Run Away: How are all the missing persons cases connected to the same cult? Details revealed

Netflix kicked off 2026 with another Harlan Coben thriller, Run Away. This time, it’s a British miniseries with eight episodes, all sharp and tightly wound.

James Nesbitt leads as Simon Greene, a father whose whole world falls apart when his daughter Paige (Ellie de Lange), who is struggling with addiction, just vanishes. At first, it’s all about one frantic father searching for his missing kid. But soon, things spin out of control. There’s murder, buried secrets, and a creepy religious cult tying everything together in ways you don’t see coming.

As you watch, it all starts to connect. Every missing person, every murder, it all leads back to one place: a dangerous cult pretending to offer spiritual salvation, while quietly pulling everyone’s strings.

The cult connection at the center of Run Away

The core of the mystery of Run Away is The Beacon of the Shining Truth, also called The Shining Truth. It is a religious cult under the leadership of a man named Casper Vartage. Within the organization, he is known as “The One.” Shining Haven was a prison where Vartage was the manager. He imprisoned people there and kept them in bondage without allowing them to go. He could break individuals down using psychological tricks and confine them when they failed to comply with his wishes.

The cult ran a systematic brainwashing program that made the members give up all their financial assets in exchange for staying at the compound. The cult also went as far as renaming all its members, breaking their connection to their former identities as well as the external world. In the most shocking discovery of Run Away, police found the members locked up in storage containers as a means of solitary confinement, a technique that highlighted the brutal means of control by the cult.

The Shining Truth was strictly hierarchical, with two sons of Casper Vartage acting as “The Visitor” and “The Volunteer,” which were peculiar titles that signified the isolating ideology of the cult. One of the members, Dee Dee (Maeve Courtier-Lilley), was identified in the cult as Holly and was instrumental in the series killing spree after she thought that it was her spiritual obligation to obey the commands of Vartage without question.

In Run Away, the relationship between the missing person cases and murders is made evident through the investigation of the private detective Elena Ravenscroft, played by Ruth Jones. Elena was forced to locate another runaway child, Henry Thorpe. As she excavates the truth about what has happened to him, she finds emails from Paige. These messages, and some other tips, draw her directly to the scenes of murder that Ash and Dee Dee had left, which link all three cases.

TV Guide UK dispels the appalling idea of the murders: Casper Vartage had fathered fourteen sons in his years as the head of the cult, as a result of non-consensual affairs with female members of the cult. In line with the cult belief that male blood was better, the daughters of Vartage did not qualify to inherit.

Over the years, Vartage had been selling these sons to be adopted out illegally with an accomplice known as Alison, who was an employee of an adoption agency, falsifying the paperwork and informing the mothers that the babies were stillborn.

Twenty years later, in Run Away, when Vartage was nearing his death, he had become worried that these biological sons might be able to inherit his fortune and threaten the cult’s future under his chosen heirs, The Visitor and The Volunteer. To eradicate this danger, Vartage used assassins Dee Dee and Ash (Jon Pointing) to kill his biological sons, who had been adopted as babies and were leading normal lives, not having any idea of their relationship with the cult.

The murders were conducted with calculated variety. One of the deaths was similar to a suicide. One of them appeared to be a violent robbery. Nevertheless, there was never always a connection: all victims were innocent people who were targeted only because of who their father was. They changed their ways intentionally so that the cops would not notice that all these killings were connected.

The relationship of the victims was eventually found on the modern genealogy and DNA testing websites. These platforms had brought the adopted sons together, who had had no idea of their relationship to each other before. It was discovered that they were half-brothers without any clue to how dangerous such a connection could be.

The genealogy site had turned into a dangerous breadcrumb trail that the victims left unintentionally, allowing the cult to trace down the biological sons of Vartage, who were just starting to connect. This contemporary version of cult secrecy shows how modern technology can reveal the hidden truths as well as introduce new vulnerabilities.

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All eight episodes of Run Away are currently streaming on Netflix.

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