Sex offender Little Pebble plans to return as leader of his doomsday cult
For 10 years “Little Pebble” operated a doomsday cult on the south coast of NSW, and even after he was jailed for sexually assaulting young girls, the cult carried on. Now out of prison, he wants to return to his flock, as convinced as ever of his divine
Nowra is an idyllic town nestled among the flourishing waratahs and majestic gums of the NSW south coast. But just a few kilometres away lies an unsignposted dirt road that leads to a dark and desolate place. Huge steel gates guard the entrance to a compound, its perimeter cordoned off by barbed wire fences. Though anyone happening by would wonder why so much trouble has been taken to protect this patch of land – a desiccated dust bowl strewn with a few derelict caravans.
For more than a decade, the followers of a man named William Kamm lived here while they awaited the end of the world. Food and warm clothes were stockpiled. Every six months they taped black plastic over their windows, fearing the sight of devils walking across the fiery earth would instantly kill them. They worked to earn money for Kamm, a self-proclaimed prophet who went by the name Little Pebble. In the 1990s and 2000s, he presided over 180 faithful here in Nowra and many more at sites around the world. He’d convinced his followers they would be the sole survivors when a comet wiped humanity from the earth.
But while the members of his ‘Order of Saint Charbel’ were working and praying, Little Pebble was using his influence in opportunistic and predatory ways. One of his prophesies was that he would repopulate the earth by procreating with 12 “queens” and 72 “princesses” plucked from among his acolytes, and he was true to his word.
In 2005, he was locked up for sex crimes against underage girls. After that, many of his followers drifted away, but roughly 27 people remain at the run-down site near Nowra – some because they have nowhere else to go.
Earlier this year Kamm went to court seeking permission to return to his “Holy Grounds”. He told the NSW Supreme court that, “While he adheres to the 12 queens and 72 princesses doctrine, he now consistently professes that God has revealed to him that it is not applicable now but will apply only after the Second Coming”. His barrister said he is “much older than he was when his offending occurred [and] his advanced age makes it much less likely that he is interested in teenage girls as sexual partners or able to act on any such interest”.
According to author and former member of his cult Claire Ashman, Kamm sees himself as above the rule of man. “He’s a master of lying,” she says. “Kamm had this idea that he was the first seer in history to have a direct line to heaven. If someone wrote a letter with questions to him, he would ask the Virgin Mary and the Virgin Mary would give him an answer.”
“Letters” from the Virgin
Mary contained instructions for how people could best please God. Kamm used this to control
his followers and to shield himself from interrogation, and it worked.
As an escapee from the St Charbel cult, Claire has a unique insight into Little Pebble. She understands his narcissism, the level of control he wields over those who still believe, and the limits of authorities to stop him, given his capacity to manipulate willing conspirators.
Hook, line & sinker
Claire was raised in a religious sect called SSPX, the Society of Saint Pius X, which is a conservative breakaway within the Catholic Church that shuns modernisation.
“I describe my upbringing as indoctrination,” Claire says. “Myself and my siblings were homeschooled. We didn’t have any television or outside influences so my mother could ensure we had the purity of the Catholic faith.”
At a young age, Claire married a man named Tony, who had a fascination with apocalyptic theories. They lived in Melbourne and had four children in quick succession. Claire’s fourth baby, a little girl named Rita, sadly died when she was very small and Tony visited Little Pebble’s property in Victoria where Little Pebble told him their grief “would give them a higher place in heaven and reveal [their] mission”.
“Tony was just pulled in hook, line and sinker,” Claire says. “He loved the idea that there was a fuller picture of what the end of the world was going to be like, and of course, William Kamm is very good at telling every person what they want to know.”
Tony was eager to move Claire and their children to the commune near Nowra, but Claire was against it. “I didn’t have a good feeling about it at all. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
The idea of communicating with the Virgin Mary through letters was deeply unsettling to her, but Tony was insistent. He told Claire she was being belligerent and disobedient. He wrote to the Virgin Mary, via Kamm, and when the handwritten reply came back, it sealed Claire’s fate.
“The Virgin Mary said we needed to be in Nowra,” she explains. “You know how you feel those cold hands of fear around your heart? That’s how I would describe it.”
In 1997, Claire, then 27, packed up her family and relocated. There was a sense of urgency around the move, she says. Those in the order “could not talk fast enough”. They said: “You need to move to a community quickly to be safe”. It made her anxious.
