The Process

The Process

"My prophecy upon this wasted earth and upon the corrupt creation that squats upon its ruined surface is: THOU SHALT KILL."

- from Jehovah on War by Robert DeGrimston aka Christ

The black-caped, black-garbed, death-worshiping Process Church of the Final Judgment arrived on the Los Angeles scene in early 1968. They stayed in public view till a few days after Robert Kennedy's assassination in June of '68, after which they dropped from sight in Los Angeles.
And for what purpose were these noble Englishmen journeying to the United States? Gore and world-end. They had made a decision to travel around the world to make converts and plant the seeds of their cult. They had spent quite a bit of time in a remote beach lagoon on the Yucatan peninsula and there they had discovered Satan and sacrifice-full moon frolics in which they paid obeisance to gore. From there the Process moved into southern California to collect violence-prone adepts-a form of human that just loves southern California, the home of weird cults.
And now it was the spring of the Year of the Pig 1968 and they were swarming the streets of Sunset Strip, trying to convert psychedelic merchants, seeking out movie stars and especially they doted on the hell-oriented bikers and bike gangs that frequented Hollywood.
The Process really grooves with war. Among their many publications, founder Robert DeGrimston has published three books on the subject of war, Jehovah on War, Lucifer on War and Satan on War, alleging that the words are from the three gods themselves as operating through the mouth of Robert DeGrimston. It is interesting to note that as things got hot for the Process, they toned down some of the violent language in later editions of the same books, particularly Jehovah on War.
In Satan on War, for instance, Robert DeGrimston urges humans to:

Release the fiend that lies dormant within you, for he is strong and ruthless and his power is far beyond the bounds of human frailty.

It is necessary, unfortunately, to devote a few words of description to this depressing unsalvation army, these black-garbed DeGrimston-zombies, in order to describe yet another sleazo input which warped the mind of Charlie Manson.
The Process Church of the Final Judgment is an English occult society dedicated to observing and aiding the end of the world by stirring up murder, violence and chaos, and dedicated to the proposition that they, the Process, shall survive the gore as the chosen people. Sound like Manson? It was formed by two fierce occult death-freaks, Mary Anne Maclean DeGrimston Moor and Robert Sylvester DeGrimston Moor. At his wife's suggestion, they dropped the name Moor, except when they want to travel incognito, and do so using the surname Moor. She is now around forty, if she is still alive, and he is around thirty-six years of age.
Mary Anne DeGrimston is a baleful lady who dotes on groveling followers. She has assumed various names such as Hecate and the Oracle and possibly Circe.
Both are devout reincarnationists. According to one account, Mary Anne DeGrimston believes she is the reincarnation of Goebbels. But in the era of Manson she was known as Hecate, an apt appellation. Hecate in ancient lore was the queen of ghosts and magic, she haunted crossroads, she was attended by hellhounds, she was the protectress of enchanters and witches.
Robert DeGrimston is thought by the cult to be Christ. He was born on August 10, 1935, in Shanghai, China. Before waxing weirdo, DeGrimston studied architecture. Bob and Mary Anne met at the Hubbard Institute of Scientology on Fitzroy Street, London in 1963 or 1964. They had been training to become scientology auditors or instructors. They were married in
1964 and left the Hubbard Institute a few months later, to seek some sort of spiritual salvation together.
At the time, Robert DeGrimston was powerfully built, tall, blond with a well-cut beard. He was known as a sharp dresser. He had been educated at Winchester and had received preliminary architectural training at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Mary Anne DeGrimston worships spank-spank. She was born on November 20, 1931, in Glasgow, Scotland, an illegitimate child. In her youth, she was slapped into reform school. At some point she moved to the United States, where she became engaged to the former boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson. After breaking up with Sugar Ray Robinson, she went back to London, where she was a dance-hall hostess and a prostitute. She set up hooker headquarters at 31 Lesusington Street in London where she was a kept woman for several influential men, including one gentleman who was later to become the lawyer for the Process. She was energetic during the Christine Keeler era at sado-sodo in London.
