Chapter 5 - The X factor

Gale Ann Benson was the privately educated, trust-fund financed and generally over privileged daughter of the one-time Tory MP for Chatham in Kent, Captain Leonard Plugge. Plugge was an interesting character who had created the International Broadcasting Company in 1931 as a commercial rival to the BBC. Plugge loved to travel around Europe and moved in a social circle that included the likes of Princess Margaret. Through these highfalutin circles Gale met, in the late sixties, an American who called himself Hakim Jamal, although, in reality, his real name was the far less glamorous Alan Donaldson, who hailed from Boston in the US and who was a cousin of the Black civil rights protestor Malcolm X.

Hakim came to London and managed to bag himself a pair of X’s when he ingratiated himself into the circle of Peter Rachman’s former henchman, turned UK Black Power activist, Michael X. Michael X, born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad, had resettled in Britain and developed a career as a drug dealer, pimp and all-round heavy; indeed he titled himself the ‘archbishop of violence’. To this considerable bow he added a side-line as a political and civil-rights activist and, as a result, found himself being lauded by the liberal, white, middle-class hippie intelligentsia that infested west London at that time with their kaftans, mung beans and altogether overbearing pretentiousness.

Gale Ann Benson was very much a part of this set and her life would be changed completely when she encountered Hakim Jamal at a dinner party at the house of the actress Vanessa Redgrave.

Despite her ignorance of black culture – “He was the first black man I had ever really talked to.” -  she probably thought she had met a kindred spirit when Hakim, like her darling Daddy, boasted of attending functions alongside Princess Margaret, and her then husband Lord Snowdon, as well as the broadcaster David Frost.

Hakim had written a book about Malcolm X for which a launch party was held at the flat of his publisher, Diana Athill. It was here that Gale’s brother Frank witnessed the bizarre hold Hakim seemed to possess over his sibling:

“But what I found really odd was the strange act Hakim did with Gale. He laid her across two chairs, head on one, legs on another, and as I watched, she seemed to go into a sort of coma. She was quivering - and she wasn’t acting. Hakim said that being able to do this was proof that he was God” said Frank.

By 1971 the infatuated Gale was living in a ‘Mansonesque’ commune in Trinidad with Hakim and Michael X’s cronies – X being now on the run from Britain after he and four colleagues were arrested for extortion – when, on January 2, 1972, she came across Michael and his pals digging a hole in the ground. After innocently pondering its purpose she was told that “this is a fresh hole for decomposed bodies” before being set upon by two men armed with cutlasses and buried alive; it was her own grave!

Within a month Hakim had fled the island, despite his partner still being officially listed as missing, with funds supplied by Michael X and claiming that he had grown tired of the “clingy” Benson; this being despite her persistent efforts to raise funds on behalf of his pet projects. Back home in Boston Hakim would then regale the British press with lurid stories of a Black Magic New Year’s Eve party held at the commune immediately prior to Gale’s death. Hakim recalled how he had seen Michael X slit a cow’s throat and drink its blood, the sight of which had made him nearly throw up. A natural reaction perhaps, but hardly Godlike!

God’s memory then seriously starts to betray him as he recounts that a few days later he was haunted by a “sense of evil” and that this prompted him to take Gale to Port of Spain in an attempt to sell a diamond-less diamond ring in order that they could raise the funds to get Gale out of Trinidad. They failed.

Now you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to realise that Gale did not have a few days to raise funds; she was dead within 36 hours of the blood drinking incident, so was Hakim attempting to cover his own tracks or had Michael X really summoned Satan to battle God?

If he did, it was the devil what won man.

Vengeance was swift however, as a little over a year later God’s divinity and omnipotence were exposed for the shams they were when a black hit-squad burst into Hakim’s apartment and kindly redecorated his walls with the addition of Jackson Pollockesque splatters in a fetching shade of claret. God is dead as Friedrich Nietzsche had predicted some one hundred years earlier.

As for Michael X: well the archbishop of violence was defrocked in 1975 when, like Ruth Ellis, he also felt the coarse retribution of the hangman’s noose; not for Gale’s murder but that of a barber named Joseph Skerrit who was discovered, like Gale, pushing up the daisies beneath Michael X’s vegetable patch.

Skerritt was a member of Michael X’s ‘Black Liberation Army’ and had been killed by him because he refused to obey orders to attack a local police station.

But why kill Gale?

In the plot of a 2008 film, The Bank Job, it is claimed that she was working deep undercover for the secret services as part of their campaign to infiltrate the Black Power movement. Now this may not be as ridiculous as it first seems. Gale’s father had been rumoured to have been an MI5 operative and one of Hakim’s former lovers, Jean Seberg, had been the victim of an FBI COINTELPRO plot that maliciously suggested that she had become pregnant by a black man during an extra-marital affair. This was not true, but it was her payback from the, so-called, greatest democracy on Earth for having previously donated money to the American Black Panther Party. So it seems clear that there was governmental concern on both sides of the Atlantic over the growing rise of black civil-rights activists.

