In the early days of Conscious Development of Body, Mind and Soul, if you dared to question Terri, she’d target you without implicating herself. So when Terri’s own husband Glenn becomes skeptical of her teachings, his days are numbered. Binge all episodes of Scary Terri, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Cases show page on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Unwrap a huge holiday discount on NordVPN by heading to https://nordvpn.com/thebinge. Plus, with our link, you’ll get an extra 4 months free on the 2-year plan, and it’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee. Check the link in the description! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What warning does the episode give about sensitive topics?
The Binge. The Binge. Before we get started, I just want to let you know that we do discuss suicide in this episode. So please listen with care. Glenn Cooley was a student at North Texas State when he met Terry. He started showing up at CDBMS meetings before he could even drink alcohol. He was that young.
Sandy Brown here. He wasn't super tall, 5'8", 5'9". You know, he had a very kind of calming voice.
Glenn dropped out of college to be with her, and soon he became Terry's right-hand man. He was 20 years old when they wed. She was more than 10 years his senior. So Terry had the upper hand in that way. But she was also his spiritual teacher, the one guiding his development, telling him how to think in counseling sessions.
Chapter 2: How did Glenn Cooley meet Terri?
I got some insight into how Terry was behind closed doors with students, thanks to those taped consultations with a follower named Dorothy. Terry could be charming, affable, a cheerleader if something good happened in your life, but also spent an awful lot of time telling Dorothy what to think. This went way beyond wanting to be revered as a teacher.
At one point, it seems Terry was able to convince Dorothy that she had temporarily lost control of her own mind.
I was wondering, too, has anyone taken any of my faculties? No.
Oh.
Nobody else. I got your faculties back. Oh. You already got them back. I'm still in the process of working with them, but for the general purposes, we've got most of them back. Oh, that's quite a process, I understand. Well, that's wonderful. Yes, it is. It's nice to have your faculty back. Yeah, you're a busy, busy being.
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Chapter 3: What was Glenn's relationship with Terri like?
If she had this much control over any old student, it's hard to imagine how much sway she had over Glenn, a young man who was totally dependent on her, who used to sit close to her in group meditations so he could hold her hand. It must have been quite an unwelcome surprise for Terry when Glenn started thinking for himself, started questioning whether Terry was actually full of shit.
She and Glenn were having marital problems.
Janine, from the last episode, said the last time she saw him, he had just about had enough.
I remember overhearing a conversation at Sandy Cleaver's. Sandy was expecting me, but she didn't know I'd gotten there because I'd come in the kitchen door, said hi to Wheezy and moved on. Sandy was confronting Glenn and he was saying, you guys are just buying a bunch of bullshit. And Sandy said, that is not true. This is, and then she was explaining Terry's behavior, explaining Terry's something.
And he was animated and intense about it. questioning her or questioning what she was saying or questioning what she was doing. I never put that together either.
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Chapter 4: What led to Glenn questioning Terri's teachings?
By the winter of 1976, Glenn and Terry were splitting up. Glenn was moving on, and so was Terry. She'd started seeing Ben Johnson, another younger man who'd later become her third husband. It was looking like Glenn Cooley had gotten out, out of his marriage, out of CDBMS. One night, February 2nd, just after the divorce was finalized, Glenn left Dallas for Flower Mound, Texas.
It's a quiet community on Grapevine Lake, about 30 minutes outside the city. His parents had a cabin out there. It's this wide, pristine lake, perfect for summer sports on the water and for reflecting on your life after a long and tumultuous relationship that just ended. According to reports at the time, Terry, her new beau, Ben, and another follower named Alice Hoffman went to the cabin.
They wanted to check on him, but were horrified by what they saw. They opened the door and walked in. And there was Glenn, fully clothed and in his bed, an open can of beer on the nightstand, along with pills, Valium, and an anti-anxiety drug. He laid there motionless, a foamy residue spilling out of the corners of his mouth. He was non-responsive, dead on arrival.
Chapter 5: How did Terri's behavior affect Glenn's mental state?
There's no doubt she killed him.
These shark eyes, those cold, dark eyes.
The most sophisticated sociopath I've ever observed.
left behind a series of bizarre diaries and writings associated with Terry Hoffman and a group she founded called The Conscious Development of Body, Mind, and Soul, Inc.
The payoff was going to be in the other spiritual realms. It was not going to be here.
Are those items that are used to control and combat, shield against black lords, are those your teachings?
I invoke the fifth minute. That it was a cult? I didn't know that.
From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Scary Terry. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Chapter 3, Marital Issues. For the people who got involved with Terry, faith was a bedrock of their lives. Many, if not most, had been raised in some sort of Christian denomination. CDBMS was a replacement for that faith. And like their traditional faith, the glue that kept their families together.
