In the last few years, especially during the pandemic, people from around the world have journeyed to Costa Rica to live in intentional or ‘eco’ communities, drawn by the dream of creating a new ‘heaven on Earth’. These communities call themselves names like The Ark or Brave Earth, some even declare that they are sovereign territories, independent of the law of Costa Rica. Seekers arrive like Puritan pilgrims in 17th century America, searching for a new Jerusalem free from Babylon. Like the Puritans, they can forget that it’s not a New Earth, it’s someone else’s country.
Some of these intentional communities survive and integrate into Costa Rica, like Monteverde, where American Quakers established a school and nature reserve in the 1950s. But some communities go wrong - people fall out with each other, or with the locals, or they get scammed, or the pioneer spirit slowly fizzles out. I often drive past a road sign saying ‘Paradise’, pointing the way to one former eco-community - the place is deserted, over-grown, snake-infested.
In rare cases, intentional communities become harmful and controlling cults. That, according to former members’ reports, is what happened to EarthWaking Village, an eco-community founded in 2022 near Dominical, on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. It was founded by four Americans - Jonathan England (44) (that’s him in the video), his partner Melinda ‘Love’ Hallman (44), Kirk McDow (63) and his partner Donna Gingras McDow (62) .
EarthWaking offered people the dream of ‘heaven on Earth’. In the words of the community’s prophet, Jonathan England:
Costa Rica is a place that’s calling, it’s like ‘please birth the New Earth here’, it wants it to happen here, there’s this energy here, we got all the food and water, it’s abundant, it’s perfect temperature. Costa Rica is the Garden of Eden. There’s a lot of people coming here building communities and they’re just crumbling like crazy, because people are thinking they can just get to heaven on Earth, but you can’t be in heaven on Earth until heaven is in you.
On 6 October, agents from Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Agency (OIJ), together with the public prosecutor’s office and the investigations department of the US Embassy, raided the village and arrested England, Mel Hallman, Kirk McDow and Donna Gingras McDow . They were detained on suspicion of fraud. According to the OIJ, 11 alleged victims handed over money ‘under various promises’ and are believed never to have got it back; investigators put an initial estimate of losses at around $600,000. No charges have yet been filed, and the four have been released but are subject to precautionary measures imposed by the criminal court in Pérez Zeledón while the investigation continues. They’ve been ordered to leave the village they founded.
Javier Chaverri Ross, a lawyer for several of the alleged victims, told the Costa Rican news site CR Hoy that the real losses exceed $3 million, and that his clients’ complaints go beyond fraud, to include alleged coercion, sexual offences and deception in the sale of plots of land. Javier told me he is now trying to negotiate a settlement to compensate those who lost money. The four founders’ lawyer, Jonathan Montenegro, told me his clients are ‘fully cooperating with the legal process’ and added that he hopes ‘all parties involved will reach a satisfactory agreement.’ Under Costa Rican law, criminal cases for offences against property committed without serious violence can be closed if the accused fully compensate the victims and the victims accept it.
What began as a New Age community turned, according to former villagers, into a fire-and-brimstone Christian sect, with the prophet Jonathan England claiming he was in direct communication with God, although one follower says he actually seemed to be channeling the advice of ChatGPT.
The village has said on social media that it is not a cult. However, former members describe group manipulation, intense “breakthrough” processes, pressure to take part in psychedelic ceremonies, brutal public shaming sessions, and banishment for those who didn’t submit to the leaders. Followers say they were encouraged to put their savings into a cryptocurrency called ‘Nature Coin’, which they were then unable to cash out, or they made loans that were not repaid, or they were told that expropriated homes or possessions were donations. One mother says she was expelled from the community and denied access to her children, who remained in the village, for three months. One young American spent five months in a US psychiatric unit after his family brought him home; his mother says he was diagnosed with psychosis induced by a psychedelic drug. And two participants died within weeks of attending the same EarthWaking retreat in May 2025: Claudiu Tataru drowned off the Costa Rican coast on 26 May, and Heather Tyks, who had returned home to the US, took her own life on 24 June. Friends and family say both were in acute mental distress after the retreat, and Heather’s mother suspects she was destabilized by a drug, though it’s not yet clear what occurred.
