For a pair of prominent anti-war activists, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had many battles to fight in 1971. Upon their move to America, they faced the ire of bitter (and often racist and misogynistic) Beatles fans, investigations by the FBI, deportation attempts by the Nixon administration and pressure to either manifest or temper the revolution as bombing campaigns in and around Vietnam escalated.
Perhaps the most personal and pivotal of them all, however, was a custody battle.
Ono gave birth to her first child and only daughter Kyoko Ono Cox in 1963. While Ono wasn’t married to Kyoko’s father for long — especially after meeting Lennon in ’66 — she and American filmmaker and artist Anthony Cox co-parented amicably while exploring their respective careers and relationships. At least, at the beginning.
In the new HBO doc One to One: John & Yoko, Ono admits to being an “offbeat mother,” bringing Kyoko onstage during performances as a baby and to Montreal for the “bed-in” for peace with Lennon when she was only 4. The unconventional family even gathered in Denmark for New Year’s Eve in 1969 — Ono and Lennon, Cox and his new wife Melinda Kendall, and little Kyoko.
The peace wouldn’t last. Ono and Lennon found it harder and harder to communicate with Cox, who grew paranoid that the celebrity couple was plotting to take Kyoko away from him for good. He missed a court-ordered appearance in 1971 and was jailed. Out on bail, he disappeared with the 8-year-old.
Cox and Kendall had been searching for a higher power, a sense of belonging — and validation for their rash decision to withhold Kyoko from her mother and stepfather. They found it in the Living Word Fellowship (LWF), also called the Church of the Living Word or simply “The Walk.”
As readers of Little Village may recognize, LWF is the cult that built the Shiloh township south of Kalona, not far from the birthplace of its founder and charismatic prophet John Robert Stevens. Before it was abandoned and leveled in a controlled burn in 2020, Shiloh hosted all-night death prayers, doomsday prepping, child labor, abusive summer camps, inadequate schools, a farm that produced and sold snake-oil health products, and an annual Fourth of July fireworks show attended by normal families across eastern Iowa.
While Shiloh served as the spiritual headquarters of the LWF, the cult formed in southern California among God-fearing hippies and wayward artists.
“In our first meeting with John Robert Stevens, he solved all our problems,” Cox claimed.
“Father John” invited Cox in front of his L.A. congregation, prophesying the artist would raise his small family in Iowa. Cox obliged.
“The relationship was all right between us and Mr. Cox,” Lennon said in a 1972 interview on the The Dick Cavett Show. “But one day something happened, and we just didn’t see her, and Yoko hasn’t seen her child for two years. For two years, we’ve been chasing him all over the world.”
Kyoko was the main reason Ono and Lennon made their fateful move to the States. They spent a fortune on lawyers and investigators to try and find Cox, who they knew was somewhere in his home country.
Meanwhile, Kyoko found herself in a quaint Iowa farmhouse doing chores: cleaning, husking dried beans and listening to tapes of John Robert Stevens’ sermons, over and over. Even mainstream Christian music was frowned upon, let alone Top 40 radio.
“There’s my mom and John doing all these things to appeal to me,” Kyoko told the Daily Mail in a rare interview earlier this year. “But I was living on a farm in Iowa. We didn’t own a TV.”
Ono and Lennon pined over Kyoko in talk show appearances and in songs. “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” begins with Ono whispering, “Happy Christmas, Kyoko.” She wails her daughter’s name in “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow).” In her 1973 song “Looking Over From My Hotel Window,” Ono pleads, “If I ever die, please go to my daughter and tell her that she used to haunt me in my dreams (That’s saying a lot for a neurotic like me).”
Back in Shiloh, “We never talked about my mom and John. We avoided people who would talk about it,” Kyoko said. “Going into a cult was like the perfect place to go if you were scared of being tracked down by the FBI. … Nobody there gave a damn. They were in love with the cult leader and trying to read the Bible and do whatever the cult leader said and listen to his sermons.”
“There were so many times that I said to my dad, ‘I really want to get back in touch with my mom.’ And he would say, ‘Well, if you do, first of all, it’s not what God wants you to do, and then second of all, you’ll put me in jeopardy. Your mom is for sure going to put me in prison.’”
Once, Cox let Kyoko call her mother briefly on Christmas. When Ono asked, “So where are you?” he ended the call immediately.
After a few years, the family would join the LWF congregation in Los Angeles, Kyoko attending the cult’s school. Cox gradually grew disillusioned with Stevens. He picked Kyoko up early one day and whisked her away. His wife stayed.
Ever paranoid, Cox convinced Kyoko that Ono would have trouble forgiving them both for falling off the map. He insisted she attend the conservative Christian Wheaton College in Illinois. There, she met her future husband, who would help her gain independence from her father. She began a career as a public school teacher and married in 1992. In 1994 — 14 years after Lennon’s murder — she finally found the fortitude to reach out to Ono.
Her mother didn’t care about prosecuting Cox; to this day, he hasn’t faced any legal consequences for kidnapping Kyoko, who now views her father as “impossible,” “self-deluded” and a “major narcissist.”
Ono was simply elated. “She wanted to see me right away and then we just started spending time together,” Kyoko said.
“When Kyoko finally appeared, I was totally in shock,” Ono told People in 2003. “It felt like the part of me that was missing came back.”
Mother and daughter have been close ever since. Today, Kyoko lives in California. She has two children of her own, now in their late 20s.
John Robert Stevens died in 1983. His widow and another high-ranking member married and took control of the Living Word Fellowship, which dissolved in 2018 amid revelations of sexual abuse and cover-ups at the highest levels. The former Shiloh was annexed by the city of Kalona, which is converting the land into trails and a park. Learn more about LWF history.
This article is from Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
