The Whipping Cult

By Syran Warner

Additional Reporting by Posey Parker
Original Art by Vibedoubt.

Minneapolis is known for its surplus of lakes, a sexy rock & roll deity, giving “ice cold” a “nice” rebrand, and that one time Kirby Puckett socked a dinger in The World Series. But there was a season, long ago, when the talk of the town was this crazy car accident of a cult…

i. Introduction

As you can probably imagine, it was the literal whipping that made them newspaper curios in the 1950s, but The Whipping Cult is a notable early entry in the history of modern cults for two other important reasons.

#1, it was the first cult led by a woman to get significant attention in the national press.
Marie Doyle was a stocky, Midwestern housewife and mother in her 40s who also happened to be charismatic in the minds of a few couples at a Baptist church she attended in a neighborhood called Powderhorn Park. Once she accumulated a few followers, Marie formed her own house of worship where the doctrine she dictated was strictly enforced.

Of course, men typically hold the highest offices in the cultiverse, but Marie really outdid herself in proving that a woman can be every bit as disgusting a man given the right stimuli, and that kind of pioneer spirit shouldn’t go unnoticed. Doyle was, YAS QUEEN, a real bad lady. Children were traumatized, some people were brutally murdered.

This feels wrong, but can I get a, “Oh yes we did!”

Another notable thing about The Whipping Cult is that journalists of the day actually called it a cult, which was a rare distinction back in the day. Today the word has a more secular connotation and we recognize groups with no religious affiliation like NXIVM as cults. Back then, editorial standards seemed to only deploy “cult” when the situation fit the precise dictionary definition of a small religious organization with an unorthodox doctrine with the obvious kicker that whatever they were up to was clearly and obviously against societal standards.

In Minnesota, where The Whipping Cult exclusively practiced, the word “cult” had never been used in the newspapers to describe an organization in the region before Marie jumped into the frame. Readers were sensitive to the term it seems, particularly if it involved a Christian group. Of course, there were cults in the area before The Whipping Cult, they just evaded an official classification. Marie’s church was just such a catastrophe The Minneapolis Star’s hand was more or less forced into the editorial decision. Post-Whipping Cult, the paper wouldn’t use the term again for well over a decade. That’s how special The Whipping Cult was. 

How the ball got rolling was with a new interpretation of scripture that a few individuals became so enthusiastic about, they were booted out of church.

Marie and her husband Pat were voted out of their own congregation which only made Marie’s ideas more extreme. An opportunist in exile, Marie got few impressionable friends of hers to follow. The newspapers of the era fail to mention what the specific views were that caused Marie Doyle to get tossed from an institution like the Baptist church that typically bends over backwards for conservative white ladies who commit scripture to memory like she did. It may be a hint, however, that her favorite passage from the Good Book was Proverbs 20:30: “The blueness of the wound cleanseth away evil and so do stripes the inward parts of the belly.”

“The Whipping Cult” is a name the press used. The church she created never got around to giving itself a name.

ii. Alice

Like cults do, Doyle’s grew quietly. The “church” was located in a not-so-big house in the Minneapolis suburb of Lauderdale. By the time this cult got busted up, seven adults and seven children were living in the single family home.

Every few days, members who lived in the city would come over to gather in the living room, sing traditional songs, recite Bible passages and, of course, that signature on-brand activity they were crazy about. There’s a reason they weren’t called The Singing Cult or whatever. They believed in the devil and they believed there was only one way to drive him out of a “sinner.” Literally. With a whip.

So, The Whipping Cult would gather and beat the living shit out of each other all the time, and the singing? That was what they used to drown out all the screaming that came from the whippee so the neighbors wouldn’t get suspicious.

The cult likely would have gone unnoticed to the wider world until the whippings turned deadly if not for a woman named Alice Christensen, who almost died in 1950. Alice and her husband were one of the young couples in The Whipping Cult, and Alice was pretty displeased about the church her husband dragged her into. She was so upset about it, in fact, that she started the car she shared with her husband in their garage with the door closed and the car’s windows open and proceeded to nap in the driver’s seat until her exhaust-poisoned body was discovered by Mr. Christensen and she was rushed to a hospital.             

When Alice was being treated by her early 1950s physicians, they noticed fresh welts from a beating she received at the house in Lauderdale. When questioned about her injuries, Alice spilled the beans about Marie Doyle and her operation. Alice told the doctors all about the church and the whipping practice and named the people who were responsible for her injuries.

When the doctors heard Alice’s story, they did what was a more common treatment way back then for a woman who’d just been brutally abused: they sent her to a room with padded walls against her will indefinitely. They concluded she was nuts.

