Lou Castro and the Angels Landing Cult: Deaths, Abuse, Conviction

“Lou Castro” was one of several aliases used by Daniel Urive Perez, a Texas-born con man who ran a small commune called Angels Landing north of Wichita, Kansas, from 2002 until his arrest in 2010. Prosecutors said he convinced his followers he was a centuries-old being inhabited by angels, sexually abused girls as young as eight, and arranged the deaths of at least six people to collect millions in life insurance. A Sedgwick County jury convicted him of 28 felonies in 2015, including the first-degree murder of Patricia Hughes. He is serving two consecutive life sentences plus 406 months and will not be eligible for parole for 80 years.¹

Who Lou Castro Really Was

His real name was Daniel Urive Perez. In the mid-1990s, while living in Texas, he was charged with raping a 14-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty and received probation, but the case was dismissed after authorities were told he had died in Mexico — his wallet turned up on a body there. With police no longer looking for him, he adopted the name Lou Castro around 1996 or 1997 in Corpus Christi.¹

He had trained as an airplane mechanic, but his real trade was persuasion. In North Dakota in the mid-1990s he began telling people he could make it rain, receive messages from the dead, and see the past, present, and future. He told younger followers he was hundreds of years old and that three angels lived inside him: Arthur, Daniel, and an angel of death he called Amber. Those claims became the machinery of everything that followed.¹

Life Inside the Kansas Commune

By spring 2002, Perez and his followers had bought roughly 20 acres in the 9500 block of North Oliver in Sedgwick County, a rural stretch north of Wichita near Valley Center and Kechi. They built three houses side by side and called the compound Angels Landing.¹ The group was small — mostly women, their children, and a handful of men who came and went. Perez had no visible employment, yet investigators later noted vehicles on the property worth more than $40,000.²

Recruitment happened through personal contact. A real estate agent who helped Perez find the Kansas property ended up bringing her own teenage daughters into the group.² Once inside, members lived under Perez’s direction on housing, dating, and money. He told them to take out life insurance policies on themselves and each other, and he dictated the coverage amounts and the beneficiary designations so the proceeds would flow to people he controlled. He also directed fraudulent vehicle loan applications, always keeping his own name off the paperwork, and had members inflate their net worths on financial documents. Compliance was enforced with beatings, firearms, and threats of death.¹

The Deaths That Funded the Group

Over roughly seven years, at least six people connected to Perez died in what were ruled accidents. Detective Ron Goodwyn of the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office, who led the investigation, said the deaths came in a cycle of about every two and a half years, usually when the group’s money was running low. Each one was followed by an insurance payout that refilled the accounts.²

Mona Griffith, her daughter Lindsey, and James Chace all died on February 19, 2001, in an airplane crash near Norris, South Dakota. Mona had a $750,000 policy naming Lindsey as beneficiary and Patricia Hughes as caregiver; with all three dead, the money went to Hughes.³¹
Patricia Hughes, 26, died in June 2003 at the compound. Her death was initially ruled an accidental drowning and later became the murder charge at the heart of the case.
Brian Hughes, Patricia’s husband, died on March 2, 2006, in Rapid City, South Dakota, when a car fell on him after a jack apparently failed. His death benefit was paid to another member, identified in court as K.L.⁴¹
Jennifer, the mother of former member Sara McGrath, died on September 22, 2008, when she drove her car head-on into a fully loaded truck. Her benefit also went to K.L.⁵¹

Prosecutor Marc Bennett called Angels Landing “a pool of money that was essentially proceeds from these people dying,” and said the surviving members lived off the death benefits while Perez decided who would die next.⁶

How Patricia Hughes Was Killed

The Hughes drowning was the case’s central murder count. According to trial testimony, Perez told a young follower identified as E.H. that it was “time to go” for Trish, and described a plan in which he would “bend time” so her death at the pool would look accidental. Two weeks later he told E.H., then 11, that “it was time,” and instructed her to hide in a closet with a child. From there she heard a shriek and a splash. Perez appeared moments later, panting, his forearms wet. E.H. found Hughes’s body in the shallow end. Perez then told her to place the child in the water and call 911, claiming Hughes had drowned while trying to rescue the child.¹

