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MARIETTA — Set among the pineywoods of East Texas, Cass County is home to Don Henley of the Eagles, 1,000 miles of rural country road and a free-spirited, live-and-let-live way of life.
It’s a place where new faces are welcome but scrutinized.
In Marietta, there’s a church, along with a few homes, a Masonic Lodge, the city building and the Ole Town Cafe, the longtime bedrock of the 115-person town that is about 130 miles east of Dallas.
“That’s really the only thing in our town, is that restaurant,” said Kirby McCord, a teacher who runs his family’s nearby cattle ranch. His parents ate nearly every meal there. “A lot of people depended on it,” he said.
When Profundity Yours bought the restaurant, the food got better, said McCord and other locals. The new management was talkative and effusively kind. They offered more vegetarian options that appealed to McCord, who was changing his diet after a recent open-heart surgery.
“They’re nice folks,” McCord said.
But McCord began hearing some strange rumors about his new neighbors. Some of it was so far-fetched it couldn’t have been true. He heard the group might be a cult. He heard many more people — including a potential predator — might be moving into town. He heard other, and otherworldly, whispers.
“I started getting texts from my friends about things that were on the Internet about aliens,” he said.
Leslie Skopick wears a pair of alien sunglasses at the Ole Town Cafe as she pokes fun at…
Leslie Skopick wears a pair of alien sunglasses at the Ole Town Cafe as she pokes fun at what outsiders think of her and other Profundity Yours members.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
The Dallas Morning News traveled to Marietta and spoke with residents, local officials, McGillis and current and former members of her group to check out the rumors and understand the county’s sudden division.
‘We were all broken’
After her son was fatally shot in 2014, Michele Nahas became unmoored in grief. “I lost my faith in God and started looking for other things,” she said.
She found support in the new-age communities on YouTube and Facebook, where she was introduced to McGillis, who had been gaining a following as a sort of spiritual self-help guru.
McGillis was a stargazer and a lightworker — one who had gone through a soulful awakening and sought to help others reach similar epiphanies. She managed Facebook groups where followers could help one another address and confront trauma. For people like Nahas, it became a therapeutic experience.
“There was beauty,” said Nahas, who said she learned a lot from McGillis. “She’s very intelligent. She’s learned and has some very wise things to share.”
McGillis chose favorites from her followers, Nahas said. Many of them had deep-rooted personal trauma or were going through drastic changes in their lives, including divorces, family estrangement and the deaths of loved ones.
“We were all broken,” Nahas said, “and Linda made us feel like we had a purpose higher and better than anyone on Earth.”
Linda Good McGillis poses for a photo at the Ole Town Cafe in Marietta.
Linda Good McGillis poses for a photo at the Ole Town Cafe in Marietta.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
Vicki Grunstad was similarly disaffected as a single mom taking care of an ill and aging dad in 2018. “I felt kind of stuck in my life,” she said.
McGillis would tell Grunstad that she was her favorite. She promised Nahas she would take care of her for the rest of her life. Nahas repaid that devotion by leaving her family to become a caretaker for McGillis, who was living in the Central Texas town of Kempner, just outside Killeen, at the time.
‘I chose you’
As McGillis began gaining more of a following, something switched, Nahas and Grunstad said. While it had always been difficult to succinctly describe McGillis’ ideology — she told her followers they shouldn’t have any beliefs — they said she became more arcane in her advice and more conceited in her descriptions of herself.
McGillis described herself to followers as the Alpha and Omega, Nahas said. She said she was the “I am.” She compared herself to Jesus Christ.
In some of the many hours of video she posted to social media, McGillis brought more esoteric pronouncements into her ideology.
“I have holographic computers in front of me,” McGillis once said, “and because I’m one of the highest-ranking commanders of the Intergalactic Federation of Worlds, I am in direct contact with my ships and my fleets.” In that same video, McGillis referenced an “ascension” involving 144,000 people.
“It’s all a bunch of hooey,” Nahas said, “But that’s what she says. The more admiration came, the more she started sucking into this belief system that she was God.”
“‘This is who I am,’” Nahas recalled McGillis saying. “‘I chose you, Michele.’”
She could also be prone to screaming fits, they said. When her followers upset her, McGillis would turn some of the trauma they had shared against them, Nahas and Grunstad said. At one point, she told Nahas it was her own fault her son was killed.
“She would take that information, blow up on you and make you feel worthless,” Nahas said.
Nahas said she twice saw McGillis scream into the faces of minors. In the first instance, she said members of the group picked up a homeless 17-year-old outside a gas station in Kempner. When McGillis started telling the girl that she was God, the girl rejected her, putting McGillis in a rage.“Linda put her against a wall and started screaming,” she said. Nahas eventually took the girl out of the group’s trailer and sent her on her way.
