May 4, 2022 • 42 mins
Ostracised from his family and his home, Ervil continues to build his cult from across the border in the US. When he starts threatening Colonia LeBaron with an attack, the townsfolk prepare their defences and brace themselves for the worst. But when Ervil LeBaron’s followers eventually do act, they manage to catch their victims unaware. Jesse returns to the scene of a 1974 massacre, only to find some survivors with surprising loyalties, despite the devastation.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Novel. A listener note this episode contains violence and content
that some listeners might find distressing. Previously on deliver Us
from Herbal, Welcome to Colonia Labert. Well, yeah, come and
(00:29):
say hi to Jesse's. We were going to Zion, a
place for Jesus to return. I was all prepared to
see a beautiful, wonderful place. We wanted to tell Joel
what to do, because he wanted Joel to do everything
more perfect and more professional, and Joel wasn't like that.
One of the dictims of that cult was if you
(00:49):
ever left, you would be killed. Non's if some butts
about it. My brother says that he heard noises and
discussions and then all of the sudden, some shots they
killed him. The actual killing of my dad and brutal,
cold blah. They kill him right here. On the twentie
(01:11):
Fagasteen seventy two August nineteen seventy two, the Mormon fundamentalists
(01:31):
of Colonial LeBaron are gathered at an airstrip in the
desert of Chihuahua. The sky is lit up by bright moonlight.
They're waiting for the body of their fallen prophet, Joel LeBaron,
the One Mighty and strong murdered in an ambush in
a town on the Baja coast of Mexico by disciples
of his brother Herbal Murder. We're talking about murder. Naoma
(01:57):
Stubbs was in the crowd that night at the airport.
Joel died when I was nine years old, and I
actually drove in the back of a truck when they
brought his casket to The gusts are on this airport,
and I remember watching as they landed to bring his
casket home just before midnight. Huge floodlights flick on as
(02:20):
the plane descends lands and the doors open. Naoma presses
close with the rest of the crowd to see their
profits body. A pickup then backs up to the plane.
Joel's casket is lifted into the truck bed for his
final short trip back to Colonial a Baron. I remember
(02:46):
all the men discussing what has to be done to
be able to take care of his body and bring
him home. Within days of bearing Joel, the focus of
the people of Colonial Aaron turned to Irville and his accomplices.
(03:06):
Thanks to Joel's son Ivan identifying the killers, they had
no doubts these were the people responsible for the death
of Joel. He was our prophet and we all looked
up to him and admired. Plus on top of that,
now they could murder any of us. Because if Erville
could have his own brother killed, the one mighty and strong,
(03:31):
surely no one was safe. He started threatening that he
was in a murder people if they didn't do what
he said. It was very terrorizing, that terror. It was
part of Herbal's plan to intimidate people so they'd fall
in line behind him, so they joined his cult. We
were always threatened. Nailma's mom, Larivee Stobs. I'm just gonna
(03:55):
tell you this. Hervill thought that if he got rid
of Joel, that he could just move in and take
leadership with Joel's people. Well it didn't work, that's the problem.
So the stage was set in Herbal's mind. At least
it was him against the world. From the Team's at
(04:23):
Novel and I Heart Radio. I'm Jesse Hyde and this
is deliver Us from Hervial Episode two, the Massacre and
Los Milinos. It was four when the phone calls started,
(04:48):
calls threatening the townsfolk of colonial LeBaron. I remember always
being fearful of him because as we were growing up
after he had murdered Joel. It was always the fear
of the I'm coming an attack in our town. There
was a phone and they would send messages and say
they're threatening this or they're threatening that. Up until now,
(05:10):
the years since Joel Slang had largely been quiet, and
one big reason for that was Hervill had been in
prison following Joel's killing in seventy two. He had slipped
across the US border with Dan Jordan's who had killed
Joel and some other followers, and they cut a swath
across the American South, stayed in cheap motel rooms from
(05:32):
Texas to Tennessee, planning, scheming, never in one place for
more than a few days. But then, after several months
on the run, Herval did something really strange. He turned
himself in. It was a gamble, a huge gamble. Back then,
(05:53):
under Mexican law, a prosecutor only had seventy two hours
to gather evidence, and if they couldn't find enough for trial,
well then he was a freeman. So this sudden move
might give him an upper hand. But the gambit failed.
He was charged with the murder and sentenced to twelve
years in prison in Mexico. That could and should have
(06:16):
been the end of it. But fourteen months later, the
appeals court reversed the conviction and Herville was released from prison,
an act of God, more likely a bribe to the
right official by a member of his cults. Once released
from prison in Mexico, he traveled north, back into the
US where he could put those fourteen months of brooding
(06:38):
and scheming into action. He told his followers of a
coming war, and back in colonial le Baron, those menacing
phone calls had started. He tried to scare people into
life and death like that, and people were scared so
that you had to be careful. Yeah, you did. Local
(07:00):
is like larive Stubs were spurred into action. The town
erected a watch tower on a hill. One resident even
put a siren on his roof. They were taking the
threats of violence from Herbyl's cult seriously. Naoma remembers armed
townsfolk patrolling the streets looking for anything suspicious. They would
(07:22):
shoot gunshots. So if you would hear those gunshots, you
knew that, Okay, everybody needs to take cover because we're
under threat. And that would happen all the time. Those nights.
We would put our sleeping bags in the weeds and
sleep in the ditches because we had threats on our town.
(07:46):
You would literally gather up the younger kids, leave the
house and then go to a ditch. Yeah, we had
a ditch in front of our house. Always had weeds
in it because of the water. And I would always
grow of sleeping, bagging, go jumping the ditch because the
fear was our roof was made out of wood, and
if he would throw a gas bomb on it, well,
(08:10):
our home would be in fire and you're going to
run out and he would kill us. So if you
were in the ditch and you're being quiet and there's weeds,
don't never know. They wouldn't go in the ditches? In
my mind, how long would you stay in the dish?
Like all night? I remember one night being there all
(08:30):
night long and waking up there in the morning time.
How often do you remember it happening? I remember, I
don't know. I probably went to the ditches nine twelve times.
For Naoma. This thing, she feared, this thing. She seemed
(08:50):
to almost see residents being drawn out of their homes
by bombs and fire, only to be gunned down as
they fled. A lot of people I talked to reporting
the story told me a vivid premonitions like this, And
if this sounds a bit crazy, I get it, I
really do. But here's an important thing to understand. Mormonism
(09:13):
is a religion of dreams and visions and prophecies of
magic in a way of the veil between heaven and
Earth being very thin. All Mormons believe that, whether they're
fundamentalists or someone like my parents. But here's the really
crazy thing. This vision of violence seen by Naoma, it
(09:40):
turned out to be right more after the break. I
grew up in a very devout Mormon family. We were
not fundamentalist. We were part of the mainstream church. As
(10:04):
a kid, I thought a lot about what I read
in scripture, and I think, like a lot of kids
raised in devoutly religious homes, be a Catholic, Muslim, evangelical,
I thought a lot about sin, and to be honest,
I feared it. I feared the judgment of God. Looking back,
(10:25):
I've got to admit it probably wasn't healthy how often
I felt guilty. Mormonism teaches that you can be forgiven
of pretty much any sin unless you denied the Holy Ghost.
