Cult Stories

The sect of The Way that Susan joined in college had been established a few years before it found her. People going through transitions in their lives are at the highest risk of falling prey to coercive control, and whether or not Victor Wierwille knew this, he encouraged his missionaries to set up shop and look for new members on college campuses. Here he found people who were likely going through the biggest transitions of their lives and more likely to join a new group of friends. Susan was directly in The Way’s hot zone as a small-town girl with a religious background, hours away from anyone she knew, adjusting to life on her own. The Way got to her before her first classes began. In her first semester, the freshman was able to balance her newfound faith and schoolwork, but by her second her grades started to slip, and she was spending more time in The Way than she was at school. Her report card was the first warning sign to her parents. They were open to Susan’s exploring of a new Christian religion at first, but their daughter had always been an A student and it seemed unlike her to be floundering at college. Then came the first summer break when Susan came home and worked as a waitress in a small Bird Island café. At a certain point her father Norman learned that Susan was sending nearly all her earnings to The Way and when Norman figured this out, he started trying to convince his daughter that the church was bad news.

Susan wouldn’t hear it. The Way was her salvation. After another year at Moorhead, Susan took her donations a step further and sold a car Norman had bought for her, giving every penny she got from the sale to Wierwille’s church. At that point, Norman sought the advice of his pastor in Bird Island. The two men thought of ways to get Susan to see that she was being taken advantage by a charlatan. The pastor talked to Susan about her faith but didn’t make much progress.

All appeared hopeless when the following semester Susan became engaged to a member of The Way who’d helped recruit her two years earlier. At the end of her next semester Susan got into a car she recognized on that sunny day in May of ’76 and after the car missed its expected exit, found herself hostage to captors who’d keep her bound until she gave them what they wanted. This was the price Susan had to pay for joining the cult her parents warned her about. Did her fiancé have something to do with her disappearance? Was Susan kidnapped by The Way?

The man driving the car was Norman Jungclaus, and sitting shotgun was the pastor who helped him come up with the abduction plot. After missing the turn south to Bird Island, Norman continued east on Interstate 94 to Minneapolis. Here Susan’s father and the pastor had to drag the young woman kicking and screaming into a house she’d never seen where a therapist and a group of former cult members Norman had paid $14,000 were preparing to change her mind and get her out of the cult she’d joined by any means necessary. Once inside Susan was restrained and locked in a guarded room.

Susan was about to go through a process called deprogramming. Her story became unique enough that it’s a good case study in the phenomenon the “therapy” was, but Susan’s plight it just one of thousands of kidnappings and false imprisonment tales involving cult members in the ‘70’s and 80’s. Who would think of such a thing?