When the 3-year-old child of a pair of Profundity Yours members began acting up, Nahas said she watched McGillis hold the child on the ground and scream at him. It all became too much for Nahas, who left Profundity Yours at the end of 2020 when a friend asked her to take care of him.
When Nahas told McGillis she wanted to leave, “she said I was evil,” Nahas said. “She said I was the devil. I was Satan’s daughter. I was choosing friends when I was supposed to take care of her.”
McGillis threatened her with hell, Nahas said. “My last words to her were, I think, ‘Hell would be better and if you are God I will choose not to serve you.’”
McGillis eventually decided to move out of Kempner and look for somewhere else to build a community with her followers.
They settled on Marietta.
The Marietta city office building (right), volunteer firehouse (center) and old mercantile…
The Marietta city office building (right), volunteer firehouse (center) and old mercantile building line Central Avenue across the street from Linda Good McGillis’ Ole Town Cafe.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
‘A third-eye slap’
Last April, a Profundity Yours member, Elvira Giummarra, bought a 152-acre ranch about 6 miles south of Marietta. Ownership of the ranch was transferred to Emerald Sun Ranch Trust, which is controlled by McGillis, in December, according to Cass County property records.McGillis formed a limited liability company, Profundity Yours LLC, earlier this year. That entity bought the Ole Town Cafe in late March.
Grunstad was preparing to move to the ranch with Profundity Yours. But the “tough love” from McGillis became an almost-daily occurrence, she said.
“It never let up,” Grunstad said. “If you said or did something, it was like you were under a microscope all the time.”
A sign warns trespassers to Linda Good McGillis’s rural Cass County ranch near Marietta,…
A sign warns trespassers to Linda Good McGillis’s rural Cass County ranch near Marietta, where she bought the town’s only restaurant, Ole Town Cafe.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
During a trip to Arizona, Grunstad, McGillis and others stopped at a crystal shop near Tucson, where McGillis started gathering thousands of dollars’ worth of crystals. Grunstad asked her whether it was a good idea to be spending that much money when they were in the process of buying a ranch.
McGillis smacked Grunstad in the forehead, she said.
“She called it a third-eye slap and asked me to shift my mind out of ‘poverty consciousness,’” Grunstad said.
At the ranch, Grunstad said she watched, but did not participate in, a ceremony involving hallucinogenic mushrooms. McGillis told the members they needed to take the mushrooms to have a breakthrough. If they didn’t break through, she said, they risked eternity in hell.Each participant took a large dose of mushrooms, Grunstad said. When the ceremony was over, McGillis told everyone they had failed. She homed in on one woman — who Grunstad said had a history that included sexual abuse — and grabbed her inner thigh. McGillis pointed in the woman’s face, said she needed to break through and demanded she take another dose of mushrooms before leaving the room.
While McGillis spoke with The Dallas Morning News during an extensive conversation in early June, she did not address specific allegations made by Grunstad and Nahas, and there is no indication in public records she has ever faced criminal charges. In a text message, Giummarra asked a reporter to “question the validity of what’s been said,” but declined to provide further information.
‘A strong gut feeling’
The presence of Profundity Yours in Marietta began gaining widespread attention after Syran Warner, a Minneapolis-based journalist who researches cults, posted snippets of some of McGillis’ videos to his TikTok account. Warner said McGillis’ rhetoric, including the talk of aliens and ascension, reminded him of the Heaven’s Gate movement, whose 39 members died in a mass suicide in California in 1997.
Heidi Lindsay-Reinhardt, who lives a county over from Profundity Yours, began mocking the group and McGillis on social media and gained a following.
After the restaurant’s Facebook page posted about a burger special, Lindsay-Reinhardt asked whether it was made from alien meat. Some of her posts went over the line, Lindsay-Reinhardt conceded. She posted a picture of an alien in crosshairs but deleted it after realizing it might be perceived as a threat.
Lindsay-Reinhardt said she regrets the alien talk taking up so much space in hindsight. One of her main motivators in bringing attention to Profundity Yours, she said, was to expose Mark McNeely, whom McGillis has described as her common-law husband.
In 2019, McNeely was sentenced to federal prison after pleading guilty to several child-pornography charges. He isn’t scheduled to be released until 2029, but Lindsay-Reinhardt and other Marietta residents said they don’t want someone they view as a predator to potentially live in their community someday.“I have kids,” Lindsay-Reinhardt said. “I am one of those people that does not believe pedophiles can be reformed. I have a strong gut feeling that when he gets out, he’s going to set up shop again.”
