Episode 189 - Escape from Reality - The Case of Barbara Rogers & Stephen Mineo
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The opinions expressed in the following episode do not necessarily reflect those of the Minds of Madness podcast. Listener discretion is advised. What's the first thing you think of when you hear the word cult? Chances are, escape is high on that list. That one word alone paints a picture of constant surveillance, suffocating conformity, and a community that hates to let anyone go.

For some people caught up in cult-like circumstances, finding a way out can be a dangerous undertaking. But what if a cult was the source of where you found all your meaning, all your connections in life, and it had been that way for years? In this scenario, finding yourself on the outside looking in could be a real nightmare.

That's what happened to Steven Mineo and Barbara Rogers when they crossed paths with internet cult leader Sherri Schreiner, a woman who weaponized a strange mythology of reptilians, clones, vampires, and demons against her own followers.

Join me now as we unpack the bizarre events that led to Stephen Mineo's death. A story that takes us from the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania to the Ohio countryside and into the minds of three people with a very strained relationship to reality.

There are two sides to Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. The side most people know runs on tourism, especially in the winter months, when skiers hit the slopes at the many luxury resorts scattered around the region. One of those resorts actually helped pioneer snowmaking machines in the 1950s.

And yet another was the birthplace of the heart-shaped Jacuzzi, one of the reasons the Poconos were once nicknamed "Honeymoon Capital of the World." In the warmer season, hikers, bikers, and other outdoor enthusiasts flock to the area to explore its secluded peaks or whitewater raft through the mountainous gorges. Of course, relying on outside visitors can be a double-edged sword.

Without any industry to fall back on, communities that only get a smaller slice of the tourism pie struggle to provide good jobs. At low times, guests and transient employees clear out, leaving some towns feeling empty. That's the side of the Poconos fewer people see. The one where abandoned resorts poke through the trees, weather-beaten and crumbling after a few harsh mountain winters.

In these less prosperous parts, only a handful of intrepid photographers trickle in to document the empty pools, rotting gazebos, and graffiti-tagged walls that once attracted couples from all over the country. To 20-something Steven Mineo, it sounded just about perfect.

Steve was a prepper. He believed the apocalypse was coming, and he intended on being ready when that fateful time came. He originated from New Jersey, but being too close to a population center made him edgy. He wanted to be somewhere he could disappear. Steve's ultimate goal was to get as off the grid as possible.

But even with that goal in mind, he had a serious blind spot for YouTube, where he often posted about various conspiracy theories that were preoccupying him at any given time. His channel and blog developed a decent following, but his content mostly drew inspiration from another prominent internet figure, Sherry Shriner, a self-proclaimed messenger of the Most High God.

To help us understand the complicated ideology of Sherry Shriner, we reached out to author and veteran journalist Tony Russo, a person who is perhaps the most familiar with this case than anyone else. My name is Tony Russo. I am a journalist living and working on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

And I was looking into Sherry when I was looking to write a series on religious scammers. And she just came across my desk and someone recommended it to me. And at first, I wasn't even interested in it. It seemed too easy. Like, oh, look at all the crazy people. But then as I started to dig into it, I kind of was able to get my teeth around some important facts. And I saw that these were normal people.

It's believed that Steve Mineo discovered Sherry Shriner's content as far back as 2004. Back then, before YouTube, Twitter, and the now infamous algorithms, if a person wanted to find conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs, they kind of had to go looking for it.

So Steve was originally from New Jersey, and he wasn't far from where I grew up in New Jersey, maybe an hour north of me. And that's important. The reason it's important is because there's no easier kind way to say it, but 9-11 broke a lot of people up there. And I have come to believe that Stephen was one of them.

The Internet was still new ish. Right. People were just kind of getting online in mass. And there were all of these what we would call today memes. There was all sorts of nutty, nutty stuff out there. And Stephen just kind of got sucked up into that.

He found his way into this pseudo-religious conspiracy truthers. He was just a truther that found his people. Sherry was one of his people, and he got to be quite friendly with her online. Sherry's main form of communicating with her audience was with her online radio show. Her shows tended to start off a little slow.

And hello everybody, welcome to the show. I'm Sherry Schreiner. A couple things I want to talk about. I'm hearing kind of an echo on this line.

Sounds like I'm in space. We're getting better. But once Sherry got warmed up, her show almost always delivered something spectacular. She had a knack for serving a fire and brimstone with a modern twist. So stop being soft on evil because that's what your church pastors have led you to be.

to be accepting of the government, to be accepting of every abuse that comes your way, to be floor mats, to be treated like garbage and be abused, and stand up for yourselves. You have one AR? Go get another one.

As for who the enemy was, well, Sherry seemed to have all the answers.