However, even though the professionals thought Alice was insane, it was a crime that she tried to kill herself. The police had to fill out a report and interview people close to her. A reporter at The Minneapolis Star caught wind of this bizarre story and followed up with interviews of their own.

What the Star found were a whole bunch of happy congregants who didn’t understand what the fuss over Alice was all about. These people were unashamed that they were in the church and that whipping was involved, and they stuck to their version of events: The Bible gave them the green light to flay each other with a three-foot whip and Marie Doyle said it was what God wanted, so there was nothing wrong with it.

Everyone also admitted that Marie was in charge and when questioned, Marie seemed to take extreme pride in her church. She simply quoted some of the scripture that she was using to justify the violence when the reporters asked her what the whipping was about.

The First Amendment is pretty damn clear about the right to practice whatever religion you choose to in America. It’s also impossible for there to be any crime in whipping someone if the person being whipped is cool with it and everyone interviewed thought whipping was cooler than Elvis.

A woman in her 60s named Anna Halverson defended the whippings to the Star. She said the beatings helped free her “from the bonds of Satan.”

Here’s what else they wrote:

iii. The Murders

In October of 1951, Whipping Cult member Curtis Lennander and his wife Ardith were going to bed in the home in Lauderdale they shared with 12 other people, including and their two sons, Thomas, who was nine and LeRoy, who was eight.

Ardith & Her Children

Curtis Lennander later claimed to law enforcement that he suddenly became “remorseful for his sins” while laying in bed, woke up Ardith and dragged her into the living room where Marie Doyle, Anna Halverson and Halverson’s daughter-in-law were. Curtis stripped off Ardith’s clothing and started whipping her in the center of the room.

The violence was a little too intense for one of the spectators who regularly saw whippings that drew blood. Anna Halverson made a fatal mistake when she stood up and tried to stop Curtis. He turned his attention to her and didn’t stop lashing until cult members Fred Bauer and Pat Doyle walked in on the crime scene.

Marie Doyle was in the room the whole time and didn’t say a word, later testifying for Curtis’s early release from prison saying that he was simply whipping the devil out of the women because they had tried to kill themselves like the good Christian he was.

Obviously, no one called 911. Bauer and Pat Doyle picked up the women and wrapped them in sheets before placing them in separate beds. Then they dealt with Curtis’s misbehavior, giving him the whipping of a lifetime with the metal end of a garden hose. After that, it seems everyone went to bed like it was just another night at the trap house.

This is what Curtis’ back looked like after he took his whipping.

In the morning Anna was dead.

There was no Biblical interpretation of what Curtis did being righteous and even the cult members knew that murder is a real bad sin as it is considered in civil society too, and Curtis had already gotten his whipping, so what was there to do?. Someone at the house got wise and picked up the phone. Curtis was arrested and Ardith was taken to the hospital.

Ardith lived two more days, regaining consciousness long enough to make a statement to police that her husband was indeed responsible. After she died, the Minneapolis D.A. acted swiftly and charged Curtis with a few counts of 1st and 2nd degree murder.

Lennander told police he was “in a frenzy” at the time of the beatings, which is kind of an understatement. The newspapers in Minnesota deserve credit for calling a cult a “cult,” but Minnesota readers were of a pretty modest Scandinavian stock in 1951 and the crime was never described in detail in the press locally. However, this was no longer just a local story after the murders, and a few reporters in other markets were a little more willing to describe what actually happened.

Using the original police report, an uncredited Chicago Tribune reporter wrote of his attack on Mrs. Halvorson that Lennander, “said he tore off her dress and that she screamed while blood spurted from wounds from her hips, thighs and back.”

In the Madera, California News-Tribune evening edition, an unbylined article announced that Ardith Lennander had died that day, suffering from “patches of skin the size of a man’s fist torn from her body.”

Curtis Lennander’s assigned defense attorney proposed he go the route of Alice Christensen, insane that is, and be committed to a hospital rather than a prison for the rest of his life. 

However, this was not in Lennander’s view of himself and he refused to be marked infirm by the state. Instead, he took responsibility for his actions. Sort of.

In court Curtis told the judge, “I was possessed of Satanic fury that night… I am sane now, and I was sane that night, except for being possessed by Satan.” When asked how he’d like to plead, Lennander said, “God intends me to plead guilty.”

iv. Esther

You might think that after two prominent members of the church were murdered and another was behind bars, the cult would disband, or cut out the whipping at least, but that’s not how things work in Cultland.

