Podcasts about Short Creek

In this episode of Serial Streamers Jami walks listeners through the 2026 Netflix documentary series, Trust Me: The False Profit. From 2019 to 2022, Samuel Bateman led a breakaway polygamist FLDS sect in the aftermath of Warren Jeff's imprisonment. The sect of loyal Warren Jeffs followers were struggling and vulnerable when Bateman showed up in their Short Creek community, near the border of Arizona and Utah. Bateman declared himself the successor of Warren Jeffs and used religious authority to control his followers and sexually abuse minors. In 2016, Christine Marie, a survivor of abuse by a religious cult leader, ingratiated herself to the Short Creek FLDS community. She, along with her partner, Tolga Katas, began gathering evidence that would ultimately lead to Bateman's arrest, conviction and imprisonment.   Follow Jami Rice on IG, TikTok and YouTube @jamionair. Watch Serial Streamers on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jamionair and subscribe so you don't miss out on the latest documentary recaps. Check out Jami's other podcasts: Dirty Money Moves: Women in White Collar Crime: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dirty-money-moves-women-in-white-collar-crime/id1619521092 Bravo's Most Wanted:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bravos-most-wanted-with-jami-rice-and-katie-ginella/id1896791981 Want to advertise on this podcast? We've partnered with Cloud10 Media to handle our advertising requests. If you're interested in advertising on MURDERISH, send an email to Sahiba Krieger sahiba@cloud10.fm with a copy to jami@murderish.com.  Visit Murderish.com for more info about the show and Creator/Host, Jami Rice. Remember …cults are stupid, Ted Bundy is ugly, scammers suck at life, and binge-watching true crime documentaries IS self care! Stay safe out there! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To understand the 1953 raid on polygamous families living in Short Creek, we have to go back even further and understand where the community of Short Creek came from, and the theological controversies that led fundamentalist Mormon families to settle there.

From inside a federal detention facility, Samuel Bateman maintained sufficient control over his followers that three women risked life sentences to execute his directives — communicated through a shared electronic tablet. That detail anchors the behavioral analysis of a case where the mechanisms of coercive control operated across physical separation, institutional confinement, and the threat of decades-long sentences for the people carrying out his instructions.Robin Dreeke, retired chief of the FBI's Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, and psychotherapist Shavaun Scott examine the operational playbook Bateman employed to construct his FLDS offshoot in the Short Creek community on the Utah-Arizona border. Bateman — homeless and without resources — entered a community still destabilized by Warren Jeffs' imprisonment. He appropriated Jeffs' prophetic authority by claiming Jeffs communicated through him. His requirement of public confessions functioned as a compliance mechanism: each confession created psychological investment that made departure increasingly costly. His insistence on being filmed reflected identity construction — the need for an external audience to validate the role he'd assigned himself. Law enforcement questioned him on two separate occasions and did not pursue charges.Christine Marie was inside Bateman's world with a camera for an extended period. She and her husband had relocated to Short Creek to document the community's recovery from the Jeffs era. Bateman identified their presence as an opportunity and granted access. Christine had previously experienced coercive control under another self-styled religious leader and recognized Bateman's behavioral patterns from firsthand experience. She understood what performance of trust was required to maintain access and preserve the evidentiary record she was building.In her first extended interview, Christine addresses the operational and psychological cost of sustained embedded access — the process of earning trust within a paranoid community, the daily discipline of entering an environment where documented harm was occurring, and the internal transition from documentary filmmaker to active participant in building the evidentiary foundation that contributed to Bateman's fifty-year federal sentence.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #CoerciveControl #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

Samuel Bateman is incarcerated in a federal facility serving a fifty-year sentence. He maintains regular telephone contact with followers. A meaningful number of the women and girls removed from his FLDS offshoot — including individuals Christine Marie personally helped extract — have reportedly returned to his sphere of influence. Adult wives continue to identify him as their prophet. The conviction and sentence have not disrupted his operational control over the belief system he constructed.The pattern has direct precedent. Warren Jeffs has maintained influence over FLDS members from a Texas prison cell for over a decade. Bateman is replicating the same dynamic with the same psychological infrastructure — what Christine Marie characterizes as an "IV of indoctrination" delivered through regular telephone contact.Christine Marie addresses what she has learned about the content of Bateman's prison communications with followers. She identifies the division between women who have permanently separated from the group and those who have returned — and the social consequences for those who left, including potential reclassification as fallen or as enemies of the faith. She confronts the clinical and moral question she returns to repeatedly: whether some adults who have been conditioned within high-control religious environments from birth can be reached through intervention, or whether some individuals are functionally unable to construct identity outside coercive structures.Short Creek remains structurally intact. The theology, the isolation mechanisms, and the obedience hierarchy that produced both Jeffs and Bateman continue to operate. Robin Dreeke and Shavaun Scott examine why the FLDS persists when comparable organizations — NXIVM, Peoples Temple — collapsed following their leaders' removal. They address Faith Bistline's circumstances — having lost her family to Bateman and now raising the children affected by his conduct. They evaluate what intervention methods demonstrate efficacy with children in high-control religious environments and the competing harms of removal versus continued exposure. Both experts address directly whether the conditions at Short Creek are likely to produce another leader operating on the same model — or whether the community possesses the capacity to interrupt the cycle.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ShortCreek #TrustMeNetflix #ChristineMarie #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #CoerciveControl #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

 Following their removal from Samuel Bateman's FLDS offshoot, the rescued minors were interviewed by trained forensic specialists. They disclosed nothing verbally about the conduct documented in the case. Their journals — recovered during the FBI's execution of search warrants — contained detailed accounts: dates, descriptions, and names, recorded in their own handwriting. The dissociation between written and verbal disclosure represents a specific clinical phenomenon in cases involving prolonged coercive control during childhood development.Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, with more than thirty years of experience in forensic mental health, domestic violence, and coercive control, examines the psychological mechanisms at work. Bateman's "atonement ceremonies" — group acts conducted under the framework of divine commandment — functioned to normalize harm within a closed belief system. The behavioral presentations visible in documentary footage that viewers have interpreted as voluntary participation reflect clinical indicators of conditioned compliance, not choice. Eight minors went willingly with Bateman's wives when they were removed from foster care — a fact that demonstrates the depth of the psychological infrastructure Bateman had constructed.The co-defendants' cases present an unresolved moral and legal question. The women convicted of facilitating harm to children were themselves raised within the FLDS system, married off as teenagers, and conditioned from birth within the same coercive framework they subsequently perpetuated. Scott and retired FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke examine whether the legal system's binary framework can adequately address individuals who are simultaneously perpetrators and products of the same system.The investigative timeline preceding the FBI's intervention compounds the case's complexity. Christine Marie provided footage to local law enforcement repeatedly. The responding sergeant reportedly found the material credible but declined to act. The Short Creek community had normalized practices that constituted criminal conduct for decades. The recording that precipitated federal action came in late 2021: Bateman's own voice describing the transfer of wives to his male followers, including a minor. Christine subsequently facilitated the cooperation of Julia Johnson, a mother whose four daughters had been placed with Bateman, and assisted in physically removing the girls to enable the federal operation.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #ShavaunScott #RobinDreeke #CultTrauma #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

Christine Marie risked everything to get them out. Some of them walked right back in. Samuel Bateman is serving fifty years in federal prison. He still calls. The women still answer. Some of his adult wives still call him their prophet. Some of the girls Christine helped pull out of his house have returned to his sphere. The conviction changed nothing about his hold on them. The sentence changed nothing. One phone call at a time, the certainty keeps flowing — what Christine describes as an IV of indoctrination right into their veins.The same pattern held with Warren Jeffs twenty years ago. He ran the FLDS from a prison cell. Now Bateman is doing the same thing with a different phone and the same psychological infrastructure underneath it.Christine addresses what she actually knows about what Bateman feeds his followers from inside. The split between the women who got out permanently and the ones who returned — and whether the ones who left are now treated as traitors, as fallen, as enemies of the faith. Why some women can walk out of a coercive group and build a real life the way Christine did, and others can't. The question she keeps coming back to — whether some adults can be reached at all, or whether some people only feel at home inside something broken. And what real change at the federal and state level would even look like.Short Creek is still standing. Same theology. Same isolation. Same obedience structure. Every co-defendant in the Bateman case was convicted. Robin Dreeke and Shavaun Scott examine why the FLDS survives when NXIVM and Peoples Temple collapsed after their leaders fell. They talk about Faith Bistline — who lost her entire family to Bateman and is raising the children they helped destroy. What actually works to help children still inside high-control religious groups. And the question both experts answer point-blank: is Short Creek going to break the cycle, or is the machine just waiting for its next operator?Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #WarrenJeffs #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

