After self-professed prophet William A. Lewis escaped conviction in the 1983 beating death of a child at his House of Judah compound in rural Allegan County, FBI agent Gene Debbaudt sought out a federal civil-rights prosecutor to go after the cult leader and his lieutenants.
Call it a cowboy streak, or a quest for justice. Debbaudt showed up in Ann Arbor, where the prosecutor, Susan King, was trying an unrelated case.
“He said, ‘You have to do something about this case,’” King recalled.
“It was not at the time typical for an FBI agent to do that in a slavery case. This one was definitely different from the rest. Legally complicated, with the religious overtones, and by the fact the victims were in the custody of their parents.”
It required King to mount a precedent-setting case – one that showed you could enslave a child, even if they were still in the custody of their parents.
King, along with Daniel Bell, successfully tried Lewis and others on slavery charges, centered on the July 4, 1983, killing of John Yarbough, 12.
House of Judah: How a local FBI agent, federal prosecutors pushed ‘the prophet’ behind bars | WORLD CULT WATCH
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