Then you become something called a son of perdition. Growing up,
(10:46):
I didn't know exactly what that meant. I just knew
I didn't want to be one, because a son of
perdition gets sent to a unique kind of hell, a
place Mormons call outer darkness, And I'll be honest, it
terrified me. I pictured like space and some little star
off all by itself, cold, alone, forever, no path to redemption.
(11:13):
It freaked me out. I say all of this because
when I tried to picture Herville, especially after he killed
his brother, when I try to think of him washing
the metaphorical blood from his hands, I can't help but
think of him as a son of perdition in his
own sort of outer darkness. Because Herville had crossed what
(11:38):
for me at least is an unimaginable line ordering the
slaying of his own brother, and as I see it,
it was a demarcation point from which he would never return.
He was cast out from colonial a baron, eden zion home,
(12:00):
whatever you want to call it, and the rest of
his days would be spent in restless wandering, like Kine
after he killed his brother Abel in the Book of Genesis.
But if Herville felt a weight a darkness for killing
Joel if he felt even a semblance of that guilt
and shame I knew as a kid, he didn't show it.
(12:24):
The continued threats to Colonial LeBaron demonstrate that he simply
pressed on wandering through the darkness. And it was darkness
that was now spreading out from Colonial LeBaron and headed
across Mexico, falling across the Baja Coast. We're on Highway
(12:57):
of one in Mexico, which starts at the border right
after San Diego, and we have been driving in total
from the border were about three hours. And the highway
when you first get outside of Tijuana, it's just stunningly beautiful,
just hugs the ocean. There are hotels right on the beach,
(13:23):
then these little Mexican towns, and then the first kind
of big town you come to is Rosarita, and then
an hour so after that in Sonata. But we are
driving toward a town called Los Molina's. If in Colonial
Labaron Joel had yearned to create the next kingdom of
(13:45):
God on Earth, you might say Los Molinos was heaven spillover.
It was one of the major outposts of Colonial l
Abaron where Joel and Irville had attracted converts as their
church numbers started to swell. Los Milinos, which means the
Windmills in Spanish, is about an hour's drive from where
(14:05):
Joel was killed. As you pass down the highway, the
beauty of the landscape is unrelenting, the light that haze
from the ocean. You pass vineyards where you can stop
to drink delicious samples and eat local cheese, and then
the town appears across this vast flat plane of land.
It's a little more barren and dry than the countryside
(14:28):
you've passed through. In the distance the shore of the
Sea of Cortez, and to the north, a steep hillside
overlooks Los Milinos. Back when Joel was still alive in
the sixties, both he and Herville saw huge potential in
the town. I've got to be honest, sometimes, when you're
(14:49):
in colonial LeBaron, out in the harsh desert, it's sort
of hard to understand why the LeBaron's thoughts such an
inhospitable place would be the best location for Zion. But
what you see when you pass along this coastline road
towards Los Milinos, well, it's much easier to imagine how
the LeBaron saw its promise for Joel and the people
(15:11):
who ran his church after his death. The opportunity they
saw was for another communal utopia like Colonial LeBaron, but
Erville's vision for the town was different. He focused in
on the nine miles of surrounding beachfront property. What Erville
imagined was a luxury resort kind of his own Mara Lago.
(15:35):
He even lined up investors in the States. He flew
them down on a private plane for a tour, and
in typical RVIL grandiose fashion, he called it the Baja
Yacht Club. I don't know, maybe he thought that was
an easier cell than the next Kingdom of God on Earth.
Even before Joel's murder, Los Milinos townsfolk had mixed loyalties
(15:57):
between Joel's church and hervil. One. Los Milinos local I met,
for instance, Joe Castillo. He was firmly behind Joel and
saw him as his prophet. Our prophet said that Los
Molinos was a suitable place to come and lift our people.
Joe Castillo was one of Joel's earliest converts, so he
(16:20):
moved from Central Mexico to Colonial le Baron, then onto
Los Milinos. When the keep and when I came here,
I saw that it was a much better place for
me in regards to the economy, because we had better salaries,
and it was also a better place to develop. That
(16:40):
is why we have been here since nineteen sixty six
until now. They say. But Hervill was popular in town too,
when he made the long trips across Mexico to visit Mama.
I remember my mom saying that Ervil really liked Bence
and Salta. My mom all aways gave him food. This
(17:02):
is another Lost Millinos resident Delhi. She grew up here
and when Herville came to town, he would stay in
her parents home. It was a house where they gather
to study, to talk, to talk more than anything with
my dad. But I remember that my mom used to
happily tell me that my dad like Herbal, but he
(17:25):
arrived with stuff for my mom. Hervil gifted in machine
and Yes, considering the mixed loyalties between Joel and Hervill,
it's easy to understand that when Herville had his brother killed,
it sent Los Milinos into a state of somewhere between
panic and confusion. The majority of the town continued to
(17:50):
follow Joel's church, the Church of the Firstborn, which by
nine seventy four was led by a man called Verlin Barnon.
Le Baron is as the youngest brother to joln Irville,
and he was seven years the younger than yo Joel.
A Baron's son Adrian, took me to the spot in
(18:11):
Los Milinos where Verlin lived today. It's a small, tumble
down one story home, a rusting gate, rusting chain link fence.
And the reason we're standing up here because when they
startled about Molinos, he brought his family here. He helped
a lot to build this down little Molinos. He had
(18:32):
en office here. Verlin he didn't have the Hollywood looks
of his brother Herville, and he wasn't like his brother
Joel either, really like he never made any kind of
claim of revelation to be the one mighty and strong,
that person who was chosen to unite the whole Mormon church.
There was no seeing angels or hearing God's voice for Verlin.
(18:54):
In fact, you could say he wasn't ambitious for power
at all. Yet after Joel's death, he was running the
community Herville had sought to control. This sent Herval into
a rage, and no sooner had Rlin inherited the leadership
of Joel's church. His presence at Los Milinos had put
the whole community squarely in Hervil's crosshairs. Hervill's fourteen months
(19:19):
in prison might have given the town some respite, but
then in nineteen seventy four he was released, and just
like in colonial LeBaron, the town started to receive ultimatums
to fall in line under Hervil. Things didn't stop there,
because in nineteen seventy four, everyone who didn't want to
(19:41):
follow where we started receiving threats. He quoted a passage
in the Bible that talks about destruction. Los Milinos residents
like Joe Castillo started to receive handwritten violent threats delivered
by his own, well supporting neighbors. But then, just as
(20:03):
it seemed inevitable that these threats would turn into actual violence,
a strange thing happened. In late nineteen Quietly, without any announcement,
those families who had joined Hervil's church, the Church of
the Lamb of God, started leaving Los Molinos. They just
quietly packed up their homes and left. The community breathed
(20:27):
a collective sigh of relief. We never believed that they
were capable of attacking us. They left and we were
having a normal life. But in they threw an attack.
