MINNESOTA
Star Tribune
Article by: JENNIFER BROOKS and LIZ SAWYER , Star Tribune staff writers Updated: February 28, 2015
His arrest on sexual assault charges ended global manhunt
A Minnesota cult leader who had been the subject of a yearlong global manhunt was arrested Saturday in a beach town in Brazil.
Victor Arden Barnard, 53, was wanted on 59 counts of sexual assault on girls and young women in the isolated religious community he founded in Pine County. The U.S. Marshals Service coordinated with Brazilian military and law enforcement officials, who arrested Barnard early Saturday. Pictures of a handcuffed Barnard appeared in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo.
The arrest took place in a condominium by Pipa Beach, considered one of Brazil’s most beautiful coastal locations. Barnard was reportedly staying with a 33-year-old Brazilian woman who previously lived in the U.S. Federal police confiscated religious papers, diaries, computers, flash drives and cellphones from the condo.
Two young women have told Minnesota investigators that Barnard raped them after they were chosen, at ages 12 and 13, to be separated from their families and live near him as part of a cloistered group he called his “maidens” in the River Road Fellowship near Finlayson.
One of the women who stepped forward to report Barnard was Lindsay Tornambe, who was 13 when Barnard informed her parents that he had chosen her to join the maidens. She told Pine County sheriff’s investigators that Barnard raped her soon afterward, and that the abuse continued for the next nine years.
“I am ready to have him locked up,” Tornambe told the Star Tribune. “As soon as I got the news, I started crying. It feels so surreal. I knew the day would come, but it finally came and it’s almost numbing.”
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