The Whipping Cult
By Syran Warner
Additional Reporting by Posey Parker
Original Art by Vibedoubt.
This story was originally reported by the Minneapolis Star
i. Introduction
As you can probably imagine, it was the whipping that made them newspaper curios in the 1950s, but there are two other reasons The Whipping Cult is a notable early entry in the history of modern cults.
#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. She also happened to be charismatic in the minds of a few couples at a Baptist church she attended in the neighborhood of 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. Men are more likely to be hellbent controlling psychopaths than women. But Marie Doyle proves that under the right set of circumstances a woman can be every bit as disgusting a man, and that kind of pioneer spirit shouldn’t go unnoticed. Recognize QUEEN, Doyle was a real bad lady. Children were traumatized, some people were brutally murdered a manner you’d get on the first guess.
“Oh yes we did!”
The other notable thing about The Whipping Cult is that journalists of the day actually called it a cult, which was a rare distinction. 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. No groups with members in high society were ever called cults, interestingly enough. The whipping cult was mostly blue collar, and ripe for sounding the alarm.
In Minnesota, where The Whipping Cult exclusively practiced, the word “cult” had never been used in the newspapers to describe a regional organization before Marie Doyle jumped into the frame. Readers were sensitive to the term, particularly if it involved a Christian group. This wasn’t the first cult in Minnesota; the others just evaded classification. Marie’s church the perfect catastrophe to force the hand of The Minneapolis Star’s editorial team. Also interesting: post-Whipping Cult, the paper wouldn’t use the term again in its pages for well over a decade. That’s how special The Whipping was.
It started 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 her out the door.
The newspaper fails to mention what the specific views were that caused Marie Doyle to get tossed from the Baptist church, which is an institution that typically bends over backwards for conservative white ladies, but there were hints. The passage Marrie committed to memory 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 invented by the press. The church Marie created never got around to giving itself a name. This probably had as much to do with secrecy as it did the congregation blowing their whipping loads early in the endeavor.
ii. Alice
Like cults do, Marie Doyle’s group grew quietly. The “church” was located in a small house in the Minneapolis suburb of Lauderdale. By the time they got busted up, seven adults and seven children were living on top of each other in the home.
Mass was frequent. 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, whip the living shit out of each other. There’s a reason they weren’t called The Singing Cult even though there was singing. The cult believed in the devil and they believed there was only one way to drive him out of a sinner once his hands were in you. That is literally. With a whip.
It’s suggested that the singing was deployed to drown out the screaming that came from the whippee. That way the neighbors wouldn’t get suspicious.
The cult likely would have gone unnoticed to The Star before the whippings turned deadly if not for a woman named Alice Christensen, who almost died herself in 1950. Alice and her husband were one of the young couples in The Whipping Cult, and Alice was displeased about the church her husband dragged her into. Whipping is not for everybody. Alice was so upset about the club, in fact, she started the car she shared with her husband in their garage. She had the door closed and the car’s windows open. Alice napped 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 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.
1950.
When the doctors heard Alice’s story, they did what was a common for a woman who’d just been brutally abused: they sent her to the looney farm indefinitely. Apparently, she was nuts.
It was a crime that Alice 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 from a primary source and followed up with an interview 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 hiding that they were in a church where whipping was elemental, and they stuck to their version of events: The Bible gave them the green light to flay each other with specifically a three-foot whip, and Marie Doyle said it was what God wanted, she was a prophet, so there was nothing wrong with the practice.
Everyone also admitted that Marie was in charge and when they were questioned, and Marie seemed to take extreme pride in her church publically, so they were a green, unexperienced cult. Marie quoted scripture she was using to justify the violence when the reporters asked about it.
The First Amendment is clear about the right to practice whatever religion you choose in America. It’s also impossible for there to be any crime in whipping the skin off 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. This included their two sons, Thomas, who was nine and LeRoy, who was eight.
Ardith & Her Children
Curtis Lennander would later claim 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 too intense for one of the spectators even though they regularly saw whippings that drew blood. Anna Halverson 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.
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, get this, the whipping of a lifetime. They used the metal end of a garden hose. When it was over it seems everyone went to bed like nothing fucking happened.
This is what Curtis’ back looked like after he took his whipping.
In the morning Anna was dead.
You’d have to bend the rules quite a bit to find a Biblical interpretation of Curtis’ actions being righteous. The cult members knew that murder is a real bad sin and had some awareness it was considered bad in civil society too. Curtis had already gotten his whipping, so what was there to do?
Someone at the house got wise about stasis leading to even worse outcomes and they picked up the phone. Curtis was arrested at the scene and Ardith was taken to the hospital.
Ardith lived two more days, regaining consciousness long enough to make the statement to police that her husband was 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 an understatement if you observe the crime scene photos.
Using the original police report, an uncredited Chicago Tribune reporter wrote of the 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 and be committed to a hospital 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 the cult would take a break from the whipping, 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.
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. They adapted.
