8

BLUE ROOMS

In the Operation Forest interview room, Lex Man could see that Kibby was becoming bolder. He was enjoying the process of being interviewed, and, now that he trusted them, telling police more. Lex could even see that sometimes Kibby was excited by the prospect of doing good with all the information he had. The relief was palpable. ‘I remember he said to me at one stage, “I feel like bloody Sherlock Holmes.”’

Kibby detailed for Lex a nasty little trick Anne tried to pull in 1980 on a property in the hills called Werona. Kibby acted for both buyer and seller. The Supreme Court was later told that ‘undue influence’ may have been exerted on the owner, a cult member called Winifred Lugton, to sell it.

Lugton gave the money from the sale — $40,000 — to Anne, and Anne in turn gave it to a company called Faffete Pty Ltd. Don Webb and John Mackay were directors, according to Kibby. Lugton, who was 65, died ten days later of a brain haemorrhage. Two other women who had gifted properties to Anne also died, of the same cause, around the same time. Police found no link between their deaths and the cult, but all three had been swiftly cremated, which prevented deep investigation. The Werona money was then allegedly moved from Faffete to Anne’s daughter, Natasha. The buyer never got her title deeds, so she sued the Lugton estate for them. Kibby lied in court and said the money was to repay debts in the United Kingdom. It was later found that affidavits certifying the debts were false and countersigned by a posse of cult members.

Then came an even more audacious scam. In 1985, Anne managed to get a court order excluding her old friend Joan Vilimek’s three daughters from their mother’s estate, worth $AU620,000.

Vilimek was the wealthy cult member who owned Newhaven, and also a small property near Uptop called Sunny Corner. She died in 1979. Her husband Jaroslev, a horse breeder, had passed away before her, in 1974. They had no biological children together, but Marion had three from her previous marriage and had adopted, with Jaroslev, two boys, Gavan and Rohan. The parents formed a trust fund for the five kids and put Anne in charge of it. They also entrusted Anne and Peter Kibby with their estate. But, according to Kibby, Anne removed him from this role — and then excluded the three daughters, two of whom were cult members, from any of the money, instead directing it to the two boys, over whom she had control.

As Kibby related such incidents, week after week, Lex began to feel desperately sorry for him. He felt that Kibby was a good man who had been exploited. Above all, Kibby was a victim. ‘Peter was not a bad person, but Peter was a person like many others in the cult — he’d been deceived through his illness to do things for Anne because he had a true belief that he was actually doing this on behalf of Jesus Christ. He truly believed that she was who she said she was.’

Kibby had become vindictive and angry over Anne’s treatment of him. ‘Towards the end,’ Lex recalls, ‘he used to say, “She’s just a fucking bitch. This is what the bitch has done to me. This’ll fix the bitch!”’

Kibby also started to talk much more about Trish MacFarlane. Lex led him down this path because, like Kibby, she had left the cult disenfranchised and with a lot of secrets. She had co-signed a lot of the fake documents too. She had been a trusted acolyte, but she was now on the outer, of her own choosing, and Lex could not help but suspect she must be full of regrets and misgivings. Lex worked on convincing Kibby to unearth her and persuade her to talk. For the good of the children.

One morning in November 1990, Lex drove to the hills as usual, as he had been doing four days a week for nearly three months, to pick Kibby up and bring him to the city for another session. ‘He was over the moon. Couldn’t wait to get into the police car. “I’ve got news for you,” he said. “I did speak with Patricia last night.”’ She was still in the United Kingdom. She had been there since the raid. She was living near Winchester, in the south of England.

Says Lex: ‘He had convinced her that I wasn’t an ogre and that I could be trusted, and that she should talk to me. So I was pretty happy with that. Except she was in the UK. So we arranged one night — nighttime in Australia and daytime in the UK — to actually call Patricia.’

Trish MacFarlane agreed to talk to Operation Forest. But not in Australia. ‘It was a great moment for Peter, because Peter had helped us to establish a link with one of the two supposed Aunties that had administered some of the treatment to the children at Eildon, and had convinced her to talk to police,’ says Lex. ‘And I don’t think that would ever have occurred without the trust that had been built up through Peter Kibby.’

Lex de Man went up to the tenth floor of the St Kilda Road police complex. All of the force’s specialist crime squads were housed in this building, a large glass tower. Standing beside him at the urinal was the assistant commissioner for crime, one of the men right at the top of the tree.

Lex was on the verge of a breakthrough for Operation Forest, but it was bittersweet because Trish MacFarlane wasn’t prepared to come back to Melbourne. The taskforce was under-resourced; it would take Lex a couple of months to get approval to go as far away as London. But she was central to the story.

Not all men talk at the urinal, but these two did. ‘We’re standing there, the two of us having a bit of a chat, and the boss said, “So, how are things going with Operation Forest?” I said, “Not bad, sir. I think we might have a breakthrough, but I’ve gotta bit of a problem.” He said, “What’s that?” I explained to him that MacFarlane, one of the main offenders, wanted to turn, and would speak to us, would give us full details, on a written statement. And he said, “Great — when are you going to get it?” And I said, “She’s in the United Kingdom and she won’t come back.” And I remember him turning to me and saying, “So get on a plane and get there.”’

