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And I love how helpful these gummies are. For me, half a microdose gummy during the day helps me stay centered and fresh as I get everything done on my list. They also help me relax at night and be really present in the moment instead of worrying about things from that day or worrying about what's coming tomorrow.
It's a feeling of mind and body relaxation and focus that I absolutely adore. They really do taste amazing and feel so good. I've used them to help me get in the zone when I'm doing creative work at night, and they help me wind down, chill out, also sleep like a baby, which is the best.
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In 2008, Cheryl changed the name of her ministry. Originally, it was Freedom Fire. Then it became Moriah Ministries, and finally she changed it to the Oneness Foundation. They had been operating out of a rental in Bellingham, but Cheryl wanted to own her own building. The Oneness Foundation bought an old Masonic temple 20 miles north of Bellingham in Blaine, Washington.
Blaine is about as far northwest as you can go in the United States before hitting Canada. It's right on the border, only an hour drive from Vancouver. Rachel took me to the building. Oh, wow. So this was the main, like, worship area? Yeah. You can see the sound booth that we had back there. Around 2008, Rachel recalls one particularly extreme shift in Cheryl's stance on recruiting.
Shortly after we got here, she wanted the women to start dating because if we brought in men, that was more tithe money into the church. And that backfired on her when we all started to date and enjoy ourselves, but that meant we weren't paying attention to her. It went from, yes, I want you to do this, to start holding back, and then to men are just evil predators here to take your purity away from you.
Eventually, Cheryl forbade her followers from dating at all and closed the Oneness Foundation off from the public, making it exclusive and secretive. Visitors were no longer allowed. When looking at the timeline of Cheryl's ministry from the start in 2001 up to the point in 2013 when she left in the middle of the night for Tennessee, I think this decision to make her ministry exclusive is significant.
It shows her becoming more extreme. She was less interested in being the pastor of a church and more interested in being an end times prophet. Her sermons intensified. Rachel says oftentimes Cheryl would spend the whole service crying and weeping, moaning, claiming to channel God's warnings of coming destruction. Yeah, you could see her start just rocking and then maybe pacing like a lion, like
And then she would just start going off, either in tongues or in prophecy, or just crying, loud crying. This is a recording of one of Cheryl's services in December of 2008. And when they finish their testimony, the beast will ascend out of the bottomless pit, and he will make war against... God has seen that no man can ever keep away from Noah, nor God.
And he will make war against them and overcome them, and he will kill them. The Beast is a reference to Revelation, the last book of the Bible. Revelation is full of language of violence and destruction and has been interpreted by many groups as a prediction of the events that will take place at the end of the world. Cheryl references it multiple times in this tape as well as others.
In this same recording, she speaks about the 144,000, which is doomsday code for the elite group who will be saved while the rest of the world burns. As we covered in previous episodes, Cheryl taught that Mary Magdalene would lead the 144,000 into salvation. And she continually implied that she was Mary Magdalene. By the power of the communion of their relationship, she was a prophet of God. She was not a whore.
And as he removed from her the seven sins, gluttony, jealousy, anger, lust. I can't remember them all. Anyway, so the seven sins. As he removed those from her, the veil was then parted. And she was able to see. And then the grail was made ready for the impregnation to bear forth the lineage of that of the half-breeds, that of the 144,000.
I want to stop here and consider what it might feel like, what it might really feel like to believe that you are one of the 144,000 people in all of humanity that will survive the end of the world. I imagine it feels something like this. Let's say you're on an island and you know that a tsunami is coming your way. It's going to be there in minutes. But fortunately, you are standing on top of a mountain, standing
so high up that the water will not be able to touch you. You will be safe. But you're looking down below at all of the people walking around on the shore, and you know in a matter of minutes they will all die. Is that a good feeling? No, but it's better to be on the mountain than it is to be down by the water.
Cheryl was the mountain. She convinced her followers that if they stopped believing in her, it would be like falling off the mountain and getting swept away. By comparison, any earthly sacrifice that Cheryl asked of her followers was a drop in the bucket because she was saving their lives. And that is power.
