“An apology is a GREAT idea!” Dave e-mailed to say.

I met up with Roland, one of the London-based leaders of the Jesus Christians and Susan’s husband. He drafted an impromptu apology for me to read out in the documentary.

“It would be great,” Roland said, “if you could say something like, ‘Hello, I’m Jon Ronson. I really must apologize for my article. I said this . . . Blah blah blah . . . It was wrong. And I guess I’ve been doing it for many years—reading into things or trying to make them more exciting—and in my zeal I misrepresented a few things. And I apologize.’”

“Many years?” I thought.

I didn’t say anything. I had been admonished into submission. Roland said he thought Dave was “extremely patient” with me when it came to pointing out my faults. “I was marveling at the amount of time he took over it,” he said.

“It certainly took many e-mails from Dave for me to see the error of my ways,” I said.

“It was worth it,” Roland said.

A month or so earlier, Roland’s wife, Susan, had gone to visit C in Scotland, and I went with her. This was the woman with kidney failure Susan had been corresponding with by e-mail, along with Larry in Aspen.

C turned out to be a young woman called Christine.

“When I first read the e-mail,” Christine told me when Susan was out of earshot, “I thought, ‘Nutter.’ A part of me still thinks there has to be some catch. But as yet I’ve not sussed it out. And maybe there isn’t one. Maybe it’s just my untrusting nature. She doesn’t seem like a crazy, off-her-head person. She seems like a normal, sane person. So she obviously knows what she’s doing. She hasn’t been brainwashed, as far as you can make out. It’s what she believes. And everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs, right? What’s the group called?”

“The Jesus Christians,” I said.

“I’ve not heard of them,” she said.

“They’ve never been that successful,” I said, “because they aren’t the most fun religious cult to be in.”

“It doesn’t sound like it if you have to give a bit of your body away to join,” Christine said, shrugging. We laughed.

Now, Roland told me, Susan had decided to donate her kidney not to Christine but to Larry in Aspen. The decision came to her in a dream. In the dream, she met a sixty-year-old man with gray hair, a little overweight, and he was happy to see her because she was about to give him her kidney. That’s exactly what Larry looked like, which is why she took this dream to be a message from God.

A few weeks passed. Then I received an e-mail from Dave in Australia. He wrote that Christine from Scotland was dying. He said he could instruct one of his members to give her a kidney, but if he did I would only accuse him of manipulation. So instead, he wrote, he had decided to let Christine die and let her death be on my conscience.

He posted me a video message. It was him, sitting on a sofa, speaking directly into the camera.

“It’s one thirty in the morning here in Australia,” he said, “and I’ve just received an urgent telephone call from the UK. It seems that Christine in Scotland has had a turn for the worse and I have to make a decision immediately if we’re going to help her at all. At the moment the only person in the community available to help Christine is Reinhart, and he’s booked to fly to India tomorrow morning. The problem with Reinhart is that although he’s willing to donate, he’s not very keen. I could push him into it. I have to make a decision, and there’s a life dependent on it.”

Dave paused. The bags under his eyes practically reached down to the end of his nose. His beard looked stragglier than ever.

“The decision I make,” he said, “is going to have to take into consideration repercussions from the media—people like yourself. As you know, we stopped the filming after your article appeared in the Guardian. Among other things, I was upset about the fact that you portrayed me as a manipulator, forcing or coercing Casey into doing something he might later regret. I think that was terribly unfair both to Casey and myself. No way did I push him into doing it. I didn’t even approach him. It was his idea and he ran with it. And that’s why we decided not to cooperate with you. But after this phone call tonight I’ve had a rethink. I’m prepared to go ahead with the documentary, but on one condition: You use this video. You see, I’m not going to say anything to Reinhart. I’ll let him fly out tomorrow. And I’ll let Christine’s blood be on your head, Jon, and on the heads of the authorities there in England, those people who felt that because a group of Christians wanted to donate their kidneys to strangers, there was something wrong with us. So go ahead. Make your documentary. But don’t forget to tell them about the recipients. That’s the big picture, Jon, and that’s been overlooked. These recipients are real people. People like Christine.”

Dave bowed his head and said: “Thank you.”

“You stupid fucking idiot,” I thought.

I’d entered Dave’s world convinced that the cult-busters were the crazy ones, comparing Dave to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc. But now I thought of him that way. Why? Because I really didn’t like him. I began to dislike Dave hugely, in the way that former members of sects hate their former leaders after they rejoin the real world.

Dave had especially hated the implication in my article that he was personally hoping to get out of donating a kidney. And, as it transpired, Dave did indeed donate one, in January 2003, to a man from California.

Susan donated a kidney to Larry from Aspen. I don’t know what happened to Christine from Scotland. Three years later, on April 26, 2006, the Department of Health announced plans to legalize altruistic kidney donations—donations from a stranger to a stranger—as long as they were assured no money was changing hands, and no coercion was taking place.

“I Make It Look Like They Died in Their Sleep”

In January 2002 the Irish television news reports that a woman’s body has been found in a rented house in Donnybrook, Dublin. Her name is Rosemary Toole Gilhooly. The police say it was suicide. She’d been suffering from depression. The story would probably have gone unreported were it not for the fact that she’d been spotted at Dublin Airport a day earlier, picking up two jolly-seeming Americans at arrivals. The three of them were then seen drinking Jack Daniel’s and Coke at the Atlantic Coast Hotel in Westport, County Mayo. At one point, other drinkers later testified to the police, Rosemary Toole Gilhooly stood up to go to the toilet and did a jig at the table. The next day she was dead and that night the two mysterious Americans, one dressed as a reverend, left Dublin.

The Irish police release the names of their suspects. They’re seeking the arrest and extradition of the Reverend George Exoo and his partner, Thomas McGurrin, of Beckley, West Virginia, for the crime of assisting a suicide, which, under Irish law, carries a maximum prison sentence of fourteen years.

Radio phone-in shows across Ireland are ablaze with callers supporting Rosemary Toole Gilhooly’s right to kill herself with a reverend at her side if that was what she wanted. I feel the same way. I contact George Exoo to ask if I can follow him around. He agrees.

And so, at dawn on a Monday in 2003, he and I set off in his old Mercedes on a five-hour drive to Baltimore to visit a new prospective client, Pam Acre, who has told him she’s been suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome since the 1970s and is considering killing herself. George is paying for the petrol himself even though he’s broke. He says he asks for donations from his clients but often doesn’t get them, but he doesn’t care because this is his calling.