When Claire and her family arrived, they were given “ugly brown scapulars” with big white crosses on them to wear “like ponchos”. Claire had been told she could take temporary vows but once they were in Nowra, Little Pebble said, “It’s all or nothing”.
“I was forced to take these vows: poverty, chastity and obedience according to your state in life”. For married couples, sex was only allowed for conceiving children. “Even then it harkened back to old Catholicism: the woman had to give in to the man whenever he wanted it.”
“It’s very easy for people to say, ‘Why didn’t you just leave?’,” Claire
tells The Weekly. “I liken it to North Korea, how they don’t have Facebook and all the news is fed to them how the government wants them to believe it. When you’re immersed in it, that’s all you hear, that’s all you know.
I grew up with this culture of indoctrination, but the doomsday cult was up 10 notches.”
Claire learned that the reason
Kamm had been so insistent that her family move to Nowra was that he wanted her to join a select group within the order, known as the Royal House of David.
“I was chosen as one of the princesses,” she says. “I just didn’t take any notice of it. I’m from the country. I’m very practical and I know I don’t belong to royalty, so I was shocked when a young girl came running over just after we moved and said, ‘You must be a princess’.”
Of more pressing concern was the Hale-Bopp comet, which was flying towards the earth in a spectacular blaze of light in early 1997. Hale-Bopp was 100 times brighter than Halley’s comet and had a brilliant blue and white twin tail.
“Kamm said that as the comet went past the tail would lash out and hit the Earth, knocking it off its axis and causing extreme heat followed by extreme cold. Much of the population would die. Only the people in the communities were going to be saved,” Claire says.
Kamm wasn’t alone in attaching a spiritual significance to the comet.
On March 19, 1997, in a house in San Diego, California, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult “evacuated the Earth” to a spaceship hidden in the Hale-Bopp tail via a mass suicide.
But Hale-Bopp came and went without annihilating humanity.
Still, every six months or so, the community was instructed to gather food and tape up their windows. Each time the world failed to end, Little Pebble would say it was because he had made special sacrifices and the Virgin Mary had interceded.
Court documents provide further details of the prophecies Little Pebble told his flock, including that in the new era “he would be the last pope” and his “mystical seed” would repopulate the planet. He had purchased a bishop’s throne that he would sit on. “Whenever he was there, there would be certain young women who would come and kiss him on the lips,” Claire says.
Three times a day, a ‘priest’ of the order would deliver sermons threatening damnation. “He would be shouting about how dare we do this and how dare we break the rules of the order. ‘You’re jeopardising everybody. You should be taking this seriously. It is the end of the world! It is coming!’”
Some in the community were put to work in convenience stores owned by Kamm. “He would pay them the minimum wage so the wives could claim the maximum Centrelink,” Claire says. All income was put into a single account in Kamm’s name. “Then he would dole out the money to every family or single person according to what he believed they needed in life.”
But his stores were not well patronised. Locals didn’t like Little Pebble. There were whispers about the type of man he was, and it was far worse than being a religious zealot.
“You know how you feel those cold hands of fear around your heart? That’s how I would describe it.” – Claire Ashman
Pebble’s teen victims
It was in the summer of 2000 that Claire realised how depraved Kamm really was. She was in the chapel when she saw a note from Little Pebble on the message board. It was celebrating the birth of a baby girl, and the mother was a single 17-year-old girl.
“There was just something about the way he wrote it that I suddenly realised: Oh my God, that baby is his! Then I realised, retrospectively, other ones were his as well,” she says.
“I was so angry. I was horrified. I was disgusted. I went straight home to Tony and said, ‘He’s having sex with these young girls. I don’t want to be here. I don’t agree with this. I’m moving out. I’m done’.”
But Claire was stuck. “I had no resources, no money, no friends, so I couldn’t move out. I was forced to stay. But I thought: I am going to take extra good care of my kids because I am not having that happen to my girls.”
She needn’t have worried though. Kamm’s web of deceit was beginning to come undone. In 1999 and 2002, Bishops William Morris and Peter Ingham issued episcopal decrees that Kamm was “at best [a] deluded dupe, and worst [a] culpable false prophet”.
In 2002 Kamm was arrested over allegations that he had abused underage girls. He insisted he was innocent and was granted bail. He returned to his community where he instructed two of his followers to burn any letters that linked him to his victims in “an intimate way”.
“After he was arrested, he started spurting things like, ‘It’s not what it looks like. The devil may have triumphed for a short period of time but I’m not going to jail. This is a test for the faithful’,” Claire says.
