270: The Devil and Joan Vollmer | Australia

Joan Vollmer’s funeral was held on Friday, the 5th of February, 1993, at the Salvation Army Hall in the town of Horsham, Victoria – a place where Joan, and her husband Ralph, had occasionally attended worship services in the past. The woman had been dead for just under a week, and up to this point, her husband Ralph had not even shed one tear. And while 60 of their friends and fellow parishioners had come out in celebration of Joan’s life, the media had arrived en masse. Around 30 journalists and photographers, all invited by Ralph, caught their front seats in and around the Horsham Police Force who monitored the event.  You see, in the days preceding the service, Ralph had been interviewed by numerous members of the AAP or Australian Associated Press, videotaped even, as he eagerly toured them around their pig farm just inside the remote town of Antwerp, about 360 kilometres northwest of Melbourne. He openly told the story of the events that led up to his wife’s passing, making sure that each reporter he talked to would go on to relay the gospel truth: Ralph and his god-fearing colleagues had successfully delivered Joan’s body of at least 10 evil spirits. And furthermore, he was absolutely certain that Joan would be resurrected before her body was ever laid to rest. In his own words: “God has made a solemn promise that she will rise on the day of the funeral and he wants us to witness it”. Following the service at the Hall, Joan, still very-much in her casket, was escorted through to the Horsham Cemetery Reserve for burial. Even there, numerous spectators gathered to congest the perimeter, all awaiting this miracle which God had promised to Ralph and his friends. Following a final Bible passage delivered by Salvation Army Captain, Colin Corkery, the coffin began to lower, and Ralph kept his eyes to the sky, in prayer, still ever faithful for his wife’s revival. But once the coffin touched the ground, and the silence persisted, Ralph finally found himself at a loss. And for the first time since Joan’s death on his own obedient watch, he began to sob, only realising that in that moment, his wife was truly gone. You are listening to: The Evidence Locker. Thanks for listening to our podcast. This episode is made possible by our sponsors—be sure to check them out for exclusive deals. For an ad-free experience, join us on Patreon, starting at just $2 a month, with 25% of proceeds supporting The Doe Network, helping to bring closure to international cold cases. Links are in the show notes. Our episodes cover true crimes involving real people, and some content may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised. We produce each episode with the utmost respect for the victims, their families, and loved ones. Antwerp is little more than a scattering of buildings in Victoria’s Wimmera, surrounded by flat farmland and the slow bend of the Wimmera River. In summer, the heat settles over the paddocks. Roads run straight through wheat country, towns are separated by long stretches of open land, and a farmhouse can feel very private indeed. Ralph and Joan Vollmer came here in 1988 looking for a new beginning. Their weatherboard farmhouse stood at the end of a long dirt driveway, with a wide veranda, pig pens outside and the river behind the property. Ralph concentrated on the farm. Joan made the place her own. She planted garden beds and established a greenhouse. Inside, she collected ornaments, jewellery, vases and small decorative objects. Joan Lenora Taylor had met Ralph in 1986. She was shy, friendly and, according to people who knew her, much easier to talk to than her intensely private future husband. Her life before Ralph had not been easy. She had experienced serious trauma and periods of psychiatric illness, and she had spent time in mental-health care. She also had a daughter from an earlier marriage. By the time she met Ralph, she was in her forties and hoping, perhaps, for something quieter. Ralph Vollmer had been born in Germany in 1938 and migrated to Australia as a teenager. His family settled first in Melbourne before moving to rural Victoria. Ralph worked on farms and at assorted jobs, married, had two sons and later divorced. He was a reserved man who seemed most comfortable away from crowds. In Antwerp, Joan and Ralph largely kept to themselves. They were not unfriendly, but neither became deeply involved in the tiny local community. Then religion entered their lives. They married at the Salvation Army in Horsham in 1989 and attended services there for a time. Joan participated without becoming consumed by it. Ralph was different. He read the Bible constantly, listened to hymns and increasingly interpreted ordinary life through scripture. A neighbour later recalled that Joan could talk about all sorts of things. With Ralph, sooner or later, the conversation came back to God. That difference would become important when Joan became unwell. In 1990, her behaviour changed dramatically. She slept very little, became restless and struggled to concentrate. At times she behaved in ways Ralph found bewildering. He became frightened of her expressions and later said that her eyes appeared unnaturally bright. Where a doctor saw psychiatric illness, Ralph began to see something else. Joan was assessed and admitted to Lakeside psychiatric hospital in Ballarat. Records later discussed in court described anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and hypomania. She was treated with medication and improved sufficiently to leave hospital after several weeks. She was prescribed the antipsychotic thioridazine