went to church with him and, uh, heard stories from him and his family about these abuses that went on, uh, quite a number of years ago at this point. And it is just so horribly evil. The things that Leo did, uh, to the young

children, you know, all the way up to the teenagers and young men there in, in the park. Um, it's just horrendously evil stuff. You know, corporal punishment or spankings, and the message is widespread at the instruction of William Branum and then by extension, the leaders of each splinter group are subsect. William Branum would often say to take a barrel slat, which is a thick piece of wood or even a tube before in beecher, women and children with this. And so it's widespread. There are people in our support groups that often talk about being brutally beaten by their parents. And again, it's at the, at the request or the

instruction of William Branum. So it's much, much different, I think, than your normal, quote unquote, normal Christian family who still uses corporal punishment as a means to train their children. And even, even in the animal world, you don't train a dog this way. You give a dog a treat because you can beat the dog and it's just going to be scared of you. It's not going to, not going to create a relationship with the dog and the animal is not going to behave because you beat the tar out of it. But we do this in the message. The families in the message do this at

the instructions of William Branum. So I think it's critical to point out, you know, the difference between bringing a child up in the right way, which is encouraging them, giving them, you know, instructions to help better themselves and making them live in fear of being tortured like, like you were in the park. In relation to that, I'm curious, we have a page on Keith Loeker.

And I'm wondering if how many people in the park were aware that this was going on with the Loeker family. There was obviously the forced marriage union between a man who is homosexual and this woman basically to prevent his homosexuality and it resulted in a murder spree.

So I'm curious how much people were aware of this in the park at the time. It's all been talked about. It's all been bandied about. It was a huge issue in Keith Loeker's trial and he was forced to marry her as a cure for his homosexuality. And this was after he was taken into a homosexual relationship with Leomarsir.

So you have to think also there, again, about a young man who has come into this religion, believes it with all of his heart, came in with a big family, understands that he has this issue that doesn't settle into a religious environment.

And then he is taken into Leomarsir's bed. And then, out where everyone can see, he is pushed into an attempted cure. And he was married to my sister. And my sister has suffered. She has suffered a great deal.

And there's part of me that wants to ask why she didn't say, no, I'm not doing this. But people, average people, normal people are very overwhelmed by a group setting. And this is the manipulation of churches everywhere.

We've had a revelation from God. We've seen a vision. And that person, if they have any faith in the leader who's speaking to them, they just jump through their hoops. And I don't think my sister had a lot of happiness in the park after that.

And this is one of the comments that I made in my book that there was no holy ghost to be found. There was no Christianity have been completely destroyed. The holy ghost that they wanted to push into me my entire life.

I didn't ever see it. I didn't see anything that I thought could be called the Holy Spirit as a child who was totally comprehending the differences in what I was told versus what I was seeing.

So a commune dedicated to divine faith healing. And I'm just so curious. It's all fascinating. But what happened? I mean, do you remember William Brannam ever coming to the park? I do remember both of the times that Brannam came to the park.

I was really young when he came to the park to preach the first sermon he preached there, which was oddball. And that was May 31st of 1963, I think. And I remember the reverence of the people there.

I remember in my mind, it was like he was God come among us and speaking to us. And that memory is... really singular in my mind of the chorus, the singing. It was very reverent.

The people were full of love and expectation and reverence for this man. And so I remembered the singing and then this message that started out one way and became very thunderous at some point. And in that message, he definitely spoke about women and how they dress and bob their hair. And I remember even just really young thinking because I had never been exposed to women who bobbed their hair or did any of these things he was talking about.

And like you said, I was very young, but I remember, wow, that's interesting. But it was just, I don't even know if I qualified it in any way, other than to say, I don't understand this.

The second time he came, he preached leadership and that time I felt like I was more aware of the things he was preaching. And if anyone in this continent speaks about every word proceeding from his mouth being the word of God and they listen to those tapes, they will recognize how he endorsed the park.

And they can say what they want to, but he endorsed the park publicly, verbally, on a tape that these people call the word of God. And this has been a frustration between me and my family for years because it was like, how can you not see the endorsement of the park here?

He called Leo Mercier our shepherd. He said, we've all got to have a shepherd. If we don't have a shepherd, well, we'll just wander off into sin and corruption and that shepherd keeps you on track.

So what I see is that people are very conveniently able to say they'll pick out one thing. They'll say, well, he called it a little Goshen and we all know what Goshen was. Goshen was a slave city.

And it's like, well, okay, I guess that's what you picked out to make this all right. It just blows my mind that in a Christian religion, you have these things that practically every Christian knows.

They teach it in Sunday school and they get it so far wrong. And it becomes, it enters into cult doctrine in the wrong way and Charles, you're the minister. I'm going to let you take this, but this is just completely wrong.

Yeah, John, I mean, it is. So pathetic, Deborah, I'm sorry. Goshen doesn't mean slave city, you're exactly right. And people will do anything just to try and twist even the Bible itself to make excuses for William, Brannum.

