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Chameleon Weekly.

In July of 1991, Mike King was a new detective.

Freshly promoted from patrol officer, he was working in the property unit at the county attorney's office in Ogden, Utah.

I was actually working in an undercover sting operation, running a task force of a group of officers.

We were buying and selling stolen cars and trying to work our way up the pyramid in the chop shop business.

One day, Mike was in his office when a woman walked into the lobby, desperate to speak with a detective.

Everyone else was swamped, so the receptionist called Mike.

It wasn't a property case, but he could certainly take a statement and pass it along to an investigator.

I approached the woman who clearly had spent a great deal of time getting ready for the day.

I mean, she was just a beautiful 20 -year -old woman with jet black hair, and I remember her standing up very confidently and sticking out her hand and firmly shaking my hand and saying, I've been involved in a cult that's sexually abusing children.

Do you have a minute to talk to me?

Mike didn't tell her that his specialty was stolen property.

I, you know, tried to act like I hear this kind of thing every day.

He led this woman, who we're calling Aaron, back to his office.

My mind was racing because I was going through the process of not only was this an interview of someone who wanted to share information, but it most likely would turn into an interrogation.

That could lead to her as well facing criminal charges if she truly was involved in a cult that was abusing children.

Mike warned Erin about the risk, that she might incriminate herself by sharing this information with police.

It's really a delicate dance to help people understand their rights without frightening them away.

Erin decided to talk anyway.

This was important enough to her that she was willing to risk trouble of her own in order to put a stop to what she'd been seeing.

She started to describe how she had been part of a religious cult in the community that had been operating for what we later learned was at least 10 years by the time that it became known to us.

And in the course of that revelation, she revealed that children were being sexually abused on a daily basis.

Mike spent hours with Aaron in his office as she told him all about this cult and its ritual abuse.

It was, she told him, a polygamist doomsday cult made up of about 60 people that called itself the Zion Society and was an extremist offshoot of a mainstream church, the Latter -day Saints, also known as LDS or Mormonism.

And it was all happening down the street.

They weren't out in the outskirts of town or in the woods or up in the mountains in a place where they were hidden away.

They were in a neighborhood that was very controlled by access and egress.

They were living in plain sight.

Despite the extreme privacy and aversion to outsiders, it was a community that Mike actually knew, but for entirely other reasons.

The neighborhood was well known.

because of the incredibly landscaped yards.

That was because of the group's leader, a landscaper named Arvin Shreve, who Mike also knew.

Because he was the man responsible for tending the town's gardens that surrounded the police department and the courthouse.

Mike was now hearing that this man was a cult leader and a rapist.

And the horror he was perpetrating had been going on for 10 years.

right under their noses.

Mike felt like he was in way over his head.

My absolute hope was to turn this over and go back to doing the kind of crime that I liked, which was a little more, I guess, for a young 30 -year -old police officer, a little more testosterone -driven policing.

And frankly, I didn't feel equipped to handle.

the complexity of a child sexual abuse case, let alone a case that had any inkling that there might be ritual crime or cult abuse involved.

He brought his report to the higher -ups.

I went in and gave the information to the county attorney and hoped that he would then take that and give it to another officer.

This didn't happen.

Mike's superiors felt there was a risk in too many people knowing about it at this stage.

And also, Aaron had opened up to Mike.

His bosses saw that as useful and wanted to keep him on the case.

There was no getting around it.

Mike was in this for the long haul.

Through a sensitive, highly secretive investigation that would culminate in a massive police raid, all in the pursuit of a self -proclaimed prophet.

I'm Josh Dean, and this is Chameleon, the show about expert manipulators.

This week, a mild -mannered psychopath and the unimaginable evil hiding behind his beautifully trimmed hedges.

This is Chameleon, the weekly.

He grabbed the bush and he would just stand and stare.

at the hole or wherever he was going to put it, and then he would dig it.

And he explained that, you know, he's just conferring with the Lord to make sure that this is the proper place to put the bush.