This was in early December 1990. Within a week, Lex and a female detective senior constable from Forest were in Britain.

They interviewed Trish in a British police station in Winchester, in the forensic science building. She confessed straight up to police that she could never see herself ‘dobbing’ Anne in to the authorities — her word — but that she found herself with only that option after 20 years as a ‘neophyte’. She said the Aunties were victims too, and that she hoped the children would eventually understand this.

At first, Trish said, The Family was good. All of the cult members we spoke to say this: that right in the beginning, when it was just yoga, it was terrific. Trish was vulnerable and at a low ebb following the sudden death of one of her sons in that car accident, when he collided with a milkman’s cart. Anne had been helpful and kind — despite turning up unannounced at her house — and by sending her off to become a nurse, Trish felt that Anne was helping her further by plunging her into an environment where she was among suffering all the time. ‘There were lots of people worse off than myself,’ she said.

Anne was the answer, or at the very least she could provide or point to the answer, and Trish was soon convinced the answer for her was to go to Uptop. ‘To me, Anne in the early days was everything. Her talks to us in the chapel were brilliant.’

But things changed. The way Trish saw it — in hindsight — it seemed as if she drifted into subservience and blind loyalty through a combination of mind control and a sort of enforced apathy. Although, with her, this sense of subservience was tempered. Liz Whitaker, she said, was always scared of Anne, but she never was. ‘I obeyed her and did as I was told but was never frightened of her.’ She also said she never liked Whitaker, even though the pair were handpicked as senior enforcers at Uptop. ‘I never got on with her.’

Trish served and was victimised by Anne for so long, it was perhaps inevitable that the misgivings piled up. She flirted with escape once, way back in 1971, fleeing from a cult house in Ferny Creek after an LSD session.

She was injected with LSD at Winbirra and at a house in the hills belonging to Joan Vilimek. Like the children, adults such as Trish were told to get in their pyjamas or nighties and get into a bed. Classical music would be playing. After a session when she had been injected in the crook of the elbow, with Anne coming and going from the room, as was her method, Trish told Anne that she was Beethoven. John Mackay was there too and at that point, Trish said, put on a Beethoven record.

The next morning, still feeling under the influence of the drug, Trish realised there was no milk in the fridge, so she jumped in her car and began to drive. She got all the way to Eildon from the hills — over two hours’ travel — in a daze. She kept going, ‘way past Eildon because I wanted to get to the other side of those mountains’.

But the car started playing up. She had to pull over at a mechanics’ workshop, and it was going to take a couple of days to fix, so she checked into a bed and breakfast, still under the influence of LSD. She asked the management if she could borrow a nightie, and stayed for two days. Then she drove back to the hills. Once she returned, Anne told her she had put a jinx on the car so it broke down and Trish would not be able to escape. But it wasn’t a serious bid for escape. It was more a gesture — in her clouded, scattered mind — that, deep down, she felt something was wrong.

When she finally did leave the cult, after the raid, Beryl Hubble, Raynor Johnson’s youngest daughter and a rusted-on supporter of Anne’s, wrote a letter that Trish was certain Anne dictated. Hubble (otherwise known in the cult as Christine Fleming) had terminal cancer by this time. The letter read, in part: ‘Patricia, it was you that dunked the kids in the water. You were the Aunty that was hardest on the children. I’m going to come back and haunt you and all the people who have left Anne.’

Trish threw it out.

Just before Lex arrived in the United Kingdom to talk to her, Trish had seen a lawyer in Guildford. She wanted to prepare herself for what was to come. The lawyer told her that she didn’t have to say anything if she didn’t want to. But she did want to. When she first met Lex, she told him that she didn’t want any involvement from the Australian Consulate or High Commission — she just wanted to talk. She wanted to go back to Australia one day and hoped to be free to do so, but more importantly, after 20 years of unpaid work at Eildon and in the United Kingdom for Anne, she had seen the light. She wanted police to know exactly what the circumstances were, as she saw them, around certain incidents, methods, activities … to clear up the ‘misconceptions, rumour and innuendo’.

When Lex first met Trish, he thought she was distant and matronly. ‘That cold face, that very harsh face,’ he says. ‘That was her exterior.’ But soon he and his detective partner heard enough from her to conclude that she was the same as Kibby, the same as Johnson, the same as both Whitakers — ‘brainwashed into the cult’. Picked on at a vulnerable time. ‘She was a bit of a character, one of those loving Nannas, but underneath that you knew that she had actually perpetrated some terrible things on the kids that were at Eildon.’

Trish’s emotions were up and down during the long series of interviews. She cried and laughed. ‘She was very defensive at times about some of the claims that were made, but at times she was really regretful at some of the activities that she had been involved in,’ says Lex.

She confirmed the detail of Leeanne’s adoption into the cult in 1968: she was merely summoned to the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne by Anne and Joan Vilimek, she said, addressed by her incorrect surname of Webb, and given the baby with the crooked jaw she had ‘adopted’. Then she gave the child to Anne.

She admitted to signing false documents to do with the child in front of a suburban justice of the peace in 1970, two years later. There she was to see, for the first time, documents signed by Anne and Peter Kibby changing Leeanne’s surname to Hamilton-Byrne. And she was happy to tell police that her second son, when he was around 21, was part of a pathfinding group Anne sent in the early 1970s (by ship) to the United Kingdom to establish the cult’s British footprint.

