by Robert Scott
The rave scene wasn’t Justin’s scene, however. He preferred dressing all in black and attending Goth clubs. He went alone several times and took Taylor and Keri once. She thought it was vampirish and kind of weird. Goth clubs were not for her or Taylor.
Everyone was working and paying rent at Oak Grove except for Taylor—even though, according to Keri, Taylor was receiving substantial checks for his disability. Taylor told the others it was important he kept his money to invest in the schemes he was coming up with. At first, these schemes were somewhat along the line of Harmony. He told Keri he wanted to start a counseling group for couples to be able to communicate better. He would be the facilitator and help their relationships. He didn’t want to use his real name for this, so she toyed around with the idea and made up some business cards for him with the name Jordan Taylor. The cards basically asked people if they wanted better relationships, better sex and more joy in their lives.
Taylor continued to sell drugs at the raves, especially ecstasy, to help fund his ideas. As time went on, his ideas started to gel toward a plan he called In To Me See. When spoken quickly, this phrase sounded like “Intimacy.” As his ideas for In To Me See became more grandiose, he talked Keri into dancing nude at a club in San Francisco called the Gold Club. She agreed, and as she danced and gyrated before men on the stage, she received money from them. Later, she would claim she could make between $500 and $1,000 a night at the Gold Club.
Even with this good income, Taylor wanted more and more money for In To Me See. And his plans for Keri’s involvement became more bizarre. According to Christina Kelly, she had a conversation with Keri about this. Keri supposedly told Kelly that Taylor wanted her to have private sessions with men, dance for them and then have whatever sex they wanted with them. According to Christina, Taylor became very upset when Keri supposedly gave one man oral sex, but did not charge him for it.
In To Me See changed and grew and began to focus around something that Taylor called the Twelve Principles of Magic. He went so far as to print these principles on the back of a psychedelic poster. He hung this poster on a wall in the house on Oak Grove for all to see. In a paraphrased version of the twelve principles, they read:
1. He was already perfect, so he could do no wrong.
2. There was no such thing as right or wrong.
3. He was all powerful and the creator of everything in his life.
4. Life was always right and he embraced all the results of it.
5. All the results of life, he created for himself.
6. He believed nothing, and perceived the world without fear.
7. His perceptions were always right.
8. Unconditional, fearless love was the most profound in the universe.
9. Spirit knew everything.
10. He gave total control by losing control.
11. What goes around, comes around.
12. There was a higher person than himself—Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father.
At some point In To Me See faded away and Taylor began to talk of Transform America, or Impact America. The terms became almost interchangeable as he used one term with a certain person and the other term with another. It was to be a very powerful institution with himself as its leader. He said he needed three core people to run Transform America. By now, the number three was almost sacred to Taylor. It had echoes of the Trinity, the three Wise Men and other connotations. Taylor wanted Justin and Keri to be among his three core people—people he could trust implicitly to carry out his orders.
Taylor kept explaining to Keri that there was no such thing as right or wrong. He didn’t like those terms she said. She recalled, “He explained that there was only good and evil, not right and wrong.”
Taylor began a remorseless crusade in his scheme to implement Transform America. Whether from too many drugs, or an actual onset of insanity, he became absolutely manic on the subject. He would talk to Keri and the others about it ad nauseam. When they didn’t understand what he was saying or disagreed with him, he would become irate.
Keri recalled, “If you didn’t go along with him, he’d talk to you for hours. It was always, ‘You shouldn’t think of things like that, you should think of things this way.’ Taylor was in control of everything. He was relentless. He was on drugs. If you disagreed, he’d say, ‘You’re stuck in your stuff. You aren’t on my level.’ And if you disagreed, you were evil.
“I’d beat myself up because I didn’t see things his way. I’d finally say, ‘Okay. I get it,’ even if I didn’t, just to make him stop.
“For the first time in my life, I really felt special and loved. I was afraid I would lose that if I disagreed with him.”
