Killer Cults
by
James J. Boyle

     All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except 
in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or 
reviews.  For information address St.  Martin's Press, 175
     Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

     ISBN: 0-312-95285-6

     Printed in the United States of America

     St.  Mar-tin's Paperbacks edition/ May 199.5

     Table of Contents

     Introduction 1
     1. Summer of Love 4
     2. Dad Knows Best 33
     3. Gordon Kahl 70 4. Palace of Gold 92
     5. Come and Get Us!  112
     6. Blood Atonement 140 7. El Padrino 169
     8. Yahweh 194
     9. King of the Israelites 213
     10.  Ranch Apocalypse 232
     11.  Circle of Fire 258

      Introduction

     FIRST, A WORD about the devil.
     For well over a decade the media have been spreading shocking 
accounts that, taken together, would seem to indicate that a vast, 
secret network of fanatical cultists have been preying on decent 
society, committing unspeakable acts of ritual murder, child abuse, 
human mutilation, cannibalism, and other heinous crimes in the name of 
Satan.
     These lurid tales are myths-partly created, like the giant 
alligators of the New York City sewersthrough an excess of credulity 
and a lack of common sense.  The human need to find focus for fear and 
apprehension is a powerful one.  The devil one can't see is, perhaps, 
more terrifying than the devil one can see.
     I refer anyone interested in the subject of satanic cults to two 
books published in 1993: Remembering Satan: A Case of Recovered Memory 
and the Shattering of an American Family, by Lawrence Wright, which 
originally appeared as a series in the New

     I

     Yorker,- and Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contempoi-ary 
Legend, by Jeffrey S. Victor.
     This book@xcept for those instances when Satan takes his bows 
among the cast of characters parading through the deranged mind of a 
psychopath like Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo-is not about the devil, but 
about an evil that can be seen, documented, and learned from: the 
twenty-five-year span of dangerous cults that began with the Manson 
Family and most recently blazed into the headlines on the plains near 
Waco, Texas.  Such cults are assembled by charismatic figures like 
David Koresh-epic megalomaniacs who have no interest in associating 
themselves with Satan, who is, after all, folklore's single biggest 
loser (even Manson redefined his devil in service to a vengeful God).
     Real killer cults nearly always claim to be on the side of the 
righteous.  Some actively prey on the world outside their tightly 
controlled borders.  Others -like Koresh's Branch Davidians or 
Philadelphia's Move-insist that they left other people alone, and all 
they ever wanted was to be left alone in return.
     When their illegal actions or apocalyptic street theater goad the 
police into ill-advised violent confrontations, their supporters blame 
only the police.  I hope these stories show that they cannot in good 
conscience justify that.
     As the millennium approaches with the start of the next century, 
hysteria and fanaticism about the end of the world-one of the favorite 
themes of killer cults-will accelerate.  From Manson to Jones to 
Koresh, the dangers posed by destructive cults have been clear and 
persistent for a quarter century.
     Whether the authorities, the news media, and the public have 
learned from them is something that remains to be seen.

      CHAPTER ONE

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     Summer of Love

     HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE identified him merely as "No Name Maddox," 
but by the time he was through, there wouldn't be any problem 
remembering the name.
     By the late summer of 1969, the horrors had already been going on 
for some time, quietly.  But they burst into the headlines on a sultry 
Saturday morning, August 9, from the sun-dappled seclusion of an estate 
on a road that ambles for a short distance in Bel Air, high on the 
mountain where Benedict Canyon plunges down to Beverly Hills.
     Winifred Chapman, a maid, first noticed something amiss when she 
arrived for work at 10050 Cielo Drive around eight A.M. A telephone 
wire, sliced with a knife, dangled uselessly over the steel-mesh front 
gate.  Since whoever cut it had obviously made no attempt to conceal 
the fact, she did not give too much thought to the matter, assuming it 
to be an unfinished job by a phone company worker.  She picked up the 
morning paper from the ground and let herself in.
     But on the well-manicured lawn just inside the gate, she noticed 
another odd sight: an old white Rambler sedan parked haphazardly just 
off the winding drive, its front tires turned sharply into the matted 
wet grass.  The cars here usually were foreign and expensive-sleek 
Mercedes or Ferraris, not boxy Ramblers.  Picking up her pace, Mrs.  
Chapman made her way inside the house to the kitchen, where she 
typically started her workday before the residentsmovie people-arose 
late in the morning.  The house was very quiet, which was normal enough 
for the hour.  She held the phone to her ear to check for a dial tone.  
It was dead.
     That was when she saw the blood, a small glistening pool of it on 
the rich Italian tiles of the kitchen floor.  Frowning, the maid saw 
that a faint trail of blood led through the dining room along the 
living room floor.  Following it, she nearly stumbled on two 
blood-soaked bathroom towels wadded up on the rug beside a couch.
     Off to the right she could see sunlight knifing in through the 
half-open door to the garden.  The maid hurried over to close it, but 
she stopped short.  Finally, she screamed.  Across the door, someone 
had scrawled the word PIG.  The epithet was written in blood.
     Outside, on the gentle slope of the lawn just beyond the border of 
three-foot hedges, she found the first two bodies-a white male in his 
early thirties, his bell-bottom jeans, purple shirt, and low-cut boots 
stained in blood, his flesh ragged with slash wounds, his skull bashed 
in.  Beside him, in a bloody fulllength white nightgown, sprawled a 
dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties.  Her limbs also were severely 
slashed.
     There was no escaping the carnage.  Running hysterically back into 
the living room, the maid found a pretty blond woman, the mistress of 
the house, more than eight months pregnant, lying in a fetal position, 
clad only in bra and panties.  Her body, sprawled in front of the 
fireplace, was slashed from head to thigh.  Around her slim neck was a 
loop of rope, which had been tossed over a wood ceiling beam and then 
fastened around the neck of the other body on the floor, a male in a 
blue shirt and white trousers, also slashed.
     There was one more.  Inside the Rambler, slumped dead on the front 
seat, was an eighteen-year-old boy, the only one of the bodies that the 
maid did not recognize.
     She ran screaming from the property.  Down the street, she finally 
saw another person, a fifteen-year-old boy.
     "There's bodies and blood all over the place!"  she cried.  "Call 
the police!"
     The headline in the next morning's newspaper terrified those who 
had awakened with a shudder to the bloodcurdling screams echoing 
blindly in the night over the hills of Benedict Canyon: RITUAL MURDERS!
     Charles Manson and his Family, leering from the headlines like 
demons, had announced the start of a new American nightmare.
     Charles Milles Manson didn't really fit the profile of a 
cold-blooded mass murderer.  At first glance he seemed more like what 
he had started out as in his criminal life: a small-time car thief with 
a chip on his shoulder-a dim-witted punk who robbed gas stations for 
spending money.  He was more the hairtriggered hoodlum who might shoot 
a gas station attendant in a panic, and then run and hide.  Physically 
cowardly, shifty-eyed, loudmouthed, surly, desperate for attention-he 
didn't really appear to have the volition, patience, or boldness to 
commit premeditated mass murder, let alone actually persuade others to 
kill in his name.  Only a unique intersection of man and era could 
create the specter of Charlie Manson, whose evil grin would become a 
hobgoblin for the sixties, leering toward the millennium.
     Charlie was born in Cincinnati in 1934 to an unmarried teenage girl 
named Kathleen Maddox.
     Asked to provide a name for the infant's birth certificate, the 
mother had been stumped.  Thus he entered society as "No Name Maddox."  
It wasn't until a few months later that the boy became Charles, and a 
few years after that came the surname Manson, after a man his mother 
briefly married.
     When Charlie was not quite five, his mother was sent to prison for 
robbing a gas station, and he was taken in by an intensely religious 
aunt and uncle in West Virginia.  But the young Charlie apparently did 
not get religion, at least not the way his foster parents envisioned 
it.
     By the age of twelve he was in an Indiana reform school.  That was 
where the first official notation of young Charlie's budding 
personality was entered.
     When he wanted to be, he could be a "likable boy," the 
institution's records said.  But (and perhaps understandably) the boy 
was already showing signs of a gtpersecution complex."
     Charlie soon escaped from reform school and managed to locate his 
mother, who was out on parole.  She told him to get lost, and he did.  
In the process, he held up stores and was caught redhanded during a 
nighttime burglary.
     Thanks partly to the ability he had to turn on a degree of 
manipulative charm when it suited him, Charlie managed to get himself 
sent to Father Flanagan's Boys Town, the charitable home in Nebraska.
     There, he sorely taxed the institution's famous slogan that "There 
is no such thing as a bad boy."  He lasted all of four days, before 
stealing a car and committing two armed robberies.
     A repeat offender by thirteen, in and out of penal institutions 
over the next few years, Charlie committed his first federal felony at 
the age of sixteen when he and two other boys escaped from a 
reformatory and crossed state lines on a crime spree to California, 
robbing gas stations in stolen cars along the way.
