Arizona trailer park cult that brutalized more than 100 children exposed 60 years later

Editor's note: This story contains graphic descriptions of physical and sexual violence against children.

PRESCOTT, ARIZ. – Light peeks through leaves as Deborah Daulton-Thibodeau wanders the streets and sidewalks of her childhood. She’s flanked by trailer homes and trees that cast long, harsh shadows.

Daulton-Thibodeau climbs through overgrown brush, touches the bark of a beloved tree and points out the trailers where her neighbors used to live. She finds a Bible verse written in a cracked piece of stone, a vestige of the oppressive, pseudo-Christian commune she was part of from late 1962 to 1975, most of her first 14 years.

It was a simple life. No telephones, no radio, no TV. A family of nine in one small trailer. A small community tucked away from the world along a quiet stream, following the orders of their leader, Leo Mercier.

Daulton-Thibodeau and about 100 other children would sweep sidewalks, lay patio bricks and weed the creek bed from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day in the summer. After chores, they would find refuge playing in a group of boulders scattered along a small ridge. Big rock, flat rock, alligator rock, they named them.

The children would sit on the boulders and compare the bruises that covered their small bodies, Daulton-Thibodeau explained. Blood would well up just beneath the surface of their skin after they were routinely whipped with belts and sometimes electrical cords, she said.

“We’d all just be up in the rocks playing, and we’d all be showing off our bruises and our blood,” Daulton-Thibodeau said. “It was just what we did. We thought it was normal. And how do you know that it isn’t?”

“I just thought it was normal to beat kids.”

Daulton-Thibodeau, 63, is one of the first to speak out about the egregious forms of sexual and physical abuse that she says she and other children endured at the trailer park commune at 910 West Gurley Street, known by its residents as “The Park.”

Some of the tortures were exposed in a trial for 1991 murders years after the commune dissolved. But Daulton-Thibodeau said former members have been largely silent about The Park in the decades since.

She broke that pattern in 2022 when she published a book called “The Serpent’s Tail” that chronicled her upbringing in the cult.

The trailer-park community is a little-known piece of history for a religion called “The Message,” or “The Message of the Hour,” an offshoot of Pentecostalism that was started by William Branham, a faith healer who gained fame in the 1950s. Though Branham died in 1965, he has millions of followers worldwide who believe him to be a prophet, according to an estimate from a nonprofit called Voice of God Recordings.

The Arizona Daily Star and Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team started investigating The Message and its global influence in 2023 after receiving reports of a Tucson Message church that former members say has devolved into a “cult” in recent years.

It is only the latest example of a Message community where a powerful, Branham-influenced leader seized authoritarian control of his congregation. The Park was one of the first.

Mercier was a part of Branham’s inner circle. He and another man, Gene Goad, were known as Branham’s “tape boys” because they traveled the country recording their prophet’s sermons.

When Branham visited The Park in 1964 and 1965, he blessed Mercier’s work leading the commune and said he always knew Mercier was made for “something greater in life” than making the tapes. Branham praised the commune as an idyllic community — a Promised Land. But Mercier had allegedly already started to molest children, according to one survivor.

Mercier used Branham’s endorsement to become a sort of “king” or “demi-prophet” over his roughly 130 followers, Daulton-Thibodeau said. Mercier called himself “The Servant of the Lord.” Branham’s religious framework of unaccountable, independent churches with individual pastors as the highest authority over their congregations gave Mercier absolute power.

Like Branham, Mercier taught his followers he could speak directly to God — and sometimes spoke directly for God. Mercier claimed that Branham’s gifts of prophecy and revelation were passed onto him in “double portion,” Daulton-Thibodeau said. Commune members believed Mercier was the next prophet after Branham. When parents followed Mercier’s orders, they thought they were taking orders from God.

When Branham died, Mercier’s draconian grip on the community tightened. He ordered his followers to subject the children to brutal punishments for minor rule infractions, according to Daulton-Thibodeau, another former member and court testimony from other victims.

On Mercier’s orders, Goad and other men whipped children with belts, burnt their fingertips, separated them from their families, killed their pets, forced them to run naked through the commune and locked them in a dark cellar for days with limited food, Daulton-Thibodeau said.

“Childhood memories flicker in my brain like freeze frames,” Daulton-Thibodeau wrote in her memoir. “Sometimes when I sleep, they emerge, and I relive the terror and desolation I felt when I realized no one would protect me from a sadistic madman, Brother Leo Mercier.”

Daulton-Thibodeau described Mercier as “a deviant mind that’s given a playground of 100 children.”