She believed in the literal Bible. She believed there was a war coming and it would be a literal war between good and evil. And that since time immemorial, Satan had been kind of populating the earth with evil.

serpents with lizard people, people who are born evil and who are going to be on the devil's side when the war starts. And they're around now doing evil things and thwarting good things as best they can. And it's important for me to say that none of this is true. The reason you have to remember it's not true is because if you try to make sense out of it, you're going to go mad.

There's no consistency among the literature. Let's put it that way.

For conspiracy-minded listeners, her channel was like one-stop shopping, a clearinghouse for the wildest ideas online. She blended strands from almost every popular conspiracy theory with her own unorthodox interpretation of Christianity. She also believed that she was a literal daughter of God, but not like we're all God's children, like it was her and Jesus and Satan.

And they were all baby angels together playing before time and before the fall. Viewing the world through this warped perspective, Sherry created an apocalyptic stew featuring villains that wouldn't be out of place in a sci-fi blockbuster.

One of the books that Sherry believed in that was important to her is called the Book of Enoch. And it's one of the apocryphal books of the Bible. There used to be more books for the Bible. There was a big conference. They threw some out. They kept some in. But anyway, so there's this Book of Enoch. And one of the things that's in the Book of Enoch is that after the fall, after Satan and his folks got kicked out of heaven, they hung around on Earth and mated with

Everybody. And so if you are a direct descendant of an actual demon, then you're part of what they call the serpent seed line. So that means that you're essentially born damned. And also you have a serpent soul. And that brings us to what they call soul scalping, which is where they perform a literal kind of surgery on someone and insert a

a serpent's soul into them and take their other soul out. The following clips from one of her YouTube channels give a good idea of just how far out there she could really get. It's critical mass time. One in four humans die

It's real. Human hunting parties where they abduct humans, they throw them on these ranches, and then the hunters go looking for them. And I've been talking about how they shove serpents down people's throats. Was that what Madonna did to Drake on Live State? Someone just sent me a heads up.

There was never really a dull moment in Sherry's universe.

Across her Facebook group, YouTube channels, and numerous websites, she described a personal theology where reptilians disguised as human beings were stationed in various positions of power. Sherry claimed that out of every four humans, only one is real.

Her suspects included politicians, bankers, and anyone on television, estimating that around 90% of people on TV were actually clones of some sort. But the bottom line of her strange theology was this: governments had welcomed the infiltration in exchange for power, and only God's elect could resist the coming wave.

And of course, God's elect were the people following her to learn the truth. People like Steve Mineo. Of all the people I've spoken with, very few have met Sherry face to face. And Steven was not one of them. But through his interaction with Sherry, he met a woman. Her name was Barbara Rogers.

Barbara Rogers was dark-haired and lean, much like Steve. When the two met online in 2011, she was in her mid-30s, and Steve was 10 years younger. But Steve took the lead. Barbara was new to Sherry Shriner's world, and Steve was a helpful presence in the chat, always ready to answer her questions. But how do people make their way into these conspiracy forums anyway?

There can be a lot of reasons, including powerful political convictions, a recommendation from a friend, or sheer curiosity. In Barbara's case, it's possible Sherry's urgent message of good versus evil had resonated because of her troubled past.

Years before discovering Sherry Shriner, Barbara was a U.S. military service member working in an administrative role. During that time, she was also married to a man named Joel Scrabbage. Together, they raised two children, one of their own and one from Barbara's previous relationship. But it wasn't long after the birth of their own child before Barbara began struggling with her mental health.

According to Joel, Barbara had started experiencing bouts of psychosis, believing she was being pursued by demons who hounded her to the brink of suicide. On more than one occasion, Barbara even called the military base's chaplain for emergency spiritual aid. Eventually, it all became too much, and Barbara swallowed a fistful of pills, washing them down with some bleach.

Fortunately, Joel was able to intervene and called 911 just in time, and miraculously, Barbara survived. In the wake of her suicide attempt, Barbara was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and honorably discharged from the military for medical reasons. Things weren't much better at home either. Although Joel and Barbara continued trying to make things work, their marriage was floundering.

Eventually, the trauma and strain caused Barbara to search for answers high and low. And that's about the time when she discovered Sherry Shriner's ideology. In Sherry's forums, Sherry herself would often interact with her followers, which only increased a lively community. But the person Barbara found herself chatting with the most at this crucial turning point in her life was Steve.

At the time, Barbara was living in Florida, but after getting comfortable enough with Steve online, decided to make a trip out to meet the man in real life. And she liked what she found. After just a few more trips to visit, Barbara and Steve decided to take their only befaith. Leaving her children and ex-husband behind, Barbara officially moved in with Steve, but it wasn't long before they hit a snag.

