Exclusive: Killer of two young girls in the U.S. is deported to Britain

Mirror, UK/February 8, 2009

A double murderer who butchered two teenage girls in a sinister cult massacre in the United States has been deported to Britain - even though he has not lived here since he was a CHILD.

Steven LeGrand, 52, was flown back to the UK on Friday despite spending most of his life in the US.

And due to a legal technicality, Britain is powerless to prevent him from being dumped here, where he will collect housing benefit and jobseekers' allowance.

LeGrand spent more than 31 years behind bars for the murder of two sisters - a crime he committed with his father, the leader of a bizarre and brutal US cult.

Gladys Rivera Steward, 18, and Yvonne Rivera, 16 were beaten to death before LeGrand and his father Devernon chopped them up, burnt their remains and dump them in a lake.

LeGrand was escorted by two US Marshals as he flew into Heathrow and was handed over to officers from Scotland Yard.

An immigration source said: "There was nothing we could do to stop this killer coming back to the UK. The Home Office confirmed he's a British citizen so the taxpayer will have to fund him, setting him up with a home and giving him benefits."

LeGrand's father was a self-styled "Bishop" who ran a New York-based cult called the St. John's Pentecostal Church of Our Lord.

Police believe he recruited young women by seduction, raped and impregnated them, and then threatened them or their children unless they begged for money on the streets.

His headquarters, a four-story townhouse, was occupied by eleven so-called "nuns" and their 47 children, many of them fathered by Devernon.

Devernon was initially convicted and sentenced to 15 years for bribery and the rape of a 17-year-old girl in 1975.

The Rivera sisters, both "nuns", gave evidence in that trial and were due to give evidence in another rape case at the church. Devernon, then on remand, and Steven took their revenge by battering them to death, dismembering and beheading them in the church's country "camp" before dumping their remains in a lake.

Both were jailed for life in 1977.

Devernon was also jailed for the murders of two previous wives and died in jail in 2006. A spokesman for the Home Office said: "British citizens are not subject to immigration controls and have the right of abode."

In a similar case last year paedophile Raymond Horne was sent back to the UK even though he had lived in Australia for 40 years. And in 2005 Robert Excell, another paedophile, was deported from Australia after serving 40 years in jail. He had left Britain when he was 10 but is now housed in Oxford under a new name.

Taxpayers will pick up the bill.

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