Atrocities

Lynne Daulton, 67, who is speaking publicly for the first time about the abuse she suffered at The Park, said she was subjected to perhaps the worst of Mercier’s deviance. Although a few years older, she is Daulton-Thibodeau’s niece.

“Leo Mercier molested me that day in bed with two other little girls and the teenage boy that he forced there,” Daulton said of an incident that happened when she was 6. She said it was the first time she was abused.

She told her father, and his response was to beat her — a 6-year-old — “within an inch of my life,” Daulton said. He told her to never speak such lies about “The Servant of the Lord,” she said. She never brought it up again.

“A pedophile was given permission by my father to do whatever he wanted to do (to) me for the next 13 years of my life,” Daulton said.

Daulton said Mercier repeatedly molested her for more than five years and insisted on calling her "Miriam" after the Old Testament prophetess. She ran away from The Park multiple times, but someone always brought her back to her life of “atrocities,” she said.

Mercier would have Daulton’s hair curled into tight ringlets and call her his “little Goldilocks whore,” Daulton said. He lived a few doors down from Daulton and would come into her trailer home at night, take her out of her bed and bring her into his trailer to abuse her, Daulton said.

One night, Daulton said Mercier brought her into the root cellar and used a wooden bar stool to molest her. Then Mercier whipped her, she said.

“I was raped repeatedly,” Daulton said. “I was beaten. I was stripped naked and left in that root cellar with nothing but dirt and my bruised bloody body for three days.”

Daulton-Thibodeau said many other children, including herself, were locked in the pitch-black root cellar for hours and sometimes days for punishment. Sometimes they were given bread and water to eat, but Daulton said she was given nothing.

Daulton later found out her mother sat outside the cellar and cried for her. Her mother was distraught but felt trapped herself, Daulton said.

Adults also experienced abuse in The Park. One woman was beaten with a willow switch when she refused to give up her trailer, Daulton-Thibodeau said. Another day, Mercier had his men line the women up in the dining hall and slap them in the face to “keep them all in line,” Daulton-Thibodeau said. Branham has been criticized for misogynistic teachings, including that women should stay in the kitchen and that “an immoral woman” is a “human sexual garbage can.”

That’s how Daulton slowly came to view herself. Daulton said Mercier “put her with” a man who raped her repeatedly when she was a teenager. The night before her wedding, Daulton said Mercier’s followers put her into bed with Goad and his wife, and Goad forcibly penetrated her anus.

She also never consented to getting married at 17. She said she begged multiple adults in The Park: “Please don’t make me get married. I’m not in love. I just want to go to college.” Her father beat her two days before the wedding for her resistance.

On her wedding day, she was so exhausted from the abuse that she passed out while walking into the ceremony. Daulton’s father picked her up, twisted her arm behind her back and pushed her down the aisle to meet a teenage boy at the altar, she said. The boy didn’t want the marriage either.

“I will not,” Daulton remembers telling her father. But her parents signed her marriage papers for her.

When she returned from her honeymoon and hadn’t consummated her marriage, leaders at The Park coached her young husband on how to rape her, Daulton said.

Daulton was molested at least 13 times at The Park, she said. She said she remembers because her primary perpetrators, Mercier and Goad, would rebaptize her each time to make her pure again.

“Every time they molested me, I had to get rebaptized … to get cleaned again inside. I was baptized 13 times,” Daulton said. “And that was because I was so dirty after the exploitations.”

Sexual abuses

Daulton isn't the only one describing abuse.

Former commune member Doris Scott testified in 1994 that Mercier molested one of her sons when he was just 5 years old, according to a court transcript. Scott said she attempted suicide twice while living in The Park because of the guilt she felt for not protecting her children.

“I have been so afraid that I got tired of being afraid,” Scott said in court. “Have you ever been so scared that you decided, I can’t live this way? … I would get very violent. My violence would turn on myself. I tried to take my life.”

“We were the adults,” Scott said later. “We should have protected our children. We have to bear that guilt.”

Scott was one of the witnesses who testified during the sentencing phase for Keith Loker’s murder trial. Loker, who lived in The Park until he was about 4, was convicted of murdering two men in an adult bookstore, committing multiple robberies, raping a woman and attempting to kill the woman’s husband during a three-day crime spree in California and Arizona in 1991. Loker was 20 at the time. He remains on death row in California.

His defense called 36 witnesses, including many former Park members, to argue that Loker did not deserve the death penalty because his abusive upbringing contributed to his violent behavior. At least seven former commune members, including Daulton-Thibodeau, testified to the physical abuse of children in The Park, according to Loker’s appeal and partial court transcripts obtained by Lee Enterprises.

