Bizarre sisters act writes new chapter in horror story of rape, cages and murder

By Brad Hamilton - NYPost.com

August 1, 2010

The girl met her killer at Adventur ers Inn, a second- rate amusement park in College Point, Queens.

Elizabeth Brown, 15, was at the park with friends one summer night in 1974 when he rolled up in his chauffeur-driven, cream-colored Cadillac -- with its own bar and TV -- and stepped out. He would have been hard to resist: a dapper preacher in a silk suit with movie-star looks, wealth and charm.

But this "pastor," Devernon "Doc" LeGrand, 50, had no intention of saving her soul. His slick approach was intended to snare the girl into his commune in Brooklyn, where he plied teens with drugs and booze, seduced them and forced them to panhandle in nun garb.

Brown became LeGrand's concubine and beggar, hitting up subway riders by day and having sex with him and dropping angel dust by night.

"She had a good heart but was very angry, very belligerent," said Brown's sister Cathy. "Our father was sick with cancer and dying. She was looking for stability. A kid like that attracts dirtbags like magnets."

Thirty-six years later, authorities assumed LeGrand's cult, which eventually devolved into rape and murder and scandalized the city in the 1970s, was long gone. But last week they opened a new probe into the remnants of his clan after The Post found Mindy LeGrand, his daughter-in-law, pulling the same old sister act in Little Italy.

Investigators have returned to the dark secrets of 222 Brooklyn Ave., a Crown Heights row house where for two decades LeGrand headed one of the most notorious crime families in city history.

LeGRAND fathered 46 children, many of whom lived in tiny bedrooms upstairs in the four-story headquarters where Devernon preached on the first floor. For years, kids were kept in cages, starved and beaten -- until cops busted LeGrand for child-abuse in 1965.

"They had these tiny little rooms. The kids would stay with their mothers or just run around everywhere," said Eugene Jarkow, who investigated LeGrand for the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office. "The street-level floor is where they had the church. There was a big meat freezer in the basement, supposedly where he'd put the bodies, but there was no proof of that."

Every morning, LeGrand's phony nuns would pile into his Cadillac and he would drop them off at locations across the city. One fake sister, Vivian Roye, "was olive-skinned and passed as Italian -- she did very well on Mulberry Street," recalled former Brooklyn prosecutor Harold Rosenbaum.

The church took in an estimated $250,000 a year, enough to buy the Crown Heights building and a 58-acre farm in Sullivan County, which LeGrand paid for with rolls of coins.

When Devernon wasn't in a rage, life could be good. There were tailored outfits, luxury cars and gambling trips to Atlantic City. Booze and drugs flowed freely.

"They lived what they thought was the good life," Jarkow said. Cathy Brown added, "There was always a party at that place."

Jarkow even admitted to a certain fondness for the charlatan.

"I liked him -- and I knew the horrors he committed, the grief he brought on this earth," said Jarkow. "The guy could have sold me anything. He was very charming. . . . He was like an entertainer."

LeGRAND, born in 1924, said he came to New York as a 12-year-old with his parents from Laurinburg, NC. He claimed he was ordained in 1954 on Long Island and got a doctorate in a psychology and theology from an unnamed institute in Newark.

LeGrand was charged with killing his first wife, Ann Sorise, and his second wife, Ernestine Timmons. The wonder is that he got away with so much for so long. City and state officials never figured out a way to shut down the panhandling swindle. And as many as 23 additional "parishioners" went missing and couldn't be located. Cops wondered: Had LeGrand killed them?

Twice cops dug up the basement of the church looking for bodies -- in 1965, after three members vanished, and 10 years later while looking for the remains of two teenage sisters. It was a long time before they would learn the full truth.

The cloak began to fall away in 1975 when LeGrand and his son Noconda were convicted of first-degree rape after they repeatedly sexually assaulted a 20-year-old woman in the church. Then two cult insiders -- Kathleen Kennedy and the church handyman, Frank Holman -- came forward to say LeGrand had killed his own daughter-in-law, Gladys Stewart, 18, in a fit of rage.

The truth was much worse.

Stewart, who had married LeGrand's 20-year-old stepson, Donald Stewart, had had enough of the family and wanted out. She had also secretly helped prosecutors get the rape conviction. When she made it clear to Donald on Oct. 3, 1975, that she was leaving for good, he flew into a rage, and LeGrand intervened.

LeGrand detained both Stewart and her sister, Yvonne Rivera, 16, who was visiting, and ordered the rest of the congregation downstairs to the first-floor meeting room, where he demanded they stay "until I tell you to come out." Over the next two hours, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., LeGrand and another stepson kicked and beat the two teens. A LeGrand daughter went in and told the flock, "Daddy's stomping Gladys."

Holman said he heard a woman scream, and the group began to sing hymns. They stayed until 2:30 a.m., when LeGrand came in and sent them to bed. Weeks later, LeGrand boasted he'd killed and dismembered the girls and had their remains incinerated at his upstate farm.