A medical expert later concluded the death was not accidental. Evidence included grip marks on the back of Hughes’s head and a broken barrette, consistent with her head being forcibly held underwater. Hughes had a $1 million policy with an accidental death rider; the payout exceeded $1 million and went to Brian Hughes and K.L. as co-beneficiaries.⁷

Sexual Abuse of Children

Perez used the angel story to justify years of sexual abuse. He told followers that the angels living in his body required sexual acts with young female virgins to survive, and that he literally needed to have sex with girls to stay alive.⁷ His victims ranged in age from 8 to 16.

Sara McGrath, who joined the group as a teenager after her mother began working with Perez, later said he raped her for nearly seven years. He framed it as “fixing her,” and she recalled asking afterward, “Am I fixed now?”² Another victim described lying naked at age 10 with a pillow over her head, “just waiting for it to be over.” A teenage survivor said she spent years “holding onto my secret” and “planning my own death every day.”⁷ Perez enforced silence with firearms and threats of death.¹

How the Case Finally Broke

The investigation took years. Detective Goodwyn began looking at the group in 2003 after Hughes’s death. FBI agent Jon Sullivan opened his own inquiry in 2007. Perez was hard to track. He used a rotation of aliases, moved the group across Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Kansas, and eventually Tennessee, and coerced followers, including children, to lie to police. Every death on paper was an accident.¹

The break came from Sara McGrath. After she left Angels Landing and began dating a man named Daniel McGrath, she told him what had happened inside the group. In January 2010, he emailed the FBI through its website.² Sullivan and Goodwyn interviewed him, and the case moved fast after that. Investigators tracked Perez to Columbia, Tennessee, where he was living under the name “Joe Venegas.” On April 21, 2010, agents searched his home, recovered 11 firearms and multiple pieces of identification in different aliases, and arrested him.¹

A second break followed. E.H., the young girl Perez had forced to lie about Hughes’s death in 2003, recanted her old statement and told investigators what she had actually seen. Her account became the evidentiary spine of the murder charge.⁷

Conviction, Sentence, and Appeal

Perez was formally charged in Sedgwick County District Court on September 11, 2011. In February 2015, after a trial before Judge Joseph Bribiesca, a jury convicted him on all 28 counts:

First-degree premeditated murder for the drowning of Patricia Hughes
Sexual exploitation of a child
Eight counts of rape
Seven counts of aggravated criminal sodomy
Three counts of aggravated assault
Eight counts of making false information

The defense had asked the court to instruct the jury on assisting suicide, arguing Hughes had talked about wanting to die and “crossing over.” The court refused, finding the physical evidence and E.H.’s testimony showed Perez actively killed her.¹

Perez received two consecutive life terms, one for the murder and one for the sexual exploitation count, plus a consecutive 406 months for the remaining convictions. He is not eligible for parole for 80 years.⁸

On June 23, 2017, the Kansas Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the convictions and sentence in State v. Perez, No. 114,554.⁹ Perez has been continuously incarcerated in the Kansas Department of Corrections since his 2010 arrest and will spend the rest of his life in prison.⁷

1
Kansas Courts. State v. Perez, No. 114,554
2
Oxygen. Lou Castro Daniel Perez Angel Landing Cult Sara McGrath
3
Newspapers.com. Rapid City Journal
4
Kinkade Funerals. Brian Hughes Obituary
5
E! Online. Oxygen’s Deadly Cults Sneak Peek: Daniel Perez’s Former Follower Recalls Mother’s Untimely Death
6
Legal News. Daniel U. Perez Case
7
The Wichita Eagle. Lou Castro Case
8
Columbia Daily Herald. Columbia’s Brush With Agent of Pure Evil
9
KWCH. Kansas Appeals Court Upholds Commune Leader’s Convictions