As someone who has married a Costa Rican, made this beautiful country my home, and is moving into an eco-community next year, I care about what happens in these communities, how they can integrate into and benefit Costa Rica, and how they can go wrong. This is a long, wild story, which I’m going to tell over several weeks. The story begins somewhere very different from a strict Christian eco-community: Spring Break in Florida.
Panama City Beach
Jonathan England, the 44-year-old prophet of EarthWaking, was born in Kentucky in 1982. He had an older brother who had muscular dystrophy. Jonathan says his mother Carol, compensating for her feeling of guilt for their first son’s illness, worshipped Jonathan as a ‘perfect superhero son’.
She always told everyone about all of the amazing things that I used to do, most of which were quite an exaggeration. She never admitted to anyone that I could ever make a mistake. ..“In order to be worthy of love, I have to be a perfect super hero.”
His brother died when Jonathan was 12, and then his family moved to Panama City Beach. Jonathan struggled to fit in, but as a young man he got a job ‘working on a parasail boat and hanging out with girls in bikinis’. Panama City Beach is a small town on the Florida coast which became an infamous spring break capital in the 1990s. It was the home of Club La Vela, supposedly the largest night club in the US, the site of appearances by Eminem and MC Hammer on MTV Spring Break, wet t-shirt contests, frat bros chugging beers, and hundreds of thousands of college students partying until they passed out.
Jonathan England describes himself at this time as a ‘broke, ignorant, blackout-drunk atheist beach bum’.
I would have about fifteen shots along with several beers per night. Most nights, I was also doing other drugs as well. I had new girls to hang out with every week. I had a very strategic pattern that I learned to run on the parasail boat that worked perfectly for getting any girl I wanted to hang out with me.
The mentor: Markus Bishop
Amid this carnage, there was a preacher called Markus Bishop, who would become Jonathan England’s mentor. Bishop became a star in the prosperity gospel network of Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar and other mega-church multi-millionaire preachers. He preached the prosperity gospel - wealth is a sign you know God, poverty means you don’t.
Bishop was clearly close to God, judging by the size of his $4.4 million mansion - Italian marble, Brazilian mahogany, a theatre, ballet studio, band room, six bedrooms and four-car garage.
But later on he would talk about the risk of having a double life - the public persona and what is actually going on behind the scenes. In Markus’ case, his church, Life Center at The Tabernacle, was running a night-club in the evenings called Amnesia, holding wet and wild contests, naked paint parties and twerking contests for Spring Breakers - all tax-exempt until Bay County revoked its church status.
Bishop even got an ATM installed outside the church.
The story made headlines around the world.
Less amusingly, Bishop was arrested for battery of his wife in 2008, and then in 2014 he was arrested over allegations that he gave marijuana to a teenager and made sexual advances; the charge was later dropped. He was arrested again for possession of marijuana in 2016.
Bishop did not respond to a message. He’s since been born again (again) and talked about his fall from grace:
From 2001 to 2021 I had five front page stories, four public arrests, three really bad divorces, two full bankruptcies and a church nightclub on television and with all of that you think you hit bottom there’s always another bottom and another bottom and another bottom and another bottom till you’re ready to come back home, and I found myself in that pig trough you know eating pig slop, metaphorically speaking
The real estate hustler and wannabe-prophet
Markus Bishop had two young side-kicks - Jonathan England and Erik Gerace, a boat-captain and a jet-ski tour guide (Erik would later follow Jonathan to EarthWaking Village in Costa Rica). The two set up several businesses with Bishop, including an addiction recovery center called Remedy Cove (dissolved) and a holding company called Five Fold Holding (dissolved). But Jonathan had bigger dreams - he was trying to set himself up as a real estate impresario.
He often tells a story about how in two years he went from ‘homeless to building a multi-million dollar real estate empire’. He says that, while living as a ‘black-out drunk atheist’ in PCB, he was arrested for drunk driving. Bay County court records also show he was charged with burglary and grand theft in 2001; both charges were dropped. One night in a jail cell, he decided he needed to change his life. He saw an infomercial for a real estate coach called Dean Graziosi, selling people on a vision of ‘no money no credit real estate investing’.
