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The Followers of Christ Church seems to have originated in Kansas in the early 1900s. Its breakaway Oregon City branch was led by Walter White, an authoritarian, apocalypse-preaching pastor known as the Apostle, who died in 1969. After finishing their schooling, church members try to avoid socializing with the outsiders, but several own local businesses. "These are law-abiding people with a good work ethic," says a prosecutor's investigator. "The only way they really differ is in their faith healing."
It is a mortal difference. Like many fellow Pentecostals, the Followers believe the Bible prescribes prayer and the laying on of hands to cure physical ills. Unlike most, however, Followers reportedly refuse medical treatment--for themselves or for their children. Emergency workers recall face-offs with church members who tried to persuade them not to take injured fellow worshippers to the hospital; the Oregonian found a state legislator's complaint about Followers children arriving at school with home-set bone breaks. After Lewman took the medical examiner's job in 1986, he encountered far worse and began recording what he calls "painful, torturous deaths that sometimes lasted days, if not weeks."
Finally, after three Followers children died what he considered needless deaths in a seven-month span, Lewman began aiding the Oregonian investigation. He says one shocking case was that of Alex Dale Morris, a four-year-old who complained of fever in February 1989. Fellow Followers laid hands on Alex, anointed him with oil and prayed over him for 46 days. On Day 44, a police officer acting on a tip paid a call but left after the boy himself claimed good health. Alex died two days later; his autopsy revealed an infection had filled one entire side of his chest with pus. Basic antibiotics, says Lewman, could have saved him.
The death Gustafson considered prosecuting was of Bo Phillips, 11, last February. Bo suffered a diabetic crisis and was treated with liquids, prayer and anointings. County sheriff's detective Jeff Green recalls arriving at the Phillips house to find 200 or more church members. Bo's body "was lying in bed, covered with a sheet. His eyes were sunk into his head, and his face was completely yellow. The suffering that boy must have endured..." Bo's parents, says Green, were devastated, but "I kept asking the father why he let the boy die, and the answer boiled down to what he told me flat out: 'It was my choice.'"