Trish’s son left the cult soon after, and, following a stint as Anne’s driver, hooked up with Anne’s daughter, Natasha. They and four others set up house on a property in Crowborough, Kent, called ‘The Olde Cottage’.

Another ship went to the United Kingdom, Trish told police, in late 1972. She was on it, with Anne and Bill, Johnson and his wife, and one other adult member of the cult. They rented a cottage in a village called Wadhurst, in Sussex, from Joan Vilimek’s daughter. John Mackay came over and stayed with them, she said, and then he and her son were sent (‘for some unknown reason’) to the Himalayas to go trekking.

The cult’s pathfinders found Broom Farm in Langton Green, Tunbridge Wells, 20 minutes away from The Olde Cottage but much larger and grander and more historic. It would become Anne’s bolthole in the United Kingdom, and of course the site of some horrific drug-related experiences for the children as they got older.

Anne and Bill stayed at The Olde Cottage as members of The Family fixed up Broom Farm for them. It took a year of weekend work by eight male cult members, including John Mackay. The whole house was stripped and refurbished to house Anne and her new husband — all the carpets and tiles were replaced. The men were never paid for their work, but Anne gave them money to buy materials. Trish and, by now, Liz Whitaker, who had joined them in Britain, cooked the men food while they worked on the house. Anne and Bill didn’t help, according to Trish.

The cult expanded its UK operations even further into Guildford, where Trish and four others lived in the same street — Pilgrim’s Way — with Maie Davie, the social worker affiliated with the cult who facilitated the fake adoptions from Melbourne hospitals. Trish and several of the other women were nurses, working through an agency.

One night Anne started ringing around. A group of cult members needed to go to Italy. It was all very urgent. A wealthy, elderly American woman named Esther Beare was sick and needed nurses. Anne got the contract. She had the nurses, after all. Her contact with the Beares — Esther’s husband, John Beare, was an Englishman who served 18 years with Scotland Yard, including heading an anti-corruption squad — came about through Howard Whitaker. His former secretary, a cult member, had gone to Europe after Whitaker went out of business and ended up working for the Beares.

A former member of The Family told us: ‘Mr Beare thought Anne was pretty good. She said she had all these miracle cures that could help Mrs Beare. [Mrs Beare] was about 90 and Mr Beare was fighting with her relatives because she was the one with the money and her relatives were fighting to make sure that he was disinherited. They did everything possible to say the marriage wasn’t a consensual one. He was 50 or 45 or something. They were absolutely outraged because he wanted the money. He had to have all these people around to prove this poor old 90-year-old was getting all the attention that she needed.’

The cult nursed her at two houses, one a mansion near Genoa, and the other huge house beside Lake Como, in northern Italy, near the Swiss border. As the old lady was bedridden with dementia, her much younger husband was spending a lot of time at home. ‘He was looking after her shares and her finances,’ says the former member, who asked not to be named. ‘I stayed beside the lake for a year, then I was told to go somewhere else. He used to send me Christmas cards every year. We had to sign to say we wouldn’t write about it or go to the papers. I just think he married this woman who was super-wealthy. Anne used to visit her, and Mr Beare thought she was a wonderful woman.’ John Beare wrote to Trish — because one of the nurses had told him about her, and given him her address — to summon her there after the first wave of nurses had been through, but Anne didn’t let her go. She held her women on a tight leash, Trish believed, to control them.

Anne’s connections to Melbourne society were also still strong — around the same time her nurses were looking after Mrs Beare, another squadron were tending to the dying former governor-general of Australia and government minister Lord Richard Casey. He died in 1976. (Michael’s uncle, Sir Zelman Cowen, became governor-general the following year.)

Trish also told Lex that a fundamental rule of being in The Family was to have a blue room. It was a place in their homes to meditate and pray to Anne. This was, Trish believed, a further way for her to infiltrate their lives, even away from the lodge and the coterie in the hills homes, and concentrate their collective focus around her. The colour was supposed to be a channel toward her, a tunnel. The chosen room could be any room in the house, but it had to be completely blue. Blue was spiritual. If there was no spare room, a corner of an existing room should be used. Outside light must be blocked out. Anne gave members photographs of herself to be used in the blue rooms.

Why blue? One of Raynor Johnson’s flights of fancy was blue light, and Anne had adopted the idea from him. Johnson had met a yoga master in the 1950s and continued writing to him. The Venerable Sumangalo, an American from Alabama whose ‘western’ name was Robert Clifton, gave him the idea, because he told Johnson he had been treating a woman possessed by occult forces but had exorcised her with blue light, flowers, incense, and bowls of water. Ancient teachings, he told Johnson, showed blue light to be the most spiritual.

At her house in the hills, Trish had used a spare bedroom, which she painted blue and hung with dark-blue velvet drapes. She put in a dim blue light bulb, and arranged a table with a crucifix and a photograph of Anne. Trish told Lex she was supposed to meditate for up to an hour twice a day in the blue room, in the lotus position. ‘I was pretty bad at meditating full stop,’ he remembers her saying. ‘I always got bored and went and did something else.’

