**_An excellent examination of a wrongful conviction, a virtual cult, and the insanity that connects them (thoughts on the second season)_**

>_The reptilians have been dominating earth for hundreds of years, thousands. America started making written agreements with the aliens. Written agreements! "Ok, you can have a base here, we'll give you this base, and you can abduct any of our people, just give us your technology." And that's how we've advanced in technology. And these aliens, they pose as humans so they can destroy humans on earth. And the thing about it is, people just can't see it,_ _they can't grasp it, and that's why they're not doing anything about it._

- Sherry Shriner; _Sherry Shriner Online Radio_ (May 11, 2001)

>_People want to know how it's possible that I could interview the devil, but from my perspective, it's why not. He's been stalking me my entire life; he would go to my softball games, he was there when I graduated and walked across stage to get my diploma. So you tell me who's more qualified to interview this loser. I know more about him than anybody on this planet, I can guarantee you that._

- Sherry Shriner; _Sherry Shriner Online Radio_ (May 30, 2006)

>_There's going to be a war against the real humans versus the fakes. These demons and alien entities are like parasites; they get a foothold into humans and they start to grow until they totally take them over. It's like a cancer taking over mankind. The war is on for total assimilation. Anyway, I'll be back next week folks._

- Sherry Shriner; _Sherry Shriner Online Radio_ (December 21, 2015)

Are you at all concerned about the alien reptiles who can take on human form and have infiltrated the highest levels of world government on the orders of Satan? What about that family member who is almost certainly a clone? Surely you're worried about your colleague, the one who is, without doubt, not just a witch, but a witch with a vampire demon inside her. What about the giants? Or the zombies in Miami? And let's not forget the fact that the CIA is a cover for a global paedophile ring, the children of which are sacrificed to Satan after they're raped, and then eaten (usually during lunch break). If you worry about any of these issues, care about your fellow man, or love the lord, then Sherry Shriner is the person you need. The earthly manifestation of God's actual literal daughter (yep, Jesus had a sibling. In fact, he had thirteen of them. Apparently), Shriner wants you to join her movement today and help fight the war for the very fate of humanity (first though, make sure you subscribe to her Patreon. And contribute to her GoFundMe. And buy some merchandise. And sign up for a recurring donation on her website).

Okay, as flippant an introduction as this is, it does serve to make a point regarding the utter absurdity, unworkability, mercenary, and thoroughly incoherent nature of Shriner's core beliefs, which posits that mankind is engaged in a millennia-old war with Satan and an army of aliens, reptiles, clones, vampires, witches, vampire witches, demons, giants, zombies, genetically engineered super soldiers, paedophiles, Meg Ryan, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift (don't ask). As cults go, her unnamed movement (they were informally known as the Orgone Warriors) certainly isn't one of the better-known ones, but as the excellent second season of _The Devil You Know_ illustrates, you don't need thousands of followers living together on a compound to make an impact, to create pain and suffering, or to ruin lives. In fact, you don't even need to leave your house.

July 15, 2017; Tobyhanna Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania. A woman makes a frantic 911 call to report her boyfriend has been shot. Police arrive on the scene and find that the man, Steve Mineo, is dead, a single gunshot wound to his forehead. Confused and distraught, his girlfriend, Barbara Rogers, isn't making much sense, so police bring her in for a formal interview, during which she tells them that although she was holding the gun, Steve knowingly pulled her trigger finger to fire it. Finding this explanation hard to believe, over the next seven hours, police press her, and eventually she says she killed Steve by accident. And ignoring her obvious mental health issues and her state of shock, this admission is all the DA needs to charge her with murder.

As directed by Lana Gorlitz and Zebediah Smith, the second season of _The Devil You Know_ initially seems to be setting up for an investigation into a case of someone wrongly accused, but it instead uses Steve's death to probe the Orgone Warriors, of which both Steve and Barbara were members, before running afoul of Shriner. Active on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, GoFundMe, Blog Radio (her twice-a-week show ran for 14 years, totalling over 500 hours of content), her own websites (all 19 of them), and with three self-published books (one of which is an actual literal interview with Satan and Lilith), Shriner output a massive amount of material in which she outlined and re-outlined her wild theories. And because of the vast reach of social media, those theories were disseminated to a fair larger audience than they ever would have been pre-internet.

And, aside from Steve's death, that's the real theme of the show – much as the first season used the Pazuzu Algarad case to probe disaffected youth, drug addiction, and a broken mental health system, here, Steve's death is used as a springboard to examine the power of social media and how easily it can be used to manipulate and indoctrinate. Ultimately, the show asks the question of how could a lone middle-aged woman who barely left her house and who met almost none of her followers in person amass thousands of blind adherents all over the globe and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

Like most of her followers, Steve first encountered Shriner on Facebook. He eventually introduced Barbara into the group, although she rarely engaged with anyone online. In April 2017, she uploaded a picture of steak tartar to her own page and wrote, "I crave raw meat". This was seized on by Shriner as evidence that Barbara wasn't human. She told Steve that Barbara was a witch with a vampire demon inside her (she also claimed at various times that Barbara was a clone, a reptile, and a super soldier), but he refused to accept it (going so far as to perform a test on Barbara that Shriner said would reveal if someone was a clone/reptile/witch etc.). He was subsequently ostracised from the group of which he had been a member since 2003. Furious and bitter, he responded by making anti-Shriner videos, soon becoming obsessed with exposing her as a fraud and thus stoking the ire of her many followers, who believed everything she said.