The California Supreme Court concluded that children were subjected to arbitrary beatings and said it also found “evidence that Mercier sexually abused children.”

Daulton-Thibodeau said in an interview that she saw her brother come home after Mercier allegedly took him down by the creek, stripped him naked and shoved sand and dirt in his anus, mouth and ears, she said. Mercier forced her brother and other children to run home naked, even though modesty was a central tenet of their faith, Daulton-Thibodeau said.

When Daulton-Thibodeau was 7, Mercier brought her into a room under the guise of needing to be “checked for worms,” she testified. A retired woman pushed her dress up, pulled her underwear down and conducted an “invasive inspection” of her genitals, Daulton-Thibodeau said. “I felt violated,” she said.

After the inspection, Mercier brought Daulton-Thibodeau to the dining hall and shamed her in front of the adults with false accusations. He told them God revealed to him that Daulton-Thibodeau was a “sexual deviant” and had been molesting other girls, she said.

Daulton-Thibodeau thought the inspection and public humiliation were punishment for a few days prior when Mercier gathered the children in the Chapel. They took turns sitting on his lap to confess their sins.

When it was Daulton-Thibodeau’s turn, he asked her to admit to sexual acts she had never heard of, such as putting her mouth on her brother’s “privates,” Daulton-Thibodeau said.

“‘God has spoken to me and he has shown me the nasty things you have done with your brothers,’” she remembers Mercier telling her. “We will pray together. You will be pure and clean as driven snow.’”

She refused to confess, and Mercier shoved her off his lap, she said.

Indiscriminate lashings

Most of Daulton-Thibodeau’s abuse was not sexual in nature. She more often endured physical and psychological tortures, she said.

Her first severe punishment came when she and her twin sister Esther were 6. They were playing in their front yard when their dog Fritz bit a young neighbor girl, leaving her crying.

Men sent by “The Servant of the Lord” swiftly came to their yard and shot their dog in the head in front of them, Daulton-Thibodeau said. Killing pets was not an uncommon punishment in The Park. Daulton said Mercier killed her bird.

After Fritz’s death, the men whipped Daulton-Thibodeau and her sister, she said.

“We had had our hair cut off, and we had this terrible beating,” Daulton-Thibodeau said. “That, to me, was the first time that I recognized that our parents have no control here.”

Short hair made Daulton-Thibodeau an “abomination” to her community, she said. Women in The Message never cut their hair because Branham preached against it.

Elisabeth Jones testified that her hair was also cut short as punishment when she was a child in The Park. Jones said she was “devastated.” She wanted to glue her hair back on.

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Men would periodically show up at Daulton-Thibodeau’s trailer to take her and her siblings for beatings, most frequently when she was between ages 7 and 9, she said.

She and Esther were the youngest of 12 siblings, many of whom were adults during their time in The Park. Some of Daulton-Thibodeau’s nieces and nephews, like Daulton, were closer to her age than her siblings.

Sometimes Daulton-Thibodeau was punished for lying. But other times, she was beaten for innocuous things like playing with pinecones on her porch, she said.

Loker’s older sister Hannah Lunsford testified that her punishments were also arbitrary. She said she got “25 licks for crossing a bridge” when she wasn’t supposed to. When she was 4, she was spanked because her underwear showed while swinging on a swing. Once she was put on a diet of only bread and water for two days because she tried on clothes she wasn’t allowed to wear. Jones said children were slapped in the face for not eating their food.

Hugh Scott testified that when he was 8, he got “50 licks with a razor strap on my bare butt” for talking with another child while they were forced to march around The Park. Scott said he lived in “constant fear” of being brutalized. The children were also beaten with willow switches and electrical cords, according to Daulton-Thibodeau and Jones.

During her worst beating, Daulton-Thibodeau said two men gave her 150 lashes with a belt for no reason at all. Mercier’s men came down to the creek with a list of children’s names and the number of lashes they would receive: anywhere from 50 to 150 lashes each, she said.

A group of children watched and counted each of Daulton-Thibodeau’s lashes aloud in the lunch hall to ensure she didn’t receive any extra licks beyond the 150 she had been assigned, she said. Daulton-Thibodeau said the pain was “searing.” After, she sat on the linoleum floor and helped count as she watched her friends get beaten.

One boy tried to escape the whipping session, and a man picked him up and smashed his head through the drywall, Daulton-Thibodeau said.

Daulton-Thibodeau said the number of lashes that day was unusually high, but she knows of boys who received 400 licks in one day. Daulton said her brother got 200 licks.

