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The following is from the first edition of Ed Sanders' "The Family."
This chapter had to be removed from future editions due to a lawsuit.
Other sections were also removed.
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START OF CHAPTER 5 - THE PROCESS
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FIVE
The Process
"My prophecy upon this wasted earth and upon the corrupt
creation that squats upon its ruined surface is: THOU SHALT
KILL." - from "Jehovah on War"
by Robert DeGrimston aka Christ
The black-caped, black-garbed, death-worshiping Process Church
of the Final Judgment arrived on the Los Angeles scene in early
1968. They stayed in public view till a few days after Rober Ken-
nedy's assassination in June of '68, after which they dropped from
sight in Los Angeles.
And for what purpose were these noble Englishmen journeying
to the United States? Gore and world-end.
They made a decision to travel around the world to make
converts and plant the seeds of their cult. They had spent quite a
bit of time in a remote beach lagoon on the Yucatan peninsula and
there they had discovered Satan and sacrifice - full moon frolics in
which they paid obeisance to gore. From there the Process moved
into southern California to collect violence-prone adepts - a form of
human that just loves southern California, the home of weird cults.
And now it was the spring of the Year of the Pig 1968 and they
were swarming the streets of Sunset Strip, trying to convert psyche-
delic merchants, seeking out movie stars and especially they doted
on the hell-oriented bikers and bike gangs that frequented Holly-
wood.
The Process really grooves with war. Among their many publica-
tions, founder Robert DeGrimston has published three books on the
subject of war, "Jehovah on War," "Lucifer on War" and "Satan on War,"
alleging that the words are from the three gods themselves as oper-
ating through the mouth of Robert DeGrimston. It is interesting to
note that as things got hot for the Process, they toned down some
of the violent language in later editions of the same books, particu-
larly "Jehovah on War."
In "Satan on War," for instance, Robert DeGrimston urges humans
to:
Release the fiend that lies dormant within you, for he is strong
and ruthless and his power is far beyond the bounds of human
fraility.
It is necessary, unfortunately, to devote a few words of descrip-
tion to this depressing unsalvation army, these black-garbed
DeGrimston-zombies, in order to describe yet another sleazo input
which warped the mind of Charlie Manson.
The Process Church of the Final Judgment is an English occult
society dedicated to observing and aiding the end of the world by
stirring up murder, violence and chaos, and dedicated to the prop-
osition that they, the Process, shall survive the gore as the chosen
people. Sound like Manson?
It was formed by two fierce occult death-freaks, Mary Anne
Maclean DeGrimston Moor and Robert Sylvester DeGrimston
Moor. At his wife's suggestion, they dropped the name Moor, except
when they want to travel incognito, and do so using the surname
Moor. She is now around forty, if she is still alive, and he is around
thirty-six years of age.
Mary Anne DeGrimston is a baleful lady who dotes on groveling
followers. She has assumed various names such as Hecate and the
Oracle and possibly Circe.
Both are devout reincarnationists. According to one account,
Mary Anne DeGrimston believes she is the reincarnation of Goeb-
bels. But in the era of Manson she was known as Hecate, an apt
appellation. Hecate in ancient lore was the queen of ghosts and
magic, she haunted crossroads, she was attended by hellhounds,
she was the protectress of enchanters and witches.
Robert DeGrimston is thought by the cult to be Christ. He was
born on August 10, 1935, in Shanghai, China. Before waxing weirdo,
DeGrimston studied architecture.
Bob and Mary Anne met at the Hubbard Institute of Scientology
on Fitzroy Street, London in 1963 or 1964. They had been training
to become scientology auditors or instructors. They were married in
1964 and left the Hubbard Institute a few months later, to seek some
sort of spiritual salvation together.
At the time, Robert DeGrimston was powerfully built, tall, blond
with a well-cut beard. He was known as a sharp dresser. He had
been educated at Winchester and had received preliminary
architectural training at the Regent Street Polytechnic.
Mary Anne DeGrimston worships spank-spank. She was born on
November 20, 1931, in Glasgow, Scotland, an illegitimate child.
In her youth, she was slapped into reform school. At some point she
moved to the United States, where she became engaged to the
former boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson. After breaking up
with Sugar Ray Robinson, she went back to London, where she was
a dance-hall hostess and a prostitute. She set up hooker headquar-
ters at 31 Lesusington Street in London where she was a kept
woman for several influential men, including one gentleman who
was later to become the lawyer for the Process. She was energetic
during the Christine Keeler era at sado-sodo in London.