     Caught red-handed again, Charlie graduated to a federal juvenile 
center.
     Prison psychiatrists were intrigued by the stubbornly illiterate 
young man.  He was evaluated as unstable, antisocial, but "criminally 
sophisticated"-a diagnosis that seemed questionable since he was always 
caught so readily.  Criminal a titude aside, @p Charlie did exhibit 
enough jailhouse social skills to instinctively understand how to say 
what people wanted to hear.  After a period of psychotherapywhich he 
submitted to eagerly, since he loved attention-he impressed his 
therapists as stable and levelheaded enough to be considered 
rehabilitated and ready for freedom.  A parole hearing was scheduled.
     As usual, Charlie ran into trouble.  A month before the hearing, 
he brutally sodomized another boy at knifepoint.  Instead of being 
paroled, he was shipped to a tougher federal reformatory.
     The cycle repeated itself.  Back behind bars, he learned to impress 
his guards with cunning and cordiality; he even took some classes to 
try to learn how to read, though without great success.  In 1954, 
nineteen years old, he was paroled.  Free again, Charlie met and 
married a seventeen-year-old waitress.
     Though they had a son together, he had little time for fatherhood. 
 Instead, he concentrated on stealing cars, a pursuit for which he had 
shown little talent in the past.  Of course, he was caught.
     Once again in prison, this time in California, the hapless con fell 
under two influences that would prove to be crucial in his later life.  
One, seemingly innocuous, was modern psychological "motivational" 
training, in which the social and business networking principles of 
such popular self-improvement help gurus as Dale Carnegie were combined 
with intense group therapy and so-called "mind dynamics" sessions.  
Charlie naturally excelled at this.
     The other was a more traditional form of jailhouse education.  He 
attached himself to an older inmate, who had been associated with the 
Ma Barker gang and who taught Charlie, among other less useful things, 
how to play the guitar.
     A star was born, if only in his own mind.  In March of 1967, 
released on parole, having spent more than half of his life in the 
rigidly structured world of prison, with his beat-up guitar and 
thirty-five dollars in his pocket, Charlie took a bus for San Francisco 
and turned himself into a hippie rock musician, just in time for the 
fabled Summer of Love.
     To a self-absorbed ex-con with no skills other than the ability to 
manipulate people and mimic records, San Francisco in the summer of 
1967 was a paradise of free-flowing drugs, willing women, and unchecked 
hedonism, all coated with a thin veneer of idealism.
     Charlie worked the scene like a burglar.  As an older man with 
outlaw mystique, which he skillfully combined with a cultivated hippie 
image, Charlie didn't have to panhandle the streets with his guitar for 
long before he scored.  He struck up a conversation with a shy, homely, 
twenty-three-year-old assistant librarian named Mary Brunner, moved 
into her apartment, and settled into life in the teeming Haight.
     Charlie quickly disabused Mary of any notions she had about 
monogamy.  He brought home another, much prettier young redhead, 
Lynette Fromme, whom he had picked up on a trip to Venice Beach, near 
Los Angeles, with this line: "I am the god of fuck."  Fromme, a 
nineteen-year-old who had grown up in middle-class comfort in Santa 
Monica before dropping out, was nicknamed Squeaky-because of her 
disconcerting high-pitched giggle.  Though Mary resisted having Squeaky 
move in, Charlie easily prevailed.  And once Squeaky was installed, 
other girlsmost of them runaways recruited from the streetsbegan 
arriving.  The allure was part crash pad, part Charlie himself, and, of 
course, the Haight itself.
     Charlie's deliberately crafted image found a ready audience in the 
Haight, where hallucinogenic chemicals smoothed over rough emotional 
edges while acid-rock music pumped redemption into bare souls.
     With people constantly drifting in and out of the Manson 
household, the core group soon numbered more than a dozen-including a 
few young men, brought home by the girls and the promise of sex, drugs, 
and rock and roll.  They called themselves the Family.  From the 
beginning, Charlie sat at the head of the table.
     Arrayed around him were the desperate by-products of a culture 
that offered but two alternatives: stardom or despair.  Charlie "gave 
off a lot of magic," the stolidly loyal Squeaky Fromme later enthused.
     "He was a changeling.  He seemed to change every time I saw him."  
Dreamily, she recalled that Summer of Love: "We were riding on the 
wind."
     The wind was actually howling in from hell, but the merry blaze of 
drugs, music, and companionship of the mutually disenfranchised offered 
a haven.
     Charlie presided over all activities in the household, where 
Family members found comfort thinking of themselves as gentle, 
idealistic "flower people"-a pose that was ludicrous in light of 
Charlie's incessant ramblings about killing "niggers."  As such, the 
Manson Family was perfectly emblematic of the Haight of the late 
sixties, long after the comparatively innocent LSD-spiked milieu of a 
few years earlier, when the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead 
were neighborhood bar bands and Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were 
on the loose.  As the sixties waned, the ruthless drug trade, as much 
as drugs themselves, dominated Haight life.  The flowers were props 
placed on streets thick with cynical opportunism.
     In his book The Family, Ed Sanders described the "frenzy" that had 
engulfed the once-gentle HaightAshbury district by the summer of 1967, 
as the marketing engines of the music industry relentlessly hyped the 
hippie experience.  "The word was out all over America to come to San 
Francisco for love and flowers," Sanders wrote.  Like jackals to a 
watering hole, criminal opportunists flocked to such a scene.
     Besides runaways and would-be hippies fleeing suburban 
stultification, "the Haight attracted vicious criminals who grew long 
hair.  Bikers tried to take over the LSD market with crude, sadistic 
tactics.  Bad dope was sold by acne-faced methadrine punks .  . .
     People began getting ripped off in the parks.  There was racial 
trouble."
     Charlie, with his remarkable ability at winning friends and 
influencing people, positioned himself to take full advantage of the 
opportunities.  Though well into his thirties, Charlie perfected a role 
as sensitive hippie, even carefully grooming his own hair and beard to 
resemble popular conceptions of Jesus Christ.  As he worked on his 
"music," Charlie proclaimed that he was going to become "bigger than 
the Beatles."  Meanwhile, as he drew his followers ever closer together 
in a constricting world of isolation and paranoia, he began introducing 
fanatical religious elements into the spiritual mix.
     Though still barely literate, he had managed to acquaint himself 
in prison with the favorite Scripture of paranoids, the Book of 
Revelation-the book of the Bible that most resembles an acid-rock album 
cover, with its evocations.  of multiheaded homed beasts, mystical 
signs in the heavens, and apocalyptic cataclysms in which the righteous 
slaughter the damned in a blaze of glory.  Amply dosed with LSD, 
brimming with the maniacal metaphors of Revelation, Charlie announced 
that he had experienced his o%m epiphany in the Haight: Armageddon was 
at hand!  And he, the former No Name Maddox, would be the one to 
brandish the terrible sword and lead the faithful to salvation.
     While undergoing this theological awakening, Charlie had fallen in 
briefly with some Scientologists, members of a cult with which he had 
had some contact in prison.  For a time, he tried to mimic their 
abstruse rhetoric, but without commitment.  More to his liking was 
another influential Haight-based cult called the Process, a bizarre 
group of satanists that had been founded in England by a renegade 
Scientologist named Robert Moore.  From their rundown house on Cole 
Street, two blocks away from the place where Manson and his Family 
lived, the black-caped Process preached a lifestyle that combined the 
depraved melodrama of satanic ritual with the usual measures of 
hallucinogenic drugs-laced together with talk of violence.
     The Process was good at self-dramatization, Nazi imagery, and 
depiction of necrophilia.  But membership required blind allegiance to 
a leader believed by the group to be Christ.  Fresh out of prison, 
unwilling to take orders from anyone, secretly terrified of any male 
whom he could not readily dominate, Manson quickly lost interest in the 
Process.
     But bringing his notoriously short attention span into full focus, 
he did borrow various Process theories that appealed to him.  Chief 
among them was the notion that Christ and Satan had united in a divine 
alliance as the end of the world approached.  Satan's job in Armageddon 
would be to slay the damned as a favor to Christ, Charlie decided.  To 
a mind capable of putting that notion together, it was not a great leap 
to volunteer for the job himself.  Charlie, then, was the avenger.  
Impatient for his Armageddon, he started openly advocating group 
violence as a way to bring about the Final Days.  As a lifelong racist 
like Charlie figured it, white America-incensed by crimes committed by 
radical groups such as the Black Panthers-would go to battle against 
black America, resulting in nuclear war.  When the dust settled, 
Charlie and his followers would emerge from a hiding place in the 
desert and take command of the resulting New Order.  To bring all of 
this about would require igniting the racial war, and Charlie claimed 
the way to start it was to blame blacks for a wave of shocking violent 
incidents.
