Teresa Kibwetere (64) clearly remembers the day she met the woman who was to transform her husband into the head apostle of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.
"It was July 1989. We had gone to church and we were told about two girls who had visions of the Virgin Mary," she said. "The girls greeted us cheerfully and they told us they received messages from heaven. When they saw we were interested, they told us to bring them to our house."
The meeting changed her life. Her husband, Joseph Kibwetere, went on to become the leader of the cult which has so far taken more than 600 lives, 330 of them in a fire at the cult's headquarters at Kanungu on March 17th, which is being treated as murder.
The remainder have since been dug up from two buildings owned by the movement. On Wednesday police exhumed a further 53 bodies. Most of the dead were women and children, many of whom had been strangled.
Teresa Kibwetere, a former domestic science teacher, is a polite, elderly woman dressed in a traditional busuti. She lives in a small village in Ntungamo district in western Uganda, in the house she and her husband built in 1973 when he was a wealthy member of the community.
Photos of their early married life show a shy Teresa and a confident Joseph with his colleagues from the land commission.
In 1979 Joseph - who was deeply religious despite having several children out of wedlock - visited Rome and on his return he built a church for his community.
"We had a happy marriage," Teresa says. "He was very kind. The problems only began when we met Credonia Mwerinde and her sister Ursula in the church in 1989."
Little is known of Credonia's past other than that she described herself as a former prostitute. All Teresa knows is that she moved into the house in July of that year.
"She was humble at first. But she soon began to mistreat me. She said I was bad, then she said she and her sister should sleep in the same room with my husband and I. He always supported them," she says.
By 1991 the group had about 200 members. Joseph was appointed leader but Credonia was the power behind the throne.
Credonia stayed silently in a room, Teresa said, and "said she was receiving messages from the Virgin Mary and she spent the whole day writing them down".
The turning point came when Ursula Mwerinde poured paraffin on a bag of Teresa's clothes and set them alight. When Teresa complained, Credonia tried to beat her.
The rest of the family decided enough was enough when Joseph started to sell off his property to buy food and clothing for the commune. "We called the elders and we explained what was happening," Teresa's son Giles says. "They agreed to expel him."
Joseph and the other cult members left for Kanungu in 1991.
The family is still struggling to understand what happened to their father.
Police have speculated that the cult leaders may have told followers to sell off their property and then gathered them into the church in Kanungu, boarded up the windows and set the building alight.
They suspect that Joseph Kibwetere and Credonia Mwerinde fled with the money. But the family believes Joseph is dead.