Seberg, incidentally, would become another member of the sleeping pill ‘suicide’ club!

According to the film Michael X was using a set of sexually incriminating photographs of Princess Margaret, taken in Mustique, to try to blackmail the British Establishment. Does this sound at all familiar?

The photos reportedly detail a sexual liaison between two West Indian men and Princess Margaret.

These pictures were then stored in a bank vault in London, from where they were, supposedly, recovered in a sophisticated undercover raid in 1971 by the intelligence services in what has become known as the Baker Street robbery.

The fact that the bank was literally a stones-throw from where Stephen Ward lived should, by now, alert you as to his, at least peripheral, involvement. Of course by the time of the robbery he was long dead – Ward, indeed, did not have a bank account himself - and the responsibility for the security of the illicit photographs had been left to Michael X.

Gale, it is claimed, had been secreted into an undercover role to establish whether any other photos or negatives might be found at Michael X’s home. In the book Michael X by John L. Williams the author claims that X had discovered Gale nosing around the contents of his desk three times, however, if the authorities had secured the offending photos in 1971 via the Baker Street robbery then why hadn’t Gale been extracted? There must be more to this.

Likewise if Michael X suspected Gale’s motives, as it appears he did, why did he not ask Hakim to use his ‘Godlike influence’ over Gale to reveal her mission, or, failing that, to force her to fuck off?

No, it is far more likely that Benson was stubbed-out because of what she knew and that Michael X decided he simply could no longer risk her continued existence.

I have no doubt that mucky pictures of Princess Margaret do, or did, exist. She was, after all, as partial to a phallus as she was a drink and there have been long-held rumours of the existence of photographs of an inter-racial, inter-sexual liaison on Mustique; not to mention her fondness for the villain John Bindon and his extraordinary member! Let us not forget also that one frequent visitor to the island was her cousin, the famous photographer, Lord Lichfield, who may have captured God only knows what on his trusty Nikon.

We cannot, however, simply assume that Princess Margaret was the star of these photos. There are plenty of other royal candidates; not the least of whom being her brother-in-law, who may well have also been caught in flagrante delicto by the erect zoom-lens of a concealed paparazzo. As such, we shall return to the Baker Street Robbery in greater detail in due course.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 - A process of mind-control

We cannot, however, simply assume that Princess Margaret was the star of these photos. There are plenty of other royal candidates; not the least of whom being her brother-in-law, who may well have also been caught in flagrante delicto by the erect zoom-lens of a concealed paparazzo. As such, we shall return to the Baker Street Robbery in greater detail in due course.

I can’t help but be drawn to the similarities between Michael X and Charles Manson. Both commanded support from groups of star-struck acolytes, both ran bizarre communes and both condoned racial uprising, – albeit from totally opposite sides of the tracks – Manson with his ‘helter-skelter’ and X with his ‘Black Liberation Army’.

Manson famously claimed that The Beatles had been sending him messages via the lyrics contained within tracks on ‘The White Album’, while Michael X could go one better when the ex-Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono shaved off their mop-tops and sold the remnants on behalf of X’s Black House before also paying for his, considerable, legal fees.

Manson, it has been alleged, ordered the atrocities at 10050 Cielo Drive because he had become aware that the property’s tenant, the film producer Roman Polanski, was involved in a paedophile snuff-movie ring and that it was this that precipitated the brutal murder of Polanski’s heavily pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four others.

Now subsequent incidents would imply that there may be some truth in the Polanski allegation but these would not have been common knowledge at the time so how did Manson know?

Equally, if the allegations about the Princess Margaret photographs are true then how did they land up in the hands of a drug-dealing London pimp?

All will be revealed in good time.

However, in the case of Manson we need to look even further afield. Manson had been indoctrinated into the bizarre ‘auditing’ methods of Scientology when he was in prison and claims that by the time of his release in 1967 he had reached the level of ‘Cleared Theta Clear’, or ‘Beta-Clear’. Whatever that means?

Actually, in mind-control programming it is the subjects who are deemed to have demonstrable psychic abilities that undergo Theta programming. In the parallel world of Scientology a ‘Cleared Theta Clear’ is, according to its founder L. Ron Hubbard:

“A thetan who is completely rehabilitated and can do everything a thetan should do, such as move Matter, Energy, Space, and Time and control others from a distance, or create his own universe”.

