Other New religious movements Moffat, CO, USA · 2021

Love Has Won: all charges dismissed after Amy Carlson's death

Record class

Context only

Evidence status

Closed without charge

Authority role

self-described Mother God and spiritual leader, online spiritual and wellness organization

Organization

Love Has Won, Gaia's Whole Healing Essentials

Spiritual nexus

Love Has Won followers treated Carlson as 'Mother God' and described death as spiritual ascension. The organization also marketed colloidal silver through spiritual and wellness claims. Those beliefs provide the documented context for the treatment of her illness and body, but the available proceedings did not establish that another person criminally caused her death.

Spiritual healing or treatment
Prophecy or divine command
Guru or spiritual-teacher authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2020-04-01 · regulatory warning

U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission. The agencies warned Gaia's Whole Healing Essentials that products promoted through Love Has Won's website as preventing or treating COVID-19 were unapproved new drugs and misbranded drugs under federal law.
2021-09-14 · criminal cases dismissed

Saguache County Court, Colorado. Charges initially filed against seven followers after Carlson's body was found were dismissed. Prosecutors told the court that they believed the corpse-abuse charge was constitutionally questionable in the circumstances. No defendant was convicted in the matter.
2021-12-02 · death investigation

Saguache County Coroner. The coroner's report classified Carlson's death as natural and attributed it to global decline in the setting of alcohol abuse, anorexia and chronic colloidal-silver ingestion.

Documented coercion mechanisms

claims of divine incarnation and ascension
spiritual-healing claims involving colloidal silver
group authority around illness and death

Primary record

Sources

official federal regulatory record warning letter and product claims U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission, warning letter to Gaia's Whole Healing Essentials, LLC (Apr. 1, 2020).: The joint federal warning identifies lovehaswon.org and records the unapproved and misbranded COVID-19 treatment claims made for colloidal-silver products. It is a regulatory finding about marketing, not a criminal judgment or finding about Carlson's death.
contemporaneous court reporting dismissal and procedural posture Associated Press, 'Charges against 6 accused of tampering with body of Love Has Won leader are dropped,' Colorado Sun (Sept. 21, 2021).: The report confirms the dismissals with the Saguache County court clerk and distinguishes the discovery of Carlson's body and initial allegations from the final no-conviction posture.
coroner sourced local reporting autopsy and disposition corroboration CBS Colorado, 'Autopsy Complete After Cult Leader's Death' (Dec. 2, 2021).: Contemporaneous local reporting quotes the Saguache County coroner's report on the natural manner and stated causes of death and notes that the related criminal charges had been dropped.

Contextual record

Background & context

Institutional and pattern-level sources on New religious movements, not specific to this one case.

ABC News (2005) ''Prince' of Former Cult Commits Murder-Suicide', ABC News, January. Available at: abcnews.go.com (Accessed: 15 July 2026).: The documented aftermath of the Children of God's abuse system: Ricky Rodriguez, raised as the movement's 'prince' and heir, 'stabbed his former nanny to death before committing suicide' in January 2005, after videotaping a statement about his childhood: 'How can you do that to kids and sleep at night?' Note: Rodriguez died the same day and was never prosecuted; this entry documents an outcome of the abuse system established in the Ward judgment above, not an adjudication — and his characterizations of individuals are his own claims, not court findings.
Wikipedia (2026) 'Richard Bandler' [summarizing the 1988 Santa Cruz murder trial and acquittal]. Available at: en.wikipedia.org (Accessed: 15 July 2026).: Richard Bandler, co-founder of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, was acquitted — that verdict leads this entry, which documents a trial, not a guilt. 'In 1986, Corine Ann Christensen... a former girlfriend of Bandler's friend and cocaine dealer, James Marino, was shot dead in her Santa Cruz townhouse with a .357 magnum owned by Bandler. Authorities charged Bandler with her murder. Bandler testified that he had been at Christensen's house, but that Marino had shot Christensen. After a short deliberation, a jury found Bandler not guilty.' The trial — and the contemporaneous reporting around it — remains the most extensively documented court event in the history of the human-potential movement's founder generation, and a window into the coercive-influence milieu from which NLP marketing later grew. Bandler was and remains legally innocent of the killing.

Related record

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