Back in 1987 I heard about a man named LeGrand. Some associates of mine from Brooklyn told me stories about Doc LeGrand a self proclaimed preacher who was leader of a cult in Brooklyn, New York. He had women dressed in habits who were mostly in the subway stations collecting money for LeGrand's so-called church. At the time, 1987 while they were telling me this I recalled seeing those nuns begging for money. What they told me next was mind blowing. This man was snatching up young girls and killing them as well as some grown women. At first I thought it was some urban camp fire style stories meant to keep young girls from running away or roaming the streets alone. Yet they were telling me the truth.
The reason they were telling me this was because I had a confrontation with one of LeGrand's sons. I had no idea who he nor his father were until they informed me. They said in some cases he used his teenage sons to lure teenage girls in to his flock. After years of girls, women and possibly some men disappearing they finally found evidence in a lake in upstate New York where LeGrand owned some property.
In any event, I decided to do some research concerning LeGrand just to see if my memory is still reliable and how accurate was the information I was given back in 1987. Below are several article about LeGrand. See how long this serial rapist and murderer was able commit these horrible acts.
~Malik Shabazz
‘Bishop’ LeGrand Indicted in Killing of 2 Wives and 2 Teen‐Age Girls
For Years, Women Vanished. A Brooklyn Church Hid the Secret.
Devernon LeGrand, the self-styled bishop of a Brooklyn church, was indicted yesterday on charges of having murdered two of his wives, one in 1963 and one in 1970.
In addition, he and a son, Steven Strong LeGrand, 26, years old, were indicted in the murder of two sisters —Gladys Rivera Stewart, 18, and Yvonne Rivera, 16.
District Attorney Eugene Gold of Brooklyn said his office was continuing the investigation that led to the murder indictments. Although he would say nothing more, sources in his office had disclosed earlier that the District Attorney was looking into the disappearance of more than a dozen persons linked to Mr. LeGrand.
The four murders listed in yesterday's indictments were all said to have occurred in the four‐story town house Mr. LeGrand maintained as a church and residence at 222 Brooklyn Avenue in the Bedford‐Stuyvesant section. The church is known as St. John's Pentecostal Church of Our Lord.
According to the indictments, all the victims were “beaten, stomped and dismembered.”
Ann Sorise, one of the two wives Mr. LeGrand allegedly killed, was also shot. She was said to have been murdered in September 1963.
The other wife he allegedly killed was identified as Ernestine Timmons. She was said to have been killed about May 1, 1970.
Both women were in their 30's.
The Rivera sisters, the indictment said, were beaten and stomped to death last Oct. 3 by Devernon LeGrand and his son, Steven, “acting in concert with another person.” The third person was not identified.
That third person is expected to testify against the two LeGrands under a grant of immunity.
In an affidavit filed previously with the District Attorney, a caretaker for the LeGrands, Frank Holman, said he had helped take the dismembered bodies of the two sisters from the house in Brooklyn to “LeGrand Acres,” a 58‐acre farm maintained by Mr. LeGrand for members of his church and their children in Liberty, N.Y.
He also said he had helped burn the bodies in a metal washtub and then had dumped the remains into Lake Briscoe, four miles away.
Mr. LeGrand has accused Mr. Holman of having an affair with his current wife, the former Kathleen Kennedy, an Englishwoman, and had accused Ithe two of seeking to implicate him falsely. They now are in protective custody.
The LeGrands, father and son, were arraigned yesterday before Justice John R. Starkey in State Supreme Court and both pleaded not guilty.
The question of bail was not raised since Devernon LeGrand is currently serving 5 to 15 years in jail for rape and bribery. And his son Steven is in jail awaiting trial on charges of murdering two men who were said to have worked as pimps for his father.
Children of missing ‘nuns’ seek help finding remains
BROOKLYN, N.Y. (PIX11) — The now-adult children of a Brooklyn serial killer are asking PIX11 for help in finding the remains of their missing mothers.
The women vanished in the 1960’s and 1970’s from a four-story house on Brooklyn Avenue, run by self-styled “Bishop” Devernon “Doc” LeGrand. He was convicted of stomping to death and dismembering three young women in 1977. Up to 23 people vanished from the household over two decades and were never seen again.