She was punished for her apparent transgressions. One of Anne’s feared methods — apart from name-calling in the Lodge — was called the ‘rounds of the kitchen’, where the enraged Teacher shouted down those she had gathered, admonishing them and threatening their journey, their pathway.

Trish said Anne kept a blue ice-cube tray at Uptop for a kind of voodoo. She would write the names of her enemies or her traitors — those who had betrayed her — on small slips of paper and freeze them in the tray so the people named suffered or got sick or had a terrible accident. Beyond the ice trays, of course, she would freeze them out in daily life.

When she accused cult members of transgressions in the lodge, others would also take down these names and repeat this freezing process at home. At Uptop, Trish and Liz would often answer the phone and it would be Anne with a new list of names for the ice tray. Old enemies were removed, new ones added. Trish told Lex the voodoo was hard to explain but that she considered it ‘magic’, and Anne had more ‘magic’ than anyone else around her.

A regular frozen name was Hans Halm. Anne had allegedly put a false story out among cult members after Kim Halm had gone missing that Hans had been sexually abusing Kim, as well as another girl — ‘the little girl next door’. In addition, the very word ‘Uptop’ was taboo for cult members — they knew about it, but they weren’t allowed to say anything or betray the mantra of silence. But people like Hans broke out.

Lex and the detective stayed in the United Kingdom for six weeks over Christmas and New Year. They interviewed six current or former cult members, including Trish, Max Deacon the homeopath, and Trish’s son. They also met with local police around Kent and Hampshire, and with Scotland Yard’s extradition squad. And the information they were gathering was filling out their picture of Anne and her Family substantially.

Some rank-and-file cult members came in quickly during the passion of the 1960s and early 1970s culture of ‘seeking’, and exited just as quickly. Some stayed for long periods and then edged away. Some were courted fiercely and submitted, but later fought the power that was trying to engulf them.

We meet Fran Parker, who fell towards Anne through Raynor Johnson, like so many, in a middle-class search for meaning. Fran had been working at the University of Melbourne’s main library through the 1960s, and found inspiration on the library’s shelves — specifically, in Johnson’s books. ‘He wasn’t just an ordinary physicist, if they can be said to be ordinary,’ she says. ‘He was a physicist who was spiritually searching.’

She went to a series of his lectures and, like Trish MacFarlane, was so enraptured that she approached him afterwards. She asked him if he could recommend any good yoga teachers. ‘Of course he said, “I would love to do that,” and he gave me Anne’s phone number. I went home and I rang her straightaway, and this lovely voice answered me. It was an entrancing voice, full of depth and love and encouragement, and I said, “I’m from Dr Raynor Johnson’s classes,” and she said, “Is your interest in yoga for physical health, or something perhaps more religious?” And I said, “Well, it really is a spiritual dimension I’m longing for, but I realise you have to do the hatha first, and I really want to start there.” And she said, “Oh darling, you’re so ready.”’

Fran went to the yoga with her then husband, John, and met Anne. ‘There she was. Entrancing, beautiful. Loving. And everyone there seemed to be on a similar wavelength. They were just lovely people who were sincerely looking for the spiritual dimension in their lives, even if they weren’t quite aware of it yet. From then on, one thing led to another.’

Fran and her husband moved up to the hills. She knew there were adoptions happening: that adults were being assigned children who would then often disappear. Then, Fran says, Anne phoned her and told her to go the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne. “Frances,” she said — she always called me Frances — “your little baby Jamie has arrived. Now jump in a taxi and go off to the Women’s Hospital, and ask for Nurse such and such, and there he will be.”’

Fran didn’t think twice. To her, nothing was wrong because the nice people in The Family who had jobs and a good education and spoke so well and were so kind … they were all doing it.

When Fran arrived, the baby was in an incubator. ‘I just fell in love with that baby at first sight. He was beautiful, very little, and he kept on trying to pull out his tube, and I thought, What a determined little guy, I really love that; he’s just perfect for me.’

The baby had to stay in hospital for a while. The nurses taught Fran how to feed and bathe him. The doctor who delivered him was a member of The Family, as were the social workers organising the adoption. She was told that his parents were English migrants who had split up. Fran’s husband was surprised, but went along with it. ‘I took him home, and I was just so happy. He was gorgeous. He started growing up, and he was a playful little boy. He used to sit in the car seat beside me — they didn’t have capsules in those days — and he’d be laughing happily, and we’d look at things out of the window, and we got closer and closer.’

Her cult friends told Fran about Newhaven and about Anne being a version of Jesus. ‘These beautiful, clever, wonderful people had literally experienced ecstasy, they had seen her glorified with beautiful light around her, an exquisite spiritual angelic sort of ecstasy, and they would also have seen hideous, ugly things about themselves.’ She believed them. But: ‘We didn’t think of ourselves as a cult,’ says Fran. ‘I mean — that would have been ridiculous.’

Soon her husband was put into Newhaven. Their marriage was in trouble and he was unhappy. Fran got the sense that he was being pushed away from her because he was defiant at times and stood up to Anne. He was beginning to be viewed as a liability rather than someone who could be easily moulded. Fran resisted LSD herself, so she wasn’t in the inner circle. She was operating in a sort of vacuum.