Mary Anne, in the manner of all occult ladies who dote on worship, possesses that fixed gaze of imminent punishment. Her hair has been in the past coppery red in color. Her vehement fingernails have been known to be long and painted silver. Process members are trained to fawn and grovel at the very thought of her. And, of course, none but the most trusted are ever allowed to see her in person.
Together Robert and Mary Anne DeGrimston formed something called "Compulsions Analysis." The purpose of this group was to study the reasons behind compulsive behavior, to remove the need for such behavior and to set people free from such behavior. A key point in the group was that an individual is totally responsible for his acts, that even birth defects were chosen by an individual, including any characteristics held over from alleged prior lives. Mary Anne was always saying that Jews died in the Nazi camps through free choice.
Their charismatic and diligent efforts created around them a circle of followers, mostly young and perturbed English youth. They specialized in attempting to attract wealthy people, for they charged considerably for trying to find the causes of various neurotic behavior. And the two founders, as they are known, just loved to fly first class and gobble up that hotel room service.
In March of 1966 they secured the lease on a luxury mansion on Balfour Place in the exclusive Mayfair district of London. Twenty- five young followers were required to leave their homes at once and move into the mansion. In addition, they were required to turn over all their money and worldly possessions to, guess who, Bob and Mary Anne.
Mr. and Mrs. DeGrimston encouraged complete emotional dependence from their group of followers. The Founding Couple, as they were called, established themselves in the top apartment of the Balfour Process Palace, to which only the inmost group was admitted.
"When Bob and Mary Anne came down, they descended like gods. She was the resident deity, he her consort." So deposed an acolyte of that era.
Mary Anne DeGrimston took care never to be seen alone, but always as the center of a crowd, always as the magical matriarch. One day, after she and Bobby DeG. moved into the Balfour mansion, they each got a large, vicious Alsatian dog, a variety of German shepherd. Other member puppets also acquired the Alsatians, to the point where a dog pack was assembled.
It was decided to go abroad with the full membership of the burgeoning cult. So, on June 23, 1966, having sent out an advance party to prepare their arrival, Mary, Robert, eighteen Processans and six Alsatian dogs went to Nassau in the Bahamas.
They encountered some difficulty there, so they looked around for a more suitable location for their group. In August of 1966 they secured a large property in Xtul, Mexico, a village of the Gulf of Mexico on the north coast of the Yucatan peninsula, near Merida. There they acquired an estate for $175 a year, which included four miles of seashore, a palm tree jungle, a lagoon and the roofless, gutted, stone remains of a salt factory, plus various wooden huts. It was desolation alley.
Because of the tendency of the DeGrimstons to attract the young sons and daughters of wealthy, aristocratic Englishmen, several parents hired lawyers to attempt to get their children back from Mexico. So in November of 1966, lawyers, representing the parents of converted adepts, Hew to Xtul, Mexico, to bring back several young people. The Sunday Telegraph of London, a newspaper, printed an article entitled: "The Mind Benders of Mayfair," dealing with the return of the youth-pack from the jungle lagoon.
It was at Xtul where the Process got into satanism. Up to then, their "gods" were Lucifer and Jehovah. They added Satan, evil Satan, the god of human sacrifice, bloodshed and rip-off.
At Xtul they coined a word "xtummie," evidently an adjective denoting a satanic state of preparedness. A "good" satanist exists in periods of depravity, periodically "exploding in dynamic action" i.e., cruelty. Oo-ee-oo.
Even though many of the Process members returned to London, some stayed behind or returned to Xtul to continue experiments in the new modes of psychedelic satanism.
The concept of a Process Church was also formed in Xtul. This formative period was recounted to all new converts.
"Xtul ...was a place of revelation. It was a time of revelation. The basic church formed itself at that point," recalled Brother Ely in an interview. The grim experiences of Xtul had more or less divided the Process group. The issue seemed to be whether to proselytize or to become a very inner-directed group. One of their members had inherited a considerable amount of money, so evidently they used about $80,000 of it to buy a yacht in Greece, in order to crisscross the seas in secret comfort between the Mayfair mansion and the Satanic
Lagoon in Mexico.
