He rushed into the living room while picturing the worst, the impossible. A bloated, rotten body in one of the rooms, somehow missed by cleaning crews, past residents, and the Realtors who had handled the listing for so long. He saw Halcomb’s followers spread out on the living room floor; Audra Snow half-gutted yet somehow still alive. Her mouth opening and closing while she gasped for air.

But when he skidded around the corner, he saw nothing but Jeanie hanging over the upstairs banister. Her hair framed her face in twin swaths of gold. For half a second, excitement glinted against the green of her eyes. Her mouth turned up into a smile that reminded him of how she used to be, before the blight of his and Caroline’s problems had eaten away at their kid’s happy innocence.

“There are two bathrooms . . .” Her excitement faded midsentence, as she spotted what must have looked like panic on his face. “Dad?”

Anxiety had jammed his heart up into his throat.

“Are you okay?” The lightness of her expression was gone, replaced by leery concern.

“Fine,” he said, forcing a smile. “Sorry. You just freaked me out for a second.”

“Freaked you out.” She parroted the words back to him, her worry taking on a far more skeptical intonation. “Why would I have freaked you out?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“How do you not know? I just said Dad and you—”

“I thought something happened.” He cut her off. “Never mind.”

“What would have happened?”

“I said forget it,” he snapped.

Jeanie blinked at him. Her face went taut with emotion. Just when he was sure she was about to yell down at him, YOU forget it! she turned her back on him and pushed away from the balustrade.

Lucas squeezed his eyes shut. Get it together. “You are Lucas Graham,” he murmured to himself, his right hand gripping the handrail. “You can do anything.” A mantra he’d picked up from a self-help book—A State of Mind: How to Overcome Obstacles and Get What You Want. “Your failures are only failures in your mind.” That was a hard one to swallow, especially when his failures were printed on royalty statements that didn’t make a dent in his bank account. “You will only succeed if you believe you deserve it.” He had to believe, even if it seemed crazy, even if this whole plan was insane.

If Halcomb’s devotees could put their faith in a crackpot, Lucas could surely believe in beating the odds.

EXCERPT FROM “THIS CHARMING MAN”

By Daniel Gould

Rolling Stone (Issue 456)

September 12, 1985

Sandra Gleason was only fifteen when she met Jeffrey Halcomb, a name that, over two years ago, became synonymous with cults, murder, and devil worship. Back then, she went by Sandy—a moniker she’d picked up on account of her love for Grease and Olivia Newton-John. Sandy was a runaway, wandering the streets of San Diego, when a dark-haired stranger swept her off her feet. “He was very charming,” Sandy recalls of Halcomb. She sits across from me at a chic Los Angeles café, sipping on a cappuccino despite the summer heat. “He called me Sunrise. Once I met him, I couldn’t think of anyone else,” she tells me. “I was sort of in love with this other boy for a while, but after I met Jeff . . .” She shakes her head, as if to say forget it. “[Jeff] was magnetic, you know? He was infectious. Once he got in your head, he was in there for good.”

Few members of Halcomb’s group have come forward since the murder/mass suicide. Sandy is the only who claims to have known each of the eight members who took their lives on March 14, 1983. “I knew them all,” Sandy tells me. “Gypsy and Sunnie. All of them. But not Audra Snow.” Gypsy was Georgia Jansen. Sunnie was Shelly Riordan. Every member of Halcomb’s group was renamed, as if to separate their past selves from the people Halcomb wanted them to become.

Audra Snow came well after Sandy left the group. “She was my replacement,” Sandy explains. “At least that’s as much as I can figure out. Jeff had a thing for blondes. He sought them out, like Adam looking for his Eve.” A strange Biblical reference for a man whom the media has deemed a satanist. “I don’t know where they got that from,” Sandy tells me when I bring up the theory. “Jeff never mentioned the devil or much about religion at all. He was about love and togetherness and rejecting material possessions. He was, like, a walking representation of the peace-and-love generation. But he also made no secret about believing in God.”

It’s no wonder Halcomb has fallen under satanic scrutiny, says Sandy. “People look at what he did and, yeah, it’s evil. I mean, he killed a baby.” She looks down at the table, as though trying to place herself in Audra Snow’s shoes. But of the time Sandy spent with Jeff Halcomb and his crew, she insists that she never feared for her safety. “It felt like the safest place in the world to be. Jeff promised to take care of us, and he did.” And while, at times, Halcomb forced his followers to live in tents and eat out of Dumpsters, Sandy insists those types of hardships weren’t a big deal. “We had tough times just like any other family,” she tells me. “But we were always happy.” It’s a wonder, then, that Sandy ever left the group. “Things started getting strange when I found out there was expectation,” Sandy says of her departure. “At first I thought Jeff just liked me more than the other girls, and really, I liked that. Who wouldn’t? Any girl in her right mind would have wanted [Jeff] for herself.” She blushes, then shrugs as if to dismiss her girlish musings just before her expression goes dark. “But things changed. The longer I was with them, the weirder things became.”

Sandy explains that she met Jeff Halcomb in the summer of 1980. Less than a week after making his acquaintance, she accepted his invitation to tour the West Coast with the group. She remained with them for the better part of two years. Did she ever make the comparison between Halcomb and Charles Manson? Sandy shakes her head at me. “Never,” she insists. “I suppose I would have if [Halcomb and his group] had been scary . . .” She pauses, reconsiders her statement. “Then again, it’s not like I ever met any of the Manson kids. Maybe they weren’t as creepy as I imagine them to be.” But once things got frightening for Sandy, it was the beginning of a downward spiral. “I found out that Jeff was trying to get me pregnant,” she says. “I was only eighteen. It spooked me. We started arguing. And that’s when I started to doubt him. He couldn’t handle that.” She soon found herself falling out of favor with the group. “He got angry, like I was somehow betraying them all. We got into a fight when I accused him of using me. That’s when he told me I was worthless.” She frowns down at the table. “Obviously, it hurt to hear that. I loved him, and seeing the anger in his face . . . I just left. I guess that’s why they didn’t follow me. What’s the point of chasing someone who you deem a waste of time?”

But even three years after her narrow escape, Sandy insists Jeffrey Halcomb had the best intentions for those he referred to as his family. “Jeff never wanted to hurt anyone,” she says. “He had some strange ideals, some weird points of view, but he wasn’t dangerous. I’m telling you, he loved everyone who put their trust in him. Sometimes I think that maybe I was wrong in running away. I think that maybe I misjudged him. I reacted that way because he hurt me. I wanted him to love me more than he loved the others, and that was wrong of me. Jeffrey loved everyone equally. My jealousy ruined that.” And of the various crimes the media has tried to pin on Halcomb and his group, specifically the brutal double murder of Richard and Claire Stephenson of Pier Pointe, Washington, Sandy refutes the possibility of Jeffrey being involved. “At times, we had to do things we weren’t proud of to get by,” she tells me. “Yeah, sometimes it involved stealing. But we never went into houses when people were there. Jeff never intentionally hurt anyone.”