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Chapter 1: What warning does the episode give about sensitive topics?
Listen to all episodes of Scary Terry ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page or visit getthebinge.com to access wherever you listen. The Binge, feed your true crime obsession. The Binge. Before we get started, I just want to let you know that we do discuss suicide in this episode.
Chapter 2: What tragic events surround Terry Hoffman's circle?
So please listen with care. People talk about the Texas sky. It's big, grand, but there's more to it than that. There's a sense of perspective, awe even, that holds its lovers captive. And under that wide canvas, the human drama plays out, small and terrifying below. By the late 1980s, the drama that surrounded Terry Hoffman's small circle was beginning to bleed out from its protective covering.
Hi, my name is Pete Slover and I'm an attorney in Austin, Texas. At the time that the Hoffman case was unfolding, I was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News.
Chapter 3: Who is Pete Slover and what role did he play?
Pete was a cub reporter in the 80s when he joined the paper. And for one of his first big stories, he started looking into Terry and her group. By then, Devereux Cleaver had drowned. Glenn Cooley overdosed. Sandra and Louise had driven off a cliff. Don Hoffman had taken his life in a hotel on account of cancer he didn't have.
I didn't see anything that was obvious that would explain their deaths, but what I did see was Terry Hoffman's name recurring in multiple places.
Chapter 4: How did Terry manipulate her followers?
How could one person seemingly have been in the right place at the right time to benefit from so many deaths, so many suicides?
It's easy to kind of roll up these series of events into one kind of crazy story. But at the same time, you have to think of each one of these victims as being deeply affected and arguably their lives ruined, their family members' lives ruined by these circumstances. So that's a huge thing.
So Pete went looking for answers.
I talked to her on the phone.
Terry Hoffman. He called her up. At that point, she would have been in her early 50s.
She was very soft-spoken, very quiet, and did not betray anything of what other people recounted as something of a pretty stiff temper.
Pete Slover was particularly interested in what happened to one couple, the Goodmans, and their involvement with Terry, because he actually knew David.
I was a student of David Goodman, who was a professor at Southern Methodist University. He had this kind of big, blocky, bowl haircut that seemed a little bit dated even in the 80s when I knew him. Kind of a Sir Lancelot look going on. And he was kind of funny and light and very, very intellectual.
His specialty was something new at the time, how to integrate computers into workplaces. He had gotten a PhD at Yale and eventually found himself in Dallas as a professor at SMU. His son, Tony, summed him up this way.
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Chapter 5: What led to the deaths of David and Glenda Goodman?
I teach that an individual does not only have one life to live, but many.
Secure death doesn't work.
No, I don't.
Could Terry have pushed the Goodmans, like her other followers, to believe that their soul would return to Earth someday? That they needn't fear death? From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Scary Terry. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Chapter 5, The White Pill. By the time Tony and his brother Rick left for college, his dad had been involved with Terry for over 15 years.
This wasn't a flash-in-the-pan thing. He was a true believer. And as the years went on, Tony said his dad's ideas became stranger, more extreme. Terry, it seemed, loomed larger in his worldview now.
He was definitely at the point where I'd do anything she says because he is... incarnation of Jesus.
This sounds familiar to me. In the group I was raised in, something similar happened. A guru-type figure who started out as a kind of spiritual cheerleader, a life coach. Over the years, he began to cast himself with a wider net. Terry now had the power to control your body, your thoughts. She wasn't just having visions of Jesus. She was Jesus. Jesus.
He started talking about these pills that Hoffman gave him that raises your energy to the spiritual level and puts you in touch with God. And that once the world found out about these pills, everything would be different. It was probably about that time I really felt like it was getting too strange.
By now, both Rick and Tony were out of the house. Glenda and David lived on a beautiful tree-lined street near campus in North Dallas. Somewhere along the line, David had stopped talking to his son, Rick. Terry had told him not to. This was a giant, blood-red flag billowing in the breeze before a hurricane. At least to us, now, knowing what we know. Saturday, November 25th, 1989.
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Chapter 6: What were the circumstances of the Goodmans' discovery?