In London, in the spring of 1967, the Process was into fixing up their stately mansion in Mayfair. They had opened up an all-night coffee bar, where they showed art movies to attract the intellectuals. They made forays into the pop field, attempting to attract the Beatles and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. They held lectures, demonstrations, telepathy classes and outdoor soapbox rant sessions in Hyde Park. They opened up a book store. They began to publish expensively produced tracts and philosophical works. They began to put out a magazine called Process that, gradually as the issues oozed out, became more and more murderous. The magazine eulogized Hider, slaughter and carnage, adorning itself occasionally with pictures of battlefield death. Somehow, they managed to attract for a while Marianne Faithful, the singer and actress, into their circles. In Process magazine number 3, they showed Marianne Faithful lying down, holding a rose, as if she were dead. The story goes that Mick Jagger was instrumental in weaning Miss Faithful away from the cult.
In the latter half of 1967, the DeGrimstons seem to have made a tour of the Far East and Turkey.
In October of 1967, perhaps during his travels in the East, Robert DeGrimston recorded or wrote a book called As It Is. On the front page of As It Is is a seven-sentence gibberish plexus, declaring the unification of Christ and Satan, in order to snuff the human
universe. It is this:

Christ said: Love thine enemy. Christ's Enemy was Satan and Satan's Enemy was Christ. Through love, enmity is destroyed. Through love, saint and sinner destroy the enmity between them. Through love, Christ and Satan have destroyed their enmity and come together for the End. Christ to judge, Satan to execute the judgment.

They have printed this statement in several of their subsequent publications, although, to soften it a bit, they have added, after the final word "judgment," the words: "Salvation or doom."
The title, As It Is, and the last line of the thirteen-page tract, "So be it," became a sort of hosanna of the cult, which they would repeat over and over to each other when they met each other in the corridor or halls or streets: "As it is, so be it," almost like a "hello" and "good-by."
From Xtul or the Far East or somewhere, DeGrimston and Hecate arrived from their proselytizing travels and the Process celebrated their return by printing a handbill for a meeting called "Christ Has Returned," which was held on November 24, 1967. Shortly there-
after, the Process ran into trouble with the police. They kidnapped a recalcitrant follower and zapped him with some shock treatment and/or torture. There was a fall 1967 freak scene, since which Robert DeGrimston and Mary Anne DeGrimston have not been seen in public, except in shuttling anonymously back and forth from airport to airport in their world travels.
From this point forward, it was a go-ye-forth and convert scene. There is a picture published in an issue of their magazine in late '67 showing eleven Processors sitting around a table, dressed in black, all looking intently at their leader Robert DeGrimston aka Christ. A globe of the world sits in the center of the table, perhaps indicating a meeting to plan where on earth to send their cult's spores.
It was the game of the gods. Here is Brother Ely talking:

"The gods set up the game a long time before the players came onto the scene. And part of the way, the gods have set up this game, as if there are certain beings who are the gods (Lucifer, Jehovah, Satan) , beings who are servants of the gods, whether they know it or not, consciously or unconsciously, they serve and do their part. What the Process did was sweep through the whole world and when they went into each area, those beings who were of the gods, those beings who were serving their purpose...those beings that were in the service of the gods came magnetically attracted to the Process in that area. So in going through the world systematically, they've picked up those people who are of the gods, who are servants in the destiny of things. And they've picked those people up. Some stayed with the Church, some were taught, and in that way, the seeds were planted."

The Process had now become firmly subdivided into three groups, the Luciferians, the Satanists and the J ehovans. The Luciferians were of this world; they were fun-Ioving, they celebrated tranquility, harmony, order, peace and sensuality. The Jehovahs were up-tight, narrow-minded, rectitudinous, anti-sex, zealous and austere. They beat each other as punishment and were into self-flagellation according to a girl who once was associated with the group. And Satanists-well, the Satanists were both cold and calculating, and cruel, and violent; they were the goons.