To try and make money for Impact America, Taylor came up with an idea called the Feline Club. He pushed Keri into helping him on the project. The club was supposed to be a place where rich men could meet beautiful women. It was to be an escort club, but only for rich yuppies. In essence, it would be a high-class prostitution club. Olivia and Keri were supposed to oversee the girls and the club and make suggestions to make it better.
Some of Taylor’s ideas about the place included free drugs on platters for anyone who wanted them. One idea was that it would cost a man $300 to be with a beautiful girl and not have sex with her. It would cost $500 or more to have sex with the girl.
Keri said later, “People would come over and say our house was weird.” Just how weird it had become can be ascertained by comments from Brandon’s girlfriend, Sarah Brents. Sarah, in her own way, was just as beautiful a blonde as Keri. Sarah stayed over at Oak Grove on several occasions and agreed with most other people that “Taylor was outgoing, vibrant and confident. He would walk into a room and draw attention to himself.”
She said of Justin, “He was a nice person. He seemed polite and together.”
Sarah saw a different side to Taylor one day when she asked him what he did for a living. He told her he was on disability. Then as Keri walked by, Taylor slapped her on her derriere and said, “This is my meal ticket.”
According to Sarah, Taylor used ecstasy, pot, meth, GHB and Special K (a cat tranquilizer used as an illegal drug). She said that Keri used ecstasy and pot. The only person in the household that didn’t seem to use drugs very often was Justin. Sarah made no mention of Brandon or Olivia.
Sarah was told at some point that Taylor made money by selling drugs at raves. She was asked to go to some Goth clubs by Justin, but she said, “I wasn’t into that.”
About the sexual nature of the house on Oak Grove, Sarah related later, “Justin, one time, watched Keri and Taylor having sex. It was all right, because Taylor said it was okay.”
Sarah also knew about Keri posing nude for Playboy, but nothing freaked her out more at the Oak Grove home than Justin’s eating habits. She said, “He would make large smacking sounds. He would get it all over his face. It was almost animalistic. One night I went into the kitchen and Justin was down on all fours, eating from a plate on the floor. I was scared. I went back to Brandon’s room.”
Of Justin’s sex life, Sarah said, “Well, he didn’t have one. He told me he’d had sex with a girl once in his twenties. And that was it.”
Sarah’s initial impression of Justin in the beginning was mainly positive, though she did acknowledge several quirks that he had, especially when it came to food. But her impression of him as a nice guy changed dramatically after she broke up with Brandon. It’s not apparent if Brandon left Oak Grove about that time, but Sarah continued to go there. Knowing that Sarah had broken up with Brandon, Justin asked her if they could go out sometime. She told him she didn’t think of him that way. She only thought of him as a friend. In response, he said, “I’ve only been friends with you to see if I could fuck you!”
Sarah was startled. She had never seen Justin in this light. But she was even more startled one day when he told her he had a new piercing and asked if she wanted to see it. Before she could answer, he pulled down his pants and revealed his penis. Sarah said l
ater that he did not have a piercing there. His whole intent seemed to have been to flash her.
The entire household on Oak Grove was by now revolving around Taylor’s schemes. Taylor determined that he needed lots of money to implement Transform America, or as he was calling it more often now, Impact America. One of Taylor’s get-rich-quick schemes was the manufacturing of meth. Keri came home from work one day to find a meth lab set up in the garage. She was incensed. She said later, “I was mad. That was my home too! I didn’t want that there.”
In the long run, it didn’t matter what Keri wanted. Taylor ruled the roost at Oak Grove. He gathered all the ingredients to make meth, except red phosphorus. There is some indication that he eventually got the red phosphorus, but the drug operation apparently never amounted to much. Taylor seemed to be left in the roll of a distributor, not manufacturer.