Disfellowshipped

When Daulton-Thibodeau was 9, her mother caught her in a lie about scribbling on a folder. Her mother dragged her across the commune by her hair and threw her on the floor of the dining hall before Mercier, Daulton-Thibodeau said.

Mercier ordered her older brother to hold her fingertips on a stove so she would “know what Hell feels like,” she said. Her brother complied. Mercier then told her that God demanded she sit in her pain in a metal chair overnight. She was so scared that she stayed put, even when she urinated herself, she said.

A few days later, Mercier had a man cut off her hair for a second time, Daulton-Thibodeau said. Mercier then separated her from her family — even her twin sister — and moved her into the trailer of a couple who did not have children.

Daulton-Thibodeau was “disfellowshipped” from the community for two years, she said. The other children no longer spoke with her. She was forced to walk around the commune until dark with a sandwich board that read “I’m a dirty liar” and “I’m as stubborn as a mule.”

The only blessing was that the couple, Herb and Grace, were kind and loving. They allowed her to read secular books, drink tea and celebrate Christmas, a holiday the commune never observed. They got her a little dog named Panda and protected him.

“We were in the garden, and a couple of men came to kill Panda,” Daulton-Thibodeau said. “Herb picked the dog up in his arms, and he said, ‘OK, go ahead shoot.’ And of course, they couldn’t.

“He did something for me my own parents didn’t do. He wouldn’t let them kill that dog.”

End of The Park

The Park dissolved by early 1975. Daulton-Thibodeau said it was because some of Mercier’s sexual proclivities spilled over onto the adults. 

Indiana Message pastor Nathan Bryant said the group disbanded because park rangers caught them poaching.

Former Park member Jim Ed Daulton preached in a 2016 sermon that the commune broke up because “different things happened” and “greed got in.” In the spring of 1975, former members filed a lawsuit alleging that $11,800 from their drywall company was used illegally to buy Mercier and his wife a new Cadillac, according to an Arizona Republic article. Jim Ed was a partner in the business, the Republic reported.

Daulton-Thibodeau said Mercier lived out the rest of his life in Arizona as an openly gay man. Pastor Lee Vayle, a close friend of Branham’s, claimed in a July 2000 sermon that both Mercier and Goad were gay, a major sin in The Message.

Mercier and the men who did his bidding at The Park never faced criminal charges. Mercier died in 1987, according to U.S. Social Security and Census records.

Goad died at 66 in his Indiana home from a gunshot wound to the head on June 14, 1995, according to his death certificate. That was less than a year after former Park members testified during Loker’s trial.

Although the commune had about 130 members, relatively few agreed to come forward for Loker’s trial. Multiple witnesses said they were reluctant to testify and that family members across the country were calling each other, worried about what would be uncovered. Gershom Salisbury, born in The Park, said his grandmother told him: “Don’t say nothing about The Park.”

“Some of them are scared they might go to jail,” former Park member Danny Johnson testified about his family members. “And some of them maybe should be in jail.”

Branham’s role

Present-day Message leaders acknowledged that the abuses that happened in The Park were horrific. But they stress it’s something Branham never would have supported.

Jeremy Evans, spokesperson for Voice of God Recordings, which distributes Branham’s sermons worldwide, said “it’s a shame” that men like Mercier have created communities that “falsely represent the Message of the Hour.”

Michigan Message pastor Paul LaFontaine said Mercier’s actions were “pathetic.” He said there’s no justification for them in The Bible or in Branham’s more than 1,200 sermons. LaFontaine noted that the “tragic” abuse intensified after Branham died.

“I don't know why the enemy, Satan, takes over something after a man is gone,” LaFontaine said.

Bryant said that to his knowledge, the beatings and abuse in The Park started after Branham died. He said Branham would have been "100% against" that.

But both Lynne Daulton and Daulton-Thibodeau said Branham bears at least partial responsibility for their traumatic upbringing.

Branham paid special attention to Daulton and pulled her onto his lap during one of his visits, she said. She believes that’s why Mercier continued to single her out.

Daulton said she wanted to ask Branham if he would rescue her and other children from The Park, but she didn’t get the chance. Branham interrupted her before she could ask her question.

Daulton-Thibodeau said her parents never would have stayed had it not been for Branham’s blessing of their commune. Parents believed they were living according to Branham’s will, and therefore God’s will. They hoped the beatings would help their children learn to be less sinful so they could get into heaven, Daulton-Thibodeau said.

Daulton-Thibodeau was 36, sitting with her father at her home in Washington when she finally confronted him.

“How could you let these things happen to us?” she remembers asking him. Her father started to cry.