and warned that stopping treatment carried a risk of relapse. Not long after her discharge, a local doctor reduced the dose because Joan was experiencing severe restlessness and prescribed additional medication. A follow-up appointment was arranged. The doctor never saw the Vollmers again. Ralph had already begun looking beyond medicine. To him, prayer seemed to produce changes that tablets had not. He came to believe that whatever had taken hold of Joan could be restrained spiritually. When her condition settled, he regarded that improvement as confirmation. Over the next two years, Ralph became close to John and Leanne Reichenbach, farmers from the Wimmera who were involved in a small charismatic Christian prayer circle. Their religious world placed great emphasis on direct messages from God, miraculous healing, speaking in tongues and what they called “deliverance”: prayer intended to cast out evil spirits. This was not the formal ritual people might picture when they hear the word exorcism. There was no senior priest arriving with an authorised rite. The group had no recognised ecclesiastical structure supervising what they did. Members prayed for one another, interpreted behaviour as spiritual signs and believed that some of them had particular gifts for recognising demons. By late 1992, the Reichenbachs had been expelled from their Lutheran congregation. Their prayer circle continued anyway. In January 1993, Ralph and Joan travelled to Adelaide for a six-day charismatic Christian convention recommended by the Reichenbachs. There was preaching, singing, faith healing and talk of spiritual warfare. Joan was withdrawn during the trip. When they returned to Antwerp on the 10th of January, her condition deteriorated rapidly. She stopped sleeping properly. She swore, became agitated and behaved in ways Ralph considered obscene. He said she made animal noises and pulled strange faces. Instead of recognising the return of symptoms for which Joan had previously been hospitalised, Ralph interpreted them within the belief system that now dominated his life. The spirits, he decided, had never gone. They had merely been bound. And now they were fighting back. On the side of the pigsty, Ralph painted a message to himself in red: “STOP TELLING FATHER YOUR NEEDS.” He believed God already knew what was happening and that repeatedly asking for help showed a lack of faith. Other people, however, could see that Joan was in serious trouble. On the 21st of January, her friend Roma Karris visited the farm. Despite the summer heat, Joan wore a nightdress under a heavy dressing gown and complained of being cold. Her thoughts wandered. She spoke about things Roma could not see and made claims that did not make sense. The following evening, Ralph found Joan outside in the paddock, barefoot and dancing. When he tried to take her back to the house, she ran. She was eventually found kilometres away. At that point Ralph called John Reichenbach. John arrived late that night. He and Ralph stayed awake praying over Joan and reading from the Bible. By morning, Leanne Reichenbach had joined them. Telephone calls began going out to members of the prayer circle. One of those calls reached Leah Clugston, a seventy-seven-year-old woman in Rainbow who was treated by the group as a spiritual authority. Leah claimed to receive messages directly from God. Without examining Joan, she concluded that the problem was not one spirit but ten. The diagnosis, in the eyes of the prayer circle, was now settled. Joan was possessed. What followed did not begin with the violence that eventually killed her. It developed by degrees, each escalation justified by the failure of the one before it. Joan was placed in a chair while Ralph and Leanne sat across the kitchen praying, reading scripture and demanding answers from the supposed spirits inside her. Christian music played. Sessions continued for hours, sometimes through the night. John came and went; Leah and other members of the circle gave advice by telephone. Joan did not improve. That failure was not taken as evidence that their diagnosis might be wrong. Instead, it was taken as evidence that the demons were strong. David Klingner, a young contract harvester associated with the prayer circle, was brought in to help. He already believed he had witnessed something demonic in Joan at an earlier gathering. When he arrived at the farm, he described sensing a battle between God and Satan. The group’s methods became harsher. When Joan would not remain in the chair, her feet were restrained against pieces of timber. Food and water were restricted. She was slapped when her answers were not accepted. Her resistance itself became further proof of possession. This created a closed system from which Joan had almost no way out. If she cooperated, the group could interpret it as a spirit speaking through her. If she resisted, that too was a spirit. Hunger, thirst, anger and fear could all be folded into the same explanation. Ralph sometimes expressed concern about the bruising and pain his wife was suffering. But the others reassured him that they were not hurting Joan. They were hurting what was inside her. It was a distinction Ralph would repeat later to police. By Saturday, the 30th of January, the prayer circle decided more help was needed. Kathleen Nuske contacted her son Matthew in Melbourne. He had never conducted a deliverance like this, but his mother believed he was unusually sensitive to evil presences. He drove hundreds of kilometres to Antwerp. By the time he arrived around midday, Joan had endured days of disrupted sleep, restraint, prolonged prayer