According to his desires, an individual could become an advocate of any of the three. It didn't really matter because all were going to unite at the End-i.e., for the world-wreck.
In late 1967 the Process spores spewed out to America. They also sent a contingent to Germany, always a fertile ground for death-freaks.
The Process, or members of it, visited Los Angeles late in 1967 around the same time as the DeGrimstons sent Process members to San Francisco. In Los Angeles they spent several weeks at a house operated by the Diggers on North Highland just south of Sunset
Boulevard, then they headed north. Meanwhile, an advance party of Jehovans consisting of Father Alban aka Christopher Alfred Fripp and Father Aaron Tubal-Cain, with his dog Lucifer, voyaged to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, arriving in November 1967, just about the time Manson was driving his school bus full of girls toward Hollywood.
Father Aaron, once called Hugh Mountain, had given over a hundred thousand dollars to the Process. He was a founding father. Eager were they to win over the Haight. They visited the offices of the San Francisco Oracle, the underground newspaper of the Haight, wearing their black capes and their black suits and their silver crosses, but were hooted off the set.
Father Alban gave a lecture on the Berkeley campus of the University of California sometime in that fall of 1967. For his lecture, there was an advertisement in the Berkeley campus newspaper. Attending the Process recruiting meeting was a former dental student, Victor Wild, a twenty-seven-year-old dropout from Los Angeles. Wild had been attending dental school in Chicago and had experienced a vision on LSD that involved a Christ-figure telling
Wild to gather up a group of followers and go to California. Later he associated this vision-wraith of Christ with Robert DeGrimston.
He went to San Francisco in 1967 where he found employment servicing artificial kidney machines. He had been graduated in 1964 from UCLA with a degree in zoology.
Evidently Wild lived at 407 Cole Street near Panhandle Park. He was living in a commune where other ripe plums for the Process also lived. He saw the ad for the Process meeting on the Berkeley campus and decided to attend. It was the answer to his prayers.
After the meeting Wild brought Father Alban back to meet the members of his commune on Cole Street. Process members have claimed that Father Alban almost wept at the sight of such a large group of people waiting for the word. He went Jaweh-batty with happiness.
Victor Wild turned over his followers and his possessions including almost a thousand dollars to the Process. In due time, after proper instruction, Wild was renamed Brother Ely.
And no one was as gung-ho for the Process as Victor Wild aka Brother Ely.
In quick order, Processans began to Hood into San Francisco. At first the Process stayed at 407 Cole Street. But they were eager to set up a "processcene"- a center where they might have church "services" and proselytize. The cult acquired a house at 1820 Oak Street where they ate and slept and did their thing. Members would rise at 6 A.M. in silence. There was a morning invocational service of obeisance to Jehovah and Satan. Internal members of the Process wore black robes, silver crosses and what was known as a "Mendez goat," a triangular red magical sign, the goat symbol of Satan, sewn on their cult-capes. As for a church, they located a basement at 2416 Geary Street where they poured pillars and painted the walls red and black and set up lighting as befitting a chapel.
Bob and Hecate sent Luciferans to proselytize in New Orleans, Louisiana. There is indication that the Satanists continued to operate on the beaches of Xtul, Mexico. They tried to incorporate in New Orleans as the Church of the Process of Unification of Christ and Satan, but they weren't allowed to use the name Satan.
Instead at 1:35 P.M. on January 29, 1968, under the name "The Process Church of the Final Judgment," the Process incorporated in New Orleans as a non-profit religious scam. Their address listed on the corporation papers was 1205 Royal Street.
In New Orleans, the Process rented a large house in the French quarter. The eight Luciferans from the London home church, with Alsatian dogs, began to run a coffee house and serve home-made brownies, attempting to relate to the hippie community. One night a week they ran telepathy sessions. They talked about the Gray Forces of moderation which needed to be annihilated. They also talked about some of the Process "work" On the Yucatan peninsula.
There is some indication that while in New Orleans they became interested in voodoo.
In early 1968 Processans left New Orleans for California. Reports from two people, one a former Processan, say that they encountered trouble with the local authorities in New Orleans. In any case they were summoned by Robert and Hecate to San Francisco.
