S5 E5 - Deliver Us From Evil

Summary

American Nightmares – Gardens of Evil: Inside The Zion Society Cult
Season 5, Episode 5: Deliver Us From Evil
Date: March 3, 2026 | Host: Aaron Mason (Gamut Podcast Network)

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Episode Overview

This episode of American Nightmares takes listeners deep inside the harrowing events leading up to and during the dawn raid that brought down the Zion Society cult in Ogden, Utah. Through firsthand accounts, survivor testimonies, and law enforcement perspectives, the episode unveils both the meticulous preparation and traumatic aftermath of the operation that rescued dozens of children from ongoing abuse. The story is told with raw clarity, gripping narrative, and a focus on the voices of survivors and key participants, highlighting the contrast between the cult’s outwardly idyllic appearance and the horrors concealed within.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Façade of Perfection and Hidden Horror

• Opening Reflections
  Detective Marcy Korgenski describes the neighborhood:

  "Those yards were such perfection that it's hard to even describe… Such ugliness covered by such beauty." (01:27)
  The contrast between the manicured lawns and the horrific abuse is established as a central theme.

The Run-Up to the Raid

• Law Enforcement’s Dilemma
  Detective Mike King recounts the agonizing nights before the raid, burdened by the possibility of either saving children or letting them down:

  "I knew in the morning that we would either rescue 32 children and take them away from this abuse, or we would make a huge mistake and they would continue to be involved in a cult. That was a weight that you cannot describe." (03:16)

• Testimonies of Abuse
  Survivors detail the cult's systematic grooming and sexual abuse of children, often orchestrated as “games”:

  “We're going to play some games downstairs. Do you want to come? … The game was called Rape in the Dark… each girl had a card… if you're the rapist, then you try to kill everybody else…” (Aaron Anderson, 04:07–04:46)

• Cults’ Isolation Tactics
  Andrea explains how the cult severed children from their parents and fostered loyalty to Arvin, the cult leader:

  "So once Arvin and his women had trained me… my sister and I… just saw my parents as other group members. Your eternal family is your family." (09:03)

Building a Legal Case & Preparing for the Raid

• Need for Meticulous Evidence
  Mike King clarifies the challenge of convincing a judge:

  "You have an eyewitness telling you that kids are being sexually abused. Why can't you just… run in there? Frankly, just going to a judge and saying, hey, someone said they saw something isn't enough…" (12:02)
  The team had to specify evidence in each warrant, knowing any misstep could prevent convictions.

• Approval and Planning
  With only seven of ten search warrants approved, the team faced risk and uncertainty. Chief Mike Empey’s support was crucial.

  "Imagine the pressure of knowing you’re sending 70 police officers into what potentially could be an armed conflict… All of those things are on your mind constantly." (13:41)

The Dawn Raid (Operation Details)

• Briefing and Execution
  Law enforcement’s focus:

  "Secure the children, secure the evidence, and then arrest Arvin… first and foremost we had to disrupt the organization by getting the leader, get the head of the snake." (Mike King, 18:10)
  The episode details the synchronized approach, assignment of teams, and contingency planning for extreme resistance—believed possible due to the group's firearms stockpile.

• Moment of Action

  "All units move in for the individual teams… everyone had to go in immediately and simultaneously. And that really was probably the most stressful few moments in time." (Mike King, 28:20)

• Unexpected Calm

  “Usually … there's a lot of screaming and crying… and none of this happened… They seemed very compliant. They just seemed like nice people. And so it was a conflict in my mind that these really nice people could do such horrific things to these children.” (Detective Marcy Korgenski, 28:46–29:24)

Aftermath and Evidence Gathering

• Chilling Discoveries
  Officers found neatly organized, immaculate homes and out-of-place items like drawers filled with children’s lingerie:

  “In the dresser drawers, specifically the panty drawers, there were what seemed like dozens of pairs of sexy panties, arranged neatly in the drawer…” (Sergeant Blaine Clifford, 35:12)

• Key Evidence Found (and Destroyed)

  "We recovered pornographic material… video, audio, print form pornography… clothing that was intimate and built for children." (Mike King, 36:10)
  Yet the leader, Arvin Shreve, was absent—potentially allowing him to rebuild elsewhere.

Survivors’ Experiences and Trauma

• Getting Out
  Andrea, now an adult, reflects on the rescue:

  "It's hard to convey what my psyche might have been doing… you have the terror, the opposite terror. So I just probably just shut down." (Andrea, 39:14)
  Most children, not yet able to trust outsiders, felt fear and confusion rather than relief.

• Life Inside the Cult
  Andrea paints a picture of a life ruled by regimentation and constant threat:

  "It was an extremely militant environment… everything was on a clock… but the only time the clock stopped was for a sexual assault." (Andrea, 40:45–41:31)
  “Arvin didn't want to have sex with you unless your body was perfect. And… having sex with him is what got you into heaven… I must be thin to get into heaven.” (Andrea, 44:25)
  “We were all affected by this for ever, really… If people could see how those yards looked… it was something else.” (Detective Marcy Korgenski, 50:08)

• Psychological Toll & Ongoing Struggles
  Survivors discuss the long-term impacts—disassociation, self-blame, lifelong trauma, and the ongoing path to healing:

  "Of all the times that Arvin was on top of me, I don't remember them because I blacked out that much… it was the terror of disassociating that was… the ongoing terror." (Andrea, 54:15)
  "I just went to an intense therapy session just yesterday and bawled most of the day because I'm still trying to rescue this little girl that thinks that she has to, like, do everything right and perfect or no one will love her." (Andrea, 55:21)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Such ugliness covered by such beauty.”
  — Detective Marcy Korgenski (01:27)

• “The weight that you cannot describe.”
  — Detective Mike King, on responsibility of the raid (03:16)

• “Be ready, willing and able at all times. So be a bunny, because that's what God loves.”
  — Andrea, on the leader’s sexual indoctrination (06:45)