Another person who didn’t like Taylor with drugs was his cousin Charney Hoffman. He said later, “Taylor was very belligerent when he was wasted. I remember driving with him one time and he criticized my driving. He said he was wasted and he could drive better than me. My brother grabbed his face as hard as he could, squeezed his face and all Taylor could do was put his hands up. He used to be articulate, polite and a joy to be around. Instead of him being able to talk his way out of a situation, that situation blew out of control.”
Christina Kelly said of this period, “I remember one rave in Santa Cruz where Taylor was selling ecstasy. We all used it. Justin reacted badly to it and got violently ill and threw up. I didn’t find the experience that great either. But then it started to kick in. At the rave, I enjoyed it. I felt good sometimes and other times I was nauseous.”
The Feline Club idea was dropped around this time by Taylor and a new plan emerged where he would get young girls from Mexico. He told Keri that they were to go down to Mexico, get the young girls and set them up in the house on Oak Grove. They would basically turn them into sex slaves. Taylor said he would train them in how to pleasure a man. And Keri was to keep an eye on them.
There was a half-baked plan to have the young girls pose as sandwich-delivery girls from a deli who would take sandwiches into a Dean Witter office. They would make friends with young rich yuppie stockbrokers and eventually invite them over for sex. Taylor would take pictures of them on the sly. Then after they had sex, the girls would threaten to sue Dean Witter for $50 million, because they would only be fourteen or fifteen years old. According to the plan, Dean Witter would settle for $20 million, and Taylor would even give the blackmailed stockbrokers a million, so they wouldn’t commit suicide.
Taylor and Keri eventually did go down to Mexico, but not to get young women as sex slaves, but rather to buy Rohypnol, the date-rape drug. Keri said later, “I didn’t want to do a lot of things he told me to do. But I’d go ahead and say okay, and then I’d do them.”
She even heard Taylor starting to talk about some scheme called Brazil. He only let her in on a very limited amount of what he was cooking up about Brazil. But by this time, Taylor was losing faith that Keri would ever be his third-core person. He became more suspicious of her and would often talk to Justin alone. He began to shut Keri out of his plans. She only heard the name Brazil mentioned and not much else about it.
Taylor became even more irate with Keri when she stopped dancing at the Gold Club. The money she made there was supposed to help fund Impact America. But Keri was beginning to be just as frustrated with Taylor as he was with her. She said later, “I realized at some point that he was just a parasite.”
Keri even tried to warn Justin not to become involved in Taylor’s schemes. They seemed to cost everyone money except Taylor, but Justin responded, “Oh, no! Taylor knows how to make money. He’ll pay me back.”
It was not only Taylor’s insistence on illegal schemes, but his insistence that he was divinely inspired that made Keri nervous. Taylor kept telling everyone in the household, “I’m on my life’s mission to impact America. It’s my calling from God! My mission is to spread love to everybody.”
Just what this vision of love was to be, Taylor let a woman named Jessyka Chompff know. She said later, “Impact America was to be a self-realization course. To learn more about yourself. Another term came up for it as well—Transform America. He would get things rolling by starting a club. Everyone there would be beautiful and rich. Taylor would be the one who got them together. It would be a kind of porno Fantasy Island. A Disneyland of sex.
“Taylor would market sex and drugs. But it sounded unrealistic to me. I thought, ‘Why would rich men need him to find beautiful women for them?’
“It was hard to listen to all this stuff. I thought he would be in over his head. I didn’t think he could be a drug kingpin.”
Keri was also having her doubts about Taylor and his wild schemes. She wanted to get on with a modeling career that had nothing to do with sex clubs, principles of magic or Impact America. She went down to Los Angeles to have more professional photos taken. She said of Taylor’s schemes, “I didn’t understand a lot of it. It didn’t feel right in my heart. I wanted out.”
By the end of 1999, Taylor was ready to toss her out of his inner circle anyway. It was now very apparent that Keri was not going to be his third-core person. He would need another—someone who would truly believe in him and his visions. Someone who would accept him as a prophet. Someone who knew in her heart and soul that he was divinely inspired by God. He didn’t have to look any farther than the Third Ward of the Latter-Day Saints Church in Walnut Creek.
