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| http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130310/METRO/303100306
Metro Detroit family blames fringe religion for Redford woman's suicide
By Francis X. Donnelly
The Detroit News
Kelly Pingilley 22, of Redford. Pingilley killed herself in December after joining an Ohio religious group that believes in doomsday prophecies. (Facebook page of Sherry Shriner)
Redford Township -- Kelly Pingilley was trying to make sense of the voices in her head when she went looking for answers on the Internet.
She stumbled upon a website promoting a religion that believes in UFOs, vampires, conspiracy theories and doomsday prophecies.
Pingilley was drawn to the writings of time travel and people's thoughts being controlled by cell phone towers, friends said. With the teachings feeding into her delusions, Pingilley's behavior grew increasingly erratic.
In December, she wrote in a personal blog that the world was about to end in a lurid outburst of cannibalism, bestiality and the moon dripping blood. One week later she killed herself. She was 22.
"Someone in that state of mind can potentially be very vulnerable and suggestible," said Rick Ross, a frequently used expert witness whose Trenton, N.J., institute has been tracking cults for 17 years.
"The combination of a mentally unstable person and a destructive cult can be a very volatile mix."
Ross wasn't aware of Sherry Shriner, the woman behind the website that attracted Pingilley.
Pingilley's family and friends blame her death on the fringe religion, saying leader Shriner filled Pingilley's head with scary, apocalyptic thoughts.
"Kelly didn't hitch a ride on a spaceship. She didn't die peacefully," said Debra McCorkle, 54, a Pingilley family friend from Johnson City, Tenn.
"It was a cold and silent death alone in the woods. She was looking for God, and Shriner steered her into some weird crap."
Pingilley's grandmother, Kellie Pingilley, agrees.
"She's done a lot of damage," Pingilley, 73, of Southfield, said about Shriner. "Someone should do something about her."
Kellie Pingilley declined to say why the family failed to get help for her granddaughter's apparent affliction. Other family members didn't want to be interviewed.
Shriner, who believes God put her on earth to stop the arrival of the Antichrist, said in an interview she wasn't aware how irrational Pingilley had become until reading her blog after her death.
If she had known, she said, she would have done something to help her.
"Her last blog -- I don't know where she came up with it," said Shriner, 47, of Carrollton, Ohio, near Canton. "Some stuff was pretty out there. It was just crazy."
But Shriner also said she didn't believe Pingilley killed herself. She said the death was made to look like a suicide by the people who really killed her -- a NATO hit squad.
'A great truth seeker'
Pingilley's childhood held few clues to the trauma that would follow.
She was a happy kid, a cheerleader with a ready smile, friends said. She attended Lutheran schools and believed in God. Living with her mom and a brother in Redford Township, she worked as a technician at a drug and alcohol rehab clinic.
She first contacted Shriner in 2010 after reading on a website the Ohio woman needed someone to transcribe her weekly radio program, "Aliens in the News."
Shriner said the young woman told her she was trying to decide between going to college or giving her life to God.
"It just clicked with her," Shriner said. "She became a great truth seeker in such a short amount of time, always wanting to learn new things."
Shriner runs her Internet ministry from her home. Among her 19 websites are They Want You Dead, Serpent Seedline and Just Give Me the Truth. She said the sites are viewed 3 million times a month. Her Facebook page has 230 followers.
The self-proclaimed messiah, who has self-published two books about her beliefs, said during her radio show in January that people who agree with her teachings are often described as crazy by society.
"They don't fit in here," she said. "They're the black sheep, the square pegs. People desert them, they mock them, they don't understand them."
She said the only way to stop the approaching apocalypse is through "orgone," which are crystals, copper coils and aluminum shavings encased in fiberglass resin. Shriner, who makes the orgone, sells it in various shapes and sizes for prices ranging from $6 to $750. She said she makes $10,000 a year through sales and donations.
Beginning the ministry in 2000, she has been preaching for 13 years the end of the world is imminent.
Schizophrenia never diagnosed
As Pingilley became more interested in Shriner's teachings, she withdrew from her family and friends. She had tried to talk to them about her new beliefs but they were incredulous, she wrote on her blog.
She retreated to her computer, spending marathon sessions researching the religion, discussing it with other believers and writing her blog.
"I know how it feels to be all alone in your area with no real believers or support nearby," she wrote in her blog in August.
Pingilley, a regular listener of Shriner's online radio program, was one of three followers who volunteered to join the religious leader on trips to New York and Fort Knox, Ky., last year.
In New York, which Shriner believes sits above a lair of aliens, the group buried muffin-shaped orgone all over the city for eight days, said Marianne Mulloy, one of the volunteers.
Pingilley didn't care about shopping or sightseeing, said Mulloy, 59, of Plymouth. When the rest of the group returned to the hotel to sleep or relax, she plotted how to distribute more orgone.
"Kelly went nonstop on a mission. You never saw anything like it," Mulloy said. "She was her happiest on orgone missions."
Pingilley was never diagnosed with schizophrenia but her blog suggests signs of the disease. The journal, which covered the last two years of her life, describes hallucinations, paranoia and delusions of grandeur.
Recounting a dream, Pingilley wrote in 2011 she didn't believe schizophrenia was real.
"It's all chip implants and demonic/alien interference in some way, shape or form," she wrote.
The last blog
At first Pingilley's blog echoed the teachings of Shriner. But she eventually turned from disciple to messiah, believing she was the anointed one. She even appropriated some of Shriner's personal experiences as her own.
Pingilley's blog became increasingly irrational -- long, convoluted posts on the minutia of her beliefs. She would introduce a word from the Bible followed by 15 definitions.
One of her last blogs was titled "The Importance of Crying."
"This kingdom coming ahead is putrid and disgusting to the very depths of all the abominations that could exist," she wrote a week before her death.
The blog never suggested what would happen Dec. 28.
Three days after Christmas, Pingilley left her home at night, telling her brother Nate she was going off to be with her daughters, he told others. She believed she had had children in an earlier life.
Unknown to Nate, she had left a note on her pillow.
"I'm off to fulfill my destiny," it read. "I don't know when I'll be returning."
Police determined she drove 53 miles to Waterloo State Recreation Area east of Jackson, took 30 sleeping pills, wrapped herself in a blanket against the evening chill and lay down in a field covered with freshly fallen snow and died.
She was found the next morning by hunters, police said. Around her neck was a pendant made of orgone.
From The Detroit News
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