But in a twisted irony, it seemed that getting close to Terry could rip your family apart. Sandra divorced Chuck. Devereux died on the Huaylupe Peninsula. Terry tried to break up Janine and her husband, Rick. The list goes on and on. And now, Glenn Cooley was dead. But when Don and Alice Hoffman joined, it wasn't so cut and dry, hindsight being 20-20. The couple were deeply troubled.
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Chapter 6: What tragic event occurred after Glenn's divorce?
That was, as you can imagine, very devastating for my parents. Really caused the whole family to question, why would God take this little innocent boy away?
Janet was the middle child, Rick the oldest.
I was nine years old.
She watched her mom and dad spiral after the baby died.
Mom blamed herself, of course, as any parent does, because he drowned. And then my parents were grieving a lot, and my mom was just, you know, sad all the time. And I guess, so we started going to church, and that helped a little bit.
The family bounced around to a number of churches.
They were turning to God because, you know, they needed that comfort and they felt like as a family that would be a good thing to do.
And something about that tragedy had softened her father, Don Hoffman.
He was a yeller and you were not allowed to make mistakes. So that was kind of hard. And then my mom was kind of the opposite. She was more lenient to try to make up for him being so strict and hard on us. I was always really close to her. I can see now as an adult that he did love me, but growing up, I never believed that he loved me because he was so hard on me.
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Chapter 7: How did the Hoffman family become involved with CDBMS?
That was her thing is she would take people in that had just lost a loved one or that were grieving and that are vulnerable. And then she would prey on those vulnerabilities and give them answers that they want to hear to kind of string them along.
Much like Sandra, Terry seemed to be drawing in Don and Alice through their grief, liberating them from their pain, but also indebting them to her. In the fog of that grief, no one in Janet's family could have imagined Terry to be the predator she really was. The Hoffman family started attending conscious development meetings. They'd been going to a Lutheran service before that.
We would go and we would do meditations and it seemed all innocent and you'd feel better afterwards. So it kind of like sucked you in a little bit like, okay, I still have my beliefs in God. This doesn't like go against that.
Of course, my parents first started reading Terry's writings, you know, so there were quite a few booklets and she had a whole series of books that, you know, you could get and learn and everything.
Terry also sold jewelry, so she had this big line of her jewelry, like stones and that kind of thing, with gemstones and sterling silver.
This was the jewelry Sandra had begun selling with Terry, that Janine had spent $25,000 on. They'd incorporated into a business with the name CD Gems and Jewelry.
She made a bunch of stuff. So that was all lined up against the wall. And then we would go in and people would kind of look at that. And then they would, you know, talk. And then we would all sit down. And then she would talk just a little bit. But most of it was just the meditations. And she would have, sometimes you would sit in the chair.
Sometimes you could, you know, find a spot on the floor to lay down and get comfortable. It's very relaxing. She would talk you through it, like, usually it was like, okay, let's, you know, envision a swimming pool and you jumping into that pool and cleansing all your bad energy out of your body and that kind of thing.
And of course, Terry was front and center in all of this, though she hadn't made much of an impression on Janet.
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Chapter 8: What role did Terry play in the lives of her followers?
She said the talks would sometimes veer into these esoteric subjects, like the planes of existence and things like dark forces that needed to be combated, the Black Lords. But for the most part, she felt like it was a welcoming place for her as a kid, at first. She remembered Glenn Cooley, Terry's husband, when they joined CDBMS, being very friendly. And Ben Johnson, too.
The man Terry would wed after Glenn?
Ben... He... Yeah... So he was this long-haired hippie. He came to my house and taught me how to play the guitar. Taught me a couple of things. I had an electric guitar at the time. House of the Rising Sun. The very beginning to Stairway to Heaven. He was probably a weed-smoking dude. Of course, at the time, I wouldn't have known that, but he was just very hippie, laid-back.
Carrie no doubt had a type, younger, hippie-ish, a bit wounded perhaps, impressionable. Certainly seems like some kind of pattern was beginning to emerge. But in the mid-70s, according to Janine, talk of black lords and fighting against evil energies and spirits was starting to dominate the messaging at CDBMS.
Glenn was very unhappy with his life, that he was struggling as a jewelry maker, that his marriage to Terry was not going well. Just seems like there were a lot of... And again, I think we piecemeal some of that together with just some of the discussions we had had here and there.
That's when Glenn cut bait. And not long after, he was found dead alone in his parents' cabin on February 2nd, 1977. But here Terry was, now for the fourth time, a mysterious and inexplicable death in her orbit. And while she would claim to grieve, the message to her flock belied any grief or remorse.
In fact, what members of CDBMS were led to believe was that Glenn's suicide was grist for the mill, another step up the stairway to heaven, an evolution, not an end to life.
Glenn's death was definitely a staged thing that they knew about and expected to happen.
So he needed to move on to the next plane of existence. So Terry and one other person went to a cabin with him and he overdosed. I don't know who it was.
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