Barbara came and lived with him in New Jersey. And as far as we can tell, there was a falling out of some sort. Barbara didn't get on with Steve's mom or his dad. And so the two of them needed to go find some other place to live. And Sherry recommended the Poconos. If anyone's not familiar with the Poconos, it's in eastern Pennsylvania. It's a middle class resort. It's in kind of like a depressed area. And so there's this...

kind of weird balance between the wealth that comes from having a resort town and the poverty that comes from everybody being a waitress or a waiter. But it's more rural than you would think. The suggestion to relocate to the Poconos seemed to suit Steve's personality, especially his prepper and survivalist interests. Eventually, Steve and Barbara found a tiny place to rent in the rural town of Tobyhanna.

So Stephen was able to get, like, he was living in the back room of a trailer that was rented. It wasn't a pretty place. It was a depressing place. Toby Hanna was depressing, but it was cheap. And Barbara had her pension. And Stephen would go on, would essentially go garbage picking and work.

fix up the things that he found in the garbage and turn them around on eBay. And that's how they were kind of making their money at the time.

The room Barbara and Steve called home was incredibly small for two people. Their refrigerator stood next to their bed, and what little floor space was left was taken up by cardboard boxes, appliances, and whatever else you'd find in a combined kitchen, living room, and bedroom. But Steve and Barbara seemed happy to be together, despite the cramped space. And although they never formally married, Barbara started using Steve's last name.

Sherry's doomsday ideology told them that the end of times were coming soon, very soon, and the thought of confronting it together gave Steve and Barbara's relationship an oddly romantic touch. Meanwhile, Sherry's ministry gave Steve a sense of purpose and mission he struggled to find in his everyday life.

Stephen saw himself as kind of the citizen journalist where he would find evidence about conspiracies online. He was mostly interested in the survivalists, like what are going to happen during the end times? How are people going to survive during the war between God and Satan? And so that was his primary interest.

During this time, Steve was always active online, debating the newest conspiracy theories of the day. But it wasn't long before Sherry decided that online activism wasn't good enough and that Steve would have to take his enthusiasm to the streets. How do you lead an online cult? How do you starve people and force them into submission? Because that's one of the biggest things of cults is mind control and submission.

How do you do that online? You know? How do you run an online cult? When you can just unfriend somebody or, you know, put up a website, take down a website. I mean, how do you run a cult online? It's ridiculous.

In order to finance her so-called ministry, Sherry began selling and distributing a spiritual weapon for her followers to use. A weapon she called Orgone. As interpreted by Sherry, Orgone was a special form of energy concentrated in blocks of brown resin.

They're about the size of a hockey puck with aluminum shavings, quartz, and copper embedded inside. They were basically a steampunk version of healing crystals that Sherry was manufacturing in muffin tins. Now, Sherry didn't invent the concept of Orko. That was a guy named Willem Rijk, but like so many things, she took the general outline and ran with it.

Because when I started praying to the Father on ways to tear down the strongholds of Satan, it led me to orgone energy. And I'd never even at that point heard of Wilhelm Reich. I didn't know who Wilhelm Reich was. I was just listening to the Father. And he showed me how to make orgone. And I started putting it out around my neighborhood and found that when the chemtrail planes came and it started smogging up the sky, there was a big, huge, clear blue area above my house.

'Cause chemtrails wouldn't stick where I had Oregon.

Sherry advertised Orgone as "healthful for humans and an effective alien repellent." It was available for order from OrgoneBlasters.com, one of her many websites. The smallest puck retailed for $6 with a 12-piece minimum order. You could also buy them in packs of up to four dozen because 12 pieces were only enough to protect a modest home and yard.

I was taking trips across the country, putting orgone walls up to protect the people here.

and we started seeing the UFOs crashing. The media didn't know what to do. They started calling them meteors. Oh, another meteor in the sky. Fireballs in the sky. Must be from a failing magnetic, blah, blah, blah. Nobody ever gives us the credit. It's Orgone. It's the Orgone. And you can read in my book, Interview with the Devil, Lucifer Admit, Orgone's wiping them out. It's crashing ships. One of his biggest complaints to the father was we'd crashed over 16,000 UFOs.

with our orgone. Today, we've crashed over 16,000.

And as crazy as this all might sound, the Orgone actually became one of Sherry's most successful ideas, with her followers even beginning to call themselves Orgone Warriors. She started this essentially club, and this is where her genius just shines through. Even though the idea was stolen, the execution was her own, she would...

pick places that were going to be attacked by the devil. And she would say, I need people to buy some orgone from me and bring it to this place to keep the devil from attacking it. And then all of a sudden you have all of these people who are powerless and

Many of them were lonely and all of them were just searching for something. And she gave them a mission and they could execute it. So Steven would go out on Oregon missions like all the time and put these Oregon rocks around cell towers, put them near military facilities, etc.

Not only did Orgone become Sherry's best money-making scheme, but there was also one incident in particular that made Orgone her most successful spiritual conversion tool as well. And it happened at the Super Bowl in 2013, after Sherry claimed to have received a message from God, a prophecy she shared with her followers.