Goshen certainly does not mean slave city. It actually means a place of rest and comfort. And at the exact same breath where William Brannum called it Goshen, he also called it Little Jerusalem. It's very, very clear to anyone with a lick of sense in their head that William Brannum was complementing the park when he called it Goshen.

He wasn't calling it a slave city, encouraging people to escape. He was encouraging everyone to stay, right? And anyone who would say otherwise is someone, I hate to say it, is brainwashed. And somebody who's actually very dangerous, who is someone who's willing to cover up a child molesting sex, deviant, torturous pervert, in order to protect William Brannum, right?

And somebody who would do a thing like that, I mean, I don't care who they are. I mean, they're bad people. You've got to get away from them. Anyone who would go to the extent to say Goshen does not, is change the meaning of the words of the Bible in order to protect William Brannum.

Dangerous, dangerous people. You've got to get away from people like that. And they will, they'll hurt you. And they'll do nothing when other people hurt you. This I find is what people do. They just make it okay.

And if you don't have a brain that says, wait a minute, that's not what you said the last time. And this doesn't match what you're telling me. And I can't put this in my brain and make it make sense.

So as an adult, you have the ability to say, I am done with this, none of it makes sense. And I'm walking away. And we did have some people in the park who did.

We had a family in the park called the Pews. And they were actually the son of Sister Mabel Pew. I don't know if you remember her or hearing about her, but she was an elderly lady who came to the park.

And she was in a wheelchair after an auto accident. And her son was a man named Jim Pew. And he came into the park with all of his children. And he picked them all up and left.

I remember them being a really active part of my life when we were little, because they lived very close to us in the park. And then they were just gone, because he wasn't dealing with it.

And Sister Mabel was there, though, until she died. And I used to always wonder why, with everything we heard, why she wasn't risen out of that wheelchair. And I think I heard at some point that William Brannum told her that this was her place somehow to be in this wheelchair.

So, that's convenient too, when you believe in someone so much and you believe in the power of what comes out of their mouth, the laying on of their hands, and you don't really believe in your own power or your own ability.

And I believe faith healing is possible, because I believe that the faith comes from the person who is seeking that healing, and not from the man who's laying his hands on you. And I feel like I, William Brannum, everything was about William Brannum laying his hands on you, or touching something that he owned, or physically having an interaction with him.

And if this happened, then these absolute miracles would occur as well. So, I couldn't understand why I didn't see those happening. You know, that's very common, and not just in the message, but many of the other faith healing cults.

They rely on the testimonies of other people who witnessed something miraculous, and there's very few direct witnesses to it. We have that example on the website of Alfred Pol who sponsored and worked with William Brannum during the Canadian Revivals of William Brannum, and there were a large number of people that claimed that people were healed in these meetings, and, you know, according to Pol and according to the newspaper journalists that were traveling through Canada, there was not a single person that they could find who was actually a miracle case.

It's interesting that quite a number of people say that, and when I left the message, I asked a lot of the old timers about the miracles that they witnessed, and I was surprised, actually, John, by how few actually felt like they saw a bonafide miracle when they were around William Brannum.

So quite a few, even who had attended the tabernacle, would say they never actually saw any miracles. I had, I'd say roughly half of the old timers I interviewed, John, who were long time attendees of the tabernacle, said they'd never seen a single miracle occur at the tabernacle, and the rest that did see miracles, almost all of them were just repeating stories they heard from other people.

There's very few eyewitnesses of actual miracles that's generally people just repeating stories. So Deborah, could you maybe tell us a little bit about the families that William Brannum encouraged to join the park, you know, who some of them were, and maybe what they were like a little bit?

When the park developed, he brought in three large families. He brought in a huge family of locars from, I want to say they were from Michigan, or somewhere in that area, and then he brought in the Vitasis, which is a big family from Chicago.

ago, and the Dalton's, of course, were from Kentucky. And then the Armstrong's were also a large family. And there were several elderly ladies who came along. And you know, in the children, we got used to a fairly significant amount of use in their in terms of punishments, but seeing an old lady whipped to the willow switch, they whipped the old ladies.

Even just taking a step back from that, with the way that these cults work, they not only do they beat you into submission mentally, they, the abuse factor, the spiritual abuse, in your case, the physical abuse, all of the varieties of abuses that go on, in self-preservation and your mind kind of goes back to the mode of being a child.

And you develop this relationship between the central figure in yourself as like a parent child relationship. And at that point, mentally, you're even, you know, no longer even an adult. So I'm curious, you know, I'm curious what the adults thought about all of this.

I think what the adults don't understand is that the adults, and I still think of us as two separate entities. I think of the park as the adults of the park and the kids of the park.

And now, and look at me, I was one of the babies and I'm an old lady now. But when, when you see something like that and you see an old lady, and I think there was a young couple getting married, so they wanted her trailer.

