The cult collapsed after May Otis Blackburn was imprisoned for stealing 40,000 dollars from Clifford Dabney. Īccording to Time magazine, the Blackburn Cult was also known as "The Great Eleven", and May Otis Blackburn was referred to as the "Heel of God". May Otis Blackburn was charged with twelve counts of grand theft, and articles at that time referred to her as a "cult leader". These indictments created a sensation after the background of the grand theft was revealed to the public. In 1929, group leaders were indicted in Los Angeles for grand theft and investigated in connection with the disappearances of several members. The cult was also accused of killing a member in an oven, poisoning another during a " whirling dervish" ceremony, and making several other members disappear.
Rhoads later confessed to the police that they had placed their daughter in the tomb fourteen months earlier at the suggestion of May Otis Blackburn. Police found the corpse of young woman Willa Rhoads under the floor at the Rhoadses' residence, wrapped in spices and salt, and surrounded by the bodies of seven dead dogs. Newspaper articles from the period reported strange rituals including the sacrifice of animals, sex scandals and attempts to resurrect a dead 16-year-old girl.
She started the group on Bunker Hill in Downtown Los Angeles, California, and later formed a retreat in the Southern California Simi Valley.īlackburn was said to have received revelations directly from angels, and, along with her daughter Ruth Wieland Rizzio, believed that she was charged by the archangel Gabriel to write books revealing the mysteries of Heaven and Earth, and life and death. The Blackburn Cult, officially the Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, or the Great Eleven Club, was a new religious movement started in 1922 by the American woman May Otis Blackburn.
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