Christine Marie brought tape after tape to local police. The sergeant believed every frame. He wouldn't move. Short Creek had spent decades looking the other way — polygamy was lifestyle, not crime — and the local department had stopped seeing what was in front of them long before Bateman declared himself a prophet.The recording that changed everything came in late 2021. Bateman, in his own voice, describing handing three of his wives to three of his men — one of them a minor. That tape crossed a line local reluctance couldn't absorb. Christine flipped a mother named Julia Johnson, whose four daughters had been given to Bateman. She helped pull the girls away so federal agents could finally act. Every month the wall held was another month those girls weren't safe — and Christine still carries the weight of that timeline.The girls who were rescued sat across from trained forensic interviewers and said nothing. Their journals — seized by the FBI — told a different story. Dates. Details. Names. Written in their own handwriting. They could put it on paper but they physically could not speak it. That gap between what a child can write and what they can say out loud is where the psychological damage lives.Shavaun Scott has spent thirty years in trauma work, domestic violence, and coercive control. Robin Dreeke ran the FBI's Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. They examine what the documentary footage reveals about body language viewers are misreading as consent or choice. What Bateman's "atonement ceremonies" — group acts framed as divine commandment — did to his followers' capacity to recognize harm being done to them. Why eight girls went willingly with Bateman's wives when they were removed from foster care. And the moral calculation that makes the co-defendants' cases the hardest question in this entire story — women who were raised FLDS, married off as teenagers, conditioned from birth to obey, and then convicted for facilitating harm to the next generation of children.Christine addresses what she'd do differently to get Bateman stopped faster. The regret isn't about what she did. It's about every month the system refused to listen.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #ShavaunScott #RobinDreeke #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime #FBIRaid

A broke, homeless man walked into a fractured religious community on the Utah-Arizona border. Three years later he was driving Bentleys, commanding fifty followers, and fathers were handing him their young daughters as spiritual wives. The behavioral question isn't whether he was evil. It's how he did it — and why every system that should have stopped him didn't.Robin Dreeke spent decades at the FBI studying exactly this kind of manipulation. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott has worked in coercive control and forensic mental health for over thirty years. Together they pull apart Samuel Bateman's behavioral playbook — the one now at the center of Netflix's Trust Me: The False Prophet.Bateman read the vulnerability of a community still reeling from Warren Jeffs' imprisonment. He claimed Jeffs was speaking through him. His demand for public confessions wasn't about accountability — it was about manufacturing complicity. Every person who confessed became invested in the system because admitting it was false meant admitting what they'd given up for it. His obsession with being filmed reveals how he saw himself — not as a con artist but as a figure of historical significance. Police questioned him twice and walked away both times. From a federal detention cell, he maintained enough control that three women risked life sentences to carry out his orders through a shared tablet.Christine Marie was inside his world with a camera every day. She didn't go to Short Creek looking for Bateman — she and her husband moved there to document a community recovering from Jeffs. Then Bateman appeared and saw two outsiders with cameras as the path to the audience he wanted. He let them in. Christine had survived coercive control with another false prophet years before. She could read every move he was making because she'd seen it done on her. She knew exactly what trust to perform to keep his guard down.In her first extended interview, Christine describes the cost of living that double life — gaining the trust of paranoid believers, walking into that house every morning knowing what she was watching, and the moment "documentary maker" became "mole" inside her own head.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime #WarrenJeffs

The girls who were rescued from Samuel Bateman's FLDS cult sat across from trained forensic interviewers and said nothing about what happened to them. Their journals — seized by the FBI — were full of it. Dates. Details. Names. Written in their own handwriting. They could put it on paper but they physically could not speak it.Robin Dreeke and psychotherapist Shavaun Scott examine that gap — what it tells you about the depth of psychological conditioning inside Bateman's world, and why the standard tools forensic investigators rely on to build cases involving minors broke down completely when applied to children raised inside coercive religious control.Scott has spent thirty years working with trauma survivors and people escaping coercive environments. She examines what Bateman's "atonement ceremonies" — group acts framed as divine commandment — did to his followers' ability to even identify what was happening to them as harm. The body language in the documentary footage that most viewers are reading as choice or compliance is neither — Scott explains what it actually represents clinically. She addresses why eight girls went willingly with Bateman's wives when they were removed from foster care, and the impossible question at the center of the co-defendants' cases: women raised FLDS, married off as teenagers, conditioned from birth to obey, now convicted for facilitating harm to children who were in the same system they'd been raised inside.Christine Marie saw the conditioning up close for months. She brought footage to local police repeatedly. The sergeant believed it. He wouldn't act. Short Creek had normalized what was happening for decades — the local department had stopped seeing it as crime. The recording that finally broke through came in late 2021: Bateman in his own voice describing handing wives to his men, one of them a minor. Christine flipped a mother named Julia Johnson. She helped pull the girls out so the FBI could move. Every month the system refused to act was another month those girls weren't safe.Christine addresses the regret she still carries — what she'd do differently to get him stopped faster, and what that delay cost the children she was trying to help.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #ShavaunScott #RobinDreeke #CultTrauma #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

The legal case is closed. Samuel Bateman is serving fifty years. Every co-defendant was convicted. And Short Creek is still standing — same theology, same isolation, same obedience structure that produced both Warren Jeffs and Bateman. The machine didn't break. It just lost its current operator.Robin Dreeke and Shavaun Scott examine why the FLDS survives when other cults collapsed after their leaders fell. NXIVM dissolved. Peoples Temple ended in mass death. The FLDS keeps regenerating. The theology provides the framework. The isolation provides the barrier. The obedience structure provides the pipeline. And the community has now demonstrated twice that when a leader is removed, the conditions that created him remain intact.They talk about Faith Bistline — who lost her entire family to Bateman and is now raising the children they helped destroy. About what actually works to help children still inside high-control religious groups when removing them causes devastating psychological consequences and leaving them in produces worse ones. About whether Jeffs can maintain control of the FLDS indefinitely from a prison cell — and whether Bateman is doing the same thing right now.Because Bateman is still calling. Every day. From federal prison. The women still answer. Some of his adult wives still call him their prophet. Some of the girls Christine Marie helped rescue have returned to his sphere. The sentence didn't end his control. The conviction didn't end his control. Christine describes the phone calls as an IV of indoctrination — certainty flowing one conversation at a time into people whose entire identity was built inside a system designed to make leaving feel like dying.Christine addresses the split between the women who got out and the women who went back. Whether the ones who left are now treated as enemies of the faith. The ugly question she can't stop asking: whether some adults can be reached at all. And what real systemic change would look like — or whether this is just the cost of a country that lets people believe whatever they want, even when what they believe is destroying children.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ShortCreek #TrustMeNetflix #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #FaithBistline #WarrenJeffs #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

The Netflix docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet introduced the world to Christine Marie — the cult psychologist and survivor who walked into Samuel Bateman's FLDS inner circle, gathered the evidence the FBI used to put him in federal prison for fifty years, and is still living in Short Creek today. The documentary couldn't tell you everything. This conversation can.This is the complete extended interview — all three parts in one continuous sit-down. Christine takes Tony through how she got inside. She and her husband Tolga moved to Short Creek in 2016 to film a different project entirely, and then Bateman emerged from the post-Warren Jeffs FLDS community and declared himself the next prophet. He let them in because he thought their cameras would make him famous. He had no idea Christine had once fallen for a false prophet herself, years before, and could read every move he was making.She walks Tony through the years of getting local police to do nothing despite watching her footage. The late-2021 recording — Bateman describing "the Atonement," three of his wives, one a minor, handed to three of his men — that finally moved the FBI. Julia Johnson, the mother she flipped, whose four daughters had been given to Bateman. The morning of the raid, and how the girls were pulled away from him before agents moved. And the part the documentary can't end on — that fifty years in federal prison hasn't broken his hold, and a number of the women Christine risked her life to save have walked right back to him by choice.It's the deepest dive into this case anyone's published. The full story, from the only person who lived it all.LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrueCrimeToday #TrustMeFalseProphet #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #Cults #TrueCrime #Netflix