There developed in San Francisco considerable strife between the dope-loving, sensual Luciferans and the austere sexless self-flagellating Jehovans, according to witnesses. There was talk among the Luciferans of gang-banging the "prissy Jehovan bitches." People were accusing one another of being anti-Christ-the ultimate sin in a cult whose leader is thought actually to be Christ.
It was decided by Hecate and Christ to abandon, at least publicly, San Francisco.
Meanwhile, the DeGrimstons were in Los Angeles where they located a real estate operator named Aarons with offices on Robertson Boulevard who showed sympathy for the group. Father Christian aka Jonathan dePeyer claims that it was John Phillips who located Artie Aarons for them and that Phillips, a songwriter and pop singer, offered them aid and comfort.
Once a week the Process would go around and clean up and do repairs and small construction jobs at the various properties owned by Mr. Aarons. In exchange for this work service, the real estate operator agreed to permit the Process the use of a large, two-story house at 188.2 Cochrane in south central Los Angeles. It was a fifteen - to twenty-room house which now is a rest home for the aged. At that time, it was far from a rest home.
One night in early March 1968, DeGrimston called from Los Angeles and gave the Process two days to pack up and come to Los Angeles. Around March 10, 1968, a convoy of seven Process automobiles containing thirty people and fourteen Alsatian dogs journeyed toward Los Angeles. The Process moved into the South Cochrane house with all their dogs and their black turtlenecks and black pants and black capes with pictures of the devil sewn on them.
In the following week they went around to various mansions, cleaning them up, in order to pay for their rent. One such mansion that the Process work group visited while working for Artie Aarons was the John Barrymore mansion, located at 1301 Summit Ridge Drive.
It is a large, four-story mansion located several blocks down the hill from where Roman Polanski rented his house at 1600 Summit Ridge. Early in 1968, a young man from Baton Rouge, Louisiana named Kim was living at 1882 South Cochrane with a few friends of his from Louisiana. He was employed in some capacity by Artie Aarons, the owner of the property at 1882 South Cochrane.
In February of 1968 Lawrence Kim, because of the heavy freakiness-ratio at the house on South Cochrane, got permission from Artie Aarons to move into the so-called John Barrymore mansion at 1301 Summit Ridge Drive, in the Hollywood Hills.
A few days later the Process Church of the Final Judgment moved into the house owned by Artie Aarons on South Cochrane. Kim remembered that Processans would come to see Aarons.
"They were trying to get him to move them over to a Pasadena property he had because it was a lot bigger and they were expecting more of the followers in or something." He already had a caretaker for that property, a woman and her son, so he was loath to turn it over to the Process.
The Process spent some time at the Barrymore mansion, and may have attended parties there for show business personalities. Mr. Aarons did not actually live at the Barrymore property but rented parts of it out, and there were parties aplenty there- In March '68, the Process held public meetings to recruit dupes at the former Digger house on North Highland. They flooded the streets to whisper about the end of the world and to hawk their magazines.
At the time, there were approximately six grades or degrees of status in the Process. The first and lowest was that of acolyte, which was the status of a person just joining up with the group. The next step was that of initiate, which lasted for about six weeks of intensive training for the nascent cultist. The next step was that of messenger, where one acquired his or her cult name. The next step was that of prophet and then priest, and finally the highest rank in the order, that of master.
The cult used the family unit as a model. Those of the degree master were called Father this and Mother that. After a few months of intensive training with the group the Founding Couple (Christ and Hecate) chose a cult name for new converts, such as Sister Sarah or Brother Reuben, and they left their legal names far behind.
Like any cult, information was not shared. Practices of the upper grades were not known by the lower punks. How convenient. It is known that in the early phases of the initiation sexual celibacy is practiced. Further on, however, in the trek toward higher ranks, all sorts of bunch-punchings take place. At one stage the Processans are required to enter into a prolonged worship of Satan, involving satanic ceremonies and blood sacrifice. They engage in various telepathy meditation sessions and are into psychometry, a form of group telepathy. They sit in a circle and exchange personal objects in order to scan each others' personal vibes and to communicate via telepathy.