“I wanted to find out the truth about my mother,” 49-year old Cheyama LeGrand said to PIX11 News, in an exclusive interview that will air Monday night at 10 P.M. Cheyama’s mother was Bernice Williams, and Cheyama recounted she was only about four-years-old when her mom disappeared from her life. “She always laughed,” LeGrand recalled. “She was just a happy woman.”
Cheyama has limited memories of her mother, but she remembers one time when the young mom dressed Cheyama and her older sister in nice dresses. “I can remember the dress so clear,” she said.“Mine was red. Hers was blue.”
Cheyama also recalls her mother sharing fruit cocktail cups with the two little girls in the kitchen at 222 Brooklyn Avenue, where the “bishop” ran a four-story house with up to 70 men, women and children living there at one time.
In March 1977, Doc LeGrand — then 52-years-old — was convicted of beating to death teen sisters, Yvonne and Gladys Rivera, and burning their bodies in a tub at his upstate farm. LeGrand was also convicted in the 1970 murder of Ernestine Timmons, who had born six children for him and was forced to dress as a nun and beg in the subways. LeGrand’s scam was earning him $250,000 a year in the mid-1970’s. He used to drop off the phony nuns in Little Italy and in busy, transit hubs five or six days a week. One source told PIX11 if the women didn’t bring home at least $100 a day, they would be beaten. Last week, PIX 11 profiled the case of another, missing nun — Elizabeth Brown — who was only 14-year-old when Doc LeGrand seduced her with angel dust and alcohol at the Adventurer’s Inn Amusement Park in College Point, Queens.
The family of Ernestine Timmons has also reached out to PIX 11, seeking help in finding her remains. Hundreds of bones were dredged from Lake Briscoe upstate in early 1976. This was before DNA technology. Prosecutors relying on the work of an anthropologist helped to identify bones that likely came from the remains of the teens, Yvonne and Gladys Rivera. Some jewelry that belonged to Yvonne Rivera was also found in Lake Briscoe.
There were no bones linked to Timmons, who was 30 when she was killed. Prosecutors won a conviction, because one of LeGrand’s wives testified she witnessed some of the activity surrounding Timmons’ death, and an accomplice gave the jury details, as well.
On Monday night at 10 PM, PIX11 will air our extensive interview with Cheyama. She will recount the secret she learned when she was 12. She will also reveal how she confronted her father in prison, to ask about the fate of her missing mother. Devernon LeGrand died in state prison in 2006, when he was 82-years-old.
The girl met her killer at Adventurers Inn, a second-rate amusement park in College Point, Queens.
Elizabeth Brown, 15, was at the park with friends one summer night in 1974 when he rolled up in his chauffeur-driven, cream-colored Cadillac — with its own bar and TV — and stepped out. He would have been hard to resist: a dapper preacher in a silk suit with movie-star looks, wealth and charm.
But this “pastor,” Devernon “Doc” LeGrand, 50, had no intention of saving her soul. His slick approach was intended to snare the girl into his commune in Brooklyn, where he plied teens with drugs and booze, seduced them and forced them to panhandle in nun garb.
Brown became LeGrand’s concubine and beggar, hitting up subway riders by day and having sex with him and dropping angel dust by night.
“She had a good heart but was very angry, very belligerent,” said Brown’s sister Cathy. “Our father was sick with cancer and dying. She was looking for stability. A kid like that attracts dirtbags like magnets.”
Thirty-six years later, authorities assumed LeGrand’s cult, which eventually devolved into rape and murder and scandalized the city in the 1970s, was long gone. But last week they opened a new probe into the remnants of his clan after The Post found Mindy LeGrand, his daughter-in-law, pulling the same old sister act in Little Italy.
Investigators have returned to the dark secrets of 222 Brooklyn Ave., a Crown Heights row house where for two decades LeGrand headed one of the most notorious crime families in city history.
LeGrand fathered 46 children, many of whom lived in tiny bedrooms upstairs in the four-story headquarters where Devernon preached on the first floor. For years, kids were kept in cages, starved and beaten — until cops busted LeGrand for child-abuse in 1965.