Cheryl expected everyone in her life to do exactly as she told them. And if anyone did not fall in line, she would go to extreme measures to get rid of them. From Cast Media, this is The Opportunist, a podcast about regular people who turn sinister simply by embracing opportunity. This is episode three of four on Cheryl Ruthven and Eva's Eden. I'm Hannah Smith.
It's clear to me that by the time Cheryl moved her ministry to Blaine and closed the doors to outsiders, she had weeded out anyone who doubted her. And the followers that were still with her believed in her so deeply that Cheryl could basically do anything she wanted. Rachel Gunderson was one of those people. She says Cheryl requested impossible things from her followers. She wanted us to be like her, but not like her.
She wanted us to do everything she ever told us to do and fashion us in her image. But when we went too far into that fashion, we would get in trouble. Rachel and I are standing on the porch of the old Oneness Foundation building. Like, she had a perfume. If any woman wore the perfume, they would get in trouble if they got found out that they were wearing the same perfume Cheryl wears. Or people would change their hair to look like Cheryl's hair.
So the goal was to be as much as we could to be pleasing to her. And some people took that as mirroring her. And there was a point where that became appreciated and not appreciated. Like what were some things that were appreciated about mirroring her? Well, like when she would ask questions to us as a group, answering how you knew she wanted you to answer questions.
was key. And when people didn't answer her, that would make her so mad. And if you answered her incorrectly, that would make her frustrated. So learning how to speak how she speaks was so important because you needed to be able to respond, but do it right.
Once, someone showed up with a new haircut, and Cheryl told her, in front of everyone, that it looked like she was wearing a helmet. The woman started crying. And what did everyone else do when she... Ha ha ha ha ha. When Cheryl made a joke, you laughed. Didn't matter if it was funny, you laughed. But I want to get back to the how. How did Cheryl get here? What methods did she use to convince her followers to become so devoted?
It's not uncommon for an insulated organization or group to have some kind of language, words unique to that group. Cheryl wanted her followers to be able to respond to her in a very specific way. Here's an example of that in one of her teachings. Faith comes by hearing. And so the more we speak it out, the more it pulls down those doubts. And so we speak it, speak it, speak it, but where do you speak it from?
You have to feel it. Just words don't cut it, people. You feel it, and then go back, go back, go back to the remembrance. Breathe.
I have no idea what Cheryl is talking about there, which is kind of how I feel about the tapes of Cheryl in general. There are a lot of references to the apocalypse that I recognize, but in general, when listening to her prophecies, I understand the individual words, but I don't really grasp her overall meaning. I asked Rachel about this.
If you are sitting in the service, are you understanding what she's saying? I think you thought you did. It was kind of like a point of pride if you understood things and you got revelations out of it. But there's a point where you couldn't do that too much because if you started inventing things out of what she would teach and she heard about it, that was a big no-no. So you could regurgitate. But once you come up with your own things out of that, you had to be careful in how you said things else you were teaching sheep.
And she didn't want sheep teaching sheep unless she gave permission. In my search to understand Cheryl's trajectory from Cheryl Walker, pastor, to Cheryl Ruthven, reincarnation of Mary Magdalene, God on earth, one thing I think is notable is that Cheryl didn't have a declaration of belief. Most religious organizations declare what they believe publicly, usually on their website. Cheryl didn't do that.
All of her former followers that I spoke with joined Cheryl's ministry believing that it was a Christian church and didn't realize until later that much of what she taught wasn't Christian at all. In fact, it wasn't any specific religion. It was a mishmash, a soup of random ingredients.
In a matter of minutes, she'd be talking about something from the occult, like Baphomet, the sabbatic goat deity. And then suddenly she'd be talking about Shambhala, a concept found in Tibetan Buddhism that refers to a sacred realm or kingdom.
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I'm a professor at Salem State University, which is in Salem, Mass. I've been there about 20 years. I have a Ph.D. in religious studies from Brown University. I have a master's in religious studies from Harvard. He also has a B.A. in philosophy and has studied theology at Yale. I played a short clip of Cheryl prophesying for Professor Gubbins to see what he thought. What is it that flows? Veins is gone.
