“If I ran an evil cult, I would be the worst cult leader ever,” Murray claimed Steve wrote in an email to her. “‘I don’t have a compound to get people involved. I don’t control people’s sleeping or eating patterns, and I tell people to get their own lives in order instead of being people’s ‘gurus.’ ”
And that’s when Murray was convinced.
“I was completely fascinated by everything he said,” she wrote. “I believed him. I believed he was not a cult leader. I believed everything he said.”
Murray was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but admitted he was speechless even after being hospitalized.
“I did not get sick and returned home healthy,” she wrote. “I became extremely psychotic, but I became somewhat less psychotic.”
Murray, who was still seeking induction into Steve’s organization at the time, added: “I had just left the ward and gone straight back to the life I had there.”
Years later, Murray hopes that by sharing her experience, she can prevent others from falling prey to the same situation.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Well, that’s not going to happen to me,’ but when we start saying things like that, we do ourselves a disservice, because you don’t know,” Murray said. guardian last month. “I never thought I would go through the things described in this book. I would have thought I couldn’t do it, I would be safe. I was a well-educated middle-class family. Everything was going to be fine. I thought, ‘I’m smart. I’m going to make the right choice.'” Well, I made a terrible choice.
She said: “It’s important to understand why people do things the way they do, instead of thinking, ‘Oh, they must be stupid.'” Or, ‘How stupid can they be? ”
