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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader, Spencer Henry, and this, this right here, this is a little leader where I read the stories that you send to me. If you have a story you would like to share with the cult, you know what to do. Just send it on over to Spencer at Cult Leader.com. Maybe put little leader somewhere in the email or the subject line and you can tell me about anything. You just have a story and you don't know who to tell. I want to hear it. We've been getting

a whole mixed bag of stories lately. This week I think we'll see a pretty common theme in the stories that we're sending. So I'm excited to get to those. But a happy Friday, Bays, it could not come soon enough. I don't want to really go to Off Track, but I also don't want to say nothing. I mean, it was a very somber week. The world that we're living in right now, it's just a lot of what the fuck. But I'm going to be leaving a link in the show notes if you guys would like to join me today in donating to every town for gun safety.

Or you can visit everytown.org, thinking of everybody today and hope you're all doing something nice for your mental health. You can find other resources on the Cult Leader podcast Instagram stories.

Congratulations to everybody graduating this week. I know there's a lot of graduations going on. My little sister is graduating high school. She's the last of us. Oh, also I made a note. I could not forget. Thank you guys for all of the stuff you've been sending to the PO box.

I'm going to open some of them up on the next little leader, but I'm coming to you from the Bay Area today because I'm here for my sister's graduation.

And you guys send me some questionable things that I didn't feel like explaining to TSA at the airport. Now let me distract you for a bit.

Let's talk about under the banner of heaven. Never in Cult Leader history has a show been recommended to me as many times as under the banner of heaven on Hulu has.

And when you watch it, you'll see why very pro leader vibes. I don't want to spoil anything, but it is captivating. It's so

suspenseful and it encapsulates so much of what we've talked about on the show. There was a lot of familiarity to stories that we've talked about on here, like the Mormon Manson episodes that we did a few months back. And I feel like having that background knowledge, you kind of go into this series with a little bit of a head start. Yeah, that's right. We're actually learning something on the show.

The show isn't about that story in particular. The show is actually based on the very tragic murder of 24 year old Brenda Lafferty and her 15 month old daughter, Erica. I mean that description alone tells you this is a very tragic story.

In Andrew Garfield stars in the show, he plays the detective. And at least the first episode is really coming from his point of view, but he's perfect for the role. He does a really good job in it. I actually think he's kind of underrated.

I just watched the Tammy Faye Baker movie a couple of months ago and he played Jim Baker in that one also highly recommend. So I start looking into more information about the show. I had heard of the Lafferty case, but I had never looked too deep into it.

So I started looking more into the case. And I think I would actually like to talk about it eventually because it very much falls into the cult leader realm.

While I was looking into the show and reading about the case, I came across this article from the Deseret news where they interviewed this woman Sharon Wright weeks who's actually Brenda's sister in real life.

And I'll link that article in the show notes. It's a really good read. And she talks about the show and how it resurfaces a lot of emotion for her. And she's also like they got a lot wrong. They didn't necessarily depict her the way that she actually was in real life.

And she kind of list out some of the differences and provides a lot more information on what her sister was like in real life. So I think it's something important to read. I mean, I know true crime as a genre is frequently, especially as of lately, a topic of debate.

But I think it's more about how each individual consumes it and relays the information out. And I've said it before I'll say it again. When you're watching a series like this, you should always take the time to look into the real story or at the very least.

Take what you're hearing or reading or watching with a grain of salt. And that goes for everything podcast documentaries, TV shows, nobody's going to know the stories like the family's involved. Of course, that being said, I think this series is really well done.

I like the way that they filmed it. It's based on the book under the banner of heaven, a story of violent faith by John Kerakauer. It came out in 2003, that book.

And then the creators of the Hulu series bought the rights to the story. I think it's really well done. I like all the actors in it. So I recommend it.

That being said, I think it's time to get into some emails. But first, it's time for a break. And this is technically an ad break. But my partner.com want you to focus on yourself for a moment.

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