“They had these tiny little rooms. The kids would stay with their mothers or just run around everywhere,” said Eugene Jarkow, who investigated LeGrand for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. “The street-level floor is where they had the church. There was a big meat freezer in the basement, supposedly where he’d put the bodies, but there was no proof of that.”
Every morning, LeGrand’s phony nuns would pile into his Cadillac and he would drop them off at locations across the city. One fake sister, Vivian Roye, “was olive-skinned and passed as Italian — she did very well on Mulberry Street,” recalled former Brooklyn prosecutor Harold Rosenbaum.
The church took in an estimated $250,000 a year, enough to buy the Crown Heights building and a 58-acre farm in Sullivan County, which LeGrand paid for with rolls of coins.
When Devernon wasn’t in a rage, life could be good. There were tailored outfits, luxury cars and gambling trips to Atlantic City. Booze and drugs flowed freely.
“They lived what they thought was the good life,” Jarkow said. Cathy Brown added, “There was always a party at that place.”
Jarkow even admitted to a certain fondness for the charlatan.
“I liked him — and I knew the horrors he committed, the grief he brought on this earth,” said Jarkow. “The guy could have sold me anything. He was very charming. . . . He was like an entertainer.”
LeGrand, born in 1924, said he came to New York as a 12-year-old with his parents from Laurinburg, NC. He claimed he was ordained in 1954 on Long Island and got a doctorate in a psychology and theology from an unnamed institute in Newark.
LeGrand was charged with killing his first wife, Ann Sorise, and his second wife, Ernestine Timmons. The wonder is that he got away with so much for so long. City and state officials never figured out a way to shut down the panhandling swindle. And as many as 23 additional “parishioners” went missing and couldn’t be located. Cops wondered: Had LeGrand killed them?
Twice cops dug up the basement of the church looking for bodies — in 1965, after three members vanished, and 10 years later while looking for the remains of two teenage sisters. It was a long time before they would learn the full truth.
The cloak began to fall away in 1975 when LeGrand and his son Noconda were convicted of first-degree rape after they repeatedly sexually assaulted a 20-year-old woman in the church. Then two cult insiders — Kathleen Kennedy and the church handyman, Frank Holman — came forward to say LeGrand had killed his own daughter-in-law, Gladys Stewart, 18, in a fit of rage.
The truth was much worse.
Stewart, who had married LeGrand’s 20-year-old stepson, Donald Stewart, had had enough of the family and wanted out. She had also secretly helped prosecutors get the rape conviction. When she made it clear to Donald on Oct. 3, 1975, that she was leaving for good, he flew into a rage, and LeGrand intervened.
LeGrand detained both Stewart and her sister, Yvonne Rivera, 16, who was visiting, and ordered the rest of the congregation downstairs to the first-floor meeting room, where he demanded they stay “until I tell you to come out.” Over the next two hours, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., LeGrand and another stepson kicked and beat the two teens. A LeGrand daughter went in and told the flock, “Daddy’s stomping Gladys.”
Holman said he heard a woman scream, and the group began to sing hymns. They stayed until 2:30 a.m., when LeGrand came in and sent them to bed. Weeks later, LeGrand boasted he’d killed and dismembered the girls and had their remains incinerated at his upstate farm.
“You all remember Gladys,” he said. “Daughter or no daughter, you’ll join the bitch. You know what I do with bitches. I burn them. . . . That little bitch [Yvonne] came down to see about her sister and I got her, too.”
Holman, who joined the church after leaving his job as an autopsy assistant with the Brooklyn Medical Examiner’s Office, said he was ordered to load two big garbage bags into his car and drive them to the farm. When he got there, something had spilled from a bag.
It was Yvonne Rivera’s severed head.
He dumped the jumble of body parts into an old bathtub, doused them with paint thinner, and set the contents on fire. They burned for two hours. He then put the ashy remains in a garbage can, which he tossed into a pond near the camp. He later led investigators to where the bone fragments were submerged.
“I was given two large Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets with bones and told, ‘Here, try the case,’ ” said Rosenbaum.
The prosecutor said he enlisted an expert from the Museum of Natural History to piece together the fragments, and LeGrand and stepson Steven LeGrand were convicted of the double homicide; each got 25 to life. Devernon LeGrand died in prison in 2006 at age 82.