Mary Anne, in the manner of all occult ladies who dote on wor-
ship, possesses that fixed gaze of imminent punishment. Her hair
has been in the past coppery red in color. Her vehement fingernails
have been known to be long and painted silver. Process members
are trained to fawn and grovel at the very thought of her. And, of
course, none but the most trusted are ever allowed to see her in
person.
Together Robert and Mary Anne DeGrimston formed something
called "Compulsions Analysis." The purpose of this group was to
study the reasons behind compulsive behavior, to remove the need
for such behavior and to set people free from such behavior. A key
point in the group was that an individual is totally responsible for
his acts, that even birth defects were chosen by an individual, in-
cluding any characteristics held over from alleged prior lives. Mary
Anne was always saying that Jews died in the Nazi camps through
free choice.
Their charismatic and diligent efforts created around them a
circle of followers, mostly young and perturbed English youth. They
specialized in attempting to attract wealthy people, for they
charged considerably for trying to find the causes of various neu-
rotic behavior. And the two founders, as they are known, just loved
to fly first class and gobble up that hotel room service.
In March of 1966 they secured the lease on a luxury mansion on
Balfour Place in the exclusive Mayfair district of London. Twenty-
five young followers were required to leave their homes at once and
move into the mansion. In addition, they were required to turn
over all their money and worldly possessions to, guess who, Bob
and Mary Anne.
Mr. and Mrs. DeGrimston encouraged complete emotional de-
pendence from their group of followers. The Founding Couple, as
they were called, established themselves in the top apartment of
the Balfour Process Palace, to which only the inmost group was
admitted.
"When Bob and Mary Anne came down, they descended like
gods. She was the resident deity, he her consort." So deposed an
acolyte of that era.
Mary Anne DeGrimston took care never to be seen alone, but al-
ways as the center of a crowd, always as the magical matriarch.
One day, after she and Bobby DeG. moved into the Balfour man-
sion, they each got a large, vicious Alsatian dog, a variety of Ger-
man shepherd. Other member puppets also acquired the Alsatians,
to the point where a dog pack was assembled.
It was decided to go abroad with the full membership of the bur-
geoning cult. So, on June 23, 1966, having sent out an advance party
to prepare their arrival, Mary, Robert, eighteen Processans and six
Alsatian dogs went to Nassau in the Bahamas.
They encountered some difficulty there, so they looked around for
a more suitable location for their group. In August of 1966 they se-
cured a large property in Xtul, Mexico, a village of the Gulf of Mex-
ico on the north coast of the Yucatan peninsula, near Merida. There
they acquired an estate for $175 a year, which included four miles
of seashore, a palm tree jungle, a lagoon and the roofless, gutted,
stone remains of a salt factory, plus various wooden huts. It was
desolation alley.
Because of the tendency of the DeGrimstons to attract the young
sons and daughters of wealthy, aristocratic Englishmen, several
parents hired lawyers to attempt to get their children back from
Mexico. So in November of 1966, lawyers, representing the parents
of converted adepts, flew to Xtul, Mexico, to bring back several
young people. The "Sunday Telegraph" of London, a newspaper,
printed an article entitled: "The Mind Benders of Mayfair," dealing
with the return of the youth-pack from the jungle lagoon.
It was at Xtul where the Process got into satanism. Up to then,
their "gods" were Lucifer and Jehovah. They added Satan, evil Satan,
the god of human sacrifice, bloodshed and rip-off.
At Xtul they coined a word "xtummie," evidently an adjective
denoting a satanic state of preparedness. A "good" satanist exists in
periods of depravity, periodically "exploding in dynamic action" i.e.,
cruelty. Oo-ee-oo.
Even though many of the Process members returned to London,
some stayed behind or returned to Xtul to continue experiments in
the new modes of psychedelic satanism.
The concept of a Process Church was also formed in Xtul. This
formative period was recounted to all new converts.
"Xtul... was a place of revelation. It was a time of revelation.
The basic church formed itself at that point," recalled Brother Ely
in an interview.
