The Samaritan Cult: Linda Greene’s Deadly Path To Spiritual Enlightenment

A respected nurse’s spiritual teachings attracted hundreds of followers worldwide, but beneath her claims of divine insight lay a deadly cult that would ultimately consume those closest to her.

The Deceptive Facade of Linda Greene

Linda Greene appeared a straightforward woman living in Oklahoma City during the 1980s. She was a registered nurse and even showed up in local news stories about progressive hospice care. Beneath this appearance of normalcy, however, Greene held ideas that would eventually subsume her own life and lead others to destruction. Not content with being just a nurse, Greene also dabbled in acting, poetry, and writing. Her creative talents enabled her to win the confidence of people who were searching for something more meaningful. She began to write about New Age ideas, cobbling together theories of spirituality, healing, and conspiracy that would later form the ethical system for her sect. What really made Greene dangerous wasn’t just her charisma, but that she could present herself as both caring and knowledgeable. People saw her nursing experience and naturally thought that she had an understanding of healing. And astonishingly, they read her published work as revealing some greatly original perception. This combination would prove fatal to those who fell under her sway.

The Birth of a Cult

In the 80s, Greene founded what was to become called the Samaritan Foundation. But under the surface, Greene was busy teaching methods quite different from what ordinary spiritual churches instructed. She claimed to be divinely inspired and told her followers that she could glimpse the final days. In print materials, she wrote of abnormal warnings against supernatural dangers that most people would dismiss as baseless superstition or sometimes even sheer fantasy. She maintained that vampires and zombies were real threats for followers of hers who did not follow her teachings closely enough. Everyday items such as bar codes are full of negativity that hurts people was one of her teachings. Most disturbing of all, Greene saw herself as Christ reborn. She told followers that she had “willingly given her soul so all of yours can live.” This was not just spiritual metaphor to Greene: She actually believed she was the savior of humanity, and she expected her followers to honor her as such. The foundation attracted people from around the world who came because they were fascinated by Greene’s confident assertions, and also her promise of spiritual protection. When it was at its peak, the group was made up of approximately 350 members around the globe who all sought Greene’s advice on how to navigate what she called a perilous supernatural landscape.

Life Under Greene’s Control

Most of what went on within the Samaritan Foundation was dictated by Greene’s increasingly outlandish demands and religious observances. She said that with the power of her mind she could transfer all devil energy into soybean milk. After that, soybeans and little products had to be washed and agitated before being disposed of down drains. Mrs. Greene told members to take the “bad vibes” out of bar codes and sprinkle their groceries with holy water and small crystals for power. They say garlic keeps vampires away – my vampire journey brought this discovery I just couldn’t have made without you. Her teachings may be of interest in light of those of Mantak Chia. Seminar leaders claimed that they could help people to slack off negative energy-based sounds of dissonance and make the activity of their living environment more harmonious. Greene’s most powerful dominating expedient for maintaining control over her followers was to arrange marriages for them. Marriages were conducted at Greene’s seminars, for example, men and women paired up and married each other after knowing each other just a few days. In a particularly ghastly incident, Greene forced a newly married couple to have sex with her claiming that her life depended on it. This kind of over-the-top control demonstrates how Greene used her own claim to be an enlightened master for economic benefit in the most intimate areas of people’s lives. In 1981, Greene published her “Advanced Esoteric Dowsing Charts” as a set of three volumes under the name of Amber Press. In these books that can only be ordered using bank drafts, she elaborated upon her methods and taught her followers to distinguish spiritual energies from each other. Someone who gets into printing these five-dollar documents empty-handed can then get loaded with them by enrolling in her seminar. The 1994 publication of her work extended its influence beyond her immediate circle and widened its basis on American soil.

The Black Jail: A Dark New Chapter

In 1993, together with her then-husband Allen Ross, Greene followed willing hands and purchased a ramshackle old building in Guthrie, Oklahoma, that locals called the “Black Jail.” This was the place where condemned criminals in territorial times were held overnight before their executions the following morning. For Greene, an apocalyptic leader, its dark past had a certain appealing charm. The former jail was turned into this home-cum-headquarters by the Samaritan Foundation, and, as such, served for both its religious activities and seminars. Greene, with the coming uprising, believed that the jail would become the nerve center of their work to extirpate evil from the whole world. However, the living conditions inside this Black Jail were abysmal. More than thirty persons, all forced to be housed under inadequate conditions. In 1993, Department of Human Services conducted an investigation and condemned the building as unfit for human habitation. State intervention began the decline of the Samaritan Foundation. Public scrutiny became even more intense when a very public child custody case focused on what the sect was doing. A mother, inspired by Greene’s teachings, had taken her two children from Massachusetts to Oklahoma without their father’s consent. When the court awarded custody to the father, it exposed Greene’s pernicious hold over her followers.

The Final Exodus to Wyoming

The Black Jail was condemned in 1993 and following increasing legal pressure, the Samaritan Foundation packed its bags and headed down to Wyoming in 1994. Trying to shake off the scrutiny they’d had in Oklahoma, Greene moved the remaining members from a congregation to Cheyenne, Wyoming. But the decline was now irreversible. The group’s numbers had dwindled from 350 worldwide followers to a mere five members: its core who consisted of Linda Greene, her friend Julia Williams, her fourth husband Denis Greene, and her fifth husband Allen Ross. The relocation to Wyoming was more than a change of address but marked the beginning of the end for the Samaritan Foundation. Isolated from their former support network and with no funds to preserve what they had improvised, the group’s influence dropped away.

At this stage, Greene’s behavior became increasingly erratic. The woman who had commanded hundreds of followers now fought to subordinate even her small inner circle. Her paranoia deepened, her conspiracy theories somehow accelerating as the world around her shrank and grew bleak.