This is Ron, a man who lived next to Arvind Shreve, as heard on a podcast called Garden of Evil, which Mike later made.

Ron had seen Shreve's gardening gifts firsthand.

It was one way he lured people into the Zion Society, by designing their gardens for free.

He did this for Ron and his wife Jackie, who in their early 20s moved in next door to Shreve.

They gradually became more and more dependent on him and his group.

The free landscaping was followed by offers of food and other resources.

And after a while, Ron felt compelled to switch churches, attending services run by Shreve.

Shreve came across as kind and mild -mannered.

He's been described as looking like an innocent grandpa, often wearing sweaters and oversized glasses.

In reality, He was a master manipulator.

This is a guy who was in high school an all -state debate champion.

He went on to college and was a debate professional in college and won national awards in debate at the collegiate level.

Shreve had used his speaking talents to land a side gig as a teacher in his Mormon church.

He was a very popular...

Sunday school teacher in their local congregation.

People started asking him if he would meet during the week and teach people more about the Bible and the Latter -day Saint canon of Scripture, the Book of Mormon.

And he agreed to do that and started getting these massively large groups that were coming to his gospel instruction lessons on a weekly basis.

Shreve also preached some of his own ideas, which were controversial.

He started to talk about polygamy and asked people to kind of keep that quiet because it was outside of the doctrine of the Latter -day Saint faith.

The Mormon Church banned polygamy in 1890.

Instead of keeping it quiet, some of Shreve's members alerted the church's leadership.

The bishop called him in and told him, He cannot keep his church membership if he's going to teach doctrine that the church doesn't support or believe.

And he refused to do that.

So he was excommunicated from the Latter -day Saint faith.

Which did absolutely nothing to deter Arvin Shreve.

He continued to teach these practices.

And gradually to attract like -minded people.

The group that would become known as the Zion Society began to form around Arvind Shreve, and his doctrine evolved with it.

The end of days is a tenet in all forms of Mormonism.

The name Latter -day Saints itself is a reference to that.

But extremist groups like the Zion Society tend to center the idea and build upon it in a way that mainstream Mormon leaders discourage.

It creates urgency, a sense of impending doom.

According to Shreve, the apocalypse was coming soon.

And he was a prophet meant to assist God in the buildup and aftermath.

His job was to bring people together and then make sure they get back to heaven.

But there was more.

The tree would only share once he had gained someone's trust.

Ron and Jackie joined the group in early 1981, but for the first year and a half, there was a lot they didn't know.

They were completely unaware of the rampant abuse that was already happening among the cult's core members.

It wasn't until June the next summer that Shreve decided they were sufficiently reliant on him and his group, both financially and emotionally, to reveal more.

He sat the couple down and explained, as Ron remembers.

There was a war in heaven, and a third of the host of heaven was cast out.

But they were all men, which left a lot of women.

Because there were more women than men in heaven, Shreve explained that the society needed to have sister programs.

groups of girls and women who served their husbands.

Each man in the Zion Society had his own sister program, along with what Shreve called a thread, which was a quote -unquote sexy program that the women in his sister program had to follow.

Fetish is basically, like wearing lingerie or fishnet tights or glasses.

Shreve would assign the thread to each man, and his group would follow it, using binders of pictures cut from X -rated materials as examples.

Also, every girl and woman in the sister program was expected to have sex with her husband whenever he wanted.

They were also forced to have sex with each other.

This was also because of Shreve's vision of heaven.

Because there were more women than men in heaven, the women had to satisfy each other.

Oh, and the women were also forced to train each other and the children how to perform sex acts on men.

All of this is so disturbing that it would make me run for the hills, or the police.

And Ron and Jackie basically did that, the first part anyway.

They swiftly sold their house and left the Zion Society for good.

But many other followers were too ensnared in Shreve's web to run when they had the chance.

Or they were brought into the cult as children and groomed, raised to think that this horror was normal.

