Elizabeth Struhs’ lifeless body was left on a mattress while members of her religious congregation sang and prayed around her. Credit: Cloe Read
Outside his home, Jason Richard Struhs is pulled from his religious congregation to talk to police. The body of his eight-year-old daughter has been lying in the house, on a mattress on the floor, for 36 hours.
Singing can be heard from the crime scene as Jason starts answering a detective’s questions.
Footage of the interview, shot on January 8, 2022, and only now made publicly available as a verdict is handed down over his daughter’s death, shows a man politely explaining details up to that moment.
“Yesterday, she just,” Jason shrugs, “fell asleep and passed away.”
Jason, along with his wife, Kerrie, and 12 other members of the congregation, “the Saints”, was convicted of Elizabeth Struhs’ manslaughter after one of Queensland’s biggest trials.
In the footage, he shrugs again. “Obviously we believe in God, as you can tell, and we expected him to bring her back.”
He explains how strong-willed his daughter was. She had always believed in God, like her mother, and she had wanted to stop taking insulin for her type 1 diabetes early that January.
Kerrie is even more devoted to the fringe religious group, having been a member for 17 years, and refusing all modern medicine.
But Jason had been baptised only months before Elizabeth became gravely ill. He had resisted his wife’s hardline beliefs for years.
Kerrie is so devout, she tells police she hoped her daughter would rise from the dead in front of paramedics.
On the Monday before Elizabeth died, Jason says, he agreed with his daughter and stopped giving her the insulin. By Friday morning, the 53-year-old baker woke up to the sound of praying in his house.
For years, the small group – who called themselves “the Saints” – had quietly practised their religion in a neat brick house typical of those found in the suburbs of Toowoomba, west of Brisbane.
Reading scriptures, speaking in tongues, and denouncing medicine, “the Saints” chose to believe God would heal them.
“We were upstairs, and I ran downstairs, and she’d passed on,” Jason says. “But I wasn’t sad.”
Elizabeth is remembered by her older sister Jayde as a “bubbly, energetic soul who was always happy”.Credit: Nine News
He stares at the detective through dark-rimmed square glasses. He says his daughter wasn’t breathing. He shrugs. “She was motionless.”
The detective asks why police weren’t called to the Meredith Crescent home the day before.
“We expected God to bring her back,” he answers. “There was never going to be a time where we call straight away because that just destroys what we believe.”
But Jason eventually decided to call for an ambulance.
Asked by the detective if he has any regrets, he says he’s at peace.
“I’m happy for her,” he says, looking at the ground. “Because I’ve seen what she had to go through. She hated it.
“I don’t care what anyone thinks, and it doesn’t worry me, I did this for my baby girl.”
Between questions, Jason is seen saying goodbye to other members of the congregation. “I don’t feel sorry. I feel happy because I know now she’s at peace.”
‘Only thing different is now I believe, where I didn’t [previously], and I gave my little girl what she wanted and I expect God to look after her.’
Jason Richard Struhs
He begins to cry. “And so am I, because I don’t have to … I’m not totally … she’s not dependent on me for her life now, and I’m not trapped by diabetes as well because it’s an awful thing for parents to go through, and kids and everything.”
The detective, who knows Jason from a previous incident in which Elizabeth almost died, asks the father how he’s faring.
“I’m great – I won’t say great. I’m not jumping up and down with joy. But I’m at peace. I’ve got nothing to hide, like last time, we’ve had nothing to hide.”
Later, his wife Kerrie Elizabeth Struhs, 49, would be interviewed in a room by two detectives. She answers questions with deference. At times, she raises her chin at the police.
She tells them she has believed in God for about 17 years. But her husband never did, she says. But, in the August before her daughter died, something shifted.
She was in prison at the time, having been jailed back in 2019 for failing to provide for Elizabeth when the child was first diagnosed with diabetes, and Jason was struggling to care for their eight children.
That August, Jason decided to get baptised in the backyard by the leader of his wife’s congregation – Brendan Luke Stevens. In the footage of her police interview, Kerrie smiles as she recalls receiving news over the phone in prison from her husband.
She was released on December 15, 2021. Three weeks later, her daughter was dead.
‘It was an amazing turnaround. For 17 years I put up with him bagging me and my beliefs and all of a sudden, he has exactly the same belief.’