While the clip plays, I can see Professor Gubbins taking notes and furrowing his brow. Seeth ye, and you will seeth me, says the Lord. Is that not my children?
You know, when you think about it, the scriptures come down to us in two languages. The Hebrew scriptures are in Hebrew, ancient Hebrew. And then the New Testament scriptures are all in what's called Koine, common Greek. And yet when people within English speaking countries want to sound authentic, they're
they start using, you know, King James English. You can see it's kind of like you put up a church and you, you know, give it a Gothic facade. So it looks like it's from the Middle Ages. Cheryl often used this King James English, you know, thee, thou, cometh, knoweth. And somehow that's supposed to give someone sort of the appearance of authority, right?
I mean, the most outrageous appearance of authority with her is that she is proclaiming God's Word. Professor Gubbins said it's unconventional for a pastor to reference the Word of God without referencing the Scripture and the Bible. Typically, if you say, "'Says God,' you are referring to a specific text written in the Bible."
Cheryl rarely, if ever, referenced her sources. I can't help but think back to season one of this show, when I listened to the Sherry Schreiner recordings. I have to say, Sherry Schreiner's beliefs may have been wild, but at least they were clear. She explained exactly why she believed Taylor Swift was an alien, for example.
But I have listened to hours of Cheryl Ruthven talking, and I still have very little understanding of what she is saying. Even the structure of her sermons doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't sound remotely like any church service I've heard. There are no coherent throughlines. And it's not just me. I have found through speaking with her former followers that they were also confused—that
The difference is, her followers believed they just weren't enlightened enough to understand. It's going to hit me in a different way depending on what my lineage is back here. Does that make sense? I know that's really deep. I'm just trying to take you through it because we get so confused sometimes. Professor Govins also found the tapes confusing. I mean, it's almost hard to make sense of what she was saying. So I think this kind of vagueness is a kind of technique.
An intentional vagueness disguised as intelligence or religious authority, but designed to fool people.
Professor Gubbins said it made him think about the minister's speeches in the Salem witch trials, which stirred up fear and hysteria, or the taming of the shrew and its iconically vague, confusing structure, or perhaps a more modern example. It also reminds me a little bit about, I don't know a lot about Q, but, you know, these Q drops that I guess have stopped, but, you know, these kind of vague references. So in a way,
You're calling on the imagination of your listener to kind of fill in. But you get all the emotional impact because, you know, you're staring at this person who's in the throes of something. Cheryl insisted that these words were not hers. They were God's. If you didn't understand them, then perhaps your faith was not strong enough.
She had a volunteer transcribe all of her prophecies, and then she saved them in a database. She asked members of the ministry to go back through her past prophecies and try to connect them with current events so that it seemed as if Cheryl had predicted those current events. One of the people who did this for Cheryl was a man named Barry.
On January 4th, 2010, Cheryl wrote an email to her followers. Oneness disciples, she calls them. And at the end of the email, she has pasted a message from Barry with his findings. It says...
Pastor, we'll see where everything goes with the record cold temperatures occurring worldwide. I'll just keep an eye on things. Almost exactly a year ago, God said on 1909, "...let the inauguration day be, says the Lord. Let the temperature rise, let them drop. Let the earth shake, says God. Let calamity come as thy foundations, shall they not fall, says the Lord."
There are multiple links to news articles followed by excerpts from Cheryl's past prophecies meant to show that God was speaking directly through Cheryl, giving them clues about the future. It's right here in the email. Her words are referenced as God's words. If you really believe that, think of what that means. If Cheryl's words are God's words, who are you to question God?
And this was put to the test when Cheryl's cat, Eva, passed away. I know that she had a very expensive cat named Eva. It was a Scottish foal that died. And she had a revelation with Eva's passing that she wanted to open up her own cat shelter. That meant we had to open up a cat shelter. We had to finance it. We had to build it. The more cats we saved, the more good karma we had storing up for later.