The grim experiences of Xtul had more or less divided the Process
group. The issue seemed to be whether to proselytize or to become
a very inner-directed group. One of the members had inherited a
considerable amount of money, so evidently they used about
$80,000 of it to buy a yacht in Greece, in order to crisscross the seas
in secret comfort between the Mayfair mansion and the Satanic
Lagoon in Mexico.
In London, in the spring of 1967, the Process was into fixing up
their stately mansion in Mayfair. They had opened up an all-night
coffee bar, where they showed art movies to attract the intellectuals.
They made forays into the pop field, attempting to attract the
Beatles and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. They held lectures,
demonstrations, telepathy classes and outdoor soapbox rant sessions
in Hyde Park. They opened up a book store. They began to publish
expensively produced tracts and philosophical works. They began
to put out a magazine called "Process" that, gradually as the issues
oozed out, became more and more murderous. The magazine eulo-
gized Hitler, slaughter and carnage, adorning itself occasionally
with pictures of battlefield death. Somehow, they managed to at-
tract for a while Marianne Faithful, the singer and actress, into their
circles. In "Process" magazine number 3, they showed Marianne Faith-
ful lying down, holding a rose, as if she were dead. The story goes
that Mick Jagger was instrumental in weaning Miss Faithful away
from the cult.
In the later half of 1967, the DeGrimstons seem to have made a tour
of the Far East and Turkey.
In October of 1967, perhaps during his travels in the East, Rob-
ert DeGrimston recorded or wrote a book called "As It Is." On the
front page of "As It Is" is a seven-sentence gibberish plexus, declar-
ing the unification of Christ and Satan, in order to snuff the human
universe. It is this:
Christ said: Love thine enemy. Christ's Enemy was Satan and Sa-
tan's Enemy was Christ. Through love, enmity is destroyed.
Through love, saint and sinner destroy the enmity between them.
Through love, Christ and Satan have destroyed their enmity and
come together for the End. Christ to judge, Satan to execute the
judgment.
They have printed this statement in several of their subsequent
publications, although, to soften it a bit, they have added, after the
final word "judgement," the words: "Salvation or doom."
The title, "As It Is," and the last line of the thirteen-page tract, "So
be it," became a sort of hosanna of the cult, which they would re-
peat over and over to each other when they met each other in the
corridor or halls or streets: "As it is, so be it," almost like a "hello"
and "good-by."
From Xtul or the Far East or somewhere, DeGrimston and Hecate
arrived from their proselytizing travels and the Process celebrated
their return by printing a handbill for a meeting called "Christ Has
Returned," which was held on November 24, 1967. Shortly there-
after, the Process ran into trouble with the police. They kidnapped
a recalcitrant follower and zapped him with some shock treatment
and/or torture. There was a fall 1967 freak scene, since which Rob-
ert DeGrimston and Mary Anne DeGrimston have not been seen
in public, except in shuttling anonymously back and forth from air-
port to airport in their world travels.
From this point forward, it was a go-ye-forth and convert scene.
There is a picture published in an issue of their magazine in late
'67 showing eleven Processors sitting around a table, dressed in
black, all looking intently at their leader Robert DeGrimston aka
Christ. A globe of the world sits in the center of the table, perhaps
indicating a meeting to plan where on earth to send their cult's
spores.
It was the game of the gods. He is Brother Ely talking:
"The gods set up the game a long time before the players came
onto the scene. And part of the way, the gods have set up this
game, as if there are certain beings who are the gods (Lucifer,
Jehovah, Satan), beings who are servants of the gods, whether
they know it or not, consciously or unconsciously, they serve and
do their part. What the Process did was sweep through the whole
world and when they went into each area, those beings who were
of the gods, those beings who were serving their purpose... those
beings that were in the service of the gods came magnetically at-
tracted to the Process in that area. So in going through the world
systematically, they've picked up those people who are of the gods,
who are servants in the destiny of things. And they've picked those
people up. Some stayed with the Church, some were taught, and
in that way, the seeds were planted."
The Process had now become firmly subdivided into three groups,
the Luciferians, the Satanists and the Jehovans. The Luciferians
were of this world; they were fun-loving, they celebrated tranquil-
lity, harmony, order, peace and sensuality. The Jehovahs were up-
tight, narrow-minded, rectitudinous, anti-sex, zealous and austere.
They beat each other as punishment and were into self-flagellation
according to a girl who once was associated with the group. And
Satanists - well, the Satanists were both cold and calculating, and
cruel, and violent; they were the goons.
