*Season two of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” began last week. Here are the first two episodes - Ep1 - Small But Deadly and Ep2 - Guidelines and Guns*
From late June through October of 2021, I posted to this blog 73 times. In the last year, I've posted twice. I didn't intend for the dropoff to be so extreme, but it became difficult to hold it all in balance. When we launched this blog it felt like a matter of life and death. This week I listened to the first episode of season two of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” and the visceral feelings of immediacy and danger came rushing back to me.
Towards the beginning of the episode, there’s a clip of a recording from early June of 2021, a few weeks before we began our public campaign. In the clip, June is laying out our plan; for me to release the first blog posts, for the first teasers of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” to be released, and for June and her kids to go into hiding while MOVE leadership was already disoriented by the onslaught of inside information about the group being released publicly. Those were difficult months, and we really didn’t know if things would end peacefully. We had significant concerns that June could be killed for publicly exposing MOVE, based on MOVE's leader, Alberta, telling her that this is what would happen if she ever told anyone the truth about her life.
The intensity of the situation, of trying to get enough information out there to protect the survivors who were coming forward, demanded all of our full attention. Once things settled a bit, it was difficult to continue to think about MOVE-related things while keeping the other areas of my life in balance. I was well aware of this danger going into this project, and it's something I worked hard to avoid. People who leave cults often develop a cult-like obsession with exposing the cult and getting justice. It's an understandable response, but one that often ensures that they will waste more years of their life fixated on the cult, rather than living their life in liberation from the group.
In the second post I made to this blog, I wrote about how one of the purposes of the blog was to provide a first-hand account of what it's like to leave a cult, in the hope that it might be helpful to another person who finds themselves in that situation. Finding that balance is part of the process, even all these years later, so it seems worth at least mentioning that here. If I’m not careful, it's easy for my own obsessive tendencies to rise up and get the best of me, causing me to miss the things in my life that are most important.
I regret that I didn’t prepare a blog post acknowledging the 20th anniversary of John Gilbride’s murder on September 26th, 2022. I intend to keep this site active in order to keep John’s memory alive, to acknowledge the experience of children who were abused within MOVE, and to work toward justice. The fact that John Gilbride's murder remains unsolved, and that the abuse of children in MOVE has still largely gone unacknowledged, provide valid reasons for me to want to continue to write. I’m hoping to begin posting occasionally again, so long as I can do it in a balanced fashion. I have no foreknowledge of what information will be released on this season of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” and I’d like to use this space to process that information, as well as to reflect on some other MOVE items that have been in the news since I was last writing regularly.
Episode two of “Murder at Ryan’s Run” is mostly an interview with JoAnne, the woman MOVE’s co-founder, Donald Glassey, was married to at the time of MOVE’s formation. There’s a lot to comment on in her stories, but one of the things that stood out as I was listening was just how absurd much of MOVE’s history is, and how much coincidence and happenstance went into the making of a group that has led so many to destruction. As MOVE supporters, we were taught that everything Vincent Leaphart/John Africa did was strategic and brilliant. Hearing JoAnne reflect on how Leaphart originally wanted MOVE members to take on the last names of their countries of ancestral origin, and only later prescribed that all MOVE members should take the last name Africa, highlighted the degree to which he was just making it all up as he went along.
Everything looks so different in hindsight, at the age of 39, than it did when I first encountered MOVE when I was 14. Hearing JoAnne talk about how Leaphart was 44 when he began MOVE with Glassey, who was 24 is a good example. As a young MOVE supporter, I viewed Leaphart as a wise old man. Now, as I imagine him, it seems so sad that a man in his mid-forties was spending all of his time with teenagers and people in their early 20s, LARPing at being a revolutionary while causing little but destruction. As a father now, reflecting on the ways the children were put in danger and used as props in order to advance an agenda aimed toward nihilistic chaos is more and more difficult to think about.
When I reflect on MOVE’s history my mind often toggles back and forth between seeing it as one of folly; the story of a man with charisma, and some degree of poetic genius, but without the wisdom to navigate the power he gained, or the story of a man who grew increasingly evil as those around him submitted their will to him. Hearing the first-hand accounts of the children raised in MOVE, some of the patterns are so diabolical that no other word but evil can describe them. The murder of John Gilbride, the deaths of the children on Osage, the suspicious deaths of other MOVE members, and the patterns of manipulation and control, all clearly support this interpretation. When I reflect on the leadership of Ria and Bert I feel the same duality. At times it seemed like the destruction that follows them is the product of incompetence and delusion. Much of the time I simply think of them as having been possessed by evil. Being certain that you alone possess all of the answers to all of the world's problems seems to open individuals to this path in ways that almost nothing else can.
One consistent feeling that arises as I reflect on MOVE’s history is that of grief. My wife, Maiga, and I have had our own experience of deep grief and loss this past summer. This, and the events that led to that loss, is one of the reasons for the radio silence from this blog. In working with grief, I've found nothing to be as helpful in feeling grounded and connected as offering prayers for the dead. Even before our personal loss this summer, I often found myself praying for peace for the soul of John Gilbride, or for the children who died on Osage Avenue. Lately, I even find myself offering prayers for the souls of those who were complicit, not in order to exonerate them, but in recognition that we’ve all been a part of a pattern much bigger than ourselves, and in the interest of healing as we continue to seek justice and reconciliation.
As I finish writing this first post in several months and begin attempting to reflect on these histories while keeping my balance, it feels appropriate to start out in this way; Delisha Orr, Zanetta Dotson, Katricia Dotson, Tomaso, Little Phil, John Gilbride, Life Africa, Vincent Leaphart, James Ramp, Conrad Hampton, Raymond Foster, Theresa Brooks, Rhonda Harris Ward, Frank James, Ted Williamson, William Whitney Smith, (and many more, known and unknown), eternal rest grant unto them…..
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