(20:48):
The attack. It's December seventy four and the moon is
bright overhead. It's one of the coldest nights of the year.
The town then looked much like it does today. Mostly
single story houses, small yards, the occasional garden, all in
(21:10):
a grid system with a church in the center. Basic
not unlike a suburb and a small American town. Although
the roads are unpaved, the majority of the few hundred
villagers that night have turned in. They're huddled around stoves
to keep warm. We're already in bed. Just before nine pm,
(21:31):
two vehicles approached the town, flick off their headlights as
they enter. The first is a brown GMC pickup stolen
from the United States. In the back of the truck
are three of Herville's most trusted lieutenants. Close behind in
a dark green Fiat driven by another follower, a teenager
(21:54):
who will become central to the whole Hervil story. Her
name is Rna chinof Tonight. She's a sixteen year old onlooker.
In a few months she'll become Hervil's thirteen wife. The
cars passed by a house shared by four families, including
Joel Aguilar, a local clam fisherman, another one of Joel's
(22:16):
early converts. He lives with his parents and two of
his married brothers. He looked through the window that pointed
north and said that Virhinias bets Hells was on fire.
The tallest structure in Los Milinos was this three story building.
(22:39):
Everyone called it the tower House, and Joel Aguilar saw
that it was ablaze. Joe Castillo saw the fire too,
and like there are other neighbors who saw the tower
House burning that night, his first thought was, how can
I help you in the moment, it's like that meant
(23:00):
I thought it was an accidental fire. I didn't see
anything evil on it. Who were just there with a
trust of putting the fire out, thinking it's okay. Things happened,
Fires happened, But the tower House fire was no accident.
(23:22):
It had been caused by a Molotov cocktail, and shooters
were now hiding in the shadows about twenty yards away,
their targets standing before them perfectly silhouetted against the burning house.
(23:43):
More after the break, the first fire in Los Milinos
that night was under control role in a little more
than ten minutes, neighbors had worked together to get the
(24:04):
tower House blaze under control, like Joe Castillo and his
brother Fernando, who had climbed to an upper floor of
the burning house and from there had successfully fought back
the flames. But the fire was a trap. On the
(24:24):
second floor. When my brother was he suddenly felt a
bullet and told me I have been shot, but I don't.
Irville had ordered the fire just to lure out his
brother Verlin. Once again, Irvill was trying to kill one
of his brothers, and the way he planned it as
leader of the community, Verlin surely would come out to
(24:45):
join his neighbors in tackling the blaze. The shooters, who
were now firing from the shadows, would execute Verlin as
he came running to help. But so far Verlin hadn't
shown up, and as the blaze subsided, the shoot as
were now at risk of being spotted by men like
Joel and Fernando Castillo on the upper floors of the
(25:06):
tower House. Before they could lose the element of surprise,
they opened fire. But that's when I realized how dangerous
this was, so I grabbed my brother and jumped from
the second floor into a pile of sand. Joe Castillo's
(25:26):
brother landed on the floor bleeding. So I pulled my
brother close. He could still walk a little, and as
I took him, I told him stay here. At that instant,
I got shut in my hand and my mano. Now
both men had been wounded. Joe Castillo moved his brother
to a sheltered spot as he tried to process exactly
(25:49):
what was going on. He told him, good, you stay here,
because something is happening. It started to dawn on Joel
Castillo that this was a trap. But who were these
attackers he now saw coming from the shadows, their faces
seemingly distorted, partially obscured by some kind of cloth like mask. Then,
(26:16):
as shooters moved away from the shadows, the townsfolks started
to make out facial features, some were alarmingly familiar. Los
Milano's resident Deli can remember her sister's shocked as she
realized she recognized an attacker. And she looked at him
and so it was her friend, the friend that almost
(26:38):
became her boyfriend. This was someone she had been to
school with, sat with him in class. She saw his eyes.
He was completely covert, and she saw his eyes and
recognized him, and he turned and saw her and ran away.
Other townsfolk were coming to the same awful realization. Not
(27:00):
only were they under attack, but the assailants were the
children of their former neighbors. Most of the attackings were kids.
Joelah Baron's son Adrian, took me to the place where
this all happened. And the kids that Adrian is talking about,
they were teenagers from the town. It's amazing how children
(27:22):
are not turtem fourteen, fifteen, sixty and eighteen year old
can be swam to the opposite side so easy doing
the attack. They're in a thank your spot of life,
so you see, convinced of something else. And those are
the people that Irvil somehow brainwashed. It was powerful. As
(27:46):
the teenagers attacking Los Milinos realized Berlin wasn't going to
come out to fight the fire, they switched to their
next phase of the assault, basically an all out attack.
These teenagers started firing randomly at the panicking crowd. One
attacker moved towards a wounded sixteen year old boy, a
(28:09):
boy named Maronai Mendez. Marona I was on the ground
moaning and crying, and this attacker stood over Maronai and
shot him in the chest. Now the attackers left the
burning tower house and headed towards Verlin's home. Joe Castillo,
(28:32):
who had been shot in the hand, had made it
back to his house. From there, he could see that
the attackers had split into two groups, one moving through
the town on foot, the other by car, both sets
randomly firing into residence homes. They were shooting house by house,
(28:52):
and so I panicked. I didn't even tell my wife
I was hurt, but I did tell her it was
you know what, going look for a place to hide
up there with the trees. Are go over there and
hide because we are being attacked by as people. The
teenagers weren't just randomly firing at people. They were now
(29:14):
also throwing these handmade bombs at the houses. They'd shoot
at the people fleeing their burning buildings. One group of
attackers arrived at clam Fisherman Joe Aguilar's Houseman went and
looked through the window. He went towards the window and
at the moment he opened the curtain and look, he
(29:36):
got shot. He got shot in the head. And then
a molot of bomb was thrown through the same window,
but the same weekd men. That bomb was made out
of petrollum base and I had a week inside a bottle.
And the moment the bullet and the bomb were at
(29:58):
the same time, the bullet hit him in his head
and the bomb lit and fell on him, setting his
body on fire. And to say, my brother. Then as
I wake up, he fell to the floor with a
(30:20):
bullet in his head while being on fire, and my
dad then took a bedsheet and tried to put out
my brother's body. We then woke up and my mom
tried to hug it, but he had a lot of
pain and kept rolling from one way to another. My
mom cried, we all cried. He was in so much pain.
(30:51):
The attackers arrived at Virlin's home. Here they threw nearly
a dozen Molotov cocktails on the roof, fired round after
round through the windows, but Verlin still didn't emerge, and
that is because, unknown to the attackers, he wasn't anywhere
near the town that night. He had fled to Honduras,
(31:12):
leaving days before the attack. Seeing one brother already slain
by Herval's colt was enough to convince him to take
Hervil's recent threat to the town more seriously, but he
left behind his wife, Charlotte and their small kids, as
well as his congregation, and now his family were following
the same procedure rehearsed by residents of Colonial le Baron,
(31:35):
hiding in the town's ditches just yards away from their
burning home, and other families and Los Milinos were now
also hiding their small children from the onslaught as the
attackers continued their seemingly random assaults on different houses. But
my husband, and he was wounded. He just didn't show
(31:58):
me anything. He then manned at his rifle and grabbed
it with his own injured hand. No, no, he only
said to me, go out back, take the kids and hide.