     Laying such grand plans within the parochial confines of San 
Francisco was difficult, however.  The Haight, teeming with newly 
minted hippies, was also jammed with tour buses.  Rattling with the 
jackhammers of gentrification, the Haight was rapidly losing its allure 
for the communal satanic lifestyle dedicated to bringing about the end 
of the world.
     The Process helpfully blazed the trail.  In 1968, led by a phalanx 
of bikers in full-dress regalia, a caravan of black-robed Process 
members wound down the coastal highway to Los Angeles.  There, they 
resettled in a big house near the Sunset Strip, a neighborhood just 
beginning its degeneration into a postmodern landscape where tourists 
framed out faded images of moviedom in their cameras while ignoring the 
prostitutes, drug dealers, hustlers, beggars, con men, and wasted 
proselytizers grimly staking their claims to the forsaken precincts of 
Hollywood.
     Shortly after the exodus of the Process, Manson and a dozen or so 
of his starstruck adherents followed the devil worshipers to Hollywood. 
 There, the diminutive hippie Messiah quickly reestablished a lively 
commune.  The Family was funded by drugdealing, panhandling, and 
credit-card theft, and wellnurtured by a recruiting system in which 
young runaway girls, some of them barely into their teens, acted as 
sexual lures to attract new males.  In this symbiotic Eden, Charlie 
craftily doled out the pleasures of sex and drugs, while manipulating 
the fragile group psyche to place himself as the source of authority 
and the facilitator not o-lily of pleasure and security, but of 
intimidation, isolation-and growing, unfocused rage.
     As with any bully, fear was the crucial weapon.
     Charlie quite consciously used it.  "Getting the Fear," in fact, 
was the title of one of his standard motivational lectures.  As people 
felt more afraid and alone in his presence, he fine-tuned the picture 
of himself as Jesus Christ, Superstar-as a man who would overcome 
betrayal and persecution to fulfill a destiny of greatness and eternal 
fame.  One favorite ritual was to strap himself to a wooden cross in 
the Family house while other members stripped naked and engaged in 
group sex at his feet.
     While sentimental hippie romanticism was celebrated in the 
Family's frequent sessions at which everyone would sing or play music, 
the group found no contradictions in Charlie's virulent racial bigotry, 
which he made little effort to conceal, and his insistence that the 
Family start stockpiling guns for its coming journey to the 
"wilderness" to wait out the end of the world.  Charlie's social 
philosophy had now become fully defined along three sharp forks: the 
black race's sole purpose on earth was to be slaves to the white race; 
women existed solely for the sexual gratification of men; no human 
action is evil, especially not murder.
     Hopelessly gullible, drug-addled followers like Susan Atkins found 
him irresistible.  A twenty-one-year-old high school dropout who had 
worked as a topless dancer before wandering into the Manson fold, Susan 
told others that she firmly believed that Charlie literally embodied 
both Jesus Christ and Satan.  Like Susan, other Manson followers were 
so desperate for a measure of emotional certainty that snippets of pop 
song lyrics could sound like the meaning of life, and a lifelong 
loser-an illiterate, bigoted, vile-tempered ex-con with a beard, long 
hair, and a persecution complex could be seen to be like Jesus Christ.
     "He is the king and I am his queen," gushed Susan, among the 
truest of the disciples.  "Look at his name, Manson.  Man's son.  Now I 
have visible proof of God, proof the Church never gave me."
     Sometime in 1968 Charlie obtained a beat-up Volkswagen bus, which 
was painted black and driven around southern California and into the 
desert on romps designed to evoke nostalgia for the fabled 
acid-and-love odyssey of Ken Kesey and his merry band.  Charlie always 
brought his guitar, which he now played proficiently, performing mostly 
his own songs-songs that people in the music business would later 
describe as competent, but derivative, overwrought, and without 
artistic merit.
     Yet Charlie was clever enough to make inroads into the periphery 
of the popular-recording industry.
     This was because he entered the picture at precisely the time when 
poseurs, con men, and marketing wizards were redefining the industry 
more as speed-demon spectacle than music.  With little actual talent, 
but plenty of macho "attitude"-a posture of contempt and a carefully 
cultivated satanic sneerCharlie usually managed to get an initial 
hearing.  To some newly rich, young music executives, the pintsized 
ex-con with the crazed eyes and the devoted cult offered an opportunity 
to flirt with what seemed like danger.  None of them realized, until 
later, just how genuine that danger was.
     One of the most important contacts Charlie made in Hollywood at 
this time was Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys.  In the 
spring of 1968, Wilson had stopped to give a ride to a couple of female 
hitchhikers who turned out to be Manson Family members.  They 
introduced him to Charlie.
     Before Wilson quite realized what was happening, Charlie and 
members of his hippie harem inserted themselves as frequent house 
guests at Wilson's palatial Sunset Strip residence, a place that had 
once belonged' to Will Rogers.  Simultaneously attracted and repelled, 
Wilson and his brother Brian, another Beach Boys member, even assisted 
Charlie in recording a demo record.  What's more, Dennis introduced him 
to a television and music industry executive named Terry Metcher, who 
was the son of actress Doris Day.  Metcher lived in Bel Air.  The 
address was 10050 Cielo Drive.
     A key convert to the Manson Family around the same time was 
Charles "Tex" Watson, twenty-three years old.  Watson was typical of 
the young men who had now swollen the ranks of the Manson family to 
about forty.  A tough talker, he was actually an insecure, 
self-absorbed mama's boy who had dropped out of college and overcome 
inertia just barely enough to drift to Los Angeles, where he had 
vaguely outlined aspirations of becoming a "star."
     He had been hitchhiking on the Strip when he was picked up by a 
driver who, to his astonishment, turned out to be Dennis Wilson.  
Wilson invited Tex to his house to "party."  There, he met Charlie and 
some of his girls.
     "Charlie pulled me toward him with his girls," Watson recalled 
later.  "For the first time in my life I felt like somebody."
     Later in the year, satisfied that his music career was,on track, 
Charlie decided that the Family needed more room and a degree of 
seclusion to prepare for the next phase of his plan-the exodus to the 
wilderness to await the Final Days.
     Family member Sandra Goode, the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, 
told Charlie about a movie ranch out in the far reaches of the San 
Fernando Valley, thirty miles northwest of Los Angeles.  Secluded in 
the hills, the sprawl of ramshackle buildings, including a dilapidated 
western-movie Main Street set, was formerly the home of silent-movie 
cowboy star William S. Hart.  It was now owned by George Spahn, who 
sometimes rented it out to film companies for location work.  Scouting 
the location, Squeaky Fromme prevailed on the blind, eighty-two-year-old 
Spahn to allow the Family to move into what were called the "outlaw" 
shacks on the rear of his property, in exchange for doing chores and 
tending the horses.
     Close enough for an easy commute back into L.A but backed up 
against the Santa Susanna Mountains in an area of the valley that was 
still largely uninhabited, the ranch was perfect for training and 
consolidating the Family.  It was also located in a convenient 
geographical region near other secluded hideaways where much of the Los 
Angeles basin's drug warehousing and distribution operations were 
based.
     After settling in, Family members fanned out on daily errands into 
the city and suburbs to panhandle and steal.  They also developed 
special skills as night burglars who would sometimes choose a house at 
random and enter it while its inhabitants slept, on Charlie's orders.  
The cultists would creep about the premises, gleefully moving furniture 
without awakening the inhabitants.  Charlie himself sometimes 
participated in this nocturnal activity, which he called 
"creepy-crawling."  Later, some residents in and around Los Angeles 
would realize with a cold shudder that they had been visited in the 
dark by the Manson Family.
     For its part, the Family would soon have to move again, Charlie 
declared, to the "wilderness"-a site he had chosen in Death Valley, 
where protection could he had from the "fallout" of nuclear war that 
Charlie said would result from the period of racial strife.
     While they lingered at the ranch, the Family outwardly lived as a 
hippie commune, though the women seemed to do all of the chores.  There 
was constant preparation for the Final Days.  Weapons were stockpiled.  
Old Volkswagens were converted into "dune buggies," which roared up 
dirt roads loaded with naked cultists armed with machine guns.
     Charlie preached hate while doling out the drugs and sex.  By now 
the talk was frequently of murder.
     As Watson recalled, Charlie insisted that "there was no such thing 
as death, so it was not wrong to kill a fellow human being."
     From the Beatles' 1968 White Album, Charlie had adapted a song 
called "Helter Skelter" as the Family's anthem.  Though the title 
actually referred wistfully to an amusement park ride in England, 
Charlie claimed to have deduced in it a more ominous meaning.  "Helter 
Skelter," he declared, referred to the end of the world-specifically to 
the activities that would ignite the race war that would bring the 
Family glory.
     "It all made sense," said a Family member.  With sufficient 
amounts of drugs and isolation, everything made sense.
     Charlie was wily in maintaining his own control.