Sherry got a message that said the Super Bowl was going to get blown up. The Super Bowl was between the Ravens and the 49ers that year. She didn't know this at the time, but she did know that it was in New Orleans and that it was going to get blown up. So what she did was she put out this call and she said, you can have free Oregon. You don't have to pay me for it.

Well, not free. You don't have to pay me for it now. We can work out the payment later, but I need someone to go down there. A woman named MJ, one of Sherry's devote followers, was quick to volunteer for the all-important mission.

MJ, who lives in Louisiana, said, yes, I will go and I will orgone the Superdome. And so she gets a bunch of orgone from Sherry and she drives to New Orleans and

And she starts spreading orgone all around the Superdome in the parking lot as close to the stadium as she can get the whole area. And so on February 3rd, 2013, the Super Bowl is going on and there was a blackout.

When those lights went out,

I know that every Shrinerite's heart absolutely stopped. And they all became true believers. That kind of solidified Sherry's legend. And then this woman, MJ, was kind of like elevated to this almost like saint, sainthood status because she did it. She saved billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives.

And I mean, she believes this. I've spoken with her. She absolutely believes it. And I guess you probably couldn't tell me different either. I don't know.

The Super Bowl prophecy confirmed two things for Sherry's followers. That Orgon was real, and that Sherry was, indeed, a prophet of God. Now she had even more followers, and all she needed to reach them was a Wi-Fi connection and a little free time. Anyway, folks...

Be back on Monday night. Don't forget to support your favorite ministry on the planet. Go to sherryschreiner.com and click on the donate page. Till next week, everybody. God bless.

Before the internet, a person with an audience as large as Sherry's would have had to live in a city with access to TV stations, radio antennas, newspapers, or at the very least, a good publisher. But Sherry lived about as far away from the big city as you could get in the tiny rural village of Carrollton, Ohio.

A small town of about 3,000 people in America's Midwest wasn't the likeliest place to build a media empire. But on the other hand, it didn't really matter where she broadcast from, because the internet was her pulpit. Most people, even from her own town, had no idea who she was or what she was up to. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1965, Sherry had a devoutly Baptist upbringing.

As a young woman, she studied at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, a conservative Christian institution founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell. Sherry's original goal was to work in journalism, but by the early 2000s, failed to land a job in the field. But if the traditional channels wouldn't have her, blogging was an internet frontier that seemed wide open. And it worked.

Sherry mixed and matched her evangelical roots with the modern fringe and steadily gained a digital following. Whichever new concepts attracted the most followers became integrated into her online ideology. To this day, Sherry's YouTube channel has over 30,000 followers and millions of views across hundreds of videos. Just how much money Sherry was making off her followers is unknown.

She was getting cash and checks and envelopes. She also had Patreon for a while. She had a PayPal. She had any way you could pay someone online, she was willing to be paid online.

What we do know is that over a 10-year period, Sherry was making approximately $70,000 each year through online donations. But that was only one of her revenue streams. She made considerable money through orgone sales and was known to have several generous financial backers among her loyal listeners as well.

As her online presence and popularity continued to grow, Sherry made it clear she had no time for challenges to her authority. If Sherry turned against a follower, her other followers would do the same, effectively ostracizing and excommunicating them. But they didn't just do this simply by turning the other cheek.

Instead, they accomplished this by trolling, bullying, and even threatening. And the things that might set Sherry off weren't always easy to understand. She could take offense at something incredibly small or seemingly unrelated. Something like a Facebook post Barbara Rogers was about to make.

Steve was a night owl. He'd be up all night. Me and him would chat about stuff during the night. Because we kept the same kind of hours. He slept all day and stayed up all night. But he brought this Barbara in there. And this was the first time we really was like, okay, who is this, you know?

And I never talked to her. She never came in there when I was in there. So more reason why it lagged on and no one had confronted her about anything because nobody really knew her. Nobody was talking to her. She was staying hidden in the way, way background. And that's why I didn't have any issues with her because she never opened her mouth at that point. But then we started noticing some of the stuff she was posting on her Facebooks.

On April 10th, 2017, Barbara made a fateful post about her love for steak tartare. "This is the best thing ever with minced garlic," she wrote. "I just crave raw meat all the time for some reason." Few people would find that post appetizing. It showed a close-up of a slab of ground beef topped with a raw egg, but most users would just scroll past. Not Sherry Schreiner.

When she opened her Facebook feed, the post triggered some very negative associations. And she posted this post about craving raw meat. And this ghastly picture of raw hamburger meat with some other things. But most notably, off to the side of it was a pile of feces. Yeah, yum. That sounds good. Feces and raw hamburger. And I knew that was a wicked Satanist kind of picture. Because there's only...

certain types of people who crave raw meat because they crave the blood. And that's those with the vampire demon in them.