They are killing people out there. Joe Castilla's wife, Julia Cardoba,
had hoped she could wait out the onslaught, but now
(32:20):
looking out from her window, she clearly saw other homes
going up in flames. So I left and hit. There
was a beautiful bride moon. It almost felt like daylight.
I went to hide. I had my three kids and
I was pregnant. I told the kids to hold on
(32:42):
to me as I grabbed the youngest one to live.
It was December, it was very cold. I gave a
blanket to my oldest sons and we left. I let
them down, and I told him it looks like someone
is burning the houses over looked in at the houses
from where we were in cases at our house on fire.
(33:05):
Stay here, I told my four year old victor, to
which he replied, yes. Mommies hiding in the flickering shadows
of their burning home. The community of Los Milinos waited
in sheer terror for what would come next. But by
(33:28):
ten pm the raid was over. The attackers fled along
that same highway I had driven into town on, rejoining
their families and Hervil's colts. Meanwhile, in Los Milinos, the
people gathered the wounded. Joel Aguilar remembers four women and
eleven men ranging an age from sixteen to seventy eight
(33:50):
years old, had been shot. They were taken to a
local hospital. The most of your cases where my brother
with a bullet in his head, and another young man
whose name was Moronimendous. They were there for three days.
(34:11):
After three days, my brother ed Mundo died around one pm,
and Moroney around three pm. The nursessor said it was
a beautiful day. The son suddenly came out of the clouds,
but the clouds came back, and then it rained. The
earth shook, and then a peace, but later on tiered
(34:36):
shook again. We're standing on a hill above Los Molina's
(34:57):
or is there, as they called today, standing here at
and down. When I visited Los Milinos to see for
myself the side of the attack, I ended up on
the hill, the one that overlooks the town. Where we
stand you can see all the way. Thought it was
on the same hill in nineteen seventy two, just before
(35:17):
he had ordered his brother dead, that Irville had pretty
much laid out his entire plan to one resident, a
man named Fernando Castro. He was Deli's dad, Delhi, whose
mom RVIL would give gifts to whenever he visited town.
On this hill, Rvill had told Fernando Castro about both
(35:38):
his desire to kill his brother and to take control
of Los Milinos. He offered him a role in his
cult in exchange for his loyalty and help, but Fernando
wasn't interested, or maybe he just couldn't comprehend that Ervil
would actually do all this. Anyway, Now I'm back at
that very spot, looking out over the same view of
(36:00):
Los Milinos with Fernando's daughter Deli. I'm also with Adrian.
He's the son of Joelo Baron and the nephew of Herville.
Today Delhi and Adrian are married. Delhi is one of
Adrian's three wives. She points down to the town below
us and tells me about what life was like for
(36:22):
the community in the aftermath of the attack. The people
who lived here were still unsure whether Irvill's court would
return with more violence and destruction, and maybe that in
my life and mine, the sound of the ocean still
connects to what happened that day. The ocean reminds me
(36:44):
of the massacre. But that's what we say. Where those
two pounctories are is where the whole town went to
hide that night to sleep. We were scared, and we
were told that you cannot sleep at your home. You
have to go and spend the night at the houses
that are further away. Up here, at the top of
(37:08):
the hill, I can see brown earth and the charred
remains of buildings below me. In total, twenty four homes
had been firebombed that day, twenty four several were completely gutted,
and to be frank it seems like in some ways,
this town hasn't really been able to move on much
(37:29):
from what happened that night. There never has been any
justice for what happened in the Los Milinos massacre, not
that day, not ever. Two residents, one of them just
a teenage boy, were dead, and the dreams this community
had for a communal utopia, for prosperity even today, that
(37:50):
is still their struggle. But Herville's followers cowardly attack on
their own town seems to have stopped Los Milinos in
its tracks. Then, as Delhi and I continue to talk,
she says something that catches me off guard. I still
love Hervilly because Hervil is responsible for my mom and
(38:15):
my dad coming here. I'm stunned she still loves Hervil.
And it's not just me who was shocked to hear this,
So is Adrian. Herville was the man who ordered his
father dead. I look across at Adrian and I see
that he's crying. Adrian, there are something she said that
(38:35):
seemed to make you kind of emotional. What was that
or why did it make you emotional? The way she
the way she feels, that makes me feel, just because
it's sad to see this story. Guy, he's got me emotional.
Same match it to me. Let's say it's it's a
(38:57):
very interesting to me. It's uh, okay, he killed my dad,
so he should pay for it. But then, but then
if you start thinking who he was for for my dad,
and it doesn't matter if he became possess or obsessed
with evil spirit, it doesn't change the fact that we
(39:19):
lost the beautiful salt because to me, Herbal was a
beautiful soul. This is real crucial for me. I'm learning that.
And this seems even more incredible. Adrian's dad was murdered
by Irville. In fact, not just his dad, Joel was
also his prophet. But somehow Adrian has similar feelings towards
(39:43):
Irvil as Delhi. This is one of the more remarkable
and I gotta say challenging things about Hervial, the love
and loyalty he was able to extract from people no
matter what he did. And as I'm standing there on
that hill overlooking the town of Los Milinos, I wonder
(40:05):
was that how he was able to get away with
manipulating people to kill in his name, Because there is
no denying the whole evil had over certain people. Even
after the attack on those Milinos you could say he
was only really just getting started. He was headed from
(40:26):
Delhi from Joe Castillo, Joe Aguilar, Julia Cardoba. But Erville
would continue to be chased and hunted by people like
Larive Stops and others in colonial LeBaron as he continued
his restless wandering through the darkness. Rville was headed to
America to expand his cult to new followers, and there
(40:49):
he would find more disciples willing to shed more blood
in his name. They were going to go out and
save the world. Was the leader. When they all got
on this ship to go out and save the world.
And as they went along, I started thinking started dragon
and things weren't good, and then it caught on fire.
(41:14):
That's coming up in episode three. Deliver Us from Herville
is hosted by me jesse Hyde and written and reported
(41:34):
by me Leona Hamid and David Waters. Production from Leona
Hamid and David Waters. Sean Glenn and Max O'Brien are
executive producers. Lena Chang and Megan Oyinka are researchers. Marianna
Gongora is our field producer. Fact checking by Donya Suleman
(41:55):
and Sona Avakian. Production Management from Shari Houston, free Key Taylor,
and Charlotte Wolfe. Austin Mitchell is our creative director of production.
Michae Lee Row is our managing editor. Gavin Haynes is
our head of Development. Willard Foxton is our creative director
of Development. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander
(42:18):
and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters.
Our music is composed by Julian Lynch. Special thanks to
Scott Anderson, Scott Carrier, Del van Ada, Pippa Smith, Saskia Edwards,
Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norville and beth Ann Makaluso, or In Rosenbaum,
(42:39):
Shelby Shankman and all the team. A U T A.