• “Why can't you just row some folks together and run in there? ...Frankly, just going to a judge and saying, hey, someone said they saw something isn't enough weight…”
  — Mike King, explaining legal obstacles (12:02)

• “You couldn't wash your hands with soap and then let, like, water or, like, squishy soap collect because that would be unattractive and not have the spirit.”
  — Andrea, on obsessive house rules (48:28)

• “Those little marks on their legs were herpes… She had no idea how serious what that was on their legs… Oh, it's just herps… And I just. I felt for those children.”
  — Detective Marcy Korgenski (30:18–31:29)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Setting the Stage: Horrific Reality Hidden in Perfection (01:27–03:16)
• Survivor Testimony: Child Abuse Details Emerge (04:07–07:03)
• Legal Strategy and Stakes for Law Enforcement (09:03–14:26)
• Pre-Raid Briefing and Operation Planning (16:39–19:24)
• Moments Leading Up to & Execution of Raid (26:18–28:39)
• Initial Response: Calm Compliance and Hidden Wounds (28:46–31:29)
• Evidence Gathering & Reflections on Organization (34:21–36:10)
• Life in the Cult: Order, Abuse, and Indoctrination (40:45–49:37)
• Aftermath & Ongoing Trauma for Survivors (53:26–55:39)

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Conclusion

This episode meticulously reconstructs not just the mechanics of the Zion Society’s downfall but also the psychological reality of its victims and the profound impact on the small-town community. From the painstaking legal work to the surprise raid, and especially through survivor accounts, listeners are confronted with the full scope of how evil can hide in plain sight, enabled by manipulation, secrecy, and communal compliance. Yet, by the end of the hour, the case is far from complete—the cult’s leader remains at large, and the scars left behind will last decades.

Resource:
If you or someone you know is experiencing sexual violence, contact RAINN at rainn.org or call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (available 24/7).

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Note:
For the complete story, including further developments and the pursuit of justice, future episodes in the series will continue this investigation.

Transcript

[Mike King]

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[Aaron Anderson]

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[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Some of the subject matter in this podcast is difficult, including sexual abuse of adults and children. While the more graphic details will be left out, the specifics can be triggering. Please take care when listening

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

those yards were such perfection that it's hard to even describe. I mean, it's just so perfect and spotless. And trying to think about the horror that happened inside there, inside those homes with such a pretty facade. It just didn't make sense. Such ugliness covered by such beauty.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

It was a still Summer Night on August 2, 1991, and Detective Mike King was lying in his bed, staring wide eyed at the dark shadows the moonlight cast on his bedroom ceiling while his alarm clock ticked faintly and relentlessly through the night. Past midnight, past 1am he glanced over at his wife, soundly sleeping, wishing he could do the same. It had only been 24 days since Aaron Anderson walked into the Ogden Municipal Building and first told him of the abuse occurring behind the closed doors of the zion Society cult. 24 days of working in virtual secrecy for 1618 hours a day alongside his two partners, Detective Dave Lucas and County Attorney Reed Richards, building a case that would stand up in a court of law so that when they could finally go in and rescue those children, they would stay rescued, never to return to their tormentors. And now, in only a few hours, Mike King, along with a SWAT team, a cadre of social workers and two thirds of Ogden's entire police department, would descend on nearly a dozen Zion Society homes just as the sun's first light began to crest over the peaks of the looming Wasatch Mountains. A surprise raid at dawn.

[Mike King]

I knew in the morning that we would either rescue 32 children and take them away from this abuse, or we would make a huge mistake and they would continue to be involved in a cult. That was a weight that you cannot describe.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

As he lay awake, Mike's mind reeled. He thought about his own children, three of them who happened to be the same age as many of those in the Zion Society. It was something he thought about a lot. He was also replaying the hours and hours of things Aaron Anderson and other witnesses told him over the last three weeks. The atrocities happening every day within the Zion Society. Things like rape in the Dark.

[Aaron Anderson]

One day early on, one of the girls came up to me and she said, we're going to play some games downstairs. Do you want to come?

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

These are Aaron's words from one of her interviews with Mike, read by a voice actor.

[Aaron Anderson]

I got down there, and There were about six girls wearing just negligees, little flimsy 90s. The game was called Rape in the Dark. The lights were off, and they were sitting in a circle with a red candle. And each girl had a card. One card said rapist on it. And if you're the rapist, then you try to kill everybody else. And the last person out, you get to do whatever sexual act you want to them.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

It was kind of like a twisted version of musical chairs.

[Aaron Anderson]

So they would start by holding hands, and the rapist would start squeezing a number of times, five times, the next one would squeeze four, the next one, three, two, one, till that person was out. And they would, like, keep doing that until one person was left.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

The group was a mix of adult women and underaged girls, two of whom were sisters. After the last person had been decided and the sexual contact began, Erin ran crying up to her room.

[Aaron Anderson]

Nobody came up to console me. It had probably been two hours. Finally, Arvin came over, and the girls that were downstairs came up, kneeled around my bed, and prayed for me.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Aaron told detectives games like this were extremely common. She spoke about entering one of the other houses and seeing girls ages 7, 9, and 10 dressed in lingerie, playing a less than innocent game of spin the bottle on the kitchen floor. Another disturbing incident occurred when Aaron was in the home Arvin shared with his loyal lieutenant, Carl.

[Aaron Anderson]

I was teaching Carla's daughter how to type. She was 14 at the time. It was just she and I down there. And Carla came into the room and shut and locked the door behind her. She Started lifting up her dress, touching her legs. By the time she got on the floor, she had all of her clothes off except for her bra.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

I'm gonna stop there. But Carla's show continued, and when she

[Aaron Anderson]

was done, she grabbed her dress and the stereo and said, arvin said to be bold and daring, but not dangerous, and left the room.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Carla was willing to commit sex acts in front of her own children.