Residents of Marietta who didn’t disavow Profundity Yours said Lindsay-Reinhardt also started mocking them. One, Jan Deaton, said she was called a pedophile lover, which Lindsay-Reinhardt denied.
“I love these people,” Deaton said of Profundity Yours. “They haven’t done anything bad to me, and it makes me mad when people say bad things about these people because they don’t know them.” Questions about Profundity Yours began snowballing. Some locals wondered whether McGillis planned to invite 144,000 people to Cass County, which has a population of about 30,000, to prepare for their ascension. Others wondered whether the group was stockpiling weapons.
‘Everything I say makes sense’
Inside Ole Town Cafe, Profundity Yours members have taken a tongue-in-cheek approach to their notoriety.
In a gift shop, they sell T-shirts for $20 that say “We drank the Kool-Ade and survived!” A board inside the restaurant spells out the words “Christ Unites Love & Truth,” with the first letter of each word highlighted. Giummarra and another longtime member, Mariana Madrigal, welcome customers.
A sign above a civil engineer map of Marietta spells out the word CULT at the Ole Town Cafe.
A sign above a civil engineer map of Marietta spells out the word CULT at the Ole Town Cafe.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
For months, McGillis told The News during a three-hour conversation, she and other members have been subjected to relentless harassment because of Lindsay-Reinhardt’s Facebook posts and their newfound attention. Strangers have been driving onto their property. People asking about aliens have been calling the restaurant.
Profundity Yours isn’t a cult, McGillis said. It’s a family. And she’s not the leader — she’s just the one who brought everyone together.
There are no more than eight guns at the ranch, mainly used to kill feral hogs and snakes, McGillis said. The number 144,000 is a Biblical reference, not an anticipated Profundity Yours population.
McGillis’ family, as she calls it, wanted a place where they could grow and live as a community.
At the Ole Town Cafe, Linda Good McGillis (center) and her followers (from left) Mariana Madrigal, Leslie Skopick and Jill Martin talk about their experiences living in Marietta.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
“If they actually, genuinely were worried about their community, were worried about us hurting people, it wouldn’t be a witch hunt,” McGillis said.Grunstad said while she’s still healing from her experience, she harbors no hate toward McGillis. Nahas said she loved McGillis.
“By no means did I seek out to destroy this woman,” Nahas said. “I love that woman I met many years back, but she shifted out of it and went very dark.”
At the cafe, McGillis described a formative experience of her life — being sexually assaulted in 2013 in Montana, where she lived at the time. After the assault, she spent 44 days in the mountains alone near Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.
During those days in the mountains, McGillis said, her soul left her body and was replaced by something else. She said she met Jesus Christ.
“He gave me the intelligence I have,” McGillis said. “I don’t see the same way that I did before … and in every situation, I can see the unseen.”
McGillis said Lindsay-Reinhardt couldn’t possibly conceive of what she’s talking about because she operates on a different frequency. She threatened to sue Lindsay-Reinhardt.
“When you understand that everything is built on cosmic law, not human law; universal law, not human law; that everything begins in energy, frequency and vibration, then everything that I say makes sense,” McGillis said.
‘Family’
In his office, Cass County Judge Travis Ransom, the county’s top executive, said he believes the story of Profundity Yours has been blown out of proportion. He has received frequent calls from residents about McGillis and the group’s presence, and has assembled a thick dossier of publicly available information about the group and its members.
The Cass County Sheriff’s Office is aware of Profundity Yours. They’ve responded to the ranch after receiving two calls for well-being and animal-welfare checks, Sheriff Larry Rowe said. The deputy who responded to those calls, Amy Vallery, said all members seemed content. No law enforcement action was taken.
Cass County Judge Travis Ransom points where the small town of Marietta is on a map in…
Cass County Judge Travis Ransom points where the small town of Marietta is on a map in northwest Texas.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
Ransom said his county has more tangible problems: Meth. Poverty. Fatherlessness. He acknowledged concerns about McNeely, but said the department will take care to ensure he’s meeting reporting requirements if he moves to the county.
“If people spent as much time in the Bible, in church or in prayer as they have spent time online researching a cult in Marietta, Texas, they’d probably be a lot better off,” Ransom said. “I’m not trying to dismiss a concern, but being a nosy neighbor has its limits.”
After being told Profundity Yours would prefer to call itself a family instead of a cult, Ransom scoffed. They’re not a family by his understanding of the word, he said.
To make his point, Ransom pulled out a dictionary and looked up the definition of “family.” His eyes widened and he broke into a smile after coming upon the third definition.
“A group of people united by certain convictions.”
“Well,” the county judge said, shrugging. “Hot damn.”