For more from novel, visit novel dot Audio
Novel. A listener note this episode contains violence and content
that some listeners might find distressing. Previously on deliver Us
from Herbal, Welcome to Colonia Labert. Well, yeah, come and
(00:29):
say hi to Jesse's. We were going to Zion, a
place for Jesus to return. I was all prepared to
see a beautiful, wonderful place. We wanted to tell Joel
what to do, because he wanted Joel to do everything
more perfect and more professional, and Joel wasn't like that.
One of the dictims of that cult was if you
(00:49):
ever left, you would be killed. Non's if some butts
about it. My brother says that he heard noises and
discussions and then all of the sudden, some shots they
killed him. The actual killing of my dad and brutal,
cold blah. They kill him right here. On the twentie
(01:11):
Fagasteen seventy two August nineteen seventy two, the Mormon fundamentalists
(01:31):
of Colonial LeBaron are gathered at an airstrip in the
desert of Chihuahua. The sky is lit up by bright moonlight.
They're waiting for the body of their fallen prophet, Joel LeBaron,
the One Mighty and strong murdered in an ambush in
a town on the Baja coast of Mexico by disciples
of his brother Herbal Murder. We're talking about murder. Naoma
(01:57):
Stubbs was in the crowd that night at the airport.
Joel died when I was nine years old, and I
actually drove in the back of a truck when they
brought his casket to The gusts are on this airport,
and I remember watching as they landed to bring his
casket home just before midnight. Huge floodlights flick on as
(02:20):
the plane descends lands and the doors open. Naoma presses
close with the rest of the crowd to see their
profits body. A pickup then backs up to the plane.
Joel's casket is lifted into the truck bed for his
final short trip back to Colonial a Baron. I remember
(02:46):
all the men discussing what has to be done to
be able to take care of his body and bring
him home. Within days of bearing Joel, the focus of
the people of Colonial Aaron turned to Irville and his accomplices.
(03:06):
Thanks to Joel's son Ivan identifying the killers, they had
no doubts these were the people responsible for the death
of Joel. He was our prophet and we all looked
up to him and admired. Plus on top of that,
now they could murder any of us. Because if Erville
could have his own brother killed, the one mighty and strong,
(03:31):
surely no one was safe. He started threatening that he
was in a murder people if they didn't do what
he said. It was very terrorizing, that terror. It was
part of Herbal's plan to intimidate people so they'd fall
in line behind him, so they joined his cult. We
were always threatened. Nailma's mom, Larivee Stobs. I'm just gonna
(03:55):
tell you this. Hervill thought that if he got rid
of Joel, that he could just move in and take
leadership with Joel's people. Well it didn't work, that's the problem.
So the stage was set in Herbal's mind. At least
it was him against the world. From the Team's at
(04:23):
Novel and I Heart Radio. I'm Jesse Hyde and this
is deliver Us from Hervial Episode two, the Massacre and
Los Milinos. It was four when the phone calls started,
(04:48):
calls threatening the townsfolk of colonial LeBaron. I remember always
being fearful of him because as we were growing up
after he had murdered Joel. It was always the fear
of the I'm coming an attack in our town. There
was a phone and they would send messages and say
they're threatening this or they're threatening that. Up until now,
(05:10):
the years since Joel Slang had largely been quiet, and
one big reason for that was Hervill had been in
prison following Joel's killing in seventy two. He had slipped
across the US border with Dan Jordan's who had killed
Joel and some other followers, and they cut a swath
across the American South, stayed in cheap motel rooms from
(05:32):
Texas to Tennessee, planning, scheming, never in one place for
more than a few days. But then, after several months
on the run, Herval did something really strange. He turned
himself in. It was a gamble, a huge gamble. Back then,
(05:53):
under Mexican law, a prosecutor only had seventy two hours
to gather evidence, and if they couldn't find enough for trial,
well then he was a freeman. So this sudden move
might give him an upper hand. But the gambit failed.
He was charged with the murder and sentenced to twelve
years in prison in Mexico. That could and should have
(06:16):
been the end of it. But fourteen months later, the
appeals court reversed the conviction and Herville was released from prison,
an act of God, more likely a bribe to the
right official by a member of his cults. Once released
from prison in Mexico, he traveled north, back into the
US where he could put those fourteen months of brooding
(06:38):
and scheming into action. He told his followers of a
coming war, and back in colonial le Baron, those menacing
phone calls had started. He tried to scare people into
life and death like that, and people were scared so
that you had to be careful. Yeah, you did. Local
(07:00):
is like larive Stubs were spurred into action. The town
erected a watch tower on a hill. One resident even
put a siren on his roof. They were taking the
threats of violence from Herbyl's cult seriously. Naoma remembers armed
townsfolk patrolling the streets looking for anything suspicious. They would
(07:22):
shoot gunshots. So if you would hear those gunshots, you
knew that, Okay, everybody needs to take cover because we're
under threat. And that would happen all the time. Those nights.
We would put our sleeping bags in the weeds and
sleep in the ditches because we had threats on our town.
(07:46):
You would literally gather up the younger kids, leave the
house and then go to a ditch. Yeah, we had
a ditch in front of our house. Always had weeds
in it because of the water. And I would always
grow of sleeping, bagging, go jumping the ditch because the
fear was our roof was made out of wood, and
if he would throw a gas bomb on it, well,
(08:10):
our home would be in fire and you're going to
run out and he would kill us. So if you
were in the ditch and you're being quiet and there's weeds,
don't never know. They wouldn't go in the ditches? In
my mind, how long would you stay in the dish?
Like all night? I remember one night being there all
(08:30):
night long and waking up there in the morning time.
How often do you remember it happening? I remember, I
don't know. I probably went to the ditches nine twelve times.
For Naoma. This thing, she feared, this thing. She seemed
(08:50):
to almost see residents being drawn out of their homes
by bombs and fire, only to be gunned down as
they fled. A lot of people I talked to reporting
the story told me a vivid premonitions like this, And
if this sounds a bit crazy, I get it, I
really do. But here's an important thing to understand. Mormonism
(09:13):
is a religion of dreams and visions and prophecies of
magic in a way of the veil between heaven and
Earth being very thin. All Mormons believe that, whether they're
fundamentalists or someone like my parents. But here's the really
crazy thing. This vision of violence seen by Naoma, it
(09:40):
turned out to be right more after the break. I
grew up in a very devout Mormon family. We were
not fundamentalist. We were part of the mainstream church. As
(10:04):
a kid, I thought a lot about what I read
in scripture, and I think, like a lot of kids
raised in devoutly religious homes, be a Catholic, Muslim, evangelical,
I thought a lot about sin, and to be honest,
I feared it. I feared the judgment of God. Looking back,
(10:25):
I've got to admit it probably wasn't healthy how often
I felt guilty. Mormonism teaches that you can be forgiven
of pretty much any sin unless you denied the Holy Ghost.