[Andrea]

The belief that he brainwashed us toward was just be a sexual being.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

That's Andrea, whom you've heard from several times already. She was in the Zion society from ages 12 to 17.

[Andrea]

Like his tagline for the sexual way of life was be ready, willing and able at all times. So be a bunny, because that's what God loves. That's what I love. So it was just be a presentable sexual being. Literally 24 7, and I was well trained.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Andrea grew up isolated, homeschooled, with no tv and rarely left the house. When her family moved to Ogden In August of 1986 when she was 11 years old, her mother had already been a polygamist.

[Andrea]

She like treats cult like a drug and she's an addict. And she just needed a better cult, like a higher charge, because it wasn't getting her high anymore and it wasn't a big enough hit and it wasn't getting her enough heaven fast enough. And then because my mom was plugged in to all the homeschool people and all the fundamentalist people, someone just introduced her, they said, well, there's these Zion Society, you know, they're really living the word of God and they've got beautiful grounds and I think you'd really like them. So just a couple months after I turned 12, this, I distinctly remember this, just my sister and I and my parents drove and had a sit down meeting and sat and listened to all of Arvind's teachings, and my mom was hooked within one meeting and stuck her. One meeting.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Sound familiar? That's exactly how Jeff Peterson described his and his then wife Carla's first visit with Arvin. I look at him and I look

[David Wheeloth]

at her and I go, I've lost her.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Although they lived in another part of Ogden, Andrea's mom started spending more time in the Northwood subdivision. Oddly, they never officially joined the Zion Society as a family. Instead, Andrea and her sister began getting their own visits from some of the women in the cult.

[Andrea]

Like, they truly kidnapped us, where they just kind of started inviting us over for long weekends. And then one time we just came and collected all my belongings at the house that we lived in, and then we just never went home. So I never lived with my parents. My parents eventually bought a house around the corner, but we were never their daughters again, Ever.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Andrea's chances of escaping were bleak.

[Andrea]

So once Arvin and his women had trained me like, it took maybe weeks, if even shorter for us, my sister and I, to just see my parents as just other group members. Your eternal family is your family.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

This was the case for many, if not all, of the Zion Society children. Very few spent any time with their parents, even if they were cult members, too. Nearly all of them lived locked away together inside the house they called the children's dormitory, where they were shown pornographic images in movies and taught how to perform sexual acts on adults and each other. Help was going to have to come from outside the group. But how was anybody, especially law enforcement, supposed to breach the cult's cloak of secrecy to reach them? Detective Mike King had a plan, but that plan depended largely on making sure he got a hold of critical evidence inside of those homes, Evidence that not only proved Aaron Anderson's testimony, but that he also used to justify ordering the impending raid on Northwood. Unfortunately, it was exactly the type of evidence Aaron had seen them destroy several months earlier, back when she was still in the group and Jeff Peterson was fighting to get his son and daughter away from their mother, Carla.

[Aaron Anderson]

Arvin was sure there was going to be a police raid. I came home from work one night, and it was fairly late, and I came in to tell them I was home. And there was Arvin and Carla in the basement with, I mean, boxes and boxes of things, and they were just throwing them in the stove, and they were just burning things left and right and said that they needed my help.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

They were burning Arvin's pornographic training materials, what he called his volumes.

[Aaron Anderson]

Everything was in a manual form, pages in plastic covering. And I had to take the pictures out of the plastic covering. And all it was was. I mean, it was just pictures and pictures of girls in different positions, you know, out of magazines.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Mike needed to get inside and recover proof of the crimes that would hopefully put Arvin in prison. But it's not as simple as just barging in and taking a look around. It's illegal for law enforcement to enter a home without a warrant. And to get one, an officer has to go before a judge and convince them to sign off on it.

[Mike King]

When you approach a judge on a warrant, you have to give the judge a probable cause that you are on target with what you have. And then you have to establish where individual Crimes happen to tie in to that place that you're trying to serve the warrant on. So everything has to be connected to the crime.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

So there are people that are going to listen to this story that go, you have an eyewitness telling you that kids are being sexually abused. Why can't you just row some folks together and run in there?

[Mike King]

Frankly, just going to a judge and saying, hey, someone said they saw something isn't enough weight to get a judge to say, I'm going to let you kick the doors down on 10 homes, raid 100 sleeping people and take children away. You have to have more than just, I saw something happen. And then you have a court system that's going to demand certain elements of a crime be proven. But, but, but keep in mind, again, in many cases, a search warrant is served on one criminal event. And in reality, we were looking at hundreds and hundreds of events.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

So when he submitted his request to Judge w. Brent West Two days prior on July 31, Mike had to be very specific about why they needed to access each home and, and what exactly it was they were looking for. And if that evidence didn't turn up, or any number of the myriad things that could go wrong did, the results could be catastrophic. Judge west signed and approved search warrants on seven of the 10 houses Mike requested, meaning there were going to be a handful of homes that remained inaccessible. More on that later. With papers in hand, Mike headed straight for the office of Ogden Police Chief Mike Empey. He showed him the signed warrants and gave him a brief rundown on the case. Chief Empey immediately picked up the phone and called in two officers to help plan this raid in less than 48 hours.

[Mike King]

Imagine the, the pressure of knowing that you're sending 70 police officers into what potentially could be an armed conflict. Imagine that you are hoping to recover 32 children who by all accounts, are being sexually assaulted daily, if not multiple times a day. And your failure to do this right might leave them in an environment where that kind of behavior continues, perhaps under a much heavier cloak of, of darkness. But, but that, that might continue. All of those things are on your mind constantly.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

It was now 2:45am on August 2, and Mike King was still staring at the ceiling. He decided sleep just wasn't an option that night. So he quietly got out of bed. Showered and dressed in the dark, making sure not to wake his wife. He then made his way toward the front door, tiptoeing past his children's bedrooms. He drove to the police station in silence. Down dark and empty streets. The traffic lights that hung above every other intersection along Washington Boulevard bathed the road in red, green and amber as he thought through every facet of the plan in his mind over and over. As he pulled into the municipal building's nearly empty parking lot, Mike could feel his adrenaline start to kick in. There was no turning back and no room for error. I'm aaron mason and this is gardens of evil. Inside the zion society cult episode 5 deliver us from evil.

