‘They're so fired up': The flagship ABC show taking on a deadly cult
Her investigations helped instigate the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Yet, she approached with trepidation a brief from Compass to follow up on the Toowoomba sect known as the Saints, of which 14 members were sentenced in February for the 2022 death of eight-year-old diabetic Elizabeth Struhs, whose insulin was substituted for prayer. This time, Smith wanted to achieve the seemingly impossible: offer a glimmer of hope amid the inconceivable cruelty.
'If I was just doing another, 'Isn't this shocking?' story, I think it might have broken me,' Smith says. 'But because there's such a groundswell of action going on [within the wider church community in the south-east Queensland city], and they're determined to expose coercive control in all their churches, it gave me a bit of hope … I think having that positive angle is really important.'
Interviewed about this push for change in the Compass report are three local pastors of varying denominations: Wesleyan counsellor Cecilia Anderson, psychologist and survivor of the US Children of God cult Maria Esguerra, and Paul Reid, a former friend of the Saints' leader, Brendan Stevens. None of the jailed cult members agreed to speak.
Most confronting are the responses of Cameron Schoenfisch, whose son Lachlan is serving time in jail for manslaughter.
'I had quite a few tears after Cameron thanked me,' says Smith. 'I actually did a drive around Toowoomba with Cameron. It's not in the Compass piece. But the number of churches popping up everywhere there … Cameron's very concerned about that because some of them are in backstreet lanes; some of them are in people's garages. They often turn up in abandoned warehouses.
'So what is actually stopping another Elizabeth Struhs if we're not going to talk about it? But the key thing that kept me going is, everyone wants to expose what's going on. And they're so fired up.'
Executive producer Amanda Collinge, who is also the executive producer of Compass, says Cult of the Saints is an example of the 'journalistic rigour' she has favoured for the ABC's 37-year-old flagship religion and ethics program since stepping into the role 3½ years ago.
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