Page 84 of Killing Mind
Her face paled and her eyes hardened.
‘Yes, I’ve heard of it. The damn place pretty much ruined my life.’
‘Please, tell us about it,’ Kim urged.
‘Happy to. They got hold of my son and wouldn’t let him go. Don’t get me wrong. I was glad of his new friends at first. I was getting a lot less calls from you people but that didn’t last long.’
‘Go on.’
‘Okay, I need to explain that Eric was not an easy child. We tried every form of parenting and nothing worked. He was extremely demanding and not happy unless he was the centre of attention all the time.
‘He got expelled from three different schools and none of his friends ever visited twice. He was a bully who enjoyed negative attention more than positive. We tried everything: boundaries, no boundaries, tolerance and loving, firm. We tried two different counsellors and one of them refused to see him again after he touched her inappropriately. As parents, we totally failed and hoped he’d grow up. The behaviour followed him into his twenties and actually got worse. And then he met a man named Jake.’
She paused for breath and shook her head.
‘This man became like God to him and after seeing the initial change in our son he became a God to us too for a while. It was as though we had the son we’d always hoped Eric would be. The violence stopped, the attitude went away and when we saw him he no longer called us names.’
Kim wondered just what it had been like to live with Eric.
‘After about eighteen months Eric started to ask for money. Small amounts at first. We knew he wasn’t using it for drugs, so initially, we indulged him. I suppose it was relief or guilt that we hadn’t been able to effect this change ourselves. Anyway, the requests got bigger and more often until his father said enough was enough. He would give no more money until he could see where it was going. When we sat down and did our sums we saw that he’d spirited away almost twenty thousand pounds.’
‘How did he react to your refusal?’ Kim asked.
‘Badly. We woke one night to find him trying to take our possessions from the house. Henry tried to stop him, but the van outside was already half full.’
Martha took a breath.
‘Eric beat up his father, called him a zombie, that’s their favourite name for non-cult members, and told him that the Farm needed the stuff more than we did. My husband never fully recovered physically or emotionally from the attack. That one action from Eric that night changed Henry’s life completely.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Eric stamped on his hands, repeatedly. Broke seventeen bones and he was never able to play the piano professionally again.’
Kim tried to hide her horror but failed. There was a cruelty in that one action that said so much about their son.
‘Exactly. That’s when we knew Eric had been brainwashed. Old Eric, however bad he’d been, would never have done something so cruel.’
Kim couldn’t have stopped listening even if she’d wanted to.
‘We thought getting him back from Unity Farm would be the hard part. We were offered an opportunity and took it but our problems only increased. We thought if we could just get him away from Jake we’d be able to talk some sense into him. It just made him worse. He resisted every attempt we made to make him understand that he’d been lured into a cult. His loyalty to the Farm and the people there grew even stronger being forced away from them. He began to threaten our lives, saying that once he got back home to his family he would make a plan to come back in the night and kill us both. It was as though we were dealing with a stranger; a violent hate-filled unpredictable stranger, who was capable of murdering us while we slept. We really did fear for our lives.’
‘So, what did you do?’ Kim asked.
‘The only thing we could do.’
‘Which was?’ Kim repeated, unable to join the dots.
‘To save our son and to save ourselves we only had one option.’ She paused and breathed deep. ‘We had our son committed.’
Sixty-Eight
The boss had instructed her to get background on Kane Devlin and Britney Murray. After a quick search, Stacey had decided to start with the easiest first.
Sad as it was, Britney Murray’s story was not unique. Born to a teenage mother in the late nineties she’d been placed on the ‘at risk’ register when her unnamed father had walked out when she was five years old. Child Services had been alerted to her mother’s neglect by neighbours who had feared the child was being left alone for long periods of time. Despite their best efforts to keep the family together the girl had been taken into care when she was seven years old. Foster homes had followed until she dropped out of school and the care system when she was sixteen years old. She had no criminal record, and Stacey couldn’t help wonder at the girl’s life in the intervening years before she’d found safety at Unity Farm.
A part of Stacey hoped that the place was not as dubious as it was beginning to appear and that Britney had found somewhere she could be happy amongst the family she’d never had.
Judging by the quick update she’d just received from the boss, Eric Leland had been happy there too. And yet the closed group on Facebook had not wanted Eric Leland to join. He was still loyal to Jake, so did that mean the people in that group were not?
