9

HURLEYVILLE

Where was she? Where was Anne? The Santiniketan Lodge had been bugged and photographed — detectives lying in the dirt in the hills, hidden by trees and undergrowth, snapping cars, identifying who owned them — and while this was all useful intelligence for police, the cult’s central figure was nowhere to be seen. Her properties in Melbourne were under surveillance, her passport details on high alert, but there was no sign of her.

The Operation Forest detectives returned to Australia from the United Kingdom in late January 1991, having secured Trish MacFarlane’s full testimonies: about the properties, the LSD trips, the ‘Uptop way’, the allegedly bogus pregnancy. They also had a sense of her great sadness, and the way she seemed to have been both victimised and unceremoniously ripped off. Trish had given Lex de Man a list of 99 adults involved with the cult, providing as much detail as she could about them. Lex told his bosses back in Melbourne that Trish had detailed her 20 years of involvement with The Family, from her first meeting with Anne to Trish’s short-lived partnership with John Mackay, and all the alleged misdeeds she knew about with kids and houses. As a result of her testimony and the investigations it sparked, Lex was able to list 11 people who could be charged, including Anne and Bill Hamilton-Byrne, Peter Kibby, Leon Dawes, and Liz and Howard Whitaker.

Lex’s bosses heard that, pending legal advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions, Anne could potentially be charged with perjury, creating false birth records, conspiracy to breach adoption laws, false imprisonment, assault, obtaining property by deception, and charges relating to LSD.

While in the United Kingdom, the detectives had met Scotland Yard extradition-squad police to prepare for the possibility that Anne and Bill might be arrested at Broom Farm and would have to be sent back to Australia for trial. No charges had been laid; it was a speculative act by police. Yet the walls were closing in on Anne. The FBI was also briefed about her home in the Catskills and her hideout in Hawaii, should she appear there.

Hurleyville, northwest of New York, in the fabled Catskill Mountains and near Woodstock, is a hamlet within the town of Fallsburg. It’s beautiful there; the seasons are distinct and clear, not unlike at Lake Eildon in central Victoria. The colours are the same. Hurleyville’s Kiamesha Lake is still and quiet, bordered by trees. It’s misty, like Lake Eildon, in the right season. Narrow, shaded roads wind around it.

Here US flags fly from silos and rooftop poles. It was once called the ‘Borscht Belt’: each year, summer resorts filled with wealthy New York Jews. It has become a Hasidic Jewish area, with cows and hayrolls in the paddocks between dandelions. The bridges are covered, as they are in neighbouring New England. Hurleyville used to be a stop on an old US mail route.

Police knew Anne had a house here, a white-timber, twin-gabled spread with lattice windows, set on 40 hectares. The property also held two other houses. She bought it in the late 1970s — 1977 or so. Just nearby was Swami Muktananda’s East Coast ashram, and she was a regular there. In 1978, she took a collection of cult children from Uptop to visit him, and they all stayed at the Hurleyville house.

The swami, according to former devotee Joan Radha Bridges of New York, was devastatingly charismatic. Joan now publishes online articles as a ‘guru-buster’, but she was a Muktananda disciple from 1974 until 1982.

‘When you were around him, he could just completely suck you in,’ she told us. ‘And if he looked into your eyes, he could give you experiences. When he would give “an intensive”, it was called, people would sit in meditation and he’d go around and swat you with this big peacock-feather wand, which was supposed to be, you know, very magical-powered. And he would awaken the kundalini, which is the spiritual force.’

She joined what was called his ‘tour’, travelling in a coterie to his ashrams. ‘It was completely blissful. Addictive. I wanted to be around him all the time, and so did everyone. And people got nasty about it. If you weren’t in the in-crowd and you were new, you were shunned, essentially. As I was around longer and longer, I was allowed to sit up front [with the in-crowd] sometimes.

‘The women sat on one side of his meetings and men sat on the other. Which was kind of unusual, but that was supposedly about an energy thing. And also that the men wouldn’t get distracted. But it was Muktananda that was getting distracted.’

Muktananda set up an ashram in Melbourne, and, after visiting Santiniketan Lodge in 1975, called it, according to Michael (who was with him), the most peaceful place on earth. This was when he sat on Anne’s special chair. ‘When Anne came back and sat there again, she said she could still feel his energy,’ Michael says. ‘His was a more virile energy. Hers was more mythical.’