sessions and inadequate food and water. The farmhouse itself had been transformed into the stage for a spiritual battle that existed entirely in the minds of the people controlling her. Matthew began by blessing olive oil. He then walked around the outside of the house seven times with cling film, using it symbolically to seal the property against evil. Objects Joan valued were treated as possible idols. Her ornaments were smashed. Jewellery, vases and flowers were targeted. Plants in the garden and greenhouse were destroyed. The destruction is one of the details that makes the case especially unsettling. Joan’s home was being stripped of the things she had chosen and cared for while she remained physically restrained inside it. Then the group returned their attention to Joan. They held her down and demanded that the demons identify themselves. Leanne pressed against Joan’s abdomen and chest. David restrained her around the head and neck. Joan was slapped repeatedly. Her mouth was forced open. Her eyes were held open while prayers were shouted at her. Names were assigned to the supposed entities. One was called Legion, after the biblical account in which demons are driven from a man into a herd of pigs. Another was associated with the childlike voice Joan sometimes used and was called Baby Joan or Princess Joan. To the group, these names were progress. They believed they were identifying an enemy. To Joan, the ordeal simply continued. By late afternoon they believed only the strongest spirits remained. Joan was moved from the kitchen to the bedroom. There, several people held her down while pressure was applied to her abdomen, chest, throat and head in an effort to force the remaining demons upwards and out through her mouth. At some point, Joan shuddered and groaned. Then she became still. Ralph checked for a pulse. There was none. They attempted CPR, but Joan did not revive. For most people, that would have been the moment the ritual ended and an ambulance was called. Inside the Vollmer farmhouse, it became something else entirely. Matthew spoke with Leah Clugston and assured the others that Joan’s stillness could be part of a successful deliverance. They believed she would rise again. Her body was covered with a quilt. The group prayed and sang songs of victory. Matthew left. Joan remained on the bed. The next morning, Sunday the 31st of January, she was still dead. Leah and Kathleen Nuske came to the property. Leah placed her hands on Joan and commanded her to rise. Nothing happened. They continued to wait. By Monday, Joan had been dead for roughly two days when a Lutheran minister, alerted to what had happened, contacted police. Senior Constable Jeffrey Arnott was on duty at Jeparit when he was asked to attend the Antwerp property. David Klingner met him first and offered a warning of sorts: “It’s a long story.” Inside the farmhouse, Arnott found Ralph and Leanne at the kitchen table with a Bible, studying passages about resurrection. In the bedroom was Joan. Her body was badly decomposed. There was extensive bruising. In the heat of a Wimmera summer, flies and maggots had gathered. The smell filled the room. Yet the atmosphere in the kitchen was, in Arnott’s recollection, remarkably calm. Ralph told him there would be no funeral. God was going to restore Joan completely and she would walk back into the kitchen. Police removed her body for a post-mortem examination. Ralph, Leanne and David were interviewed for hours. Their accounts were extraordinary, but they were not evasive about the basic fact that they had restrained Joan and subjected her to the deliverance. They believed their actions had been necessary. Ralph explained the distinction he had come to rely upon: the woman being hurt during the ritual was, in his mind, no longer his wife. He told investigators that he would never have allowed anyone to do those things to Joan, but believed they had been dealing with an evil spirit instead. That belief is central to understanding the case, but it does not make Joan’s suffering abstract. Whatever the group thought they were fighting, every restraint, slap and application of pressure was inflicted on Joan Vollmer’s body. The post-mortem found a fracture to the thyroid cartilage in her neck. The precise medical mechanism of her death became one of the most important legal issues in the case. The prosecution would argue that the physical force used during the final stage of the ritual contributed to the cardiac arrest that killed her. The defence would later exploit the fact that the pathologist could not state the causal sequence with absolute certainty. Ralph, meanwhile, continued to expect a resurrection. He spoke freely to journalists and invited them to the funeral so they could witness it. That confidence is what led to the extraordinary scene with which this episode began: reporters at the Salvation Army Hall, spectators at Horsham Cemetery and Ralph watching as Joan’s coffin was lowered into the earth. When she did not return, his explanation changed. Perhaps, he suggested, Joan was simply happier in heaven. The criminal case was far from over. Three months later, Ralph Vollmer, Leanne Reichenbach, David Klingner and Matthew Nuske were charged with manslaughter. At a committal hearing in September 1993, the court heard evidence about Joan’s psychiatric history, the force used during the ritual and the defendants’ religious beliefs. Leah Clugston appeared as a witness. She maintained that God had personally confirmed Joan’s possession to her, despite never having met Joan before the deliverance. At moments during her evidence, she announced that