Mainstream religions tend to change their views to conform to society at large the same way the justice system and laws evolve with the times. As the views of society change and become more liberal, so do churches. It’s a slow process, and there are always going to be reactionaries, but religions adapt to the present often because it’s most reasonable to do so. Remember when the Pope went off script and acknowledged climate change even though there’s nothing about it in the Bible? That’s a case of a church leader being presented with evidence and adapting on his own.
Of course, denominations also make changes because there will be serious consequences if they don’t, like when the Mormons decided to end the practice of polygamy, lest all the men have dates with the feds and belly up to an all-you-can-eat prison buffet. They adapted because it was against the groups best interest not to.

Cults, however, are a little more prone to just say “fuck it” and keep the train humming down the path of destruction because there is no Council of Elders or Board of Trustees in the organization. Only one person gets a vote in a group like Marie Doyle’s and that vote is always cast by a narcissistic psychopath. In spite of the murders, when faced with the choice of discontinuing her favorite part of church or doing the wrong thing, she did the wrong thing.

ANYWAY. After Ardith died on October 18, 1951, the national press was knocking on doors to interview members of the famous Whipping Cult. The term “brainwashed” had only been coined three years earlier, so while it wasn’t in wide use, it’s an adjective that reporters could have used when they met the woman known in news reports of the time as “Mrs. Luther Halvorson.” 

Ester was the daughter-in-law of the beaten-to-death Anna Halvorson. Ester, like almost everyone else in the cult, didn’t really seem to give a shit that her mother-in-law had just been brutally murdered or that she was the victim of similar attacks. Marie Doyle herself said, “No, why should I?” when asked if she should have taken the whipping situation a little more seriously that night. This is especially cold considering the deceased Mrs. Halvorson was Doyle’s biological mother.

During the murder investigation, police examined the women and children and most of them had suffered some sort of physical abuse. The children were removed from the home, as they would be again and again for years, and Ester was committed to a hospital where she said her husband and Pat Doyle assaulted her. Did she press charges? Of course not. She was brainwashed and believed her beatings were deserved.

When asked what had happened with her husband and Mr. Doyle, Ester delivered B-movie realness and said it was for her “downright crookedness.” 

“I didn’t ask Doyle to beat me, but I am awfully glad he gave it to me,” she said. “I’ve been such a liar and cover-upper all my life.”

v. The Neighbors

 The elevator on the story of The Whipping Cult only goes in one direction, so naturally the conclusion of this story is buckwild. Before we arrive at the end though, there are a few other loose ends on the way.

After the murders, members of The Whipping Cult continued to make the news on account of the fact they were a destructive cult that continued to beat the devil out of each other and harass their neighbors with recruitment efforts.

One family got a temporary restraining order against the Doyles, Luther Halvorson and Fred Bauer, saying the cult would not stop visiting their home or calling them with the extremely unenticing offer of having their backs whipped to shreds for sin in the scary house down the block where too many people lived. (Chuck Manson’s free LSD was a far more appealing horror cult marketing campaign.) The cult’s response in court was that it was a “smear campaign” and of course they quoted some violent Biblical horseshit.

Another family had a closer encounter. One day a few cult members knocked on the door and asked to speak to a Mrs. Ebling about Christ. Being a good neighbor, this lady let The Whipping Cult into her living room. Cult members talked to this woman about God for a while, presumably, until Mrs. Ebling put it together that the church these bozos were doing their missionary work for was the same church that Ardith Lennander and Anna Halvorson had died in.

We can only imagine how this conversation went, but the result was that Mrs. Ebling asked the gentleman with The Whipping Cult to leave. These were good Christians, so they honored her request, but not before taking a keepsake with them. That keepsake being Mrs. Ebling.

Her husband Paul, who must have been in another room while the missionaries were in his home heard his wife screaming, so he, presumably, took a peek outside and noticed his wife being dragged toward a vehicle parked outside his home.

Paul Ebling was not pleased when he saw his wife being carried away by strangers, and thankfully, he was able to chase off the cult members. Because the cult never actually got the poor woman in the car, the kidnapping charges didn’t stick, and The Whipping Cult went right back to whipping which is what they did best.  

One of the last writeups on The Whipping Cult came in November of 1952, when a neighbor called the cops on the people at the Lauderdale house saying someone was getting a “terrible beating.” When the police arrived, they said they heard Esther say “Now I’ll beat you too” to her husband who she’d just been pummeled by with a leather belt. The Halvorson’s were arrested along with Marie Doyle.

The Halvorson’s two children were in the home that night, ages three years and 18 months. At the time of the murders they had been taken from their parents... and given to Marie Doyle.
Holy shit, legal system!
Marie admitted the kids had been back with their parents for a month and Esther admitted that she had abused her kids multiple times during that period.

