‘Doomsday cult’ leader sentenced to 64 years in deaths of 2 girls on Colorado farm

NORWOOD, Colo. — A Colorado “doomsday cult” leader who once referred to two young girls as “little b****es” who were “unclean” was sentenced Friday to 64 years in prison for her role in the girls’ 2017 deaths.

Madani Ceus, 40, of Haiti, received back-to-back 32-year sentences in the deaths of sisters Makayla Victoria Roberts, 10, and Hannah Elizabeth Rosalina Marshall, 8, who were found dead the summer of 2017 on a marijuana and vegetable farm near Norwood, a small town just outside the Uncompahgre National Forest and about 35 miles west of Telluride. According to Colorado’s 7th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, Ceus was acquitted of murder in February but convicted of two counts of felony child abuse resulting in death.

The girls, whose badly decomposed bodies were found in a tarp-covered car, were deprived of food and water and left in the hot car to die, authorities said. According to The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, their bodies were too far gone to determine if it was starvation, dehydration or hyperthermia that killed them.

Their mother, Nashika Leonie Bramble, 39, was sentenced last fall to serve two life sentences without parole in their murders.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, San Miguel County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Dan Covault was one of the few people in the courtroom Friday during Ceus’ sentencing. Covault was the lead investigator in the murder case.

“Ms. Ceus said a number of things that basically corroborated our testimony,” Covault said in a statement. “For example, she said from a young age, she has thought of herself as a creator. She also referred to the two girls as ‘little b****es.’ She stated that the girls were unclean, and she didn’t want them around her children.”

The children’s bodies were discovered Sept. 8, 2017, after police received a tip about their deaths. At that time, four people were taken into custody: Ceus, fellow Haitian Ashford Nathaniel Archer, Frederick “Alec” Alexander Blair, of Norwood, and Ika Eden, of Jamaica.

Bramble was at large until she turned herself in the following day, authorities said.

Ceus’ own two children were found alive on the farm and taken into protective custody.

“In my 37 years as sheriff, I have never seen anything as cruel and heartless as this,” San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters said after the girls’ bodies were found.

Following Ceus’ sentencing, Masters said the community should have “good faith” in the justice system.

“This cult found their way to our county and committed horrific abuse to these little girls, who died as a result of the inhumanity of Ms. Ceus and her associates,” Masters said. “Ms. Ceus had a competent defense team, and we had competent investigators, prosecutors, and ultimately, she met our judge for her sentencing.”

A ‘harlot’ and a ‘reign of terror’

Editor’s note: The following story contains disturbing and graphic details that may upset some readers.

According to an affidavit obtained by the Telluride Daily Planet, Blair told detectives that Makayla and Hannah were sometimes banished to the car, a gray Toyota Camry belonging to Eden, as punishment because their spirits were “unclean from a previous life.” It was not clear when they were sent to the car for the final time.

Authorities said after the bodies were found that the girls had been dead for at least two weeks, the Planet reported.

The Sentinel reported that a diary found in the car, written in by one of the girls, indicated they had been in the car for a significant amount of time. Their bodies were surrounded by a number of empty food cans.

Blair, who met Ceus and the others at a Grand Junction truck stop in May 2017, said Ceus, who preferred to be called “Ama” or “Yahweh,” told him they were on a spiritual retreat in search of St. Michael the Archangel. Ceus declared that Blair was the saint, who, according to biblical teachings, is a warrior in the battle between good and evil.

She claimed “the (group members) were not humans but spiritual beasts that were going to survive the coming apocalyptic times,” the affidavit said.

Blair told investigators Ceus’ group soon moved onto the farm he owned near Norwood, on which he was licensed to grow marijuana. He moved full time onto the farm with them.

Blair said once the group was on the farm, he “became under the control of Ms. Ceus out of fear that she was going to shatter his spirit with some kind of magical powers he believed she could control him with,” the court documents charged.

He told detectives he didn’t report the child abuse or help the girls out of fear of Ceus.

Bramble’s attorney, Harvey Palefsky, also told the Sentinel in 2018 that Ceus engaged in a “reign of terror” over her followers.

“She threatened to have people’s souls ‘harvested’ by ‘reapers,’” Palefsky said. “They would be sent to the ‘purge.’ They would become ‘abominations’ or ‘sent to abomination.’ She decided, more importantly, who could live and die.”

Masters, the sheriff, testified that Blair told investigators Ceus believed Bramble’s 10-year-old daughter, Makayla, had been a “harlot” in a past life and put all of their spiritual well-being in danger.

“It started with identifying Makayla as being evil,” Masters testified, according to the Sentinel. “So, the first step was, she was not allowed to play with the other children.”

Before long, Makayla was banished to the Camry, the sheriff said. Around July 20, 2018, Ceus decided the girl should no longer be fed with the group’s food, which she believed was holy.

Around that same time, Blair overheard a conversation between Ceus and Archer that indicated there was another girl sequestered in the car. Blair was stunned because he did not know Hannah existed, Masters testified.