     When he distributed drugs like LSD, he always took a smaller dose 
than anyone else, Watkins would tell Vincent T. Bugliosi, the deputy 
L.A. District Attorney who prosecuted the Manson Family and later 
summarized the case in his book, Helter Skelter.
     Isolation was crucial.  Except for assigned missions to steal or 
creepy-crawl, "Charlie never wanted us to leave the ranch," Watson 
explained.  But there were compelling reasons to stay, Watson said.  
"It was drugs,drugs,drugs .  . . bags of acid and speed.  The girls 
would go out and hitchhike and meet new guys and bring them to the 
ranch."
     LSD and mescaline, pot and peyote, amphetamines, angel dust, 
heroin and cocaine, were available in abundance at the ranch, not only 
to the Family, but to the procession of drug-dealing bikers, gun 
freaks, and other outlaws who came and went.
     Charlie especially encouraged the girls to use sexual favors to 
lure members of outlaw motorcycle gangs, who he hoped to be able to 
call on in his anticipated war against what he had come to call the 
"pigs."
     Not all of the visitors were criminals, however.  To their later 
chagrin, legitimate music industry people like Melcher would be called 
on to explain their associations with the Manson gang.  Melcher, for 
example, twice visited the Spahn ranch at Charlie's invitation, to hear 
him perform with some of the girls.  Indeed, in the winter of 1969, 
Charlie himself drove down to Bel Air to drop in on Melcher at his 
Cielo Drive home, following what Charlie believed was Melcher's offer 
to help him record a song.  But Melcher wasn't there.  Rudely, Charlie 
was informed by someone in the house-perhaps a servant-that Metcher had 
moved.  Charlie was furious at what he considered to be an insult.  
Secretly, he vowed he would return.
     Back at the ranch, Charlie, who had tak@n to wearing a military 
sword on his belt, drew up a hit list of rich celebrities-"pigs" who 
were to be murdered in such a way that blame would be cast on black 
radicals.  On his list were such names as Warren Beatty and Julie 
Christie.  But at the top of that list was Terry Melcher.
     The Family was now a weapon ready to be pointed, and Charlie 
decided that the time had come.
     It is not known how many people Manson and members of his Family 
ultimately killed as part of Helter Skelter.  Manson, though a chronic 
liar, once bragged that he had murdered thirty-five people by himself.  
It is known, however, how many the Manson Family killed in one 
blood-drenched month in the summer of 1969.  From July 27 to August,26 
of that year they slaughtered nine people.
     The first one to die in that period was thirty-two-year-old Gary 
Hinman, who had made the fatal mistake of telling Charlie to go to 
hell.  Hinman had been studying for his doctorate in sociology at UCLA, 
and living comfortably thanks to a lucrative sideline as a small-time 
mescaline manufacturer.
     This was the activity that brought him into routine contact with 
the Manson Family.
     An adherent of a militant Japanese Buddhist cult, Hinman was both 
arrogant and short-tempered in his dealings with the Family.  When a 
dispute arose with Charlie over money in a drug transaction-at the time 
when Charlie and the Family were working hard to put together enough 
cash to finance their exodus to Death Valley-Hinman unwisely thought he 
would stand his ground against Charlie's threats.
     Late on the night of July 25, Charlie, his sword in hand, came to 
Hinman's house on Topanga Canyon Road to demand the money.  When 
Hiniman tried to throw Charlie out, threatening to expose him and his 
followers, Charlie sliced off his ear with the sword.
     All night long Family members terrorized the bleeding Hinman, 
finally forcing him to sign papers transferring ownership of two of his 
vehicles, a minibus and a Fiat.  But it wasn't enough.  The next night, 
Charlie sent three followers back to Hinman's house: Bobby Beausoleil, 
a twenty-year-old aspiring rock musician with connections to Hollywood, 
Susan Atkins, and Mary Brunner.
     Hinman was brutally stabbed to death.  When they left, the Manson 
cultists fingerpainted the words "Political Piggy" on a wall in their 
victim's blood, along with the crude drawing of a panther's claw-a ploy 
to lead police to suspect the Black Panthers in the murder.
     Back at the ranch, the Family assembled for a late night music 
session.  A new song was composed about the murder.  Its refrain 
consisted of Hinman's dying words: "I wanted to live.  I wanted to 
live."
     The house on Cielo Drive, now sublet by friends of Terry Melcher, 
was next on Charlie's list for Helter Skelter.  The tenants were a 
movie actress, Sharon Tate, twenty-six, and her husband, a 
thirty-fgur-year-old Polish director named Roman Polanski.  They had 
been married a year before while working together on a movie called The 
Fearless Vampire Yellers.
     Besides having a featured role in Valley of the Dolls, the 
soft-spoken, well-liked Tate had achieved a measure of celebrity by 
having appeared nude in Playboy magazine in'photos taken by her 
husband.
     In February the Polanskis had sublet the house on 10050 Cielo 
Drive, with its almost cliched panoramic view of Los Angeles spread out 
far below.  Polanski, still in Europe finishing work on a movie, 
planned to join his wife-now eight and a half months pregnant -about 
the middle of August.
     On the night of August 9, Tex Watson later testified, Manson 
called him aside at the Spahn ranch, where an orgy had just concluded.  
Said Watson, "He was smiling.  Total perfection.  I would do anything 
he asked me to .  . . He computed with me to go with three girls and 
kill people.  He handed me a knife and a gun and told me to make it as 
totally gruesome and bloody as we could."
     Selected to assist him were Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and 
Linda Kasabian.  Linda, who had been at the ranch for only a month, was 
designated as the driver and lookout.
     Charlie's orders left no room for confusion.  Go up to the house 
where Terry Melcher used to live," he told Watson.  "Kill them, cut 
them up, hang them on the mirrors."  Watson said that Manson evidently 
had only a vague idea of who was now residing at 10050 Cielo Drive.  
"He said something about movie stars living there," Watson recalled.
     That night-, Sharon Tate had three houseguests.
     One was Jay Sabring, a flashy thirty-five-year-old hairdresser who 
made a comfortable living as a stylist for male celebrities such as 
Robert Redford and Frank Sinatra.  Tate and Sabring had once been 
engaged.
     The other two guests were Abigail Folger, the flighty 
twenty-five-year-old heiress to the Folger coffee fortune, and her 
boyfriend, an unemployed Polish EMIGRE whose name was Wojiciech 
"Voytek" Frykowski, thirty-two.  On the night of August 9, as on many 
nights before, Frykowski and Folger had been using MDA, a 
hallucinogenic drug.  Frykowski also was known as a dealer in LSD.
     After parking the car on darkened Cielo Drive outside the 
residence sometime just past midnight, the intruders creepy-crawled 
onto the grounds.  Carrying a cowboy-style .22 revolver and a 
forty-foot coil of nylon rope, Watson first shimmied up a telephone 
pole and sliced the telephone wires into the house.
     While Kasabian waited by the car, Watson, Atkins, and 
Krenwinkel-all carrying long knives-dropped over the fence onto the 
lush, moist grass.
     As the intruders crouched in the long shadows of the circular 
driveway, a car drove up.  At the wheel was an eighteen-year-old youth, 
Stephen Earl Parent, arriving for a late night visit to his friend, the 
young caretaker of the house, William Garretson, who lived in a guest 
cottage at the rear of the grounds.  Seeing the furtive trio in his 
headlights, Parent stopped, rolled down his window, and asked them what 
they were doing.
     In response, Watson stepped forward, leveling his gun through the 
window.
     "Please don't hurt me," the young man cried, but Watson shot him 
in the head four times.  Calmly, Watson reached across Parent's body 
and turned off the ignition.  The shots had reverberated over the hills 
of Bel Air, but then all was quiet.  There was no sign from the house 
that anything was amiss.
     Watson stole up to the house and slit a screen in a window leading 
into a first-floor room that was being remodeled as a nursery.  
Smelling the fresh paint, he crept through the darkened first-floor 
rooms and let the others in through the front door.  They snapped on 
the lights.
     In the living room, Frykowski awoke to see Watson looming over 
him.
     "What time is it?"  Frykowski mumbled groggily.
     "Be quiet," Watson growled.  "Don't move or you're dead."
     "Who are you and what are you doing here?"
     The intruder replied simply, "I am the devil and I am here to do 
the devil's work.  Now where is your money?"
     But money wasn't really the reason they had come.
     They had really come to kill people whose names they did not even 
know, and they did so merely because Charlie told them to.
     The slaughter was about to begin.  Susan Atkins went upstairs to 
see who else was in the house.  She looked into a bedroom and waved 
casually at Abigail Folger, who was reading in bed and just waved back.
     Walking down the hall, Susan found Tate and Sebring talking 
quietly on the bed in the master bedroom.  Brandishing her knife, she 
ordered the three of them to follow her downstairs.
     There, the horrified victims found Watson holding a gun on 
FRYKOWSKI.  Watson ordered them all to lie on the floor on their 
stomachs in front of the fireplace.