God was speaking through her. The medical evidence caused the prosecution difficulty. The pathologist considered pressure to Joan’s neck a highly probable contributor to her cardiac arrest, but could not prove the connection to the standard required for the case to proceed on the evidence then before the magistrate. On the 16th of September, Magistrate Tim McDonald discharged the four accused. The reaction around Horsham was immediate. To many people, it looked as though a woman could be restrained, deprived, beaten and die during an improvised religious ritual without anyone being held criminally responsible. Victoria’s Director of Public Prosecutions reviewed the matter. In February 1994, proceedings were brought again. This time the allegations included manslaughter, recklessly causing serious injury and false imprisonment. The trial began in Horsham in October 1994 and became a spectacle. The courtroom was small; the case was not. Journalists crowded in. Religious experts gave evidence. Witnesses spoke about demons, possession and divine messages while lawyers tried to translate a week of extraordinary behaviour into ordinary questions of criminal law. The prosecution did not need to prove whether demons existed. It needed to prove what the defendants had done to Joan and whether those acts were unlawful. That distinction mattered. The case was not, legally, a referendum on Christianity or on belief in possession. The question was whether sincere religious conviction could justify restraining another person against her will and using dangerous physical force upon her. The jury saw police video from the farm: the boards and stockings used to restrain Joan, and the remains of the possessions and garden that had been destroyed because the group considered them spiritually dangerous. They also heard that Joan had previously received psychiatric treatment and medication. The defence argued that the defendants genuinely believed they were helping her. It was also suggested that the medical evidence left open other possible causes of death. Matthew Nuske was acquitted of manslaughter on the judge’s direction after the prosecution case against him on that charge was found insufficient. The remaining verdicts came on the 30th of November 1994. Ralph Vollmer was found not guilty of manslaughter, but guilty of false imprisonment and recklessly causing serious injury. Matthew Nuske was convicted of false imprisonment. Leanne Reichenbach and David Klingner were convicted of both false imprisonment and manslaughter. When Justice Graham Crossley sentenced them, he made an important point: they were not being punished simply because they had performed an exorcism. The criminality lay in what they had physically done to Joan. Leanne received two years’ imprisonment, with twenty months suspended. David received eighteen months, with fifteen months suspended. Ralph was given a twelve-month wholly suspended sentence, and Matthew received three months, also suspended. Only Leanne and David served time in custody. All four appealed. In September 1995, the Victorian Court of Appeal rejected their challenges and upheld the convictions. The decision became an important Australian authority on false imprisonment: a person cannot simply take away another adult’s liberty because they believe confinement is for that person’s own good. There is a temptation with a case like this to treat it as a curiosity from another age: demons in a farmhouse, cling film around windows, smashed ornaments and a promised resurrection. But Joan Vollmer died in 1993, not 1693. Her death occurred in a country with hospitals, psychiatric care, police and courts, only hours from Melbourne. And that may be the most disturbing part of the story. The people around Joan did not think they were torturing her. They built a belief system in which every sign of suffering could be interpreted as evidence that the treatment was working. Her protests belonged to demons. Her hunger belonged to demons. Her resistance belonged to demons. Even when she stopped breathing, death itself was reinterpreted as victory. Joan’s own voice became progressively less important until, finally, it disappeared from the room altogether. Years later, the Antwerp farmhouse acquired the inevitable local mythology. It stood empty for long periods and became a place teenagers dared one another to visit. People in the district still remembered the case because, as one local put it, it had placed Antwerp on the map. Joan is buried at Horsham Cemetery. Her headstone is simple. Beneath her name are the words: “Always in our hearts. In God’s care.” The words are striking because faith was present at every stage of Joan Vollmer’s final days. It was invoked when medical treatment was abandoned, when she was restrained, when her possessions were destroyed, when force was used against her and when help was not summoned after she stopped breathing. But the court eventually drew a line that the people in the farmhouse had not. Whatever they believed was inside Joan, the person in front of them was Joan Vollmer. And she had the right to be free. If you'd like to dive deeper into this case, check out the resources we used for this episode in the show notes. Don’t forget to follow us on social media for more updates on today's case – you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. We also have a channel on YouTube where you can watch more content. If you enjoy what we do here at Evidence Locker, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now and consider leaving us a 5-star review. This was The Evidence Locker. Thank you for listening!