Muktananda was a constant presence in The Family’s life. When Howard Whitaker last saw Anne, for example, after he had agreed to meet his ex-wife Liz outside the Muktananda ashram in Melbourne, Anne was walking a row of children from the cult in the door: ‘A troupe of kids dressed in blue with long blonde hair, and they all marched in, in a group,’ Whitaker told Lex. ‘I guess those are the children that have been referred to.’

But by the time of the 1978 visit to his ashrams in Hawaii and Fallsburg, Anne was said to be trying to bring Muktananda down in a snide power struggle. Although he was someone she professed to adore and in whose teachings she schooled all her children and followers, ultimately she appeared to want his power base. He had thousands, millions, of adherents, including celebrities. It was as if she thought she could be the one true Master, a voice for all the seekers, not only those in Melbourne.

‘That was a really interesting thing,’ says Sarah. ‘She really got herself involved there to the extent where she sponsored Muktananda before he became kind of famous. When he became mega-famous and that organisation Siddha Yoga [which he formed] … they had lots and lots of money. She really insinuated herself very far into it.’

Sarah had loved Muktananda. She went on several missions with Anne and the other children to visit him. After one trip, she came back to Uptop and built a makeshift shrine to him in the garden, but the Aunties dismantled it. Sarah thought Anne really respected him. But the relationship between the Australian cult leader and the Indian swami was a very strange one. Joan thinks Muktananada never took Anne seriously, and it seems clear to us from the accounts we have heard that Anne, while keen on his spiritual writings, was opportunistic in her pursuit of him and his fanbase.

‘The aura of love and compassion and stuff that was around him seemed quite different from the hypocrisy that was around her,’ says Sarah. ‘I think she solely saw that it was an opportunity for power and money and went for it and managed to cause havoc as usual.’

In all, five Uptop kids travelled to the ashrams. Muktananda got around his ashram compounds in a golf buggy and would give the children rides. ‘He loved us children and treated us specially,’ says Leeanne, who also went on the trips. One lasted three months.

The swami was getting older and sicker when the children met him and when Anne put him in her sights, and despite allegations of sexual abuse that would later surface in regard to Muktananda, the children felt safe with him and called him Baba. He gave them gifts, they gave him poems and letters; he asked if they wanted to go and live in his ashram in India. But Anne controlled their contact — perhaps because they liked him so much, and felt happy in his company. Sarah was punished for writing a poem to him without Anne’s permission.

He offered a sort of sanctuary, even though he would be accused of hideous crimes after his death. ‘He offered us a spiritual solace,’ Sarah wrote in her book. ‘A refuge from the harsh reality of the world in which we lived.’

Anouree went to visit him too, and she loved the chanting. ‘It was a very relaxing, calming experience, actually. It was quite a meditative experience. So in a way it worked out quite well for me. It was a good experience to just see a bit more of the world than Eildon had offered.’

The children were given new spiritual names for the duration of their visits: Jahadeva, Mirabai, Barati, Kanti, Luksme. They ate Indian food at the swami’s house and went swimming and shopping. They also went sightseeing, like tourists. In the evenings, they would change into clothes Anne had bought in England and listen to Muktananda preach.

One day, after ‘bopping’ Leeanne with his peacock feather, he told her he had a dream that Anne had been beating her. ‘I thought, Will I tell him or won’t I that she does do that?’ She decided against it. ‘When I got home, Anne said to me, “Well, what was that all about?” I didn’t want to tell her, and to this day I never told her, but because of that she beat me so badly that I could hardly move. I was black and blue all over. She beat me with a stiletto shoe, she beat me with a whip, anything she could get her hands on. She had me on the floor, beating me.’

Joan was there in 1978, in Fallsburg, when Anne began her bitter power struggle with the swami. She was taken aback by Anne — the bewigged Australian ‘Master’ — and her troupe of odd kids. ‘I got this sense that Anne was there to get power from Muktananda, and Muktananda was there to show up Anne. He gave her the name “Ma Yoga Shakti”, which means “the great mother Shakti”. It was like he was making a joke out of her.’

Anne looked wealthy, like the kind of person who would never get her hands dirty, says Joan. ‘Muktananda was trying to impress all of the kids. In a way, probably trying to pull them away from Anne.’ However, it was Anne who was often given the prized reward of being allowed to sit at Muktananda’s feet during his sermons.