Mary Anne liked giving rings to people for the psychometric effect-a practice used by Manson, who once gave Dean Martin's daughter a ring at Dennis Wilson's beachhouse.
Every night at midnight the inner Processans hold a worship service for Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer. Twice a month on Wednesday nights, the Processans sit in a circle and summon the gods Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer, who talk through the mouths of the cult members.
Oo-ee-oo.
Their vicious Alsatian dog-pack accompanied the group. It is interesting to note that the dogs were considered members of the group and were given special names and even oaths to bind them to the group. They pimped the psychedelic merchants. For instance, the Brother Joshua and Brother Reuben, a recent convert from New Orleans, came into a psychedelic shop on North Cherokee called Stick It in Your Ear and tried to convert the proprietor, Ron Mathes. They backed off when they discovered he was a practicing Gurdjieffan.
Doubtless you ask, what publications were they hawking on the streets of Los Angeles? The main publication at that time was issue number 4 of the Process magazine, the so-called "sex" issue, which depicted on its front cover a ceremony involving an inverted cross and a naked girl upon an altar surrounded by hooded snuffoids, one bearing what appears to be a sword. In another part of the front cover a long-haired young man raising a sword is walking across a beach or a desert toward the full moon, perhaps a reference to Process full-moon beach ceremonies. On the back cover of the Process magazine a large winged skeleton is hovering atop a mound of shrieking suffering naked bodies evidently dead or in hell. Inside the magazine contained a hodgepodge series of articles about sex, an article about black masses and corpse violation, and various pain-streaked items of confused writing.
One place that spring where the Process distributed their literature was at the Omnibus Restaurant on North LaCienega Boulevard. A lot of the bikers that later associated with Manson hung out there. Rick, "a biker," brought in Process material to the Omnibus. Rick
worked at a Shell station on Sunset across from Whiskey A Go-Go. The Process tried to deal with the Satan-oriented bike groups but had to be content with stirring them up. One girl associated with the cult then said this: "They tried, you know, getting them [the bikers] to come to meetings and you just can't do nothing with a motorcycle rider. So they decided to use them and it would be easier to sort of incite them and get them to do what they wanted done. That is the thing, you know, figuring they were the forces of Satan. "
They, or at least Brother Ely, had great visions of the bikers becoming Process assault squads. Sound like Manson?
"When it really gets going, we'll have a mobile conversion unit with messengers in jack boots on black Harleys, wearing black leather jackets with the Process symbol [ an inverted swastika] in studs on the front and the cross in studs on the back." This is what a dropout from the Process says that Brother Ely told him in the summer of 1968, following the breakup of Process activities in Los Angeles.
It was the message of the unity of Christ and Satan that Manson grooved with. "Christ and Satan through love dissolved the enmity that existed between them and the unity of Christ and Satan is what the process is all about. They've come together to usher in the end of the
world," said Brother Ely to a reporter from an English occult magazine.
The unification of Christ and Satan is exactly what Manson was getting into at that time, when the family was roaming Hollywood in the black bus. The Process decided to make it big in the entertainment business, so they formed a rock and roll group called The Black Swan. Some Process members claim that the rock group was actually called the Voice of the Process. The Black Swan consisted of Brother Joshua on guitar-Brother Joshua had been in a pop group in London for quite a while-and Brother Benedict, the satanist, on drums. Brother Ely on flute and Brother Bamabas on string bass. Says Father Ely: "Brother Barnabas was a really good string bass player. You know, he was doing lounge shows in Las Vegas. Very professional bass player.
"We never made much money. We used to pass the hat. Sometimes we'd get a couple of bucks, but that's about all." The Black Swan, the world's only rock group that believed in human sacrifice, at least publicly, would play in various clubs and bars, generally filling in between the main acts.
"We went into a biker bar one time. They took up a collection for us. They really liked us," said flutist Ely. The biker bar was on Sunset Boulevard near the Strip.
