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Child Sex Cult Leader Freed From Prison
Child Sex ‘Cult’ Leader Freed From Prison
On Friday, after serving 33 years for sex crimes against children, George Feigley, 68, will exit prison and reenter society.
Because of the timing and the nature of his crimes, he is not subject to Megan’s Law restrictions. He will not be ordered to check in with police or with a parole officer. He will not wear a tracking device.
He is expected to return to his house at 1316 Derry St. in Harrisburg, the residence where in 1975 prosecutors say he sexually abused children while acting as the charismatic leader of a sex cult and advocating the use of children for sexual gratification, according to police reports.
Feigley, who used aliases such as “G.G. Stoctay Ph.D.” and “the Angel of Light,” has long maintained that his Neo American Church was never a cult. But he had a group of devoted followers who risked life and limb for him.
In 1976, he engineered a daring escape by scaling a prison wall and fleeing to West Virginia where he’d started a commune and school. Police and FBI caught up to him in 1978, but he escaped again less than a month later while awaiting extradition. Nabbed again by the FBI in Tennessee, he was behind bars again in two months.
In 1983, according to newspaper reports, two of his followers died in what was believed to be another attempt to spring him from prison. A man and a woman crawled into a sewer line close to the Western Penitentiary only to drown when the Ohio River swept in.
In 1994, Feigley and his wife, Sandra, were back in court. Prosecutors said Feigley had been orchestrating the abuse of a minor from prison. While speaking on a prison phone, Feigley gave commands to his wife and another man on work release to have sex with a 14-year-old girl.
Feigley was found guilty and sentenced for conspiracy to commit involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. Because of problems with the search warrants, Feigley’s wife and the girl’s mother were able to plead guilty and receive probation.
In the 1970s, everyone in Harrisburg knew the name of George Feigley and the Neo American Church, which prized sexual pleasure above all else, on Derry Street.
“Back then, it seemed like someone always knew someone somehow involved,” said Scott Portzline, a concerned citizen who has followed this case since the 1980s. “It seemed like everyone had a friend or a cousin or a girlfriend with some sort of affiliation.”
Now, in 2008, it is an old and strange case that few remember. But because of a flurry of recent media attention surrounding Feigley’s release, Harrisburg is getting a history lesson on the details of crimes against children committed by Feigley and his followers.
The tenets of Feigley’s Neo American Church, not to be confused with a church of the same name founded by Timothy Leary in the 1960s, included an emphasis on achieving mystical experiences through orgasm. It also included a sinister point of view on the sexuality of children and how they should be used for pleasure.
Feigley founded the church and the school in 1971. But in 1975, after receiving complaints from one of the parents, the police became aware that something wasn’t right on Derry Street. Feigley was arrested on multiple counts of statutory rape, indecent assault and corrupting the morals of minors, for which he was sentenced to 10 years to 20 years in prison.
His wife, Sandra, was also found guilty of corrupting the morals of minors.
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