Then you become something called a son of perdition. Growing up,
(10:46):
I didn't know exactly what that meant. I just knew
I didn't want to be one, because a son of
perdition gets sent to a unique kind of hell, a
place Mormons call outer darkness, And I'll be honest, it
terrified me. I pictured like space and some little star
off all by itself, cold, alone, forever, no path to redemption.
(11:13):
It freaked me out. I say all of this because
when I tried to picture Herville, especially after he killed
his brother, when I try to think of him washing
the metaphorical blood from his hands, I can't help but
think of him as a son of perdition in his
own sort of outer darkness. Because Herville had crossed what
(11:38):
for me at least is an unimaginable line ordering the
slaying of his own brother, and as I see it,
it was a demarcation point from which he would never return.
He was cast out from colonial a baron, eden zion home,
(12:00):
whatever you want to call it, and the rest of
his days would be spent in restless wandering, like Kine
after he killed his brother Abel in the Book of Genesis.
But if Herville felt a weight a darkness for killing
Joel if he felt even a semblance of that guilt
and shame I knew as a kid, he didn't show it.
(12:24):
The continued threats to Colonial LeBaron demonstrate that he simply
pressed on wandering through the darkness. And it was darkness
that was now spreading out from Colonial LeBaron and headed
across Mexico, falling across the Baja Coast. We're on Highway
(12:57):
of one in Mexico, which starts at the border right
after San Diego, and we have been driving in total
from the border were about three hours. And the highway
when you first get outside of Tijuana, it's just stunningly beautiful,
just hugs the ocean. There are hotels right on the beach,
(13:23):
then these little Mexican towns, and then the first kind
of big town you come to is Rosarita, and then
an hour so after that in Sonata. But we are
driving toward a town called Los Molina's. If in Colonial
Labaron Joel had yearned to create the next kingdom of
(13:45):
God on Earth, you might say Los Molinos was heaven spillover.
It was one of the major outposts of Colonial l
Abaron where Joel and Irville had attracted converts as their
church numbers started to swell. Los Milinos, which means the
Windmills in Spanish, is about an hour's drive from where
(14:05):
Joel was killed. As you pass down the highway, the
beauty of the landscape is unrelenting, the light that haze
from the ocean. You pass vineyards where you can stop
to drink delicious samples and eat local cheese, and then
the town appears across this vast flat plane of land.
It's a little more barren and dry than the countryside
(14:28):
you've passed through. In the distance the shore of the
Sea of Cortez, and to the north, a steep hillside
overlooks Los Milinos. Back when Joel was still alive in
the sixties, both he and Herville saw huge potential in
the town. I've got to be honest, sometimes, when you're
(14:49):
in colonial LeBaron, out in the harsh desert, it's sort
of hard to understand why the LeBaron's thoughts such an
inhospitable place would be the best location for Zion. But
what you see when you pass along this coastline road
towards Los Milinos, well, it's much easier to imagine how
the LeBaron saw its promise for Joel and the people
(15:11):
who ran his church after his death. The opportunity they
saw was for another communal utopia like Colonial LeBaron, but
Erville's vision for the town was different. He focused in
on the nine miles of surrounding beachfront property. What Erville
imagined was a luxury resort kind of his own Mara Lago.
(15:35):
He even lined up investors in the States. He flew
them down on a private plane for a tour, and
in typical RVIL grandiose fashion, he called it the Baja
Yacht Club. I don't know, maybe he thought that was
an easier cell than the next Kingdom of God on Earth.
Even before Joel's murder, Los Milinos townsfolk had mixed loyalties
(15:57):
between Joel's church and hervil. One. Los Milinos local I met,
for instance, Joe Castillo. He was firmly behind Joel and
saw him as his prophet. Our prophet said that Los
Molinos was a suitable place to come and lift our people.
Joe Castillo was one of Joel's earliest converts, so he
(16:20):
moved from Central Mexico to Colonial le Baron, then onto
Los Milinos. When the keep and when I came here,
I saw that it was a much better place for
me in regards to the economy, because we had better salaries,
and it was also a better place to develop. That
(16:40):
is why we have been here since nineteen sixty six
until now. They say. But Hervill was popular in town too,
when he made the long trips across Mexico to visit Mama.
I remember my mom saying that Ervil really liked Bence
and Salta. My mom all aways gave him food. This
(17:02):
is another Lost Millinos resident Delhi. She grew up here
and when Herville came to town, he would stay in
her parents home. It was a house where they gather
to study, to talk, to talk more than anything with
my dad. But I remember that my mom used to
happily tell me that my dad like Herbal, but he
(17:25):
arrived with stuff for my mom. Hervil gifted in machine
and Yes, considering the mixed loyalties between Joel and Hervill,
it's easy to understand that when Herville had his brother killed,
it sent Los Milinos into a state of somewhere between
panic and confusion. The majority of the town continued to
(17:50):
follow Joel's church, the Church of the Firstborn, which by
nine seventy four was led by a man called Verlin Barnon.
Le Baron is as the youngest brother to joln Irville,
and he was seven years the younger than yo Joel.
A Baron's son Adrian, took me to the spot in
(18:11):
Los Milinos where Verlin lived today. It's a small, tumble
down one story home, a rusting gate, rusting chain link fence.
And the reason we're standing up here because when they
startled about Molinos, he brought his family here. He helped
a lot to build this down little Molinos. He had
(18:32):
en office here. Verlin he didn't have the Hollywood looks
of his brother Herville, and he wasn't like his brother
Joel either, really like he never made any kind of
claim of revelation to be the one mighty and strong,
that person who was chosen to unite the whole Mormon church.
There was no seeing angels or hearing God's voice for Verlin.
(18:54):
In fact, you could say he wasn't ambitious for power
at all. Yet after Joel's death, he was running the
community Herville had sought to control. This sent Herval into
a rage, and no sooner had Rlin inherited the leadership
of Joel's church. His presence at Los Milinos had put
the whole community squarely in Hervil's crosshairs. Hervill's fourteen months
(19:19):
in prison might have given the town some respite, but
then in nineteen seventy four he was released, and just
like in colonial LeBaron, the town started to receive ultimatums
to fall in line under Hervil. Things didn't stop there,
because in nineteen seventy four, everyone who didn't want to
(19:41):
follow where we started receiving threats. He quoted a passage
in the Bible that talks about destruction. Los Milinos residents
like Joe Castillo started to receive handwritten violent threats delivered
by his own, well supporting neighbors. But then, just as
(20:03):
it seemed inevitable that these threats would turn into actual violence,
a strange thing happened. In late nineteen Quietly, without any announcement,
those families who had joined Hervil's church, the Church of
the Lamb of God, started leaving Los Molinos. They just
quietly packed up their homes and left. The community breathed
(20:27):
a collective sigh of relief. We never believed that they
were capable of attacking us. They left and we were
having a normal life. But in they threw an attack.
(20:48):
The attack. It's December seventy four and the moon is
bright overhead. It's one of the coldest nights of the year.