There wasn't actually any feces in the photo, but that didn't matter. By Sherry's logic, the post proved Barbara was either a vampire or a witch, and urged Steve to leave the imposter that had infiltrated his life and their online community. In essence, Sherry was telling Steve that Barbara was the very evil they'd all been fighting against this whole time.

Soon, Barbara was banned from Sherry's forums, and then it seemed as if everyone was gossiping about Barbara online. It was weird and confusing, and it stung her, but no one was more hurt by the entire exchange than Steve.

At first, he tried to reason with the group. He did his best to prove the accusation didn't hold up to the group's own standards. And he did it by pointing at the orgone. It was scattered around his entire property. In theory, it should have been intolerable for Barbara if she were a monster. Instead, she could hold them easily.

He went as far as stacking the pucks on her while she was asleep to prove the point to himself and Sherry's followers. He was arguing with devoted conspiracy theorists, though, and one suspicion took hold. Any counter-arguments seemed to hit a brick wall.

Barbara's theory was that Sherry was attacking her because she didn't post enough. With Steve as a loyal and vocal supporter, Barbara's comparative lack of enthusiasm stood out more. Although Sherry rejected the term cult whenever it came up, isolating individuals to better control them was a move straight out of the cult leader handbook, and being confronted by it provoked a crisis of faith in Steve.

He'd retreated to the mountains on Sherry's suggestion, but he'd also climbed a mountain of belief for her. To backtrack now would be a confusing, painful, embarrassing reversal of everything he'd stood for. Steve weighed out the probabilities and trusted the evidence of his eyes, and defended the outrageous claims against Barbara and pushed back, which did not sit well with Sherry's other followers.

And so, they did to him what they'd done to others who dared to go against Sherry and turned against him hard. Sherry had declared Barbara Rogers as the embodiment of evil and declared it to a very large, very vocal online following.

You know, if you're gonna call me a false prophet, you better have some serious charges because you're just liars. Everything I've ever said, I've been talking about this stuff for 20 years. It's exactly what I've said. Back then, everybody called me crazy, the UFO lady. And now look, look at YouTube, type in reptilian humans or reptilian shapeshifters or cloned humans. All this stuff comes up. This is stuff I've been hammering about for over a decade.

When it became clear that Steve had chosen sides, Sherry accused him of being spiteful and filled with rage. From Steve's point of view, it stung horribly. There weren't many places his beliefs could find acceptance, so to be ousted unceremoniously from the one place he didn't already feel like an outsider left him fewer options than some people might have had. So Steve decided to counterattack.

Without jettisoning his belief systems entirely, Steve became determined to oust Sherry as a false prophet, becoming obsessed with creating a video to expose Sherry as a fraud. Central to his strategy was getting footage of her flaunting the biblical laws and religious prohibitions she preached online. That meant getting shots of her smoking cigarettes or violating other minor tenets of the faith.

Because Steve lived more than 300 miles away from Carrollton, Ohio, he turned to a private investigator. The PI he contacted said he needed at least 20 hours to dig up dirt on Sherry. Steve could only scrape together enough to pay for four hours. In Carrollton, Ohio, Sherry's home sat at the end of a long driveway. The PI would never catch a glimpse of her. The plan was a bust.

Meanwhile, Sherry's followers were at work, sending vague but sinister messages, mocking Steve and doubling down on the vampiric accusations against Barbara. Most alarming of all were the photos they sent of Steve and Barbara's home. That meant they knew where they lived.

For Steve, this was crossing the line. But keep in mind, he'd just hired a PI to practically do the same thing. Regardless, Steve swallowed his reluctance to deal with the government and filed a harassment complaint with police.

The knowledge that the online community had his address was alarming, but police determined the photos were pulled from Google Street View. No stalker had physically entered their space, so the complaint didn't go much further. Steve's confidence was shaken, money was tight, and his former allies had turned on him. And by his own admission, Steve sometimes felt as though he was teetering on the brink of suicide.

On January 15th, 2017, Steve received yet another round of nasty Facebook comments from Sherry's crew intent on unmasking Barbara. Angrily, he came to her defense, firing off a few choice comments of his own. It had been three months since the raw meat post, and Barbara encouraged him to log off and let it all go. Clearly, the arguments weren't doing Steve's mental health any favors.

That night, they tried to shake off the nasty Facebook comments and went out drinking till around 2 a.m. Stephen and Barbara were at dinner at Lombardi's Brookside Inn, and they were going back and forth with someone online. Someone was trolling them. They've been fighting with Sherry for all of this time. There was a lot of heavy drinking going on. We were...

Also using kratom when they did Stephen's blood. He had it in amounts that had been known to kill people in the past. People who had died of kratom have had that much in them when they died. When they got home, Steve suggested heading into the woods and firing off a few practice rounds with his .45 caliber semi-automatic Glock.