And he beat her with a will of sweatbatch because she didn't want to give up her trailer. And she didn't want to give up her money. And that was an old lady named Katie Hewitt.

And there were a couple of other older couples who, ultimately, I believe left and did not stay there. The Susas, Edra, and Dan and Edra Susa, they were there for a while and they were related to the Armstrongs, but they were not there as I got older.

So I feel like they left. And then Sister Hattie Baker, she was an elderly widow who was my oldest brother's mother and law. And she left the park over the abuse that happened to one of my nieces.

And here again, I'm going to be a little bit careful because she has suffered more than she has suffered her entire life because of this religion and because of the things that people did to her and the things that she experienced.

And of course, in this particular following. Women were seen as the evil doers in most situations. And a childhood filled with the knowledge that you're a sexual garbage can not fit for the kingdom of heaven unless you're married to a man who gives you your golden ticket.

We never learned the power of our own personality and our own ability as women to be strong and capable. We just learned that we were not worth anything unless we were married to a man of God.

That and my dad raised my older sisters completely differently than he raised us because he was not in the message when he was raising his older daughters. They were all grown. I think Doris was the youngest one at 17 when dad came into the message.

And by the time my twin sister and our one sister that's a little older than us, by the time we were born, he had encompassed this whole idea that women are, that girls have to be contained a certain way or they're going to lead somebody right into the flaming pits of hell just because of their gender.

So I always thought that I knew dad loved us, but I also felt like he classified us in this place that we could be easily led astray. And the times in my life that he told me he would, he would stone me and put me six feet under because I'd be better off that way.

It's so manipulative and you know for the children I know that a lot of these cults they they focus in on the children because if you pass my grandfather said if you get the children you can get to the parents and if you can get to the parents you can get to their money.

That's a quote from my grandfather. But you know I'm curious what other ways did Leo manipulate the minds of the children? I felt like children were hoodwinked. He set up a little science experiment that we were all fascinated by and I'm sure it was just red food coloring and bleach and even then as a seven year old I was very baffled by the fact that he had this glass of water and he dropped in red food coloring and he said this is the color of sin and then he dropped some bleach in it and of course all the

red food coloring just vanished. And it was like magic. And that's what we saw. So he he sucked us all in with this magic trick. But in my mind, I was saying, but wait, the blood of Jesus is red. So how is this right?

But that is the kind of kid I was. So if you were a precocious kid, you suffered in there. If you were a kid who wasn't so precocious, you suffered in there. It just it's like if you were the ones who fell into the figure it out, that you're going to be safe. If you keep your mouth shut, things were sometimes not quite so bad. So he sucked us in with the magic trick and then the rubber stamp that we got stamped the Holy Ghost on our hand. So he appealed to children on a childlike level. We all wanted

to get stamped on our hand with the Holy Ghost. And this experience is the singular one in my early life that that everything that followed was based on this experience. And he had already just perpetrated horrible things on my brothers. And these were things that I just heard as a child. The things that you were describing that your family went through there was just horrific. And I have to imagine that your parents realized some of this stuff was not good.

Why didn't your dad want to leave? What made your dad and your family stay in the park and subject themselves to all of that abuse? I remember my mother just crying and begging our dad saying, why? Why? And dad would always soothe her with those words that promised from William Branham that it was all going to be okay. I mean, he was like a priest up there with this sacrament laid out, you know, and he gave us this little magic trick. And then he told us that he was going to pray with each and every one of us. And if we confess our sins,

then he would ask God to forgive them. So my sins at the time, you know, we didn't have a lot. We were babies. We were little kids. And my big sin in that moment was I had stolen a dime from Mama's purse to buy an ice cream from the ice cream man. And so, and I watched all the kids were praying, and you know, kids are, they were fervent. They were, they really wanted the Holy Ghost and they knew there was this price to pay. And that was to pray for it so that you would earn it. And then

each child was invited to sit on his lap. And, you know, I saw him talking to one child. after another and you know I was terrified of him at that point so this day was was just weird you know he was being nice he was praying with the children and my sister went up there my twin sister went up there they sat on his lap and they cried and they talked and they got off of his lap and they got stamped bang the rubber stamp they got the Holy Ghost so when it was my turn I I just remember the utter revulsion of sitting on his lap I didn't

like the way smelled I didn't like the way felt I was too close to him his ears were ugly it was like everything about it was just repulsive to me so I was I was not in the mode I guess is the way to say it and then when he began asking me these terrible sexual things that asking me if I had done them with my brothers and explicit explicitly asking me if I had done things with them and

