Published November 18, 1983
All eyes are on Olympia as the case of cult leader Jeffrey Halcomb begins proceedings in Washington State Supreme Court today. The story of the massacre that occurred in Pier Pointe, Washington, in March of this year has been nothing short of a media frenzy. Halcomb’s face, as well as those of Audra Snow and the group the media has referred to as “Halcomb’s Faithful,” seem to permanently shine from our television screens. But who is Jeffrey Halcomb? Where did he come from, and how was one man able to talk a group of intelligent, vibrant young adults into taking their own lives?
“Jeffrey led our congregation out in Veldt, Kansas,” says forty-five-year-old Mira Ellison. Ellison, who now resides in Topeka, recalls her youth in the tiny hamlet. “It was small. A few thousand people. Jeffrey’s father was a pastor.” The Gate of Heaven Church was founded by Protestant Gregory Halcomb in 1939. Three years later, Jeffrey Halcomb would be born to sixteen-year-old Helen Halcomb (née Stoneridge). Gregory Halcomb was forty-three at the time of his son’s birth.
The Gate of Heaven Church wasn’t the only house of worship in Veldt at the time. “My mother said there was a big confrontation,” Ellison recalls. “Pastor Halcomb was dead set on running the original church out of town. Something about the opposing pastor being a blasphemer. I was young, so I don’t remember the details too well.”
But Ellison does remember meeting Jeffrey Halcomb for the first time. “He’d run up and down the center aisle during his daddy’s sermons. Everyone loved Jeffrey. People said that God had blessed him, being born to the pastor and all. Helen [Halcomb] was also gifted, so they all just assumed Jeffrey would absorb all that enlightenment from his folks.”
Helen was raised Protestant in Veldt. The older Gregory Halcomb was smitten before she reached the age of thirteen. “In Veldt, everyone ran in the same circles. Helen was entranced by the idea of marriage as much as she was by the idea of going to heaven. When she broke into tongues during Pastor Halcomb’s sermons, you could see Gregory watching her, fascinated. They were just enamored with each other.”
Helen Halcomb had the habit of tumbling out of her church pew and convulsing at the foot of the pulpit. “Nobody would intervene,” says Ellison. “The adults saw it as God working through her, delivering a message, but to us kids it was downright scary.”
That message from God, the congregation agreed, came in the form of a baby. When Jeffrey Halcomb was born in November 1942, the Gate of Heaven rejoiced.
“He was leading sermons by the time he was eight or nine,” Ellison recalls. “When he hit his teens, Pastor [Gregory] Halcomb handed over the reins. They called him ‘the Child Prophet.’ After word got out, people came from all over Kansas. We had to start having church outside on the lawn. Pastor Halcomb told folks that his son was the Lamb of God, that he’d usher in the second coming of Christ. It wasn’t long before Jeffrey started preaching about his own divination. My momma used to say that he only did it to make his sermons more powerful, but it seemed to me like [Jeffrey] believed it himself.”
Why, then, did Halcomb not stay in Kansas, where he was so revered? “He started convincing the younger kids that he could bring them back from the dead,” Ellison says. “Rumor was that a local boy tried to kill himself after Jeffrey said he could pull him back from the other side, but we never did find out who that boy was. That didn’t matter. [Veldt] turned on Jeffrey. His own father ended up excommunicating him, calling out the devil and such. Pastor [Gregory] Halcomb made him get down on his knees in front of the entire congregation and whipped him with a rod. There had been stories about how Pastor Halcomb used to beat Jeffrey bloody whenever he thought the boy had sinned. When he did it in front of the church, he said each lash stood for a year of deception, said that Satan had tricked him into believing his son was the Lamb.”
Jeffrey Halcomb disappeared from the tightly knit Veldt community after his excommunication. He had just turned seventeen. “Most everyone in Veldt was glad, too,” Ellison says. “By then, everyone was right scared of their kids dying because Jeffrey said he could bring them back. When, at a spring picnic, someone asked Helen where Jeffrey had gone to, she went pale and said that he’d gone back to hell.”
There were, however, those who didn’t take so well to Jeffrey Halcomb’s excommunication. “Lots of people had come down from all over to listen to Jeffrey preach, and lots of people really did believe he was doing God’s work. So when Veldt told [Jeffrey] he had to go, some of those who came from far away weren’t happy at all about it. Jeffrey was real charismatic,” says Ellison. “Lots of the young girls fell for him. I remember, after Pastor Halcomb announced that Jeff was gone and not coming back, some of them started wailing like they’d just seen someone die. A few of them demanded the pastor reveal where Jeff had gone to. Those girls were determined to find him, to follow him out to wherever he had gone.”