     "Can't you see she's pregnant?"  Sabring shouted, lunging for the 
gun.  Watson fired, the bullet entering through Sebring's armpit.
     Again money was demanded.  Folger fumbled with her purse.  It 
contained seventy-two dollars.
     Watson was too busy uncoiling the rope to take the money.  He 
looped it around the neck of the wounded Sabring, and then around the 
necks of Tate and Folger beside him on the floor.  As he did this, 
Susan struggled to bind the terrified Frykowski's hands with a towel 
from the bathroom.
     Sabring kept resisting.  -Furiously, Watson began stabbing him 
into silence, then tossed the rope over a long ceiling beam and hoisted 
the dead man and the two women up with it.  Tate and Folger had to 
stand on their toes to avoid being strangled..
     "You are all going to die."  Watson told them.
     He ordered Susan to kill Frykowski.  But Frykowski broke free and 
ran toward the front door.  As he stumbled into the garden, he was 
stabbed repeatedly in the back.  He lay writhing twenty feet from the 
front door.  His screams were so loud that they carried through the 
night across the canyon.
     Watson pulled the trigger, but when the gun jammed, he pummeled 
the man's head with the butt.
     Hearing the screams from her position by the car, Kasabian was 
horrified.  "Please make it stop!"  she called out to Susan on the 
lawn.
     It was far too late for that.
     Back in the living room, the two female victims worked desperately 
to get free from the rope.  Folger managed to run toward the garden, 
but Atkins was right behind, stabbing her repeatedly as they ran.  As 
Folger slumped to the ground, Watkins joined in the orgiastic slashing 
until she was dead.
     Returning to the living room, Watson told Atkins to stab Tate, who 
was pleading, "Please don't kill me!
     All I want to do is have my baby!"
     "Look, bitch, I don't care about you," Atkins muttered coldly, 
looking the actress in the eye while raising her knife.  "I don't care 
if you're going to have a baby.  You better be ready.  You are going to 
die."
     Accompanied by Watson and Krenwinkel, they slashed at the pregnant 
actress, stabbing her sixteen times.
     Atkins later said she licked the blood off her own hand.  "Wow, 
what a trip," she said.  "I felt so elated.
     Tired, but at peace with myself I knew this was just the beginning 
of Helter Skelter.  Now the world would listen."
     As she left the house, Atkins dipped the towel in Sharon Tate's 
blood and lingered by the front door to dab the word PIG on it.
     Outside, the killers changed clothes in their car, where Kasabian 
waited.  They then drove aimlessly on the winding streets of Bel Air, 
stopping at a desolate embankment near Mulholland Drive at the crest of 
the mountain to hurl the knives and their bloody clothes over a cliff.  
Nearby, they parked the car outside a house and used a garden hose to 
wash the car.
     They fled when the owner came outside.
     When they got back to the ranch at TWO A.M Charlie was waiting, 
stark naked.
     "What are you doing home so early?"  he inquired casually.
     Tex could barely control his excitement.  "Boy, it sure was Helter 
Skelter!"  he said.
     The next day, Susan learned who she had killed while watching news 
bulletins on television.  "My reaction was, 'Wow, they sure are 
beautiful people!" she later said, adding that she had been thrilled 
to have been so close to a celebrity like Sharon Tate.  "It really blew 
my mind."
     The grisly killings threw Hollywood into a panic.
     Charlie was delighted.  There was a dope party back at the ranch 
to celebrate.  Plans were immediately made for a new raid to strike 
more horror into the hearts of the pigs.  Charlie announced that he 
himself would lead this one, to show how it was done.  And there was no 
time to waste, now that blood was flowing.  It was set for the next 
night.
     Charlie, Watson, Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Kasabian-along with 
Family members Steve Grogan and Leslie van Houten-Arove around for a 
few hours.
     In Pasadena they stopped outside one house, chosen at random.  
Charlie crept up to the windows, but came back and announced that the 
residents would be spared because he had seen photographs of children 
displayed in the living room.
     With Charlie giving directions, they then drove down to the Los 
Feliz neighborhood near Griffith Park in Los Angeles.  They parked 
outside a big house 3301 Waverly Drive, the residence of Leno LaBianca, 
the middle-aged owner of a chain of supermarkets, and his wife 
Rosemary.
     Shortly after one A.m Leno LaBianca was sitting in his living 
room reading the newspaper, which was filled with stories about the 
gruesome murders in Benedict Canyon.  His wife was in the bedroom.
     LaBianca looked up and saw a short, grizzly-looking man standing 
silently in front of him, holding a gun.
     He was astonished that the intruder had managed to get in without 
a sound.
     "Be calm," Charlie told him.  "Be quiet.  You won't be harmed."  
That was a lie.
     He led LaBianca to the bedroom and tied him up beside his wife.  
Then he walked out to the car.
     "Tex, Katie, Leslie, go into the house.  I have the people tied 
up.  They are very calm."
     While Charlie remained outside, the Family grimly killed again.  
Rosemary LaBianca was kept on the bed with a pillowcase over her head.  
Her husband was led downstairs, where Tex Watson slashed his throat, 
leaving the serrated kitchen knife sticking in the victim's neck.  
Hearing her husband's screams, Rosemary LaBianca struggled upstairs.  
Van Houten -a petite, twenty-year-old former Campfire Girl who had sung 
in her church choir and played Sousaphone in her high school band-held 
down the woman so that Krenwinkel could stab her in the back.  The 
slashing severed Rosemary LaBianca"s spine.
     In the living room, Leno LaBianca was writhing toward death.  
Watson rushed upstairs to gleefully join in the mutilation on the bed.  
In all, Rosemary LaBianca was stabbed forty-one times.  Her husband was 
stabbed twelve times with a knife and fourteen times with a large meat 
fork.  The word WAR was crudely carved into his belly.  "Death to Pigs" 
and "Helter Skelter" were scrawled in the victims' blood on a 
refrigerator and a wall.
     The murderers were thoughtful enough to feed the LaBiancas' three 
dogs, one of which licked blood off their hands.  Then they all took 
showers in the LaBiancas' bathroom.  They fixed themselves dinner.
     Grabbing some containers of chocolate milk from the refrigerator, 
they left.
     At the ranch in the days afterward, Charlie stepped up 
preparations for the exodus to the desert.
     Things began moving rapidly, especially as the police started 
closing in-not on the killings but on drug dealing and theft in the 
region.  But first there was the problem of Shorty Shea.
     Donald Shea, a thirty-six-year-old ranch hand and horse trainer 
who had worked for Spahn for about fifteen years, had been getting on 
Charlie's nerves, and August 1969 was not a good time to get on 
Charlie's nerves.  Shorty had previously incurred Charlie's wrath by 
marrying a black woman, and allowing her friends to visit the ranch.  
But Shorty sealed his doom when Charlie heard that the ranch hand had 
been trying to persuade the elderly Spahn to run the Family off.
     On August 26, Charlie sentenced Shorty to death.
     He was promptly ambushed by members of the Family.  "It was like 
carving up a Christmas turkey," Daniel Decario, a biker associated with 
the Family, later testified.  (Decarlo was not present for the murder, 
but was told about it later by a Family member.) Shorty was cut into 
nine pieces, his arms and head lopped off.
     Charlie's long run of luck began to falter a week later, when he 
was arrested, along with twenty members of the Family, during a police 
raid on the ranch in a car theft investigation.  They were not yet 
suspects in the Hollywood murders, and all were released for lack of 
evidence.  While the police had discovered the extent to which Manson 
controlled a dangerous cult, they did not manage to link the Manson 
Family to the sensational murders in Los Angeles until Susan Atkins 
began jabbering away behind bars.  Atkins-in jail on an unrelated 
chargeblithely described to a cellmate the details of the murdering of 
Sharon Tate.  The cellmate promptly informed a guard.
     By the end of the year Charlie, along with Watson, Krenwinkel, 
Atkins, and Van Houten, had been charged with murder.  All were 
ultimately convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.  Steve Grogan, 
a Spahn ranch hand, was also sentenced to life for decapitating Shorty. 
 He would be released on parole fourteen years later.  No charges were 
brought against Mary Brunner and Linda Kasabian, who testified for the 
prosecution.  Several years later Charlie's loyal lieutenant Squeaky 
Fromme would receive a life sentence for a botched attempt to 
assassinate President Ford.
     In 1970, on trial for murder, Charlie described himself in legal 
papers as "Charles Manson, also known as Jesus Christ, Prisoner."  In 
court he took the opportunity to make a rambling hour-long lecture.  To 
hear Charlie tell it, everybody but himself was to blame for the 
carnage.
     "I never went to school," Charlie said, "so I never growed up to 
read and write too good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed 
stupid, and I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow 
up.  And then I look at the things that you do and I don't understand.  