[Mike King]

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[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Mike King sat alone at a table in the Ogden Police Department's briefing room, surrounded by piles of papers, plans and pamphlets to be handed out to the various teams of 70 or so law enforcement personnel to prepare them for the morning's raid. A raid they still didn't know was happening. Remember? All any of them knew was that a call went out the evening prior to Be in the police briefing room with your gear at 0400 hours tomorrow morning. Up until this point, Mike and his partner, Dave Lucas, County Attorney Reed Richards, and recently Police Chief Mike Empey were the only people who knew about the Zion Society case. But just prior to the raid, they let two others in on the plan. First was Ogden Police Captain Marlon Balls. He was assistant Police Chief at the time and ran the OPD whenever the chief was unavailable. A seasoned commander, Captain Balls had worked just about every kind of assignment policing had to offer. He was calm and level headed, well respected among the staff, and he was particularly savvy when it came to communicating with the press, which they knew would swarm in once the word got out. The other was SWAT team commander Sergeant Don Moore. Moore was a 6 foot 4, former Army Green Beret with an intense, laser focused personality. During Mike's years on the SWAT team, he served under Sergeant Moore and trusted him with his life. Their plan focused on three main goals.

[Mike King]

Secure the children, secure the evidence, and then arrest Arvin. But if we had to wait on the other adults, we were okay with that because we knew that first and foremost we had to disrupt the organization by getting the leader, get the head of the snake.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Something that was not a part of law enforcement's mission that morning was arresting the adult members of the Zion Society. I asked Mike about that. Are you concerned in a case like that where maybe those people are going to pack up and skip town and you'll never see them again?

[Mike King]

Yeah, always, always concerned about that. We didn't want to have charges against people that we weren't fully ready to file on because a court could then throw those out if we weren't truly ready for trial.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

As 4am began to approach, Mike started to hear the familiar sound of meeting metal doors in the nearby locker room clicking open and banging closed. Confused and bleary eyed officers started trickling in, some of them murmuring about having to cancel personal plans or complaining that they had been given so little notice and not told why they had to be there at such an ungodly hour.

[Mike King]

I was greeting them as they came in and there were a lot of pretty unhappy faces in there. And I remember hearing one of the old salty cops that I had worked with for many years saying that this is probably parade duty today or something like that. And as they sat there kind of theorizing what was going on and why they were there, the police chief walked in the room and they all sat a little taller.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Chief Mike Empey was followed by SWAT Sergeant Don Moore, Captain Marlon Balls, and County Attorney Reed Richards. The tone of the room shifted dramatically. That same salty old cop said out loud what they were all thinking. This is no parade. County Attorney Reed Richards.

[Ron Van Beekum]

This group was prepared for some type of insurrection. We'd been told by many of the contacts that we'd made that they had a big stop pile of weapons that if they were given the chance, could create a real mess. We're not talking about someplace out where they're all by themselves and the only ones involved are going to be them like some of these cult groups have been. This is an area right in the settled part of Ogden. So it's not a place you want to have a shootout. You don't want to have a shootout anytime, but you certainly don't want to do it in a place where you've got all sorts of neighbors living in fairly close.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

In order to avoid a catastrophe, this operation would have to move like clockwork. Richards began briefing everyone by laying out the case, explaining the complexity of the situation and what exactly they were going to be doing that morning.

[David Wheeloth]

Yeah, Anytime you see an administrator out of bed that early, you know something serious is going on.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

That is David Wieloth. In 1991, David was a detective in the Major Crimes Bureau as well as a member of Ogden Pedy's SWAT team.

[David Wheeloth]

With these types of groups, they have some interesting ideologies Sometimes, sometimes that can be extreme. So we were there to provide security for that.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Worst case scenario, the SWAT team would be on site as a backup measure in case the cult decided to turn their vast array of weapons on law enforcement.

[David Wheeloth]

With the information we were given and, you know, we're pretty on edge about what we may be facing when we get there and start serving warrants.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Detective Marcy Corgenski was one of the officers at the briefing.

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

I'd worked the streets, and I had also worked in narcotics for five years at that time. So I'd been involved in quite a few raids. And all of those were relatively small in comparison to this. This was huge. To be involved in that and to be a part of that and to, you know, to know that we were going in a place where a lot of children were being abused. We took it so seriously, and we were just flabbergasted by how horrible it was, and we just wanted to do everything exactly right and not make any mistakes.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

They also heard from multiple sources that AK47 assault rifles were hidden in secret compartments throughout the various residences.

[Mike King]

There were 14 homes in this community that were interconnected by alarm systems, by a communication network, and guarded by sentries who watched over it. We knew that most of those homes had fortifications on parts of the homes, like windows with bars on those or metal doors or multiple lock systems on a door.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Each team of four or five officers, including a team leader, was assigned to a particular house. When the signal was given, all of the teams would move in simultaneously. Each search warrant listed specific evidence Mike believed was in each home, that each team was responsible for finding pornographic material, sexual stimulation aids, see through lingerie. Four of the homes specified videos that depicted unclothed children. And although they couldn't enter the homes they didn't have warrants for, officers were still needed in those locations to make sure they could respond if anyone decided they wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. There were crime scene investigators, evidence collectors, social workers, paramedics, two K9 officers to back up the SWAT team. Six patrol officers were assigned to traffic control to shut down access in and out of the neighborhood and to keep the media at bay. But none of this would work if it didn't. All happen at precisely the same moment. And that wasn't going to happen unless everyone knew exactly what to do.

