As investigators dug up hundreds of rotting corpses at the compound and cult sites last week, the evidence mounted that what looked like mass suicide when hundreds died in a church fire on March 17 was in fact murder. At first, Ugandan police thought “Bishop” Joseph Kibwetere had led the cultists to their deaths; last week Mwerinde became the prime suspect in the deaths of more than 900 people, many of them strangled. “We think she was the one,” said Terense Kinyara, a top Ugandan investigator.
Villagers who grew up with Mwerinde in the remote Ugandan village of Kanangu told NEWSWEEK they learned to distrust her long ago. A high-school dropout, she set up a black-market business selling gin and homemade banana wine, and reportedly gained a reputation as a seductress. “She stole the husbands of other women and then left them,” said one former neighbor. Eventually she married. “She liked making money,” said her ex-husband, who helped set her up in business.
Mwerinde claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in 1988, after her bootlegging business went bankrupt. Nobody in her village seemed interested, so she took her message to a heavily Catholic part of the country. Within five months she had a patron. Kibwetere, owner of a Catholic boarding school, was an ideal mark: he was known to have an interest in miracles. Soon Mwerinde moved into his house and was trading on his connections. “She used him because he was a man,” says Kibwetere’s wife, Teresa, who served for three years as one of a dozen self-styled “apostles.”
As more members joined, Mwerinde imposed strict rules. She forbade Kibwetere to have sexual contact with his wife, and made him sleep in the bedroom Mwerinde shared with her sister and niece. Children were segregated in squalor. “There were 60 children in this room,” Kibwetere’s son said, pointing to a small shed. “The windows were nailed shut and the children slept on the floor.” Kibwetere’s family finally had enough. They organized a meeting and asked him to send Mwerinde and her followers out of the house. When Kibwetere refused, his son forced them all out. “He cursed us,” the son recalled.
Mwerinde took the group of 200 people back to her own village, where the cult became centered on her and her family. Though the Catholic hierarchy denounced the movement, membership soared past 1,000. Mwerinde had predicted the world would end Dec. 31; when it didn’t, some of her followers reportedly demanded the return of their property. It still isn’t known if she and Kibwetere died in the fire or–as many suspected–are now on the run.
