Further reading for The Children of Thunder
Unholy Sacrifice by Robert Scott
The Children of Thunder for whatever reason are referred to as a cult in the landscape of American crime and it baffles the mind. This cult, including the leader, was comprised of three people and one of them was the leader’s brother. Still, in the year 2000 they murdered and dismembered five people and that has to count for something. But does this qualify as a cult? I suppose that it could have, eventually, but I’m not sure that any of the people involved had the mental capacity to manage a petting zoo.
Glenn Helzer sat at the head of the cult, one of the many weirdo cults to spin out of the already pretty-weird Latter Day Saints church. When he was excommunicated in 1998 for drug use, Glenn being an enthusiastic user of MDMA and crystal methamphetamine, he formulated his own commandments by which members of his cult were to abide and then recruited his brother Justin and Justin’s girlfriend, Dawn Godman into his congregation with a plan to train local orphans to assassinate LDS church members so that he could take over and usher in the end-times. Unsurprisingly, this all crashed and burned as quickly as you’d expect a drug-addled plan to commandeer a large religious body in America to crash and burn.
To finance this operation, Helzer and company kidnapped two former clients of his and forced them to write checks before murdering them and then three murders followed in order to cover up the initial crime. Are you surprised that this got away from them? This is a story about very, very stupid people, an anti-Manson Family, if you will, and they were most definitely stupid people as well.
Episodes: 489-490
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