[Mike King]

We broke off into smaller groups. We spent almost an hour and a half just prepping and reviewing aerial imagery and other kinds of things before sending them out.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Aerial imagery gave them the layout of the neighborhood and could be used to determine the best way to approach approach each home. But what was waiting for them on the inside? Well, attached to the warrants in every team's packet were copies of maps of each home that Erin Anderson had hand drawn on line notebook paper. She knew every nook and cranny, closets, doors, furniture, hidden gun compartments, secret door alarms, which windows had bars on them. And interestingly, there was another person who played an unknowing role in preparation, whom you've met before, although he didn't even realize what he was doing at the time.

[Ron Van Beekum]

I didn't have a clue. I just worked graveyards and I don't even know who was included in the raid, to be honest with you.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Ron Van Beekum and his wife Jackie moved into the Northwoods subdivision next door to Arven's son way back in episode one, you'll remember they eventually fled le leaving the neighborhood and the Zion Society behind them. But in the ensuing years, Ron got a job with the Ogden pd. But he had no idea about the investigation or the secret raid that was being planned right under his nose. Ron worked overnights at the time, the graveyard shift. Apparently someone had found out he had lived among Arvin and his group a decade or so earlier.

[Ron Van Beekum]

One of the team leaders from SWAT took me one graveyard night and asked me to show him the homes and then asked me to give a description of the inside of the homes. Not really realizing what was going on. And I thought, well, I don't. That's weird. So he got in my patrol car and we drove around and looked at it and I'm like, okay. And that was the end of it.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Or so he thought. Ron did not participate in the raid. He worked his regular overnight shift completely

[Ron Van Beekum]

unaware until, like we saw it on the news

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

at the conclusion of the morning's briefing at around 5:30am the teams quietly made their way out into the darkness toward the designated meeting spot and parked lights off, just south of the only entrance into the Northwood subdivision. As six o' clock ticked ever closer, Mike made his way from team to team, car to car, making sure everyone was crystal clear on the plan and that they had their warrants in hand. Mike told me that later he learned a member of The Zion Society had just left for work moments before they started staging. If they'd been spotted, that person could have made a phone call or turned right back around and left, locked it all down. All it would have taken was the wrong early morning jogger or dog walker to have ruined everything. David Wheeloth and the other members of the SWAT team were on standby in their windowless van a block away.

[David Wheeloth]

You're sitting there with eight or ten other team members just, you know, waiting, and is it going to end peacefully or. Or are we going to get the call that shots have been fired, officers are down, citizens are down, suspects are down, and, yeah, it's very tense. And again, waiting is the hardest part.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

The trap was set, the spring coiled and ready to pop. All the runners were at their places, feet on the starting block, muscles tense, focused, their heartbeats pounding in the empty silence, waiting for the crack of the pistol. In three, two, one. The clock struck 6. The police radio crackled, and the voice of Captain Marlon Balls broke the anxious silence.

[Mike King]

All units move in for the individual teams. They knew which side of the house, which door they were covering, which window they were covering, and that everyone had to go in immediately and simultaneously. And that really was probably the most stressful few moments in time.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

With surgical precision, each team approached its designated home and knocked on the door.

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

You know, they were pretty calm for us, coming in and bursting into their house in the early morning hours.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

That's Detective Marcy Kurgensky again.

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

Usually if there are children involved on any kind of a search warrant, there's a lot of screaming and crying going on, and people are upset and they're hurling insults and all kinds of derogatory comments at the police officers. And none of this happened.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

As each team made their way inside their assigned homes, the residents gathered in their living rooms. Except for a few of them who spoke with police, most of the adults and children sat quietly on the couches or on the floor.

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

They seemed very compliant. They just seemed like nice people. And so it was a conflict in my mind that these really nice people could do such horrific things to these children.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Detective Korginski had gone inside one of the homes along with another detective, a reserve officer, and a Child Protective services worker.

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

They were upset. The children were upset, and the mother was upset about the situation. And they knew it was a search warrant and the children were being removed from the home and they wanted to pray about it. So we decided to go ahead and let them do that. Anything to make the children feel better. You know, we knew they were already had been victimized so much. So they prayed. And the other detective that was with me spoke with the father and I spoke with the mother.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Then she was taken aside by the social worker who had been talking with the children.

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

And there were some comments about some marks on the upper inner legs of these children. A number of these children had these little sores on their legs.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

So Marcy mentioned them to the mother and I'll just.

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

I just never forgot it because I was just so surprised by her answer. I said, are you concerned about these little sores on something to that effect? And. And she said, oh, they're just herps. And I said, they're just hurts or they're. They're what? And she said they're just herps. And. And I didn't know initially what she meant by that. Those little marks on their legs were herpes. And they didn't understand the gravity of these little. All of these little children having herpes, a sexually transmitted disease that would go with them throughout their entire lives. She had no idea how serious what that was on their legs. It was just unbelievable to me. And I just never forgot that comment from her. Oh, it's just herps. And I just. I felt for those children.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

The Zion Society children who were there that day were taken from the cult's home and put into the hands of caring professionals.

[Mike King]

We started putting the children into the custody of Child and Family Services, the protective social workers who put them into vans and took them to the Children's Advocacy center, which we call it a children's justice center.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

They were safe for now. Ultimately, all of the planning and professionalism paid off.

[Mike King]

Within three minutes, every home had been reported secured. So within that 180 seconds, every home, every individual inside those homes was secured by those bus teams, which is just phenomenal.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Here's swat's David Wheeloth.

[David Wheeloth]

It's plan for the worst and hope for the best. And you know, we're in that van sitting and waiting. And I was waiting for the worst case scenario that we're going to exit the van and we're going to be neck deep in something pretty ugly. So, yeah, there was a relief. Our end goal is always peaceful resolution.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

But it was a close call.