Kerrie Elizabeth Struhs
“He’s saying all the things – quoting scriptures,” she says.
She talks in depth about her belief in God, how her children became involved in religion, and usually “received the Holy Spirit” by eight years old. She tells detectives her eldest child, Jayde, began to speak in tongues about the age of six.
Then she describes Elizabeth’s death. Kerrie appears emotionless, devoted to the idea that God would bring her child back to life.
“By Thursday, she was obviously very sick, and then by the morning, she stopped breathing,” she says, sitting with her arms folded on the table.
The congregation had stayed around Elizabeth, keeping buckets close by because she kept vomiting, Kerrie explains.
The Toowoomba home where Brendan Luke Stevens and his family lived, and where “the Saints” worshipped. Credit: Cloe Read
When Elizabeth died, the group started praying, she says. Her daughter was “very still”.
Kerrie says she never checked her daughter’s breathing, “because I was expecting whether she was breathing or not, God would still heal her”.
Everyone was touching Elizabeth, she says, and they “could just feel she wasn’t breathing, and she wasn’t moving at all”.
“I was hoping she’d stand up in front of [the paramedics] and say, ‘What are you doing here?’ But I can’t decide what God is going to do.”
‘God has his own time, we can’t tell him how it should go. As I said, she could get up now.’
Kerrie Elizabeth Struhs
How the Struhses and others joined “the Saints” remained a mystery until the mammoth trial began last year over Elizabeth’s death.
Fourteen worshippers were charged, including other members of the Struhs and Stevens families. Jason Struhs and congregation leader Brendan Stevens, 63, were accused of murder, while the others faced the lesser charge of manslaughter.
On the first day of the trial, some defendants grinned at journalists and the public watching from the limited seating in Brisbane’s Supreme Court. Extra prison officers were brought into the courtroom, which was reconfigured for the 14 people being prosecuted.
Over the weeks that followed, the court was told how one of the accused, young woman Keita Martin, had initially started spending time with the Stevens family in 2016.
Fifteen years old at the time, Martin was taking drum lessons from a member of the Stevens family.
But her mother became increasingly concerned about her involvement with the family, and Brendan’s influence over her daughter. Martin was baptised by 2018, and dropped contact with her own family.
The eldest Struhs daughter, Jayde, who eventually cut ties with the family because of the overwhelming religious beliefs, described her childhood to the court in an emotional testimony.
She said it was a formal process to go to the Stevens house, read scriptures, and share a meal several times a week.
The Stevens home, where the cultlike group read scriptures and shared meals a few times a week.Credit: Cloe Read
“[Brendan Stevens] led every single one. He was the one who … started the meetings, shared what he had found in the Bible to share with us that Sunday. He’d pick the songs, everything pretty much.”
Outsiders were rare, Jayde told the court.
She described it as like enduring hell. She was fearful, especially once she revealed to the group that she was gay, which was seen as an “abomination”.
The members of “the Saints” opted to represent themselves legally.
As some addressed the courtroom, others would whisper and giggle among themselves.
Brendan Stevens would at times appear frantic as he spoke, gesticulating as he referenced the Bible. His testimony ranged from global conflicts to pig organ transplants in humans.
A night before the verdict, Justice Martin Burns approved the public release of the video of Stevens’ police interview.
And about midday on Wednesday, January 29, 2025, Burns handed down his decision: all 14 defendants were found guilty of the manslaughter of Elizabeth Struhs.
When asked if they had anything to say, Jason Struhs said, “no, your honour”. Stevens said, “not that I can think of”.
In the previously unseen footage of Kerrie Struhs’ police interview, she insists firmly that she never considered taking her daughter to a hospital. “She wasn’t even healed before, she was propped up by medicine.”
And she tells detectives she has no intention of holding a funeral. “No. Because the Bible says, let the dead bury the dead, and Elizabeth’s body is simply just bones and flesh, her spirit is most certainly living. So, yeah.”
As the interview concludes, the mother declares: “God can’t fail. And I don’t believe he has failed here. And everyone is still yet to see some great miraculous thing happen and this is for everyone to know there is a god and that they need to turn to him really soon.”
Her eyes widen. “Because these are end days. That’s what this whole thing is about.”
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