I described it in my book as just like a bell tower in my head I could not understand what was happening and I was caught in that place where if you say yes you're telling him you did these horrible things and if you say no you're not going to get the Holy Ghost but but I could not do it I could not sit in his lap and say I had done these things with my brothers so I just kept saying no no I know I didn't do that I didn't do it and and now it became an issue because now I'm the only

child in the group who hasn't confessed what he asked me to confess I don't know what he asked all of them I'm not sure but I do know he asked my sisters some of the same nasty stuff I didn't know that for almost 25 years after the fact when I was able to ask them you know what what did you say to him what did you tell him and they both said you know what you made it harder for yourself he just wanted you and so he just wanted you to to say yes that he had done these nasty things

so that the benefit to him it just you know he's a perv you know he was a pedophile he was a homosexual and he he he perved on children so I was sent out of there to go sit on the steps so in that whole group of children I was the one who did not get the Holy Ghost that day and we heard so much about it there it was a big deal, there were these steps, you had to get the Holy Ghost, and then you had to get the third pool, and then you had to get the mountaintop, and then you had to get the perfect walk.

And I kept thinking, is everybody going to get stamped with all of those things when they get them? But it was never a personal choice. It was a man sitting in a chair deciding that you have the Holy Ghost because you've had a nasty sexual conversation with him.

And like I said, I only know what the conversation was in terms of myself and my sisters, but he had been perving on my brothers for some time. So that was the beginning of the years that I feel, trying to think, there's part of me that feels like that was the beginning of the years that destroyed me, but there's another part of me that believes that was the beginning of the years that helped me get liberated later.

It angers me the way that these men behave, and the fact that people put up with it, that mothers and fathers were there watching all of this happen, and they allowed their children to be subjected to this.

And I never will forget one of the ministers in, and I won't give his name, but he obviously had a problem with one of the younger girls that was sitting close to the front every Sunday in church and started condemning this girl because she had a quote-unquote sedusive spirit.

And I mean, it was obvious after you left this church that this man legitimately had a problem, but instead of addressing his own problem, and quite honestly, he should have just stepped down, he blames the female who's sitting there, who he has a problem with.

And it just blows your mind that these men can get away with this. It is just terrible. You know, I'm thinking about my children having to go through something like this, and I just, it floors me.

And Leo pretending, and the adults all accepting that he can just stamp your hand, and you have the Holy Ghost. I mean, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, you know, and then forcing all the children to be subjected to these perverted, evil accusations sitting on his lap.

I mean, I can just only imagine how horrible this thing was to go through Debra. And what happened? What happened to you after you refused to go along? It sounds like things just got worse for you because you refused to tell him the perverted things he wanted to hear.

You know, I don't know how much you know about penworms. Kids get penworms. When they get penworms, you check their anus because that's where you will find... pinworms if they have them. And that isn't out of the realm of possibility to do something like that.

But several days after that, I had been sent to another family's home. This was the family. This was Leo Mercier's brother-in-law, his wife's brother and

his wife. So I was their house. And one of the older ladies who had been a nurse came to this house and they were going to check me for worms. And I didn't know anything about pinworms. I didn't know anything about being checked for worms. But it followed right on the heels of this deviant prayer meeting that we had. And when they pretty much exposed me and they did not check for worms where you check for worms and little girls or little boys. And it was a real violation because we had been taught from the time we were out of diapers that you don't go in the

bathroom. You don't go in the bathroom when anybody's in there. I remember it being like a huge issue if you accidentally opened the bathroom door while somebody was in there. It was always this sort of awareness of things that were nasty. And yet, as very little girls, I remember bathing with my sisters all the time. We were just in the tub together because it was convenient.

And there were nine of us in the house. So while this was happening, one of my older siblings was there, one of my older sisters. And I just understood that I was not going to get any help from her. And this was, this was, this is kind of heartbreaking when you think about the kind of tight knit family we had. And then suddenly, as a very small child, you were forced to recognize that no one you know is going to save you from what's about to happen. It is just going to happen, and you're going to have to deal with it. And I remember the feeling in my head of,

of just, this is so wrong. This is so wrong. And I don't have any place to file it. And

then I remember having everything kind of came back to me. It had only been a few days earlier. He had been asking these questions about me and my brothers. And so, you know, and I, I hope I'm not being too explicit or frank. I know these things are touchy sometimes. But when a child is violated that way, when they've been told their entire life, that this, this place is to be secret, this place is to be private, this place is to be not touched by anybody by yourself. And that's only to go to the bathroom.

And then these things happened, so I, as a seven-year-old, connected in my brain that this was happening to me because I didn't tell him that I had done these things with my brothers. So, and I didn't know what was going to happen after that.

I just knew they did this very invasive genital exam and I was allowed to get up and get dressed again and I was then summoned to the dining hall where all the adults eat.

And the dining hall had two levels. There was a lower level that was the original trailer, or maybe it was the upper level was the original trailer and then the lower level was a built-on addition.

And so he used to sit up on, there was these three rounded stairs steps and he would sit at the top of that and it was sort of like his dais, or dais, dais, when he decided he wanted to pontificate.