Allen Ross: The Filmmaker Who Disappeared

Around the time she began conducting seminars in the early 1990s, Allen Ross became acquainted with The Samaritan Foundation. As a filmmaker professionally, Ross was attracted to Ms. Greene’s charismatic personality and her claim of spiritual insight. He ultimately became Greene’s fifth husband, but it was a marriage from which he would never emerge. On November 22, 1995, Ross vanished without a trace. When he suddenly disappeared, the entire family was immediately worried. He was a promising man, with great prospects and a bright future. In their desperation, they hired private detectives to track him down, but these attempts were thwarted by contradictory reports and blind alleys. It was not until years later that they finally heard anything from Greene. But what she said about Ross was very uncertain. At first, she insisted he left of his own accord; at other times she hinted he might have had some sort of mental breakdown. This continually-changing story did nothing to alleviate the suspicions in the minds of those who knew her, and at this time, it is hard to say what really happened to her husband. For five long years, the case of Allen Ross’s disappearance remained a complete mystery. But his family held on to the hope that he might still be alive somewhere, perhaps with amnesia – though this thought was only an attempt to quench their own pain. The truth, however, was more terrible than any of them could have imagined.

A Horrific Discovery

Five years after Ross disappeared, in 2000, workers made a shocking discovery at the Wyoming house where the Samaritan Foundation lived. Beneath one room of this house was a large space used mainly to store the coal that heated their homes; when they dug in it they found Ross’s decomposed corpse. Their discovery confirmed the worst fears of Allen’s family and friends. He had returned to the people who had killed him. Rather than looking for spiritual truths, he had found death among people whom he trusted with everything he had. Investigators were horrified by the bloody discovery which took place in a Wyoming cabin and also brought fresh attention to the Samaritan Foundation and its enigmatic leader. What had gone on behind the closed doors of that isolated Wyoming building in Ross’s last days? How could a group devoted to good works become the instrument of such a diabolical act?

Unraveling the Murder Plot

Investigations into this murder revealed that many of Greene’s closest associates within the Samaritan Foundation had some hand, no matter how slight, in what had been done to Ross. For the first week after Ross’s disappearance, Julia Williams, who had long been Denis Greene’s loyal comrade, denied any knowledge of what became of Ross. Under the relentless questioning of the police, Williams eventually broke down and confessed that she did help wash away the blood after Dennis Greene murdered Ross – and both body disposal methods were used. In her written confession, Williams admitted withholding information about what happened to Ross. She also accused Denis Greene – Linda Greene’s fourth husband – of actually pulling the trigger. Witnesses confirmed that Denis Greene shot Ross, and in the early stages of the inquiry, he failed a polygraph test. The circumstances seemed to suggest that members of the very spiritual family which Ross called his own had murdered him in cold blood. Despite increasingly severe suspicions and powerful circumstantial evidence, Linda Greene was never officially charged with the murder of Ross. Remaining steadfastly innocent in every way throughout her trial, however, her reputation crumbled and she was forced out. In 2005, Julia Williams was convicted of accessory to murder and covering up for the criminal activity. She was sentenced to 34 months in prison for her role in Ross’s death. Denis Greene, however, was never prosecuted primarily because instead of bringing formal charges, the evidence available to them at one stage was thought too weak.

The End of Linda Greene and Her Foundation

When Linda Greene died in 2002, it meant the end of the road for Samaritan Foundation. She reportedly died of liver failure in Berryville, Arkansas, at age 50. Her family said she suffered from alcoholism, through which she struggled with “voices” in her head. The death of Greene saw the demise of her controversial leadership and the sect that had taken shape around her nonsensical boasts of divinity. A woman who once regarded herself as the savior of mankind met her end alone and betrayed, her immense spiritual mission reduced to nothing more than tragedy and waste. By the time of Greene’s death, the Samaritan Foundation had disbanded completely. The remaining members – now a very small group – had gone their separate ways, and the denomination’s odd teachings were finally to pass into the shadow of aftermath. The Black Jail in Guthrie, Oklahoma, lay empty, the depressing sight of a cult’s decline.

Legacy and Lessons

The story of Linda Greene and Samaritan Foundation is an example of how powerful people can manipulate those who are young and vulnerable who are looking for spiritual fulfillment. What took place was a matter of a respected registered nurse turning into a very dangerous cult leader for which there exists almost no recourse because authorities will not get involved.

Because of violence and death and suffering during much of its time, the Samaritan Foundation Center now offers tours to haunted house enthusiasts who prefer live theatre to movies as an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s former story. An episode from 2017 featured this building on New Year’s Eve in a mission that is still being talked about today, a call for help from the dead and dispossessed who seem to have found new life setting themselves.

Including her “Advanced Esoteric Dowsing Charts,” books by Greene are collected and reprinted by New Age movement researchers even today. These volumes are invaluable aids for understanding, in part, the inner world thoughts of a woman who managed to convince hundreds that she was both God and mother.

Critical and general analyses of how cult psychology and community take hold flourish. In Greene’s case, she shows that many people yearning for spirituality can easily fall victim to the evil designs of others.

Allen Ross’s death is the most dreadful consequence of Greene’s psychological and spiritual tyranny. As a creator of movies that were gifted in various ways with the infinite motion of a moving picture, he found himself at an impasse and went to people who knew nothing of it for help – consequently being totally destroyed by those who gave him their good opinions. His death proves that real, harmful results can come about as a consequence of the toxic atmosphere within cults.

Sources: Medium, The Cinemaholic, Wikipedia, Edmond Life & Leisure, Strange Strange Strange, Ellipsis Rare Books, Abandoned Oklahoma, Chicago Reader, KingFM

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is not an AI voice. (AI Policy)