"You all remember Gladys," he said. "Daughter or no daughter, you'll join the bitch. You know what I do with bitches. I burn them. . . . That little bitch [Yvonne] came down to see about her sister and I got her, too."

Holman, who joined the church after leaving his job as an autopsy assistant with the Brooklyn Medical Examiner's Office, said he was ordered to load two big garbage bags into his car and drive them to the farm. When he got there, something had spilled from a bag.

It was Yvonne Rivera's severed head.

He dumped the jumble of body parts into an old bathtub, doused them with paint thinner, and set the contents on fire. They burned for two hours. He then put the ashy remains in a garbage can, which he tossed into a pond near the camp. He later led investigators to where the bone fragments were submerged.

"I was given two large Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets with bones and told, 'Here, try the case,' " said Rosenbaum.

The prosecutor said he enlisted an expert from the Museum of Natural History to piece together the fragments, and LeGrand and stepson Steven LeGrand were convicted of the double homicide; each got 25 to life. Devernon LeGrand died in prison in 2006 at age 82.

THE family business, renamed St. Joseph's Church of Christ and Home, is now headed by LeGrand's son, Noconda, the convicted rapist, and is under investigation by the state attorney general. The agency wants to know why Mindy LeGrand is lying about being an Episcopal sister and raising funds for an orphanage that doesn't exist.

The Attorney General's Office served LeGrand with a subpoena after The Post's front-page expose last Sunday, sources said.

The city Health Department sent inspectors to 222 Brooklyn Ave. last week after her son Quomenters claimed to The Post that the church took in orphans and provided child care. The inspectors found no evidence of either, a department spokesperson said.

Perhaps more worrisome was Quomenters' insistence that nine youths who lived in the house were "away at summer camp" on the family's farm in White Sulphur Springs, the same place -- now abandoned -- where Holman burned up the Rivera sisters' bodies.

He ran a house of God, he said, but it turned out to be a house of horrors.

In the 1970's, women in black habits resembling those of nuns became a familiar sight in New York City as they solicited alms on the street and in the subway. Actually, they were from St. John's Pentecostal Church of Our Lord, which Devernon LeGrand, who called himself a bishop, presided over in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Soon, the public learned that there was more to Mr. LeGrand than his dispatch of charity seekers whose garb confused many New Yorkers. In 1975, he and a son were convicted of raping a young woman in the four-story building at 222 Brooklyn Avenue that housed the church and the LeGrand family.

Then, amid bigger headlines in 1977, he and a stepson were convicted of charges that in 1975 they had beaten and stomped two teenage sisters to death in the building and dismembered their bodies. The men murdered the sisters, the prosecutors said, to keep them from testifying in the rape case. Later in 1977, Mr. LeGrand was convicted of having similarly murdered and dismembered his wife in 1970 in the Brooklyn building.

Now 77, Mr. LeGrand has served 27 years of his prison sentence (25 years to life) for the three murder convictions and the rape. He is to be considered for parole in October. He was first considered for parole in early 2001, after reaching the minimum 25 years of his term. He insisted he had not been involved in any of the crimes but had been the victim of lying witnesses and an ambitious prosecutor.

''I was a minister, and I liked a lot of women,'' he told the parole commissioners interviewing him at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, N.Y., where he is confined. But he said he had ''nothing to do with that woman,'' referring to the rape victim. He blamed the sisters' killings on the husband of one of them. And his own wife's killing? ''She's in Africa,'' he said. ''She left and went to Africa.''

In denying him release then, the parole commissioners said, ''Your conduct indicates a depraved indifference for human life and no respect for the law.''

As for 222 Brooklyn Avenue, it is the site these days of St. Joseph's Church of Christ and Home, with the Rev. Noconda LeGrand, a son of Mr. LeGrand, listed among the ministers.

No Jobs, Just Suits After Labor Day Parade

Four Labor Days ago, the annual parade in Broad Channel, Queens, took an infamous turn.

A group of men on one float wore blackface and Afro wigs. Some threw watermelon to the crowd, and one re-enacted a black man's being dragged to his death behind a pickup truck in Texas. The group included two New York City firefighters, Robert Steiner and Jonathan Walters, and a police officer, Joseph Locurto.

Though they had been off duty, they were fired from their jobs, deemed to have undermined their departments' images and standing with the public. The men said they had not meant to offend black people and had been mocking the views of their fellow whites in mostly white Broad Channel.

Now they are using another argument in a court fight to get their jobs back. ''Their constitutional right to free speech was denied to them when they were fired,'' Marvyn M. Kornberg, a lawyer for Mr. Steiner, said last week.

In July, the city, which says it had every right to fire the men, was rebuffed in its latest effort to get the lawsuits dismissed, and a combined trial in the three suits is expected in January.