At the ashram, Anne was allowed to set up a clinic, dispensing homeopathic medicines and, according to Sarah, LSD. ‘I think Anne’s design for being with Muktananda was to figure out how he did what he did,’ Joan told us. ‘But she just had a few followers. And I think that Anne was jealous. I mean, she wanted to be — you know, she was the messiah, she should be followed by all these beautiful people. Because everybody was always dressed to the nines, especially in the meditation hall. And that would be right up her alley, to be followed by all these beautiful people that were willing to do all this work for her, or do what she said.’

The turning point came a year or so before Muktananda’s death — he died in 1982 — when the first whispers of sexual abuse at the ashram surfaced. Another swami, Abhayananda, whose real name is Stan Trout and who, like Joan, has become a ‘guru-buster’, left the Muktananda faction and moved into Anne’s house in Hurleyville. Trout was the one at the forefront of the allegations against the swami. Joan thinks Anne helped Trout spread the allegations about Muktananda to undermine him.

Joan didn’t trust Anne from the start but couldn’t put her finger on why. ‘I felt a darkness from Anne.’ She was into the occult, as was Muktananda: ‘I know that Muktananda practised black magic.’ Joan believes that Anne wanted to learn about such things from him. ‘To be around him, to learn more about it. I mean, she had that kind of vibe about her, like you read about people in the early 1900s when they were doing séances.’ Joan didn’t know at the time that Anne was considered the earthly reincarnation of Jesus to her followers, but figured out that her teachings were ‘a hodgepodge of Christianity, and Hinduism, and black magic’.

Anne acquired a lock of Muktananda’s hair at the Catskills ashram to cast occult spells, Joan says. All the while, she was being trailed by a group of children from Uptop. The girls had ‘identical, fluffy, ruffly dresses, and they all had blonde hair, of course. And it was all pulled up with giant bows in their hair. So, I mean, when you saw them coming it was hard to miss. I always got this impression that she was, like, this spider with all these little baby spiders. It was one of the strangest things.’

After Muktananda died, the full allegations emerged from former devotees. They were numerous. He was accused of preying on young female students in his Fallsburg ashram and of spying on girls in their ashram dorms. He was also accused of condoning violence and having guns in his ashram. Claims were made that he squirrelled away in Swiss banks the large fees he charged for his services. Later still, The New Yorker reported claims that he had raped adult women devotees. Joan Rahda Bridges told us she was raped by Swami Muktananda.

The year Anne was reportedly trying to usurp Muktananda at his own ashram, she married Bill, back in Melbourne. Trish MacFarlane was the matron of honour. They tied the knot in a church in the hills in front of a small crowd — a dozen people, at the most. Leon Dawes was Bill’s best man, and John Mackay was said to be there too. No Hamilton-Byrne children were at the ceremony.

Dr Raynor Johnson, Anne’s key enabler, entered old age. In 1978, he found he could no longer drive. He was 77. He stopped writing in his diary that year too. His final entries are downbeat and frightened; he was convinced the world would soon end.

In a section of his diary headed ‘The Master’s Work and the Future’, Johnson wrote that ‘towards the close of 1978’ Anne’s progress was in its ‘early-middle stages’ but might not come to anything. He expressed it in terms of the seasons — ‘the seed is being sown and germinating here and there in a few lives. Will it survive a hot parched summer? Will a few ears of corn ripen to provide the seed for future generations to sow and reap a distant harvest?’

He noted again that she worked best in secret: unseen, unheard, unknown.

His final diary entry was apocalyptic. By now he had been studying ecology and extraterrestrial lifeforms for some years. His final written words about the woman who rang his doorbell in 1962 indicate that it was all over, or would be soon, and only Anne, The Master, could be the saviour. ‘The immediate years look full of menace,’ he wrote. ‘It has been indicated to us that time is running out, and that in the absence of a new spirit, based on love and wisdom, this civilisation will close in tragedy with the end of the century. The Master alone holds the strategic master-plan for the remaining years. THE END.’

His old Methodist allies — forged in Leeds and London before he arrived in Australia and met Anne — had long cut him loose. He was considered too esoteric, too strange. ‘There were mumblings about whether or not something should be done about him,’ says former student Ian Weeks. Weeks’ father, an eminent Methodist, reportedly advised Johnson to retire from the University of Melbourne early, before he was charged by the church with heresy.