[Laura (Andrea's sister)]

I had conveniently, the morning of the raid, had left for work just minutes before the raid.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Andrea, who you've met, this is her older sister Laura. Laura was 19 and had a job at a hotel where her shift began early in the morning. She's the one Mike heard about later who nearly missed running into everyone. Staged Outside the neighborhood moments before the raid began.

[Laura (Andrea's sister)]

Somehow, the dominoes in my life fell that direction that day, for whatever reason. So I don't have that. That trauma of a raid and sitting for hours on the couch while the police went through everything.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

As the children were being escorted away, law enforcement was able to breathe a small sigh of relief. But the work was only just beginning.

[Mike King]

My job as the lead investigator was not only to find Arvin, but to go from house to house and make sure that we were hitting all of the key things that we needed to hit in order to satisfy the search warrant and the criminal cases that I'd built.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

But so far, no sign of Arvind Shreve. So the initial wave of officers dealt with the people on the premises. And remember, the only arrest warrant that day was for Arvin. So none of the other adults were taken into custody. But now it was time for detective Dave Lucas and the various evidence teams to begin searching the homes and taking photograph and video evidence of what they saw inside.

[Sergeant Blaine Clifford]

The place was spotless, with no clutter anywhere.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

This is a voice actor reading from an email sent to Mike King from Ogden police Sergeant Blaine Clifford.

[Sergeant Blaine Clifford]

I observed in the storage room downstairs that all of the food, storage and other items were also very organized and in a specific order. Of most interest to me was that each storage shelf was covered with handmade curtains that covered that specific shelf. It was spotless. I also became aware that the other residences were similarly arranged.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

I've seen pictures, and every single item, every bag, every bucket, every can was organized and arranged meticulously so that each label faced straight outward like a. Like a perfect grocery store display that had never been touched.

[Sergeant Blaine Clifford]

Also, what stood out to me was that in the dresser drawers, specifically the panty drawers, there were what seemed like dozens of pairs of sexy panties. Each was very neatly folded and arranged neatly in the drawer, overlapping but not covering, so that you see exactly what type it was without rifling through the items. Apparently, the volume of neatly organized lingerie stood out to other officers as well.

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

I just thought, oh, my goodness, what is this for? Just these drawers and drawers of laundry, neatly folded in these. In their own little place. Every single one. And just so much of it. It was just a lot.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

For six hours, teams scoured every inch of every home they could, and what they found was just what they were looking for. Mike felt like he dropped a sledgehammer on the Zion society and smashed the cult to pieces.

[Mike King]

Well, thankfully, we recovered a boatload of evidence to support the crimes that we were alleging. Had Occur. We recovered pornographic material. We recovered video, audio. We recovered print form pornography, print manuals as part of the doctrine that they were teaching. We recovered sexual stimulation aids. We recovered clothing that was intimate and built for children, not adults. All kinds of evidence.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Remember when Aaron walked in on Arvin and Carla heaving piles of pornography into the fire? That was only a few months prior.

[Mike King]

Which really brings up an interesting question. If they literally burned boxes and boxes of pornography, and we recovered boxes and boxes of pornography, and it can only make you wonder what must have been inside those homes.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Another interesting question. Why hadn't the cult members used their guns to try and repel the police? They had the firepower. Maybe it was because their prophet wasn't there to lead the charge. Was there anything you were looking for that you didn't find when it came to evidence?

[Mike King]

The only thing we didn't find was Arvind Shreve.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

While he had what he needed now to move the case against the Zion Society forward in court, Mike didn't have the man he was after. The head of the snake, as he put it. And if he didn't find him, what would stop Arvin from picking up shop and moving his perverted empire further out of civilization, deeper into the shadows? This is not over. Mike was still on a mission. And with the children now in protective custody, he turned his focus to hunting down and apprehending Arvin Shreve. Back at the brand new Children's Justice Center, a group of social workers began to talk to the Zion Society children. Kids who had been brainwashed into accepting abuse, and social workers who, because of the investigation's intense need for secrecy, were only informed the previous afternoon that they needed a plan to handle them all. And it wasn't easy. It was pretty obvious to everyone that they'd been coached on what to say and how to act if they were ever questioned. Some of the teenagers seemed aloof, standoffish, or even combative. Andrea was 17 on the day of the raid.

[Andrea]

I mean, it's hard to convey what my psyche might have been doing. Kind of realizing to some degree what was actually happening. Like, the bad guys had gotten us, had found us out, but they were still bad guys, and it was still very scary. So I wasn't going through, oh, I've been. I've been saved. I'm getting, like, released from my capture. You have the terror, the opposite terror. So I just probably just shut down. I sat there on the couch and just shut down. I distinctly remember what I was wearing that day, the lingerie that I was wearing when I was pulled out of bed. I remember very little else about that day. I remember sitting cross legged on the couch and just probably disassociating significantly. I don't remember, Mike. I don't remember anything else. It's the weirdest thing.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

When the Zion Society's doors were opened and the outside world, Babylon, as Arvind called it, started looking around. It was the beginning of an intense period of discovery. The outside world was about to learn of the Zion Society. And although there would be articles in newspapers and reports on tv, what you're going to hear now on this podcast is something you would have never heard then. A firsthand account of day to day life inside the cult. Here is Andrea.

[Andrea]

I think the number one goal was just to keep us busy constantly. And it wasn't just like, oh, you know, do stuff as soon as you wake up. It was an extremely militant environment. Like same as the military. Like you get up on at this moment, you more or less at this moment you go eat, you know, you make your bed. Like everything was on a clock. I think it was every 15 minutes or every 30 minute blocks, you were either bathing yourself, which was twice a day, cleaning the house, sewing clothes for yourself, Bible study, child care, lawn care.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Arvin knew that if someone had too much time to think about what was happening, they might come to a conclusion he didn't like. So that kind of thing was tightly controlled.