You eat meat and you kill things that are better than you are, and then 
you say how bad, and even killers, your children are.  You made your 
children what they are .  . . These children that come at you with 
knives, they are your children."
     CHAPTER TWO k6 kt 0 ki 0 Dad Knows Best His MOTHER CALLED him 
Jimba and said he had the Holy Spirit in him.
     "The boy will be a famous minister," she would enthuse, and the 
boast didn't seem to be idle.  As a youngster growing up in rural 
Indiana during the Depression, little Jim Jones played preacher the way 
other boys played cops-and-robbers.
     By the age of eight he could reel off long passages from his 
Bible.  Though short-tempered with people, the dark-eyed youngster 
seemed to have a great love of animals.  He often brought home stray 
cats and dogs.  Only years later would it be remarked upon that the 
animals Jim adopted so often got sick and died suddenly under his care. 
 The boy always buried them with elaborate "funerals," where he 
preached and sobbed at his loss.
     His mother, Lynette, made him a clerical robe to dress up in.  By 
the time he was twelve the boy was a genuine neighborhood 
oddity-gathering crowds of youthful spectators with 
hellfire-and-brimstone sermons, even leading small groups of children 
to the creek, where he ceremoniously "baptized" them.
     He'd then head home, with the pennies and nickels they handed him 
jingling in his pockets.
     His mother was right.  The boy was a natural.
     That was the most remarkable thing of all.  Just as the children 
trailed after him to the creek, people always followed Jim Jones.  His 
wife, Marceline, was one of the first.
     They'd met and married when he was seventeen and starting a career 
as an apprentice Methodist minister in Indianapolis; Marceline was a 
pleasant but quiet twenty-one-year-old nurse.  Soon after they were 
married, Marceline learned how restless her husband was when he fled 
the hierarchal constraints of Methodism for the more freewheeling 
opportunities of street preaching.  In 1957, after raising cash selling 
South American monkeys door-to-door for twenty-nine dollars apiece, 
Jones hung a shingle, "People's Temple," outside a rented storefront in 
an Indianapolis neighborhood whose population was rapidly changing from 
white to black.  Just like that, he had founded his own religion.
     Hustling, the fast-talking preacher quickly managed to attract 
crowds of curiosity-seekers who came back week after week.  As the 
church rolls grew, he and his wife began a family.  In 1959 they had 
their own child, a son they christened Stephen Gandhi Jones, but they 
also adopted three minority orphan babies-two Asians and one black-to 
fill out what they called their "rainbow family."  To those who had 
known the intensely religious young man as a teenager, this seemed 
somewhat unusual.  Jim Jones had always been a bigot as a youngster.  
But he was foremost a wily opportunist, and a Bible-thumping white 
racist with "nfgger" on his curled lips wasn't about to get ahead 
preaching to a congregation that was nearly all black.  This was the 
late fifties; the airwaves resonated with the stirrings of civil rights 
and black social activism.  Setting hinmlf up as a religious activist 
with a calculated appeal to a transient black population in a hi@ 
environment, Reverend Jones had found his 1*he.  As always, he was in 
the right place at the right time ' to cash in.
     He did this with gusto, using a bag of gimmicks and public 
relations tricks to build audience appeal, emmnce his reputation, and 
bring in the donations.
     Posters attesting to his awesome abilities as a preacher, prophet, 
and faith healer fluttered from walls and telephone poles all over 
Indianapolis.
     While mainstream neighborhood churches dispensed their steady diet 
of hymns and homilies, Reverend Jones's People's Temple defined itself 
as an urban Christian mission-a place where people down on their luck 
and looking for comfort could find not only spiritual uplift, but also 
a meal, a bed, a sense of community in a rootless environment-and quite 
often, a job.  Jones used the resulting pool of cheap labor to set up 
small businesses affiliated with-and channeling money into-the People's 
Temple.
     Prosperity in turn attracted new and better-heeled followers, and 
soon the Temple was a thriving neighborhood institution that boasted a 
hundred-voice choir and attracted jubilant crowds to Sunday services.  
The Temple was a beehive of activity during the rest of the week too, 
as Jones expanded his base, leading his followers in fair-housing 
demonstrations and other New Left protests that generated respectful 
media attention and quickly established the charismatic young preacher 
as a new community leader.
     In 1961 he demonstrated his growing political clout when he was 
appointed director of the city Human Rights Commission.
     With these successes came the flashy symbols of status-diamond 
rings, alligator shoes, frequent trips out of town in the style of a 
touring dignitary.  By the early sixties Jones went everywhere 
surrounded by an entourage of aides and bodyguards.  Some of his flock 
might well have remarked on the fact that Jones's top aides all were 
white-while the congregation was overwhelmingly black.  If so, there is 
no record of it.  From the beginning, Jones was alert for any sign of 
dissent.  "Troublemakers" were isolated and dealt with at the first 
grumble of discontent.
     While the Temple had begun to generate income from a number of 
outside sources, the "cash crop," as Jones called it, was always 
harvested from its growing membership.  Along with the ever-circulating 
collection plates came frequent fund-raising drives in which 
congregants were expected to pledge wages or welfare and Social 
Security checks.  Many went so far as to sign real estate and bank 
holdings directly over to Jones.
     Jones was an effective preacher, but his forte was faith-healing.  
Like most faith-healers, he expertly orchestrated religious hysteria to 
provide cover for fraud and bunkum that utilized standard carnival 
tricks to deceive audiences.  Impostors were hired to pose as cripples 
who would cast off their wheelchairs and crutches when "healed" by 
Jones.
     Spies working for Jones furtively compiled detailed notes on the 
quirks, confidences, and offhand comments of members of the 
congregation, who would then be flabbergasted to.hear the preacher name 
them-and disclose their secrets-from the pulpit.
     But Indianapolis wasn't big enough to contain Jones's voracious 
megalomania, and the ceaseless self-promotion wore thin within a few 
years.  Rumors about the Temple's ceaseless rind-raising were 
spreading, and officials in city hall were beginning to look askance at 
those relentlessly advertised claims that Reverend Jones offered cures 
for cancer, arthritis, and heart disease.
     Always alert to the first whiff of trouble, Jones suddenly had a 
religious epiphany.  He announced to his startled congregation that God 
had visited him with a dire warning: nuclear holocaust was coming to 
destroy most of the world.  Only two places would be safe havens for 
the righteous: Belo Horizonte, Brazil (which he visited on a 
"missionary" mission in 1962), and Ukiah, California, about a hundred 
miles north of San Francisco.
     Ukiah being somewhat more convenient, Jones and a loyal crowd of 
followers-more than a hundred of them would make the journey-drove 
across country in 1965 in a caravan of cars and minibuses, with Jones's 
shiny black Cadillac at the front.  It was the first proof that some 
people would follow him just about anywhere.
     Jim Jones's ego was such that he acknowledged no role model save 
one: Father Divine, a fabulously Wealthy inner-city black preacher, a 
Harlem-born charismatic who had amassed a huge following among poor 
blacks migrating into northern cities during the 1920s and '30s.  Father 
Divine's "Kingdom of Heaven'@built around converted old downtown hotels 
where followers lived in communal ecstasywas still thriving in the 
sixties when Jones started to build his own ministry.  Jones correctly 
saw in Father Divine's Kingdom a brilliant amalgam of church, business, 
and political machine.  To his followers, Father Divine was God.  But 
to white urban power brokers, he was a black Caesar, a political genius 
who could swing an election in the Negro wards with a nod of his head.
     In the late fifties Father Divine's wife, Sara, published a 
biography of her spouse, Father Divine.- Holy Husband.  In it she 
concluded that "if Father Divine were to die, mass suicide among the 
Negroes in his movement would almost certainly result .  . . This would 
be the shame of America."
     This sentiment thrilled Jones.  In the early sixties, accompanied 
by his now-constant entourage, Jones had even traveled to Philadelphia 
for a personal meeting with Father Divine.  He was bitterly 
disappointed when his hero was too decrepit to receive him.
     Father Divine died in 1965, just as the People's Temple was 
relocating to find new opportunities in California.  Jones waited 
impatiently for the mass suicide of stricken followers of Father 
Divine, but it did not occur.  Worse, Father Divine's widow and some 
of his followers subsequently moved to the suburbs and lived a life of 
luxury.  Father Divine himself was quickly forgotten except as a 
historical footnote.
     Jones vowed that the same thing would never happen to him.
     To Jones, the spotlight was not meant to be shared.  Hardly 
missing a beat after the migration from Indiana to California, he 
quickly established a new Temple and made sure everybody knew who was 
its master.  During angry sermons he would raise the Bible high above 
his head and dash it to the floor, screaming at his flock: "Too many 
people are looking at this, and not at me!"