“Mr. Blair is shocked that all this time there’s been another girl on his property that he’s never seen for the past two months,” Masters said.

Ceus put the entire “family” on lockdown as an Aug. 21, 2017, solar eclipse approached. She and Archer told her followers the eclipse signaled the date of the impending apocalypse.

The group withdrew to the far end of Blair’s 20-acre farm, leaving Makayla and Hannah behind in the Camry. Blair told Masters that Bramble told the group in mid-August that the girls had died, the sheriff testified.

A horrific discovery

Blair told detectives that on Aug. 19, he had a dream that police would be coming to the property. Ceus ordered Blair and Archer to seal the car doors with tape and cover the vehicle with a tarp to hide it.

That same day, Covault, who was responsible for annual inspections of Blair’s marijuana farm, showed up, the Sentinel reported. Covault testified that Blair, who was normally talkative, didn’t seem like himself during their visit.

“He told me that he had destroyed all his marijuana and that he was no longer going to be cultivating marijuana, and told me I was interrupting a religious ceremony and that I needed to leave,” Covault testified. “He was like, ‘I destroyed it all, you don’t need to ever come back.’”

Covault spotted the covered Camry on the property, the newspaper reported. He also saw Ceus’ two young daughters on the farm and was concerned.

The deputy filed a report with San Miguel County social workers but was told his observations didn’t meet the requirements for an investigation to be launched, according to the Sentinel.

According to testimony, Blair told authorities that the eclipse passed with no sign of the world ending. Ceus blamed her followers for “not being pure enough,” Masters said.

She ordered Blair’s dog into a cage without food and water.

Next was Bramble, who she ordered into a car without nourishment.

“Ms. Ceus confronted Bramble stating that she had been an evil person in her past life and that she hadn’t done enough to try to get rid of all this evilness that she was carrying around with her,” Masters testified.

Bramble, who was heavily pregnant, soon fled the property.

Read details of the case below in a transcript from the first day of a two-day November 2017 preliminary hearing, courtesy of the Sentinel.

The criminal affidavit stated that Makayla’s and Hannah’s deaths became known after a friend of Blair’s, who saw his emaciated dog during a visit, grew worried and contacted Blair’s mother, who called Blair’s father in Dallas.

Blair’s father drove to Norwood, where his son told him there were two dead children on the property. His father notified authorities, the Planet reported.

Blair’s father, Franklin Fletcher, testified last year that he approached the gray Toyota to photograph its license plate.

It “got bad” as he approached,” the Planet reported.

“There was a tarp, condensation and blowflies, the flies you see on dead things,” Fletcher said in court, according to the newspaper.

Fletcher testified that he didn’t know what he was seeing until later media reports came out about the discovery of the children’s bodies.

When questioned by police, Ceus told investigators that she prepared all of the group’s meals, including the food Bramble provided to her daughters in the car, the Planet reported. When the food supply ran low, she refused to feed Bramble.

Bramble and Blair would then go to a local food pantry to obtain food for her and the children.

Ceus told authorities Blair was “frantic” about the children’s situation but did not go to police out of fear of being arrested, the affidavit stated.

Both Bramble and Ceus were ultimately charged with murder in the girls’ deaths. Archer and Blair were charged with two counts each of felony child abuse resulting in death and a count of being an accessory to a crime.

Eden was charged with two counts of child abuse resulting in death.

Archer, 53, was found guilty following a three-week trial in March 2019, according to the District Attorney’s Office. He was sentenced in June 2019 to 24 years in prison.

Blair, 25, accepted a plea deal in May 2018 that allowed him to avoid the child abuse charges, according to the Sentinel. He was sentenced in October to serve 12 years in prison on an accessory charge, but prison records show he is eligible for parole in 2023.

Eden was found mentally incompetent to stand trial in 2018. Her trial was postponed indefinitely.

Eden’s daughter, Hannah-Joy Sutherland, told the Sentinel that her mother was always spiritual but went overboard when she met Ceus and Archer, who began amassing followers to their belief system around 2015.

“Things kind of went, like, to the extreme,” a then-19-year-old Sutherland told the newspaper in 2018. “It’s like she did nothing but worship.”

Around the spring of 2015, Sutherland got off the bus after school and was told by her mother and Archer that the world was going to end and they had to go. She said her mother burned all their family photos and their government identification cards.

She also destroyed the family’s phones, Sutherland said.

“It was a traumatizing experience for me, like an evacuation,” she told the Sentinel.

The family moved with Archer and Ceus to their apartment near Charlotte, North Carolina.

It was in 2015 in Georgia that Eden recruited Bramble and her two small daughters into the group, authorities said.

Sutherland told the newspaper she was angry her mother got caught up with Ceus. She said she could not understand how her loving mother stood by and watched while two little girls died.

“She’s a good person,” Sutherland said of Eden. “She’s just in the wrong group.”

Cassandra McCarroll, a former follower of Ceus,' remembered the little girls who died.

“They were the most sweetest, genuine, loving girls, always hugging me, always just giving me affection,” McCarroll told the Sentinel. “Those girls did not deserve it.”

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