Episode Details

Christine Marie watched Samuel Bateman every single day for years. She sat at his table. She filmed his sermons. She listened to his wives recite their devotion to him. And she has an answer to the question true crime listeners keep asking about him — was he a true believer, or did he know, deep down, that he was a fraud?

She's the one outsider who got close enough to actually know.

Christine and her husband Tolga moved to Short Creek with a completely different project in mind, planning to film something else entirely in the FLDS community along the Utah-Arizona border. Then Samuel Bateman walked into their lives — a self-proclaimed prophet rising out of the wreckage of Warren Jeffs' imprisonment, taking "spiritual wives," some of them children, claiming Jeffs spoke through him. He thought Christine and Tolga were going to make him famous. He gave them access nobody else got. And the entire time, she was watching him with the eyes of a woman who'd once fallen for a false prophet herself, years earlier — a woman who knew every move he was making because she'd had them made on her.

In this opening conversation of our three-part interview, Christine takes us inside Bateman's world. Why he trusted her. What it cost to maintain that lie every day. The performance the women around him put on — and the real belief underneath it. The moment she admitted, even to herself, that "filmmaker" had become "mole." And what she saw in Bateman that made her wonder whether even he knew the whole thing was a con.

LINKS BLOCK

Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePod

DISCLAIMER

This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.


HASHTAGS

#SamuelBateman #FLDS #ChristineMarie #HiddenKillersLive #ShortCreek #WarrenJeffs #Cults #TrueCrime #ColoradoCity #Netflix