Blind Faith : Teen-Age Boy Starves to Death as Parents Wait for the Lord to Provide

Five days before he starved to death, 14-year-old Eric Cottam ignored a 5-pound bag of apples perched an arm’s length from the day-old newspaper he was fetching from a neighbor’s porch.

His emaciated body, concealed by bulky winter clothes, was devouring its own muscle. But Eric clung to a fanatical conviction that kept him from gobbling the neighbor’s fruit to feed his empty belly.

His reclusive family, expelled by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, reckoned that God would help them. His father, fired as a preacher, refused to buy food with $2,131.21 in cash in the house he had stashed for God.

“He could have had all the apples he wanted. All he had to do was reach out and take one,” said Mary Petyo, who stored the apples, a bag of carrots and a case of soda near the discarded papers she saved for Eric.

Wary of Neighbor

“He just stared at me with this funny look on his face. He went across the yard like someone was chasing him,” she said. “It shocked the daylights out of me when I found out he starved.”

Eric was found Jan. 4, 42 days after the vegetarian family ate its last supper. His face covered by a sheet, he lay in the only bed in the family’s two-story frame house near Wilkes-Barre in northeastern Pennsylvania.

The 5-foot-10 boy weighed 69 pounds, less than half what he should have. His parents, Larry and Leona, are charged with his murder and with endangering the life of their daughter, Laura, 12, who has been removed from their custody.

The family was hospitalized for malnutrition. Cottam, 39, weighed 139 pounds; his wife, 37, 99 pounds. Both are 6 feet tall. The girl’s weight was not revealed.

“The boy was literally their hostage,” said Margaret Singer, a clinical psychologist who studies cult behavior as a professor at UC Berkeley.

Lived in Isolation

“He probably had been so convinced he must not eat, he thought God would smote him or his parents would punish him if he disobeyed,” she said.

The Cottams lived in isolation on a dead-end street in this community of 700 residents. They spurned offers of food and help from church members and family.

They fought a two-year legal battle to teach their children at home rather than enroll them in public or parochial schools. Cottam severed ties with his parents and in-laws.

So no one noticed that they were wasting away.

The family refrigerator was unplugged and the phone disconnected. The Cottams turned out the lights at dusk. Neighborhood children knew not to knock on Halloween because no one would answer the door.

“They always was loners. We tried to help that man over and over, but we were turned away,” said Frank Kowalski, the first elder at the Slocum Seventh-Day Adventist Church, one of four churches near Wilkes-Barre where Cottam once preached.

“He tested God to the limit. There’s no way you can sit home and starve your kids and expect God to rain food out of the sky.”

Not Part of Doctrine

Nothing in the doctrine of the Adventists, a splinter group of Baptists with 6 million members worldwide, explains the Cottams’ actions.

“We have no teaching that tells people to fast to death, reject help, or withdraw from family and friends,” said Fred Thomas, one of the top officers of the church’s world headquarters in Washington, D.C. Adventists believe the second coming of Jesus Christ is imminent, and they ban the use of alcohol, tobacco and non-medical drugs.

Cottam was fired as an unordained minister in 1985 for defying church officials by yanking his children out of church schools. The family had not attended church since then and was expelled in 1987.

Although there wasn’t a scrap of food in the house, Cottam had a strongbox containing $2,131.21 in cash and bank books with $1,643.74 in savings. He told police the money “belonged to God” as a tithe.

Larry Cottam grew up in Stockton, Calif., and converted to Adventism, his wife’s religion, shortly before they were married in 1972.

Relative Has Doubts

“I had a funny feeling about Larry. He was nice and polite, but there was still something about Larry I didn’t like. He looked like a criminal,” his father-in-law, John van Renselaar, told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader.

“I felt he wanted to start a cult or something. Every time he got on the phone he’d start preaching, and I’d say to Leona, ‘Larry is a religious fanatic.’ ”

Cottam graduated from Union College, an Adventist school in Lincoln, Neb., and got a master’s degree in divinity from the church’s Andrews University in Michigan.

The family, after living in six states in 16 years, settled here in 1983. Cottam tended four churches while awaiting ordination.

Then the trouble started.

The Cottams pulled their children out of a one-room Adventist school and tried to fire the teacher in 1984. The teacher said the children wanted to work on the floor instead of at their desks, insisted on printing instead of writing and balked at learning definitions of words.

To end the squabbling and give Cottam seasoning under another pastor, the church transferred him that summer to Pennsylvania.

By Christmas, the children again were removed from the church school. The Cottams claimed that the children had been sexually abused by their former teacher. They said she wore a devil’s mask and danced a satanic jig.

A church investigation found no wrongdoing. The teacher, who had brought a large wooden mask from Kenya to class, suffered from epilepsy and once had a seizure that frightened the children.

Larry Cottam was fired in October, 1985, and moved back here, working as a truck driver.

More is known about young Eric Cottam in death than in life.

He kept a weather vane and rain gauge in his garden and dreamed of being a meteorologist, according to postmaster Michael Petyo, who gave the boy a weather band radio.

For the Cottam children, there wasn’t much chance to play with others. Their mother would call them inside.

“They didn’t want anybody else around,” said a neighbor, Carol Laurer. “Maybe they was embarrassed because (the father) wasn’t a minister anymore. (But) how can you sit there and watch your children wasting away and not do anything?”

An autopsy found no disease or condition that would have prevented Eric from eating. Coroner George Hudock Jr. ruled the death a homicide caused by starvation.

The boy’s heart was brown and atrophied instead of reddish-purple and vibrant. The normal layer of fat around his stomach had been exhausted. His empty intestine had paper thin walls.

“He had no energy to live. The flame of life flickered out,” Hudock said. “He looked like a concentration camp victim from Dachau or Auschwitz.”

Food Ran Out in November

Eric, his sister and his parents hadn’t eaten a crumb since Nov. 22, when the food in the house ran out.

His father had been fired from his trucking job months earlier, in March, after arguing with his boss. “He was radical,” the boss, Roy Dieffenbach, recalled. “His attitude was, ‘God will provide.’ ”

The gnawing pang of hunger goes away within a week after a person stops eating, experts on starvation say. Dreams of food are accompanied by feelings of cold, fatigue and lethargy.

The Cottams had no Thanksgiving feast or Christmas dinner, and Eric apparently died Jan. 3, a day after his father tried to comfort and warm him by lying in bed with him all day.

Police weren’t called until Jan. 4. Larry Cottam managed to shamble the 106 paces across the yard to use a neighbor’s phone. The mother and daughter, too weak to stand, lay on sofa cushions.

“I didn’t even recognize him,” said Ruth Rineheimer, a widow who answered Cottam’s knock. “His face was terrible thin. He looked like an old man. His clothes were real baggy. If I had seen a man like that in the streets, I’d have said he was a bum.”

God Blameless

In a television interview from his hospital room, Larry Cottam explained: “I don’t hold God responsible. The error was on my part, not God’s. My wife and I feel terrible about Eric’s death, but my faith in God is not shaken.”

The churches where Cottam once ministered took up a collection to pay for Eric’s burial.

The Cottams are jailed in lieu of $100,000 bond each. They are to be arraigned Tuesday on charges of murder, two counts each of endangering a person and two counts each of endangering the welfare of a child.

“Our allegations are the parents had a duty to provide food for their children,” said Luzerne County Dist. Atty. Correale Stevens. “I don’t know of any religion that suggests it’s all right to starve your children to death.”