And boy did she say a lot. Indeed, her claims about herself are almost as fantastical as her claims about the New World Order, the aliens who signed a treaty with the US government in the 1930s, and the war between God and Satan. So, for example, she suffered from night terrors from a young age and later claimed these night terrors were caused by one of Satan's top generals, who had been sent to kill her; she said that God began to give her visions in 1994, and in 2001, he told her she needed to use a bible code program to decode the bible, whereupon she discovered it was the end times; in 2012, she claimed she saved New York from Hurricane Sandy (which was actually a secret alien invasion intending to sink Manhattan); in 2015, she revealed that she was an angel whose heavenly name was Shazuraze, in 2018, despite originally saying Trump was an agent of Satan, she claimed that he was a literal angel and that they often worked together. Oh, and she also predicted the end of the world...every year from 2007 to 2014.

Each episode of the show looks at a distinct aspect of the broader Shriner story; the first examines Steve's death, the second looks at Barbara's background, the brilliant and emotional third focuses on Kelly Pingilley (a young follower of Shriner who killed herself in 2012 because she believed it was what God wanted her to do), the fourth delves into Shriner's background, the fifth examines Barbara's trial, and the sixth looks at the importance of social media for Shriner. An impressively broad range of interviewees includes Lucas Bray and John Bohrman (Pocono Mountains Regional Police Department), Tony Russo (journalist), Charles Benincasa (Mineo's friend), Jeff Monzo and Dick Galloway (Barbara's defence attorneys), Joel Skrabacz (Barbara's ex-husband), Alena Kreutz (Barbara's daughter from a relationship prior to Joel), Kevin Wade (Barbara and Mineo's neighbour), Kelly Weill (journalist), Phillip Bell (PI hired by Steve to look into Shriner after she banished him from the group), Marcy Walsh, Rebekah Lasak, and Brittany Simpson (friends of Kelly Pingilley), Randy Sumner (college friend of Shriner), MJ Banias (journalist specialising in cults), Shane Pettman (former Orgone Warrior who still believes in many of Shriner's teachings), Joe Pierre (Professor of Psychiatry), Andrew Kroeckel (Asst DA, Monroe County), Emanuel Kapelsohn (ballistics expert), Sam Woolley (Project for Democracy), and Guillaume Chaslot (AI expert).

Despite rarely leaving her house, and despite meeting only a handful of her followers in person, by 2010, Shriner had gained followers in 116 countries. By 2016, her YouTube channel had 6,000 subscribers and her videos totalled over a million views. As of October 2021, there are 29,000 subscribers and close to two million total views. Her GoFundMe generated over $700,000 over ten years. The almost exclusively virtual existence of the cult is also touched on in the excellent podcast _The Opportunist_, which aired around the same time as the show (and is well worth a listen to if you want to know more about Shriner). In the fourth episode, the podcast interviews Reza Aslan, a professor of the sociology of religion, who points out how much social media has changed the nature of cults in the modern era;

>_Jim Jones had to physically gather his community around him in order to keep them from alternative sources of knowledge. David Koresh had to physically gather his community to him, lock them in place. What I think is profoundly frightening is that we are entering a world in which you don't need to physically gather a community anymore; there's just the internet now, there's just social media. Another very important aspect of a virtual cult is that it allows people who would never normally join an actual cult to become members. A few years ago you would have to literally upend yourself from your community and your family and go and join this group. Now, you can just be the same person that you are, that you've always been, but you're a cultist. The Internet has changed drastically the efficacy of the cult. I firmly believe that if Heaven's Gate existed today, it would be a global movement of individuals, all of them linked together through social media._

And we see instances of how adept Shriner was at using the virtual tools available to her. For example, after Steve's death, Shriner posted to her Facebook that she knew the _real_ story of what happened, and she would reveal it in her radio show. Which she did; Steve saw Barbara manifest as a vampire after becoming aroused by seeing blood in a movie they were watching, and when he tried to escape, she killed him. And by repeating multiple times that she had warned Steve that Barbara was dangerous, Shriner managed to attract even more followers.

The other major theme, of course, is Steve's death and the subsequent investigation, with the show very much taking the stance that Barbara's conviction for murder in the third was the wrong decision. For example, it reveals that during their seven-hour interrogation of a woman clearly suffering from shock and trauma, the police heard her say it was an accident 27 times, saying that Steve put the gun in her hand and moved it up to his head and that both of them were holding it went it went off. The police point blank refused to accept this. Eventually, exhausted and deeply confused, she started to change her story to suit their narrative (although she never wavered from her contention that the death was an accident). The show also interviews a ballistic expert, who says the evidence suggests that both Steve and Barbara's hands were on the gun, as she said, but this evidence was ignored by the police, who argued that only Barbara's hands were on it.

Another example is the prosecution arguing that Barbara would have known how to shoot because she had been in the army, whereas she was actually a supply clerk and was never trained on firearms. There's also an unfortunate interview with the prosecuting DA saying you can't make out what Barbara is mumbling to herself when she was left alone during the interrogation – cut to footage of her mumbling accompanied by a full transcript of what she's saying. And the show takes the judge to task for removing involuntary manslaughter as an option for the jury. Instead, they could only pick from not guilty, murder in the first, or murder in the third.

Things are also pretty impressive from an aesthetic perspective. This is best seen during scenes set in Shriner's home. Only two known pictures exist of Shriner, and no video, but the show features her a lot in voice over. To get around this, during the lengthy extracts from her radio show, the camera moves around her empty house as various images related to what she's talking about are rear-projected onto the walls, giving the whole thing an almost haunted house vibe. It's a really nice touch and really well done.

All in all, the second season of _The Devil You Know_ isn't as good as the first, however, it's still an impressive documentary. The third episode in particular is brilliantly done, really making you feel just how badly manipulated Kelly Pingilley was and how much her friends miss her. Tightly paced, very well edited, with an excellent selection of Shriner's voice-overs and Steve's video clips, the season is definitely worth your time.