The town then looked much like it does today. Mostly
single story houses, small yards, the occasional garden, all in
(21:10):
a grid system with a church in the center. Basic
not unlike a suburb and a small American town. Although
the roads are unpaved, the majority of the few hundred
villagers that night have turned in. They're huddled around stoves
to keep warm. We're already in bed. Just before nine pm,
(21:31):
two vehicles approached the town, flick off their headlights as
they enter. The first is a brown GMC pickup stolen
from the United States. In the back of the truck
are three of Herville's most trusted lieutenants. Close behind in
a dark green Fiat driven by another follower, a teenager
(21:54):
who will become central to the whole Hervil story. Her
name is Rna chinof Tonight. She's a sixteen year old onlooker.
In a few months she'll become Hervil's thirteen wife. The
cars passed by a house shared by four families, including
Joel Aguilar, a local clam fisherman, another one of Joel's
(22:16):
early converts. He lives with his parents and two of
his married brothers. He looked through the window that pointed
north and said that Virhinias bets Hells was on fire.
The tallest structure in Los Milinos was this three story building.
(22:39):
Everyone called it the tower House, and Joel Aguilar saw
that it was ablaze. Joe Castillo saw the fire too,
and like there are other neighbors who saw the tower
House burning that night, his first thought was, how can
I help you in the moment, it's like that meant
(23:00):
I thought it was an accidental fire. I didn't see
anything evil on it. Who were just there with a
trust of putting the fire out, thinking it's okay. Things happened,
Fires happened, But the tower House fire was no accident.
(23:22):
It had been caused by a Molotov cocktail, and shooters
were now hiding in the shadows about twenty yards away,
their targets standing before them perfectly silhouetted against the burning house.
(23:43):
More after the break, the first fire in Los Milinos
that night was under control role in a little more
than ten minutes, neighbors had worked together to get the
(24:04):
tower House blaze under control, like Joe Castillo and his
brother Fernando, who had climbed to an upper floor of
the burning house and from there had successfully fought back
the flames. But the fire was a trap. On the
(24:24):
second floor. When my brother was he suddenly felt a
bullet and told me I have been shot, but I don't.
Irville had ordered the fire just to lure out his
brother Verlin. Once again, Irvill was trying to kill one
of his brothers, and the way he planned it as
leader of the community, Verlin surely would come out to
(24:45):
join his neighbors in tackling the blaze. The shooters, who
were now firing from the shadows, would execute Verlin as
he came running to help. But so far Verlin hadn't
shown up, and as the blaze subsided, the shoot as
were now at risk of being spotted by men like
Joel and Fernando Castillo on the upper floors of the
(25:06):
tower House. Before they could lose the element of surprise,
they opened fire. But that's when I realized how dangerous
this was, so I grabbed my brother and jumped from
the second floor into a pile of sand. Joe Castillo's
(25:26):
brother landed on the floor bleeding. So I pulled my
brother close. He could still walk a little, and as
I took him, I told him stay here. At that instant,
I got shut in my hand and my mano. Now
both men had been wounded. Joe Castillo moved his brother
to a sheltered spot as he tried to process exactly
(25:49):
what was going on. He told him, good, you stay here,
because something is happening. It started to dawn on Joel
Castillo that this was a trap. But who were these
attackers he now saw coming from the shadows, their faces
seemingly distorted, partially obscured by some kind of cloth like mask. Then,
(26:16):
as shooters moved away from the shadows, the townsfolks started
to make out facial features, some were alarmingly familiar. Los
Milano's resident Deli can remember her sister's shocked as she
realized she recognized an attacker. And she looked at him
and so it was her friend, the friend that almost
(26:38):
became her boyfriend. This was someone she had been to
school with, sat with him in class. She saw his eyes.
He was completely covert, and she saw his eyes and
recognized him, and he turned and saw her and ran away.
Other townsfolk were coming to the same awful realization. Not
(27:00):
only were they under attack, but the assailants were the
children of their former neighbors. Most of the attackings were kids.
Joelah Baron's son Adrian, took me to the place where
this all happened. And the kids that Adrian is talking about,
they were teenagers from the town. It's amazing how children
(27:22):
are not turtem fourteen, fifteen, sixty and eighteen year old
can be swam to the opposite side so easy doing
the attack. They're in a thank your spot of life,
so you see, convinced of something else. And those are
the people that Irvil somehow brainwashed. It was powerful. As
(27:46):
the teenagers attacking Los Milinos realized Berlin wasn't going to
come out to fight the fire, they switched to their
next phase of the assault, basically an all out attack.
These teenagers started firing randomly at the panicking crowd. One
attacker moved towards a wounded sixteen year old boy, a
(28:09):
boy named Maronai Mendez. Marona I was on the ground
moaning and crying, and this attacker stood over Maronai and
shot him in the chest. Now the attackers left the
burning tower house and headed towards Verlin's home. Joe Castillo,
(28:32):
who had been shot in the hand, had made it
back to his house. From there, he could see that
the attackers had split into two groups, one moving through
the town on foot, the other by car, both sets
randomly firing into residence homes. They were shooting house by house,
(28:52):
and so I panicked. I didn't even tell my wife
I was hurt, but I did tell her it was
you know what, going look for a place to hide
up there with the trees. Are go over there and
hide because we are being attacked by as people. The
teenagers weren't just randomly firing at people. They were now
(29:14):
also throwing these handmade bombs at the houses. They'd shoot
at the people fleeing their burning buildings. One group of
attackers arrived at clam Fisherman Joe Aguilar's Houseman went and
looked through the window. He went towards the window and
at the moment he opened the curtain and look, he
(29:36):
got shot. He got shot in the head. And then
a molot of bomb was thrown through the same window,
but the same weekd men. That bomb was made out
of petrollum base and I had a week inside a bottle.
And the moment the bullet and the bomb were at
(29:58):
the same time, the bullet hit him in his head
and the bomb lit and fell on him, setting his
body on fire. And to say, my brother. Then as
I wake up, he fell to the floor with a
(30:20):
bullet in his head while being on fire, and my
dad then took a bedsheet and tried to put out
my brother's body. We then woke up and my mom
tried to hug it, but he had a lot of
pain and kept rolling from one way to another. My
mom cried, we all cried. He was in so much pain.
(30:51):
The attackers arrived at Virlin's home. Here they threw nearly
a dozen Molotov cocktails on the roof, fired round after
round through the windows, but Verlin still didn't emerge, and
that is because, unknown to the attackers, he wasn't anywhere
near the town that night. He had fled to Honduras,
(31:12):
leaving days before the attack. Seeing one brother already slain
by Herval's colt was enough to convince him to take
Hervil's recent threat to the town more seriously, but he
left behind his wife, Charlotte and their small kids, as
well as his congregation, and now his family were following
the same procedure rehearsed by residents of Colonial le Baron,
(31:35):
hiding in the town's ditches just yards away from their
burning home, and other families and Los Milinos were now
also hiding their small children from the onslaught as the
attackers continued their seemingly random assaults on different houses. But
my husband, and he was wounded. He just didn't show
(31:58):
me anything. He then manned at his rifle and grabbed
it with his own injured hand. No, no, he only
said to me, go out back, take the kids and hide.
