They left family, joined a cult and vanished from their Missouri home. Months later, there’s still no trace of them

FLORISSANT, Mo. — It’s been about six months since four adults and two toddlers checked out of a Quality Inn just north of St. Louis and seemingly vanished without a trace. They left behind baffled family members and a houseful of personal belongings.

They never used their credit or debit cards again. There’s no indication they had cash savings, and the money their family sent them via money-sharing apps sits in their accounts unclaimed. Their social media pages lie dormant.

Authorities have received only two tips from people who thought they’d seen the group — even after Berkeley, Missouri, police Maj. Steve Runge went public with the investigation last month and said they had joined a cult led by a self-proclaimed prophet and convicted sex offender. Both tips were unfounded.

“They have to turn up somewhere,” Runge said in January. “This cannot be the only case of missing people in this country tied to this cult.”

The missing people drew national attention, and interest burned hot for a few days. But there hasn’t been a whisper of news since then.

The group disappeared just a few days before the beginning of a separate trial against Rashad Jamal, the leader of the unnamed, nationwide, online-focused cult that’s aimed at Black and Latino people. Jamal was convicted and sentenced in Georgia on charges of child molestation and child cruelty and is serving an 18-year prison sentence.

In his videos, posted to tens of thousands of followers on YouTube and various social media platforms, he encourages people to go off the grid and create a “total disconnection” from family and friends.

In interviews over the past month, family members said that’s exactly what happened with the six people who disappeared from St. Louis County: St. Louis-area residents Mikayla Thompson, 25; her sister’s cousin, 36-year-old Makayla Wickerson; Wickerson’s 3-year-old daughter Malaiyah Wickerson; as well as Naaman Williams, 30, of Washington, D.C.; Gerielle German, 27, of Horn Lake, Mississippi; and her 3-year-old son Ashton Mitchell.

The families told similar stories. Their relatives grew distant, then cut ties altogether. They abandoned jobs and adopted new names, and their behavior became increasingly strange.

Runge, the detective leading the case, talked to several followers of the cult, and they told him the group was off preparing for their imminent rapture and ascension. When pressed for more information, they wouldn’t give it.

“You eventually have to come out and get food and get toiletries and get household items that you need to be able to live,” said Mariah Williams, a relative of both Thompson and Wickerson. “I hope they are somewhere here so we can get them back and give them the help that they need.”

Cutting ties

Jamal has posted thousands of hours of videos in the past few years, many of which involve him speaking into the camera, alone, about polygamy and anti-government conspiracy theories.

He garnered some notoriety as a rapper about eight years ago. But his fame exploded upon founding a subscription website called the University of Cosmic Intelligence. Before his arrest, Jamal posted regularly to a YouTube page by the same name, in addition to his personal social media pages.

In an interview with the Post-Dispatch from jail last month, he vehemently denied he was a cult leader.

“I’m just giving you my opinion on a plethora of different subjects: from metaphysics to quantum physics to molecular biology to marine biology to geography to Black history to world history,” he said. “That doesn’t make me a cult leader.”

But followers flocked to hear his online lectures — and to apply them to their own lives.

Family members said Thompson changed her phone number and withheld it from relatives. German left her husband of less than two months, moved to St. Louis and stopped talking to her mother. Wickerson cut off her family, quit her job at banking giant JP Morgan, and insisted that her 3-year-old daughter was actually her mother.

Most said they needed to follow their ancestors, and they were seen staring at the sun for hours by neighbors at Wickerson’s rental home in Berkeley.

They would lie — sometimes unclothed — in the uncut grass outside the home. They hugged trees, meditated, buried pennies and did martial arts on couch cushions.

As they distanced themselves from relatives, the group became closer. It’s not entirely clear when, exactly, they all came to live in Wickerson’s home. But they stopped paying rent sometime in February, and they were evicted in July just before going missing.

Relatives have pieced together some of what happened.

Thompson, one of the St. Louis-area residents, took an interest in tarot cards around the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, said her mother and Mariah Williams, a relative of both Thompson and Wickerson. She built a small business charging people for readings and selling metaphysical objects like crystals, candles and other homemade items.

Thompson then connected with Wickerson, the other St. Louis-area resident. Wickerson paid Thompson for tarot readings, Mariah Williams said, and shortly after that Wickerson began cutting off her family.

Meanwhile, Wickerson quit her job and changed her number early last year. She deleted her social media accounts, creating new ones under her goddess name “Intuahma Aquaman Auntil” — something all four did at some point, a common practice among Jamal’s followers.

“I feel like she has been brainwashed, manipulated, or whatever you want to call it into doing the things that she was doing. Because that’s not how she presents herself,” Mariah Williams said. “She was always one of those people who cared for themselves. She kept her job — she and her daughter always had what they wanted and needed. She was very family-oriented.”