     No opportunity, no matter how melodramatic, was lost to dramatize 
"Father"-as he insisted on being called-as a great leader who was 
feared by unknown enemies of the Temple.  Persecution was a constant 
undercurrent in his sermons.  In 1968, when Rev.  Martin Luther King, 
Jr.  was assassinated, Jones horrified the congregation by staging a 
fake assassination attempt of himself, staggering onto the altar at 
Sunday service covered with chicken blood and claiming he had been 
shot.  As the followers shrieked and gasped, Father convulsed, 
prayed-and sprang to his feet, miraculously recovered.  The 
congregation roared in ecstasy.
     Still, despite what God had told him about a haven from nuclear 
destruction, Jones again became restless in rugged Ukiah- Leaving 
behind a compound where selected followers were trained in survival 
skills, firearms, and self-defense, Jones once again moved the People's 
Temple, this time to San Francisco.  There, he spent over a 
half-million dollars renovating a spacious old Masonic Temple on Geary 
Street in the heavily black Fillmore district, just up the block from 
the headquarters of the Black Panther Party.  Hundreds of followers who 
had come with him moved into houses and apartments all around the new 
Temple and began pounding the pavements for new recruits.
     it was in many ways a repeat of the experience in Indianapolis-but 
on a vastly larger scale and in the libertine environment of San 
Francisco in the seventies, where a large pool of young social 
idealists existed for recruiting.
     The Temple soon became a major Fillmore attraction, with its 
foot-stomping, boisterous church services at which Jones preached 
damnation while curing the sick.  Thousands of followers packed into 
the church on Sunday mornings.  As never before, the Temple reached into 
the community with open arms, serving thousands of free meals a month, 
housing the poor in dormitories that provided pools of workers for 
Temple businesses.  Jones set up a neighborhood health clinic that 
provided free screenings, VD treatment, tests for sickle-cell anemia.  
He also set up a drug-treatment clinic and instituted child-care 
services and senior citizens programs.
     The indefatigable Jones joined community boards, networked with 
politicians and taught community organizing classes at night-school 
programs, recruiting idealistic new members all the while.  As always, 
the neighborhood around the Temple blossomed with posters attesting to 
Father's powers.  One described him as a "prophet, public school 
teacher, and governmental official" who "saves the lives of total 
strangers with his predictions" and "amazing healings" of diseases such 
as cancer.  Flyers promised a "185-voice choir" and said at the bottom, 
"Free Banquet."
     Financially, Jones was able to live high and travel in style, 
always surrounded by aides and bodyguards.
     Politically, the payoff also was impressive.  Word of the Temple's 
aggressive social programs and its exuberant brand of boisterous 
left-wing Christian activism spread among community leaders and in the 
local news media, whose glowing reports on the People's Temple brought 
in ever more followers and donations.
     Jones consolidated his power like a ward boss lusting for the 
mayor's office.  On issues of Jones's choosing, the Temple routinely 
generated massive letter-writing campaigns.  Literally thousands of 
Temple protesters could be turned out on short notice for political 
demonstrations-or for a politician's rally.
     Candidates for state and city offices lined up for his support.  
During the 1976 presidential campaign he was visited by national 
political figures and had a private dinner with Rosalynn Carter, wife 
of the Democratic candidate.  Closer to home, he managed to take over 
the local chapter of the NAACP by registering People's Temple 
membership en masse.  He invited reporters to Temple services to 
experience the "joy," and he made large public contributions to First 
Amendment funds and other causes dear to journalists.  He forged a 
valuable alliance with the city's leading black publisher, Carlton 
Goodlet, whose Sun-Reporter adopted Jim Jones as its favorite 
politician, white or black.
     Jones's opinions on local issues were constantly publicized in the 
media.  He was feted at testimonials and awards ceremonies for the 
Temple's social work.
     After a mass letter-writing campaign organized by the Temple, he 
was even named to the city Housing Authority Commission.  In no time 
Jones dominated the powerful civic commission as Temple supporters 
packed the hearing room to lend their vocal support and shout down any 
murmur of dissent.
     "This was a guy who could do no wrong," a local columnist said.
     But spiritually, beneath the thunder of clapping hands and 
stomping feet and the blaze of spotlights and hype, there was something 
dreadfully wrong with the Jim Jones phenomenon.  Amazingly, the horror 
stories stayed hidden until it was too late.
     There had always been talk of Jones's prodigious sexual appetite, 
which he did little to conceal.  Bisexual by inclination, he boasted to 
associates that he could have several sexual partners and still find 
the urge to masturbate as much as a dozen times a day.
     Less publicly, he stalked the streets of the HaightAshbury and 
downtown San Francisco at night looking for male "recruits" among the 
new hordes of disaffiliated youths who had come to the city.  One 
minute he could be snorting cocaine and connecting with a male 
prostitute in an adult movie theater-he was in fact arrested for this 
in 1973, but charges were quietly dropped-and the next he could be seen 
railing from the Temple's pulpit against the horrors of sexual license.
     Demanding sexual abstinence among his followers even while he 
maintained what so me whispered was a "harem" of young women from their 
ranks-all of them, it was noted, were white-Jones worked to weaken 
marriages within the congregation.  When sex was allowed, Jones had to 
approve it.  Children were kept from parents' company as much as 
possible.  As family structures weakened, personal property became 
easier to part with.  Entire households turned over everything to the 
Temple.
     Nevertheless, like all leaders of cults, he was especially adept 
at appealing to confused and idealistic young people with college 
educations and a pipeline into family finances.  New believers flocked 
in.  As they did, they were folded into an organization in which 
nothing was left to chance, where all impulses led to control over 
people's words, movements, and ideas.
     Church services took on a lurid theatricality, part tent revival, 
part New Left political rally, performed in bright lights on an altar 
that resembled a tradeshow stage.  His face puffy from drugs and booze, 
his cheeks and forehead perpetually wet with sweat, his eyes concealed 
behind dark aviator sunglasses, his hair dyed jet-black and plastered 
over his forehead, his limbs akimbo in a flowing red robe, a microphone 
grasped in one hand and a Bible in the other, Jones had become almost a 
caricature of a Bible-thumping shyster.  But his congregation thought 
he was God.
     He employed a theatrical makeup expert who powdered his face and 
rouged his cheeks, and even used eyebrow pencil to fill out his 
sideburns to resemble Elvis Presley's.  Impostors were hired to fake 
being cured, even putting on ghoul faces to stage demonic-possession 
seizures to allow Jones to exorcize the beast.
     Jones's spy network, already adept at gathering confidential 
information that Jones could use from the pulpit, intensified its 
intelligence gathering to maintain dossiers on the habits, quirks, and 
personal finances of hundreds of followers, at times riffling their 
trash or burglarizing apartments.
     From the beginning of his ministry Jones understood the power of 
group fear.  He established "interrogation committees" within the 
congregation, supposedly to listen to complaints, but staffed with 
spies who promptly prepared reports on dissenters.
     At the weekly-and mandatory@atharsis sessions, which went on until 
people were bleary-eyed and exhausted in the early morning hours, 
"troublemakers" were paddled with wooden boards and sometimes severely 
beaten by Jones's surly aides.  Chastened miscreants were required to 
shout, "Thank you, Father!"
     As time went on, the talk of persecution and martyrdom 
intensified.  Always making up his theology as he went along, Jones 
expounded on a new theory that he called "Translation," in which the 
entire congregation would ultimately die together, and afterward be 
transported as a group to another planet to spend eternity in bliss 
with their leader.  Jones, who had to be called "Father" or "Dad" in 
every sentence addressed to him, began compiling a list of those 
suspected of lacking sufficient enthusiasm about dying.  From the 
pulpit he would identify culprits, screaming: "The names I have just 
read are people who can't be trusted yet!"  These were people, he said, 
not yet "fully ready" to dfe for "the cause."
     In her book Six Years With God, a woman named Jeannie Mills, who 
finally defected from Jones's flock, described how Father instilled in 
his flock the acceptance of group death.  "I want to take a vote today 
to find out how dedicated you all are."  Jones would intone from the 
altar that life was a "bore."
     How many people, he would ask, "would be willing to take your own 
lives now to keep the church from being discredited?"
     Betrayal lurked everywhere, he declared.  The People's Temple, he 
stressed, was a family.  When tyranny came, only Father could provide 
protection.
     There was renewed talk of finding a new place to escape 
persecution.  In the mid-seventies Jones intensified work on a major 
fund-raising drive to help the Temple establish itself in a safe haven, 
in a socialist utopia free from betrayal and the threat of nuclear 
holocaust.
     With so much coming at them all the time, Jones's followers 
adopted a standard refrain to explain the bewildering mess they had 
gotten themselves so joyfully into: "Dad knows best," they told each 
other.
     By 1977, with local news accounts unquestioningly accepting 
Jones's claim that the People's Temple had 20,000 members-actually, the 
number was less than 3,000-"Dad" was having some problems.  For the 
first time, a number of followers-disgusted by the beatings, the 
depravity, and the worsening messianic delusions of Jones himself-began 
quietly leaving the church.  At first they felt alone, often ashamed of 
the gullibility that had led them to give all to the cult.
