Sister Susan's Cult

Dean Clouse Jr and Tina Linn had the whirlwind romance that most of us only read about in books and see in movies. In 1978, New Smyrna Beach, Florida, Dean was nineteen and Tina was fifteen years old when they stepped into each other’s lives and changed them forever.

Less than a year later, the young couple rushed to the Volusia County Courthouse and officially tied the knot, becoming Mr and Mrs Clouse. Nine months after that, a honeymoon baby made the family complete. Little Holly Marie was born on January 24th, 1980, and even though they were only young parents themselves, both Dean and Tina were determined to do everything they could to give Holly the life she deserved.

They loved her and those around them described Dean and Tina as deeply devoted parents, but they were just starting out in life and there often wasn’t very much to go around. To make ends meet, the young family moved with Tina’s sister, Sherry Linn, but it was only that summer that opportunity came a-knocking.

Dean was a talented cabinet maker and he had also sensed an opportunity. Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas was developing quickly. With a huge boom in the construction industry down there, there was bound to be a need for cabinet makers, especially one that could churn out high-quality items. The young Clouses made the decision to move.

Dean borrowed his mother’s car and the family moved to Lewisville in the hopes that they were about to make a very comfortable life for themselves.

Dean found work with a homebuilding company and the family moved in to live with Dean’s cousin as they saved up money to find their own place. And it was a good thing for them to wait too. They had only just moved and work wasn’t always steady. Sometimes the money flowed and sometimes there was barely enough to go around, but the young couple never seemed to feel like they were going without.

Despite their financial situation Dean and Tina seemed to be getting on better than ever.

That was one of the reasons why their families were so shocked and confused when they suddenly disappeared around October of that year, only a few short months after moving to Texas. After months of trying to reach them, Dean’s mother reported them as missing only to get a lackluster response from law enforcement.

The police argued that Dean and Tina were young adults and if they had cut off ties with their families back home, it was probably because they’d wanted to.

Time dragged on and still there was no word from either of them. In a desperate attempt to pick up any traces of their missing family members, both families continued to spread the news around their communities and even asked the Salvation Army to keep an eye out for them in their databases.

All leads came to a dead-end and difficult, hard-hitting questions went unanswered for decades.

It was only in 2020, over forty years later, that things began to change. 

Forensic genealogists Misty Gillis and Allison Peacock were given the herculean task of identifying the over 40,000 unidentified remains still within the cold-case system of the United States and with that came some startling discoveries.

Within days of testing samples taken from the John and Jane Doe known within the department as Romeo and Juliet, Misty and Allison found themselves on a whirlwind journey of their own. 

The young couple had been found in northern Harris County, Texas, back on January 12th, 1981. It looked like the two had been the victims of foul play out in the secluded, marshy woodland and even the discovery of their remains had been the result of a truly gruesome turn of events.

A man out walking his dog that winter in 1981, let the dog off its leash and the dog darted into the forest, but when it came back, it was carrying the decomposing remains of a human arm.

The man immediately alerted the police who came down to the area only to find that there was so much more. A young man and a young woman had been brutally killed out in the wilderness and it looked like the male victim had been the last to go. From the evidence that was left at the scene, investigators were able to piece together that the woman had been strangled to death. The man had been bound, gagged and beaten until he’d died too. He’d probably been beaten because he’d been trying to protect and save the woman. Both victims had died at the scene and their remains had been left to slowly decompose only a few feet away from each other.

An autopsy revealed that they had probably been killed somewhere between a week to a few months before they’d been discovered.

Attempts to identify the couple, including through facial reconstructions, came back empty-handed and it was only forty years later that the truth was finally revealed. Dean and Tina Clouse had died in the forests of Harris County back in 1980 and they had been too new in the community for anyone to know them or even notice that they had gone.

They were buried as John and Jane Doe in Harris County Cemetery.

It was only when DNA testing of their remains came back with some hits decades later that the fate of this young couple came closer to the light. Dean Clouse’s DNA was a close match to several others within the forensic databases in Kentucky. Following the family tree, Misty Gillis and Allison Peacock then made a call to Debbie Brooks and asked if she had had any family members go missing back in the eighties.

It turned out that Debbie Brooks was Dean’s sister.

After forty years, and only ten days of DNA investigation, Romeo had been identified as Dean Clouse and it was very shortly after that that Juliet was found out to be his wife Tina. Their families came out to Harris County, both to visit Dean and Tina’s grave and to see the place where they had been murdered. It was only then that Dean’s mother gave up hope that her son was still alive.

Now with their victims finally identified, a new investigation was opened with the hopes of finally catching Dean and Tina’s killers, but the detectives quickly hit a snag. Still riding the high of providing a family who had gone with nothing for over forty years with answers, Allison Peacock found herself stumped when Debbie Brooks asked if anyone had found the baby.

“What baby?” Allison had asked back.

It was only then that the authorities found out about Holly and with that came a fresh batch of startling and chilling questions. Had whoever had killed her parents killed Holly as well? Had her body been snatched away and eaten by the wildlife in the forest? Had she been kidnapped and trafficked and lived a life of misery and exploitation for the last forty years?

A widespread effort and search was put into place to find Holly. If she was still alive, chances were that she had no idea who she really was or that she still had family out there who were looking for her.

And against all odds, on June seventh, 2022, on Dean’s birthday, Holly was found.

She was alive and well and had been all this time.

One of the clues came when the investigation was refused the right to see Holly’s birth certificate because she’d been adopted, which then led them to a church in Oklahoma where Holly had been dropped off all those years ago.

The pastor, who would later turn out to be the man who’d adopted Holly, remembers two young women, barefoot and wearing white dresses, leaving Holly at the church that day with her actual birth certificate. They also had with them signed documentation where Dean had allegedly given over his parental rights, meaning that Holly was free to be adopted. There was a similar story of women in white dresses abandoning a child at a laundromat as well.

Holly had lived her life not knowing how the women in white dresses had had her that day, but Dean’s family had an inkling.

When Dean had been a teenager, he’d been interested in religious groups, cults more than likely being the more appropriate term. His mother had even come home one time to find Dean sitting in the kitchen, talking to two bearded men in white robes who’d referred to each other as brothers. Sometimes Dean would go off with these “brothers”, who supposedly belonged to a nomadic religious group who believed in male, female separation and vegetarianism amongst other things, but the point was that Dean always came home afterwards.

And when Dean met Tina, he’d stopped going out with the “brothers” altogether.

But back in December 1980, right before Dean’s mother reported the young family as missing, a woman calling herself “Sister Susan” reached out to Dean’s family and said that she wanted to meet with them. The meeting came with a lot of conditions. They were only to meet at night and even though there were several members in white robes present, the family could only speak with Sister Susan.

It was there that Sister Susan told Dean’s family that Dean and Tina had joined their religious group and they were cutting ties with their “worldly” families. They wouldn’t be reaching out again and if the family ever tried to contact either of them, they wouldn’t be getting an answer. To prove that Dean and Tina were serious about not wanting to ever see their families again, they were returning the car that Dean had borrowed from his mother.

Both families were unconvinced and made several attempts to get law enforcement to look into the situation more seriously, including trying to file missing persons reports.

It was decades later, on her biological father’s birthday, that Holly sat down on Zoom to speak with the people who had been holding onto hope of one day finding her.

“She has her mother’s smile and her voice. To the T, she’s soft. Yeah, very soft-spoken,” Dean’s mother, Donna Casasanta, later told the press. “I just wanted to get up and hug her so bad.”

Holly and her remaining family got their wish a year later after fundraising efforts were able to sponsor a trip down to Florida for Holly to meet everyone in person.