Not long published was one of Johnson’s last scholarly articles — in Light magazine. It was about the end of the Age of Pisces wherein Earth did not have enough resources to feed all the people. Presciently, he talked about climate change, nuclear weapons, and terrorism. One of his main points was that nuclear fission — an area in which he had worked, with Ernest Rutherford — was unnatural and therefore wrong. He also talked about anthrax and antibiotic resistance.

Johnson also went on a lecture tour in the United Kingdom, describing himself now as a ‘practical mystic’ and warning repeatedly of a nuclear error. During the trip, he was taken around his old childhood haunts and thought for a moment or two that he and Mary might change their minds and retire to the English countryside after all, rather than the hills of the Dandenongs.

But he returned to Australia. He wrote another book — Light of All Life: a study of mysticism in life — but his publisher declined it, and then a year later, in 1980, he was diagnosed with dementia. Johnson was soon lost in that same corridor of split-second, fleeting images that Anne now finds herself in. He and Mary got a telegram from the Queen on their 60th wedding anniversary, just before he went into a nursing home in the hills. He died a short time before Uptop was raided and the children he had touted as a future race were freed. He is buried in a tiny cemetery, in the hills.

By 1991, Operation Forest was closer to Anne than ever, but they were also in crisis. The white noise around Victoria Police and their pitched gun battles with armed robbers — which may well have been a factor in siphoning police resources from the very earliest investigations into The Family after the raid — had come back louder and stronger.

Four underworld heavies had been charged with killing two young policemen in Melbourne in 1988, in an apparent payback for police shooting dead a known armed robber named Graeme Jensen, who had popped out to buy a spark plug for his lawnmower as police surrounded his car. He was, allegedly, armed.

The four men were found not guilty of the police shootings in March 1991. Allegations were raised that the police who shot Jensen had planted a weapon in his car to justify killing him. A detective on the scene of the shooting was later found to be a corrupt drug-trafficker. A coroner — the same coroner who looked into the questionable Kevin Storey death at Newhaven — didn’t buy it. ‘There was suspicion and assertion expressed in the inquest that the sawn-off .22 calibre rifle and two .22 calibre bullets had been planted there by police,’ the coroner said. However, ‘it is hard to envisage anything like those events unless Jensen had possession of a gun which had been seen by police members.’

A senior ex-homicide and armed robbery squad cop, Detective Senior Sergeant John Hill, was asked to investigate the Jensen shooting. Then, in the winter of 1991, Peter Spence signalled he wanted to leave Operation Forest and go back to his old job. John Hill was appointed his replacement.

Spence had become increasingly frustrated at the scant resources given to his team. But he was also confident by now that the taskforce he led would find Anne and charge her with a suite of serious offences.

Truth be told, when Spence’s considered request for a Royal Commission into The Family — which would have brought with it coercive powers over witnesses — was turned down, he started to lose faith. ‘I found it to be a most difficult time in my police career, just to actually have that conflict, being close to these great young kids. To actually have that connection, and not be able to do the absolute best for them.’

He was also aware of the emotional toll on the members of the taskforce. They were debriefing in the pub. ‘There’s no doubt that we used to do that occasionally, and drown our sorrows, get rid of these sorts of things that were creating the black dog, as they say.’

To add to the toll, one of Peter Kibby’s sons had committed suicide after his father was arrested and charged. Both the Kibby boys were at Uptop for a time. ‘Anne said, “I’ll take care of your children,” and she did — she took them,’ says Barbara Kibby. ‘She sent me away, she sent me over to England, and I was there for a year or so and then I came back and I had the children back. By the time I got the children back, they were both very damaged. It was catastrophic.’ One had trouble speaking. ‘David has no memory now of anything that happened to him before he was seven. Nothing.’ His brother attempted suicide at 16 and succeeded at 20: an inconsolable sadness for Barbara and one that she still knows was largely because of the cult and Uptop.

Spence knew the taskforce was in good hands with Lex de Man and the other detectives, but deep down he felt that an appropriately thorough investigation would be blocked again. By who, he didn’t know. ‘It was purely and simply a matter of not being able to get the message through, and get approval right up to the top, to conduct an open, public inquiry. They didn’t appreciate the gravity of the whole thing, despite having been totally and comprehensively briefed about all of the aspects of this case. I think it was that they had the power to say either yes or no. And they said no, we’ve got other things that we want to channel our efforts towards.’

