Lindsay still has photos from when she was a maiden, when she lived in Alamoth and served as Lira, the keeper of music and the spiritual battle they all fought together. Pictures of her in long dresses performing music, were huddled with the maidens around Victor in a big hug. A photo of Victor kissing her forehead as she plays the guitar, Victor embracing her in front of the bridge over the
pond where Jesus was supposed to find them. But when she goes through her memorabilia, the photos, her diary, the thing most on her mind isn't the man who called himself an apostle, the man she obeyed no matter what, who raped her for ten years. She doesn't think first of her parents or her siblings. When she's reminded of her childhood. One thing is always at the four.
It reminds me of the maidens. And the day that our parents dropped us off was July twenty third, two thousand. Victor did have a celebrate that anniversary every year with him.
It wasn't just the anniversary of their commitment to Victor. It was when the ten girls found themselves bound together, living as a family, for the next decade, ten girls and women aged twelve to twenty three, supporting each other through everything.
I still miss them, you know. I don't think there's a day goes by that I don't think of the maidens even more so than my own siblings. I think of them as my sisters, And sometimes I just wish that I could have met them under different circumstances, you know, or that somehow we would invol and out and come back together, you know, and been able to share in this grieving and healing process together. And it just really makes me sad that that didn't happen either sides with Jess.
Jess, the youngest maiden, the girl with red hair, Lindsay's best friend, who came forward with her to get Victor put away while the other maidens were still in River Road or even visiting Victor in prison. Jess and Lindsay had each other through the questions, the police interviews, the media coverage, the manhunt, the plea bargaining sentencing. It was always Jess. Three years later, in March of twenty twenty, Lindsay was at home when she saw a post online.
It was from Jess's brother. She didn't know what it meant.
Her brother posted something on Facebook asking to pray for her, and I immediately messaged him what is going on? What is going on with Jess?
From her Cocoa Punch and iHeart podcasts, This is the Turning River Road. I'm Alan Lance.
Lesser and I'm Erica Lance Part nine.
Jess. The day of that sentencing hearing back in twenty sixteen was like coming out of a tunnel. You can see it even now in the photos they took that day.
This is me and Jess after we were in court. Oh wow, it was October twenty, twenty sixteen. Yeah, you both look really happy. We look really happy, you know, And you can tell even from a picture that there's a light in somebody's eyes. You can see the light. We're both smiling so big, and she's kind of in front, and I'm standing behind her and my head is over her shoulder and we have our heads together.
They had both dyed their hair. Lindsay's, which is usually curly brown, was straight and black in this picture. Jess's hair was short and platinum blonde, almost white. They had their survivor bracelets on the ones Jess had made. There is something about that photo where both of you just looks so happy.
M h.
I'm glad you captured that moment.
To see a comparison. I think I told you about that play.
Lindsay pulls out another picture of her and Jess. This time they're young girls and pigtails and sailor costumes as from before they were maidens. When the Children of River Road Fellowship put on a musical set on a ship the community built, Jess and Lindsay had a duet together.
This was when early nineteen ninety nine. Jess and I were in the crow's and as singing. I had just turned twelve and she was eleven.
Oh my goodness, that's us, and you've got little sailor hats on, and we were in the middle of singing because our our mouths are open. They were already friends, but that was the start of them really being a pair. These two little girls caught up in the bigness of singing a duet for the whole camp, so long before they'd have to stand together in front of another audience in court years later.
We were so excited. We were the only ones who got to go up into this like huge tower that they had built. I remember being nervous, and I think she was nervous, but somehow we just helped calm each other down and climb up there and sing the song Like a ship so far from home, wandering gamesleep.
Alone, storm, tossed by the troubles of this world, dune by the something in the Mutiny of Sin.
There I was alone, a singing man. Oh man, gosh, I haven't sang this in a year. It's funny on the brain, and I can't remember that. That's the word. Really sweet memory that I have of the two of us from early on, before you know, things turned. But I look at this. This was early nineteen ninety nine, and by that summer, my parents are having me sleep
in a camper with Victor. And I feel so sad for these little girls because like they don't even know that that innocence is slowly going to be ripped and torn away from them.
Jess was like a sister to Lindsay at age twelve and at age thirty, and that was a big deal because Lindsay's birth sisters weren't in their life anymore. They supported Victor. But after Victor pled guilty, Lindsay and Jess took that picture their black and blonde hair and bracelets that said Survivor. They left Minnesota and went back to their homes, Jess to Wisconsin and Lindsay to New Jersey.
She kind of cut off contact with me.
Lindsay tried to reach her again and again, her DMS and texts and calls went unanswered, and.