She and her husband eventually split up. Anne encouraged the split and told her it was for the best and that she had a safety net in The Family. ‘She said, “Don’t worry too much about your future. You stay with that little boy. You’d look after him, whatever would happen, [even] if you had to live in a room.” I said, “Yes, I would.” And she said, “Don’t worry, darling, you won’t have to do that.”’

For Fran, this was the moment she realised she was in too deep, but to turn back would be to deny the promise and the hope that had been offered. ‘We were destined to have her for our Teacher. We could either follow the path, or else know that this wonderful thing had happened and we’d rejected it.’

Fran also saw the feeling around the cult change from ‘love and light’ to a new seriousness. Newhaven was increasingly being used a threat: Anne reportedly warned many that if they didn’t do as they were told she would have them interred and left there. ‘Anyone who hadn’t gone happily along and had marvellous experiences under the drug … I used to think, How can I be so reluctant, look at these wonderful people who are so intelligent, they’re so professional, they’re so loving, and they’re people without any really bad habits or cruelties about them. They’re just a bunch of great people. How could I have these doubts? You were made to feel ashamed of yourself if you had any doubts.’

Fran went to Newhaven under duress, and the psychiatrists tried to weaken her by using emotional triggers. ‘They’d sit at the end of the bed, and they’d try to goad me, or they’d get me emotional about how unhappy I was. This was just so contrived, and I just said straight out — “I have never seen myself as a yogi or a saint. I want a spiritual dimension to my life, I want to live a good, loving life.” I was brought up as a Christian, I said, but I don’t see myself as going further than that.’

Fran had drawn a line in the sand, outwitted the psychiatrists, and resisted LSD. So Anne betrayed her by painting her, in cult circles, as a chronic liar.

Fran found out later that the same trick had been pulled on other women in the group. She saw Anne try to break their spirit on the way towards total submission. ‘She wasn’t giving love — she was offering it and then taking it back.’

Fran had agreed to let John take their adopted son, Jamie, to England. He was English and she consented to letting the boy meet his father’s family. Fran’s new daughter — born after Jamie, to her husband, before they split up — was being looked after by relatives. Fran began studying nursing under Anne’s orders, including a stint working at a Melbourne hospital, a strategy on her part to remain safe and stable until she could properly escape and get what she wanted: her child, her son.

‘Of course I was heartbroken about my little children, being with different people to be looked after. My life had turned out to be very, very, different from the life that I’d wanted to work for and to be a family. That had been taken, but thank God it didn’t break my spirit. The real pain was the pain of not being able to protect him, to be with him, to take care of him. The pain was that he needed me and I couldn’t get there. It was loving him that spurred me on to finish the nursing and get through, because I kept feeling within me that I would get him back. I would get him back. And that’s why I could just keep on, keep on.’

She finished her nursing stint, passed her exams, and called Anne. “Oh darling, you’ve finished your nursing,” she said, “and I hear you came second in the state. What do you want to do now?” I said, “I want to go and see Jamie in England.” “Oh, I don’t think it’s time for that,” she said. “No, no, no, no. You’ll see him, though.” So I just went home and I waited.’ Fran would see Jamie again, but not for some time.

While Lex de Man and his detective were probing the UK connections of the cult — and hearing about Trish’s central role in it — detectives in Melbourne were taking a fresh look at a curious and seemingly suspicious case at Newhaven from the 1970s.

Kevin Storey worked on the tools at Melbourne’s shipyards, as a fitter and turner. He was 49 in 1975, when he died in Newhaven. He had been admitted twice before with depression after his father died. He was given numerous rounds of ECT and a milder version of deep-sleep therapy — called narcotherapy in the 1970s — with sodium amatyl.

Storey’s nurses were Trish MacFarlane and Barbara Kibby. They considered him gentle and unassuming. He had a single room on the top floor of the grand old building, and he had brought in his own cassette player for his long stays, of up to four weeks at a time, to play classical music: Brahms and Beethoven. He was a compulsive diary-writer, and entries around this time, his wife told us, have just one word: ‘nervy’.

Storey didn’t like the ECT — sometimes known then as shock therapy — because it made him drowsy and vague and unsteady on his feet. He started feeling worse; he became suicidal. He was put on a heavy program of narcotherapy, where a patient is dosed to the point of almost being asleep, but not beyond.

Storey’s doses were every other day. His wife visited him on his rest days and found him uncoordinated to the point where he couldn’t open his tobacco tin. Trish or Barbara sat beside his bed while he slept; a psychiatrist came in and out. Late in the month on one of these two-day cycles, Barbara Kibby came into his room one morning and found him dead.

To the great surprise of the Storey family’s funeral director, there was no autopsy on the body to find out how he died. His wife was told he had a heart attack.

Then, 17 years later, as Forest was hearing testimony from Peter Kibby and Trish MacFarlane, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, the Scientologists’ anti-psychiatry sleuths who built up the dossier on Howard Whitaker, started digging into Storey’s death. To them, it spoke loudly of extreme psychiatric practice with sodium amatyl causing death. They told the state coroner and Operation Forest what they had found out, and the coroner re-opened the case. Forest detectives couldn’t find records of Mr Storey’s time in Newhaven, even in an off-site storage facility where they had found other hospital documents.

