Cult of Madness

In the fall, she and her husband were barely speaking, and he moved out. But over Thanksgiving, he was hospitalized with kidney failure, which, unbeknownst to him, he had been experiencing for some time. Finally, Hurt had a reasonable explanation for her husband's volatile behavior, which had sent her into therapy in the first place two years earlier. But by the time she learned this, it was too late to save her marriage. It was almost too late to save herself.

Hurt stayed by her husband's side while he was hospitalized, but the experience zapped what little emotional resources she had left. In January, she tried to overdose on her medications. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital, where they pumped her stomach. She spent the next three months back in Charter.

During Hurt's stay, Grundman, according to the counselor's notes, told Hurt that the cult had programmed her to kill herself for revealing the family's secrets. Ross told her about the book he was writing about CIA mind-control studies. During her therapy sessions, Hurt began having memories that a college trip to Rome was actually organized by the CIA. She remembered being put in a darkened flotation tank, where sounds of guns, bombs, and attack dogs were piped in. "If you didn't do what they tell you, they put you on a table and shock you," she told Grundman, according to the therapist's notes. "Some die."

So convinced by her therapists that her family was evil, Hurt didn't attend the funeral for her oldest sister, who had suffered a heart attack after surgery.

By now Hurt's husband was fed up with her. Her children weren't coming to visit either, which Hurt thought was just as well. She figured the less exposure her children had to her, the better their chances of staving off the cult's influence. More isolated than ever at Charter, Hurt began having an affair with a married medical technician there named Larry Tyo.

When she returned home at the end of March, Bobby threw her out of the house. Broke and broken, and afraid the cult was everywhere, Hurt moved in with a woman she had met in the unit at Charter. Grundman convinced Hurt that it would be safer for the children if she relinquished her parental rights, according to Tyo's deposition. She applied for food stamps and welfare and found a government-subsidized efficiency apartment. Her therapists helped her secure Medicare by claiming she was 100 percent disabled by MPD, which they said she had at least since 1984 -- the time of her first hospitalization.

Although Grundman was not happy about the relationship between Hurt and a hospital employee, she began incorporating him into her weekly therapy sessions immediately after Hurt was released from Charter. He left his wife and moved in with Hurt in the fall of 1993 and began helping with her therapy at home.

Hurt and her husband divorced in 1994, and she relinquished her parental rights. Her ex-husband won a restraining order against her. She and Tyo moved to East Texas. She drove to Plano for her weekly therapy sessions with Grundman and four yearly sessions with Ross, who was still prescribing medication for her and was listed on insurance records as Grundman's supervisor.

In 1995, Grundman moved to Scroggins, Texas, with her husband and went into real estate. Although the counselor let her therapy license lapse, Hurt says she still conducted therapy sessions with her over the phone. In her deposition, Grundman says that they talked on the phone, but that she did not do therapy. When Hurt received a birthday card from her parents in the spring of 1996, Grundman told her that her parents were trying to bring her back into the cult.

That fall, Hurt spent Thanksgiving with her parents and siblings. Hurt missed her family terribly, but worried that being with them was detrimental. In spring 1997, she met with Ross and told him about her Thanksgiving with her family.

Ross did not seem alarmed. "I told him it was really hard to maintain contact with the family and have to go along with the denial that anything happened," Hurt says. "He said it was probably best to go along with their denial. He said it so flippantly. It was the opposite of everything he was saying before -- that I would end up back in the cult or be dead."

At this session, Ross wrote a letter releasing her from therapy. He stated that she was in the early pre-integration phase of MPD, in which the alters eventually coalesce into one healthy personality. She and Tyo continued to work on her therapy at home.

In March 1998, an ad in The Dallas Morning News caught Hurt's eye:

"ATTENTION: VICTIMS OF IMPROPER COUNSELING OR THERAPY

Has your psychiatrist, psychologist, or professional counselor ever told you that you suffered or may have suffered sexual and/or physical abuse in your past that you did not remember until 'uncovered' in therapy? Do you doubt the reliability of these 'memories'?..."