CHAPTER 3
In the Company of Angels
Dawn Godman was the single parent of a six-year-old son. She was born in Amador County, California, in the Gold Rush country. She lived in the backwoods with her family, at 3,500 feet in elevation. It was about forty-five minutes to the nearest town. The area around her home was filled with oaks and pine trees. She learned how to shoot a pistol and rifle at a young age, and was a real country girl.
Of her family life, Dawn said later, “When I was about nine or ten, my dad came down with chronic asthma. He almost died a couple of times. Mom had to provide for the family. Dad changed dramatically. You never knew what he’d do after that. Dad would be fine one minute, and then a split second later he would get mad.
“Mom spent most of her time focused on Dad, not the kids. I became responsible for the house at ten years old. I wasn’t happy as a child. But I wasn’t unhappy either. I preferred to spend time by myself. We were out in the country and I spent a lot of time in the forest alone.”
At seventeen years of age, Dawn filed for emancipation from her parents. She soon had a boyfriend, Patrick, and they got married while she was still a teenager. A year later, a son was born to them. The marriage did not last, however, and she and Patrick got a divorce.
Dawn attended Sacramento City Junior College and studied nursing. To support herself and her son, Dawn took a job as an attendant in a convalescent home. As part of her work, she took patient’s vital statistics, helped feed them and eventually worked her way up to helping in the intensive care unit.
Because of stress at work and having to take care of a son by herself at home, Dawn began taking methamphetamines at the age of twenty-two. She said later, “It ruined my life. I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t do my job. Getting high was the most important thing in life.”
Dawn eventually lost her job and the meth use became so bad by 1996 that her ex-husband filed for and got full custody of her son. She started living in a car or even camping out in the woods. Drug-ridden and desperate, Dawn tried committing suicide with a bunch of painkillers. She said later, “In December 1996, I attempted suicide. It failed. I was in a mental-health ward for three days. I thought about whether I wanted to live or die. I realized that life was important to me because I had a lot of things to pass on to my son.
“I had been raised Pentecostal. I wanted something better for my son, and to get that for him, I needed to feel that for myself. I liked that the Latter-Day Sain
ts took care of its members. I found the values I was raised with, stronger in the Mormon Church.”
In 1996, a friend gave Dawn a copy of the Book of Mormon. She eventually read it all and a companion book, The Pearl of Great Price. Dawn joined an LDS ward in the foothills, first living in a homeless shelter in Jackson, and then staying at a friend’s house. She even stayed a weekend at the house of the president of the local Latter-Day Saints relief society, before moving in with her grandmother in Martinez, in Contra Costa County. Of the LDS, she said, “The Mormon Church provided a community. When growing up, I never belonged in any group. I was always different. I had to fight to go to a dance. My brother always had everything given to him. I had to do everything possible to get a teacher to notice me, even though I was an A and B student. Nothing was ever good enough with my parents. With the LDS, people would really listen to me.”
Dawn began to go to church every Sunday at the local Mormon Church. She took the new member lessons and studied them all through 1997 and into 1998, when she finally became a full-fledged member of the LDS. She became such a member in good standing, she was allowed to go inside a temple. Her reaction to the temple was that it was a very sacred place. She said later, “You could feel the spirit of God there. In the Mormon Church, I felt I had a purpose in life. I felt that the Bible was only part of the story. The Book of Mormon described other stories. Those of the Nephites and Lamanites. All of the stories of the Book of Mormon were interesting and I believed it was the truth.”
Dawn had her photo taken at the Oakland Mormon Temple with star quarterback Steve Young, of the San Francisco 49ers. She was even allowed to see her son, again on weekends. She was progressing far in her life and looked forward to the day when she could have full custody of her son.
