GRAPHIC WARNING: SOME CONTENT MAY OFFEND
Linda Feary was a lost solo mum when she found salvation in the form of the Gloriavale religious community in 1975. But through the 1980s, she claims the controversial commune was rife with incest, sexual assault, child abuse, bullying, and forced labour. Now, after almost 30 years on from her escape, Feary tells her story for the first time. Kurt Bayer reports.
PART 1: Revelations
The galloping stallion thundered up the winding path, scything through dense bush, kicking up fine dust clouds. A dark figure clad with billowing black cape rode high approaching a rickety wooden house backed into the steep hillside. The taniwha, thought a little girl, just aged 4, barefoot and wide-eyed. A miracle.
The Catholic priest dismounted and introduced himself to the remote, disconnected whānau. He had followed the path nearly 6km into the northern Taranaki backblocks out of curiosity. It was 1945. The priest stayed for two nights and orated on God. The little girl thought God, who lived in the sky, sounded like a grumpy fulla.
As he was leaving, the priest blessed the child: "Remember, little one: God always answers prayer".
PART 2: Salvation
Thirty years later, Linda Feary was still searching for God. Early spring, walking through Christchurch's Cathedral Square she was turning the same questions over in her mind. She was living down south now. Her marriage had broken up and she was a solo mum, with two young kids.
As she crossed in front of the great Gothic-style cathedral, she was wondering just why it was that believers were told to pray to Mary, and not talk directly to God, when she encountered a vocal group of street preachers.
Feary stopped and listened. As they spoke about church, never one to bite her tongue, she interjected.
"I challenged them," she recalls. "I said church shouldn't be a building, it should be a body of people. And to my surprise, they agreed."
They invited Feary to a picnic the next day. She went along and couldn't believe what she found.
"What they were preaching and doing and talking… It was like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."
Things then happened quickly. Feary uprooted her family – a 13-year-old son and reluctant 11-year-old daughter - to a religious commune at Cust on the terraced hills in North Canterbury, overlooking snow-capped and jagged Southern Alps.
Back in 1975, it was known as Springbank Christian Community. Families lived according to a strict interpretation of Christianity, working unpaid in community farming and aviation businesses.
Feary was sure it was the right thing to do. It felt right. She liked their messages. It seemed they were living the New Testament, and everyone had something in common. She willingly gave up her household and brand new furniture. The kids abandoned all their toys and treasures.
There were already about 120 people living there. Initially, Feary was welcomed to stay in the family house of community leader, Neville Cooper. The Australian-born Christian, evangelical preacher founded the settlement six years earlier. Later, he would go by the name, Hopeful Christian, the "Overseeing Shepherd".
Feary was given a new name too: Obedience. Looking back, she thinks it was because the community didn't think she was very obedient at all.
Things went well, for a while.
When a new family arrived, Feary and her children got shifted out of Cooper's place to another household.
Quietly, the community worked away. They stuck to themselves and the congregation steadily grew.
Feary and her daughter worked in the gardens, tending to vegetables and fruit. They weren't given wet-weather gear and worked long hours. Feary was also the unofficial cook and nanny for the family they lived with. The lady of the house was "a good woman" and she loved the children.
But alarm bells soon tolled. Feary says the man of their house tried to persuade her daughter to shower with him. She said no.
However, he managed to convince her to get into a spa with him, his wife and daughters. She could keep her underwear on, he said.
"She felt absolutely sick."
And in 1979, she was forbidden from attending her mother's funeral.
Around that time, and the dawn of the 1980s, the community was changing from a loose collection of houses to a becoming a commune. And when that happened, other more concerning things began to emerge, Feary says.
If her son had been deemed naughty and was off to school on a hot day, the leaders made him wear a thick woollen jersey. If it was cold, he had to sit outside in a thin shirt.
By the age of 15, her son was working extreme hours, up to 20 hours a day. He worked in drain-laying, plumbing, carpentry, and interior decorating, with no wages. He butchered all of the commune's sheep – up to 15 at a time – single-handedly.
He ran away, but came back. Feary saw changes in him, becoming dark and distant. When he would finally escape in 1983, he cut himself off from her.
"He was poisoned against me," she says.
"Subtle practices like saying, 'I notice that you are fair and your mother's fair, how come your sister's dark?' What were they implying? They fed lies to the boy until he turned against me."
Feary also noticed that husbands were "encouraged" to discipline their wives.
"They would put them across their knee and smack their bottoms," she says, describing it as degrading and overpowering.
Wives were not allowed to refuse their husbands sex for any reason, Feary says. She recalls a woman, seven months pregnant, who had been on kitchen duty for 14 hours one day.
When she came home and her husband wanted to "take his rights", she told him she needed a small rest first. He forced her to sleep on the floor without pillows or blankets "until she decided to be obedient to his wishes".
"This guy was also very cruel to his children," Feary says.
"If they wet the bed, he would break the ice on cattle troughs and dunk them in. Then they would have to sit at the breakfast table shivering. My opinion of that particular person was very low."
But as the 80s progressed, things became even more sinister inside the congregation, Feary says.
Incest became rampant, she claims. Daughters were expected to bath or shower with their fathers. Children were encouraged to watch their parents copulate.
"They even encouraged wife-swapping," Feary says.
"Things became sexualised, immoral."
It started at the top with the commune's leadership. Feary named Cooper as encouraging the illegal activities.
Cooper, she claims, used to physically handle brides before their wedding night.
"It got to the stage where sex was talked about at every meal," Feary says.
"It was top subject - there was no room for God. It was almost like a competition as to who could pump out the most kids.