There were some outstanding questions regarding their deaths. What was the timer used for? And if they had shot themselves point blank in the head, how had David's glasses stayed on? all elements that were hard to have much insight into. The Goodmans had become so isolated, and their bodies so completely decomposed by the time they were discovered.
Questions did start to emerge about their involvement with Terry, both from what was unearthed in the diary, but also the money.
They had paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years. They transferred her a significant amount of money in increments up to $40,000. In all, there was more than $100,000 they had given her over probably 10 months. And beyond that, there were notes in their journals about how they needed to get a lawyer to get the deed to their property transferred to Ms. Hoffman.
That never actually happened, but it was pretty clear that that was their intent.
How had the Goodmans ended up killing themselves if they had? What proof was there that Terry had a hand in coercing them to die by suicide? I hoped Tony would help me be able to get to the bottom of it. By the time they died, they were incredibly low, but their spiral started innocently enough
David told his son that he would see things in meditation sometimes, things that he would feel compelled to act on, that these were actual communications from God that he needed to trust.
I think he and Glenda would, and I don't have too many specifics here, would have a meditation and then they would get these impressions, you know, just whatever they happened to imagine, and then they would go execute on it. Like, God told me not to eat corn ever again, and then they would just not eat corn ever again.
But the ideas that God relayed to him were, of course, not all as harmless as don't eat corn.
He inclined to self-isolate. I wanted to stay in touch with my father, and to do that, I kind of needed to believe that there was, I didn't want to believe he was, he'd just been involved in a cult his whole life.
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Chapter 7: What financial ties did the Goodmans have with Terry?
These journals described increasing confusion, frustration, and then ultimately physical discomfort at how messed up life seemed to them.
And then things took an even more desperate turn.
And ultimately, those journals included talk of bullets.
The union of your physical and your spirit is imminent. Do not give in to the lies that they spread that you won't get your spirits. They can stop you by destroying your faith. Ignore all these negative symptoms. Shower, clean up, walk, etc. Keep your mind busy. And most important, deny that you have any interference. Keep faith that you will get your spirit soon.
Your consciousness can overcome this if you don't give in.
By then, the Goodmans were distressed and losing hope fast. Adding bullets to their feverish delusions was not gonna end well. In another sequence of entries, David asks questions of God. Glenda answered those questions by channeling the voice of the divine. Glenda and David's parts are being read by actors.
Just like with the shooting. If you do that, I can make you a success. That is, can make you yourself, your spirit.
God, would it be possible for you to make us feel well? God, I don't feel that I can continue. Do you think I'm lying? I know you are not lying.
These were very detailed journals, and they were really sad.
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Chapter 8: What evidence suggests drug manipulation in the Goodmans' relationship with Terry?
The conversations between Terry and Dorothy continued, mostly about Dorothy's spiritual and sexual development. But this week, January of 1990, Dorothy asked Terry about herself. What was she up to? She's talking about the wrongful death suits. This was a couple of years before the bankruptcy.
Dorothy asked if there was any way she could help. uh we should still send you some energy or yeah we still need energy to see if they'll back out he says he doesn't think they'll back out because they think that i have a lot of money and they think that um that they can get some that they can get some
She told Dorothy that a trial would be expensive, that the kids, this I'm presuming is meant to be Janet and Rick, would be bled dry by the cost of depositions.
Drag it out as long as he can, because the longer he drags it out, the more it's going to cost them personally. That's going to be our tactic.
This isn't the humble servant of God crying foul. I hear a clever strategist. someone who managed to skirt the law long enough, she wasn't about to get caught now.
Okay, send them pale blue and then visualize or imagine money coming to them.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, you can do that for me too. My attorney is going to cost over $100,000. Oh, my goodness. Yes. All right. We'll do that. Thanks. Now, is this kind of experience, the hard, hard things like this, is this part of your evolution as well? No, it's BL stuff. It's what stuff? BL stuff. Black Lord stuff. Oh, okay.
And you can't control somebody that's out of the cycle like his children are out of the cycle, but they're very, very greedy. They're totally greedy people. Yes.
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