When I didn't hear from her, I reached out to her husband. I reached out to her brother, like, Hey, is everything okay with Jess. I've been trying to message her and they'd be like, yeah, think she just needs some time to heal. And I kind of accepted that. At the time. I was like, Okay, maybe this is her way of moving on, which really sucked because I wanted to move on with her. It was almost like she just kind of wanted to maybe forget, and unfortunately that didn't include me.
It was almost four years later, in March of twenty twenty, that Lindsay saw that post from Jess's brother.
Her brother posted something on Facebook asking like to pray for her, and I immediately messaged him, like what is going on? I think it took him like two days to get back to me, and when he did, that's when he said, she is on life support and I was like, what what happened? I Am coming out there.
They'd found Jess after she tried to take her own life. It wasn't her first suicide attempt.
She was like, we found her. They tried to resuscitate her, but she had been dead for too like brain dead for too long. And I messaged him back immediately saying, please don't take her off. I want to come say goodbye. No, he said it would be too late, there wasn't time, and nah, I think it was like an hour later he I sent me back and said that she was gone. It didn't feel real.
Lindsay had cried many times over the previous decades. She'd had a lot to cry about. Often it was silent, with tears on her face or pooling on her pillow, tears that could have filled that tear bottle her dad gave her many times over. But that's not what happened this time. This time she screamed, not in silence, not into a pillow. This time it was loud, just.
So sad, wishing I could have helped her, and that wish she would have reached back out to me. And you know, I we all went through a lot of similar things, and of course we all had our own experiences being a maiden, things that others didn't, that I didn't see, that she didn't see. For me, I felt like I had lost the only person who really knew
what I had went through, you know who I mean. Yes, the other maidens knew, but they weren't supporting Jess and I. So it was like the only true sister who we had lived through this together, and she was gone.
It's hard for me every day because she was brilliant and talented and just an absolute shining light of a person, and she had so much more to offer the world.
This is Justice's Sister. Gray odins twice.
She genuinely just wanted to close that chapter of her life and move on, and she tried so hard to move past it and to build a life outside of it. She tried everything she could to run from her demons, and she couldn't.
Unlike her older sister, Gray was born into River Road Fellowship. Victor actually named her when she was born, a name she doesn't use anymore. Gray was six when the announcement came that her sister had been chosen for something special. Jess who was twelve, would be a maiden.
Now it was all of the firstborn daughters of the head families. They were supposed to be basically like nuns for our church. Like I don't understand, ah, Like how these people genuinely believed that none of this was nefarious. I don't. It makes me so livid, it's so angry.
Of course, six year old Gray couldn't follow what was happening, but the announcement was a turning point once it came she lost her big sister. They exchanged letters the first year, but then even that wasn't allowed anymore. Gray says they had no contact for six year years. The only time Gray might see Jess was at big church gatherings on days like Easter or Pentecost, but even then it was from afar.
We weren't even allowed to talk to her at those gatherings because she was one of the maidens, Like they were like the nuns, and you know, we're just the peasants. We weren't allowed to approach her. She was off limits. But there was a lot of brainwashing that first year after she left, to the point where by the time I was like eight, I didn't know who she was,
or that I'd even had a sister. They went through so much like work to get me to forget her existence, to the point that when she moved back when I was twelve, I had no idea who she was. Who's there the like leaders in the cult, like the trustee, these the elders were what we called them.
Why do you think they didn't want you to know?
One of the main tactics that they used was isolation, manipulation, twisting the narrative. And I think for the maidens because they were just terrified teenage girls. The more that they isolated them and cut them off and made them, you know, on a pedestal, the less the girls felt like they could leave, the more trapped and helpless, like he was their protector and they weren't allowed to leave him. I was robbed of my childhood. She was robbed of her childhood.
But we were also robbed of each other.
At first, when Gray and Jess were both outside the cult, their relationship was rocky. They went some periods without speaking. Gray moved to Germany for her job in the military and Jess was back in Wisconsin. But then Jess reached out.
She said, Hey, I'd like to try to be friends. I know, we don't really know each other. We were robbed of being sisters, and we started to really become friends.
She remembers one time they took a long drive together and told each other everything that had happened in the years they'd been apart, and.
I think that was the day that we really started to actually be sisters. The next two years were just amazing. We would talk everay down on the phone, we would video we got to know each other and just bond.
Just flew to Germany for a month when Gray's daughter was born. Gray and her daughter flew home to visit Jess four months later, and it was just.
A glimpse of what we could have had and what was stolen from us. And I think it made it so much harder to see the childhood that we could have had.
But the time was happy because they had found each other again.
I finally got my sister back, like I finally had what I should have had my whole life, only to lose her two and a half years later. I think that's the most unfair part of it. Obviously, a lot of is unfair and how much we were robbed of, but just each other and what could have been. It is really hard.
