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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader, Spencer Henry and boy, oh boy. Do I have a story for you this week before we get into it?

How's it going? How you been? Hope everybody enjoyed their weekend? I did. I'm in Palm Springs. Last minute decision. I was sitting at a coffee shop and I was finishing up writing my notes for the episode the other day and I was like,

should I be in Palm Springs right now? So here I am. I left. I ran home quickly packed a suitcase and we hit the road. So come and do you lie from Palm Springs and always happy about it. Never a bad place to be.

Merch went out, which I'm seeing everyone post their merch. Thank you so much, Madison. God bless Madison. She did the entire thing herself this time and I honestly have no idea how.

So thank you to everybody who purchased. Thank you to Madison for miraculously being a one woman merch production team. I'll let you know when we decide to do another round. I know some people missed it and I'm looking at different options right now as to how we can get a permanent merch store going.

I think that's just the next move. I don't think I have anything else to report though. So I just want to get into today's story and I'm going to explain why this is a part one.

Don't worry. I'm not going to leave you on a cliffhanger. Today's episode was the wildest episode I have ever researched for this show. Like the detective work that went into finding all of the information is unmatched in cult leader history.

Our story is brutal. It's from the 1920s. You're welcome and it's got everything from a cult leader to a moida and mystery. I mean, but the time you finish this episode you're going to feel like what just happened.

I'm really gassing it up. Well, for good reason. It's it's truly taken over my life. I have well had newspaper printouts all over my wall at home. I sent my friend a picture. There's like sticky notes everywhere. It made me feel nostalgic and here's why when I was little every Saturday night my parents would go out on a date night.

They'd go into the city, go on a date night and our babysitter would sometimes let us watch America's most wanted and every time afterwards I would go into my room and on the show it was always like if you see these suspects report to blah blah blah or go to our website at America's most wanted dot com or whatever.

And I would go into my room. I would go on America's most wanted website. I would print out the top criminals. It had like their little bios and pictures of like the top 10 at the time.

And then I would take them. I'd print them out. I'd put them in like a little manila envelope folder thing and then just pop them right into a drawer which God, I wish I had them still. I don't know why I did it.

I never went beyond putting the envelope in the drawer but felt like I was doing something I guess I got being alert perhaps. Imagine being my parents. Imagine going into your like eight or nine year old's room and you like open their desk drawer. You're like, oh, are they doing any dog drawings or anything?

And it's like, nope, just a folder full of the most current most wanted terrorist and murderers in America. My parents knew what they were dealing with. They used to call me detective S because I would fingerprint everyone. I was on it while baby Spencer would be proud to know that while I'm no detective, I now get to print out articles on criminals as part of my job.

So we manifested this. Are you ready to hear about this? I'm ready. Are you ready? You ready? Okay. Let's go on the evening of July 3rd, 1929 on St. Auburn Street in Detroit, Michigan.

44 year old Benny evangelist, a self proclaimed profit in healer was brutally murdered in the basement of his home. Unfortunately, Benny wasn't the only victim. His entire family was found slaughtered.

This is a case that rock Detroit for years to follow and it led to some gruesome aftermath. This is the story of the St. Auburn Street massacre.

I want to give you guys a game plan. I want to set this up for you. This is one of the first times that we're working pretty much solely off of very old newspapers. I was going through every online archive just until my eyes felt like they were going to fall out of my head.

In this episode, we're going to first talk briefly about what happened, get into some of the alarming background of Benny evangelist before his move to St. Auburn Street because that's a whole story in and of itself. And then we'll get into these specifics of some of his cultish behavior and the murders.

We're talking about primarily everything in today's episode and then in part two next week, we're going to try and come up with our own theories of what could have happened. Who could have done this? Because this is a cold case by looking into a whole list of possible suspects via the news articles that came out after the crime was committed.

And we're going to talk about a bunch of other stuff that happened afterwards, like another cult murder that happened just blocks away, a mysterious death of a mother, and just so much more. There's so much to this story that that's why I don't want to do it in one part because I feel like each needs its own dedicated episode.

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