So just over a year after Marie had basically said “And what of it?” after watching two of her congregants get beaten to death right in front of her, she was watching another beating with her pupil Esther starring in the show. No word on whether or not Marie ever took a lashing herself.

That’s just your standard story of cult abuse between brainwashed non-consenting adults though. It’s the second to last time The Whipping Cult made the news that’s the real knockout of a cult story.  

vi. Fred Bauer Goes for a Drive

In 1952, it seems The Whipping Cult’s doctrine expanded and all of the sudden the devil was fucking everywhere! Satan showed up in furniture, clothing and a host of other objects that aren’t people (where he traditionally appears when he’s on earth) and you know how much The Whipping Cult loved to beat on the bedeviled.

Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a few activities the cult members thought were no big deal but were in fact prohibited by the state of Minnesota. For example, Mrs. Christensen ran afoul of the law after setting her father-in-law’s belongings on fire because they were “spiritually unclean.” That was worth 30 days in Ramsey County. 

You might be thinking, “No, not Alice Christensen! She rejoined The Whipping Cult after they drove her to the edge of suicide?” We’re glad you’re paying attention, really, but in 1952 Alice was still in the nut house. This was new member Pearl Christensen, who had married Alice’s ex-husband. He really should’ve been working on that one huge character flaw of his before getting in another relationship, but who am I to say that?.

And then there’s a police report from around that same time, July of 1952, that’s much more peculiar than simply setting your father-in-law’s underwear on fire.

Police were called to the scene of what appeared to be a terrible car accident near an embankment in the St. Paul suburb of Inver Grove Heights. A car had driven off the road, flown an astonishing 50 feet through the air, and then crash landed into the Mississippi River.

When first responders got to the submerged vehicle, they didn’t find any survivors. But that’s because they didn’t find anybody. Whoever had crashed the car had escaped the vehicle. Good news, right? Sure. But where was the survivor? Shouldn’t they have been near the vehicle, maybe on the riverbank? This person must have been injured. They couldn’t have just walked back to the cities, that would be fucking crazy. After an accident like that?


The day of the accident Fred Bauer, the guy who whipped murderer Curtis as an in-house punishment for reducing the cult by two members, had gone for a walk in Minneapolis. Bauer lived in a nice house in Loring Park, which is on the southern edge of downtown. He walked a few miles east to the Seward neighborhood to pay a visit to cult member Luther Halverson (who, to recap, was Esther’s husband, the deceased Anna Halvorson’s son and Marie Doyle’s brother.) 

Fred Bauer wanted to borrow Luther’s car to run some errands, he claimed. Little is known about this exchange, so it’s anyone’s guess what words were exchanged. Maybe Luther said something along the lines of, “Why not Fred, you goddamn maniac. We’re living the same horror show that’s turned our sad little lives into a joke that can’t be parodied, aren’t we? Take the car. Uff da, motherfucker” before placing the keys in his hands.

That’s when Fred Bauer went for a drive. There are all kinds of unknowns here. Did Fred plan on driving into the Mississippi that day? Did he pick out the spot ahead of time or was it an accident of passion in the moment? How did he survive the accident? Was he wearing a seatbelt even? It was 1952! 50 feet!

What we do know is that it didn’t take the cops long to figure out what had actually happened. They ran the plates, saw Halverson’s name, and knew exactly who he was and the kind of people he went to church with. When the police showed up at his doorstep Luther said that he’d loaned it Bauer for some errands and hadn’t seen it since.

When the cops found Bauer (soaking wet?) back in his Loring Park home, Fred had an explanation that should be surprising to people, but you get the drill: he was doing his buddy a favor and cleansing the car of “evil spirits” for him. As Fred told it, these “evil spirits” were causing Luther to “forsake his family obligations.” It was a few months after this that Luther and Esther again lost custody of their children, after beating the shit out of each other and admitting to hitting the kids too.

Since Luther refused press charges, they couldn’t pin any crime on Fred. Afterall, driving 50 feet off a riverbank isn’t something the state had ever imposed a statute against. It’s just one of those things no one ever does on purpose.

vii. Afterword

This totally true story that actually happened was sourced from the archives at newspapers.com.

We have been able to piece together some leads on what happened to Marie Doyle and The Whipping Cult after they dropped out of the news cycle. For example, a “Curtis Lennander” with an age that matches up with our murderer married again in 1977. We have also found records of LeRoy and Thomas’s hopefully happier lives with an adoptive family. 

We would like to know more about this story.

If you have more information about survivors of The Whipping Cult, from grown children to harassed neighbors, please reach out to contact@thebodyintl.com.