If God says build a cat rescue, you build a cat rescue. Beneath the Oneness Foundation was a basement, and that basement would be transformed into an Eden for the stray cats of the world. But they weren't just cats. They were vessels. They were a key component to surviving the apocalypse.
KGMI Morning News Extra. There's a new cage-free rescue center for cats that's opened in Blaine and joining us this morning is Assistant Director of Eva's Eden, Nicole Walker. Good morning, Nicole. Good morning. In January of 2011, Eva's Eden officially opened in the basement of the Oneness Foundation in Blaine. Nicole Walker promoted the organization on a local news station, KGMI.
About how many cats do you have in your shelter right now? Well, we usually run at about 30 cats, between 30 and 40 cats actually in the shelter. Nicole is Cheryl's daughter-in-law. She's married to Cheryl's oldest son, Colin. Eva Zeden is actually a part of the Oneness Foundation, which is a ministry run by Reverend Cheryl Walker, where we embrace vegetarianism and oneness and unity and love. Listening to Nicole describe Eva Zeden, it sounds idyllic.
And when Katie Hall, a local pet groomer, first visited the rescue, it did not disappoint. It blew my mind. The hallway was clean, like immaculate. It smelled good. But everything had been so tailored to creating a cage-free, really amazing environment for cats.
I've seen photos of Eva Zeden, and I have to agree with Katie. It looked like a cat paradise. Bright hand-painted murals adorned the walls. There were nooks and crannies to explore, cat toys everywhere. And in the middle stood a massive tree sculpture, like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, a magical playground for cats. Katie wanted to get involved, so she offered, many times, to volunteer at Eva Zeden.
I offered over and over and over to any of the Eva Zeden crew, particularly Nicole. I was like, I'll come out and clean. I'll spend time with the cats. I'll help feed. I'll do anything. And just completely got shut down every time.
She thought it was strange that a local cat rescue would be so exclusive, that they would turn away volunteers. But Eva Ziedan was not just a cat rescue.
Cheryl told her followers that these cats were divine beings that would carry their souls into the afterlife in the event of the apocalypse. Like families with children weren't allowed to feed their kids before they fed their cats. If Cheryl found out that you were not putting the cats first, we would be in such large trouble. And she threatened us with random home inspections just to keep us on our toes. In an email to her followers, Cheryl wrote, This is not a normal cat rescue.
It is that which is exalting the felines back into their position as those which are the vessels that carry the angels and beings that we very well may be unaware of. If you have not received a blessing, it is only you who have hindered it. In the dying cat, the pooping cat, the peeing cat, the sick cat, the bad cat, your blessing is learning to see beyond your eyesight of inconvenience and messes,
into that of how you have handled the situation. It wasn't a volunteer thing. It was, you're going to do this or you're going to be in trouble with God. Eva's Eden adoption fairs presented 30 to 40 of the prettiest, healthiest cats to the public. And they had a high success rate. Cats were being adopted. But there were hundreds of other cats that never made it to Eva's Eden because they were too sick. Cheryl said,
— More and more frequently took us to Pasco, Washington, or took vans down there, where there's a lot of stray cat population down that part of Washington. — Eva's Eden also began to drive to overcrowded shelters in other parts of Washington state and take their cats.
At times, they were bringing in 100 cats a week, and only about 30 of those cats lived at Eva's Eden. The rest of the cats lived in the homes of Cheryl's followers, and they did not have a choice. Rachel and her roommate, Arianne, lived in a three-bedroom apartment at the time with about 30 cats. We had cats in every part of that house. I had five or seven cats in my room. Arianne had five or seven in her room.
There was maybe three or four in the really sick room and then a litter of kittens in the bathroom. And then we had a laundry room closer to the middle that we kept quarantined cats in. And then the main part of the house had more cats in that part too.
Cheryl was very particular about how her followers should care for the cats and clean up after them. If you have 30 cats living in a small space, it's a good idea to keep things very clean. But cleaning all those litter boxes, scrubbing the water bowls, feeding the cats, and cleaning up any mess that 30 cats left, that took hours every day. Rachel was getting up early to do all of this work before going to her actual paid job.