Later, masturbation was encouraged, Feary claims. Especially for girls.
Feary alleges that "young girls" were "invited to Mr Cooper's bed where he used to teach them to masturbate".
"He used to watch them masturbate," she claims.
"My daughter said she had seen it. He told her: 'Look what you're missing out on, darling'."
Eventually, word leaked beyond the community walls and police got involved.
Cooper would eventually spend 11 months in prison for sexual abuse after being convicted on the testimony of his son Phil Cooper - who wrote an explosive book on the commune called Sins of the Father after escaping in 1989 - and some young women who had fled the compound.
Others accounts have emerged from ex-Gloriavale members over the years.
In 2015, Yvette Olsen went on national TV to say that Cooper sexually assaulted her on three occasions in 1984 when she was a 19-year-old.
Olsen described Cooper, who died in 2018, aged 92, as a "dirty old man" of "unbridled lust".
Feary also felt mistreated. She was outspoken but also overweight. They shunned her, she said, confining her to a tiny bedroom and given meagre rations. Half-a-cup of porridge for breakfast, soup for lunch, and a dessert-spoon of potato and vegetables with maybe one chop for dinner.
The leaders would mock her in front of the congregation.
"I'd be stood up in front of everyone and horrible things were said to me. 'Look how fat she is' and 'No wonder her children are ashamed of her' etc etc. It was awful," she says.
On long walks, she would pick wild mushrooms, watercress, and roadside berries to sustain herself.
And eventually, she would make a bid for freedom.
PART 3: Exodus
By 1991, Gloriavale's band of leaders had bought a swathe of cheap, boggy land at remote Haupiri on the South Island's West Coast.
Feary felt deeply uncomfortable about the shift from Cust to the coast, especially when she saw the remote location, down a dead-end country road, surrounded by high green hills. She got suspicious that they were being led to a Jim Jones-style massacre, where the US cult leader led the mass murder-suicide of more than 900 members at a commune in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978.
"It felt like something crawling on my grave, I certainly didn't want to go there. It felt like being boxed into a canyon."
Feary, who was now alone after her 26-year-old daughter left the previous year, wanted to speak up. But she had no voice. She was called into a "men's meeting" - where women certainly didn't have a voice and where accusations were flung at her.
"I was told that the kindest thing I could do for my children is to not be around anymore. Suicide… that's what was implied," she says.
"I remember Mr Cooper telling me: 'God doesn't even know your name anymore'. That did something horrific to me."
She rushed back to her room with the intention of taking her own life. She took out some scissor shears and thought all she had to do was fall on them.
"But then I started to laugh, and it was that laugh that scared me because it wasn't my laugh. It was a demonic laugh and I got a fright," she says.
"I remember crying out to Jesus, 'Please Jesus, give me one more chance'. I went in to a deep, deep sleep and I felt like I had been asleep for hours but it had only been a few minutes and I woke up with the song going through my mind, 'Jesus will lead you night and day'. And I whispered, 'Jesus come and get me'."
Feary started walking. Out the commune's perimeter and down the road.
A grey station wagon pulled up. It was former Gloriavale members. They told her to get in.
Feary was taken in. She lived in a caravan and stayed for about three months.
She never went back.
PART 4: Deliverance
When she left, she left with nothing. Nothing but the clothes she stood up in.
"I didn't know how to read the traffic lights. I'd never heard of a mall," she says.
"I was living in a prison without walls. It's been a mortal struggle ever since."
Slowly, like a reformed career criminal, she started to rebuild her life on the outside.
She tried to forget about her life at Gloriavale but it haunted her like a bad dream.
One day, a former member knocked on her door out of the blue. He too felt tormented and said he needed to say what happened to her son.
Once, when he was about 13, he had pinched a car. He had driven to Christchurch to reconnect with his father. But he didn't want to know him and he was sent back to the commune. That much, Feary knew.
However, she was then told a horrific tale of her son being gang-raped.
"They destroyed my boy," she says.
"He was stripped naked, kicked in the stomach, thrashed with a rubber hose and then raped by a group of four-five men. I didn't find out until after I had come out."
The police were never called, she was told.
No one from Gloriavale responded by publication time to a Herald request for comment but one of the current leaders, Fervent Stedfast has said previously that allegations of sexual assault are "just nonsense".
"The stories are getting out of hand," he said. "There's no such thing at Gloriavale. It's not the case."
Asked whether he was satisfied claims of sexual assault were dealt with appropriately, Stedfast said: "Yes, absolutely."
Feary, now a grandmother, is living in the North Island but still doesn't want Gloriavale leadership to know where she is for fear of repercussions. And she doesn't want either of her children named.
She calls her decision to join the commune back in the mid-70s "a stupid mistake".
But as she approaches her 80th birthday, Feary finally feels she's comfortable with telling her story for the first time.
"I haven't been able to do or say anything until now because I was too angry, too hurt," she says.
"They destroyed my family. But I've come to a place where the sexual immorality and abuse of children needs to be exposed.
"It's taken me a long time but I realise now it's not about me anymore but about those who are still there. I feel it's my duty to tell the story."
Often she thinks about that day 75 years ago, when the taniwha came riding into her life up in the deep Taranaki bush, leading her on a pathway of discovery which lead to the South Island and the darkness of Gloriavale.
But she has never stopped asking questions of God. Or lost her faith.
It's the only thing that keeps her going, along with a belief in herself, now wiser after decades of pain and sorrow at the hands of a community she once trusted.
Remember, little one: God always answers prayer.