The very nature of the investigation — that it was highly emotional and populated by vulnerable ex-cult children — was the common problem for the detectives. Spence broke his golden rule of policing, after all: he took work home, either literally or metaphorically. He, Lex, and others became very close to a number of the children, and still are. They wanted to save them, and then they wanted to show them how seriously they took it.

In the end, Spence simply lost hope. His had been a long police career; he had perhaps seen too much and knew too much. He left the taskforce and wished them well.

When Detective Senior Sergeant John Hill came in, Lex immediately saw Operation Forest hit some trouble internally. Lex had been there since day one, at the school fire, the event that marked the slight but at least encouraging efforts of police command to follow the case. He got Operation Forest set up in the first place. He was upset by the new uncertainty within it, despite the reams of testimony. ‘When you worked for Peter, you knew you were working. He’s a big gentle giant.’

The question Lex asked himself was, do I betray the code of the police, the brotherhood? ‘I had to make a really conscious decision of whether I was prepared to put my career on the line and be, in today’s parlance, the whistleblower, to get the taskforce back on track, or whether because of an individual’s reputation and seniority, I was to remain silent.’

We asked Lex about Peter Kibby. He had broken the code of The Family. The group was also a brotherhood — this is what it had named itself in the beginning; Michael still calls it The Brotherhood. Codes within groups are what binds them. Kibby’s actions were brave, says Lex. ‘You’ve got to remember the motto: “Unseen, unheard, unknown”. It was a very closed culture. He broke the code. He broke the code of silence within that sect.’

When Kibby appeared in court charged with falsifying the document that had originally led Lex and Spence to him, Lex appeared with him, to give a character reference. He was impressed with his moral compass and his honesty. ‘In many ways, I look at Peter as someone who had the guts to actually stand up and say, “No, what we did was wrong, and I’m also prepared to tell the story, to stop others.”’

Perhaps it was Kibby who helped inspire Lex to make his own tough decision. He went to the deputy commissioner of Victoria Police, the second-in-charge of the whole force. The next morning, he was appointed as the senior investigator on Operation Forest. The taskforce’s office had been re-arranged.

The first thing he did was order six big whiteboards. ‘I think it was half a dozen. I gave each offender a colour, a number; each child a colour; each series of events a number. And so we started to then plot out with the various children and the various offenders what the evidence gap was, to put a number of criminal briefs together. We ended up with — I think it was about 35,000 pages of evidence that we then had to distill into charges relating to Anne and William.’

Fran Parker was almost swallowed up by the cult, but she survived. Her little boy Jamie was gone, in England with his father. She wanted him back. She had studied nursing at Anne’s request, hoping to be reunited with her son afterwards, but she was still waiting. Then she had a dream that the two of them were climbing a ladder together, with him sitting on her shoulders in order to be able to reach higher and keep climbing.

She kept talking to John, the boy’s father, by phone, and she made one visit to the United Kingdom. John had distanced himself from the cult too, but had still been in thrall to Anne to the extent that he had taken the boy to the United Kingdom when she advised him to. But Fran wasn’t sure about Jamie’s status, that was the problem. To reclaim him, who was she to go to? Could she even do that? He wasn’t her biological child. ‘I thought, I can’t just run away and go to England and take him. I can’t be sure that someone else couldn’t have a claim. That’s why I had to put up with it all. It was like a hostage situation.’

She sat it out, remembering the sense of hope from the dream. Then through the goodwill of her relationship with John — a contrast to the way the cult manipulated children and custody and identity — she was able to go and get him by mutual agreement. ‘It’s an old-fashioned word, but John’s a man of honour, and he didn’t, any more than I did, want any unpleasantness or anger or unfairness. No custody battles; we just had to try to work things through, which we did finally, because Jamie really started missing home. Australia was home, and I was there. And John rang me and said, “He’ll have to come back to you.” So of course I dropped everything. Spent the last cent. And brought him home.

‘So it did come through. I got him back.’

Through the Australian winter of 1992, as some in The Family or formerly of it were finding a way to have a life beyond, Anne and Bill were on the run. Operation Forest didn’t know where they were. There were thoughts of trying to infiltrate the cult to find out, but surveillance was deemed enough.

‘Where was Anne through this whole period?’ asks Lex. ‘We didn’t know. We were told that Anne was in the UK. We were told that Anne was in the United States. We were told that Anne, for example, was in Hawaii.