On top of that, she was setting her alarm clock two to three times throughout the night, every single night, to get up and take care of the sickest cats. Winter is here, it is freezing, and I've got a way for you to heat things up. Warm up those chilly nights with Dipsy. Picture this, a cozy blanket, a crackling fireplace, maybe a glass of wine, you listening to a sexy fantasy audiobook.
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The sickest cats were on feeding tubes, some of them in oxygen therapy. Cats with distemper, lymphoma, FIP, which is also called cat coronavirus. Distemper in particular is very contagious. So Rachel would wake up at 3 a.m. and put on sterile clothing. We'd have to bleach ourselves all the way down, our feet and our hands, put on the sterile clothing and the sterile booties and the gloves.
tend to the sick cats, give them medication, and then somehow manage to get all that dirty disposal clothing off of us and bleach ourselves completely again. Rachel says she was tired all of the time, for years. She never asked for all these cats. None of Cheryl's followers did.
Connie Gibbs told me that the cats were so much work and stress that she didn't have time to think. The threat of Cheryl's wrath was already ever-present, but now it was inside of her home. Cheryl sent random inspectors to her house to see if she was following protocol. The cats were supposed to be her priority, even over her own children.
My husband and I took our kids on a vacation that they had not had in years. And we took them to the Great Wolf Lodge down there in Washington. And a few days into it, Nicole Walker called and told us that we had to come home, that we had a sick cat. Our kids were devastated because they were like, why do we have to leave? I mean, we still have another week on our vacation. Did you leave? We did. We left on the Wednesday and headed back because the phone calls wouldn't stop.
Rachel told me that Cheryl required her followers to perform emergency evacuation drills in the dead of night to prepare for the apocalypse. During these drills, Rachel and her roommate, Arianne, would time themselves as they rushed to get every foster cat into a crate and those crates into their vehicles. But maybe the strangest part of this story is that the only person holding them accountable for performing these drills was themselves.
Cheryl simply told them she would know if they didn't do it. So there was a point in somewhere around 2011 and 2012 where Cheryl had all the different families in the group team up with those that were in proximity to where they lived.
and come up with an evacuation route that we would have to do drills practicing oftentimes in the middle of the night where we were supposed to be able to pack up all of our emergency supplies and our cages with the cats in them. And a lot of us had a lot of cats, so it was a lot to figure out.
But we would have to take these emergency routes and meet up with the other families. And it was always in preparation for when all hell would break loose and we'd have to get out of town or escape. She actually had us one day where we all had to lie to our employers that we were sick that day because she was sure that something bad was going to happen and didn't want us going to work.
Perhaps Cheryl really believed what she said, that the world was ending and that the cats were their ticket to salvation. It is possible she believed that, that she still believes that. It's also possible that these were tactics to keep her followers exhausted and busy, to make sure that they chose her above everything else in their lives, including their employment.
Cheryl would test this even further a few years to come when she would insist that everyone uproot their entire lives and move across the country. Cheryl's prophecies were not always coherent, but there were certain messages that came across loud and clear. Connie remembers Cheryl telling the Oneness Foundation that Cheryl's ex-husband, Mark Walker, and his new wife, Mary Walker, needed to die.
There were several things that, I mean, she would say from the pulpit about how Mark and Mary needed to be annihilated and taken out because her and her family would never rest as long as Mark and Mary Walker were alive. And she would make these statements from the pulpit. Mary Gunderson Lancaster said something similar. In the ministry...
We were taught that Mark was an abusive, horrible man. And Julie Bretz. He was a pawn, basically. He never had a head on his shoulders. Couldn't make any great decisions. She was very negative to him, or about him. Rachel Gunderson also brought this up to me. I remember Cheryl.
She talked about Mark all the time for all the years that I was in the group. I know that I got to the group very shortly before their divorce was finalized. And some of the earliest things I remember her saying about Mark was that he had beaten her and was abusive and was generally very horrible to her and her children.
After they divorced and for years to come, she would refer to him as the Antichrist. And that...
