A cult leader in North Carolina has pleaded guilty to killing his 4-year old son — because he thought he was gay. He also killed one of his many wives, and buried them in his mother’s backyard. You know, like ya do. I wish I was making all this up.
Peter Lucas Moses, now 28, has just registered a plea of guilty to the first-degree murders of both his 4-year old common-law son, Jadon Higganbothan, and one of his common-law wives, in a North Carolina courtroom after prosecutors dropped the death penalty. Regular readers remember this tragic case from 2011, in which Moses, the head of a religious group some call a cult, known as the Black Hebrew Israelites, shot to death his four-year old son because he thought the boy might be gay after he witnessed him hitting the backside of another young boy.
And some of his other wives joined in:
The 28-year old woman whom Moses has now pled guilty to killing, Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy, had been beaten and strangled with an extension cord by the other women before Moses murdered her. The day he did, she had escaped to a neighbor’s house and begged her to use her cell phone. The neighbor did not call police because she claims she thought the woman might be mentally disturbed. She witnessed Moses dragging her into the house, and still never called police.
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raven
June 16, 2012 at 10:40 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Hitchens: Religion poisons everything.
It’s just a charming fundie xian ritual.
Human child sacrifice by medical neglect or torture murder.
The number of children sacrificed in this way isn’t too well known but runs around 100/year in the USA.
StevoR
June 16, 2012 at 11:16 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
WTF!? He though his four yera old son was possibly gay? Because he hit another boy on the backside?!
And then thought the approrporoiate course ofactuion was to murder his own son?!?
WTF!? I .. no words.
CT
June 16, 2012 at 11:59 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I wish you were too.
Captain Mike
June 16, 2012 at 12:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
SO FUCKING WHAT? Call the goddamn police anyway! Drop the problem entirely in their fucking laps and walk the fuck away. That’s the absolute minimum you should do in this situation, not think “Well, she sounds crazy. This would be a waste of valuable police minutes.”
"We Are Ing The Matrimonial Collective"
June 16, 2012 at 12:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Bring her in on reckless endangerment or accessory. She killed that woman
mobius
June 16, 2012 at 12:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Oh…my…effing…Gawd…
And I am continually hearing from Christians how religion makes one moral.
Right. [/sarcasm]
silomowbray
June 16, 2012 at 12:50 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A 4 year old?!?
Peter Fucking Moses should be slowly strangled to death. And so should religion.
Nice Ogress
June 16, 2012 at 1:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
She was a neighbor. She was in range.
It is not uncommon for people witnessing frequent and obvious abuse to stay silent. Some of this is out of fear that no one will help anyway, but also that they will have made THEMSELVES vulnerable, and that after the other victim is gone, no one will help THEM.
This is why community outreach is so important for police and social workers.
Gretchen
June 16, 2012 at 1:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Gah, I can’t find the story where I originally read about this. The story said that the boy was not his son– he was the son of one of his wives in the cult, but by another man. In fact, the only child in their cult that wasn’t his. The woman he killed was not the boy’s mother, but the wife he thought would be likely to tell others about what he did.
Vasha
June 16, 2012 at 1:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’ve been following this case for the last year. My impression is that Moses didn’t kill the child “because he thought he was gay”, instead “gay” was the worst insult he knew to impute to someone he already didn’t like. As Gretchen said, Jadon, Vania Sisk’s oldest child, wasn’t biologically Moses’s son. Moses had already called Jadon’s father “gay” and told Sisk to “get rid of” Jadon. On the day of the boy’s death, the justification machine went into high gear: he declared that Jadon had slapped another boy on the backside, was gay like his father, and had to die. With Sisk’s full knowledge, apparently, he took Jadon into the garage, began playing a recording of the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew at high volume, and shot him in the head.
(It may have been Vania Sisk who actually shot Antoinetta McKoy.)
Azkyroth, Former Growing Toaster Oven
June 16, 2012 at 2:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Someone explain why this isn’t a felony?
F
June 16, 2012 at 4:08 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yeah, I remember this. Warped authoritarian assholes.
matty1
June 16, 2012 at 4:16 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ah, the traditional family.
brianl
June 16, 2012 at 5:56 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think it’s appalling how all you secular humanists insist on impinging on his religious freedom.
(The above is snark, and if the next time someone starts talking about whatever crap has spilled from the mouths of the Catholic Bishops Association or the American Family Association you don’t point them here and demand to know what the difference is, you’re playing to lose.)
WMDKitty
June 16, 2012 at 7:51 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This guy killed a cub.
The fact that he did it because he thought the 4-year old was gay? Just makes it all the worse.
You don’t. fuck. with. children.
EVER.
You protect them! You guide them! You give them structure and discipline and love! But you never, EVER, hurt them!
Ace of Sevens
June 16, 2012 at 7:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This guy was not leader of the Black Hebrew Israelites. There are tens of thousands of them and I don’t think they are all part of one coherent organization. He was leader of some local group who may have claimed he was leader of all Black Hebrew Israelites, but that means about as much as David Koresh claiming to be Jesus.
marym
June 16, 2012 at 8:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Actually male lions do kill cubs but not their own. This frees the lioness to go into estrus and be impregnanted by the male lion, this time with HIS cub. Moses was acting more like an animal than a human.
podkayne
June 16, 2012 at 8:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
at 15 WMDkitty
“This guy killed a cub.”
Does the deranged furry language really help, do you think?
Gretchen
June 16, 2012 at 10:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That is precisely what I was thinking, Marym.
WMDKitty
June 16, 2012 at 11:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@podkayne — Blow me. My point remains the same: it ain’t cool to go around killing the young ones.
grumpyoldfart
June 17, 2012 at 4:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Cult leaders are in the business to exercise control over other people, and they know they’ve really made it when they get to decide who lives and who dies. It puts them right up there with god himself.
isilzhaveni
June 17, 2012 at 4:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Obviously he’s not a true follower of the bible. If he was, he would have taken the kid to the city elders, said the kid was disobedient, and all of them would have stoned the kid to death at the city gate. That is the PROPER biblical way to do it!
feralboy12
June 17, 2012 at 2:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Bit of a shame that one didn’t make it into the ten commandments, eh? Too bad–there was only room for ten on those tablets, and god blew the first four on himself. Just bad planning, I guess.
cactusren
June 17, 2012 at 7:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I remember hearing about this shortly after it happened, and reading about it again still makes me want to cry.
FWIW, here’s my anecdote about the Black Hebrew Israealites: there’s a group of them that sometimes preach on a corner in my neighborhood. Most of what I’ve heard while walking by is anti-gay bigotry, with a lot of hellfire and brimstone imagery. Now, there are some street preachers that I might try to argue with or heckle, but not these guys. There’s generally a group of them, all large men, and they all look seriously angry. Maybe they’re all talk, but they’re not a group I’m going to go looking for a fight with.
That said, if one of them ran out of the group asking for my help, you can bet I’d call the police. Though it occurs to me as I’m writing this that perhaps the neighbor had an inkling of Moses’ violence, and feared some sort of retribution for calling the cops. If that’s the case, then I’m not so angry about hir inaction.