According to his desires, an individual could become an advocate
of any of the three. It didn't really matter because all were going to
unite at the End - i.e., for the world-wreck.
In late 1967 the Process spores spewed out to America. They also
sent a contingent to Germany, always a fertile ground for death-
freaks.
The Process, or members of it, visited Los Angeles late in 1967
around the same time as the DeGrimstons sent Process members
to San Francisco. In Los Angeles they spent several weeks at a house
operated by the Diggers on North Highland just south of Sunset
Boulevard, then they headed north.
Meanwhile, an advance party of Jehovans consisting of Father
Alban aka Christopher Alfred Fripp and Father Aaron Tubal-Cain,
with his dog Lucifer, voyaged to the Haight-Ashbury district of San
Francisco, arriving in November 1967, just about the time Manson
was driving his school bus full of girls toward Hollywood.
Father Aaron, once called Hugh Mountain, had given over a hun-
dred thousand dollars to the Process. He was a founding father.
Eager were they to win over the Haight. They visited the offices
of the "San Francisco Oracle," the underground newspaper of the
Haight, wearing their black capes and their black suits and their
silver crosses, but were hooted off the set.
Father Alban gave a lecture on the Berkeley campus of the Uni-
versity of California sometime in that fall of 1967. For his lecture,
there was an advertisement in the Berkeley campus newspaper.
Attending the Process recruiting meeting was a former dental
student, Victor Wild, a twenty-seven-year-old dropout from Los
Angeles. Wild had been attending dental school in Chicago and had
experienced a vision of LSD that involved a Christ-figure telling
Wild to gather up a group of followers and go to California. Later
he associated this vision-wraith of Christ with Robert DeGrimston.
He went to San Francisco in 1967 where he found employment
servicing artificial kidney machines. He had been graduated in 1964
from UCLA with a degree in zoology.
Evidently Wild lived at 407 Cole Street near Panhandle Park. He
was living in a commune where other ripe plums for the Process also
lived. He saw the ad for the Process meeting on the Berkeley campus
and decided to attend. It was the answer to his prayers.
After the meeting Wild brought Father Alban back to meet the
members of his commune on Cole Street. Process members have
claimed that Father Alban almost wept at the sight of such a large
group of people waiting for the word. He went Jaweh-batty with
happiness.
Victor Wild turned over his followers and his possessions includ-
ing almost a thousand dollars to the Process. In due time, after
proper instruction, Wild was renamed Brother Ely.
And no one was as gung-ho for the Process as Victor Wild aka
Brother Ely.
In quick order, Processans began to flood into San Francisco.
At first the Process stayed at 407 Cole Street. But they were eager
to set up a "processcene" - a center where they might have church
"services" and proselytize. The cult acquired a house at 1820 Oak
Street where they ate and slept and did their thing. Members would
rise at 6 A.M. in silence. There was a morning invocational service
of obeisance to Jehovah and Satan. Internal members of the Process
wore black robes, silver crosses and what was known as a "Mendez
goat," a triangular red magical sign, the goat symbol of Satan, sewn
on their cult-capes. As for a church, they located a basement at
2416 Geary Street where they poured pillars and painted the walls
red and black and set up lighting as befitting a chapel.
Bob and Hecate sent Luciferans to proselytize in New Orleans,
Louisiana. There is indication that the Satanists continued to oper-
ate on the beaches of Xtul, Mexico. They tried to incorporate in
New Orleans as the Church of the Process of Unification of Christ
and Satan, but they weren't allowed to use the name Satan.
Instead at 1:35 P.M. on January 29, 1968, under the name "The
Process Church of the Final Judgment," the Process incorporated
in New Orleans as a non-profit religious scam. Their address listed on
the corporation papers was 1205 Royal Street.
In New Orleans, the Process rented a large house in the French
quarter. The eight Luciferans from the London home church, with
Alsatian dogs, began to run a coffee house and serve home-made
brownies, attempting to relate to the hippie community. One night
a week they ran telepathy sessions. They talked about the Gray
Forces of moderation which needed to be annihilated. They also
talked about some of the Process "work" on the Yucatan peninsula.
There is some indication that while in New Orleans they became
interested in voodoo.