All of which is clearly the biggest pile of steaming horse-shit imaginable but I can’t help but be drawn to the claim about controlling others from a distance. However, for old Charlie-boy these alleged abilities, apparently, were not enough. Supposedly, in 1968 Charlie had dropped into a Church of Scientology in LA. whereupon Manson asked the receptionist: “What do you do after ‘clear’?”

To which the answer seemingly went along the lines of: Go forth dear Charlie and form a hippie-commune with which to rid the world of the family and friends of a kiddie-fiddling film director whilst simultaneously sparking a global race war from whence the planet will be liberated of all the non-Scientology believing scum, obviously!

Manson clearly suffers from ‘short-man-syndrome’; a disorder in which short-arsed men try to over-compensate for their boy-like stature, usually by being overly aggressive. For Charlie, however, even possessing Godlike abilities were not enough to assuage his personal demons. He was, after all, not only morally lower than a snakes belly but he also physically stood knee-high to a grasshopper!

Possibly this is why, upon his release from prison, he would seek contact with a Scientology splinter group then going by the name of The Process: Church of the Final Judgement. Now these guys were proper fruitcakes, they worshipped both Jesus and Satan and would dress up in black robes whilst walking the streets of London with their beloved Alsatian dogs in tow - they REALLY loved their dogs - handing out leaflets to the acid casualties in the hope that they would snare a real dope.

A pair of Processeans: Seriously, even brainwashing doesn’t excuse those clothes!

Surprisingly this bizarre recruitment technique does appear to have worked. They embarked upon it in London before expanding their imbecile entrapment scheme to the warmer climes of Mexico, San Francisco and LA. These days they go by the slightly less sinister, but still equally weird, name of Best Friends Animal Society - and they still REALLY love their dogs!

Despite my juvenile insinuation that the Processeans were sexually attracted to these beasts, they apparently did truly believe that Alsatian’s could predict the apocalypse! Seriously, these are the types of idiots that would place a bet on what day the Earth would end and then still expect to be around to be paid out! Joking aside though, animals can actually predict the future; my cat can predict when she needs a shit, however, I do not feel the need to follow her outside and worship her psychic sphincter!

But it is to the cool-cats of swinging London that we must return.

The Process: Church of the Final Judgement was founded by two freaks going by the name of Mary and Robert de Grimston. Mary had started life as plain old Mary Ann MacLean in the Glasgow tenements before moving to London and becoming one of Ward’s girls working out of Murray’s Cabaret Club prior to progressing on to running her own brothel. She would meet Robert Moor at a Scientology Dianetics class in 1963. 

Oracle and Teacher

The pair were enthusiastic adherents of Scientology before they were kicked out when the ‘religions’; founder, and Lord looney-tune himself, L. Ron Bell-End claimed in 1965 that the de Grimston’s had been declared ‘suppressive persons’ for launching their Process splinter group, and offering what they called, Compulsions Analysis. Compulsions Analysis was, of course, just a re-branded version of Scientology’s ‘auditing’ technique; Bob and Mary having also scarpered with a Scientology e-meter as well. Mary, however, claimed that they left the organisation after the Scientologists bugged one of her auditing sessions.

Most ex-Scientologists will tell you that being deemed a ‘suppressive person’ leads them to being bullied, victimised and physically punished, but when Bob and Mary left, taking the family silver with them no less, they found themselves being put up in a posh pad inhabited by Lords and Ladies.

The location of this posh pad in Wigmore Street, however, in the heart of the west London, Marylebone nexus, is truly significant because of the neighbours the Processeans would have shared. Stephen Ward had lived locally in Wimpole Mews and had his practice in nearby Devonshire Street – though he had departed this mortal coil by 1963 – and Dr Richard Asher lived in Wimpole Street whilst I visited him and his colleagues in nearby Harley Street.

We will come to the significance of who the de Grimston’s were living with at this time in due course, however, it would be remiss of me not to also mention that a fellow founding Processean; a guy by the name of Hugh, aka Michael, Mountain, is rumoured to be the son of the media baron and founder of Granada Television, Sidney Bernstein. I have been unable to confirm the validity of this claim, however, if true, it would help connect a lot of the showbiz dots.

Also significant is that L. Ron Hubbard had compiled a brainwashing manual about which his first born spawn, the imaginatively named; L. Ron Hubbard Jr. had this to say:

“Dad wrote every word of it. Barbara Bryan and my wife typed the manuscript off his dictation. And then we took it up to New York and tried to get them to do a program on it with Charles Collingwood at CBS. Dad also tried to sell it to the FBI. Years later they snuck it into the Library of Congress, and somebody else came by and said, “Oh lookee, it was found in the Library of Congress!” which is a lot of baloney.”

Jr. added the following juicy titbit:

“If you want to see how LRH [L. Ron Hubbard] really worked things org-wise, especially from the mid-sixties on, you just have to read the brainwashing manual.”