[Andrea]

Well, the only thing that where the clock stopped is when someone was going to introduce a sexual assault. Then of course, everything else out the window because that's the number one priority. So if someone was to proposition you, then, you know, thing on your calendar, it's okay if you skip that. But oftentimes the sexual assaults were also just planned on your calendar.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

When Andrea says sexual assault here, she's referring to sex between an abuser and their child victim. And I can't wrap my head around what it must have felt like to live with the anxiety that at any moment something awful was going to happen. And often did.

[Andrea]

I was unaware of that obviously at the time because I was so shut down, disassociated, I couldn't be aware of that panic. And I was in denial for several years, even after the cult ended, until I really got into therapy like 10 years later. But that kind of panic, fear of the world, like something bad could happen any moment, has been like my baseline my entire life up until a few years ago. So it just stays in your psyche of like the world is a scary place and people are bad and they will do bad things to me. And that's kind of what it's like to live with like that kind of trauma. Just that fear. It stays in your body.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

When it came to bodies, Arvin had rules about them too. He would justify his pedophilia by saying their earthly bodies weren't their true selves and that their spiritual bodies were closer in age. But that didn't mean he was unconcerned with their earthly bodies. Quite the contrary. Each girl had daily weigh ins.

[Andrea]

There was a scale in every house, of course, but we went across the street to the house that Arvin lived in because one of our sister wives who was in charge of, you know, taking the number down and writing it on a chart, a public chart that everyone could see, of course she lived there. So you just ran across the street on your own timeframe at some point in the morning every day to go get that number recorded. So my target weight was insanely thin. It's like anorexic thin standards. And at the time my target weight was supposed to be between 105 and 108 pounds. So that became actually like a, a very large source of my psychological trauma of, of that terror of not being, being good enough. Unless that number on the scale was a certain number. And just the kind of the criticism and dialogue I would go on every day with what I was putting in my mouth and what I was going to weigh and I wasn't going to get into heaven unless I was under a certain weight. And it was just extraordinary.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Arven convinced 12 year old Andrea and the other girls in the cult that if they were more than a pound or two over their goal weight, the consequences would be eternal.

[Andrea]

So what would happen essentially is that Arvin didn't want to have sex with you unless your body was perfect. And having sex with him is what got you into heaven because that's what he had trained us all to believe, that the more you have sex with me and all the women, the more spiritual you are. Thus the more God will love you. He'll let you into heaven. So to me it was a super easy equation. I must be thin to get into heaven. So essentially he would stop having sex with you, which would seem like a positive thing, but then you would have the extraordinary guilt of, oh, but now I'm no good. I'm just like a, a dead weight to the family unit.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Here again is Andrea's sister, Laura.

[Laura (Andrea's sister)]

There was at one point that any of us that were over our goal weight were moved into A what they dubbed the fat house. There was four bedrooms. So if two of us shared a bedroom, there could have been eight of us. My sister was with me during that time and that was one of the few times that we actually lived together. I believe they intentionally kept us separated from each other and not that any of us were fat. Like I look back at that. It's ridiculous the weight that we were given to maintain, especially in those development years of being a teenager and whatnot.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Andrea says all of that shaming eventually led to eating disorders.

[Andrea]

It wasn't like they said, we need to be thin, but let's help you and here's your workout routine and here's a great diet to stay thin. No, it was really your own responsibility. Responsibility. So you, if you wanted to go binge behind closed doors, you would go binge behind closed doors somehow. And I did. That's how I gained weight. But then I would starve myself for days and like literally pass out from not having food in my system. Pass out, fall on the floor, pass out. Because I have hypoglycemia. And I'm pretty sure all the stress and all that kind of binging and starving just exacerbated that hypoglycemia, just significantly more. The cycles of your body just never kind of finding a happy homeostasis with the food and just relaxing. Of course I couldn't relax. I was going to get assaulted any moment by any number of people.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Arven, not content to only control and abuse her body and her psyche, even found ways to manipulate young Andrea's heart.

[Andrea]

They paired us up where you kind of were forced to have a relationship with a sister wife. Just like an ongoing pairing where you were expected to kind of consistently keep building your sexual connection.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

The cult arranged a relationship between 14 year old Andrea and a woman in her mid to late 20s.

[Andrea]

And you were just supposed to like sleep with them and stay connected until they ended it. And I actually got my heart broken because I did like kind of fall in love with one of my sister wives. And then when it just ended overnight and like kind of access to her just got shut off, I was like my first heartbreak at age 14 and I'm like sad. And she didn't have the, you know, the emotional sensitivity to kind of handle it better.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

And at the time, while things like arranged relationships happened occasionally, Arvin favored constant, daily unreachable perfection to keep his followers in line.

[Andrea]

Probably as important as Arvin's sexual way of life teachings, it felt like the second most important was the environment. And I forgot what he called that.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

He called it establishing a Zion level home.

[Andrea]

His mantra was, there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. I will never forget that. In other words, thou shall not ever leave a mess anywhere on the premises ever. Ever. For any reason. You couldn't wash your hands with soap and then let, like, water or, like, squishy soap collect because that would be unattractive and not have the spirit. Spirit.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

A bar of soap couldn't just be placed back on the soap dish. It also had to be cleaned and rinsed off for risk of offending God.

[Andrea]

And, like, I remember that you couldn't even leave your bed in the morning just to go, like, have your shower first. Like, you had to make your bed the second you got out of it so that you would never leave a mess behind anywhere. It was like everything was militant perfection. And I'm not exaggerating that it was like every little corner was tucked to military perfection. Like, you open our linen cabinets and it was storage for the apocalypse. So that you'd see, like, a row of, like, pink towels. All perfect. All exactly perfect. And there's not a thing that doesn't belong somewhere. So there's no such thing as a junk drawer or just stuff that doesn't belong somewhere. But, like, down to a label from a label maker that this pair of scissors goes here and nothing else ever goes there. The entire house was that way. There was not anything that was not organized that way.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Arvin's quote unquote teachings about order and cleanliness weren't contained to just inside the homes.