Thompson, meanwhile, didn’t have such strong family ties. She was assaulted by another family member when she was a teenager, family members said, and she’d had an on-and-off relationship since then with her mother, Felicia Thompson.

Mariah Williams, who shares a father with Mikayla Thompson and met her for the first time in 2013, said she was the only family member who seemed to have a solid rapport with the 25-year-old. But even their relationship began to crack in 2022, and by the end of February 2023, the women were no longer talking.

Still, her mom said, things seemed to be going fine for Mikayla Thompson. She was a typical young person just trying to navigate life as an adult and a new mom.

“But then she met that guy,” Felicia Thompson said.

‘The cosmic war room’

That guy — 30-year-old Naaman Williams — moved from Washington, D.C., to St. Louis sometime in late 2022.

He and Mikayla Thompson, who goes by the goddess name “Antu Anum Ahmat,” appeared to post their first Facebook live video together on Dec. 16, 2022. They posted more than 20 videos together after that, most titled “The Cosmic War Room.”

They discussed concepts that echoed Jamal’s teachings: Black people are gods and goddesses; the FDA tampers with all food to harm people; six suns are orbiting Earth; the moon isn’t real, and neither is time.

“I just did a 13-hour trip there to retrieve my god,” Thompson said of Naaman Williams during one of their first videos. “Mind you, all this (expletive) is happening, and it ain’t even been a month.”

The two said they were soul mates.

Naaman Williams also posted about Jamal, as did Thompson. Both referred to him as their godbrother. Like many of Jamal’s followers, Naaman Williams insisted the leader was not guilty of child molestation, and he called for Jamal’s release from prison.

Naaman Williams’ family could not be reached.

German, the woman who moved to St. Louis from a suburb of Memphis, was the last of the four adults to move into Wickerson’s rental house in Berkeley on Graham Lane. Her husband, Steven Mitchell, said she had taken an interest in Jamal’s videos online, but he thought it would just be a phase.

German’s mom, Shelita Gibson, said she also began talking to a man on Facetime “for hours on end” in the months before her move. Runge later confirmed the man was Naaman Williams.

Gibson said he was “the reason why she was adamant about leaving.”

Less than two months after she married Mitchell, whom she had dated for about six years, German packed her things and their 3-year-old son Ashton. She left their home in a Memphis suburb and headed to her mom’s house in a nearby town.

German told her husband she was going there to take care of her mom and grandmother who had health issues. But the mother said her daughter told her she was coming over because Mitchell “wasn’t taking care of their family, and she was tired of doing it all.”

“The more and more the story has unfolded, prior to it hitting the news, I realized that it was a manipulative move,” Gibson said. “And I don’t know if it was planned all by herself, just so she could make her exit and not be stopped. I really don’t have answers to that.”

Two weeks later, German’s brother and sister-in-law gave her a ride from her mother’s house to St. Louis.

German told her mom that her ancestors were telling her to go there. She took 3-year-old Ashton with her, but she left behind her 4-year-old daughter, whose father is not Mitchell.

“I was crying and really upset the day she left,” Gibson said.

When the son and daughter-in-law dropped German off at the Berkeley home, Gibson said the woman at the home would not let anyone but German inside.

The last time Gibson heard from her daughter was July 15. German had texted her mom asking for money two days in a row. When she requested money on the third day, even though German said she had a job, Gibson asked her daughter what was going on.

German replied: “I knew not to ask. I knew you wouldn’t do it. Never mind, goodbye.”

German and the rest of the group went missing a few weeks later.

‘The craziest thing I’ve ever investigated’

Neighbors of Wickerson’s home in Berkeley, near St. Louis Lambert International Airport, said the missing people were well known on Graham Lane. Their behavior got especially strange once German moved in over the summer.

Wickerson quit her job in early 2023 and by May her landlord, an Arizona company, filed for eviction. The company said she owed at least three months of rent, and the eviction notice was served on July 27.

Runge, the detective, said police searched the home on Aug. 14, the day after they were reported missing.

The group left food in the microwave, dishes in the sink and laundry in the washer. Their valuables were still in the home, including a closet full of expensive women’s shoes.

Police tracked their debit cards and found they had used them at a 7-Eleven convenience store and a Dollar Tree on Dunn Road near Interstate 270. The group stayed at a Quality Inn in Florissant from Aug. 2-6, Runge said, and hotel employees told police they seemed happy and healthy.

Runge said he was unable to get surveillance footage of the group in the hotel lobby. Now, investigators are seeking warrants for the group’s cellphone data. Those warrants could take months to get approved, Runge said.

In the meantime, they continue to ask the public for tips.

“We don’t have any idea where they are,” Runge said. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever investigated.”

Missing St. Louis women joined spiritual cult before disappearing, police say