And so I was brought there and I was the only child in a room full of adults. And I was just, and when you don't know what's coming, I mean, you're just there, you know, it's like you have no comfort, you have no escape, you have no one who's going to protect you.

And so whatever he was going to say was going to be believed. And he told them that I had been, and he completely switched up. He wasn't even talking about me and my brothers anymore.

He was talking about me defiling other little girls in the park. So I am literally seven years old and I'm hearing that I have defiled other little girls and I've defiled myself and that I am a sexual deviant.

And in the words I didn't know, horror, lesbian, prostitute, I had heard the word prostitute, I didn't know what it meant, but I had never heard of the word lesbian. And it was just, it was not something I could comprehend.

It was, I couldn't understand what was happening, but I definitely understood that I was some kind of a wicked evil child. And then he sent me back to, you know, he sort of denounced me and then he put in all their heads that I had defiled their little daughters.

So it was just inescapable, there was, there was nowhere to go and there was no sympathy. And mom and dad were not there, they were absent. And I feel like he kept mom absent a lot of times because she was, she would not have just bent until she did.

And they did, they broke her eventually. After that, I felt like I was Mark, literally, like Kane, and the life got difficult, you know, I feel like I was always in trouble. I started school, I loved books, I loved to read, but because I became so fearful, he pretty much proved that he would do to me anything he said he would do, so you the fear becomes such a huge part of your life that it really kind of supersedes everything else.

So I started to lie, and this is where I feel it's really important for parents to understand what happens when a child is regressing into a memory that they have. This is why people have post-traumatic reactions because when you're afraid, your animal brain, your lower brain reacts before your upper brain has had time to process it.

So I would just lie, if somebody asked me something, I was terrified and I would spit out the lie out of my lower brain before my upper brain could understand that I had just gotten myself in more trouble.

So any parent out there who hears what I'm saying, when your child is doing things like this, when they are spitting things out, they're spitting it out from a place of fear that is there, some people call it your reptilian brain, it's just your reactive brain, it's not your brain where you process things.

And so that child's fear is what promotes what comes out of their mouth. And so I lied, I just lied about everything. What you're describing is PTSD, and it's really sad that not just in the message but in America, parents aren't really educated for mental health issues and they have no idea the symptoms that people have with PTSD.

There are a large number of people in our support groups that have PTSD and many of them will tell you they got PTSD because of the message. So it's really unfortunate. I'm curious, what did you do once you're going through this traumatic event?

What did you do to find your happy place? I got into school and school was incredible for me because there was some freedom there. You could read books that we weren't allowed to read.

And there were people around that weren't like us, so it was kind of a curious experience and it was for me, I loved it. My twin sister and I started first grade. together and Esther didn't like school. She just didn't, she would have been happier to stay at home. And so they held her back after the first grade. And that was, that was difficult for me because I feel like Esther and I had been, I described it as, you know, the same shadow occupying, occupying the same space all the time. So that was our first

kind of separation that was identifiable. And my mother, my mother did not want that to happen because I feel like she thought that as an entity, the two of us took care of each other. And so in some ways that separated her from a little bit of a barrier that she had. And this was also, you know, when I learned that those fantastic books that haven't been raised with are not something you should bring home. Because I, I checked out an incredible book called Little Witch. And it was about a girl named Minks. And she went, she, it was

the opposite of everything. And to me, that was intriguing to me. She was, she left the Little Witchy school because she wanted to be in a regular school. So she went to the regular school to learn from regular teachers and be with regular kids. But she was really a witch. And she could fly on a broom and things like this. So I took it home and I read it to Esther and Sharon read it. And then, you know, it would have been fine if dad hadn't found it. But when he found it, you know, that was, that was a profound experience. Because

he was enraged in a way that I had never seen about that book. And he burned the book. And you know, we got a bad weapon from dad that night. And then we, we, we were popped on the couch and we listened to that tape about witches who bash babies brains out. And, you know, tough lesson. One of the toughest ones from dad. But so I learned to start hiding things. So I became a sneak and a liar. And it was, it was my life. Everything in my life was about sneaking something that I couldn't have. And if I got caught lying about

in your book, you shared how you felt that you had to tell lies in order to survive. And Deborah, I can totally understand why anybody living in an environment like this would feel like they got a lie to survive. I mean, when you were being tortured and abused, like the children were in this commune, you'd do anything to survive. I, I can totally understand why that would happen. And I, I really appreciate you being so vulnerable and sharing those things from...

your childhood. And in your book, it looked like things just kept getting harder and harder for you after this situation happened in school. And you mentioned that they broke your mom. Could you maybe explain how that happened and then what happened afterwards?

Between seven and nine, those two years were really awful. And then because of that liar label, you know, and my mom, she did what she could to protect me. But the day that she abandoned me was, it was another pivotal moment, you know. She asked me if I lied.