In early 1968 Processans left New Orleans for California. Reports
from two people, one a former Processan, say that they encountered
trouble with the local authorities in New Orleans. In any case they
were summoned by Robert and Hecate to San Francisco.
There developed in San Francisco considerable strife between
the dope-loving, sensual Luciferans and the austere sexless self-
flagellating Jehovans, according to witnesses. There was talk among
the Luciferans of gang-banging the "prissy Jehovan bitches." People
were accusing one another of being anti-Christ - the ultimate sin in
a cult whose leader is thought actually to be Christ.
It was decided by Hecate and Christ to abandon, at least pub-
licly, San Francisco.
Meanwhile, the DeGrimstons were in Los Angeles where they
located a real estate operator named Aarons with offices on Robert-
son Boulevard who showed sympathy for the group. Father Chris-
tian aka Jonathan dePeyer claims that it was John Phillips who lo-
cated Artie Aarons for them and that Phillips, a songwriter and pop
singer, offered them aid and comfort.
Once a week the Process would go around and clean up and do
repairs and small construction jobs at the various properties owned
by Mr. Aarons. In exchange for this work service, the real estate op-
erator agreed to permit the Process the use of a large, two-story
house at 1882 Cochrane in south central Los Angeles. It was a
fifteen- to twenty-room house which now is a rest home for the
aged. At that time, it was far from a rest home.
One night in early March 1968, DeGrimston called from Los
Angeles and gave the Process two days to pack up and come to Los
Angeles. Around March 10, 1968, a convoy of seven Process auto-
mobiles containing thirty people and fourteen Alsatian dogs jour-
neyed toward Los Angeles. The Process moved into the South
Cochrane house with all their dogs and their black turtlenecks and
black pants and black capes with pictures of the devil sewn on them.
In the following week they went around to various mansions, clean-
ing them up, in order to pay for their rent. One such mansion that
the Process work group visited while working for Artie Aarons was
the John Barrymore mansion, located at 1301 Summit Ridge Drive.
It is a large, four-story mansion located several blocks down the hill
from where Roman Polanski rented his house at 1600 Summit Ridge.
Early in 1968, a young man from Baton Rouge, Louisiana named
Kirn was living at 1882 South Cochrane with a few friends of his
from Louisiana. He was employed in some capacity by Artie Aarons,
the owner of the property at 1882 South Cochrane.
In February of 1968 Lawrence Kirn, because of the heavy
freakness-ratio at the house on South Cochrane, got permission
from Artie Aarons to move into the so-called John Barrymore man-
sion at 1301 Summit Ridge Drive, in the Hollywood Hills.
A few days later the Process Church of the Final Judgment
moved into the house owned by Artie Aarons on South Cochrane.
Kirn remembered that Processans would come to see Aarons.
"They were trying to get him to move them over to a Pasadena
property he had because it was a lot bigger and they were expecting
more of the followers in or something." He already had a caretaker
for that property, a woman and her son, so he was loath to turn it
over to the Process.
The Process spent some time at the Barrymore mansion, and may
have attended parties there for show business personalities. Mr.
Aarons did not actually live at the Barrymore property but rented
parts of it out, and there were parties aplenty there.
In March '68, the Process held public meetings to recruit dupes
at the former Digger house on North Highland. They flooded the
streets to whisper about the end of the world and to hawk their
magazines.
At the time, there were approximately six grades or degrees of
status in the Process. The first and lowest was that of acolyte, which
was the status of a person just joining up with the group. The next
step was that of initiate, which lasted for about six weeks of inten-
sive training for the nascent cultist. The next step was that of mes-
senger, where one acquired his or her cult name. The next step was
that of prophet and then priest, and finally the highest rank in the
order, that of master.
The cult used the family unit as a model. Those of the degree
master were called Father this and Mother that. After a few months
of intensive training with the group the Founding Couple (Christ
and Hecate) chose a cult name for new converts, such as Sister
Sarah or Brother Reuben, and they left their legal names far be-
hind.
Like any cult, information was not shared. Practices of the upper
grades were not known by the lower punks. How convenient.
It is known that in the early phases of the initiation sexual celi-
bacy is practiced. Further on, however, in the trek toward higher
ranks, all sorts of bunch-punchings take place.
At one stage the Processans are required to enter into a pro-
longed worship of Satan, involving satanic ceremonies and blood
sacrifice. They engage in various telepathy meditation sessions and
are into psychometry, a form of group telepathy. They sit in a circle
and exchange personal objects in order to scan each others' personal
vibes and to communicate via telepathy.
