Wild Wild Country Cult: Crimes, Arrests, and Aftermath

The cult at the center of Wild Wild Country was the Rajneesh movement, a group of followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who built a commune called Rajneeshpuram on a remote Oregon ranch in the early 1980s and, over the next four years, carried out the largest bioterrorism attack in U.S. history, plotted to assassinate a federal prosecutor, arranged hundreds of sham marriages, and tried to rig a county election by busing in thousands of homeless people. The commune collapsed in late 1985. Rajneesh was deported, his personal secretary Ma Anand Sheela went to federal prison, and roughly a dozen followers were eventually convicted of crimes ranging from wiretapping to attempted murder.

Who the Rajneeshees Were

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers moved from Pune, India, to the United States in 1981 at the direction of Sheela.¹ They bought the 64,229-acre Big Muddy Ranch in Wasco County, Oregon, and on May 26, 1982, Wasco County proclaimed the incorporation of the City of Rajneeshpuram after a unanimous vote of 154 commune-member electors.²

Sheela ran the operation. She was president of Rajneesh Foundation International, sat on the board of the for-profit company that held the land, and held unlimited power of attorney for Rajneesh himself.²³⁴ The next target was Wasco County itself.

The 1984 Salmonella Attack on The Dalles

In September and October 1984, followers under the direction of Sheela and the commune’s nurse Ma Anand Puja contaminated salad bars at ten restaurants in The Dalles, the seat of Wasco County, with Salmonella typhimurium. The bacteria also went into salad dressing, coffee creamers, and produce at a local supermarket.⁵ In some cases cult members administered the bacteria directly, pouring contaminated water for a judge and feeding it to the district attorney, a doctor, and a dentist.⁶

The attack sickened 751 people and hospitalized at least 45. No one died, but a pregnant woman who was infected gave birth to an infant in septic shock.⁵⁷ The motive was electoral. The September and October poisonings were a trial run for a larger attack planned for election day in November, designed to incapacitate enough non-Rajneeshee voters to swing the Wasco County commissioner election.

Puja had ordered the Salmonella typhimurium from the American Type Culture Collection, a commercial biological supply firm, and grown the cultures in a clandestine laboratory known as the “Chinese Laundry.” The group also explored contaminating The Dalles’ water supply and had obtained more dangerous pathogens, including typhoid and tularemia.⁸

The CDC and Oregon Health Division initially identified salad bars as the source but did not suspect deliberate contamination. Investigators only connected the outbreak to the Rajneeshees a year later, after the commune fell apart. In October 1985, law enforcement searched the Rajneesh Medical Center and seized an open vial of S. typhimurium; lab analysis found the strain indistinguishable from the outbreak strain.⁵

The Share-a-Home Voter Fraud Scheme

Running alongside the poisonings was a plan to pack the county’s voter rolls. In September 1984, the commune launched “Share-a-Home,” busing roughly 3,500 homeless people from cities around the country to Rajneeshpuram at a cost of more than a million dollars, with the goal of registering them in time for the November election.⁹ Sheela told reporters the group aimed to have 7,000 potential voters and planned to run two write-in candidates for the county governing board.¹⁰

Reports quickly emerged that participants were being coerced into registering by having food, clothing, and bedding withheld.⁹ Wasco County Clerk Sue Proffitt halted all voter registrations on October 10, 1984, and Oregon Secretary of State Norma Paulus required new voters to attend individual residency hearings. Federal District Judge Edward Leavy upheld the freeze.¹⁰ At an October 23 hearing, only 14 of 200 potential voters were accepted. By the end of 1984, most of the homeless participants had left the commune.