Steven decided he wanted to go out and shoot. That was something that he did when he was stressed. Now, I've been here. There are houses around there.

He thought because, again, he's from he's not just from New Jersey, which also has rural areas. He's he's from the city area of New Jersey. So to him, three trees in a row is a woods, probably 150, 200 yards to the next house. But still, it's it's it just shows for me, it just demonstrates how.

ignorant he was just about life in general. And so he goes out and he wants Barbara to come out with him. And she at first is like, no, we're both drunk. And when two drunk people take out a handgun, that's the beginning of a bad story. That's the beginning of a story that ends badly. And I think that she knew that at some level. And then they came back in from shooting.

At some point, Stephen put the gun in her hand and put the gun to his head. And then the gun went off. I don't know if Stephen wanted to die. I don't think Barbara wanted to kill him. But that's what happened. Barbara pulled the trigger either with or without Stephen's help. Stephen was dead.

Approximately 20 minutes later, Barbara picked up the phone and called 911. In the call, Barbara sounds like she's in a wild panic.

Police arrived to find Steve's body sprawled on the floor with a gunshot wound to his head. No signs of a struggle. Immediately, Barbara was taken in for a police interview where her frantic account to detectives wasn't perfectly consistent. She claimed Steve made her do it, but also said it happened by accident when she was trying to let go of the gun.

Steve's body position suggested he'd been sitting, but at first, Barbara claimed they were standing.

She also seemed to misjudge the distance between her and Steve at the time the gun went off. The camera kept rolling during the breaks in the interview, and in the recording, Barbara could be heard muttering to herself. She expressed her love for Steve, but couldn't believe what had happened. She also said some fairly deluded things, like the moment she promised God she'd quit drinking if he brought Steve back to life.

By the time the interview was over, six and a half hours later, Barbara was facing murder charges. The investigators conducting the interview had confronted Barbara repeatedly with her inconsistencies and refused to accept answers they found unsatisfying. Still, the question remained: were they flaws in the story she was spinning, or were the discrepancies understandable in Barbara's traumatized state?

That was enough to process, but then Sherry hopped online and rubbed salt in the wound. Steve had so many things he wanted to do. So many things he wanted to do. So upset that she killed him. The father let me hear a conversation, and I don't know if I should relay that tonight or not. Uh...

Three days after Steve's death, Sherry shared a major revelation she'd received about Barbara. She announced to the audience of her blog talk radio show that Barbara was possessed by a vampire demon and God himself had revealed it to her in a vision. Exactly what happened inside Steve and Barbara's home that night? By Sherry's account, Barbara and Steve were watching a Resident Evil horror movie together on the night of July 15th.

According to Sherry, the sight of blood being spilled out on the screen must have excited Barbara so much, her vampire side manifested. When Steve saw her contorted features, he began begging for his life. In this telling, some of Steve's last words were, Sherry was right about you. I should have listened. How did it start? Because she was what I kept warning him she was.

You know, in some of her pictures that she posted, her eyes were in slits. And that's typical of reptilian possession. And that would give her superhuman strength. Steve couldn't get away from her. Because when the demon manifested in her, if it was the demon or the lizard, she had both. You know, a human is no match for that kind of supernatural strength.

Throughout the show, Sherry lamented Steve's death, even saying that she'd considered herself like a mother to him. But at the same time, Sherry didn't hesitate to pat herself on the back for being right about Barbara all along. Steve was not suicidal. He had so many things he wanted to do. He was happier than a bug in a rug living in the Poconos. It was his dream to go out there. And he made it happen. She did.

She did. It was all premeditated. I'm going to take him out there and kill him. And she did. And I warned him about it. You know, it's more than just a mother's instinct or just a basic common sense instinct. It's the fact that I had the father telling me things about her as well, folks. And I tried to protect him and she got him. She got him. You know, he wouldn't listen.

The implication was clear: Sherry was always right, and Steve was now an example to her followers of what happens to people who don't believe her. But to others, Steve's death was an example of what happens to people who do believe Sherry. When Barbara's ex-husband Joel first received a call about something bad happening to Barbara, his first instinct was to assume she'd ended her own life.

And after hearing what really happened, his viewpoint was that Sherry had sustained pressure on two vulnerable people, which was the true cause of death. It would also turn out that this wasn't the first time a person connected to Sherry's ideology wound up dead. Five years earlier, on December 28, 2012, Kelly Pingilly's body was discovered lying in a field in Michigan.

Kelly Pingilly, she was a young woman who was a fan of Sherry's. She grew up very, very, very religious, very conservative and Lutheran. But when she found Sherry, she found a whole new way of thinking. She got really into the Book of Enoch.

And I don't think it is too radical to say that she may have influenced Sherry more than Sherry influenced her.

