In this case, untangling an answer involves a lot of other questions. To start: Were the Bergholz barbers actually Amish? That's what they called themselves, but they didn't attend church, conduct daily prayers, or identify with Christianity. Adult women were allowed to live in the home of the community's leader, Sam Mullet, and members were encouraged to use paddles to strike one another in moments of disagreement. When they first settled in the Yellow Valley in 1995, Mullet's wife, Martha, explained in a letter to an Amish leader that they "wanted to step back in time a little and live more like our grandparents, because the drift in the Amish church is so plain to see ... So we stepped back in times, no bathrooms, no pressure water, no modern or power tools for carpentry work, only allowing dark-colored dresses, etc."

Especially after the attacks, members of the press and other Amish communities frequently called the Bergholz community a cult. Donald Kraybill, a sociologist at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who consulted for the prosecutors in the case and recently published a book on the trial, says the group isn't exactly Amish, but they're not a cult, either—they're more like a clan.

"They weren’t out recruiting other people to join, they didn’t have people coming from various backgrounds. They’re all members of the same family," he said. "At one point, there were families there in the community who were not part of the Mullet family—but they all got excommunicated because they raised questions about Sam [Mullet], the bishop’s, autocratic excommunications.”

These excommunications played a role in who later became victims of the beard-cutting attacks. One middle-aged couple, the Millers, had followed their six children to the Bergholz community in 2007 but left almost immediately out of religious objections. Another man was part of a committee of Amish bishops that met in Ulysses, Pennsylvania, in 2006 to decide what to do about the excommunications Mullet had issued; ultimately, the committee decided not to honor them, even though excommunications in one Amish community are typically recognized by all other Amish communities across the country.

In his book, Kraybill described the mindset that led to the attacks, which evolved over time: "Like a prophet of old, Sam voiced a lonely, solitary plea in the wilderness against God's rebellious people ... [He] is called to preach against the swelling tide of disobedience in the larger Amish world."

Throughout the legal proceedings, it became clear that Mullet had an extremely strong influence on the Bergholz community and acted as the mastermind behind the attacks. He directed his co-conspirators to attack the victims' hair, reasoning that "it’s a religious degrading to cut the hair and the beard." This was painfully true; after he was attacked, 76-year-old Raymond Hershberger told police that "I'd rather have them beat me black and blue than take my hair."