Gray got a message from Jess one day that things were not going well.
Because things were just she was in a really bad place in Wisconsin, and she was like, I can't do this anymore, like I'm tired, I can't keep fighting, like this is bad. And I was like, just come out here, you can reset. Come stay with me for a few months or indefinitely. Europe is amazing and it has been so healing for me. And I was like, just just come stay with me. I'll take care of everything like I got you. I will save you. We'll figure this
out and face it together. And she killed herself five days before she was supposed to fly here to Germany. I thought I could save her, and it just I couldn't save her, and it wasn't enough, and it should have been me. I have so much survivors and I I feel like I will never be even half the person that she was. I hope wherever her spirit and her energy is, that she is finally happy and at peace.
We've heard lots of beautiful things about Jess, that she was kind, the sort of person who helps younger kids find frogs, who gives them her books so they can fall in love with reading too. Someone who liked tattoos and funky haircuts. Someone bold and artsy and beautifully weird. Someone with a massive Julia Roberts smile, too magnificent for
the box Victor wanted to keep her in. There's some video footage of the press conference right after Victor was sentenced the day of the survivor bracelets of the photo with Lindsay and Jess's heads pressed together, the photo full of light. Watching the video, I'm always by how frank Jess is. She seems so genuine, like grounded and honest, the way I think we all wish we could be.
In the video, a reporter asks them, why do you think Victor agreed to the maximum sentence instead of going to trial?
Jess answers, objectively, there seems to be nothing in it for him.
Why do you think he really took this too?
I think he wants to cover himself and his followers, and if we want.
To trial, I mean every detail, every account, and everything that we remember would be put into record and be public, not just for us, but for him and for him to say, you know that he's trying to spare us.
The pain of a trial, and I mean.
We prepared for that, we were ready to do that, We were definitely.
Going to go ahead with that, and so for him to.
Say that he's doing it to spare us, it's very cowardly.
It's offensive because.
We are completely prepared.
And want our story to be told and want the truth.
And we've had each other to remind each other that we're strong, our survivors.
Yet, when Jess went back to Minnesota with the TV reporter who broke the story and launched the pursuit of Victor, she stood in the road outside the camp. A field of shallow snow was like a flat white frame around her face. Here, Jess was back at the Shepherd's camp as an adult, and she started to choke on emotion. I don't know if I will ever get away from it, she said to the camera. Every day I can't get
away from it. I mean, how do you you know, It's like you grow up somewhere and you go back to visit part of you is still there, that's your home. In the months after Jess died, Lindsay sort of shut down and shut others out. She knew they didn't get it, not really, No one but her could understand what she had lost by losing Jess.
And it was right when COVID was starting, so everything was crazy, but it was almost like I wanted to live in the sorrow of it for a little while, feel all of those emotions. I remember, like months after just I'd wake up in the middle of the night and just like talk, you know, talk to her, even though I know like she couldn't hear me. But I remember vowing, I will never let our story not be heard. I will never let the story die. I will share it with whoever will listen until the day I die,
because Jess is never to be forgotten. I will make sure the world hears of what we went through, of the amazing person you were. I am not going to let anyone forget about what happened to us, no matter what it takes. I want to be that voice and that light and.
Share Jess as a nice story.
The Maidens had been Lindsay's sisters since she was thirteen. They were her role models, her confidence, her friends. Jess was gone, but what about the others. Some of them had defended Victor after his arrest. Some were Facebook friends with Lindsay. Surreal acquaintances whose lives she could watch unfold in pieces and glimmers and Facebook posts and pictures. But talking about her past with us and all of these interviews reignited something in Lindsay. She wanted to reach out
to them again. She sent Facebook messages to a few former Maidens and one of them told her she'd like to meet. We'll call her Kelsey to protect her identity. Kelsey still lived in Washington. In Seattle, Lindsay flew out there on the day of their meeting. Lindsay took forever to pick just the right outfit. Kelsey always had a great sense of style, and she wanted to impress her.
She wondered if they could be friends, or if Kelsey might resis see Lindsay as the person who had betrayed her and the Maidens.
Okay, I'm walking up to the coffee shop. Definitely so nervous, had butterflies in my stomach, freaking out kind of. But I think it's gonna be really good, hopefully. Yeah, what do you even say? Like? Hello? Is that a good starter? I guess that's a good starter. Okay, I'm just gonna go for it. I'm waiting in the coffee shop, just kind of sitting there and I see her at the corner across out the window, and I was like, oh my gosh, and I didn't want to just stare at her,
so I kind of looked away. And then she walks in the door and she's like, Lindsay, we can give you each other hug, you know, like some tears came, and it wasn't that awkward. We got coffee, we sat down and.