Mary Anne liked giving rings to people for the psychometric
effect - a practice used by Manson, who once gave Dean Martin's
daughter a ring at Dennis Wilson's beachhouse.
Every night at midnight the inner Processans hold a worship
service for Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer. Twice a month on Wednes-
day nights, the Processans sit in a circle and summon the gods
Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer, who talk through the mouths of the
cult members. Oo-ee-oo.
Their vicious Alsatian dog-pack accompanied the group. It is in-
teresting to note that the dogs were considered members of the
group and were given special names and even oaths to bind them
to the group.
They pimped the psychedelic merchants. For instance, the
Brother Joshua and Brother Reuben, a recent convert from New
Orleans, came into a psychedelic shop on North Cherokee called
Stick It in Your Ear and tried to convert the proprietor, Ron
Mathes. They backed off when they discovered he was a practicing
Gurdjieffan.
Doubtless you ask, what publications were they hawking on the
streets of Los Angeles? The main publication at that time was issue
number 4 of the "Process" magazine, the so-called "sex" issue, which
depicted on its front cover a ceremony involving an inverted cross
and a naked girl upon an altar surrounded by hooded snuffoids, one
bearing what appears to be a sword. In another part of the front
cover a long-haired young man raising a sword is walking across a
beach or a desert toward the full moon, perhaps a reference to Pro-
cess full-moon beach ceremonies. On the back cover of the "Process"
magazine a large winged skeleton is hovering atop a mound of
shrieking suffering naked bodies evidently dead or in hell. Inside
the magazine contained a hodgepodge series of articles about sex,
an article about black masses and corpse violation, and various pain-
streaked items of confused writing.
One place that spring where the Process distributed their litera-
ture was at the Omnibus Restaurant on North LaCienega Boulevard.
A lot of the bikers that later associated with Manson hung out there.
Rick, "a biker," brought in Process material to the Omnibus. Rick
worked at a Shell station on Sunset across from Whiskey A Go-Go.
The Process tried to deal with the Satan-Oriented bike groups
but had to be content with stirring them up. One girl associated
with the cult then said this: "They tried, you know, getting them
[the bikers] to come to meetings and you just can't do nothing with
a motorcycle rider. So they decided to use them and it would be
easier to sort of incite them and get them to do what they wanted
done. That is the thing, you know, figuring they were the forces of
Satan."
They, or at least Brother Ely, had great visions of the bikers be-
coming Process assault squads. Sound like Manson?
"When it really gets going, we'll have a mobile conversion unit
with messengers in jack boots on black Harleys, wearing black
leather jackets with the Process symbol [an inverted swastika] in
studs on the front and the cross in studs on the back." This is what
a dropout from the Process says that Brother Ely told him in the
summer of 1968, following the breakup of Process activities in Los
Angeles.
It was the message of the unity of Christ and Satan that Manson
grooved with.
"Christ and Satan through love dissolved the enmity that existed
between them and the unity of Christ and Satan is what the proc-
ess is all about. They've come together to usher in the end of the
world," said Brother Ely to a reporter from an English occult maga-
zine.
The unification of Christ and Satan is exactly what Manson was
getting into at that time, when the family was roaming Hollywood
in the black bus.
The Process decided to make it big in the entertainment business,
so they formed a rock and roll group called The Black Swan. Some
Process members claim that the rock group was actually called the
Voice of the Process. The Black Swan consisted of Brother Joshua
on guitar - Brother Joshua had been in a pop group in London for
quite a while - and Brother Benedict, the satanist, on drums. Brother
Ely of flute and Brother Barnabas on string bass. Says Father Ely:
"Brother Barnabas was a really good string bass player. You know,
he was doing lounge shows in Las Vegas. Very professional bass
player.
"We never made much money. We used to pass the hat. Some-
times we'd get a couple of bucks, but that's about all." The Black
Swan, the world's only rock group that believed in human sacrifice,
at least publicly, would play in various clubs and bars, generally
filling in between the main acts.
"We went into a biker bar one time. They took up a collection
for us. They really liked us," said flutist Ely. The biker bar was on
Sunset Boulevard near the Strip.