Operation Forest began re-interviewing everyone involved in the Storey case. The coroner had asked the Forest taskforce specifically because of the hospital’s link to The Family. Police called in the psychiatrist who had been treating Mr Storey. He was grilled by detectives and denied injecting Storey.

But there were other curious circumstances. Mr Storey’s wife said she was told that Newhaven would cover the funeral costs. Barbara and Trish went to the Storey home to deliver flowers. Mr Storey’s 1975 diary went missing, never to be found.

The coroner had these snippets, but little else to go on. The death was 17 years earlier. He didn’t place much stock in Trish’s evidence: she was deemed an unreliable witness because she had told a few different versions of events.

The verdict that Storey died from heart disease stood. It was a classic red herring: a case of cult-related suspicions around Newhaven leading to police following a blind path.

The Family had also been linked with the coroner’s court not long before, in 1988, after the raid at Uptop but before any significant police investigation into the children’s claims against members of The Family. This one was even weirder.

Michael had a sister, Cypra. Cypra died in strange circumstances that year, aged 37: she was found naked on a footpath in the suburb of Toorak, where the family home was located, after apparently falling from the third floor of a car park. Cypra was a wild bohemian, but troubled. She was never in the cult, but skirted it. Former cult members think she was schizophrenic.

A coroner ruled her death a suicide because she left a suicide note and was suffering from depression. But Michael’s brother, John Helmer, an investigative journalist who has spent much of his career based in Moscow, challenged the finding. He tried to have the case re-opened, in 2010, claiming his sister was being aggressively courted by the cult and that the investigation into her death was shoddy.

John Helmer’s legal action failed, and the coronial finding stayed as it was, but he established, representing himself in the Supreme Court, that the coroner’s signature on the original coronial finding had likely been forged ‘by person or person’s unknown at the Coroners Court’.

According to Anthony Leigh — Michael’s adopted son and Cypra’s beloved nephew — Cypra made a lot of noise about Uptop. He told us that when he was 12 he started telling her what it was like and she started talking around town about it. He considered Cypra his ‘surrogate mother’. His brother Jerome had been through Uptop and had told him stories.

He told Cypra everything he knew. ‘The kids weren’t theirs, they’d beat them, they abused them, they put their heads in a cold water bucket, they fuckin’ didn’t feed them properly, they fed them rotten fruit, and so on, and so forth.’

Cypra, he says, was his friend and protector, as much as she could be: ‘We were very close, [she was a] very beautiful lady, crazy as a cut snake.’ She was shocked by what she was told and started talking to Nana and Papa. Papa had already tried to extract Michael from the cult. ‘The truth was that Papa had engaged a private investigator to investigate the sect,’ says Anthony, ‘and the goings-on in regards to his son. So Jerome was removed from the sect house in Eildon.’ He went to live with Michael, and Anthony.

Michael says Cypra was pushed off the carpark roof because she wouldn’t have jumped herself. ‘I think there was foul play,’ says Michael, ‘but not like what John thought. I don’t think she jumped off the building. She didn’t quite have enough courage to jump. So a friend pushed her. That was the foul play. She wasn’t schizophrenic or depressed but she was a bit psychotic. I think it came from having a couple of abortions. She was a beautiful person. She was very interested in what I was doing, but she didn’t want to hurt Mum and Dad. I don’t know if she told anyone about the abortions, but I know about them. It was all locked up inside her and she heard voices telling her how terrible she was. She used to drink and take drugs to try and stop the voices. See, I was closer to her than John. Cypra and I were very close. John was away studying. It took years for it to come out of me. Anne would say 20 years later, “You have never got over your sister dying, have you?”’

Cypra sang in a rock-and-roll band with famous Australian musician Lobby Loyde and worked during the day as a postie, delivering mail. A friend of hers from university days told us: ‘She was outspoken, she was very confident, she had long hair. She would wear a fur coat and wear her hair over her fur coat; she was very glamorous. She believed in the I Ching. She was odd. What touched me about her was on one hand she was intimidating and angry — fuck the government — but when it came to me and I was confused about something, she was very nice.’

University students were drawn into the Newhaven vortex too; it had become a thing for them to go in, take LSD, and have a chat to a therapist. Cypra’s friend had just finished university and was working as a teacher. Someone she knew who was depressed had gone in and got treatment, and it sounded all right to her. She didn’t know it was a cult headquarters.

The first time she attended Newhaven, a doctor gave her psilocybin and then LSD by injection, but she soon realised it was a seduction attempt by the cult. ‘I came close to the devil. I don’t believe in hell, I don’t believe in anything like that, but they were evil, and I had no idea at the time because I was totally naïve.’

Michael laughs at this. He laughs at a lot of things people say about the cult, ‘The Brotherhood’. He doesn’t believe in the devil either, and laughs at the suggestion that Anne was — is — the devil. ‘All the great beings have entered into the Christ consciousness to a greater or lesser extent. It’s a great state of being. It’s not a person as such, it’s a consciousness. And you’ll see a lot of the great beings have touched upon that, and have entered into it. What Jesus was saying was that he’s one with the Universal Consciousness. Different religions put it in other words, but it’s all the same.’

Michael is an incredible contradiction. Why did he walk away from his family, one of the most prominent Jewish families in Australia? He says he has not rejected anything, and even though he has worshipped in The Family, he is still a Jew. ‘There is a wonderful power of living in Jewish people. I am very proud of that. This is why they are wonderful musicians, philosophers. That is the greatness of the eternal flame.’

