Metro

Back to Brooklyn house of evil

The girl met her killer at Adventurers Inn, a second-rate amusement park in College Point, Queens.

Elizabeth Brown, 15, was at the park with friends one summer night in 1974 when he rolled up in his chauffeur-driven, cream-colored Cadillac — with its own bar and TV — and stepped out. He would have been hard to resist: a dapper preacher in a silk suit with movie-star looks, wealth and charm.

But this “pastor,” Devernon “Doc” LeGrand, 50, had no intention of saving her soul. His slick approach was intended to snare the girl into his commune in Brooklyn, where he plied teens with drugs and booze, seduced them and forced them to panhandle in nun garb.

Brown became LeGrand’s concubine and beggar, hitting up subway riders by day and having sex with him and dropping angel dust by night.

“She had a good heart but was very angry, very belligerent,” said Brown’s sister Cathy. “Our father was sick with cancer and dying. She was looking for stability. A kid like that attracts dirtbags like magnets.”

Sister Milindia AKA Mindy LeGrandBrigitte Stelzer

Thirty-six years later, authorities assumed LeGrand’s cult, which eventually devolved into rape and murder and scandalized the city in the 1970s, was long gone. But last week they opened a new probe into the remnants of his clan after The Post found Mindy LeGrand, his daughter-in-law, pulling the same old sister act in Little Italy.

Investigators have returned to the dark secrets of 222 Brooklyn Ave., a Crown Heights row house where for two decades LeGrand headed one of the most notorious crime families in city history.

LeGrand fathered 46 children, many of whom lived in tiny bedrooms upstairs in the four-story headquarters where Devernon preached on the first floor. For years, kids were kept in cages, starved and beaten — until cops busted LeGrand for child-abuse in 1965.

“They had these tiny little rooms. The kids would stay with their mothers or just run around everywhere,” said Eugene Jarkow, who investigated LeGrand for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. “The street-level floor is where they had the church. There was a big meat freezer in the basement, supposedly where he’d put the bodies, but there was no proof of that.”

Every morning, LeGrand’s phony nuns would pile into his Cadillac and he would drop them off at locations across the city. One fake sister, Vivian Roye, “was olive-skinned and passed as Italian — she did very well on Mulberry Street,” recalled former Brooklyn prosecutor Harold Rosenbaum.

The church took in an estimated $250,000 a year, enough to buy the Crown Heights building and a 58-acre farm in Sullivan County, which LeGrand paid for with rolls of coins.

When Devernon wasn’t in a rage, life could be good. There were tailored outfits, luxury cars and gambling trips to Atlantic City. Booze and drugs flowed freely.

“They lived what they thought was the good life,” Jarkow said. Cathy Brown added, “There was always a party at that place.”

Jarkow even admitted to a certain fondness for the charlatan.

“I liked him — and I knew the horrors he committed, the grief he brought on this earth,” said Jarkow. “The guy could have sold me anything. He was very charming. . . . He was like an entertainer.”

Brigitte Stelzer

LeGrand, born in 1924, said he came to New York as a 12-year-old with his parents from Laurinburg, NC. He claimed he was ordained in 1954 on Long Island and got a doctorate in a psychology and theology from an unnamed institute in Newark.

LeGrand was charged with killing his first wife, Ann Sorise, and his second wife, Ernestine Timmons. The wonder is that he got away with so much for so long. City and state officials never figured out a way to shut down the panhandling swindle. And as many as 23 additional “parishioners” went missing and couldn’t be located. Cops wondered: Had LeGrand killed them?

Twice cops dug up the basement of the church looking for bodies — in 1965, after three members vanished, and 10 years later while looking for the remains of two teenage sisters. It was a long time before they would learn the full truth.

The cloak began to fall away in 1975 when LeGrand and his son Noconda were convicted of first-degree rape after they repeatedly sexually assaulted a 20-year-old woman in the church. Then two cult insiders — Kathleen Kennedy and the church handyman, Frank Holman — came forward to say LeGrand had killed his own daughter-in-law, Gladys Stewart, 18, in a fit of rage.

The truth was much worse.

Stewart, who had married LeGrand’s 20-year-old stepson, Donald Stewart, had had enough of the family and wanted out. She had also secretly helped prosecutors get the rape conviction. When she made it clear to Donald on Oct. 3, 1975, that she was leaving for good, he flew into a rage, and LeGrand intervened.

LeGrand detained both Stewart and her sister, Yvonne Rivera, 16, who was visiting, and ordered the rest of the congregation downstairs to the first-floor meeting room, where he demanded they stay “until I tell you to come out.” Over the next two hours, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., LeGrand and another stepson kicked and beat the two teens. A LeGrand daughter went in and told the flock, “Daddy’s stomping Gladys.”

Holman said he heard a woman scream, and the group began to sing hymns. They stayed until 2:30 a.m., when LeGrand came in and sent them to bed. Weeks later, LeGrand boasted he’d killed and dismembered the girls and had their remains incinerated at his upstate farm.

“You all remember Gladys,” he said. “Daughter or no daughter, you’ll join the bitch. You know what I do with bitches. I burn them. . . . That little bitch [Yvonne] came down to see about her sister and I got her, too.”

Brigitte Stelzer

Holman, who joined the church after leaving his job as an autopsy assistant with the Brooklyn Medical Examiner’s Office, said he was ordered to load two big garbage bags into his car and drive them to the farm. When he got there, something had spilled from a bag.

It was Yvonne Rivera’s severed head.

He dumped the jumble of body parts into an old bathtub, doused them with paint thinner, and set the contents on fire. They burned for two hours. He then put the ashy remains in a garbage can, which he tossed into a pond near the camp. He later led investigators to where the bone fragments were submerged.

“I was given two large Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets with bones and told, ‘Here, try the case,’ ” said Rosenbaum.

The prosecutor said he enlisted an expert from the Museum of Natural History to piece together the fragments, and LeGrand and stepson Steven LeGrand were convicted of the double homicide; each got 25 to life. Devernon LeGrand died in prison in 2006 at age 82.

The family business, renamed St. Joseph’s Church of Christ and Home, is now headed by LeGrand’s son, Noconda, the convicted rapist, and is under investigation by the state attorney general. The agency wants to know why Mindy LeGrand is lying about being an Episcopal sister and raising funds for an orphanage that doesn’t exist.

The Attorney General’s Office served LeGrand with a subpoena after The Post’s front-page expose last Sunday, sources said.

The city Health Department sent inspectors to 222 Brooklyn Ave. last week after her son Quomenters claimed to The Post that the church took in orphans and provided child care. The inspectors found no evidence of either, a department spokesperson said.

Perhaps more worrisome was Quomenters’ insistence that nine youths who lived in the house were “away at summer camp” on the family’s farm in White Sulphur Springs, the same place — now abandoned — where Holman burned up the Rivera sisters’ bodies.

Additional reporting by Cynthia Fagen and Liz Pressman