Crime & Justice
Cult leader admits to killing 4-year-old boy
A man head of a polygamous cult pleaded guilty on Monday on charges of murder after killing a 4-year-old boy he thought was gay.
A man who’s head of a polygamous cult pleaded guilty on Monday on charges of murder after killing a 4-year-old boy he thought was gay.
Because of the deal, Peter Moses, who led a small cult called the Black Hebrews in Durham, N.C., won’t face the death penalty for the 2010 shootings of Yvonne McKoy, 28, and Jadon Higganbothan.
According to prosecutors, Moses assumed that the child might be gay because his father had left his mother.
He thought the child’s father was gay. He told the mother, Vania Rae Sisk, to “get rid” of the child.
Prosecutors said that Larhonda Renee Smith, 40, told Moses that Jadon had hit another child’s bottom.
After hearing this, Moses became angry and started walking around the house with a gun. Later, she told him that he had hit another child’s bottom.
He took the screaming child into the garage and shot him in the head with his mother’s gun while The Lord’s Prayer played loudly in the background.
“He starts screaming, ‘I told you to get rid of him!’” and told Sisk, “‘How am I going to do this?’” [District Attorney Tracy Cline] recalled the witness’ account.
Moses ordered two of the women to set up computers and speakers in the garage, prosecutors said they were told by the witness.
They said he started playing music with the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew, took Jadon in the garage and shut the door, and the women then heard a gunshot.
Prosecutors said the witness told them that the women helped clean up the body of Jadon, who had been shot in the head, and put it in a suitcase in Moses’ master suite. He later told them to get the body out because it was beginning to smell, prosecutors said.
Moses also killed Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy, 28, after he learned that she couldn’t have children and wanted to leave the group.
According to NY Daily News,
After she left the compound to call her mother, she was dragged back by Moses’ other “wives,” mercilessly beaten and nearly strangled with an electrical cord.
A witness told authorities that the other women in the house, led by Jadon’s mother, Vania Sisk, insisted McKoy had to be killed. They took her into a bathroom, turned on the same music and shot her.
Moses then showed off her body at a party, before the remains were tossed in a trash bin.
The horrors came to light when another woman escaped the cult and told police two people had been killed in the home.
The bodies were discovered by a plumber in the backyard of house where Moses’ mother had lived.
Prosecutors said they had intended to seek the death penalty for Moses, but he will instead face two consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole because he has agreed to testify against the six co-defendants in the case.
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