Yet he thinks Anne is possessed of the same purity that Jesus had. And because of that, she joins the ranks of the ‘great beings’ — Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Ghandi — who have lived on Earth, or at least are reported to have lived on Earth. ‘One of the first things Anne said to me was, “Michael, if you were meant to be Indian you would have been born Indian, dear. But you were born here as a Jew so you have to come to terms with who you are.”’

He has had two weddings during his time in The Family and three children, one of whom wasn’t biologically his — Anthony, who has been called Johnny. He is in touch with all of his children and, from time to time, his former wives. He has helped Anthony through addictions to prescription and illicit drugs.

Anne has helped Anthony too, in her own odd way. He first met her when he was a boy of six. She pronounced him her godson. He spent time at Broom Farm in a big cult mob in the 1970s. Now, he has the vulnerable air of an ex-addict: jittery and tattooed. ‘She had that aura — even then I remember thinking, as a kid, she had an aura about her. The awe that she struck among her followers, if you like, was palpable. She was a redhead, and I mean very red, a striking, striking woman. Amazing eyes, eyes that looked through your soul.’

In 1999, Anthony was at the height of his addiction and crashed his car late one night on the fringe of Melbourne’s sprawling suburbs. Anthony has written about it in his life story, which, at 120,000 words, is longer than most novels. He shared it with us.

Smash, crash, lights flashing, the thought that I am not ready to die yet; I am all of a sudden aware of how I have been on a path of suicide for months. All of a sudden the car stops. I look over and there is [my friend] John, unconscious but having some obvious problems breathing.

I jumped out of the car and for some reason threw the bonnet off the car. We were off the road a good couple of hundred meters. I went to check on John.

We were in the middle of no where [sic]; there were no street lights and I was off the road behind trees in a paddock. I had to run from the car to the road trying to flag down a passing vehicle through tall grass black berries and undergrowth. I ran back and forth checking that John was still breathing. I had no luck in getting a car to stop; finally I stood in the middle of the road until a car stopped and he luckily had a mobile phone; I had my mobile stolen only the day before.

An emergency helicopter flew John to a big hospital in central Melbourne. Anthony went to another hospital in an ambulance. He was told that John was close to death. ‘I can remember the police coming in and asking a few questions; but the only comment I can recall was that one of the cops told me that I had not even braked and the car had become airborne as it left the road.’ John did not survive.

Anthony’s natural father — a member of The Family — took him in for a while and then made him go and stay in a motel. According to Anthony, this was when Michael rescued him. ‘He took over, you know. It had been a week, by that time. And he’d found I was in the motel, and he said, “Bullshit,” and he took me up to his house in the hills. And so I started staying there, and went into hiding.’

Then, the insane part. According to Anthony, Michael and Anne raised $AU3,000 for him. They wanted him to fly to Paris and join the French Foreign Legion. There was a hotel room waiting, booked. ‘Get a new name, and new identity, and so on and so forth, so that was the plan, and I went off to do that,’ says Anthony.

He was robbed twice in Paris as he tried to find the fort where the Foreign Legion did recruiting. But he found the place — Fort de Nogent — in eastern Paris and started to fill out forms to join. When they asked for a drug history, though, he was honest. ‘Of course the French Foreign Legion wouldn’t have me,’ he says, ‘because I had the worst drug history in the world, and at that time they weren’t taking drug addicts because they didn’t need any canon fodder.’ He was thrown out of the fort.

‘So off to Amsterdam I went. I get on the phone to Anne and she says, “That’s okay, do what you like. When you’re ready, go to the farm in England, and give us a call and we’ll see you then.” When I finally shot the Channel to England, I had 20 quid to my name.’

Anthony found himself back at Broom Farm again, in the bosom of the cult. He has always been in and out, too wise to dive in but too comfortable to break away completely. He fell between the cracks of what might have been a secure life, a surrogate family who were not his family, and the cult.

‘I personally have had dealings with the leader, Mrs Hamilton-Byrne through out all my life,’ he wrote in his long manuscript. ‘She claims to be my God Mother as well as [the] reincarnation of Christ. The dreams that I can remember reflect the scared little boy who was trying to get along in an alien world all alone.’

After the raid, Michael became the cult’s gatekeeper — literally. He shooed Age journalist David Elias away from the gate at Santiniketan Lodge many times, marching down the long gravel driveway in the forest with a torch. ‘I realised he [the journalist] wanted to belong,’ said Michael. ‘If only he could come in and see. Everybody wants to belong to something meaningful.’ He kept telling us as we were preparing this book that he didn’t mind talking to us because we were non-confrontational and interested in detail beyond the salacious. But Michael’s reputation with ex-cult members and the children from Uptop — even though he never went there — is as a difficult man who is complicit in the cult’s methods.

We had seen one small illustration of this. In 2009, when Sixty Minutes were allowed into Crowther House with Sarah, ostensibly to see Anne, Michael was there, sitting out of the camera’s frame. When the interview with the elderly Anne became aggressive, he stepped in, waving his arms around frantically and berating the television reporter.