The Process sought out rich and successful people. Father Chris-
tian of the Process has claimed, for instance, that the Process man-
aged, in addition to John Phillips, to meet Warren Beatty and Cass
Elliott. To understand this phenomenon, all anybody has to do is
create a hit record or a successful film and watch the money-
grubbing psychopaths come aswarming.
They approached Terry Melcher right around the time Melcher
was meeting and grooving with Manson at Dennis Wilson's house
on Sunset Boulevard.
It is known that the Process tried to make an appointment to see
Joey Bishop who then had a talk show on ABC-TV.
It is interesting to note that there was an employee of the Joey
Bishop show living at the Barrymore mansion at the time the Proc-
ess was above ground in Los Angeles.
The Process members, most of whom were English citizens, had
been allowed into the United States on three-month visitor's per-
mits. Apparently they tried to get permission to stay by saying that
they were students of the Church of Scientology. There was talk
about a $100,000 bond that the group was going to have to put up
in order to stay in the country.
In the third week of May 1968, the U.S. Immigration office of Los
Angeles forwarded the Process files to New York for deportation pro-
ceedings.
At the house on South Cochrane they scraped possessions to-
gether and held a garage sale to raise money. Artie Aarons, the
owner of the house, complained that they sold some of his stuff also
in the sale. They moved out. Some of them seem to have gone to
New York to work on their immigration problems. There was talk
of going to Toronto.
Others went into hiding. Some may have been staying at the
Barrymore mansion on Summit Ridge when the vicious dogs went
after Roman Polanski.
On Monday, June 5, an official for the Church of Scientology -
evidently an English citizen - went to apply for an immigration per-
mit to the United States. The scientology official's application was
refused because "Twelve members of the Church of the Process of
Scientology" had been ordered to leave the country by June and
supposedly had fled the set. The Church of Scientology waxed
miffed and evidently made attempts to locate the Process because
as long as the Process got away with posing as scientologists, things
would be grim for scientologists trying to come to America.
It is possible that the Process had a baleful influence on Sirhan
Sirhan since Sirhan is known, in the spring of '68, to have fre-
quented clubs in Hollywood in the same turf as the Process was
proselytizing. Sirhan was very involved in occult pursuits. He has
talked several times subsequent to Robert Kennedy's death about
an occult group from London which he knew about and which he
really wanted to go to London to see.
There was one Process member named Lloyd who was working
as a chef for one of the large Los Angeles hotels, either the Ambas-
sador or the Sheraton. Lloyd was around fifty years old and was
always complaining of the penurious life of the Jehovans while Bob
and Hecate cruised the world in jet comfort.
It is probably a coincidence that Sirhan seems to have visited a
friend who worked in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel the day
before he shot Senator Kennedy.
Sometime in mid or late June, the Process was holding internal
meetings at a Hollywood motel. Some people interviewed claim that
the gatherings were public recruiting meetings for new followers.
But others say it was for internal Process members only. The motel
may have been the Yucca Motel, a known Process haunt on Holly-
wood Boulevard. This may have been the motel where Robert De-
Grimston caused a Process member to freak out and require
sedation, merely by being in the same hotel as the member.
It will be remembered that the ace selling point of the Process,
besides being the "chosen few," was that DeGrimston was Jesus
Christ snuffing the world. The DeGrimstons were never seen by the
underlings of the cult. Cult members were expected to have the
attitude of fawning dogs wetting in fear.
This is what our trusty informant tells us about the event: "They
were not allowed to see Robert because they were on the bottom
floor of this one hotel and he was on the top floor and they were just
all shaking and crying because he was so powerful. One of the men
happened to see him and just ran back into the room and had hys-
terics and they had to sedate him."
"We discovered the Process group staying in a Hollywood motel
... and reported it to immigration authorities," said Reverend
Gordon Mustain, a Deputy Guardian of the Church of Scientology.
Some sort of raid ensued but the wily Processans had already hit
the bricks.
Some members of the Process, including Robert and Mary Anne
DeGrimston, went to New York, where they set up a church there
for a while. Others went underground and traveled north to San
Francisco and to the Santa Cruz Mountains and evidently to King
City and points here and there. Their subsequent activities will be
recounted later.
Brother Ely aka Victor Wild went to San Francisco and then to
San Jose, where he opened up a leather shop and became rich.
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END OF CHAPTER 5 - THE PROCESS
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