‘I’m sure through that period of the investigation, Anne came back into Australia and back out of Australia with Bill. But the technology in border security in those days was not like it is today. It was all manual. We didn’t have the threat levels that you now have when you go through airports. It was a lot easier in those days to go in and out.’

Lex had never met Anne, but he felt like he had. He learned that she knew all about him too; by now she knew that he was running the taskforce. Word of Kibby’s grand betrayal — and Trish’s — had certainly reached her.

Lex desperately wanted to lay eyes on Anne. He wanted to see the kind of woman who could be responsible for the devotion, the blind love, the adoration she inspired in others, which he’d seen firsthand in the blue rooms. ‘I thought: Jeez, it would be nice to meet Jesus Christ.’

Then she surfaced. In July 1992, Anne and Bill were monitored entering the United States at Newark, New Jersey, on a Continental flight. They gave their destination as Houghtaling Road: the Hurleyville house. They had visas until the following January. But then a month later they left again, and flew to Gatwick, London, heading for Broom Farm.

In early September, the Tunbridge Wells police got a phone call from Broom Farm’s neighbours, saying they heard a child screaming outdoors in the early hours of the morning, ‘I want my mummy’. British police went to the farm without a warrant and were refused entry. Anne and Bill were not there, they were told. So the police got a warrant and went back but found no children — although they did find baby food and a pram.

Lex and two detectives went back to Uptop. By now, adults involved with the cult were living on the property, but the key persons of interest were nowhere to be found. Leon Dawes went to America for a month, in August. Christabel Wallace had just also left Melbourne, for the United Kingdom.

Back in Melbourne, the police asked the Office of Public Prosecutions to give them advice on the potential extradition of Anne and Bill and what charges they could face in Victoria. Carolyn Douglas, then a Crown prosecutor but now a County Court judge, was given the brief. The potential charges she looked at included physical and emotional abuse of the children, perjury, providing false birth documents, false property documents, and false adoption documents.

But the perjury and forgery charges, she felt, could not be proven because she would need to rely on witnesses who were either still scared of Anne or would be deemed ‘hostile witnesses’ in court. ‘They are like the Mafia,’ says Douglas. ‘You just know there are a lot of people involved who are not going to cooperate. They were cunning as all get-out.’

The decision was made to go ahead with charges of conspiracy to defraud the New Zealand authorities, and conspiracy to commit perjury, over the attempt to register the three children, including Sarah, as triplets. Anne had by 1984 registered two of them as twins in New South Wales. They were not twins, let alone triplets. Anne’s intention was to use the fake birth certificates to apply for passports for them.

The allegations of ‘continuous and very cruel’ physical and emotional abuse, says Douglas, would be difficult to prove because there was no evidence available from anyone, except the children, who was there.

The advice from mental health experts was that the children were severely traumatised after being released from Uptop. They had been housed together rather than being isolated to be interviewed about what they had witnessed and thus, prosecutors felt, lawyers for Anne and Bill could claim their evidence had been ‘contaminated’. It was also felt that re-living their trauma in court while being cross-examined could cause them further harm.

Douglas also advised that extradition from the United Kingdom would fail because the charges were not extraditable there. However, if arrest warrants were issued, Interpol would go on high alert and Australian police would find out as soon as they left the United Kingdom — and the charges were extraditable from the United States.

The police would have loved to see Anne and Bill facing more-serious charges. But the risk was that the kids would front court and be called liars. ‘We had to make a decision,’ says Lex. ‘We wanted to make sure these young people were able to progress in their lives, and some of them were going through some tough times, and to ask them to recount these experiences would most likely have done more psychological damage in the long term to these people than securing a conviction on those other charges.’

Where lies the truth? Each child had their version; everyone in this story has their version of the truth. Yet the children were never allowed to formally tell theirs beyond their statements to police.

The drugs charges relating to the LSD flowing from Newhaven — and the alleged administration of it to individuals as young as 14 — were near impossible to prove because police had to catch people in the act of administering it, and also be able to forensically test the drug to prove it was, in fact, LSD.

So the decision, in the end, was this: charge Anne with the crimes that can be proved with documentary evidence. Don’t charge her with crimes that require the former children to give testimony. It was a huge compromise. It might amount to even more of a compromise if she had to be extradited, due to the complexities of international law. But the decision was made. And Anne — languishing in beaucolic Hurleyville with Bill, on her farm with up to 100 cats and dogs — was about to make a crucial mistake.