They started talking about their lives now Kelsey had gotten married, had a career. Lindsay told her how she'd gone to college and had a daughter.
And she told me when we were meeting that the idea of travel always appealed to her. And she was telling me how back when we were maidens, she would read an atlass just for fun to see all the places in the world. I didn't know that about her.
All of the maidens had had to keep some parts of them selves secret.
She shared with me that once Jess and I went to the cops, things just got really crazy. People knew what was going on, but it was always hush hush. It was just rumors or maybe like if they had read an news article from somewhere being out and doing cleaning jobs or whatever. And in the beginning, she's like, we did think that you and Jess, you guys are bringing on like the persecution, that Victory was being persecuted.
And at that time she still wanted to remain faithful and thought she was doing the right thing, she said. Eventually some of the other maidens started leaving. So many of the maidens left, things were really breaking up, she said. At the end, it was only her, I think one other maiden there.
Lindsay's mom lived with the last two maidens at the time.
And so she said that she went and bought a car, and my mother went and helped her buy a car, which it's not her fault at all, but it just kind of stung a little bit that here my mother's supporting her to go buy a car when she wrote a letter to the judge and said all those awful things. I don't know, it just struck a chord.
Yeah with me, I'm sure that felt like a stab to the gut, yeah, Lindsay says. Kelsey told her she booked a ticket to Minnesota to visit Victor in jail.
She was only able to see him, I think through a monitor but she was like, as I sat there looking at him and hearing him, I just got such the icky feeling and knew I never ever wanted to support this person ever again. And that was the last time she ever saw him ever, like put any time into defending him or anything like that. She made it very clear that she loved me, and she was very thankful for what we did. I think, which is healing for me to hear.
Lindsay heard back from another former maiden too. This maiden had been nineteen when the ten of them are chosen, and sort of the head of the Maidens, someone Lindsay had always looked up to. Of course, Lindsay wondered how she took it when she went public with her story and took Victor down. Lindsay had last messaged her in twenty twenty to give her the news that Jess had died.
She said at that time, we probably agree on more than you think. Finally we were able to schedule a time to talk. Just last Friday. She called me and I was like hello, and she's like, Lindsay, Oh my gosh, it's so good.
To hear your voice.
And I was like, yours two. And I think we started laughing, and she's like, it's so good to hear your laugh. You sound exactly the same. It was so good to hear her laugh again. And she said, for her own healing, she does not go back into the past at all. She's basically closed that door. She said. The one thing she loves to do now all the time is laugh She loves to laugh, and it's one thing that her boyfriend has said about her that he
loves being around her. Kashill giggle at this or laugh at that.
She was usually more serious when Linday knew her. Of course, the Maidens laughed and had good times, but everything with the Maidens felt important and heavy.
And being almost like the head of the Maidens, she had to carry such a weight, being responsible for the ten of us. To hear her just that feeling of lightness and happiness was really good. It made me really happy to hear that.
For a long time, Lindsay has felt separate from the Maidens she loves so much. She and just took the risk of speaking out about what happened, breaking one of their most sacred rules. And for Lindsay, part of that sacrifice was losing the Maidens along the way. She saw their photos bridesmaids in each other's weddings. She pictured the rest of them, the Maidens, still close to each other,
somehow together while she was out here alone. When she talked to these two maidens again, she thought, maybe this could be the beginning of something. But she learned in their conversations that some of them don't keep in touch as much as she thought.
I think in my head, I was like, Okay, if this goes well, we'll just go back to being how we were, texting and maybe calling and planning. I just had this weird hope that we'd be able to reminisce on like more of the good stuff and like really bond and click and be like sisters again.
Yeah.
But when she talked to these two former maidens, she wasn't sure she fit in their lives anymore.
It could be that it's too much of a reminder of the past. It was almost like all the Maidens we were made into this beautiful pot and then it all got smashed into pieces, and we've had to grow individually and heal individually, and we just don't fit together anymore.
Next time. On the final episode of The Turning, Hey Lindsay's Erica, Hi, Hey, how are you doing good?
How are you?
I'm good?
So what's up?
It's been crazy.
I'm just gonna jump right into what's been going on.
The Turning is a production of Rococo Punch and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and produced by Erica Lance and me. Our story editor is Emily Foreman. Mixing and sound designed by James Trout. Grace Doe is our production assistant. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Cruzado. Our executive producers are John Piratti and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch, and Katrina Norvell and Nikki e Tour at iHeart Podcasts. You can follow us on Instagram at Rococo Punch, and you can reach out
via email The Turning at rococo punch dot com. I'm Alan Lance Lesser. Thanks for listening.