But Michael wanted to talk to us, and talk he did, many times, for many hours, usually at tea rooms or cafes up in the hills, or at his house. He wasn’t so friendly in the beginning, and until he decided he wanted to meet us he would often not answer his phone, or answer it and not say anything, or give a few brief responses and then hang up. But ultimately he was generous with his time. He opened the lodge for us; he showed us to Anne’s bedside. He has a studio under the house where he used to sell paintings, and he even gave us two each — paintings of our auras. After we were given the first of our paintings, we thanked him, and asked why our gifts? He said he was into giving things away and not transferring art from person to person in a ‘commercial’ way. ‘Life can be full of these moments: momentous surprises, in a way miraculous,’ he said. ‘It is living in the moment, it is intuition, the language of the heart, and images are the language of the heart, whereas words and intellect are the language of the mind.’

One day we were talking about the Lodge. We started talking about what the land might be worth. Michael shut us down. He said there was no point talking about money. ‘What’s the land of the Catholics worth? Or the Anglicans? Billions! With my paintings, I realised when I got out of commercial worlds they got better. A certain way of living is money-free. We relate everything to money. But it is false. You can’t take it with you, and it lets you down when you most need it. If you want to have a short-term way of working out the truth of a guru, it is whether they charge. Once you start charging, you open yourself up to a very rapid downward spiral.’

But, we said, somewhat incredulous, Anne asked for money. She appeared to love money. ‘No. Anne didn’t ask for money. Anne often worked out people’s inheritances or things that came with money. A lot of people think she wanted all the money for herself, but Anne doesn’t need money. This is the grievance. Sex and money are most of the reasons why people leave a spiritual group; mostly money. But Anne is independent with money. And I know a lot more than you think I know.’

He’s also convinced Uptop was, in the main, a good idea. He doesn’t believe the children’s stories of what happened there, and attributes any problems to overtired Aunties. ‘There were disciplinarian things that came out of the weakness of the two ladies, Elizabeth [Liz Whitaker] and Pat [Trish MacFarlane]. I wouldn’t have liked to have been on the backhand of Pat, a tough bird. They loved Anne, fantastic ladies, but chronic tiredness does things to people. Kids are exuberant and demand even-handedness and that goes out the window. People don’t know what’s gone on. They only know what’s been written in the papers.

‘I had one son up there — and he hates the thought of it but he is well because of it. He is a strong, great person. Compassionate, kind, physically well, and I believe his basic structure was created in those years that he was there.’

Back in the police forensics building in Winchester, Trish MacFarlane was unloading. She had lost furniture, she said, from the house she shared with John Mackay. She told them everything she knew, and she felt better afterwards. ‘I feel a different person,’ she told the detectives, at the end of her interviews. ‘Much freer, and at peace.’

The detectives showed her three notebooks, Lex recalls. One outlined the daily Uptop routine, from dawn til dark. The other two were ‘Mummy’s Rules’ and ‘Nanny’s Laws’. These volumes included Anne’s handwritten instructions about how to treat the children; they were The Family law.

The Uptop Aunties also had a cashbook and a weights-and-measures book, which were kept in a kitchen drawer, Trish told Lex. The latter was a lined school exercise book where the weights of the children — especially the girls — were recorded. Trish told Lex that Anne always wanted the girls to be slim, despite being ‘tubby’ on occasion herself, and was ‘phobic’ about their weight. Three of the kids — two girls and a boy — were very small. One was the child Lex had discovered had psychosocial short stature. Anne’s rule was that height had to relate to weight, so if a girl or a boy was short, he or she must also be skinny. The rulebook stipulated quarter-serves of dinner and weights in pounds that must be lost by the time of the next measure.

The detectives were interested in the incident where the boy from the cult was in the Uptop bathroom with Leon. Lex has revealed to us they found reference to the event in ‘Nanny’s Laws’. The evidence is a single piece of foolscap paper, handwritten by Liz Whitaker and dated June 1983. Parts of it were covered over with blue texta — homemade redacting. The incident was described as being an outburst from the boy, who was taken upstairs to the bathroom by Leon Dawes. Lex says the phrase ‘thrown to the floor in judo hold’ was covered by the blue texta, but he was able to still make out the words.

Another page, according to Lex, described a phone conversation between a cult member and Anne about the incident. He said it read, in part, that the boy was to be left alone in future and that ‘another turn could be fatal’. However, it said another child was free to be slapped across the face for being naughty.

Trish also fleshed out details of Anne’s strange pregnancy in 1975, which Peter Kibby had begun to describe. Anne had told Trish she had a hysterectomy, but then she was suddenly, apparently, pregnant. Police now believe the pregnancy in question was fake, and that the child Anne told everyone she had given birth to was in fact born to John Mackay’s new partner and future wife, Olivier: the woman who takes Anne’s dirty laundry from the nursing home and returns it clean, to this day.

Trish had one more nugget, recalls Lex. Just after the Uptop raid, at 2.00 am, she was at home, over the road from the Lodge. She heard cars going in: the clanging of the gates, the tyres on the gravel. She crept over in her nightgown to have a look and she saw three men digging holes and burying black plastic bags. They spotted her and told her to go home and mind her own business. Lex says Trish told him the three were ‘close-lipped types’ within the cult, the type of men who would never tell secrets.