Commitment was total. Cult members should commit suicide rather than fail in their duty to Master (Sun Myung Moon). They were even made to practice wrist-slashing techniques.

And there have been suicides.

April 3, 1975; Bill Daly went down to the railroad tracks near Moon’s seminary, took off all his clothes, placed his neck over the track, and was decapitated by an oncoming train. Friends, and ex-Moonies, say the cult’s constant hammering about guilt had gotten to him.

June 6, 1976; Allen Staggs fell twenty stories to his death in the old New Yorker Hotel, which under Moon’s ownership, was renamed the “World Mission Center.”

The Moonies said it was an accident. A policeman who investigated the incident was surprised that Stagg’s fellow church members acted as if they didn’t know him and appeared “annoyed that their schedule was being interrupted by the whole thing”; “they didn’t seem to care.” The police closed the case without ruling whether the death was an accident or suicide.

August 23, 1976: Kiyomi Ogata. A Japanese Moonie, plunged from the twenty second floor of the New Yorker.

August 23, 1979: Junette Bayne, again the New Yorker Hotel, from the twenty-first floor. Her estranged husband, not a Moonie, said, “If she wasn’t pushed physically, she was pushed psychologically out that window.”

Health problems were a nuisance Moon could not be bothered with. If the spirit was strong, the body would follow. If the body was weak there must be spiritual problems. A girl with a broken ankle was told to pray and drink ginseng tea. She fundraised on a broken ankle for three days before getting treatment at a fee clinic on her own. Another girl was left with permanently impaired eyesight after an emergency operation for a detached retina. The doctors said she would have been all right had they been able to treat her months earlier when she skipped the appointments her father made. Listening to lectures on the Divine Principle was more important, cult leaders had said. She almost went blind. A Moonie from Kansas suffered a nervous breakdown. When Chris Edwards finally went to the hospital and was told his infected hand might have to be amputated, he felt ready to welcome the loss as a justifiable “indemnity” for his sins.

Across the road from the training center, Moon and his family lived in a $600,000 estate – East Garden. Master had fresh sheets on his bad every day and his clothes were washed three times before wearing. He told the cult his estate and fine car were necessary in order to show the world something other than the miserable side of life. [Boettcher - Gifts of Deceit (1980) - pgs 149-150]