And it is so stupid. I just traced over my sister's name on a little manila folder. I just traced. It was written so beautifully. It was written in cursive writing. And I just traced over it with a marker. And I messed it all up. And my mom told me to go and apologize to sister Mary for that. And, you know, it seems like you would recognize that if you don't do it, you're really going to be in some big trouble. But I could not do it. I couldn't go in there and say I was sorry for writing over the name on that folder. And, but I went back home and I told mom,

I had. And I guess I thought I would, it would in there, but she wouldn't ask her if I asked, if I told her I was sorry. And of course, I had not. So my mom, and this is the single time in my life with my mother that I felt like she was near the breaking point herself.

And I suffered for that. And she, she came home and she, I just remember her saying, what is wrong with you? Is there something wrong with you? Were you born a liar? And she beat me with a willow switch. I think it's the only weapon I really remember getting from mom.

And she, because we got plenty from everybody else, she beat me with a willow switch and she grabbed me by the hair and she just yanked me down the road. I lost my shoes. My dress ripped.

And she marched me down there to the dining hall and she just threw me on the floor in front of Leo Marseille. And she said, she is a liar. And she walked out. And you know, it's, this, these are the days as a child when I said to myself, if I ever have children, I will go to hell with them before I will let someone do this to them. I will Never give them up to anyone and if it means I'm wicked and going to hell fine Then we'll just all go to hell and we'll burn together and for a child to come to that conclusion

That's a bitter and sad thing because No child should ever be forced into that corner where you would choose the eternal lake of fire Over giving your children up to a monster who can manipulate them anyway they want to But at the time I felt like that was the only choice I had So I remember those thoughts so clearly and and also fearing that I was damning my soul to hell by even having thoughts like that so This is when You know they they cut our hair You know this is the other thing at six years old when we had been taught

Oh my goodness we had been taught my entire life that bobbed haired women were Next to next in line to Satan, you know and that if you bob your hair your wicked You have no right to the kingdom of heaven and when we were six And I wrote in my book the story about the little dog we had that They killed because He bit one of the neighbors and they said we were teasing him and they shot the dog and then cut our hair off and the trauma of Of them shooting the dog was was just like something

you can You don't even recognize how you're going to encompass that experience but cutting my hair off after telling me my whole life

What a sin that is and what that makes you How does a group of Christian people Expect a child to encompass that How do they expect them to react to that They turned me into an evil wicked person in my community by doing that And then the second time they did it Was after everything came after this whole thing with chewy after this Giant lie that I told in the park and then after mom kind of gave me up to him Because I believe that the reason this Whole thing unfolded over a couple of years is because mom was resistant

But when she gave me up it was free reign for him and And

These are This is family that you are born into that you love that that are your whole world I thought my dad was the king of all men and my mother was that soft place that I needed and when you are robbed of that

something in your life you either have to encompass that you're going to survive all by yourself or you're going to fold and when mom gave me up to Leo I felt totally abandoned completely abandoned and you know by this time I had learned to believe that God wasn't looking after me because it was evil so I didn't even have a lot of hope although I remember praying and begging God to save me to help me and the thought in my head so many times is where is Jesus where is Jesus why isn't he saving me from these people

and that further enhances the idea that you're somehow wicked and you're not worthy of a response from Jesus or protection from Jesus so by now after after from the time of seven years old until almost nine having definitely learned to be afraid and definitely learned that he would do everything he said he was going to do he brought me back down to his bathroom and well that that night that mom took me to him he and my oldest brother and I love my brother I do I just feel like he was very misled when he became one of the elders in the park and in being that person

very willing to carry out Leo Marcius directives and this is difficult for me because I do love my family I love my brothers I love my sisters and I feel like we were something really special before Leo Marcius just bastardized our lives we had an incredible family and I think we could have been very incredible but this man William Brannum Leo Marcius they have they have impacted generations of our family now and you can't beat a child for lying tell them that they're on a path street to hell and then lie you just can't you you hold the right hand of God and then you lie and

some people can just get past that other people can't and I always one of the ones who couldn't so

He sat me in that chair in the dining hall that night and he told me don't move out of that chair because if you do God will show me and I had already been beaten you know my toes were bleeding my hair had been yanked out of my head I literally had hair falling out of my head and I'll never forget how handsome my brother looked to me he was so handsome he had on a cowboy hat in a vest and he just looked so manly and like he could protect me you know he could

protect me he could save me you know he didn't he was right there just to be the henchman and that's how he was he sat there quietly until he was told to do something and he did it I remember him kind of squat on his heels at one point and they mom had dragged me down there around noon or two o'clock in the afternoon and so this was evening the evening meal for the adults came in and so I'm sitting there on this chair watching the adults do their kind of buffet line that they did to eat and Leo Mercier is just sitting up there and