I think a lot of the research that Kelly did ended up in Sherry's hands and promoted as Sherry's beliefs. But there was a while she was transcribing all of Sherry's stuff for free. She was transcribing the shows. And it's worth noting how important that is. Like today, we know as podcast people that, yeah, sure, throw the transcription up there because it helps you with SEO. Sherry knew that back in the day and

And that was one of the reasons that she was doing so well, was that she had people typing out whatever, the 30,000, 20,000 words worth of her, four hours worth of talking. But Kelly did that and she was really good at it. And she did meet Sherry and they went out actually hunting reptilians, which resulted in what I've named the Battle of Fort Knox.

And so Sherry decided that they needed to go and to free captives from Fort Knox, where they keep the gold. Kelly Pingilly, along with Sherry Shriner, a woman named Mary Ann, and a man called Brother Richard, all met up near Sherry's home in Carrollton and traveled to Fort Knox, Kentucky together. They brought a bunch of orgone and gold

They all told the same story. I've heard four versions of this story. I've heard Sherry's version. I've heard Richard Brown's version. I've read Kelly's version. And I've read Marianne's version.

They were walking along and they saw a man who they knew was a reptilian was fishing on the banks. And Brother Rich held up an orgone pendant and scared the man away. And then the Battle of Fort Knox commenced. And they all tell it the same way, that there was a brain in a jar that was being...

tortured and they freed it and they freed a bunch of turtle people and those were all being held by these serpents, these reptilians. So they struck a blow against the reptilians by freeing the turtle people and the brain in the jar and I can't

tell you any more about it than that. Except that they all told the story essentially the same way, which is just chilling. But sometime after the Battle of Fort Knox, Brother Rich got very jealous of Kelly. Kelly was getting very close to Sherry and he started to undermine Kelly and Sherry's eyes.

Tensions between Kelly and Sherry's other hardcore believers began to fester. And before long, Kelly and Sherry had a bit of a falling out with one another. She was suffering and nobody knew it. Many of her diaries are available. And reading them, there is a mania there that is unmistakable. And really,

One of the things that she became obsessed with was this idea that she had to go to help God get him the key to heaven or the key to hell to start the war, the War of Armageddon. And she was preparing her friends for weeks. She was giving out orgone.

beforehand. And then one day she drove out into a quiet place and she took a bunch of pills and laid down and went to sleep and never woke back up. Her suicide note to her parents read, I'm off to fulfill my destiny. She added that she didn't know when she'd be back and sprinkled a few smiley faces throughout.

I think that she really had this notion that she was coming back. I mean, Kelly Pingilly died, officially died of suicide. But I think she fully believed that she was coming back. When Sherry was confronted about the death of one of her followers, Sherry did what she always did. She invented an entirely new conspiracy theory.

She used that as a promotional thing. They're out to get me. Look, they're killing all of my disciples. And so she said that Kelly had been killed by her mother and her brother and made it look like a suicide because it was a psychological psyop.

to make Sherry's people look crazy. And they harassed the family. I spoke with some of Kelly's friends. At some point, someone hacked her, hacked Kelly's Facebook and said, it's really easy to fake your death. It's really easy to make your death look fake or something like that. And we're contacting people as Kelly saying, I'm not really dead, which is just so, so vicious.

What you're about to hear now is a typical example of how Sherry would react to the topic of assassination.

Hey, you know, my assassins come and go. I've had assassins after me since George Bush Jr. and Dick Cheney hired the number one assassin in America to kill me. And how I know this is because the assassin told me himself many years later. Because he couldn't kill me. He told me all the problems he had every time he tried to kill me. I'm protected by the most high.

Ironically, Sherry had helped spreading the details around Kelly's supposed murder. Sherry's version of what had happened to Kelly was laid out in full on Truthseeker Blog, the kind of page that seems designed to hurt your eyes, with neon green and red text against a black background and a font size that varies by paragraph.

It was run by a user named SM. It was the personal page of Steve Mineo himself.

News covering of Steve's death in 2017 took on a sensational tone, as you might expect. Clickbait headlines about a strange alien reptilian doomsday cult spread like wildfire online. And at the center of the case was now 42-year-old Barbara Rogers, who claimed Steve's death was a tragic accident.

According to her, he'd become suicidal because of the sustained harassment of Sherry's online followers. But as the case went to trial, the prosecution painted a contrasting picture of an unstable woman who wanted out and chose the quickest way of all to end the relationship.

For prosecutors, the initial interview with Barbara was their key piece of evidence. During her six-hour interview, Barbara changed her story almost too many times to count. To them, this was proof she was inventing a story. Her defense lawyers, on the other hand, saw a confused, traumatized, and frantic person in those interview tapes.

They argued that when police told her point blank they thought she was lying, she scrambled to find a more acceptable version of events. But that didn't mean she was concealing a nefarious plan to get away with murder. In fact, she had repeated the accident version 24 times.