All three parts of our interview with Christine Marie, woven together into one extended conversation — the cult psychologist and survivor who walked into Samuel Bateman's FLDS inner circle, fed the FBI the evidence that ended his freedom for fifty years, and is still living in Short Creek today doing the work nobody else will.She wasn't even supposed to be there for him. She and her husband Tolga came to that stretch of the Utah-Arizona border in 2016 to film a different story entirely. Then Bateman stepped out of the post-Warren Jeffs wreckage, declared himself the new prophet, and started taking "spiritual wives," some of them girls. He let Christine in. He thought she was going to make him famous. He didn't know she'd already lived through coercive control herself, years before, with a different false prophet — and that everything he was doing, she'd seen done before.In this extended interview, she takes us through it all. How she pulled off the cover. What it cost to live that double life. The wait — years of local police who believed her tapes and refused to act. The recording she captured in late 2021 that finally moved the FBI. Julia Johnson, the mother she flipped. The morning of the raid. And then the part of the story that doesn't fit on a documentary's ending card — that fifty years in federal prison didn't end Bateman's hold on those women, and a number of the ones Christine risked her life to free are calling him their prophet still.It's the longest, most honest version of the entire arc — getting in, taking him down, and the unfinished fight afterward.LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #HiddenKillers #TrustMeFalseProphet #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #Cults #TrueCrime #Netflix

The complete three-part conversation, all in one extended sit-down. Christine Marie — the cult psychologist who walked into Samuel Bateman's FLDS world with a camera and a hidden agenda — sits down with me to tell the whole story from start to finish.Christine and her husband Tolga moved to Short Creek in 2016 with a completely different project in mind. Then Samuel Bateman rose out of the post-Warren Jeffs FLDS community, declared himself the new prophet, took "spiritual wives" — some of them girls as young as nine — and made the decision that would cost him fifty years in federal prison: he let two outsiders with cameras into his house. He thought they were going to make him famous. He didn't know Christine had been under a false prophet's spell herself, years before, and could read every move he was making the second he made it.In this extended interview, she walks me through the entire arc. The cover story. The mole identity. The years of going to local police who believed her tapes and refused to move. The Atonement recording she captured in late 2021 that finally turned the case federal. Julia Johnson, the mother she flipped, whose four daughters had been given to Bateman. The morning of the raid. And the hardest truth of the whole story — that fifty years in federal prison didn't break Bateman's grip on the people who believe in him, and a meaningful number of the women Christine risked her life to save are calling him their prophet still.If you've only seen the Netflix documentary, you've only seen the surface. This is the long version.LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #HiddenKillersLive #TrustMeFalseProphet #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #Cults #TrueCrime #Netflix

Samuel Bateman is in federal prison, serving fifty years, and his hold on his followers has not loosened. Some of his adult wives still call him their prophet. Some of the women Christine Marie risked her life to pull out of his house have returned to him on their own. He picks up the phone from his cell every day and the indoctrination keeps flowing right into their ears.In this third and final part of a three-part conversation, Christine Marie sits down with Tony to tell the part of the Bateman story the documentaries struggle to land. The conviction didn't end it. The sentence didn't end it. The exposure didn't end it. Warren Jeffs went to prison for life and his followers never let go either, and now the same population, in the same town, is doing the same thing with the next prophet who rose to take his place.Christine takes Tony through what she actually knows about what Bateman is telling those women from inside. The split between the women who left and the women who returned, and whether the ones who got out are now treated as fallen, as enemies of the faith. Why some women can walk out of a coercive group and rebuild — Christine herself did exactly that, years before she ever met Bateman — and others cannot. The point at which she's had to ask herself whether some grown adults may only ever feel at home inside something broken. And whether any change at the federal or state level would actually stop the next prophet from rising in Short Creek next.LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrueCrimeToday #ShortCreek #CultPsychology #CoerciveControl #TrueCrime #WarrenJeffs #Netflix

The Netflix docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet shows Christine Marie repeatedly bringing footage to the local police on the Utah-Arizona border — and the local police repeatedly sending her home. In this second part of a three-part conversation, Christine tells Tony what was really happening on the other side of that door.Short Creek had spent decades teaching itself to look away from its own children. By the time Samuel Bateman declared himself the new FLDS prophet and started taking "spiritual wives," some of them girls as young as nine, the local authorities had long since stopped seeing the patterns that were sitting right in front of them. The sergeant in the documentary believed Christine's footage. He still wouldn't move. Christine has thoughts on whether that was incompetence — or whether the town was quietly protecting one of its own.She walks Tony through the entire wait. Why she stayed with local cops as long as she did. What finally pushed her to skip them and go to the FBI. The recording in late 2021, where Bateman described handing three of his wives — one a minor — to three of his male followers, that finally broke the case open. The conversation she had with Julia Johnson, a mother whose four daughters had been given to Bateman, that turned her into a federal witness. The morning of the raid. And what she'd do differently if she could go back, knowing every month it dragged on was another month those girls were still in that house.It's a conversation about how a community can know what's happening to its own children and still find a way not to act.LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrueCrimeToday #ShortCreek #PoliceFailure #FBIRaid #TrueCrime #Cults #Netflix

Samuel Bateman wasn't hiding. He was operating in the open, on a street where the local police knew his name, in a town where the sheriff drove past his house every day. The most disturbing question about his case isn't how he got away with it. It's why everyone around him let him.In this second part of a three-part conversation with Christine Marie, we get into the wall that almost saved him. Short Creek, the FLDS community where Bateman built his sect, had spent decades teaching itself to look the other way. Polygamy was "how things are out there." Child marriages were "their lifestyle." By the time Christine and her husband Tolga arrived with cameras, the local authorities had stopped seeing what was happening in plain sight long before. The sergeant in the Netflix documentary all but says it himself — he believed her tapes, but moving on what they showed meant going to war with the way the town had always done things.Christine takes me through what that wait did to her. The moment she stopped trying to convince local cops and reached for the FBI. The recording she captured in late 2021, where Bateman described "the Atonement" — handing three of his wives, one a minor, to three of his men — that finally broke through. The mother she sat with and helped flip, Julia Johnson, whose four daughters had been given to Bateman. The morning of the raid, and how she pulled the girls away from him before federal agents moved. And the regret she lives with — what she'd have done differently to make it move faster.LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #HiddenKillers #ShortCreek #PoliceFailure #FBIRaid #TrueCrime #Cults #Netflix

Late 2021. Christine Marie's camera was rolling. Samuel Bateman started talking. And what he said in his own voice on that recording finally became the thing the FBI couldn't ignore.In this second part of our three-part interview, Christine tells the story of building a case against a man the local police would not touch. Short Creek — the FLDS community on the Utah-Arizona border where Bateman built his sect — had spent decades training itself not to notice what was happening to its own children. Polygamy was "their lifestyle." Underage marriages were "how it is out there." The sergeant Christine kept going to in the Netflix docuseries all but admits, on camera, that he believed her tapes and still couldn't move. The reasons he gives sound a lot less like incompetence the longer you listen.Christine walks me through the wait. Why she didn't go to the FBI sooner. What it cost her to keep going back to local cops who kept sending her home. The exact moment she captured Bateman describing the so-called "Atonement" — three of his wives, one a minor, handed to three of his men — and knew the dam had finally cracked. The conversation she had with Julia Johnson, a mother whose four daughters had been given to Bateman, that flipped her into a federal witness. The morning of the raid, and the precision it took to separate the girls from Bateman without tipping him. And the question she still carries with her — what she'd do differently to stop him faster, knowing every month it dragged on cost those girls more.LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #HiddenKillersLive #ShortCreek #PoliceFailure #FBIRaid #TrueCrime #Cults #Netflix