During the ten years that the Zion Society was active, Shreve would have around 30 girls and women at a time in his sister program, ranging in age from 6 to 60, all of whom were being assaulted by him, sometimes daily.

The other men in the group each had their own sister program, too, also made up of women and girls of all ages.

Arvin would explain that the reason that it was okay for him to have sexual relationships with children was that in heaven, they were really older.

And in heaven, he was really younger.

So he would like mix up the ages and make you feel like you really weren't the age that you were.

This is Amber, who grew up in the Zion Society and was abused as a child, speaking in a segment about the group on the daytime talk show, Dr.

Phil, back in 2020.

Amber described how the girls were given a handbook that taught them what to do, how to act, how to dress.

I would wear dresses every day, and we all dressed like we were going to church or something.

Even the younger children wore makeup.

That was the thing.

Perfection on earth.

When a girl joined the group, basically they would do a color wheel and tell you what color you were allowed to wear, how long your skirt should be.

That's not the end of it.

Here's Andrea, another survivor, talking on Dr.

Phil.

I was weighed every single day, and we had like a three to five pound weight range.

And if I got over 108, then I was going to hell and I wouldn't get called to go have sex.

Then you didn't feel special, then you knew you were going to go to hell.

So it was tough.

This is all highly disturbing, and it's hard to understand how anyone could ever end up in such an abusive situation.

But Shreve used people's religious devotion to his advantage.

Predators are really good at taking something that is special and sacred to people and turning that against them.

He built his doctrine by using what his devotees already believed in.

He took their belief in a God, their belief in going back to heaven, and he used all of that.

to force them into doing the things that he wanted.

It's basically blackmail or extortion.

You might have predators who, when they're hurting someone, they say, you better not tell or I'm going to hurt your puppy.

Well, imagine what it's like for someone who has a faith tradition or a belief in anything spiritual to say to them, if you don't do what I'm telling you to do, I'm the right hand of God, and you're going to be damned eternally.

Shreve had a recruitment strategy to target the people who might be most susceptible to his manipulation.

He realized that one of the most simple targets for him was a young mother with children who had just gone through a divorce that was uneducated and was worried about where they were going to live, how they were going to support themselves.

and their children, how they were going to provide for their children and still find and work an hourly wage job.

This is what all cults do.

They prey on vulnerable people.

Those who are lost and don't have a support system.

The cult offers them a support system and a family.

And so what he started to do...

is have his wife and his daughters and others start to contact women who were in this position and say, listen, come and live with us for a few months.

We'll help you get back on your feet.

We'll watch your kids while you're working your job.

Shreve and his family would help these women and make them dependent.

Then he would introduce his ideas gradually.

Slowly indoctrinated through love bombing, through...

kind of tender coercion at first and then much more forceful coercion later on to the point that these people would say, you know what, if all I got to do is sleep with the self -proclaimed prophet once in a while to live like this, I guess I'm willing to do that until I can figure something out.

And then it would get bigger.

Well, if all I've got to do is just tell the children about how to sexually please the prophet and then...

Well, if all I've got to do is have sexual relations with children, and it just continued to snowball, which is just the playbook for coercive cult leaders.

Shreve was appealing to their practical needs and their spiritual needs.

Not only did they need him to survive, they needed him to get into heaven.

Everything is about the leader.

It's about what Arvin wants to do.

Your money goes to Arvin.

You work for Arvin.

You try to please Arvin.

This recruitment strategy worked.

The group grew, and in order to sustain it, Shreve created a power structure, making some cult members lieutenants, who were granted additional power, to make sure that his word was followed.

He would get to be the mysterious Oz behind the curtain.

and they would be the one pounding and saying, we need you to work harder, we need you to go out and do this, or we need you to be sexual.

Followers were also expected to give their money to the cult.

They were required to give everything that they earned to Arvin, who would determine how it would be spent.

The cult even operated a lingerie business, not something you would expect from a group of Mormons.