Assassination Plots, Poisonings, and Arson

The crimes went further. In the summer of 1984, Puja tried to kill Rajneesh’s personal physician, Swami Devaraj (George Meredith), by injecting contaminated water into his IV drip.⁷ On July 6, 1985, follower Ma Shanti Bhadra (Jane Elsea) injected Devaraj with a lethal dose of adrenaline using a miniature syringe during a commune gathering; he survived after being airlifted to a hospital.¹¹ The group also poisoned Wasco County official Dan Durow with contaminated coffee and set fire to the Wasco County Planning Office in January 1985.¹²

The most serious plot targeted U.S. Attorney Charles Turner, who was directing a federal grand jury investigation into immigration fraud at the commune. Sheela initiated the conspiracy in May 1985. Catherine Jane Stubbs volunteered to carry out the killing, purchased weapons, and conducted surveillance on Turner’s office and home.¹³ Operatives also scouted State Attorney General David Frohnmayer and Wasco County Commissioner James Comini as potential targets.¹¹ The murder was never carried out. All eight people eventually identified as conspirators were convicted.

Throughout its existence, the commune also ran an extensive wiretapping network to monitor dissent inside and outside the community, which later became one of the federal charges brought against its leaders.¹²

Collapse and Arrests

The commune began to unravel in September 1985. On September 14, Sheela and several other leaders fled.³ Rajneesh then publicly accused Sheela of arson, wiretapping, attempted murder, and mass poisonings, inviting authorities to investigate.¹⁴

On October 23, 1985, a federal grand jury returned a 35-count indictment charging Rajneesh and seven followers with conspiracy and immigration fraud, including the arrangement of more than 400 sham marriages so foreign followers could remain in the country.¹⁵ Four days later, Rajneesh tried to flee the country on chartered Learjets. U.S. Marshals and Customs agents tracked the planes by radar and arrested him during a stopover at the Charlotte, North Carolina, airport on October 28.¹⁶

On November 15, 1985, Rajneesh pleaded guilty to federal immigration charges. He got a five-year suspended prison sentence, paid a $400,000 fine, and agreed to leave the United States, departing Portland the same day.¹⁵ The remaining leadership announced Rajneeshpuram’s closure on November 22, 1985. Just days earlier, the remaining Rajneeshee council members in Antelope had voted 34 to 0 to restore the town’s original name.¹⁷

Who Went to Prison

Sheela was arrested in West Germany on October 28, 1985, and extradited to Oregon.¹⁴¹²¹⁸

Puja, who ran the bioweapons lab, received four and a half years on federal conspiracy charges for the salmonella poisonings, three years of probation for wiretapping, and 15 years in state court for the attempted murder of Devaraj and the assault on county officials.¹⁹ She served less than four years in federal prison and then fled to Europe to avoid further state prosecution.⁸

David Berry Knapp, known as Krishna Deva, the former mayor of Rajneeshpuram, became a key prosecution witness and received a two-year federal sentence for conspiracy, including filing a false INS petition and entering a sham marriage.²⁰

The Turner assassination case dragged on for two decades. Sally-Anne Croft and Susan Hagan, high-ranking members who had returned to England, were extradited in 1994 and convicted in July 1995 of conspiracy to murder Turner. Each was sentenced to five years.²¹²² Catherine Jane Stubbs, the volunteer would-be assassin, pleaded guilty in September 2005, becoming the last of the eight conspirators to be convicted, twenty years after the plot. Sheela was also convicted of related charges in a Swiss court in 1999.¹³

What Happened to Rajneesh, Sheela, and the Ranch

Rajneesh returned to his ashram in Pune, India, adopted the name “Osho” in his final years, and died on January 19, 1990, at age 58.²³ The death certificate listed heart attack as the cause, though the signing doctor later stated in an affidavit that he had been instructed to record a cardiac cause without examining the body for signs of one.²⁴ The body was cremated within hours. The Osho International Foundation has run the movement since, maintaining roughly 750 centers in more than 60 countries, and the Pune headquarters now operates as the Osho International Meditation Resort.²⁵

After her 1988 release, Sheela moved to Switzerland, where she had acquired citizenship through marriage to a Swiss national in 1984. She settled in Maisprach and built a second career operating nonprofit residential care homes for people with mental disabilities. Her two Swiss facilities, “Matrusaden” and “Bapusaden,” received government accreditation in 2008 and care for about 30 patients.²⁶ By 2022, she had expanded to homes in Vietnam and Mauritius.²⁷