The Netflix docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet introduced the world to the woman who took Samuel Bateman down from the inside. But the documentary couldn't tell the whole story. There's a conversation behind that footage — about what it actually took to walk into a self-proclaimed prophet's house every day, lie about why you were there, and quietly build a case that would put him in federal prison for fifty years.In this first part of a three-part interview, Christine Marie sits down with Tony to tell that story.Christine and her husband Tolga moved to Short Creek on the Utah-Arizona border in 2016, planning a project that had nothing to do with Samuel Bateman. Then Bateman rose out of the post-Warren Jeffs FLDS community, declaring himself the new prophet, taking "spiritual wives," some of them girls as young as nine. He sized up the two outsiders with cameras and made a decision that would end his freedom — he let them in. He thought they were going to make a film that would carry him to the world. He didn't know Christine had once been under another false prophet's spell years earlier. He didn't know she could read him on sight.She tells Tony what it took to keep his trust. The double life she lived for years inside that community. The performance she had to put on for his wives. The moment "documentary" became "evidence-gathering" in her own head. And the strange truth she still wrestles with — whether Bateman knew, somewhere underneath all of it, that he wasn't really a prophet at all.LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #TrueCrimeToday #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #Cults #TrueCrime #ColoradoCity #Netflix

A man who trusted almost no outsiders sat down across from Christine Marie and handed her the access that would eventually put him in federal prison for fifty years. He didn't know what she was. He didn't know her history. He didn't know what she could see.When Christine and her husband Tolga first moved to Short Creek — that quiet stretch of FLDS country along the Utah-Arizona border — they came for a completely different reason than the world now associates with their names. They had a different project, a gentler one, meant to humanize a community most outsiders had condemned. Samuel Bateman wasn't anywhere on their radar. Then, slowly, he became the entire story.He cast himself as the new prophet. He took "spiritual wives," some of them girls. He looked at these two outsiders with cameras and made a calculation: they could be useful. He let them film him. He let them sit with his women. He sat for the camera and preached, certain his words were about to be carried to the world.Christine carried them to the FBI instead.In this first part of a three-part conversation, she tells me how she pulled it off. What she pretended to believe. How she got him to keep handing her access. The moment she stopped thinking of herself as a documentary maker and admitted, even to herself, that she was a mole. Whether the women around Bateman were really performing or really believed. And the most uncomfortable question of all — did Bateman ever quietly know he wasn't who he said he was?LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #HiddenKillers #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #Cults #TrueCrime #ColoradoCity #Netflix

Christine Marie watched Samuel Bateman every single day for years. She sat at his table. She filmed his sermons. She listened to his wives recite their devotion to him. And she has an answer to the question true crime listeners keep asking about him — was he a true believer, or did he know, deep down, that he was a fraud?She's the one outsider who got close enough to actually know.Christine and her husband Tolga moved to Short Creek with a completely different project in mind, planning to film something else entirely in the FLDS community along the Utah-Arizona border. Then Samuel Bateman walked into their lives — a self-proclaimed prophet rising out of the wreckage of Warren Jeffs' imprisonment, taking "spiritual wives," some of them children, claiming Jeffs spoke through him. He thought Christine and Tolga were going to make him famous. He gave them access nobody else got. And the entire time, she was watching him with the eyes of a woman who'd once fallen for a false prophet herself, years earlier — a woman who knew every move he was making because she'd had them made on her.In this opening conversation of our three-part interview, Christine takes us inside Bateman's world. Why he trusted her. What it cost to maintain that lie every day. The performance the women around him put on — and the real belief underneath it. The moment she admitted, even to herself, that "filmmaker" had become "mole." And what she saw in Bateman that made her wonder whether even he knew the whole thing was a con.LINKS BLOCKJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodDISCLAIMERThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.HASHTAGS#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #HiddenKillersLive #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #Cults #TrueCrime #ColoradoCity #Netflix

Warren Jeffs will die behind bars. The FLDS he built is hemorrhaging members. Short Creek—the community he sealed off from the world—now has soccer games, bars, and a winery. But the story is not over. From a Texas prison cell, Jeffs continues issuing edicts. A hardened core of followers—scattered across multiple states—still considers him their prophet. Reports suggest plural marriage may be restarting in hidden locations.The final episode of the Hidden Killers five-part FLDS series covers the financial reckoning: a $152 million judgment, a $12 million food stamp fraud case, and Elissa Wall's years-long pursuit of hidden assets through shell companies. We cover the Bateman connection—how the FLDS vacuum produced another self-declared prophet who was arrested on federal charges and died in custody. And we cover the people rebuilding—the Lost Boys reclaiming the community that expelled them, the survivors who testified, and the organizations providing resources to those still trying to leave.For the true crime community, this is the question that refuses to close: the man is in prison, the money is hidden, the community is scattered, and the faithful are still waiting for their prophet to come home. Is it over? The evidence says not yet.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#WarrenJeffs #FLDS #TrueCrimeToday #FLDSToday #FLDSChurch #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #ProphetInPrison #CultSurvivors #CultExposed

The conviction was life plus twenty years. The civil judgment was $152 million. And Warren Jeffs is still issuing orders from a prison cell in East Texas. According to multiple reports, his brothers have served as conduits—using coded letters and allegedly hidden recording devices to relay instructions. A 2022 edict called former members back to the FLDS and triggered the redistribution of children among families deemed worthy or unworthy by a man who will never walk free.The final episode of the Hidden Killers investigation into Warren Jeffs and the FLDS examines the aftermath of the conviction. The $152 million judgment that may be uncollectible. Elissa Wall's pursuit of Jeffs' hidden money through shell companies and remote land purchases. Seth Jeffs' guilty plea in a $12 million food stamp fraud scheme. The faithful remnant scattered in hidden compounds. The rise and fall of Samuel Bateman—the self-declared prophet who filled the vacuum Jeffs left. And the transformation of Short Creek, where the community Jeffs controlled for decades has been released from court supervision ahead of schedule.The FLDS is fractured. It is not dead. And the question this investigation ends on is whether the system that produced Warren Jeffs can outlive the man who built it.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#WarrenJeffs #FLDS #HiddenKillers #FLDSToday #FLDSChurch #TrueCrime #CultInvestigation #ProphetInPrison #CultSurvivors #ShortCreek

The evidence is staggering in its scope. Under Warren Jeffs, the FLDS married girls as young as twelve to men decades older. Of the girls aged fourteen to seventeen on the YFZ Ranch, more than one in four was either married or pregnant when investigators finally gained access. Hundreds of teenage boys were expelled to reduce competition for brides. Wives were reassigned to new husbands when their original partners fell out of favor. And the entire system operated behind a wall of silence enforced by two words: keep sweet.Part Two of the Hidden Killers investigation into Warren Jeffs and the FLDS examines the internal mechanics of the machine. How information was sealed—no TV, no internet, no unapproved books. How marriage functioned as a reward system for loyalists and a punishment for dissenters. How the 1953 Short Creek raid created a fifty-year window where no government agency would intervene, and how Jeffs exploited that paralysis to expand his control unchecked. We follow Elissa Wall from her forced marriage at fourteen through her decision to cooperate with prosecutors, and we document the trajectory of the Lost Boys—from expulsion to homelessness to a $250,000 settlement that valued their stolen childhoods at pennies on the dollar.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#WarrenJeffs #FLDS #HiddenKillers #ForcedMarriage #LostBoys #FLDSChurch #TrueCrime #CultAbuse #KeepSweet #CultInvestigation

The Warren Jeffs story didn't begin with an arrest or a courtroom. It began inside a school. At twenty-one, Jeffs was running Alta Academy—a private FLDS school housed in his father's compound—with no degree and unchecked authority over hundreds of children. Former students describe destruction lectures that gave them nightmares for years, private interrogation sessions with kids as young as second grade, and a surveillance culture where children were rewarded for informing on their own parents.When his father Rulon died in 2002, Jeffs moved fast. He claimed his father's widows as his own wives. He expelled dissenters and redistributed their families to loyalists. He used his sole authority over FLDS marriages to build a network of men who owed him everything—and he controlled the $100 million United Effort Plan trust that held every home in Short Creek. Cross him, and you lost your wife, your kids, and your roof in the same conversation.Part One of our five-part investigation into Warren Jeffs and the FLDS examines how absolute power is assembled—not in a single dramatic act, but quietly, over decades, by a man who figured out that controlling someone's family, home, education, and God means you never need to raise your voice.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#WarrenJeffs #FLDS #HiddenKillers #CultInvestigation #FLDSChurch #TrueCrime #ShortCreek #PolygamyCult #CultLeader #TrueCrimePodcast