For Jonathan, it was a light-bulb moment. ‘I knew I wanted to make a bunch of money, but I knew I didn’t want to work much because I was lazy’, he later wrote. He worked out a plan to become a real estate mogul using other people’s money, later described in his book If I Die Before I Wake - find people with money sitting in bank accounts and persuade them to lend to him, enabling him to buy, remodel and sell real estate. Bay County records show he managed to borrow around $2,000,000 from retail investors between 2011 and 2021. Two of his investors took him to court, but the cases were dropped.
Meanwhile, Jonathan was following his mentor Markus Bishop into the religion business. In 2015, he founded EarthWaking, a New Age church that would gather in Bishop’s Life Center - the same building that hosted the naked paint parties. England claimed to have had a religious awakening and to have received a mission from God: unite the religions, reform the education system, and reinvent the monetary system. He had a vision to build ‘metaphorical arks’ of off-grid sustainable living.
One of the first people to see Jonathan in his new role as life coach / prophet was Rania DiBacco, back then a competitive bikini model and entrepreneur, now a fitness and life-coach.
Rania tells me:
I’m sitting in the crowd, and Jonathan’s up there speaking, and I was entranced because it was like everything he was speaking I could feel as truth. It was like my soul was yearning for whatever he was saying.
The two started dating. Rania says: ‘He would speak all the time about his vision of off-grid living.’ She adds that Jonathan taught her self-help methods to help her heal and grow, and that he fell in love with her, and proposed marriage to her twice. Rania says that she helped Jonathan find investors for one of Markus Bishop’s ventures, a silverware wrapping company called QuiQ Silver. ‘If I found investors, I got shares in the company’. She says she persuaded her former partner, a wealthy night-club owner, to write England a large cheque for the venture. She adds that ‘one of the reasons why I separated with Jonathan’ was she came to suspect his handling of her ex’s funds intended for QuiQSilver. She says: ‘I don’t know [what happened] but I never trusted him again.’ Jonathan England’s lawyer declined to comment beyond his initial statement. England did not reply to an email. QuiQSilver has since restructured - I contacted a company representative to ask if the company is still going but didn’t hear back.
According to the testimony England would later give, he renounced all pursuit of money and walked away from his real estate empire following his 2015 religious awakening. ‘I decided I will never do anything for money ever again,’ he said. But the facts suggest otherwise. Bay County records show he kept on borrowing from small-time lenders, mainly husbands and wives, for at least six more years, taking out new loans in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021, the last after he had moved to Costa Rica. Lenders filed foreclosure actions against him in 2017 and 2021 (both dropped), and in 2019 there was a lawsuit brought against Markus Bishop for an unpaid $50,000 note which England had co-signed in 2018.
Mel’s dream
Another attendee at one of Jonathan’s events in 2015 was a 33-year-old dental hygienist, wife and mother of two kids called Melinda Hallman. She was also entranced, and later gave a video testimony about the moment.
Melinda told Jonathan she had a recurring daydream while working at the dental clinic: sitting around a bonfire at a drum circle with a spiritual family in the jungle, watching her young son run around freely in nature. Jonathan responded that building an off-grid spiritual family in the jungle was his exact vision too. He asked her: ‘That’s my home. Would you like to just hold hands and walk together?’ She said yes.
Chris Wilcox, Mel’s biological brother, tells me:
Jonathan is a master manipulator. He brainwashed my sister and I don’t even know who she is anymore. She met Jonathan at one of his mastermind seminars in PCB. Left her husband and kids a few months later, and it’s been downhill with her since. She had a near perfect life. Only one in the family to go to college, she had a good career, faithful husband for over 10 years, two perfectly healthy boys… I don’t know where her mind went wrong. I miss her.
Melinda Hallman started calling herself Melinda Love, and followed Jonathan in becoming a life-coach offering online workshops, including one on ‘non-attachment parenting’. She also followed him to Austin, Texas, and then on to Costa Rica, down a path which would culminate in her arrest last month.
Jonathan, Mel, Kirk and Donna’s lawyer did not respond to detailed questions. Next week: Jonathan and Mel move to Austin, Texas and start working with Kirk McDow and his partner Donna on an intense two-day personal growth seminar called Awakened Life Live, inspired by Landmark Education. They start to build the online sales funnel that would lead people to their eco-village in Costa Rica.
Thank you to everyone who is helping me with this series, and if you have information you want to share, get in touch.