They sold some of the lingerie to exotic dancers in the area, and those dancers would visit the community and teach women and girls about seduction.

The money from that company, plus the tithing, was spent on food, supplies, and also weapons that the group was stockpiling for the end of the world.

They had stockpiled food and weapons and ammunition, and that they had weapons hidden in certain locations in the homes.

All cult members, children included, were taught how to shoot guns.

Here's Dawn, another survivor, speaking again on Dr.

Phil.

We were preparing for the coming of Christ and the end of the world.

I didn't really feel scared because we were touted to be the chosen people and we'd be safe.

Members of the Zion Society were taught that no one in the outside world would understand.

They feared, always, that someone was going to come after them.

And they were right.

That's after the break.

You're listening to Chameleon, The Weekly.

Mike had never wanted this investigation.

He didn't feel qualified.

But his superiors had decided for him.

He'd been the one to take the initial report from the survivor, which meant that he'd earned your trust.

So this was his case.

As I looked for things to corroborate what this woman had told me, I realized that it was going to be a full -scale investigation.

Again, Mike tried to pass the case off to a more experienced detective.

He appealed to the county attorney.

But he also wanted Mike to stay on the case.

He said, no, you're going to run this.

The connection to a witness like Aaron could be so fragile.

They didn't want to scare her off by replacing Mike with someone else.

And considering Shreve's proximity to the county attorney's office, they needed to keep the circle of trust small.

Plus, Mike was an experienced and trusted investigator.

It's just that the stakes were so much higher.

Breaking open a cult required a higher level of sensitivity and caution than he was used to.

Investigating principles are the same, but...

The people and the victims and the suspects are entirely different.

And when you introduce cult behavior, then everything changes dramatically because there is such an increased level of coercive control going on inside of those kinds of communities.

Mike put together a task force made up of people he trusted.

I handpicked from people that I had worked with in the past and everyone was sworn.

to secrecy, to not speak about what we were doing.

Their job was to gather enough evidence to convince a judge to give them search warrants for the cult's properties.

We were pulling information from every source we could, and this was just in the early days of having mobile phones and other kinds of digital evidence.

So this was old -fashioned police work where we were going through the records division of different police departments and looking for files that showed us.

any information that led to the area.

We were doing stakeouts around the clock.

We spent a lot of hours in the community driving through in utility trucks or service vehicles because they had sentries as you came into the community that were reporting every...

movement that was going on.

So anything we did, we couldn't drive in in one of our unmarked police cars, for instance.

We had to ride a bike in or ride with the trash collectors as they came in, in order to gather the intel that we needed.

The task force was interviewing witnesses too, but they had to be careful about who they talked to so that they wouldn't tip off anyone devoted to Shreve.

One helpful witness was a man named Jeff, the ex -husband of one of the cult members.

The local police department had been hearing complaints for years from people whose ex -spouses had joined the group and taken their children with them.

Most of these cases were civil custody disputes and didn't include enough evidence of criminal activity for the cops to devote attention to them.

So when Jeff reported that his ex -wife brought their children to live in the Zion Society, all the police could do was recommend he hire a private investigator.

They came up with the guys that the private investigator's wife would drive to Las Vegas, get on an airplane, fly to Utah, rent a car, and drive up and meet with the cult members.

She was posing as a lingerie buyer, introduced to them by Jeff.

greed of having a big account like a Las Vegas buyer of clothing was more than the cult could stand.

And they invited her to come up and meet with them.

She took a camera in and was able to record children being sexualized in a number of different ways.

And that's what also helped in the development of the search warrants and the identifying.

of the kinds of things that we wanted to seize in the search.

After about a month of 18 -hour days, Mike's task force got their search warrants.

It was time to raid the cult.

And at 6 in the morning on August 2, 1991, 70 police officers, some of them in tactical gear, surrounded the community.

Because there were children in danger, the team took extra precautions.

We had just opened...

Two days before this, the second children's advocacy center in the United States in this community.