The family business, renamed St. Joseph’s Church of Christ and Home, is now headed by LeGrand’s son, Noconda, the convicted rapist, and is under investigation by the state attorney general. The agency wants to know why Mindy LeGrand is lying about being an Episcopal sister and raising funds for an orphanage that doesn’t exist.
The Attorney General’s Office served LeGrand with a subpoena after The Post’s front-page expose last Sunday, sources said.
The city Health Department sent inspectors to 222 Brooklyn Ave. last week after her son Quomenters claimed to The Post that the church took in orphans and provided child care. The inspectors found no evidence of either, a department spokesperson said.
Perhaps more worrisome was Quomenters’ insistence that nine youths who lived in the house were “away at summer camp” on the family’s farm in White Sulphur Springs, the same place — now abandoned — where Holman burned up the Rivera sisters’ bodies.
Additional reporting by Cynthia Fagen and Liz Pressman
The Brooklyn Children’s Museum is a two-mile walk from my apartment. It’s an inviting edifice, filled with magic and wonder for children and adults alike. The surrounding grounds are peaceful, punctuated by the boisterous sounds of little kids going in and out of the museum. For good reason it’s a jewel of the borough, attracting over 260,000 annual visitors.
A block south and across the street from the museum is a four-story dilapidated townhouse. It ought to be a fine example of pre-war Crown Heights architecture, a building worthy of admiration. Most, if not all, of the museumgoers wouldn’t even give it an extra glance. But I do, every time I walk past, ever since I learned of the house’s history.
But if they knew the house’s history, they might. This townhouse, at 222 Brooklyn Avenue, was the stuff of nightmares. Where girls and women screamed for their lives and no one heard. Where a self-styled preacher with an ill-fitting toupee and a pencil-thin mustache driving a cream-colored Cadillac with its own bar and color television created a church that was more about his sinister desires than about the worship of God. And where, amazingly, many of his descendants still live, in communion with past—and perhaps present—horrors.
***
DeVernon LeGrand didn’t learn how to be a hustler all on his own, though the instincts were present early. Born in 1924 in Laurinberg, North Carolina, LeGrand moved to Manhattan at the age of twelve, and by the time he came of age his rap sheet was in full bloom. A 1946 arrest for failing to carry his draft card. A 1947 bust for attempted rape. A suspended sentence for arranging an abortion. These were mere prelude to further descents into depravity, dressed by day in flowing black robes, and by night in maroon jackets, ascot scarfs and gold trousers.
As LeGrand’s arrest record grew, he found an early calling hitching himself, professionally speaking, to other grifters. There was one Mother Robinson, for whom LeGrand worked as a chauffeur until her death in 1949. Then he moved on to a fake preacher named Daniel E. Davis, who had started up the “New Day Holy Church of God” at the tail end of World War II. LeGrand was a procurer of women, and his product included his first wife, Helen, and his sister, Sarah Moloney.
Their task: dress up as nuns, in black habits clutching tambourines to their bosoms, and solicit around Times Square, department stores like Macy’s and Straus’s, and subway stations from Harlem to Crown Heights. The women could keep all the cash save for $2.50 per day—eventually doubled to 5 bucks per—which kicked back to the “Church.” The racket cleared well over a hundred grand a year then, which would be close to a million dollars today.
The crime novelist Chester Himes had left New York City by the time DeVernon and Helen LeGrand, Sarah Moloney, and several others were arrested in 1953 for solicitation and fraud. (The women were convicted and given prison sentences of several months each; DeVernon was acquitted, continuing his pattern of beating charges.) But Himes described the scam so accurately in A Rage in Harlem that he must have witnessed the grift in action, or knew someone who had:
“No one paid her any special attention. There were many black Sisters of Mercy seen throughout Manhattan. They solicited in the big department-stores downtown, on Fifth Avenue, in the railroad stations, up and down 42nd Street and throughout Times Square. Only a few persons knew the name of the organization they belonged to. Most of the Harlem folk thought they were nuns, just the same as there were black, kinky-headed, frizzly-bearded rabbis seen about the street.”
One Sister of Mercy in particular merited her own description: “dressed in a long black gown similar to the vestments of a nun, with a white starched bonnet atop a fringe of gray hair. A large gold cross, attached to a black ribbon hung at her breast. She had a smooth-skinned, round black cherubic face, and two gold teeth in front which gleamed when she smiled.”