you know I've described him in ways that I remember him and he was like job of the hut to me he was just like this big billious creepy disgusting man that that I just thought he was awful and when I see pictures of him now and he was younger I think you know I might have exaggerated that a little bit in my head but that's how he was to me he was just this big scary monster and so he told me not to get out of that chair and my brother reiterated that to me and

it was night it was dark and they said don't get out of that chair if you do the Lord will show and he said the Lord will show me my brother said the Lord will show him so you know by now I'm terrified I'm sitting in the dark by myself and I'm not allowed to get out of that chair and I can remember really clearly thinking I might I might lose my mind I might lose my mind and I felt like even at that young age I had already decided that my mind was really the only place I was safe because nobody could really force their way into it

and see everything I was thinking but that was that was the closest I feel like I came to a disassociative event when I felt like I was looking for anyone other than me to to be there and to experience that and I I remember begging Jesus to come and save me to get me out of this mess and and thinking that, you know, like all kids do, that some miracle is gonna happen and someone's gonna come and remove you from this awful situation.

And, you know, I drifted off, went to sleep and then I was, of course, terrified to get out of the chair. And so I sat there and I peed in the chair. And, you know, that's more trouble.

I had seen kids with their, you know, kids who didn't diaper train quickly enough, you know, the punishment was typically to throw a pair of crappy underwear on their head and make them sit there in it.

So, that night, I feel like, as I was able to look at it later, I felt like maybe that night is when I could go back and say, well, maybe Jesus really did help me.

Maybe he helped me in sparing my mind that night when I really thought that my mind was in danger. And I can remember saying, please don't let me go crazy. Please don't let me go crazy.

I don't wanna go crazy. And, because he told me there before he left, tomorrow, I'm gonna strip you naked and you're gonna walk up and down the roads of the park, naked. And to me, that was more shame than my mind could encompass.

And he had done this to kids. He had beat them, stripped them naked and sent them home. He did this to my siblings, he did it to, he did it to other girls that were a little bit older than me.

So I knew that he would do it, but it was the humiliation that I couldn't, in my mind, I couldn't bear. It was like, everything about me, if you strip me naked and you put me out here in front of everybody, then you've done to me more than my mind can tolerate.

And again, this huge balloon of confusion with the way we were taught about modesty, about dressing and then stripping you naked. It was so dichotomous. And for a kid with a black and white brain, that's tough.

So I feel like I spoke to Jesus that night and I said, if he does this to me, I'm going to lose my mind and I don't wanna be crazy. So please help me.

I don't know what happened. I really don't know what happened. I can't even speak to it. I just know that about 5.30, 5.30 in the morning, my brother came back, told me I could go home.

I went home to mom and I, I, I, I, I, don't remember feeling any anger or frustration with mama. I don't, I just wanted to be with her. And so when she put me in the tub and cleaned me up and you know they burned my fingers that night too. So, and they had done this to other children and I'd seen it done. It was their way of helping you understand how awful hell would be by holding your fingers in a flame. So, you know, and I wanted to put when I wrote the book, I wanted to write

it from a child's perspective. How I didn't want to tell it as an adult remembering. I wanted to tell it as an actual child sitting there and what was happening in my mind and in my heart and that I had no escape and that feeling of utter abandonment, no one is going to help you. This man can play with your life any way he wants to and considering him to be a monster and nothing redeemable about him, where do you have to go? What's left for you? So, you know, mom cleaned me up and put butter on my burns, put me to bed and you know that was the night I

recognized what they were doing to Esther to keep her from wetting the bed. They were tying a big knot in a sheet in the middle of her back so that they were thinking maybe that would keep her from wetting the bed. And she was also a nail-biter. This is how she coped. She would throw up, she would bite her nails, she would, this was, this is how she reacted to some of the sphere.

And I remember them dipping her fingers in turpentine or hot pepper oil so she wouldn't bite her fingernail. So, we had all these rules. We had extreme punishment for anything that you didn't do right. And all these lessons about piety and modesty and the goodness of God which we weren't seeing any of that. We weren't seeing the grace of God. We weren't seeing the love of Christ. We were only seeing that somehow God was speaking to this monster and allowing him to defile our lives. And this is the greatest crime that parents can perpetrate on their kids

in my book. Go ahead, raise your kids. You're going to make some mistakes. You're going to do things wrong. I'm not sure any kid escapes from some mistake that their parents made. But that is life. And that's what we expect. But don't give your children to another man or to a church to raise to abuse. So, I believe my I went back to the dining hall.

She left the house. She put me to bed and she left. I think she went down there and cleaned up the mess I left. And I don't know if she made promises. I don't know what she agreed to.

I don't know if she spoke to Leo. I'm not sure. I just know that for two days, I was terrified that they were gonna come get me and stir me naked and make me walk around in the park naked.

And that didn't happen. So there again, as a child, that's the piece I gave to Jesus. Okay, I didn't go crazy and they didn't do this to me. Because what I said to him was, I can't survive this intact.

