Aravindan Balakrishnan, from Enfield, called himself Bala’s companion and brainwashed himself into believing he had divine powers. One of his followers was a young woman from the middle of Wales who turned her back on a privileged life to live her life with Balakrishnan, isolated from her family, friends and society. Sian Davies, daughter of a GP from Tregaron, Ceredigion, has always had the best of everything. She studied at a boarding school in Malvern in Worcestershire and then at Cheltenham Ladies College, where she continued her law studies at Aberystwyth University. After graduating she moved to London to study at the London School of Economics where she met Balakrishnan in the mid-1970s. It was at this time that she became a “professional revolutionary”, devoting herself to a communist group known as the Labor Institute based in Acre Lane in Brixton, south London. It seems that Sian Davies played a central role in the cult, paying bills, organizing rotas and working as a personal chauffeur in Balakrishnan. Despite having a wife, Chandra, Sian Davies had a daughter, Katy Morgan-Davies. She never played with other children, never went to school and was kept hidden for decades. Aravindan Balakrishnan (left) with some of his teammates who were part of his cult Sian died on Christmas Eve 1996 – eight months after falling from a second-floor window at her home in Brixton. She never recovered from her injuries she suffered in the fall. An investigation into her death in 1998 was concluded with an open verdict and the medical examiner expressed his frustration that he did not know why or how Mrs. Davis fell out of the bathroom window at home. Her family believes she was trying to escape worship. Police arrested Balakrishnan and his 2016 trial heard him use violence, fear and sexual harassment to control his victims, saying he had an invisible machine called Jackie that could read their minds and control people. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison after being convicted of offenses such as child cruelty, false imprisonment and assault. You can read more about it here. Katy Morgan-Davies was held prisoner by her father (Image: Owen Humphreys / PA Wire) Katy Morgan-Davies, who waived her right to anonymity, filed a lawsuit against her father in court and began getting to know her family from Wales shortly afterwards. She never knew Sian was her mom until she died. Describing her ordeal as “horrible, so inhuman and degrading”, Ms Morgan-Davies said at the time: “I felt like a bird in a cage with severed wings.” The court heard that Balakrishnan founded the Mao Zedong Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Thought in south London in the 1970s and persuaded his followers to believe that he could read their minds. He warned them that a supernatural force called Jackie would cause natural disasters if they never obeyed him. Balakrishnan died at HMP Dartmoor on Friday, the Prison Service said. He added that the ombudsman had been informed about prisons and prevention.