She was sure he was going to die and that God told her he was going to die. Mark and Cheryl divorced in 2004. They have both remarried. Cheryl married Pete Herbig in 2005. Mark married Mary Walker in 2006. And yet Cheryl continued to be bothered by her ex-husband Mark. She called him evil and spoke about his death.
Part of Cheryl's preparation for the end times was to find another place to live, a place where she and her followers could hunker down and wait out the apocalypse. But she couldn't move anywhere because her ex-husband Mark still had 50% custody of their children.
As we covered in last episode, Cheryl had attempted to get full custody of her children by claiming that Mark was physically abusive. She even had a member of her ministry corroborate her claim on a police report. That person has since come out and said that she lied in order to frame Mark, that he was never abusive. While their kids were still minors, Cheryl needed Mark's permission before she could move out of state with their children. And Mark would never give that permission.
In 2006, when Olivia was only 11, Mark and Mary Walker took each of their three children on a family ski trip to Whistler. Before we got home, while we were pulling in the driveway, she was in the driveway with Pete. And we opened the door to go back into the house. She was literally inside the house. And it's like, how did she... One, the kids obviously called her and said, you know, we're pulling in the driveway. And it's like, how did she...
And two, she just literally ran in the house. And she was in the house with Pete, in our house. And it's like, what in the heck is going on? So she tried to do that. And I don't know if that's a spiritual thing or an intimidation thing or what that is, but she tried to insert herself more than once. When Mark told me this story, at first I thought Cheryl must have just been eager to have her kids back after a long weekend away. But Mark says if that were the case, she would have waited in the car.
Instead, she made it a point to barge into their house uninvited. I think it was coming in the house and doing spiritual stuff in her mind. Because she was in the house. It wasn't sit in the driveway and have the kids take their stuff to the car. She was literally inside of her house. And it was before we could even, I mean, it was shocking. She was just in there.
Like, you got home, you open the door, and then she's just like, she runs in the house. Yeah, with Pete, too. With Pete. And I absolutely believe, you know, I don't want it to sound real weird, but I had the perception of a threat from Cheryl at that point. This is Mary Walker. It's not lost on me that she is married to Cheryl's ex-husband. So, of course, there is potential for friction.
But Mary says it was more than that. She felt that Cheryl wanted to threaten her spiritually. And I remember asking for protection at that time. And that was not something that I would have been doing. I mean, I wasn't a very spiritual person at the time. I was raised Catholic. But I remember asking for a veil of protection from her at that time.
Both Mark and Mary felt that Cheryl entered their house to try to establish some kind of spiritual dominance. And then, in the middle of all of this, Landon, Mark and Cheryl's middle child, unplugged the Christmas lights at his father's house. Now, this might seem like a completely benign detail, but actually I think it's significant.
Cheryl had recently decided that celebrating Christmas was not just evil, but that it was a personal affront to her, the prophet. Cheryl was actively trying to remove Mark from her and her children's lives in whatever way she could. I'm not guessing at that. She was loud and clear about that. But Cheryl could not physically remove them from Mark because he had legal custody. Instead, she would have to convince her children that Mark was evil.
What does it look like to psychologically distance a child from their parent? I think it's in the little things, done consistently over a long period of time. It's the Christmas lights. We all went to Whistler. We all had a good time. We all learned how to ski and all that stuff. And then we got back, and yeah, he unplugged the Christmas lights. Kind of just to prove to his mom, I think, that he could do her bidding.
When Mark and Cheryl's oldest son Colin got married, Mark and Mary and their kids attended the wedding. They found out years later that this wasn't Colin and his wife's actual wedding. They had already gotten married a few days before. There was a secret ceremony that Cheryl performed and only her followers were present for it.
Well, when we went to the fake Colin wedding, he'd already been married. They were feeding us and we just instructed our kids and we never drank or ate anything. Were you worried that she might have put something in it? Absolutely. So we always had the perception that she might be doing something bad to us. And the perception turned out to be right when Rick told us. She had her whole church pray for it. Pray for Mark to die. The whole church. 180 people.