The Samuel Bateman case is the most significant cult-based child trafficking prosecution in years, and Netflix's Trust Me: The False Prophet has put it back in the national conversation. In this full-length panel discussion, former FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke and psychotherapist Shavaun Scott join Tony Brueski to cover the complete arc of the case — from how Bateman built his operation to whether the system that created him is capable of producing another one.The behavioral analysis: how a man with no resources, no credentials, and no institutional power recruited fifty people and convinced fathers to hand over their children within three years. The trauma reality: what the documentary's footage reveals about the psychological conditioning of Bateman's wives and victims — the silence in forensic interviews, the journals that told the truth, the children who experienced rescue as a threat. The structural question: why the FLDS survives when other cults collapse after their leaders are removed, what Jeffs' continued influence from prison means, and whether the Short Creek community is at a genuine turning point or just in a pause between prophets.Robin and Shavaun bring decades of combined expertise in behavioral analysis, trauma recovery, and coercive control. Tony brings the case knowledge from Hidden Killers' five-part series on Bateman. Together, this is the most comprehensive conversation on this case outside of a courtroom.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #FalseProphet #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #CultAbuse

Bateman is in prison. Bistline got life. The case is over. But every time someone asks whether this is finished, the answer keeps circling back to the same uncomfortable truth — the FLDS has survived every attempt to dismantle it for nearly a century. Warren Jeffs is still reportedly running operations from a Texas cell. The One Man Rule doctrine that created the vacancy Bateman filled hasn't changed. And somewhere in Short Creek, children are growing up under the same conditions that produced the last two generations of victims.This is the final part of our three-part panel with former FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke, psychotherapist Shavaun Scott, and Tony Brueski. We go where the Netflix documentary can't — into the structural question of whether any amount of prosecution can break a cycle that's embedded in theology, geography, and generational conditioning.We talk about Faith Bistline raising the children her brothers sacrificed. Christine Marie still living in Short Creek, still running her nonprofit. The Dream Center operating out of Jeffs' former compound. These are real signs of change. But Shavaun and Robin bring the hard lens — what they've each seen in their careers about how systems like this adapt, survive, and regenerate. The final question is direct: another Bateman, or is this where it finally turns? Both experts answer it honestly.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ShortCreek #FaithBistline #CultJustice #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #FalseProphet #TrustMeNetflix #CultRecovery

This is the conversation we've been building toward since we started covering the Samuel Bateman case. Former FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke and psychotherapist Shavaun Scott join Tony for a full panel discussion timed to Netflix's Trust Me: The False Prophet — covering the behavioral mechanics, the psychological damage, and the question of whether Short Creek can ever break the cycle.We go move by move through how a broke, homeless man turned a fractured religious community into his personal supply chain within three years. How public confessions became weapons. How narcissism became a recruitment tool. How loyalty survived Bateman's arrest and allowed him to orchestrate a kidnapping from a federal cell.Then we go inside the damage. The children who wrote their abuse in journals but couldn't say it to a forensic interviewer. The wives who were victims before they were perpetrators. Donnae Barlow — married to her uncle, terminally ill child, diagnosed with PTSD, convicted for kidnapping kids she thought she was saving. The parents who showed up at sentencing for Bateman instead of their own daughters.And we land where the documentary can't: the future. Faith Bistline raising the girls her brothers destroyed. Jeffs still directing FLDS operations from prison. The FLDS surviving everything the justice system has thrown at it. Two experts, one question — is this over or not?Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #FalseProphet #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #CultAbuse

The full panel, live and uncut. Former FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke and psychotherapist Shavaun Scott are sitting down with Tony for a complete breakdown of the Samuel Bateman case and Netflix's Trust Me: The False Prophet — from how he built the cult, to what it did to the people inside, to whether Short Creek will ever stop producing predators who call themselves prophets.Robin spent two decades reading human behavior at the highest levels of federal law enforcement. Shavaun has spent thirty years treating trauma survivors and grew up inside religious extremism herself. Together, they bring something no documentary can — the expert lens on what you watched and the clinical understanding of what you felt.We're covering everything. The behavioral playbook. The psychological wreckage. The impossible question of the wives who were victims and perpetrators at the same time. Faith Bistline raising her brothers' victims. The girl who told Bateman she never needed him. And the question the doc leaves hanging: is another Bateman coming?We're taking your questions throughout. Come ready.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #TrustMeNetflix #ShortCreek #FalseProphet #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #RobinDreeke #ShavaunScott #CultAbuse

The final segment of our live three-part panel on the Bateman case and Netflix's Trust Me: The False Prophet. Parts 1 and 2 covered how he built it and what it did to the people inside. Now we're talking about what happens next — and whether "next" means healing or repetition.Former FBI Behavioral Analysis Chief Robin Dreeke and psychotherapist Shavaun Scott are back with Tony for the conversation about the future of Short Creek. The FLDS has survived everything the justice system has thrown at it. Jeffs is still calling shots from prison. The theology is intact. Children are still being raised inside the system. So is this over, or are we waiting for the sequel?We're talking about Faith Bistline raising the girls her brothers gave to Bateman. About what intervention actually looks like for kids still inside a high-control group. About whether the FLDS is structurally different from cults that collapsed when their leader fell. And we're asking both experts the question you've been sitting with since the documentary ended: is this cycle breakable?Last call for your live questions. This is where we land.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ShortCreek #FaithBistline #CultJustice #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #FalseProphet #TrustMeNetflix #CultRecovery

Christine Marie, cult psychology expert, joins me to discuss Netflix's Trust Me: The False Prophet. This four-part docuseries follows Christine and her husband, videographer Tolga Katas, as they embed themselves in the FLDS community in Short Creek, a town straddling the Utah-Arizona border long associated with fundamentalist Mormonism. What begins as an effort to support a fractured community in the wake of leader Warren Jeffs' imprisonment turns into something far more dangerous. As they gain the trust of Samuel Bateman, a self-proclaimed prophet who rises to power after Jeffs, Christine and Tolga begin documenting his inner circle. Bateman, believing he is being filmed for a project that will amplify his message, allows unprecedented access. But behind the scenes, Christine and Tolga are gathering evidence of coercion, control, and the sexual abuse of women and underage girls. The series captures, in real time, the unraveling of Bateman's authority. A 2022 traffic stop leads to his arrest, followed by a federal investigation and raid that exposes the full scope of his crimes. He was later sentenced to 50 years in prison. Reality Life with Kate Casey What to Watch List: https://katecasey.substack.com Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/katecasey Twitter: https://twitter.com/katecasey Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/katecaseyca Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@itskatecasey?lang=en Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/113157919338245 Amazon List: https://www.amazon.com/shop/katecasey Like it to Know It: https://www.shopltk.com/explore/katecaseySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Samuel Bateman positioned himself as the heir to imprisoned FLDS leader Warren Jeffs, building a breakaway sect of roughly fifty followers along the Arizona-Utah border. By the time he was arrested during an August 2022 traffic stop in Flagstaff, Arizona, he had claimed more than twenty wives — at least ten of them under eighteen according to federal prosecutors, with the youngest reportedly nine years old. He was sentenced in December 2024 to fifty years in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to transport minors for criminal sexual activity and conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Eleven of his adult followers were also convicted.The Netflix documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet chronicles how cult researcher Christine Marie and her husband, videographer Tolga Katas, infiltrated Bateman's inner circle and gathered evidence that became central to the federal investigation. The footage captures Bateman openly describing abuse, followers operating under total obedience, and a community where children were given as spiritual wives while the town of Short Creek watched in silence.Robin Dreeke, retired chief of the FBI's Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, analyzes the behavioral control mechanisms Bateman employed — isolation, religious authority, family separation, and enforced compliance — and examines why some of his adult followers remain loyal even after his conviction, while all nine of his identified underage victims have since testified against him.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #TrustMeTheFalseProphet #Netflix #FLDS #WarrenJeffs #ShortCreek #CultLeader #RobinDreeke #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime

Robin Dreeke, retired chief of the FBI's Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, provides extended expert analysis across three interconnected investigations — applying decades of behavioral expertise to the Duggar family's private crisis communications, the family system that produced two sons facing charges or convictions involving children, and the psychological control mechanisms of FLDS cult leader Samuel Bateman.The behavioral throughline is chosen silence — how families, religious communities, and the people inside them develop and maintain systems that protect image at the expense of the people being harmed. Dreeke examines this pattern in the Duggar family's jail calls and emails, where language choices reveal trained minimization and crisis management. He identifies it in the family structure itself — the parenting model, the obedience framework, the internal culture that Jim Bob and Michelle built and exported — and the question of why that system produced the same kind of harm across two sons. And he traces it through the FLDS community of Short Creek, where Bateman operated openly — driving through town with underage wives visible to everyone — and no one called authorities.The analysis draws on the unprecedented footage captured by Christine Marie and Tolga Katas for the Netflix documentary Trust Me: The False Prophet, the public record of the Duggar family's communications, and Dreeke's expertise in reading the behavioral signatures that distinguish genuine ignorance from chosen silence.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#JosephDuggar #SamuelBateman #TrustMeTheFalseProphet #DuggarFamily #FLDS #RobinDreeke #HiddenKillers #TrueCrime #Netflix #CultPsychology

Samuel Bateman is serving fifty years. His follower Ladell Bistline Jr. got life after giving six of his underage daughters to Bateman and participating in their abuse. Torrance Bistline, the financial engine behind the operation, got thirty-five years. Seven of Bateman's adult wives were convicted. In total, all eleven co-defendants in this case have been held accountable — making it one of the most thorough federal prosecutions of cult-based child trafficking in recent history.But accountability and resolution are different things. This final episode examines what justice looks like when it can't undo the damage. The defense called Bateman "mentally ill" and "delusional," the product of an upbringing that normalized the criminal. The prosecution countered that Bateman and his followers built their own ideology to serve their own interests. The judge sentenced him to what amounts to a life sentence and called him the worst kind of abuser.Meanwhile, Faith Bistline — who escaped the FLDS and spent years fighting to expose Bateman — is now caring for the children her own brothers helped destroy. Parents of victimized girls attended court hearings to support Bateman, not their daughters. And the conditions that produced both Warren Jeffs and Samuel Bateman remain structurally intact in Short Creek, where thousands of FLDS members still live under the One Man Rule theology.The hopeful counterweight: the Short Creek Dream Center, built inside Jeffs' former compound, serves as a refuge for people leaving. Survivors are rebuilding. The rescued girls are in school, driving, reclaiming their lives. One of them stood in a courtroom and told Bateman she never needed him. That's the sound of someone breaking free from a system built to make escape impossible. The question is how many others are still waiting.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #FaithBistline #FalseProphet #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #ShortCreek #CultJustice #ChildBrides #TrustMeNetflix

The FBI couldn't get inside. Police had questioned Bateman twice and left empty-handed. The FLDS community was built over a century to resist outside scrutiny, and it was working. The formal institutions designed to protect children had failed to penetrate the wall. So two people who weren't part of any institution did it instead.Christine Marie is a cult researcher who moved to Short Creek with her filmmaker husband Tolga Katas in 2016. They came to help — Christine started a nonprofit supporting people leaving the FLDS. When Bateman declared himself a prophet and the abuse began, they shifted from humanitarian work to covert intelligence gathering. Tolga filmed hundreds of hours inside Bateman's operation. Christine built trust within his circle and recorded a critical conversation where Bateman described orchestrating sexual acts with minors. She delivered that recording to law enforcement. The FBI investigation that followed led to Bateman's arrest and a fifty-year sentence.Their footage became the basis for Netflix's Trust Me: The False Prophet, directed by Rachel Dretzin of Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey. Dretzin has called what Christine and Tolga captured "a blueprint for how to dismantle even the most entrenched systems of abuse."But the personal cost was steep. Christine had children of her own in the community. Bateman's followers had already shown they would kidnap children and flee across state lines. If her role was discovered, the danger was not hypothetical. She reflected: "I was so trusted. I wanted to help them before they found out I was a mole. I'm not betraying them — I'm helping them, right?" The girls now living free probably have an answer to that question. Whether it's the only answer is what makes this episode worth hearing.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #ChristineMarie #TolgaKatas #TrustMeNetflix #FLDS #FalseProphet #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #ShortCreek #CultExpert

Every cult case reaches a point where the same question surfaces: when parents won't protect their children, when police ask questions and accept lies, when a community closes ranks around a predator — who steps in? In the Bateman case, the answer is two civilians who had no obligation to act and every reason not to.Christine Marie and Tolga Katas moved to Short Creek to help a broken community. They ended up inside the inner circle of the man breaking it further. Christine ran a nonprofit called Voices for Dignity. Tolga was filming a documentary. When Bateman rose and started collecting wives — including children — they pivoted from community support to covert documentation. They captured conversations, recorded daily life inside his compound, and gathered testimony from women who were beginning to speak about what was happening behind closed doors.The pivotal moment came when Bateman sat Christine in his Bentley and described the "Atonement" — the sexual acts he was orchestrating with adults and children — as if it were church business. She called her law enforcement contact and said: "I got the bombshell you've been waiting for." That recording, and the hundreds of hours of footage Tolga forwarded to the FBI, became foundational evidence in the federal case.This is the episode that connects directly to the Netflix docuseries Trust Me: The False Prophet, built from Christine and Tolga's footage. But we go beyond the documentary into the ethical complexity of what they did — the relationships they built under false pretenses, the women who trusted them and are now in prison, and the daily calculation Christine made between the evidence she was gathering and the safety of her own children living in the same community.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #ChristineMarie #TolgaKatas #TrustMeNetflix #FLDS #FalseProphet #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #ShortCreek #CultExpert

The prosecutor put photographs on the screen. One by one. Each one a child. Each one identified by name. Some were nine years old when their own fathers handed them to Samuel Bateman as spiritual wives. That image — a federal prosecutor presenting child victims like evidence while their parents sat in the same courtroom backing the man who abused them — is the emotional center of this episode.Part 2 of the False Prophet series breaks open the operation that made Bateman's abuse possible. Not just what he did, but who helped. The Bistline brothers who bankrolled his lifestyle and transported children across state lines. The followers who relocated their families to Short Creek specifically to be closer to Bateman. The fathers who gave pre-pubescent girls to a man they knew was having sexual contact with them — and then lied to police to protect him.We go deep into the control mechanics: public confessions used as leverage, sexual punishment that made every participant complicit, a closed loop where obedience bred compromise and compromise made escape impossible. And we confront the hardest question in this case — the adult wives who were both perpetrators and victims. Women raised inside the FLDS, conditioned since birth, some married off to relatives as teenagers. One co-defendant's child has a terminal genetic condition found only in offspring of blood relatives. The justice system tried to draw a line between victimhood and complicity. This episode sits on that line and asks whether it can ever be drawn cleanly.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChildBrides #CultAbuse #FalseProphet #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #ShortCreek #LadellBistline #TrustMeNetflix

The FLDS put Warren Jeffs in prison for life. Then the same community, the same theology, and the same obedience structure produced Samuel Bateman — and he did it all over again. More than twenty wives. Children as young as nine. Fathers volunteering their own daughters. An interstate operation spanning four states. And a fifty-year federal sentence that might still not be enough to break the cycle.Bateman's case is the most significant cult-based child trafficking prosecution in years, and it's back in the spotlight with Netflix's Trust Me: The False Prophet, which chronicles the couple who infiltrated his inner circle and helped bring him down. But the documentary tells only part of the story. This five-part series tells the rest — starting with the system that made Bateman possible.Short Creek, the twin communities of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, has been the FLDS stronghold for nearly a century. Jeffs ran it as a closed state — cameras in homes, security patrols, no outside media, marriages assigned and dissolved at his sole discretion. When he went to prison, he tried to maintain control through coded letters and phone calls. His followers built wooden replicas of his cell to sit inside and share his suffering. But the community splintered, and Bateman recruited from the broken pieces — people conditioned from birth to follow a prophet, desperate for someone to fill the void.The question this episode asks isn't how Bateman became a prophet. It's what kind of place produces them generation after generation — and whether anything can stop it.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #WarrenJeffs #ShortCreek #FalseProphet #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #CultAbuse #ChildBrides #TrustMeNetflix