Steve's toxicology report showed a blood alcohol level of 0.15%, high enough to significantly impair his judgment. He also tested positive for kratom, a tropical plant with an effect similar to morphine. But perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence in Barbara's favor was in the physical evidence discovered at the scene.

The shape of the wound on Steve's forehead made it clear that the barrel of the gun had been in direct contact with the skin when it was fired, which, in their view, was evidence Steve had been complicit and supported Barbara's account. But there was something else, too. The firearm used to kill Steve was a Glock 45 handgun.

Upon further investigation of the gun, investigators found that the shell casing hadn't been ejected after firing the bullet. An expert brought in to testify said the most likely explanation for this was that Steve had wrapped his hands over top of Barbara's, preventing the slide from ejecting the shell properly. This would mean that both Steve and Barbara's hands were holding the gun when it fired.

However, the deck was stacked against Barbara's defense team from the very beginning. They wanted to tell the jury about Barbara's previous bipolar diagnosis, but the judge decided it wasn't relevant to the case and ruled it inadmissible.

The judge also wouldn't allow the jury to consider a charge of involuntary manslaughter, which would carry a much shorter sentence if found guilty. Instead, they would be asked to decide only between first, second, or third-degree murder.

Pennsylvania has a third-degree murder, which is called depraved heart murder or depraved indifference. So acting in such a way as to have depraved indifference to human life. In March of 2019, Barbara was found guilty of third-degree murder and received a sentence of 15 to 40 years in prison.

She was convicted of the crime that she committed. I think that she was rightfully convicted. I don't think there was any kind of miscarriage of justice. I think it would have been wrong for her to be convicted of anything more than third degree murder.

If anyone thought that Steve's death would cause Sherry Shriner even a moment of doubt, they were sorely mistaken. Despite Steve being deceased and Barbara on trial for murder, Sherry somehow found a way to frame it all, as if she was the one being persecuted. And of course, she used it to create more conspiracy theories.

The most absurd being that the Barbara who was arrested and on trial was merely a clone. That she wasn't actually the same Barbara who killed Steve at all. Her proof? She made videos where she paused pixelated footage and pointed out suspicious blurry spots. That was it.

So this appears to be like clone number four of Barb Rogers that I know of. Clearly you can see she's morphing. She's synthetic. Look at the palms folks. Look at the palm of her hands from wrist. Look at her wrist. Her face is melting. It's very blurry. Her hand morphs in and out in all of her pictures. Look at her pinky. This is the first thing I noticed. And then look at the length of this palm of her hand.

Because she believed Barbara had been cloned, it galled Sherry that the quote "original murderer" wouldn't be brought to justice. She even did the talk radio circuit promoting her viewpoint, spouting baseless accusations with impunity. They're trying to control the narrative because they have a predetermined outcome. What exactly is the outcome here?

One of the things that makes the story so hard to tell is that Sherry dies at the wrong part. If it were fiction, she would die after the trial, but she dies before the trial of a heart attack. She was always a really big person, always a smoker, and she just had a heart attack one night, and

So the story that her followers tell is that God knew he couldn't protect her from the devil anymore. And so rather than let the devil have the pleasure of killing her, he took her soul before the devil got there.

Sherry's death in January 2018 occurred about half a year after Steve Mineo's death, but more than a year before Barbara's trial. Perhaps because of this, Sherry was never formally accused of being complicit in either Steve Mineo or Kelly Pangilli's deaths.

Though friends of Steve, Kelly and others affected by her ideology consider her a cult leader whose influence tipped their loved ones into tragedy. I think Sherry Shriner, the Shrinerites are really just canaries in coal mines for the bigger problems that we have in our society. And it's one of those things you can't unsee.

And this is what happens when people start to lose their faith in the institutions that have propped their lives up for so long. It's the people who don't have a working knowledge of how their own emotions and beliefs work.

And they're lost and they're lashing out like animals. And I wish that the country was as pleasant as it was back in 2012, 2010, when Sherry really started to hit. But I think that Sherry was the first twist or was part of the first twist in the knot that made the tension where it is today.

At a time when the political climate worldwide is growing more and more diverse, it's surprisingly easy to be seduced by exciting stories and quick-fix ideas. But following some of these rabbit holes can lead to some very, very dark places. Maybe the best we can do is follow a conspiracy theorist's own advice.

Keep calm, ask questions, and stay skeptical, especially when someone seems to have all the answers. If you're interested in digging even deeper into the story of Sherry Schreiner and her online cult, read Dragged Into the Light by Tony Russo and follow him on social media.

My book is called Dragged Into the Light, Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult by Tony Russo. You can get it wherever you get books. You can listen to it. If you have Spotify, I heard that Spotify is letting you listen to one book a month or something for free. Make it mine. You can find me at bytonyrusso.com, B-Y-T-O-N-Y-R-U-S-S-O.

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