Himes was describing his own fake nun, a man dressed in women’s garb who would be the central driver of the plot before his series detective antiheroes, Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, arrived on scene. But he could have been describing Helen LeGrand, who made sure—when her husband broke away from Davis and put out his own preaching shingle in 1956—that the bevy of fake nuns went out every day and returned with enough cash to cover the $5 a day kickback.
Whether Himes followed what happened next isn’t known. But if he had kept up with LeGrand’s shenanigans, he could have had yet more fodder for his Harlem Detectives, or a story too wild for even them to contend with.
***
DeVernon LeGrand moved his flock of women and children to 222 Brooklyn Avenue in the early 1960s. By that time LeGrand styled himself as a “Doctor and Physicologist, Metaphysics & Theology” hanging a sign over the door at the townhouse. He claimed to teach classes every Wednesday evening at 8:30. He advertised his ability to preside over weddings and funerals. “I have the power of divine healing,” LeGrand once declared. “I don’t charge no salary for this. I lay my hands on you and you recover. For that you give me a blessing.” In other words, a donation, often a hefty one.
It all sounded odd, but not necessarily sinister. There was a pending state investigation into whether St. John’s Church of Our Lord was a cover for fraud, dating back to 1961, but it had stalled out. There were rumors of raucous parties ending in fights as drunken men and women spilled out into the streets, but did that rise to the level of criminality? The neighborhood wasn’t sure.
DeVernon LeGrand
And as for those other rumors of young girls being picked up by LeGrand in his shiny Cadillac, promising them the moon, only to be taken back to the townhouse and threatened with beatings (or worse) if they didn’t adopt the fake nun grift, those seemed too fantastical to be real. They had to be.
Then the disappearances began to mount.
No one really cared until Brooklyn police raided the four-story townhouse at 8:30 on the morning of September 1, 1965. As detailed in a three-part series by Rana Gustaisis for the Philadelphia Daily News later that month, a team from the DA’s office stormed the house, search warrant in hand. “The first thing I saw were bare women running all over the place,” Detective Michael Lizzio told Gustaisis. Of the eleven women present that evening, seven were pregnant. Cops counted forty-seven children on the premises, too. Most every one of them bore some resemblance to LeGrand.
What interested police, though, were reports of three women who had gone missing, perhaps murdered, who had long been associated with LeGrand, and were last seen in 1963: Anne Sorise, Mary Horan, and Lulu King. Then there was Bernice Williams, very much alive, who claimed to have been held prisoner at the townhouse for a week without access to food. And Ernestine Timmons, who claimed LeGrand “assaulted her about the head and body with fists and a stick,” and Betty Jean Davis, who detailed how LeGrand threatened her with a gun in June 1964.
Police headed for the townhouse’s cellar and began to dig for remains. They found none, but did turn up stolen weapons, contraband marijuana, and enough charges to bust DeVernon for kidnapping Williams. “I heard a scream,” one neighbor recalled to Gustaisis. “A woman from the house ran down the block. [LeGrand] came after her and yelled, ‘Come back!’ She stopped dead, turned around, and came back. He slapped her and they went into the house together.”
Prosecutors were hopeful. They believed they had enough evidence to convict. But they didn’t. The charges evaporated. Witnesses clammed up, and there was talk of a coordinated campaign of intimidation. DeVernon LeGrand beat another rap, and it wouldn’t be the last he bested.
There was a 1968 rape charge, where the woman, Kathleen Kennedy, ended up as his next wife and mother of two of his children. There was the 1970 disappearance of Ernestine Timmons, the same woman who had accused LeGrand of assault several years before. Her irate father went to the Brooklyn Avenue townhouse to confront LeGrand, armed with a pistol. LeGrand took several bullets to his body, but he survived the onslaught. (Another member of the “church” did not.) Timmons remained missing, as did others.
IF YOU WERE A YOUNG GIRL, BLACK OR WHITE, RIDING IN LEGRAND’S TRICKED-OUT CADILLAC, LIVING AT THE CHURCH…THERE WAS NO PREDICTING WHETHER YOU WOULD MAKE IT OUT OF THE PREMISES ALIVE.