So we brought in the child caseworkers from Division of Family Services and their vans to take custody because we had intentions of taking 32 children into protective custody as part of this raid.

The raid was a great success.

It was executed in less than five minutes, and we were able to secure every home and get everyone in custody and contained in those first few moments.

Then they began their search.

The search itself took the entire day in order to search all the residents and recover the evidence and process the scene.

They were looking for physical evidence that would corroborate the stories of sexual abuse they'd heard from witnesses.

Their pornography that included both adults and children that were being used to instruct the children, and that's the important thing because adult pornography isn't a crime until someone shows it to a child and says, this is what I expect you.

to do to the leader of this group.

In addition to that, there were manuals, there were sexual stimulation devices, there were pieces and articles of clothing that were particular to events that people had talked about.

And all of that became very important.

They also found the weapons the group had been stockpiling.

The search warrants included the recovery of those semi -automatic weapons.

and the validation that that, in fact, was happening.

By the end of the day, the authorities had mountains of evidence and most of the central suspects in custody.

But Arvind Shreve was nowhere to be found.

One of the places I could not get a search warrant for was a huge bunker in the back of one of the yards that had metal doors, just an incredible structure of really fortified...

large boulders and then dirt and then into the inner room of the place.

Personally, I believed at the time that Arvin Shreve was hiding in there, but I could not convince a judge to give me a warrant for that.

Asking members of the cult if he was in there, no one would answer.

But Shreve wasn't missing for long.

Three days later, he turned himself in.

It turned out that Shreve had been out of town, seemingly by coincidence.

He said that he was traveling in Nevada and Arizona when he heard that there was a warrant for his arrest.

So he turned himself in in Cedar City, Utah.

We made the 300 -mile trek to the jail in which he was sitting in and took him into custody and then brought him back.

Because of the raid, Mike and his team now had plenty of evidence.

We literally had hundreds and hundreds of first -degree felony charges that we were prepared to file.

Shreve could see that law enforcement had what it needed to convict him.

So, in an effort to minimize public attention, he confessed and pled guilty to two counts of sodomy on a child and two counts of sexual abuse of a child.

Some of his followers also came forward, seemingly at his direction.

The county attorney could finally build cases against many members of the cult.

But the legal system of the time complicated things.

In the early 1990s, Preliminary hearings still required that child victims testify.

And you have to take into consideration we had 13 defendants at that time, and those 13 defendants represented roughly 750 felony charges of abuse against children.

That meant that every one of those cases had to go to a preliminary hearing.

These kids who had been through unimaginable horrors were being forced to relive them in front of a crowd of people, including in some cases their abusers.

It was a horrid situation for child victims to have to endure that.

And more importantly, it was horrid because in a preliminary hearing, a defense attorney could really drill the child and hammer them about their testimony.

Something they would never dare try in front of a jury that would be so offended that it could never go anywhere.

But in that setting, they could really go after the child.

In a news report from the time, one of the defense attorneys even seemed proud of his performance, challenging a girl who his client had been accused of molesting.

I didn't consider it tough at all.

She hasn't seen anything yet.

The county attorney ultimately dropped one of the cases after a child stopped responding and curled up on the stand.

How many of these cases are we going to bring and how many children are we going to force to continually retestify and go through this trauma knowing that the criminal justice system would drag out for years?

In the end...

Prosecutors chose not to prosecute more than 10 of the alleged abusers to spare children from enduring any more trauma.

We just couldn't continue to punish the children that way.

Still, 12 members were convicted in cases that dragged on for years.

And that was even with the fact that they started pleading guilty because what the prosecutor came up with is he offered them, listen, I will let you plead to four rapes of a child.

And we won't prosecute you on the other 45 cases that we have.

And people were willing to do that to avoid the risk of what that might be.

The major players, at least, were put away.

Arvind Shreve was sentenced to 20 years to life.

But that wasn't the last Mike heard of the Zion Society.