Warren Jeffs got life. His community fractured. And within a few years, another man stepped into the same role, used the same theology, and destroyed another generation of girls. This is how the FLDS prophet factory works — and why locking up the man at the top has never been enough to stop the cycle.Samuel Bateman went from borrowing twenty dollars to commanding fifty followers and more than twenty wives in roughly three years. He drove Bentleys. He paraded his wives on flatbed trailers through town. He demanded fathers hand over their daughters as acts of divine obedience — and they did. Girls as young as nine were claimed as spiritual wives. The FBI says he coerced children into group sexual acts, live-streamed abuse, and gave victims to adult male followers.Before any of that, he tried to marry his own daughter. She was fourteen. He offered her Doritos and fifty dollars. She told her mother. They got a restraining order. And he kept going — because in the FLDS, a prophet's word overrides a court order in the minds of the people who follow him.This is Part 1 of a five-part Hidden Killers series that goes deeper than the Netflix documentary can. We trace the architecture — how Short Creek was built, how Jeffs weaponized it, how his imprisonment created the vacuum Bateman exploited, and why the theological framework that produced both men remains intact. If you've followed this show through the Duggar series, you already know how patriarchal religious systems weaponize faith against women and children. This case takes that pattern to its most extreme conclusion.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#SamuelBateman #FLDS #WarrenJeffs #ShortCreek #FalseProphet #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #CultAbuse #ChildBrides #TrustMeNetflix

Today, I get to talk with someone whose story has stayed with me for years. Shirlee Draper grew up in a polygamist community that became more controlling and unsafe as time went on. With no money, no work history, and no support outside her community, she made the difficult decision to leave everything behind and start over. We discuss the tension between staying and knowing something isn't right, and what it takes to start trusting yourself again. This conversation is not just about Shirlee's journey—it's about what can happen when women find their voice and their autonomy. Here's what we cover:How Shirlee spent years saving money and quietly planning before she could leaveWhat it means to choose the “least harmful option” when every choice feels like a betrayalWhy we can't understand other people's choices without their experiences and contextWhy decision-making is something you have to learn after being told what to do your whole lifeWhat it looks like to help women build their own inner voice instead of replacing it with another authorityShirlee Draper was born and raised in “Short Creek.” After leaving the community, she obtained a Bachelor of Social Work and a Master of Public Administration. She has served in many capacities in the rebirth of her hometown, including facilitating the election of the first female mayor in 2017; opening a community health clinic in 2019; serving on the board of the UEP Trust and Short Creek Community Center; and part of the Collective Impact project aimed at community revitalization.She is employed as Deputy Director for Cherish Families, a social service nonprofit which helps people from polygamous backgrounds move from crisis to thriving. She specializes in bridging the population with mainstream society and provides education for outside service providers and government agencies She also serves on several state and civic committees. Shirlee lives in St. George with her special needs children and loves to play the piano, read and travel.Find Shirlee here:cherishfamilies.org instagram.com/shirlee_jd facebook.com/shirlee.draperlinkedin.com/in/shirlee-draper lostandfound.club/events Support Cherish Families' workFind Sara here:sarafisk.coachpages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversationsinstagram.com/sarafiskcoachfacebook.com/SaraFiskCoachingtiktok.com/@sarafiskcoachyoutube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333What happens inside the free Stop People Pleasing Facebook Community? Our goal is to provide help and guidance on your journey to eliminate people pleasing and perfectionism from your life. We heal best in a safe community where we can grow and learn together and celebrate and encourage each other. This group is for posting questions about or experiences with material learned in The Ex-Good Girl podcast, Sara Fisk Coaching social media posts or the free webinars and trainings provided by Sara Fisk Coaching. See you inside!Book a Free Consult

Diese Folge ist schon vor Monaten in der Podimo App veröffentlicht worden. In der Podimo App findet ihr schon jetzt 60 kostenlose Folgen, die ihr ganz ohne Anmeldung oder Abo hören könnt – Einfach nur die App öffnen und ‘12 Leben' finden: https://podimo.de/12leben Zusätzlich zu den 60 kostenlosen Folgen findet ihr dort auch die neueste Staffel im Premium-Bereich. _ Short Creek, USA, 06. Januar 2004: Als der Vater der 18-jährigen Briell in die Küche kommt und sie ernst anschaut, ahnt Briell nicht, wie dieser Tag für sie enden wird. Weil sie ihr Leben lang gelernt hat, ihren Eltern zu gehorchen, folgt sie ihrem Vater, als er sie auffordert mitzukommen. Als Briell den Namen des Mannes hört, der sie zu sich beordert hat, weiß sie: Heute ist der Tag, an dem sie die 65. Ehefrau des Sektenführers Warren Jeffs wird. In dieser Folge hören wir Briell selbst, wie sie darüber spricht, dass sie in der ‘Fundamentalistischen Kirche Jesu Christi der Heiligen der Letzten Tage' (FLDS) aufgewachsen ist und wie sie es geschafft hat, der Sekte zu entkommen. Katharina Portmann, wissenschaftliche Referentin bei der evangelischen Zentrale für Weltanschauungen, erklärt außerdem, welche Rolle Frauen in der FLDS spielen, und wieso es für viele Menschen so schwer ist, Sekten zu verlassen. Triggerwarnung: Diese Folge behandelt Schilderungen von Kindesmissbrauch, sexualisierter und psychischer Gewalt und Suizid. Bei Gewalterfahrungen findet ihr anonym und kostenfrei Unterstützung unter folgenden Nummern: Hilfetelefon “Gewalt gegen Frauen”: 08000 116 016 (rund um die Uhr) Telefonseelsorge: 0800 111 0 111 (rund um die Uhr) Opfer-Telefon vom Weißen Ring: 116 006 (7-22h Uhr) Mehr Infos bekommt Ihr auf der Homepage der Online Datenbank für Betroffene von Straftaten: www.odabs.org Hier findet ihr außerdem Hilfe, wenn es um Sekten & konfliktreiche Bewegungen geht: Sekteninfo Berlin: +49 30 90227-5574 https://www.berlin.de/sen/jugend/familie-und-kinder/sekteninfo-berlin/ Sekteninfo NRW: Tel: 0201 - 23 46 46 (Montag - Freitag, außer Mittwoch: 09:30 - 12:00 Uhr & 13:00 - 15:30 Uhr) https://sekten-info-nrw.de/ Falls ihr Feedback, Anmerkungen oder selbst eine Geschichte habt, die ihr mit uns teilen möchtet, könnt ihr uns jederzeit eine Mail schreiben an: 12leben.podimo@gmail.com "12 Leben – Verbrechen an Frauen" ist ein Podcast von Podimo. Hosts: Helen Schulte und Massimo Maio Autorin dieser Folge: Katharina Fräbel Schnitt und Sound: Frieder Maurer & Luca Sartori (hipitch) Ausführende Produzentin: Madeleine Petry

In this Feedback Friday field trip, I take you directly into the heart of Short Creek, known today as Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. It once was the historic stronghold of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the FLDS. This is the community built around plural marriage, prophetic control, and absolute obedience, led for decades by self-proclaimed prophet Warren Jeffs, now serving life in a Texas prison for sexually assaulting young girls. As we drive through the streets of this once-sealed polygamist enclave, we stop at key locations that defined FLDS power: the massive compound built by Warren Jeffs' father Rulon Jeffs to house eighty-seven wives, the offices where obedience was enforced, and the meeting house where men were stripped of their families from the pulpit. You'll see where Jeffs escaped federal arrest, how the United Effort Plan centralized wealth and control, and how law enforcement was sidelined by church authority. We'll revisit the scars of history, including the infamous 1953 Short Creek Raid, the infant cemetery that still haunts investigators, and the burial grounds reserved only for the faithful. Along the way, we talk about secret police, hidden caves, the collapse of the FLDS corporate structure, and the uneasy reality that Warren Jeffs still exerts influence from behind prison walls. #Polygamy #PluralMarriage #FLDS #WarrenJeffs #RulonJeffs #ShortCreek #Hildale #ColoradoCity #ShortCreekRaid #1953Raid #FLDSCrimes #CultCrime #ReligiousAbuse #CoerciveControl #CriminalCults #TrueCrime #TrueCrimeCommunity #CultSurvivors #PolygamyAbuse #ChildAbuseAwareness #FLDSHistory #CrimeDocumentary #ProfilingEvil #JusticeForVictims #HumanTrafficking #ReligiousExtremism #CultAccountability ========================================https://gamutpodcasts.com/show/gardensofevilinsidethezionsocietycult/========================================20% OFF Newspapers.comhttps://www.newspapers.com/go/podcast/?ref=profilingevil?xid=8877&utm_source=ProfilingEvilPodcast&utm_medium=podcst&utm_campaign=ProfilingEvil26========================================FLDS StoryMap: https://arcg.is/0Gm4r1 ========================================Email your questions to: ProfilingEvil@gmail.com========================================