The 64,000-acre ranch was bought in 1991 by Montana billionaire Dennis Washington for $3.65 million. In 1996, the Washington family donated the land to the Christian youth organization Young Life. It now operates as the Washington Family Ranch, hosting roughly 1,100 campers per week. Many original buildings were repurposed: hotels became dormitories, a nightclub became worker housing, and the commune’s worship hall is now a sports center with climbing walls and basketball courts. A 1997 range fire destroyed Rajneesh’s former residence, the only one of the original 300 buildings to burn.²⁸

What the Documentary Left Out

One aspect of life at Rajneeshpuram received little attention for decades and was largely absent from Wild Wild Country: widespread allegations of child sexual abuse within the movement’s communes. According to survivor accounts, Rajneesh philosophy treated children as communal property rather than the responsibility of their biological parents, and children were separated from parents from age five.²⁹

Former commune child Sarito Carroll has described being groomed and sexually assaulted beginning at age ten at the Oregon ranch, and has said roughly 80 percent of the commune’s approximately 40 teenagers were involved in sexual contact with adults. She has reported that the commune’s leadership maintained a secret list of more than 100 individuals who had sexual relations with minors, and that children were coached to present a happy face when journalists visited. A 1983 U.S. Department of Justice survey reportedly stated that sex between adults and children was the norm in the community.³⁰ Similar accounts have emerged from European Rajneesh communes, including the Medina commune in Suffolk, England.²⁹

No one has been prosecuted. The statute of limitations has expired, and an attempt by a British law firm to organize a class-action lawsuit was abandoned. The Osho International Foundation has denied responsibility, stating it has no organizational memory of the accounts.³⁰ A 2024 documentary, Children of the Cult, directed by survivor Maroesja Perizonius and Alice McShane, was created in part to address the gap left by Wild Wild Country, documenting abuse allegations in Rajneesh communes across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.³¹

1
University of Wisconsin Press. Rajneeshpuram: Inside the Cult of Bhagwan and Its Failed American Utopia
2
Justia. State of Oregon v. City of Rajneeshpuram
3
Oregon Historical Society. Revisiting Rajneeshpuram
4
The New Yorker. Rajneeshpuram
5
CDC. Large Outbreak of Salmonella Gastroenteritis in The Dalles
6
Time. America’s First Bioterrorism Attack
7
National Center for Biotechnology Information. Rajneeshee Bioterrorism
8
U.S. Department of Defense. Lest We Forget
9
The New Republic. The Bhagwan’s Biggest Gamble
10
The New York Times. Limit on Voters by Oregon County Is Upheld
11
The Oregonian. Utopian Dreams Die
12
The New York Times. Former Aides to Guru in Oregon Plead Guilty to Numerous Crimes
13
U.S. Department of Justice. Stubbs Plea
14
Oregon Encyclopedia. Ma Anand Sheela
15
The New York Times. Guru to Leave U.S. in Immigration Plea Bargain
16
UPI. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Arrested
17
The New York Times. Guru’s Commune in Oregon Votes to Restore Town Name
18
Los Angeles Times. Sheela Sentenced
19
Los Angeles Times. Puja Sentenced
20
The New York Times. Ex-Leader of Commune Gets 2-Year Sentence
21
The New York Times. Two Former Rajneesh Followers Get Five Years for Conspiracy
22
The Independent. Bhagwan Women Jailed for Five Years Over US Murder Plot
23
Britannica. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
24
The News Minute. Who Killed Osho
25
Britannica. Rajneesh Movement
26
Swissinfo. The Rebirth of Ma Anand Sheela
27
Hindustan Times. Shots Fired: A WKND Interview With Ma Anand Sheela
28
Statesman Journal. Once a Cult Compound, Now the World’s Biggest Young Life Camp
29
Aeon. Lost Innocence
30
Fair Observer. The Girl From the Osho Ranch
31
The Guardian. Children of the Cult Review