Inside Australia’s notorious cult ‘The Family’ whose woman leader ‘collected’ dozens of children and injected them with LSD as she prepared for apocalyptic war
Bleach-blonde kids were beaten, starved and drugged by warped sect who believed World War Three was coming
WITH their cutely cropped hair and matching clothes, these cherubic children look like an image of innocence and happiness.
But in reality they are the prisoners of a delusional cult leader on a drug-fuelled mission to gather kids in preparation for an apocalyptic war.
Children were drugged and beaten by elders in The Family
Anne Hamilton-Byrne, the charismatic mother figure who led the creepy Australian sect known as The Family, thought she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
Taking in kids from brainwashed parents over the course of nearly twenty years, she raised her flock as her own at a secluded property in Lake Eildon in Victoria state.
And despite apparently fawning over these innocent kids, allegations of beatings, starvation and even the drugging of young boys and girls with powerful LSD in the 1970s and 80s are still rife.
These accusations are laid bare in an upcoming documentary titled The Family, which even features chilling accounts from Hamilton-Byrne herself.
Speaking of her obsession with creating a brood of identical children, she says: "'I wanted them to look like brothers and sisters — I must admit this.
"I loved them in their little smocks and jeans and the long hair and ribbons. It was beautiful. It was lovely to see."
And when confronted about why she imprisoned 28 kids over her twenty-year reign, she says simply: "I love children".
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Born Evelyn Edwards in 1921 to a mentally ill mother and an absent father, Hamilton-Byrne was working as a yoga teacher when she met English physicist Dr Raynor Johnson in 1963.
The following year they set up a group dedicated to spreading a surreal combination of Christianity and Hinduism, with Hamilton-Byrne at its centre.
Attracting middle-class New Age parents and dolling out heaps of LSD, Hamilton-Byrne convinced them to hand over custody of their kids to her in order to create a "master race".
After undergoing years of seclusion, brutal punishment and doses of powerful psychiatric drugs, upon reaching adolescence the children were put through a bizarre initiation involving taking LSD and sitting in a dark room.
The whole sickening practice was revealed when one "daughter", Sarah Hamilton-Byrne, was expelled in 1987 for her rebellious behaviour and alerted police to the cult.
Now, in the new documentary, other former Lake Eildon children have opened up about their brutal ordeal.
Ben Shenton talks of how Sarah was once violently beaten with a belt for disobeying orders.
"Sarah was thrashed", he says with tears in his eyes. "I was watching her being belted with a buckle and she's being beaten to the point where she's wriggling out of her clothes.
"Hearing her body smash across the balustrades. It was horrendous to know they had the power to do that and would it."
After the 1987 police raid led to the rescue of six children from the cult, Hamilton-Byrne and her husband Bill fled Australia.
Six years later they were found by the FBI in Hurleyville, New York and were extradited back to Oz, where they faced charges of fraud relating to falsely registering three children as their own.
They were handed £3,000 fines but were spared jailed.
Now Hamilton-Byrne is seeing out her final years with dementia in a nursing home, while a reported power struggle is underway into how the group will continue.
Detective Lex de Man, who led the investigation into the cult, told : "My only regret is she was never held totally to account for the misery she caused to the former cult children.
"I have no sympathy for the woman I consider the most evil person I ever met in my police career."
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