The smell of stale coffee and fear hung heavy in the visiting room as the sliding door opened, but for Dr. Jenn Carson, the moment was surreal, suspended in time. The man who once changed her diapers, the man she remembered as a gentle father before her world collapsed, was now a gaunt, gray figure in a prison jumpsuit.
He was not the father she remembered; he was Michael Bear, the man the tabloids had dubbed the “San Francisco Witch Killer.” As he embraced her, she found herself frozen, a statue in his arms, realizing that her plan to confront him behind a pane of glass was a child’s fantasy. There was no protective barrier here, only the unbearable reality of a monster wearing a familiar face.
For over three hours, he spoke with the same obsessive, 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔-addled fervor that had defined her childhood, a stream of consciousness about witches, a coming holy war, and his divine mission, until she finally dared to ask the one question that had gnawed at her for decades: Why did you 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 those people?
A quiet autumn afternoon in 1982 felt like the end of the world for a young Jenn Carson. While other children her age were learning multiplication tables and riding bikes, Jenn was huddled in a hidden apartment with her mother, living under assumed names because her father and stepmother, Michael and Suzan Carson, had just been arrested as serial killers. They weren’t just on the run for small-scale crime; the California Home Society had just discovered a 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 truth: Michael was on a list destined for the White House.
Clutching a pair of scissors under her pillow that night, Jenn was a girl of almost nine years old, watching the news unravel a terrifying reality that gripped the entire nation. The world was learning the horrifying details of a cult that had not only claimed the lives of over fourteen people but had also been planning to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 President Ronald Reagan. The danger was so catastrophic that the U.
S. Secret Service had descended on their quiet life, and in the crosshairs of their investigation, they were looking for two monsters, unaware that one of them was the father of the little girl playing down the hall.
To truly understand the birth of those monsters, one has to go back to a time before the police hunts and the dead memorials. In the late 70s, after the divorce that shattered her parent’s marriage, Jenn’s life was uprooted when her father, James, met a wealthy Los Angeles socialite named Suanna Barnes. Suanna was a mental wreck waiting to happen—a beautiful woman living the perfect life behind a country club façade, yet hiding a dark attraction to teenage boys and practicing “free love” with her underage sons’ friends.
When Suanna ingested drugs like LSD alongside her young lovers, it triggered a flood of severe hallucinations and latent schizophrenia. This was a dangerous cocktail, one that pushed her over the edge. Then, in a twist that sealed their fates, she met Jenn’s father at a party.
Wielding an eccentricity that was both seductive and insane, she delivered a prophecy to the impressionable man: “From now on, you’ll be known as Michael,” and “I saw that we were lovers in a past life.” The cards were now aligned, and the game of death was set to begin.
Their Sacramento love quickly devolved into a fanatical pursuit of “divine truth,” fueled by a dangerous amount of hallucinogens. Within just a few months, the couple, with a combined dream of a “new spiritual order,” relocated to San Francisco and formed a cult. It was a strange hive of paranoia where they believed the world was ruled by witches.
The first follower who joined their twisted fantasy was Karen Smith, a gorgeous 23-year-old actress from Georgia hoping to make it big in Hollywood. Charisma and eccentricity drew her into their crowded inner circle, but Michael Carson’s carnal fixation on her caused a fatal fracture in the couple’s false reality. Blinded by an insane, murderous jealousy, Suanna, who convinced herself she was a high priestess, declared, “Michael, you have to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her, she’s a witch.”
The scent of blood had just been opened.
Under a moonlit night in 1981, their horror culminated in an overplanned yet savage act: bad they cornered Karen while she slept. Michael armed with a knife and a frying pan, gave in to the madness and muffled her screams, beating the life out of her body until she stopped moving. It was a killing that granted their sickest desires and tasted like power.
It would not be the last. However, the two knew they had to avoid prying eyes, so they dove further into the Northern California forest, taking a job on an illegal, secluded marijuana farm near the remote community of Alderpool. That’s where they met, Clark Stevens.
A suntanned surfer with a loud voice, Clark was a senior on the farm and openly bickered with Suanna over agricultural methods. And in their deeply twisted logic, one insult to the laid on the child was the highest sin imaginable. One day, simple “disrespect” turned into marking him as a “witch.”
Without blinking, Michael shot Stevens in the head. Then fire, and doused him with sweat, then his remains into the compost heap as the world casually burned around them.