Grab a beer and join us tonight as we continue our series on the FLDS! We'll follow Warren Jeffs as he tightens his grip on Short Creek, kicks kids out of public school, tears down community landmarks, and starts excommunicating longtime leaders while dumping so-called “lost boys” on the side of the highway. We'll talk about his push to build new “lands of refuge” like the YFZ Ranch, how the forced marriages of underage girls escalated, and how law enforcement, former members, and the courts finally started to push back with raids, lawsuits, and criminal charges, all while Warren slips into hiding on the run from the FBI. https://www.necronomipod.com https://www.patreon.com/necronomipod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Grab a beer and join us tonight as we continue our series on Mormonism and the FLDS! We'll get into how plural marriage went from a secret in Nauvoo to a public doctrine in Utah that put the church on a collision course with the U.S. government. We'll go through the anti-polygamy crackdowns and the 1890 Manifesto, then follow the believers who refused to give it up into the remote Short Creek community, where they built the FLDS. https://www.necronomipod.com https://www.patreon.com/necronomipod Sponsored by BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com/necro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Atkins joined me to talk about Rye Playland, his high school baseball career; modeling; meeting Claudia Black and running into her 40 later; modeling with Brooke Shields, Phoebe Cates, and Lisanne Frank; showing his swing in Blue Lagoon, Randall Kleiser making him sleep with a Brooke Shields poster over his bed for a week before meeting her; swimming with a professional naked baby; William Daniels; being beaten at The Golden Globes by Timothy Hutton; Child Bride of Short Creek about FLDS; Night of 100 Star; hanging out with Paul Newman, Gene Kelly, Mickey Rooney, and Princess Grace; I Love Liberty; The Pirate Movie; Kristy McNichol and its long cult status; her chewing gun; possible reunion; his hit "How Can I Live Without Her"; appearing on American Bandstand; doing Rock 'n' Roll Summer (1985) with Dick Clark; doing a parody of Nastassja Kinski's snake poster; doing Carson with guest host Joan Rivers; getting treated like the Beatles; A Night in Heaven; Perfect Match; Dallas; having Larry Hagman help you move into your dressing room; doing Circus of the Stars and putting your head in a lions mouth; Beaks; doing two movies as a love interest for Joe Pesci's real life girlfriend; twice doing the Jerry Lewis Telethon; Smoke 'n' Lightning; playing a crew member from Blue Lagoon who died of AIDS in It's My Party; his film Amy; how he got into writing and how he wants to make his own film

The FLDS community of Short Creek is at the center of the largest outbreak of measles Arizona has seen in decades. It comes as the town has tried to move beyond the legacy of Warren Jeffs. Plus, a visit the Jane Goodall archive, housed at ASU.

Short Creek consists of the twin FLDS cities of Hildale, Utah & Colorado City, Arizona. Come along as Rick Bennett visits these 2 communities that were founded on the Utah-Arizona border to escape prosecution for polygamy. We'll visit Warren Jeffs house which is now the "Most Wanted Hotel" because Warren Jeffs was on the FBI Most Wanted List. Check it out! https://youtu.be/XPFPXiCjJ-g polygamy polygamy Don't miss our other episodes on Mormon fundamentalism! https://gospeltangents.com/denominations/fundamentalism/ Copyright © 2025 Gospel Tangents All Rights Reserved Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission. transcript to follow Copyright © 2025 Gospel Tangents All Rights Reserved Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission.

In this video, we take you behind the scenes of an incredible transformation made possible by your generous donations! Together, we renovated a men's common room at the Short Creek Dream Center, turning it into a warm, inspiring, and welcoming space now known as "The Phoenix Room." What makes this project even more meaningful is the history of the building. The Short Creek Dream Center is located in the very house where Warren Jeffs, the FLDS leader, once lived. Today, it stands as a beacon of hope, healing, and new beginnings for those escaping polygamy and seeking a better life. Your support made this possible, and we can't thank you enough!

Most of the main branches of the Restoration were formed within roughly two decades of the martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph Smith. One clear exception, however, is the Mormon Fundamentalist movement. Here's a little backstory: In 1890 President Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto announcing the Church's intention to submit to those laws recently passed and declared constitutional by the US Supreme Court forbidding plural marriage. Then in 1904, as a result of the Reed Smoot hearings before the US Senate and the national attention this brought to the continued practice of plural marriage in Utah, President Joseph F. Smith issued what is known as the “Second Manifesto,” which announced the Church's policy to excommunicate anyone who continued to enter into new polygamous marriages.  Yet some Church members felt that the manifestos of Presidents Woodruff and Smith were not inspired. Instead, they saw them as weak and uninspired capitulations to government demands rather than a continued courageous commitment to God's commands in the face of persecution. Within a few decades, those who dissented against these manifestos or were excommunicated from the LDS Church for entering into additional plural marriages began to gather on the Utah/Arizona border at a place known as Short Creek. They believed in a 1912 statement by Lorin C. Woolley, who had been courier for President John Taylor, about an unpublished 1886 revelation of President Taylor wherein the Lord declared that the “New and Everlasting Covenant” had not been revoked, nor would it ever be. This was interpreted by those in this group to mean that plural marriage would never be withdrawn. They concluded therefore that President Taylor's unpublished revelation (and their interpretation of it) overruled and superceded the first manifesto of President Woodruff in 1890 and the second manifesto of President Smith in 1904. They were staying true to this core fundamental element of Mormonism while the LDS Church was not.   In time these Mormon Fundamentalists fragmented into various groups, including the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or FLDS Church), the Apostolic United Brethren (or AUB), the Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days, among others.  In this episode of Church History Matters, Casey and I sit down with Dr. Brian Hales, an expert researcher and author of several books on the Mormon fundamentalist movement, to discuss this fascinating branch of the Restoration.  For show notes and transcript for this and other episodes go to https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/church-history-matters-podcast/   

Evil Idolatry, Warren Jeffs FLDS | Profiling Evil 1953 Raid on Short Creek polygamist community. Did you know there have been 4 raids on the FLDS over the past 70 years? Let's explore that and Cottonwood Park. What's the history behind the monument that Warren Jeffs had destroyed. And how did it get rebuilt? From Rulon Jeffs to Warren and his 87 wives, this story of the FLDS Hildale Utah and Colorado City Arizona community the fled to Texas and the Yearning for Zion Ranch will have you scratching your head. #FLDS. #pluralmarriage #polygamy #sisterwives #biglove #bigamy, #Hildale #ColoradoCity #Cult #CoerciveMindControl #keepsweet #GrowingUpInPolygamy #WarrenJeffs #babycemetery #fumarase #cps #JanjaLalich #Doomsday #doomsdaycult #cult #sisterwives #biglove #escapingpolygamy =======================================Special Discount for CrimeCon Nashville Registration with this code: PROFILINGEVIL https://www.crimecon.com/CC24Catch up on all things Profiling Evil at: www.ProfilingEvil.com and sign up for the BOLO, our newsletter that's only available to subscribers.Learn more about the Dream Center: https://www.shortcreekdreamcenter.org/SUPPORT our Podcasts: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1213394/support

Let's dig deeper into Warren Jeffs, the FLDS Leadership and how it's changed over time. Why are so many babies buried in unmarked graves in the polygamist community of Short Creek? More than 250 babies lie beneath the red clay soil in an unmarked grave, within an unmarked cemetery. There are no plot markers, no plat map... Just mystery. #FLDS. #pluralmarriage #polygamy #sisterwives #biglove #bigamy, #Hildale #ColoradoCity #Cult #CoerciveMindControl #keepsweet #GrowingUpInPolygamy #WarrenJeffs #babycemetery #fumarase #cps #JanjaLalich=======================================Catch up on all things Profiling Evil at: www.ProfilingEvil.com and sign up for the BOLO, our newsletter that's only available to subscribers.SUPPORT our Podcasts: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1213394/support