If you were a young girl, black or white, riding in LeGrand’s tricked-out Cadillac, living at the Church, or its satellite 58-acre estate in White Sulphur Springs, a Catskills area about a hundred miles north of the city, there was no predicting whether you would make it out of the premises alive. Neighbors of “LeGrand Acres,” as the Catskills estate was called, grew ever more suspicious of the sounds of gunfire, wailing children, shouting women, and trampled crops. They complained to state authorities to little result, leading to further rumors of crooked cops in LeGrand’s pocket.
Then DeVernon and his son Noconda were busted for the rape of a 17-year-old girl that happened at the townhouse on August 22, 1974. Would this charge, like so many other previous ones, evaporate into dust? Or would the Brooklyn DA’s office actually make it stick? It helped that they had a secret weapon: teenage sisters Gladys & Yvonne Rivera.
Gladys was married to another of the LeGrand offspring, Darryl Stewart. Yvonne was younger by two years. They, like so many, lodged at the townhouse. They heard the screams. They witnessed the horrors. And secretly, they began to plot a way out, which after months of pleading by their mother to leave, was a welcome sign. “He had them under his power,” Gladys and Yvonne’s mother later told the crime writer George Carpozi, Jr., who noted the quotes in his writeup for True Detective. “He was an evil man. I don’t know how he managed to hold them under his spell. I begged them to leave him but they wouldn’t listen…”
LeGrand and Noconda were convicted in February 1975 on the rape charge. LeGrand then stood trial for bribery that September. Gladys and Yvonne testified, and the preacher was found guilty. They were due to testify the following month in a different rape case. LeGrand remained in prison while awaiting trial, and prosecutors hoped that witnesses would be a lot less reluctant to testify than they had been in the past.
There was a problem: by October 1975, the Rivera sisters had vanished.
1975 gave way to 1976. Brooklyn investigators were pretty certain of Gladys Stewart and Yvonne Rivera’s fate—they had a surprise witness show up in November to say so—but it was a question of whether they had perished in their jurisdiction or if it was something for Sullivan County. Early in March, a team of diggers went to White Sulphur Springs with picks and shovels. When the days of digging once more turned up empty, the divers went to work. And on March 6, deep in the water by LeGrand Acres, investigators found what they sought.
***
When DeVernon LeGrand was indicted for murder on March 12, 1976, the Brooklyn district attorney, Eugene Gold, was as confident as he could be that the preacher would really, truly spend the rest of his life in prison. The surprise witness? LeGrand’s wife, Kathleen, forced to marry him seven years earlier to make the rape charge go away. “My husband killed them,” she told stunned detectives, then explained that the caretaker, Frank Holman, “knows much more than I do. He helped get rid of the bodies.”
Kathleen continued. “The girls….they were cut up after they were killed and…well, you talk to Frankie…he knows what happened.” They did talk to Frankie. And Holman, who turned to the church after working several years as an assistant in the Brooklyn Medical Examiner’s Office, went far further in his graphic descriptions of what happened to Cheryl and Gladys.
There was an argument, when LeGrand learned on the night of October 3 that the girls had turned state’s witness. “That bitch is complaining too much,” LeGrand told Holman. “I’m going to take care of her right now and end all this bullshit…” He trailed off, before telling Holman to convene about sixty members of the Church to the house. They wouldn’t be allowed to leave for hours. Holman had to make sure of it. “While I was watching so that nobody left,” he told investigators, “I heard the screams of a woman.” Holman led the terrified, imprisoned parishioners in a hymn “to keep them from panicking.”
Then one of LeGrand’s many daughters burst into the church’s front room. “Daddy’s stepping all over Gladys,” she shouted. The hostages wouldn’t be able to leave until 2:30 in the morning, when LeGrand gave the most morbid of all-clears.
Holman’s task was even more lurid. LeGrand needed him to transport “two garbage cans in the backyard with the covers on” up to White Sulphur Springs. Holman protested: “Can’t this wait till the morning?”
“No, get your ass moving right now.”
Holman knew enough not to protest. He knew what kind of man LeGrand was. As Kathleen later told investigators, going against her husband resulted in major trouble. “Let me tell you something,” she heard him shout to one of his other daughters, “You all remember Gladys. Daughter or no daughter, you’ll join the bitch. You know what I do with bitches. I burn them.”
