Jihad Jane: Uncovering the Cult of Radical Islamic Terror

The Encounter
Colleen LaRose’s path toward terrorism began with what devout Muslims would consider a sin – a one-night stand.
Her tryst occurred in 2007, two years before LaRose agreed to kill Vilks. At the time, she was in Amsterdam on vacation with her longtime boyfriend, Kurt Gorman, and the two were arguing.

They had dated for five years and were living in suburban Pennsylvania. They had met when Gorman, a radio technician, was dispatched from Pennsburg, Pa., to repair a 307-foot radio tower that stood near cotton fields south of Dallas. LaRose was living beneath the tower in a single-wide trailer she shared with her sister, her mother, her stepfather, and two ducks named Lewis and Clark.

Gorman, who declined to talk to Reuters, was a few years younger than LaRose. Colleen found him mellow, gregarious and adventuresome. He fell for her loud, infectious laugh and her penchant for practical jokes. He flattered her with attention and spoiled her with generosity. When she told him that she wished she had bigger breasts, he paid to get them enlarged. Her new size DDs came to dominate her 4-foot-11 frame.

One night during the Amsterdam vacation, the two were at a bar and LaRose got loaded. She could be a mean drunk and she lit into Gorman. He left the bar. LaRose remained.

A short time later, a man approached her. He was Middle Eastern, a Muslim—and handsome. She went home with him, in part to spite her boyfriend, in part because she was curious.

The decision would change her life.

The Conversion
The Amsterdam dalliance with the Muslim man sparked an interest in Islam, one that LaRose kept secret from her boyfriend Gorman when they returned to Pennsylvania.

To learn more about the religion, she began visiting Muslim websites. To meet Muslim men, she signed up for a popular dating site, Muslima.com.

She used Gorman’s credit card to pay for access to the site. When Gorman saw the bill, LaRose laughed it off as a lark.

LaRose believed in God but she had never followed any particular religion. As she continued to explore Islam online, she met a man in Turkey who became an especially helpful mentor. He explained the Five Pillars of Islam, and LaRose learned the wudu, the Muslim washing ritual. She ordered a Quran.

After a few weeks, she discovered that converting was easy; she didn’t even have to visit a mosque. All she had to do was recite the Shahada, a pledge to accept Allah as her only God and the Prophet Mohammad as his messenger. Just months after her one-night stand in Amsterdam, while chatting with a Saudi Arabian man, LaRose typed the Shahada and converted to Islam via instant messenger.

Sitting before the Dell desktop computer, an unusual feeling washed over her. Happiness.

“I was finally where I belonged,” she recalls today.

She took as her Muslim name Fatima, after one of the Prophet Mohammad’s daughters. “That’s the prophet’s favorite daughter,” she reasons, “and I was my dad’s favorite daughter.”

By “dad,” LaRose meant her stepfather. Her biological father – she dismissively calls him “nothing more than a sperm donor”–was, by his own admission, a monster.

The clearest documentation is contained in a series of archived juvenile court records reviewed by Reuters.
On November 6, 1980–when LaRose was 17–she wandered into Runaway House, a shelter for teens in Memphis, Tenn.
The girl’s platinum-blonde hair desperately needed a wash. Her hollowed eyes betrayed cocaine and heroin use. She carried venereal disease.

Colleen told a counselor that she had run away from home at age 13 and lived on the streets as a prostitute. She became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage that left her unable to have children. At 16, she married a man twice her age.
Runaway House routinely saw its share of cruelty. But Colleen’s story deeply shook the counselor, Ollie Avery Mannino.
Colleen’s parents, heavy drinkers, divorced when she was 3. Growing up near Detroit, she struggled in school and had to repeat the first grade. Once, she came to school with mouse bites on her fingers.

There was more. When Colleen was 8 years old and her sister, Pam, was 11, her biological father began to rape them, Colleen told the counselor. Her father, Richard LaRose, would appear at their door at night with a bottle of lotion, a silent signal that it was time to undress. The rapes started when Colleen was in the second grade; they continued until she ran away.

Mannino promised to help but explained that the law required her to notify a minor’s parent that a runaway was safe. Colleen gave Mannino her father’s number. When the counselor reached Richard LaRose, she told him that his daughter was in Memphis. Then she told him what Colleen had said.

“Yeah,” Richard LaRose replied without hesitation, Mannino recalls. “I raped her.”

He said it sharply, without remorse, and in such a prideful, guttural tone that Mannino snapped her head, stunned. The confession—or boast—is memorialized in the confidential report Mannino wrote to the court shortly after the call. To this day, Mannino, who spoke to Reuters with Colleen’s permission, vividly remembers what happened next.

Colleen took the phone. Angry, her face flushed and tears flowing, she screamed at her father: “Look what you’ve done to me! You did this to me! It’s your fault! Why? Why?”

A moment later, Colleen hurled the phone at a bulletin board, scattering notes and pictures. Then she crumpled into the chair.

The counselor bundled the girl off to a hospital for psychiatric treatment.

Mannino said she reported Richard LaRose to local authorities but, inexplicably, he never was charged with raping either daughter. He died in 2010.

“He never did say he was sorry for what he did to us,” says Pam LaRose, now 52, who described the rapes recently in her first media interview. “I still have a lot of anger. Colleen feels the same way. We don’t talk about it a lot. Too much pain is involved.”