Winter is here, it is freezing, and I've got a way for you to heat things up. Warm up those chilly nights with Dipsy. Picture this, a cozy blanket, a crackling fireplace, maybe a glass of wine, you listening to a sexy fantasy audiobook, and
Dipsy is an app full of hundreds of short, sexy audio stories designed by women for women. They bring scenarios to life with immersive soundscapes and realistic characters. Discover stories about second-chance romances, adventurous vacation flings, and hot and heavy hookups. And there's even a growing library of fantasy series with vampires, Greek gods, and fairy smut to explore the bounds of your pleasure.
New content is released every week, so in between listening to your faves again and again and again, you can always find something brand new to explore. They also have soothing sleep stories, wellness sessions, and sexy written stories to read. Let Dipsy be your go-to place to spice up your me time, explore your fantasies, relax and unwind,
or even heat things up with a partner. For listeners of the show, Dipsy is offering an extended 30-day free trial when you go to dipsystories.com slash OPP. That's 30 days of full access for free when you go to dipsestories.com slash OPP. dipsystories.com slash OPP. This is Rick Madrid. Rick is... How do I describe Rick? I'll let him describe himself, actually.
You know what I mean? I'm just a guy. I ride motorcycles and I grew up on horses and horseback. And I'm just a guy. I'm one of those guys. I drink beer and I, you know what I mean? I fight and, you know what I mean? I'm stupid. You know what I mean? I don't think Rick is stupid, but I do think he's had a hard life. He grew up in Arizona as one of 10 children. His parents split before he was born, and his mom left when he was young.
He's been married and divorced and has grown children. When he met Cheryl, he said she was different, in a good way. My ex-wife decided she wanted to do something else. So anyway, I saw an opportunity to have a relationship with somebody that's not the devil.
Rick first heard of Cheryl because his mother, brother, and sister-in-law were all followers of Cheryl. His mother has since passed away, but his brother and sister-in-law are still with Cheryl, as far as he knows. Cheryl reached out to Rick, and they started talking on the phone.
What attracted me to her, I mean, don't get me wrong, she's a tall blonde, big boobed. She's nice looking. You know what I mean? I mean... Rick was physically attracted to Cheryl, yes. But that wasn't what made him like her. It was her voice. Now, I don't know whether or not you have ever had that kind of relationship where you can talk to somebody and be attracted to their voice.
Rick remembers moving to Whatcom County around 2008. And this would make sense because one of the things Rick did when he moved was renovate the old Masonic temple that Cheryl had purchased for the Oneness Foundation.
Rick was happy to offer Cheryl his free labor because as soon as he moved to Whatcom County, Cheryl told him they were going to get married. It was exactly what I thought it would be. She was this cute little housewife that made apple pies and shepherd's pie. I mean, I went to work over in Blaine at BP and
They had a wedding ceremony at the Yellow House in Ferndale, and Rick moved in. For a long time, Rick believed that he was legally married to Cheryl. But he wasn't. Cheryl was married to Pete Herbig when she met Rick. She is still married to Pete Herbig. How was it explained to you how Mark was going to die? How she explained it was it was a spiritual thing. And I was...
the new spiritual father and the spiritual husband, because spiritually we were having sex. Were you physically having sex, too? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we were sleeping together. At the time, Rick believed Cheryl had two ex-husbands, Pete Herbig and Mark Walker. Cheryl didn't talk much about Pete, but she talked a lot about Mark. In fact, she told Rick that she had a plan to get rid of him.
It was explained to me that as soon as her and I were married, her ex husband Mark was gonna die. He was supposed to die because she wanted Olivia's freedom and she wanted to just go all over the world, her and her little daughter because the boys are already big and she just wanted the freedom to go.
And Mark gave her a hard time and told her, no, you can't take my daughter anywhere, you know, because he's a good dad. Cheryl wanted Mark gone. If Mark was gone, then she would have full custody of her three children and freedom to move wherever she wanted. She told Rick that as soon as they were married, Mark would magically drop dead. And Rick, well, he believed her. Why did he believe her? He thought that she had supernatural abilities.
supernatural things happened all the time. When Rick started talking about Cheryl's supernatural abilities, I was baffled, to say the least. Her aura, or whatever you want to call it, she called it anointing, but her presence at the grocery store would make women throw up. What do you mean by that? Explain that. When did that happen?