The Process sought out rich and successful people. Father Christian of the Process has claimed, for instance, that the Process managed, in addition to John Phillips, to meet Warren Beatty and Cass Elliott. To understand this phenomenon, all anybody has to do is create a hit record or a successful film and watch the money-grubbing psychopaths come aswanning.
They approached Terry Melcher right around the time Melcher was meeting and grooving with Manson at Dennis Wilson's house on Sunset Boulevard.
It is known that the Process tried to make an appointment to see Joey Bishop who then had a talk show on ABC-TV. It is interesting to note that there was an employee of the Joey Bishop show living at the Barrymore mansion at the time the Process was above ground in Los Angeles.
The Process members, most of whom were English citizens, had been allowed into the United States on three-month visitor's permits. Apparently they tried to get permission to stay by saying that they were students of the Church of Scientology. There was talk about a $100,000 bond that the group was going to have to put up in order to stay in the country.
In the third week of May 1968, the U.S. Immigration office in Los Angeles forwarded the Process rues to New York for deportation proceedings.
At the house on South Cochrane they scraped possessions together and held a garage sale to raise money. Artie Aarons, the owner of the house, complained that they sold some of his stuff also in the sale. They moved out. Some of them seem to have gone to New York to work on their immigration problems. There was talk of going to Toronto.
Others went into hiding. Some may have been staying at the Barrymore mansion on Summit Ridge when the vicious dogs went after Roman Polanski.
On Monday, June 5, an official for the Church of Scientology - evidently an English citizen went to apply for an immigration permit to the United States. The scientology official's application was refused because "Twelve members of the Church of the Process of Scientology" had been ordered to leave the country by June and supposedly had fled the set. The Church of Scientology waxed miffed and evidently made attempts to locate the Process because as long as the Process got away with posing as scientologists, things would be grim for scientologists trying to come to America.
It is possible that the Process had a baleful influence on Sirhan Sirhan since Sirhan is known, in the spring of '68, to have frequented clubs in Hollywood in the same turf as the Process was
proselytizing. Sirhan was very involved in occult pursuits. He has talked several times subsequent to Robert Kennedy's death about an occult group from London which he knew about and which he really wanted to go to London to see.
There was one Process member named Lloyd who was working as a chef for one of the large Los Angeles hotels, either the Ambassador or the Sheraton. Lloyd was around fifty years old and was always complaining of the penurious life of the Jehovans while Bob and Hecate cruised the world in jet comfort.
It is probably a coincidence that Sirhan seems to have visited a friend who worked in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel the day before he shot Senator Kennedy. Sometime in mid or late June, the Process was holding internal meetings at a Hollywood motel. Some people interviewed claim that the gatherings were public recruiting meetings for new followers. But others say it was for internal Process members only. The motel may have been the Yucca Motel, a known Process haunt on Hollywood Boulevard. This may have been the motel where Robert DeGrimston caused a Process member to freak out and require sedation, merely by being in the same hotel as the member. It will be remembered that the ace selling point of the Process, besides being the "chosen few," was that DeGrlmston was Jesus Christ snuffing the world. The DeGrimstons were never seen by the underlings of the cult. Cult members were expected to have the attitude of fawning dogs wetting in fear.
This is what our trusty informant tells us about the event: "They were not allowed to see Robert because they were on the bottom floor of this one hotel and he was on the top floor and they were just all shaking and crying because he was so powerful. One of the men happened to see him and just ran back into the room and had hysterics and they had to sedate him: "We discovered the Process group staying in a Hollywood motel... and reported it to immigration authorities," said Reverend Gordon Mustain, a Deputy Guardian of the Church of Scientology.
Some sort of raid ensued but the wily Processans had already hit the bricks. Some members of the Process, including Robert and Mary Anne DeGrimston, went to New York, where they set up a church there for a while. Others went underground and traveled north to San Francisco and to the Santa Cruz Mountains and evidently to King City and points here and there. Their subsequent activities will be recounted later.
Brother Ely aka Victor Wild went to San Francisco and then to San Jose, where he opened up a leather shop and became rich.