Robert Price: Who was Jesus in the 1952 earthquake? Scam, it turns out | Robert Price

The photographic record of the Bakersfield earthquake that occurred 70 years ago is still shocking. Dilapidated storefronts, crumbling ceilings, and cracked, decades-old ornamentation still amaze and dismay.

Photographs that afternoon at 97 Degrees—and there are many, in both public and private hands—depict how police, firefighters, ambulances, the Red Cross, and hundreds of civilian volunteers came together to help when the August 22, 1952 earthquake shook the city to its founding. Men of all ages, some in military uniforms, most in street clothes, voluntarily fought in the chaos.

But one photo—and there seems to be only one like it—stops in a different, scratch-off: it shows a group of bearded and dressed volunteers casually chatting to Red Cross workers in the middle of the city’s main commercial street, in front of a department store. Robe-clad visitors seem to have passed through a period of time, transported from the days of the Bible to the middle of the century in Bakersfield.

Who are they and what are they doing there?

The central character in the picture, and in the story behind it, is a self-anointed holy man named Krishna Venta. He looks away from others, as if lost in thought.

For a decade, from the late 1940s through the late 1950s, Venta sent his followers to wherever disaster struck in Southern California—sometimes, some in law enforcement noted, prior to the disaster.

They were part of an organization called WKFL Fountain of the World, a harbinger of a post-war cult movement that would grow and morph into a darker incarnation over the next three decades.

But on August 24, 1952, the 11 members of the WKFL (Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, and Love) who visited the earthquake-stricken Bakersfield were considered benign and helpful—albeit slightly odd—visitors of the Santa Susanna Trail in Ventura County.

Bakersfield, California, described them as “brothers in long robe who seem to rise from the ground where disaster strikes.”

The newspaper reported that 11 of them came packed into two cars, led by a tall, barefoot man in a yellow robe. Call him master.”

The master and his entourage immediately went to the police station and called Tom Wingate, head of the Bakersfield branch of the Red Cross, to offer their services.

The California Journal reported that “when it was suggested that the situation seemed to be under control, the teacher said calmly, ‘There is always work to be done.'”

Sir Francis Herman Benkovic was 41 years old, a 6ft 2cm narcissistic man, a dodgy child support watcher and a bad passerby, and since the creation of the WKFL Fountain of the World in 1949, he began calling himself Krishna Venta. He said he was 240,000 years old.

The fact that he allegedly lacked a visible navel was noteworthy supporting evidence for some that, as he also claimed, it was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Now he and 10 of his sixty followers were in Bakersfield, helping the wounded and homeless, just as they had done the previous month in Tehachapi and Arvin, after the devastating earthquake there on July 21, 1952.

They came with Red Cross field equipment, ready to bid at Venta. The men were trained in “every conceivable kind of field service and rescue work,” the California newspaper reported, and the women were trained as nurses and could do “kitchen chores” and “childcare.”

“We’re going to go anywhere — wherever that disaster strikes, whether it’s a major fire, earthquake, flood, plane crash,” Venta told The Californian.

Indeed, when a plane crashed near their monastery in Box Canyon in Santa Susanna a few months ago, the Venta personnel assisted in executing the dead. An article in the Los Angeles Times dated March 28, 1953 described the group as a “disaster relief order” whose “mantles were stained by the ashes of many fires”.

But the Ventura County Fire Department viewed them in a less glaring light. In 1956, a fire captain refused to allow members of the Venta group to help fight fires more than 200 yards from their compound—even though other volunteers were still routinely called in—and not just because their long robes were a fire hazard. Firefighters wondered why Venta himself would sometimes be at the scene of the fire, and fight it off, before the fire trucks reached the scene.

By the time, not three years later, Krishna Venta was reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in Box Canyon — hanging from a crucifix over a 150-foot-high rock formation for 23 minutes — whose cult had 140 members.

But by 1956, his star began to decline. He was convicted in Oakland of contempt of court for failing to turn himself in after being found guilty of not paying child support. (Note in court that he stopped in Tulare, on his way from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, to help firefighters fight a straw blaze. The judge, aware of Venta’s many previous convictions for petty theft and check fraud, was not impressed.)

It all ended for the master in a blaze of shame. Venta was killed in a suicide bombing in Box Canyon just before 2 a.m. on December 10, 1958, carried out by two affected former followers. They accused the leader of being a fraudster who mishandled sect funds. There was also, they said, not to be seen, that Venta slept with their wives. “Do you think I’m a hypocrite?” Venta was said to have screamed, or words to that effect, seconds before the explosion. He had his answer.

But is he really dead? Ten people, including two children, were supposed to have died when the killers brought 20 pieces of dynamite, hidden in a duffel bag, into the rock and concrete building where Venta slept. Charred bits of meat were everywhere after that but only nine trunks were found. Virgil Payton, the Ventura County coroner, initially refused to close the case.

Some speculated that Venta had plenty of time to escape in the 12 minutes between the explosions and the arrival of the volunteer firefighters, who were delayed by the explosion they were trying to investigate: The blast blew out the engine room door. its hinges.

Bishop Asiaia, who had assumed the position of cult leader in Venta’s absence, was convinced that the master had escaped. “He was never killed,” said Asiaiya.

In the end, however, the FBI identified Venta’s dental plate and a piece of his jawbone, and rumors of a cult leader’s escape with a heart to earthquake victims were placed alongside his few physical remains.

Some members of the Venta cult remained in Box Canyon but others scattered. One of his assistants, Dorothy Martin, moved to Chicago and became a mentor to researchers, a UFO-Domsday cult. Three others—David and Gladys Smith, a married couple, and Irma Winfrey—joined the Peoples Temple and died in the jungles of Guyana along with 900 fellow members of the Jim Jones Suicide Sect.

Those who stayed in Box Canyon once encountered a homeless man who they fed and sheltered. Charles Manson was 30, who stopped for spiritual sustenance and ended up staying three days. Two years later, based on a hill at nearby Spahn Ranch, Manson was leading his own cult, the Manson Family, on a deadly rampage through Los Angeles that killed nine people at four locations, including actress Sharon Tate. Like Venta, Manson also believed that he was a Christ-like being and that an impending race war would somehow lift him up.

Did Venta’s teachings affect Manson? There’s no way to tell, but the similarities between Apocalypse Venta and Helter Skelter in Manson are undeniable.

Their fates diverged in at least one important way. Venta died a violent and fiery death at the age of 47 at Santa Susanna Pass. Manson died a quiet, unremarkable death at the age of 83 at Mercy Hospital in Bakersfield.

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