Kidnaping for Christ

Wes Lockwood, 20, a junior at Yale, had a dental appointment at 4 p.m. last Jan. 16. He never made it. Nor did he show up at 6 p.m. for his job as a dishwasher at the Faculty Club. He was next seen being driven through a tollgate on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where he cried for help and said he was being kidnaped. Police stopped the car, which also contained two white men and a black. One of the whites convinced the cops that the boy was mentally ill. They then drove on to an apartment in Masontown, Pa., 40 miles south of Pittsburgh. Lockwood was held captive there for 2 1/2 days.

Thirteen days later, Dan Voll, 20, a good friend and former roommate of Lockwood's at Yale, was walking along 119th Street in Manhattan when a 6-ft. 2-in., 200-lb. white man grabbed him by the arm, and a smaller black man pushed him into a waiting car driven by a middle-aged white woman. "Don't you know you are possessed by demons?" the woman said, according to Voll. The youth screamed for help so persistently that the police intervened and freed him, unhurt except for a dislocated finger.

The police might have pressed kidnaping charges against Voll's abductors except for one fact: they included his mother and father, a junior high school principal in Farmington, Conn. The Lockwood disappearance involved his father, a stockbroker in Los Angeles, plus an uncle. The black man in both cases was Ted Patrick, 42, a former community-relations consultant for California Governor Ronald Reagan. He now heads a "deprogramming" organization that helps parents recapture children who have taken up with exotic religious sects. Patrick, a church-going Methodist, began heretic hunting as a leader in the FREE COG (Free Our Children from the Children of God) movement, a parents' vigilante group organized to reclaim offspring who joined that authoritarian fundamentalist sect (TIME, Jan. 24, 1972). Now Pat rick claims to have an underground network of deprogrammers throughout the U.S. They have recovered, he says, some 600 youths from 61 different fundamentalist, pentecostal or Oriental religious sects during the past two years. "Team members" of the underground network say that Patrick charges no fee for his services except what is necessary for travel and other expenses. He also claims that the child's parents must assume the basic responsibility for any abduction. The abductions are justified, Patrick feels, because the youths have already been "psychologically kidnaped" by offbeat religious sects. Parents, he says, are only "rescuing" them.

Patrick and his team members --mostly concerned parents, already deprogrammed kids and an occasional clergyman--are not known to have any professional credentials in psychology. Nevertheless, they claim their treatment always works. They liken it to an encounter group session. Other accounts of deprogramming indicate that the process, which can last from two days to two weeks, is something between a brainwashing and an inquisition. According to Pat ("Biff") Alexander, 23, a former member of the Jesus movement who recanted and is now a member of Patrick's team, the first step is an in tensive interrogation, sometimes lasting from morning until midnight. This is designed to "break" the subject by demolishing his false religious views. When he is sufficiently pliable, his parents take him home with them for "finishing," the reconstruction of his old family and church ties.

Alexander participated in Wes Lockwood's successful reconditioning, along with Ted Patrick and Father Gregory Flohr, a religion teacher at Pennsylvania's Seton Hill College.

Lockwood, who had been a devoted member of a small group called the New Testament Missionary Fellowship, at first resisted deprogramming. According to Biff Alexander: "He said we were all possessed by the devil, and that he was suffering for Jesus. He spoke in tongues." During the ordeal Wes was not allowed to leave the apartment where he was held in Masontown. "I worked harder that night than I had in years," says Father Flohr. "You have to talk and talk and talk until your head falls off." As Wes himself recounted the experience last week to TIME'S Lois Armstrong, "they began pulling out Scripture, and asking me if I had answers to this passage or that. I ranted, raved and thrashed around. I was afraid they were going to drug me or put me in a mental hospital. I wanted to escape because a fear had been planted in me that my parents were working for the devil. I thought they were going to persecute me for my faith. Finally I realized my father wanted to show how much he loved me. I broke down and cried. Now I feel wonderful."