My mind will not be intact if this happens to me. And then I just, I feel like I just became numb. I didn't know what they were gonna do next. I kind of had to stop caring and just let them do what they were going to do.

So this for me was at the point in your book that I had to put it down. I just, you know, just walk away from it for a while because the overwhelming feeling of helplessness, I can't even imagine as a child going through this.

You're looking to your parents as your safety net, your security blanket and they're just giving you up to the predator. And I'm curious what that was like. Did Leo Mercer ever take you alone in his house and did your parents allow this?

And, you know, just tell us a bit what that was like. He brought me down to his house and he in his bathroom again.

And this time he asked me these things that I'd done with my brothers. I mean, explicit, you know, if you put their privates in your mouth, have they put their mouth on your privates?

You know, and this word, privates. Oh my gosh, I cannot even tell you what that word does to me. If you want to know what PTSD does to a person, just use a word like that when they've had it beaten into them as a child.

I hate it. I'd rather call it anything else because I heard it over and over again. How I had violated the privates or the other little girls in the park. How my brothers had violated my privates.

I violated their privates. You know, it was so horrendous and such an awful thing to do with a child. And he asked me, you know, did you do these things? And I said, yes, I did, you know, anything he asked me.

I said, yes, I did it. He asked me for names. I gave him names. I told him names of my little nieces, girls in the park until I couldn't think anymore of names to give him.

And so I out of my own mouth at nine years old. set myself up to be this deviant, you know, and it's just, it's a, it's a horrifying experience to condemn yourself out of your own mouth because you're too terrified to do anything different.

And so I had been sitting there and he, and I only understood why he asked me these questions explicitly when I knew that daddy was outside the door. So he brought dad in there. And, you know, I had, I had kind of already experienced mom just given me to him. And then dad, who my thought was, you know, I had seen that he answered to Leo, but I thought that I didn't think in any way that he would not protect me at some point. But so he heard Leo, asked me all these questions. He heard me answer. He heard me say yes in the affirmative. And then he brought

dad in there. And he said, did you hear? And you know, I'll never forget. I mean, these pictures are like, they're frozen in my brain. They're there every day of my life. And when you lose your trust in everything and every one because of one evil person that they allowed into your life, it's a difficult perspective. But my dad just looked worn out. He just looked like he was done in. He didn't know what to do. He, he was, he had this little hat that he wore. And I can remember you know, pushing his hat down on his head and kind of leaning. I just remember him leaning on

that bathroom counter. And I could see him standing there. And I could see his reflection in the mirror. And Leo, Mercy, or told him to turn his face away from me because I was serpent seed. And you know, by now I had gotten a whole bunch of information from him about serpent seed and what it was. And that basically I was the spawn of the devil and

likened me to cane. And the way that he interpreted things was that

the birthright belonged to the second twin, not the first twin. So, you know, and now when I think about it, it's like, well, how could I have been like cane and Esau? You know, it's, but that's what he told me. He said, you are serpent seed. You respond from the devil and your sister owns the birthright. And this is basically because I had a big mouth. I was a precocious kid who said what I thought. That's the trap that I fell into. So, you know, and just to tell a nine-year-old to describe a lesbian to a nine-year-old, I don't know.

lesbian was. It's unbelievable what they do to children so young. I mean I just I can't even imagine being a parent and my child going through this. I not only what I run screaming I'd have a really hard time not taking action against the man. Where does a child even put that? I was like my my brain couldn't fold that into anything that made sense to me it was just so so here I am nine years old and I basically experienced violence sexual deviants adults who will do anything they're told no matter what their own conscience is telling them and then they expect me to grow up and and

somehow act as if anything I might experience later in my life I haven't already experienced. So yeah be careful which do to your children people and be careful if it's in the name of God because wow ultimately I don't think my sister my twin sister she didn't survive this this trauma from our childhood affected her life and everything about her life after that and she died early from consequences of her actions but the park killed her. Deborah this is a fascinating story we've got to we've got to get deeper into this so why don't we do this let's I'm sure our listeners want

to hear more let's just stop right here and let's pick back up again next week but before doing that tell us again where we can get your book how how our listeners can order your book. So it is available right now on anger spark you can you can log onto their website and find it under my name or under the title of the book the Serpent's Tale and it's also available on Amazon under my full name Deborah Dalton Tibito and same there you you'll get it faster if you get it from Amazon.

Deborah it's a powerful story I'm looking forward to us recording part two of this so everyone come back next week get Deborah's book this is there's far more details than we're talking about today in this book and if you want to know what happened in the park this is the place to go.

It is a fascinating book to say the least so if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information you can check us out on the web you can find us at William-Brandom.org and Christian gospelchurch.org for an overview of the historical research of William Brandham and the healing revivals read preacher behind the white hoods a critical examination of William Brandham and his message available on Amazon Kindle and Audible. Join us again next week we've got a great episode Coming.

Coming. Coming. Coming.