“‘Because Brother Branham told me it would be OK,’” he responded. “‘He told me it would all be OK.’”

Ripple effects

Loker’s trial showed the far-reaching effects of the child abuse in The Park. Multiple children who grew up in the commune had run-ins with the law or struggled with violent outbursts as adults, witnesses said.

Scott testified that he became an abusive husband. He said he once pulled a gun on his cousin for annoying him. Scott said he believed his behavior stemmed from the lack of control he had in his life as a child.

“I have such an anger and such a violent temper,” Scott said. “When I get into a situation, I can’t— if I can’t control it, and I don’t understand it, I get violent.”

Lunsford, Loker’s older sister, said she was normally the peacemaker in her family, but aggression came out in her too. She testified that she once beat Loker’s head against the ground because their father wouldn’t let her out of the house alone and Loker wouldn’t come with her.

“The dysfunctionality coming from The Park, it’s a ripple effect,” Loker’s defense attorney Arthur Katz said in court. “It affected Keith.”

Loker said in a brief interview with Lee Enterprises in 2024 that he doesn’t remember much from his upbringing in The Park. Loker said his mother left him alone in his crib for hours at a time, but he’s not sure if he actually remembers that or if it’s something his mom told him. Loker said he doesn’t have any other memories of abuse or neglect from his four years in the commune.

His mother, Marietta Loker, testified that she followed Mercier’s orders to physically abuse Keith when he was 3 because he hadn’t started talking yet. She said she whipped Keith and slapped him in the face for hours to try to get him to speak. Lunsford said her brother was poisoned after he drank Lysol in the trailer park, but their father refused to take him to the hospital.

Keith said he thinks The Park affected him because it traumatized his family, which created an unhealthy environment at home throughout the rest of his childhood and teenage years.

“My mom and dad were two people who came out of there who were emotionally not stable,” he said.

Marietta testified that her husband, Roger Loker, was attracted to men. She said Park leaders would beat him up so he would have sex with her. His father’s sexuality distressed Keith later in life.

Lunsford testified that their home life was characterized by “constant turmoil.” Lunsford said her mother often screamed and threw things, including dishes. Marietta said she and Roger would slap each other until exhaustion in front of their children.

Roger once fired a gun in their home after an argument, Marietta said. Keith, who was in third grade, and his sister thought one of their parents had been shot.

When Keith was 12, his father Roger beat him severely after discovering that another boy, about 14 or 15, had fondled Keith, according to a psychologist’s report. Keith’s parents never explained why he was being punished.

Eventually, Roger kicked Keith and his mother out of the home and filed for divorce. Marietta said Roger blamed the divorce on Keith, a fact she regrets sharing with her son. Keith was 17 at the time.

Asked how Keith’s execution would affect her, Lunsford said: “It would absolutely devastate me.”

A jury sentenced Keith Loker to death in November 1994. He was 23. His execution is unlikely because California imposed a moratorium on capital punishment in 2019.

Fight continues

The abuse Lynne Daulton suffered has haunted her.

She’s struggled with emotional outbursts throughout her life. She often got drunk or high to numb her pain. Daulton said she attempted suicide three times.

Daulton said she was not a good mother, especially not to her sons. She didn’t know how to be. So she gave her sons to their father.

Daulton has been in therapy for nearly 20 years. She was so traumatized by what happened to her that she blocked the abuse from her mind for decades. She had forgotten her name and her family. Three years into therapy, Daulton’s memories came back to her during a session when she remembered being called “Miriam” in the root cellar.

After Mercier abused her that day, Daulton said, she was told to write the name “Miriam” over and over and over again. It’s the name Branham gave her when he visited the commune. It was the name everyone called her in The Park. But as she was abused again and again, it became the name of her torment.

“I had totally accepted that I was the scum of the earth,” Daulton said. “This ‘Miriam’ that they defiled and used. I was worth nothing. And I had accepted that.”

To this day, Daulton has to fight the urge to think of herself as “that nasty little girl from 910 West Gurley Street who was just somebody’s dumping spot,” she said. As she sat in 2023 with a reporter and her aunt Daulton-Thibodeau, she looked at a picture of herself as a child with ringlets in her hair and said, “That’s the Goldilocks whore.”

“You’d think getting baptized 13 times would work,” Daulton said. “I always fought that filthiness. I fought that filthiness last night before you walked in my door, I fought it. How could I not fight it? I still have to fight it.”

“Until you take your last breath, honey,” Daulton-Thibodeau said to her. “But you’re still alive, and you’re breathing, and you’re speaking.”