Wes is back home in Los Angeles, living with his parents and showing ev ery sign that the deprogramming was a complete success. He attends the evangelical church where he first committed himself to Christ. He now says he was not forcibly abducted by his father but went along willingly. "When I left Yale," he says, "I was a zombie. I had a shell around me. What the deprogrammers did was like unwrapping a mummy, taking off layer after layer of hardness, of the fear that they would destroy me or send me away."

Frailties. Jerry Sharpe of the Pittsburgh Press is perhaps the only journalist who has observed a deprogramming in process. It involved a girl from the Children of God who was imprisoned in a room near Pittsburgh until Ted Patrick could fly in to take charge of her. Patrick is "an amazing guy," says Sharpe. "This girl was clutching the Bible, staring ahead, and repeating 'Praise the Lord' all the time. Patrick walked over and ripped the Bible out of her hands so hard that he almost threw her against the wall. He said, 'You don't serve God; you serve the devil.' The idea is to get them angry, to get them shouting. He tricks them into a debate. He told me 'If I can get them communicating, I can always win. I say, "Prove you are a Christian." This shows up the person's own frailties.' "

One deprogramming target, Arlene ("Patti") Thorpe, 23, a member of the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation, a commune of several hundred Jesus people in Saugus, Calif., escaped from a marathon ten-day grilling. Her mother, brother and stepfather captured her after a Sunday service at the Alamo commune and drove her 150 miles to what Patti calls "a grim, middle-class motel" in Chul'a Vista, Calif. Ted Patrick, whom she describes as a "softspoken middle-aged man who didn't look like he'd hurt anyone," first took her Bible away from her and then sent in five to ten deprogrammers at a time to work on her. "They told me I was crazy, possessed by demons. They said I hated God, and tried to humiliate me. They gave me no rest at all." Patti says she was kept up sometimes till 3 or 4 in the morning and awakened as early as 6 a.m. The deprogrammers took turns sleeping by the door in her room to prevent her from escaping. She tried screaming for help, but when nothing happened she persuaded her captors to let her go to her brother's house to think things over. She then escaped and took a taxi back to the Alamo foundation.

Many members of Ted Patrick's network see the Jesus sects not only as heretical but Communistic as well. William Rambur, of Chula Vista, a retired Navy lieutenant commander and a Roman Catholic whose own daughter is still with the Children of God after three attempts on his part to "rescue" her, says: "I can't come out and say they are affiliated with any known Communist organization, but their methods, teachings and way of life would indicate a Communist organization in some form. They follow that pattern of mindcontrol and taking over youth. They talk about how they are going to destroy capitalistic society, organized churches, the school system and the family structure. They say they're going to destroy everything we stand for!"

Rambur, who now teaches high school auto mechanics, denies that Patrick's methods inhibit religious liberty. "We say, they had freedom of religion before they joined these groups and we're giving it back to them."

Rambur claims that the deprogrammers have had cooperation from the police, but the law is ambiguous. A Texas woman, Mrs. Bernard Parmetter, for example, armed with a can of Mace, abducted her son Lee. But authorities, in turn, forced her to release him because he was 21. Dan Voll, who was seized in New York, has filed an assault charge against Patrick; his lawyer, John LeMoult, argues that most deprogram ming raids involve assault and unlaw ful imprisonment. But since parents are involved, federal officials do not in prac tice deem the abductions kidnaping.

Parental abduction is, to be sure, not novel in the annals of religion. St. Clare's family tried to retrieve her bodily after she ran ,away from home to join St. Francis of Assisi and his band of pious mendicants. Legend has it that St. Thomas Aquinas' family locked him in a room with a whore to dissuade him from joining the Dominican order. But the deprogramming practiced by to day's soul snatchers seems suspiciously like a religious version of the Ludovico technique -- that brain-blowing treatment administered to Alex, the anti-hero in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. It was designed to make him acceptable to society by ridding him of his sado-sexual violence. In the process Alex also lost his free will.

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