Star signs: Cosmic healer’s trail of woe
Allegations of manipulation, brainwashing and greed emerge, as well as a record of cruelty towards children, writes Martin van Beynen.
A German-born cosmic healer accused of brainwashing a loving mother and breaking up her family has left a trail of tragedy including horrific mistreatment of her own children and the death of a baby.
The Sunday Star-Times investigation revealed how Ingrid Jander, 66, who goes by several aliases, moved in with the happy, well-off Anderson family in Cromwell in 2017 and managed to isolate wife and mother Jilleen. Within six months of Jander’s contact with the family, Jilleen Anderson ended her marriage and changed her will so her assets went to a yet-to-be-formed trust run by Jander. Jilleen now believes she is terminally ill.
Several other victims have come forward with tales of falling under Jander’s influence during her 33 years in New Zealand, and losing money, friends, family and self-respect.
Further investigation has exposed more damage and more victims.
One was a pregnant Austrian who came to New Zealand from Tasmania to visit Jander in 1992 for a weekend. The Star-Times has decided not to name her. The woman and her husband had lived with Jander and her husband, Ferninand Pfeiffenberger, now deceased, in Austria from 1983-84.
The woman’s son, Dominik, said from Austria that Jander brainwashed his mother, who never returned from her weekend away. He was 11, and didn’t see her for 10 years.
‘‘My mum called us to tell us that she will never be my mum again and that we have to forget her. Ingrid telling her exactly what to say.’’
His mother gave birth to a boy while in New Zealand but the child died aged nine months on a trip with Jander and her family in 1993. The death was apparently ruled a cot death.
Dominik, who now visits his mother in New Zealand, said he still felt angry about the death of his brother in murky circumstances.
His mother stayed with Jander and Pfeiffenberger and their five children, believing Jander’s advice that she was terminally ill and only Jander could treat her, he said.
Jander and Pfeiffenberger treated her like a slave, he claimed.
‘‘My mum was not allowed to go into the house, she had to stay awake for days, she was only eating old food.
‘‘My father was deeply harmed by what happened to my mother . . . I will never forget all our pain of these years. No one could have understanding how she could be manipulated that much. I have forgiven her and we love each other more and more.’’
His mother was rescued in about 1999, when Pfeiffenberger went to jail for child abuse and his and Jander’s children were removed from Jander’s custody.
Other sources have also provided more details about that tortured time and Jander’s history after arriving in New Zealand in 1985.
In about 1988, when the family was living in Central Otago, Jander and Pfeiffenberger lost custody of their eldest child when she was put in foster care.
In 1991, with the marriage in trouble, Jander left the family to live with a lover in Auckland. She returned to the family home in 1992 about the same time as Dominik’s mother came to visit. In the middle of that year the family moved to Auckland and lived with Jander’s lover. The relationship ended in 1995 and Jander started another with a male family friend.
After divorcing Pfeiffenberger, Jander moved the family to Pauanui on the Coromandel where they lived in a one-room dwelling with a partitioned toilet area. The two adults and five children slept in a double bed and two single beds, the sources said.
Children, Young Persons and Their Families Service intervened in 1997 and the children were removed. Jander was charged with child mistreatment and pleaded guilty in 1998, being sentenced to community service.
The mistreatment included locking the children in an old shipping container without light, beatings with a plastic hose drawing blood and cutting the children’s fingers with a knife.
Jander justified tightly squeezing the heads of the children between the knees of one of the parents as ridding their bodies of ‘‘bad karma’’.
She blamed Pfeiffenberger and said the assaults occurred because she felt physical pain when the children thought bad thoughts about her and needed to be punished.
Her psychological abuse of the children included not allowing them to eat food like eggs because it increased their sex drive, sources said.
The children were schooled by correspondence but Jander avoided Correspondence School staff members and did not keep appointments. The children were not allowed to have friends.