A few months after the sentencing in 1992, A letter that claimed to be from a member of the cult was published in a local paper in Utah.

It gave updates on the group, saying that they needed money.

The letter caused the public and law enforcement to worry.

Was the cult somehow still active?

Was Shreve running the Zion Society from prison?

We always worried that he was continuing to run the church, and there were indications that he was still trying to control.

He was still considered to be their prophet and their leader.

As he sat behind bars in the Utah State Prison, Arvin Shreve's influence faded.

He spent his time helping with the prison's landscaping and recording books on tape for a library program.

He became less and less significant as the years waned on.

Arvin Shreve died in prison in 2019.

He was 79.

The Zion Society was gone for good.

But many of the former members still weren't free.

Most of the members of the group went on to find other groups to belong to, which is interesting and speaks to the mentality of the people.

They don't get free of the magnetism that Arvind Shreve had.

It's really about ideology and mindset and people who really want someone else to control every decision they make.

And they simply went out and started looking for someone else to fill that role.

There's a fairly typical profile of the kind of person who ends up joining a cult.

Lonely, struggling, looking for meaning.

Maybe they don't have family of their own.

Maybe they're going through a hard time and just looking for support or for someone to tell them what to do.

These people, if they don't get real help, can end up spending their lives jumping from one charismatic, dangerous leader to another.

After being freed from the Zion Society, The child survivors needed support to recover from the trauma they endured for years.

But some of them never got it, or at least they didn't get the right kind of help.

You know, we had spent a career patting ourselves on the back about what a great job we did in the investigation and the prosecution.

Convicting 12 people is an incredible feat.

But in hindsight, we missed three really important points that the kids brought out.

Points about the resources they deserve, like mental health counseling, which the government promised but failed to provide.

And so they have struggled throughout their lives with the memories, oftentimes going up against therapists who don't even believe the story that they try to tell.

Recently, Mike helped secure some mental health resources for the survivors.

Went to the governor of the state of Utah and to the Victims' Rights Council.

and shared this story.

And the Victims' Rights Council came back and promised all the kids that they would pay up to a very impressive amount of money for counseling today for them.

He also got the president of Weber State University, a college in Ogden, Utah, to offer scholarships to the survivors.

Some of them, though, have left the area and are attending universities around the country.

Just last year, we were thrilled to see one of our kids, we call them, get her master's degree in Los Angeles.

And the survivors, for the most part, wanted their stories to be heard.

They didn't have a voice.

They've never been able to tell their story because everyone pled guilty and they didn't get that public record that comes from a trial.

Mike's doing his part to help with that too.

He wrote a book called Deceived, an investigative memoir of the Zion Society cult, and made the podcast Garden of Evil, whose proceeds are going to a new Children's Justice Center in Northern Utah and to a scholarship at Weber University.

And so I really hope people will go and listen to that podcast and read the book to hear what they did and how they survived.

and how they, in the end, beat this predatory pedophile who tried to destroy their lives.

Mike never did go back to property crime.

He spent the rest of his career studying profiles and investigating ritualistic crime, going after predators like Arvind Shreve.

That day when Aaron walked into the county attorney's office and Mike happened to be the only detective available to listen to her, shaped the rest of his career.

He helped change the lives of the children who'd been trapped in Zion society's clutches.

And they changed his too.

Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and AudioChuck.

It's hosted by me, Josh Dean, and was written by me and Emma Simenhoff.

Our producer is Joe Barrett.

Our associate producer is Emma Simenhoff.

Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack.

Theme by Ewan Leitrimuen and Mark McAdam.

Our production manager is Ashley Warren.

Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Scherr, and me, Josh Dean.

And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow, and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word.

I know everyone says this, but it's true.

Ratings and reviews really do help.

And if you have any feedback, tips, or story ideas, you can email us at chameleonpod at campsidemedia .com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up.

201 -743 -8368.

Add a plus one if you're outside North America.

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Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next week.

I think Chuck would approve.