A New York native, born in 1925, LeGrand was arrested on charges of kidnapping , assault, and firearms possession in 1965. Three years later, police accused him of snatching a 23-year-old woman from her home, assaulting and raping her before she managed to escape. Neither case was prosecuted, but in 1975, LeGrand was convicted of bribery and sexual misconduct with a 17-year-old girl. That same year, along with his 20-year-old son Noconda, LeGrand was convicted of kidnapping and rape ; he drew a sentence of five to 15 years in prison, while his son got off"easy" with an eight-year prison term. Such conduct is not unheard of in New York City, but it is peculiar for the leader of a church. A self-styled holy man, LeGrand had organized St. John's Pentecostal Church of Our Lord a decade earlier, putting down roots in the Crown Heights district of Brooklyn. His headquarters, a four-story townhouse, was occupied by eleven "nuns" and their 47 children, many of them fathered by LeGrand. According to police, LeGrand did most of his recruiting by seduction, impregnating young women, then threatening them or their children if they refused to beg for money on the streets. His black-clad "nuns" were often seen around Grand Central Station, and others had been jailed on misdemeanor charges in New Jersey. It was within the Crown Heights "chapel" that LeGrand had raped his final victim , during August 1974, and authorities suspected that sexual assault was only the tip of the iceberg. In 1966, LeGrand's "church" had purchased a 58-acre spread in the Catskills, near White Sulphur Springs, converting the place to a summer retreat for the faithful. Over the next eight years, state police received steady complaints from the neighbors, alleging child abuse and health violations, wild parties and indiscriminate gunfire. Children from the camp roamed freely through the countryside, begging and stealing, while horses were cruelly beaten and left to starve. Authorities raided the camp in October 1968, seizing drug paraphernalia, photographing clogged toilets and general squalor, but LeGrand's troop returned each summer, without fail, immune to public opinion. Church members Gladys Stewart, 16, and her sister Yvonne, 18, had testified for the prosecution in LeGrand's bribery trial, but they were missing when the D.A. sought to use their testimony in the later rape case. Informants said the girls were dead, dismembered in the Brooklyn "church," with their remains transported to the Catskills for disposal. State police dug up the ranch in mid-December 1975, but they came away empty-handed. Three months later, on March 6, assorted bones and bits of cartilage were found in Briscoe Lake, and Brooklyn raiding parties turned up human bloodstains in the Crown Heights townhouse. By April, state police were confident that Devernon LeGrand had murdered a dozen or more victims, dumping some of them in Briscoe Lake. The list included three wives, two of LeGrand's step-children, the Stewart sisters, and two male employees of his "church." In May 1976, LeGrand was indicted on four counts of murder, including the Stewarts and two of his wives, slain in 1963 and 1970, respectively. The "reverend's" son, 26-year-old Steven LeGrand, was also charged with murdering the Stewart sisters, plus two men employed by his father as pimps. Father and son were convicted together in the Stewart case, on May 7, 1977, and both drew prison terms of 25 years to life.