Small, unadulterated cults, however, are a little more prone to just say “fuck it” and keep the train humming down the path of destruction. 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 psychopath. In spite of the murders, when faced with the choice of discontinuing her favorite part of church and doing the right thing, she, of course, chose herself.
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 only as “Mrs. Luther Halvorson.”
Ester was the daughter-in-law of the recently beaten-to-death Anna Halvorson. Like everyone else in the cult, she didn’t really seem to care that someone close had just been brutally murdered or that she herself was the victim of similar attacks. Marie Doyle said, “No, why should I?” when asked if she should have taken the whipping situation a more serious. This one is especially cold considering the deceased Mrs. Halvorson was Doyle’s 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 Doyle, Ester delivered B-movie-script nirvana 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
After the murders, members of The Whipping Cult continued to make the news on account of being in a destructive cult where members beat the devil out of each other and recruitment efforts get physical.
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 in Marrie Doyle’s (already at capacity) living room. Charles Manson’s offered free LSD and sex with homeless women, which by comparison, was way better than brutal beatings; someone had to say it. Anyway, the cult’s response to the restraining order in court was that it was a “smear campaign” and of course they quoted some violent Biblical passages from the one of the sections of the Bible where God is evil. The Whipping cult would only change the focus of their gaze.
Another family had an interesting 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. These folks talked to the woman about God and eternity for a while, presumably, until Mrs. Ebling put it together that the church these weirdos were from was the same church those ladies had died in.
We can only imagine how the conversation went, but the result was that Mrs. Ebling asked The Whipping Cult to leave. These were good Christians, so they honored her request, but not before taking a keepsake to remember their time with. That keepsake being Mrs. Ebling.
Paul Ebling must have been in another room while the missionaries were in his home. We know he heard his wife screaming outside. He took a peek out the window and noticed Mrs. Ebling being dragged toward a vehicle parked outside his home.
Paul was not pleased with his wife being carried away by strangers, and he chased off the dirty cult members before anyone was whipped. Because the cult never actually got the woman in the car, the kidnapping charges didn’t stick, and The Whipping Cult went right back to punishing themselves.
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 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.
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 her mother get beaten to death, she was watching another beating with her favorite pupil Esther getting torn away for following God’s plan. Life is like that sometimes.
That’s just your standard story of cult abuse between brainwashed non-consenting adults though. Flip back to second to last time The Whipping Cult made the news. That’s a 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, and you know how horny The Whipping Cult was for beating the bedeviled. Something was bound to go off the rails.
This beating of objects resulted in a few activities cult members thought were protected by the Law of God 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.” It got out of control and was worth 30 days in Ramsey County jail.
You might be thinking, “No, not Alice Christensen! She rejoined The Whipping Cult after they drove her to the edge of suicide?” Glad you’re paying attention, really, but in 1952 Alice was still wearing a straight jacket and eating quaaludes. Enter Pearl Christensen, who had married Alice’s ex-husband.
If you love someone enough to get whipped by their relatives, I don’t know if you can judge that.
There’s a police report from around the time Pearl joined the party, July of 1952. Setting your father-in-law’s underwear on fire is nothing.
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 then abandoned the vehicle. Good samaritans walked the riverbanks looking for an injured person.
The day of the accident Fred Bauer, the guy who whipped Curtis Lennander as punishment for two murders, 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, for completists, was Esther’s husband, the deceased Anna Halvorson’s son and Marie Doyle’s brother.)
Fred wanted to borrow Luther’s car to run some errands, he claimed.
Little is known about this exchange. It’s not referenced in the paper. Maybe Luther said something along the lines of, “Borrow the car? Why not Fred Bauer, you goddamn maniac. We’re literally living in the same sad horror show, right? Take my car. Uff da, motherfucker” before placing the keys in his hands.
Fred Bauer went for a drive. That is known. Did Fred plan on driving into the Mississippi when he borrowed the car? Did he pick out the spot ahead of time or was it an accident of passion? How did he survive? Did they have seatbelts even? It was 1952!
There were mysteries, but it didn’t take the cops long to figure out what had happened. They manually ran the plates, saw Halverson’s name, and knew exactly who he was and what kind of people he worshipped with. When the police showed up at his doorstep Luther said that he knew nothing of an accident, and said he’d loaned the car to Bauer for some errands. The cops are generally serious people, and they would find Fred.
When the cops found busted up Bauer in his Loring Park home, Fred had an explanation that should be surprising to people, but you get the drill: he said he was doing his buddy a favor and cleansing the car of “evil spirits” for him because Halverson was too timid to do it himself. As Fred told it, the evil spirits were causing Luther to “forsake his family obligations.”
Luther refused to allow the police to press charges, so they couldn’t pin any real crime on Fred. Driving a borrowed car 50 feet off a riverbank isn’t something the state had ever imposed a statute against.
Imagine the badly beaten Fred Bauer telling the cops his story and them realizing how different of a world The Whipping Cult was from.
A few months after this Luther and Esther again lost custody of their children after beating each other and admitting to cleansing the kids too.
vii. Afterword
This true story that actually happened. It 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.
I 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 syranwarner@gmail.com