The case could have remained a “dirt farmer missing,” but a random tragedy of hikers and a rescue team saved that very day in 1982. While navigating the woods near Alder Point, the search crew stumbled upon a man and a woman, ragged and raving, both tossing a pack they desperately tried to hide. When they chased them off, they opened it and found something far worse than the missing hikers.
Inside the knapsack there was a gun, 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 IDs, and a red-leather, hold-on”Manifesto” calling for nuclear war and a political assassination list naming a series of celebrities, and at the very bottom of the list, in plain black marker: the name “Ronald Wilson Reagan.” The local missing persons case instantly became a national terrorism alert that brought the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service to their doorstep. And it was that yellow door when Jenn’s mother was told her daughter’s father was the number one wanted killer in America for his “Witch Killer” cult that for years was hidden by the deep state racket.
Thrown into the National law, Jenn found herself standing on the precipice of her own story. After being terrorized over the years by Suanna—who continuously dunked her head underwater pretending to drive out demons and sliced open her back—little Jenn lay in her bed in complete fear about what her parents were capable of. It wasn’t just physical; the emotional mess was torture.
Recalling a colossal memory, she remembers the time she was trapped with the caretakers in that haunted house, “Mr. house look like the forest from the Wizard of Oz; I was trying to escape, dialing zero on a telephone.” Later, after her mother found out, they escaped from the circus, thrived through years of hiding, dodging the cult, as their trial pended.
In the following months, after they were arrested for the 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 of a hitchhiker, they confessed only to the killing of 14 people. But the most heinous part is that what the police didn’t know was that so many of those victims had been innocent, their lives taken because their two leaders needed to quiet a disorder.
When the trial began in a legal circus—set with wannabe mystics and fortune-tellers—Suanna stood up and screamed, “What is my crime? To be beautiful! To be an artist!”
It made no difference. The Weight of the forensic evidence was too real, and they were convicted of three murders, and them sentenced to 75 years to life. But what happens to the nine-year-old child who stands in a shadow so monstrous?
For Jenn, it meant shame. While the world gave her a label of “the daughter of the monsters,” her self began crying she was an evil seed, carrying the trauma like a poisonous gene. Through her own suicide attempts and sleeping holed up in her dorm, the life became a blur until she finally found a sanctuary in academia, becoming a Doctor of Social Work with a specialization in trauma and complex grief—a step to forgive.
As she sought to redefine, her healing felt stagnant as a new outrageous issue was raised in 2014, after a state-mandated policy shifted prison terms, road, and allowed her father and stepmom to petition for parole every five years. They claimed they had ‘spent enough time in rehabilitation.’ But Lee “she knew the only freedom they were seeking was their next victim.
Jenn’s mission now against that, to do a season against the only victims who had mourned their dead. The state had never notified the victim’s families. she tracked them down and could hear their “sorry” in an email that to regain.
They were ready—the Barnes, the Sides, the hell starting with the father-daughter unit—ready to testify against those they feared, and win the outrageous parley. “The doctor was going up against their greatest freedom,” she said at the podium, her voice clear.
Dr. Jenn Carson’s story is a testament to the government’s broken mental health system. It wasn’t the scary that she was witnessing; it’s the fact that “the woman who drowned her,” the man who mutilated his victims,’ went un-musheld from help for years because of millions in a warp who believed in delusion over medicine.
But more importantly, it was a story of self-forgiveness for a child who grew up believing she was “born bad.” “I have mental illness,” she now says openly, “I’m not ashamed. I am not a bad seed.”
She today is able to pick a new narrative, that of a survivor. She uses her Social Work to shine light on the new law of mental illness. And it’s not just because she had to survive her father; but also, in her actions, she is changing the post-conviction truth to support victims.
Simply stated, let’s untangle that moment in that prison visiting room with a father. With his twisted prophecy and the blood-red around his spotlighted future, she wasn’t closed in as a daughter of a cult for absolutely no that day. She brought courage, and she stood s, speaking the truth in the room.
That next slide, she’d send out a summary that the kids in her clinical practice say “peacefully.” Today, and even after all of it, sitting in her house, the grandmother of 14 years, today, she holds no blame. by father sits in a maximum security jail and a WA, she is free.
But Dr. Jen believes there is no god hat anymore. There is a battle between flesh and delusion, and we must accept was done—you are not a bad seed.
That was the big she taught the world. And if a tradition is having, this data must be law, but your blood is doesn’t mean you can’t choose your side.