They are killing people out there. Joe Castilla's wife, Julia Cardoba,
had hoped she could wait out the onslaught, but now
(32:20):
looking out from her window, she clearly saw other homes
going up in flames. So I left and hit. There
was a beautiful bride moon. It almost felt like daylight.
I went to hide. I had my three kids and
I was pregnant. I told the kids to hold on
(32:42):
to me as I grabbed the youngest one to live.
It was December, it was very cold. I gave a
blanket to my oldest sons and we left. I let
them down, and I told him it looks like someone
is burning the houses over looked in at the houses
from where we were in cases at our house on fire.
(33:05):
Stay here, I told my four year old victor, to
which he replied, yes. Mommies hiding in the flickering shadows
of their burning home. The community of Los Milinos waited
in sheer terror for what would come next. But by
(33:28):
ten pm the raid was over. The attackers fled along
that same highway I had driven into town on, rejoining
their families and Hervil's colts. Meanwhile, in Los Milinos, the
people gathered the wounded. Joel Aguilar remembers four women and
eleven men ranging an age from sixteen to seventy eight
(33:50):
years old, had been shot. They were taken to a
local hospital. The most of your cases where my brother
with a bullet in his head, and another young man
whose name was Moronimendous. They were there for three days.
(34:11):
After three days, my brother ed Mundo died around one pm,
and Moroney around three pm. The nursessor said it was
a beautiful day. The son suddenly came out of the clouds,
but the clouds came back, and then it rained. The
earth shook, and then a peace, but later on tiered
(34:36):
shook again. We're standing on a hill above Los Molina's
(34:57):
or is there, as they called today, standing here at
and down. When I visited Los Milinos to see for
myself the side of the attack, I ended up on
the hill, the one that overlooks the town. Where we
stand you can see all the way. Thought it was
on the same hill in nineteen seventy two, just before
(35:17):
he had ordered his brother dead, that Irville had pretty
much laid out his entire plan to one resident, a
man named Fernando Castro. He was Deli's dad, Delhi, whose
mom RVIL would give gifts to whenever he visited town.
On this hill, Rvill had told Fernando Castro about both
(35:38):
his desire to kill his brother and to take control
of Los Milinos. He offered him a role in his
cult in exchange for his loyalty and help, but Fernando
wasn't interested, or maybe he just couldn't comprehend that Ervil
would actually do all this. Anyway, Now I'm back at
that very spot, looking out over the same view of
(36:00):
Los Milinos with Fernando's daughter Deli. I'm also with Adrian.
He's the son of Joelo Baron and the nephew of Herville.
Today Delhi and Adrian are married. Delhi is one of
Adrian's three wives. She points down to the town below
us and tells me about what life was like for
(36:22):
the community in the aftermath of the attack. The people
who lived here were still unsure whether Irvill's court would
return with more violence and destruction, and maybe that in
my life and mine, the sound of the ocean still
connects to what happened that day. The ocean reminds me
(36:44):
of the massacre. But that's what we say. Where those
two pounctories are is where the whole town went to
hide that night to sleep. We were scared, and we
were told that you cannot sleep at your home. You
have to go and spend the night at the houses
that are further away. Up here, at the top of
(37:08):
the hill, I can see brown earth and the charred
remains of buildings below me. In total, twenty four homes
had been firebombed that day, twenty four several were completely gutted,
and to be frank it seems like in some ways,
this town hasn't really been able to move on much
(37:29):
from what happened that night. There never has been any
justice for what happened in the Los Milinos massacre, not
that day, not ever. Two residents, one of them just
a teenage boy, were dead, and the dreams this community
had for a communal utopia, for prosperity even today, that
(37:50):
is still their struggle. But Herville's followers cowardly attack on
their own town seems to have stopped Los Milinos in
its tracks. Then, as Delhi and I continue to talk,
she says something that catches me off guard. I still
love Hervilly because Hervil is responsible for my mom and
(38:15):
my dad coming here. I'm stunned she still loves Hervil.
And it's not just me who was shocked to hear this,
So is Adrian. Herville was the man who ordered his
father dead. I look across at Adrian and I see
that he's crying. Adrian, there are something she said that
(38:35):
seemed to make you kind of emotional. What was that
or why did it make you emotional? The way she
the way she feels, that makes me feel, just because
it's sad to see this story. Guy, he's got me emotional.
Same match it to me. Let's say it's it's a
(38:57):
very interesting to me. It's uh, okay, he killed my dad,
so he should pay for it. But then, but then
if you start thinking who he was for for my dad,
and it doesn't matter if he became possess or obsessed
with evil spirit, it doesn't change the fact that we
(39:19):
lost the beautiful salt because to me, Herbal was a
beautiful soul. This is real crucial for me. I'm learning that.
And this seems even more incredible. Adrian's dad was murdered
by Irville. In fact, not just his dad, Joel was
also his prophet. But somehow Adrian has similar feelings towards
(39:43):
Irvil as Delhi. This is one of the more remarkable
and I gotta say challenging things about Hervial, the love
and loyalty he was able to extract from people no
matter what he did. And as I'm standing there on
that hill overlooking the town of Los Milinos, I wonder
(40:05):
was that how he was able to get away with
manipulating people to kill in his name, Because there is
no denying the whole evil had over certain people. Even
after the attack on those Milinos you could say he
was only really just getting started. He was headed from
(40:26):
Delhi from Joe Castillo, Joe Aguilar, Julia Cardoba. But Erville
would continue to be chased and hunted by people like
Larive Stops and others in colonial LeBaron as he continued
his restless wandering through the darkness. Rville was headed to
America to expand his cult to new followers, and there
(40:49):
he would find more disciples willing to shed more blood
in his name. They were going to go out and
save the world. Was the leader. When they all got
on this ship to go out and save the world.
And as they went along, I started thinking started dragon
and things weren't good, and then it caught on fire.
(41:14):
That's coming up in episode three. Deliver Us from Herville
is hosted by me jesse Hyde and written and reported
(41:34):
by me Leona Hamid and David Waters. Production from Leona
Hamid and David Waters. Sean Glenn and Max O'Brien are
executive producers. Lena Chang and Megan Oyinka are researchers. Marianna
Gongora is our field producer. Fact checking by Donya Suleman
(41:55):
and Sona Avakian. Production Management from Shari Houston, free Key Taylor,
and Charlotte Wolfe. Austin Mitchell is our creative director of production.
Michae Lee Row is our managing editor. Gavin Haynes is
our head of Development. Willard Foxton is our creative director
of Development. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander
(42:18):
and Daniel Kempson. Music supervision by Nicholas Alexander and David Waters.
Our music is composed by Julian Lynch. Special thanks to
Scott Anderson, Scott Carrier, Del van Ada, Pippa Smith, Saskia Edwards,
Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norville and beth Ann Makaluso, or In Rosenbaum,
(42:39):
Shelby Shankman and all the team. A U T A.
For more from novel, visit novel dot Audio
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