Which is something that I have absolutely no doubt that both Bob and Mary did, presumably gaining first-hand instruction from the chief fruit-loop himself. Who knows, they may well have contributed some ideas of their own. When the time came for these Processeans, as they were keen to be known, to leave England’s green and pleasant land they found themselves being accused of being involved in both the Zodiac and Son of Sam serial killings and of having had connections with Robert F. Kennedy’s killer Sirhan Sirhan. Bobby Kennedy, incidentally, I’m sure, had dined the night before his death with Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate.

Indeed, in the 2002 revised edition of his Manson epic, The Family, the author Ed Sanders speaks of a 1974 investigation into “a satanic group of English origin” conducted by an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) criminal investigator named Richard Smith.

Sanders instructed a researcher working for him to contact Smith who was allowed to read his report, which stated:

“English satanist cult members invited Sirhan Sirhan to a number of parties that were sponsored by television people in Los Angeles, and that one of the parties took place at Sharon Tate’s residence. At these parties, it was averred, sexual and ritualistic activities were reported to have occurred.”  

It is rumoured that Sharon Tate was killed because of something she had overheard about the subsequent slaying of RFK by Sirhan Sirhan. Whilst only a rumour it seems clear that Sirhan was a patsy, set-up to take the fall, and that someone needed to keep the truth from coming out.

Could the parties that Sirhan attended at Tate’s, and elsewhere, have been designed in order that blackmail material could be obtained of him? Just what other prominent faces may appear in any home-movies of these soiree’s? 

Whilst in his book The Ultimate Evil, author Maury Terry contended that the Son of Sam killer, David Berkowitz, was a member of ‘The Children’: a supposed splinter group of The Process: Church of the Final Judgment.

Terry claimed to have learnt through sources, including Berkowitz himself, that one of the Son of Sam murders was videotaped, and that the cameraman, Ron Sisman, was subsequently murdered by cult members when they went to recover the Son of Sam snuff-film and that this same execution had been predicted in advance by Berkowitz.

If Berkowitz himself was a fully paid-up Processean, or, indeed part of some obscure splinter organisation is clearly a moot point, but he was certainly well versed in their methodology.

Via an intermediary on the www I managed to obtain a quote from Berkowitz himself concerning The Process: Church of the Final Judgement:

“As for the Process Church, it was pretty much dissolved over time, especially with the deaths of its founders Robert and Maryann DeGrimston. I think there’s a lot of evidence that some Process members [were] practicing mind-control, which they were big on in the 1960s and 70s, put it into the head of Charles Manson to help create “Anarchy” which Manson tried to do. His plan, so it has been said, was to start a race war. Back in the 60s there was already plenty of racial unrest. So he and his followers (who were nothing more than brainwashed dupes who were being controlled by drugs, poor diets and lack of proper sleep) set off on their killing spree with the idea that blacks would be blamed for the crimes, and this would cause something to be set off racially. The so called “Zebra” killings had been going on at this time too. The time was ripe for revolution. The primary teaching of the Process’s founders was to cause anarchy so as to bring about, in the long run, world peace. Their belief being that Satan and Jesus were brothers who had a falling out in Heaven. That once the apocalypse was over and the book of Revelation (The Process people were obsessed with the book of Revelation) was fulfilled, that Satan and Jesus would call a truce, shake hands, and a new millennium of world peace would begin and folks would live happily ever after. This was one of the themes of the Process, one of its goals; Anarchy to eventually bring about world peace. That’s why even the so called “Son of Sam” killings were seen in a positive light - as absurd as it would be to think this way now - that the ultimate goal would be world peace. That the killings was (sic) not a work of evil, but good. In that anarchy and lawlessness must come first if world peace was to come, too. Leave it to Satan to deceive the foolish, and I was a fool!”

Interestingly enough, shortly after I received this information (March 2016) I received word from my source that soon after David had written to him about the Process Church he had found himself being transferred to another prison. It seems that even today it is dangerous to talk about this organisation.

There is, though, an emergent, if circumstantial, link between The Process: Church of the Final Judgement, show-business disciples and serial-killers.

Prosecuting attorney in the Charles Manson trial, Vincent Bugliosi, in his book Helter Skelter, claims that he asked Manson about knowing de Grimston:

He denied knowing de Grimston, but said he had met Moore (sic). “You're looking at him,” Manson told me. “Moore and I are one and the same.” I took this to mean that he felt they thought alike.

So, are you beginning to see the similarities? Brainwashing, occult groups, snuff-movies and death; all being manipulated and orchestrated by sinister, Machiavellian puppet-masters.

But perhaps we should dig a bit deeper into the cult that had found itself christened – if that is not an oxymoron – the Mindbenders of Mayfair by the mighty wordsmiths of Fleet Street.


Chapter 7