Former painting contractor Charles Franklin McHugh founded the Christ Family in the early 1960s. After two failed marriages and the collapse of a small business, he went to the Arizona desert for a spiritual retreat. He claimed that after 40 days, he experienced what he said was the revelation that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ. He adopted the name “Lightning Amen” and made his way to Hemet, California, where he established a base for a sect that would in time grow to about 2,000 members.
While the Christ Family did have this central location, it became an itinerant group, traveling all across the continental United States and living nomadically. Members wore simple white robes and typically went barefoot, refusing to use leather goods they called “dead animals.” Men sometimes tied baby diapers around their heads as makeshift headdresses. Bedrolls and Army blankets were slung over their shoulders as they walked the streets, drawing attention and stares from the public.
The group rejected material possessions and conventional labor, claiming their efforts were devoted to “working for God” rather than for worldly gain. Members kept to a strict vegan diet, practiced celibacy, and smoked marijuana as a religious practice, calling it a “God-given herb” meant to bring peace and spiritual enlightenment. The group’s drug use and vagrancy led to frequent run-ins with police, though officers usually described the members as nonviolent and not a threat to public safety.
Members often severed ties with relatives and were required to sell all possessions upon joining, with proceeds going into a communal fund. Many recruits had been hitchhiking or searching for meaning when they encountered the group. McHugh himself was reclusive, traveling with the group but staying largely out of sight in each new city they visited.
The Christ Family began to experience significant legal troubles in the 1980s. In 1985, 10 members were convicted for cultivating marijuana valued at roughly $900,000 at the Hemet site. The group officially disbanded later that year, though some former members continued to practice its lifestyle and belief system on their own.
In 1987, McHugh was charged with possessing and selling methamphetamine, as well as carrying a hypodermic needle, a concealed weapon, and $30,000 in cash. He fled with several followers but was soon captured and was sentenced to five years in prison. After his release, he kept a low profile and died in 2010.
More than a decade after McHugh’s death, the Christ Family became linked to the deaths of husband and wife Harold Dean Clouse Jr. and Tina Gail Linn Clouse in Texas sometime between October 1980 and January 1981. The couple met in Florida in 1978 and married the following year. In January 1980, their daughter Holly was born and the young family moved to Lewisville, a suburb of Dallas. Their families lost touch with them, having only heard that they had become involved with a religious group.
On January 12, 1981, the bodies of Harold and Tina Clouse were discovered in a wooded area north of Houston, more than 200 miles from their home. Their daughter was not with them. Authorities were unable to identify their bodies, and they were buried in anonymous graves. In 2011, the remains were exhumed for genetic testing, and on January 12, 2021, the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the bodies, the Texas Attorney General’s cold case unit officially confirmed their identities.
Detectives discovered that at around the time of the disappearances, a woman calling herself “Sister Susan” had telephoned Harold’s mother and claimed that they had joined her religious group. Shortly thereafter, Sister Susan and two other women, all wearing the white robes of the Christ Family, returned Harold’s car to his family in Florida and said that the couple no longer wished to have any contact with them.
In 2022, investigators determined that around that same time, two barefoot women in white robes left an infant at a church in Yuma, Arizona. The church’s pastor said that the women provided the baby’s birth certificate and a note, allegedly from Harold, relinquishing parental rights. The women told the pastor that they were part of a nomadic sect and mentioned having abandoned another baby at a laundromat. The pastor and his wife adopted Holly, unaware that her parents had been murdered.
After the discovery of her origins, “Holly Marie” wrote a memoir and spoke to the media without revealing her adopted name. She has established a relationship with her parents’ families, and says that she believes that her parents might have been killed because they were attempting to leave the Christ Family. The murders remain officially unsolved.
Key Sources:
Barned-Smith, S. (2022, June 9). 42 years later, a murdered Texas couple’s missing baby has finally been found. The Houston Chronicle.
Bates, D., & Butterfield, A. (2022, June 17). Religious group that handed over missing “Baby Holly Marie” is a nomadic cult. The Daily Mail Online.
Bowman, L. (1980, April 30). Sect Proclaims Christ’s Return. The Washington Post.
Marie, H. (2023). Finding Baby Holly: Lost to a Cult, Surviving My Parents’ Murders, and Saved by Prayer. Worthy Books.
Martinez, M. (2022, June 14). Unsolved murder of ‘Baby Holly’s’ parents linked to ‘Christ Family’ cult. The New York Post.
Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religious Movements 