MLive.com
John Agar
ALLEGAN COUNTY, MI – After self-professed
prophet William A. Lewis escaped conviction in the 1983 beating death of a
child at his House of Judah compound in rural Allegan County, FBI agent Gene
Debbaudt sought out a federal civil-rights prosecutor to go after the cult
leader and his lieutenants.
Call it a cowboy
streak, or a quest for justice. Debbaudt showed up in Ann Arbor, where the
prosecutor, Susan King, was trying an unrelated case.
“He said, ‘You have
to do something about this case,’” King recalled.
“It was not at the
time typical for an FBI agent to do that in a slavery case. This one was
definitely different from the rest. Legally complicated, with the religious
overtones, and by the facts the victims were in the custody of their parents.”
It required King to
mount a precedent-setting case - one that showed you could enslave a child,
even if they were still in the custody of their parents.
King, along with
Daniel Bell, successfully tried Lewis and others on slavery charges, centered
on the July
4, 1983, killing of John Yarbough, 12.
Defense attorneys
said the government brought federal charges against Lewis and his followers
only because state charges didn’t stick.
Prosecutors said Lewis
created a “climate of fear,” with followers brutally beaten for supposed
transgressions. In Yarbough’s case, he was watching TV instead of cleaning out
the trailer of a former tenant. The young boy was beaten to death, his body
thrown in a pickup and taken to a local hospital.
In the early
aftermath of John's death, three House of Judah member were convicted in state
court. Ethel Yarbough, the boy’s mother, was sentenced to four to 15 years in
prison for involuntary manslaughter. Two others were sentenced to one year in
jail after pleading guilty to child cruelty.
But it was the
federal case that carved the legal milestone: Lewis and six members of the cult
were found guilty of enslaving children.
The sentences,
however, were light, ranging from one to three years. Lewis received three
years.
Former U.S.
Attorney John Smietanka, now a private attorney, said the House of Judah
differed from a Nazi concentration camp in Poland only in its scale.
“This is Auschwitz
in Allegan,” he said. “John Yarbough’s death was a very, very, very brutal,
torturous death.”