By now, Claire was doing everything in her power to distance herself from the order, including taking her children to mass in Nowra rather than attending sermons within the order. She had been told that if she went to an outside church she would be shamed and shunned by the congregants. Instead, the reception she received gave her the strength to stand up to Little Pebble.
“Father Pat came up to us and he just said, ‘Welcome. I’m so glad to see you here. Please come back’. The kindness of the parishioners made me cry. It really did,” she says.
By now, Claire felt hopelessly trapped. Tony had become a sub-deacon within the order. She describes lying in bed at night crying until she shook.
“I literally had no way out. I remember saying to God, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know what it’s like to live in the outside world but it can’t be worse than this’. I have five daughters. I wanted my girls to be fierce and independent and bright and happy, and to have self-confidence and self-esteem. I wanted them to be able to be whatever they wanted. Whether they wanted to be an air-force mechanic or to work at Bunnings, I didn’t care. I just wanted them to be happy.”
Fortunately, as Little Pebble faced his own reckoning, he would inadvertently provide Claire with a way out.
Brought to justice
In 2007, a jury heard that one of the girls Little Pebble was accused of abusing had written letters to the Virgin Mary and received replies encouraging her to become a “queen” and have a physical relationship with Kamm. He had taken her to a motel on more than one occasion. In one instance, she had refused to get into bed with him, saying she wanted to
sleep on the couch. Kamm, then aged in his mid-40s, had leapt out of the bed, naked, and tried to pull her in. He had begun to abuse her when she was 14 and had maintained his hold over her until she was 17, when she conceived his child.
Kamm was convicted of sexually assaulting two teenage girls. When it came time to sentence Little Pebble, NSW District Court Judge Peter Berman suggested that Kamm did not really believe the Virgin Mary told him to have sex with his victims – that it was a deception he had concocted so he could satisfy his desires.
“The offender’s belief is remarkably convenient for a person who wants to have sex with underage girls,” Judge Berman stated. “He deliberately manipulated [the victim’s] beliefs, not because he wished to re-populate the Earth, but simply because he wanted to have sex with her when she was 14 years old.” The teenager believed it
“This man harmed children in our area and absolutely should not be allowed back.”
was her “unfortunate duty” to sleep with Little Pebble, who she had been conditioned to see as a god. “It was part of the offender’s manipulative efforts that he was able to commit these offences without any fear that the authorities would discover them.”
As Little Pebble faced justice, Claire was given her chance. Kamm had been funnelling her family’s mortgage repayments into a fund to pay for his legal defence. One day the Sherriff showed up on Claire’s door and told her she was being evicted. She was actually relieved.
“He handed me this wad of papers. I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m so excited! What do you want me to do? I won’t give you any trouble’.”
Little Pebble launched numerous appeals, but each one failed. To this day, he continues to claim he is innocent. When he applied for permission to return to Nowra this year the court heard that police held concerns about a young woman living with Kamm and his third wife. In his defence, Kamm claimed that she was 18 years of age and “free to make up her own mind about her lifestyle”.
The police could not point to any criminal offence.
However, when the court gave permission for Little Pebble to return to his commune under strict supervision, the public outcry was fierce. “I remember the bastard chasing myself and girlfriends at
12. He should be put down,” wrote one woman in a petition that was circulated.
“This man harmed children in our area and absolutely should not be allowed back,” wrote another.
Local members of parliament stepped in, and the NSW Department of Justice declared that Little Pebble would not be permitted to return to the area. But he remains active.
“Of course he is,” says Claire. “When Kamm was in jail, his priest would go and hear his ‘confession’ and get instructions on how to run the order.”
Since breaking away from the cult, Claire has become a writer and a public speaker. She worked hard to adjust to the world outside the order and is studying sociology and religion at university. “For me now, it’s about finding the truth,” she says. “I want to know more.”
Little Pebble remains under strict supervision in Sydney, but he continues to prophesy. He writes to Russian President Vladimir Putin and former US President Donald Trump, whom he yearns to see restored to power. He blogs prophetically, warning that the current pandemic is just the beginning and soon volcanos will erupt all over the Earth and the new era will begin.
“The third world war will enter the world very soon! … The Antichrist wishes to take over the controlling nations of Europe! … Another devastation will come to you,” he shouts into the digital ether.
Fortunately, the failed cult leader doesn’t have a good record of getting these things right.