We were at the grocery, we were walking through the grocery store and sometimes when you're with her, sometimes you can feel, I don't know how to say it, but you can feel it come on her. And as she's walking by these people, they literally just turned around and started puking. And not just one person, but like five or six different people as we were walking through.
It wasn't just the grocery store incident. Rick says once he was in the living room meditating with Cheryl and her three children, and they all started levitating off the ground. And then another time... I mean, there was times where her and I were in a river floating, and we were making love, and we were literally in the water. You were actually physically in your house, and then you were in a river? Yeah.
Yes, we were on our bed, we were making love, and I closed my eyes and we were floating down a river and we were both entwined and we were going under the water and in and out, down waterfalls. She got stronger and stronger the longer I was with her. And
See, this is why I thought that Mark was going to die. Rick had seen Cheryl do unexplainable things. So when she said that Mark would magically drop dead as soon as Cheryl and Rick were married, that didn't seem any more unlikely than levitating or strangers throwing up at the grocery store because of Cheryl's aura. Do you think that there's any chance that she was drugging you?
I don't know. You know, I thought about that, too. I have no evidence that Cheryl was drugging anyone, but I had to ask. Rick remembers Cheryl talking about Mark's death a lot. Not just to him, and not just to the members of her ministry, but also to her children. Rick said they would go around the dinner table, and Cheryl would make them say how they would kill their father.
They would pray together for his death. His own children prayed for his death. Mostly Rick laughs about Cheryl now, but when I ask him about the children, he gets somber. The kids were tired. The kids were tired. The kids were tired. And what I mean by that is they had chased this Cheryl dream their whole lives almost.
And they were really, really ready for something to happen. And you could see it on their face, the disappointment. When it didn't, I could see it. That's a shame. What do you think that they wanted to happen? Like, what were they waiting for? I think they were waiting to see if she was real, that their mother was who she said she is. Because don't get me wrong, she's a something. She is something.
I don't know what that is, but she is something. And they really thought, I think their kids really thought that they were going to kill their dad. I did. I really did. I really thought that he was just going to fall over dead. Did the kids want that to happen? I don't know if they wanted it to happen. She had been telling them that Mark was going to die for so long that they just accepted it.
They don't have those parental feelings. You know what I mean? They don't have... They hugged me. They had feelings for me. But they didn't for their own dad. But the wedding ceremony between Cheryl and Rick did not work in killing Mark Walker. Cheryl would try another method. She wanted Mark dead, and she would do whatever she could to make that happen. She would even go out and buy a gun. Next time on The Opportunist. So she...
She literally, she like pounded it in my head that he's gotta go. He touched me, he shook my hand at that time and to now know that in context of what was actually going on at that time is sort of frightening. One day they were gone. We saw a van and a truck and all of a sudden all their stuff was gone. He had me in his sights with a rifle.
Winter is here, it is freezing, and I've got a way for you to heat things up. Warm up those chilly nights with Dipsy. Picture this, a cozy blanket, a crackling fireplace, maybe a glass of wine, you listening to a sexy fantasy audiobook.
Dipsy is an app full of hundreds of short, sexy audio stories designed by women for women. They bring scenarios to life with immersive soundscapes and realistic characters. Discover stories about second-chance romances, adventurous vacation flings, and hot and heavy hookups. And there's even a growing library of fantasy series with vampires, Greek gods, and fairy smut to explore the bounds of your pleasure.
New content is released every week, so in between listening to your faves again and again and again, you can always find something brand new to explore. They also have soothing sleep stories, wellness sessions, and sexy written stories to read. Let Dipsy be your go-to place to spice up your me time, explore your fantasies, relax and unwind,
or even heat things up with a partner. For listeners of the show, Dipsy is offering an extended 30-day free trial when you go to dipsystories.com slash OPP. That's 30 days of full access for free when you go to dipsestories.com slash OPP.
