CULT: The Family: Australia's LSD Cult

About this episode

In the hills outside Melbourne, Australia, a yoga teacher named Anne Hamilton-Byrne convinced several hundred followers that she was Jesus Christ. Her members were not dropouts: they were doctors, lawyers, nurses, psychiatrists and social workers, and at one point they effectively controlled a private psychiatric hospital that fed her new recruits. Between 1969 and 1975, she collected 14 children who were not hers, registered every one as her own birth, and raised them behind a barbed-wire fence at a property on Lake Eildon. Their hair was bleached identical shades of blonde. They were starved, beaten, and dosed with sedatives, and at 14 they were given LSD in an initiation ritual. Police did not go through the gate until August 1987. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces how one woman assembled a family out of other people's babies, the professional network that made the paperwork possible, and the survivors who brought the whole thing down after every institution around them failed. Please note, this episode contains descriptions of child abuse and discussion of suicide and may not be suitable for all audiences. Head over to our YouTu