[Mike King]

And.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

And his seemingly limitless perfectionism is something we can see proof of. As far back as his 20s, when he was designing Ogden's Municipal Gardens, to as recently as each and every Zion Society home in Northwood. Here again is Detective Marcy Korganski talking about her experience on the day of the raid.

[Detective Marcy Korgenski]

I just remember going out there and looking all around at all the yards and how perfect they were and beautiful landscaping. And we were all affected by this for ever, really. And I remember after that happened, I drove through the neighborhood and looked at it. And then even a few years after, I wanted to see how the neighborhood looked compared to when we were there that day. And I drove through that neighborhood and of course, the yards just look normal again. And I was just. If people could see how those yards looked and how those houses looked, I mean, it was. It was something else. It really was.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

One of the ongoing themes in this series is that things aren't necessarily the way they appear, sometimes there's something sinister lurking just under the surface. And this is perfectly illustrated not only by Arvin himself masquerading as a kind, grandfatherly type, but also his gardens providing a facade for his ghoulish interior life. Those yards that were so admired by people from all over Ogden were Arvind's face to the outside world, and he took immense pride in them. But the truth is, he didn't even do the work. That beautiful landscaping belonged to the women and children of the Zion Society. And his taking credit was just another way he stole from them.

[Andrea]

Standing out in the sun for eight hours, like, probably like once or twice a week every summer, you know, for five years straight, probably with no sunscreen boiling, doing all that lawn work because it was extremely tedious, because of how immaculate he wanted it.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Andrea says the girls had to wear suggestive clothing while they did yard work, short shorts and the like. They cut grass with push mowers, and it had to be done in two different directions, as per Arvin's exacting specifications.

[Andrea]

Once everything was mowed and raked and all the things were done, the final step. Step was to take the hose attachment with a really sharp fine point and hose down the entire square footage of the entire yard so there was not one blade of grass left over anywhere in the gutter, on top of the grass, on the sidewalks.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

If things weren't perfect, if you didn't follow his rules the way he wanted you to, Arvin would call a meeting.

[Andrea]

When he'd plan a meeting, you would, like, be in, like, dread self criticism mode until, you know, up until the minute you walked over into the living room. Because that's what he would use as opportunities just to, you know, just cut you down and make you feel like you were failing because it worked. You would kind of pick up the pace and do better. And Arvin was complaining during a meeting how people were failing and everything wasn't perfect. And I volunteered to basically check inside people closets and drawers and report back to him.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

Yeah, Andrea was able to find a bit of light even in the darkness.

[Andrea]

There was very few moments to escape and just kind of forget that you were on the clock. And yard day was a little bit of an escape because you could just be outside, you know, kind of escaping in your head a little bit, and you knew that, you know, sexual assault likely wasn't going to inject in your day.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

It's impossible to imagine how constant the abuse was. No freedom, no solitude. Every moment of every day, these children Were observed and judged and living in constant fear of sexual assault. Andrea said even though she had been trained to want sex with Arvin and got that much desired dopamine hit whenever she earned his approval, her subconscious was still protecting her by checking out.

[Andrea]

Of all the times that Arvin was on top of me, I don't remember them because I blacked out that much. I was actually more terrified. Like the anticipation of having to go visit him. The terror was more about knowing that I was going to have to leave my body than what he was going to do to me. That was just became easy. That always happened. But it was the terror of disassociating that was kind of the ongoing terror.

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

We've all been in unpleasant situations where we choose to daydream ourselves out of it. A boring meeting, a bad day at home. But how many of us have had it so bad that our bodies automatically do it for us? And how many of those have been constant daily for years? It's a long road ahead for Andrea and many of the others who survived the Zion society. And to be honest, it's not a happy ending for everyone. That's just the sad reality of child abuse. Not everyone finds healing.

[Andrea]

I just went to an intense therapy session just yesterday and bawled most of the day because I'm still trying to rescue this little girl that thinks that she has to, like, do everything right and perfect or no one will love her. I have a lot of compassion for her

[Narrator (Aaron Mason)]

now. There's a lot more. We could talk about that. At this point in our story, almost no one outside the cult knows yet. The children's solo drives with Arvin to get ice cream where he'd make them strip for him in the headlights. Not allowing any of the kids to go to school and not offering them any education. There's the five arts of stimulation and other sexual lessons the adult women taught to not only themselves, but the young girls as well. But what matters is that the kids are out. This particular part of the nightmare is over for them. But unfortunately, as of this point in our story, justice has yet to be served. The police and county attorney are using the evidence they got during the raid to build a case against the Zion society. But there's one person who detective Mike King is determined to make pay for the incomprehensible damage they've done. That is if he can find him. If you or someone you know is experiencing sexual violence, contact the rape, abuse, and incest national [e-mail] that's R A I N N. O R G or call the National Sexual assault hotline at 800-656-HOPE. Both services are free, confidential and available 247 gardens of inside the Zion Society Cult was written, narrated and audio produced by me, Aaron Mason. Original music by Alison Layton Brown. The voice actors featured in this episode are Laura Scott and Matt Pittman. No generative AI was used in the writing or production of this podcast. My sincere thanks to the entire Gardens of Evil editorial team. Your feedback was invaluable. Gardens of Evil is based on the book Deceived, an investigative memoir of the Zion Society called Cult by Michael R. King. Available at profilingevil.com on Amazon or IngramSpark. Mike donates all of his proceeds from the book and this podcast to fund child advocacy efforts and criminal justice scholarships. Check out Mike's podcast, Profiling Evil, where he explores unsolved criminal cases from around the world and dives deep into the minds of predators. Find profiling evil on YouTube or wherever you get podcasts Executive producers John Goforth and Jeremy Simon. Gardens of Evil is a production of the Gamut Podcast Network.