“WHILE I WAS WATCHING SO THAT NOBODY LEFT,” HE TOLD INVESTIGATORS, “I HEARD THE SCREAMS OF A WOMAN.” HOLMAN LED THE TERRIFIED, IMPRISONED PARISHIONERS IN A HYMN “TO KEEP THEM FROM PANICKING.”
Then the parts were set on fire, burning for hours in a large stone barbecue pit behind the main house. LeGrand ordered Holman to “dump the ashes and other remains into the lake.” Holman did as the preacher wanted. He also never forgot one other thing LeGrand said: “That little bitch (Yvonne) came down to see about her sister, and I got her, too.”
Kathleen LeGrand and Frank Holman’s statements, in tandem with the remains found at LeGrand Acres, and other disturbing material recovered from the townhouse—including two hacksaws, three bloodstained bedsheets, a .22 caliber rifle, eleven shells, and a pair of scissors—bolstered the state’s case against DeVernon and his son, Steven. Both were convicted almost a year later, on March 6, 1977. The Daily News reported neither man showed much emotion at the verdict.
***
The Brooklyn district attorney, Michael Gold, got his wish. DeVernon LeGrand died at Green Haven Correctional Facility in 2006, age 82. Five years earlier, at a hearing where his parole was denied, the commissioners concluded: “Your conduct indicates a depraved indifference for human life and no respect for the law.”
How much of a depraved indifference for human life is still not fully known. When LeGrand was convicted for murdering Gladys and Yvonne Rivera, Gold believed the fake preacher was responsible for the murders of as many as 20 girls and women. Ann Sorise and Ernestine Timmons seemed likely victims. So, too, did Elizabeth Brown, a fifteen-year-old girl picked up by LeGrand at a College Point, Queens amusement park in 1974, drafted into the sordid fake nun life through sex and drugs, and never seen again after 1977.
And several other LeGrand sons, including Steven, were convicted in 1978 of the murders of Jeffrey Miranda and Howard Tippins four years before, in what appeared to be a revenge killing for having “kidnapped, raped, and held for ransom a prostitute belonging to the LeGrand stable,” according to the Daily News.
Every few years, law enforcement descends upon 222 Brooklyn Avenue looking for answers. Sometimes it’s in response to rumors of buried dead bodies. Other times it’s to check why the so-called Church never stopped operating, now under the name of St. Joseph’s Church of Christ and Home. Current LeGrand family members have insisted to the papers that their work is above-board. They settled with the city over several house raids in 2016. The sins of DeVernon should not necessarily cast aspersions on the next generation, who just want to live their lives in private peace.
But the “church” is reportedly being run by Noconda LeGrand, who also served time for rape. And as recently as 2010, his sister, Mindy, was reported to be soliciting in a subway station—doing the exact fake nun scam that was her father’s bread-and-butter six decades before. She later claimed she was collecting funds “to pay back taxes.”
***
One summer afternoon, I found myself walking down Brooklyn Avenue, past the Children’s Museum, across the street from the LeGrand townhouse. I took out my phone and snapped some photos of the exterior from what I felt was a safe enough distance. Two men stood on the townhouse stoop. They glanced at me, mid-shot. Their expressions made clear what I already sensed: I should not cross the street. I should not go over and talk to them.
But it’s another year, and another summer. I know I’ll find myself on that stretch of Crown Heights again. This time, there may be no one outside 222 Brooklyn Avenue. This time, I might cross the street. Walk up the steps. Rap on the door.
And if I do, and it opens, will I go in?
—Original art by Joe Gough
Holman loaded the garbage cans, as well as a box stuffed with women’s clothing, into a Ford station wagon. Whey they arrived at LeGrand Acres, Holman said, “DeVernon told me to fill an old bathtub with benzene and empty what was in the garbage cans into the tub, which was outdoors and near the barn.” What he found in the cans were “large plastic bags filled with body parts,” including what he believed to be Yvonne Rivera’s head. Based on his prior expertise, Holman believed the girls were dissected “with a sharp knife” followed by “an ax, a cleaver, a large knife, or a saw.”
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