     But in time the defectors began to seek each other out and compare 
notes.  They decided the time had come to go public with allegations 
that Jones's hold over many of his followers was based on fear, fraud, 
and chicanery.
     Among the defectors were a white couple named Elmer and Deanna 
Myrtle, who with their five children had been members of the Temple 
from 1969
     until 1975.  Deanna Myrtle was a former Seventh Day Adventist; her 
husband was a civil rights activist who had marched with Dr.  King at 
Selma.  They joined the Temple because of a mutual belief in what they 
called "apostolic socialism," signed over to Jones their life savings 
and $50,000 worth of real estate and, like other followers, complied 
with Jones's bizarre demands that they sign false "confession" forms.  
They fled when they realized that Jones was serious about mass suicide. 
 The Myrtles so completely repudiated their past that they even changed 
their names, to Al and Jeannie Mills.
     In an affidavit, the Millses said Jim Jones had a "strange power" 
over his flock, which they attributed partly to "fear, guilt, and 
extreme fatigue" instilled at all-night services and catharsis 
sessions.  "We rationalized the punishments and disciplines because we 
believed that [Jones] was God and could do no wrong," Jeannie Mills 
later wrote.  "We sincerely believed that he would always take care of 
us."
     After leaving the Temple, people.  like the Millses all reported 
receiving anonymous threats and frequent unwanted at-home visits from 
church "counselors" demanding their return.  Some reported beatings and 
said their houses were burglarized.
     But Jones was the one with the public relations steamroller.  Now 
organized into a group called Concerned Relatives, the defectors-along 
with relatives of followers who claimed Jones was holding people 
hostage in a messianic cult-had no luck getting a hearing from news 
organizations like the San Francisco Chronicle, which had invested 
years of positive coverage in Jim Jones as a dedicated community leader 
and social activist and had no inclination to see its accolades exposed 
as hype.
     However, they did get the attention of a reporter named Marshall 
Kildruff, preparing an article on the People's Temple for New West 
magazine.  Kildruff stubbornly began peeling away the public relations 
facade that Jones had built and uncovering the layers of fraud, terror, 
and intimidation that lay at the center of Jones's hold over his flock.
     Jones reacted predictably when his spies told him what the 
reporter was up to.  Temple members churned out hundreds of letters to 
the magazine's advertisers; New West's editorial offices were 
burglarized; a rough draft of the Kildruff article was stolen.
     Nevertheless, the New West expose ran in August 1977, and detailed 
allegations that Jones routinely committed fraud, child abuse, assault, 
and criminal extortion in the operations of the People's Temple.
     The article created a public furor.  Two weeks later, alarmed city 
officials were relieved to receive a letter from Jim Jones in which he 
resigned his post on the Housing Authority.  The letter was postmarked 
"Cooperative Republic of Guyana."
     As always, Jones got out of town one step ahead of the sheriff.  
The fund-raising campaign to establish a socialist commune away from 
prying eyes, in a place where his control could be absolute, had been 
spectacularly successful.  Jones had over a million dollars to build 
his new world.
     After investigating and ruling out locations in Kenya and Cuba, he 
had settled on a site in a country few people could even locate on a 
map-Guyana, a former British colony wedged on the Atlantic Coast of 
South America between Venezuela and Brazil.
     Guyana's black-majority Marxist government was receptive to the 
propaganda value posed by the defection of a group of Americans, most 
of them blacks fleeing U.S. imperialist tyranny.  It also helped that 
their leader, Jones, had lots of money to spread around.
     "The People's Temple in Guyana intends to be an agricultural 
mission," Jones had said when plans were first announced a few years 
before the publicity turned sour.  Its purpose was to produce food to 
feed the hungry.
     The colony was set up under the supervision of Jim and Marceline's 
natural son Stephan, now seven'teen years old.  In 1977, Stephan had 
led the initial contingent of about fifty People's Temple settlers to 
their new socialist utopia on 3,800 desolate acres in the thick jungle 
near the Venezuela border, deep within the vast rain forest covering 
the northwest part of the country, 150 miles from the nearest 
significant settlement, the capital, Georgetown.  For many months they 
toiled from dawn to midnight hacking away brush and felling hardwood 
trees to clear the ground, plow the fields, and begin raising the 
tinroofed structures that would house the dormitories, bunkhouses, 
sheds, and recreational halls of a primitive settlement, first called 
the Jonestown Agricultural and Medical Mission and then, simply, 
Jonestown.
     In ensuing months the settlers were joined by others-including a 
number of "troublemakers" whom Jones thought needed more intensive 
indoctrination.
     Hundreds of elderly followers were among the first new arrivals.
     During the latter part of 1977-often before their friends and 
relatives realized what was happening most of the Temple residents in 
San Francisco were making plans to join their colleagues in Jonestown.
     By the end of the year, as press accounts back home followed up on 
the New West expose and documented even more abuses at the Temple, the 
congregation had effectively left San Francisco, resettling en masse to 
a remote, forlorn work camp in Guyana.
     By early 1978 even the once-enthralled San Francisco Chronicle had 
seen the light, harshly describing Jonestown as a "jungle outpost" 
where "the Rev.  Jim Jones orders public beatings, maintains a squad of 
fifty armed guards, and has involved his 1,100 followers in a threat of 
mass suicide."
     Now squarely on the defensive, even from thousands of miles away, 
the People's Temple publicity apparatus fired back from the jungle.  In 
May 1978 the Temple flooded U.S. news outlets with press releases 
ridiculing Jones's critics as a "sordid crew" of malcontents, perverts, 
embezzlers, and child abusers who had been expelled from the church and 
were now seeking revenge.  Included with the statement were confession 
forms.
     In the summer, as the Concerned Relatives stepped up pressure to 
do something about the suicide threats they claimed to be hearing from 
Jonestown, another press release denounced a "politically motivated 
conspiracy" to destroy the church.  The statement added, "We will 
resist actively, putting our lives on the line" to defend the Jonestown 
settlement.  "This has been the unanimous vote of the collective 
community."
     Jones had hired as an attorney the Kennedy assassination 
conspiracy theorist Mark Lane.  In September, Lane held a press 
conference to denounce what he called "a conspiracy to destroy the 
People's Temple, Jonestown, and Jim Jones."
     Other than such publicity salvos, there was little information at 
all from Jonestown, where the only regular communications links were 
mail and shortwave radio.  All mail and shortwave transmissions to and 
from the jungle outpost were carefully monitored by Jones's 
ever-vigilant staff.
     Jonestown was in fact a plantation ruled by Jones and his white 
aides, with the black majority in the fields all day under tropical 
heat, carefully supervised by guards who took notes of attitudes and 
comments.
     The workday began at seven A.m. and lasted till sunset, followed 
by mandatory meetings in the open-air pavilion that went on beyond the 
point of exhaustion till two or three A.m. Thanks to its isolation and 
the terms of its friendly lease with Guyanese authorities, Jonestown 
was essentially an autonomous dictatorship that maintained its own 
police force, judicial system, jail, schools, health care, and defense. 
 There was no appeal of Jones's dictates.
     Promotional brochures sent to members lingering in California had 
depicted a tropical paradise with palm trees and happy faces.  They did 
not show the security force-Aeceptively named the Learning Crew-whose 
hundred thuglike members wielded power like a banana-republic goon 
squad and carried semiautomatic rifles, shotguns and deadly 
springloaded crossbows.  Like Jones, the Learning Crew also had access 
to liquor, quality imported food, and their choice of sexual partners, 
male or female, willing or not.
     Having no need now to impress outside observers, Jones 
consolidated control over this primitive police state where people were 
fed food that sometimes crawled with maggots, and toiled relentlessly 
under appalling sanitary conditions.  Children developed ringworm, 
lice, and infections.
     Social conditions were no better.  With his authority absolute, 
Jones destroyed what little was left of family cohesion, segregating 
men and women in separate dorms, with children housed away from 
parents.
     For any violation of these and myriad other rules, punishment was 
more swift and severe than ever.
     Beatings with fists and straps were routinely administered.  
Another form of punishment was a "stretching," in which four camp 
guards would grab a miscreant by each leg and arm and pull until 
unconsciousness arrived.  Female offenders were beaten and then forced 
to strip and stand naked in public, or engage in oral sex in front of 
the congregation.  If a married couple was discovered in private 
conversation, the woman-or the couple's teenage daughter, if they had 
one-could be forced to masturbate in front of the group.
     Though punishments now occurred all day long, the most serious 
offenses were dealt with at nightly camp meetings, where Jones 
supervised from a wooden "throne" on an altarlike platform at the 
center of the open-sided camp pavilion where meals were served.  
Sometimes, offenders were dragged in unconscious-after being beaten or 
sometimes drugged-and then "resurrected" by Jones.  For oftenses as 
trivial as forgetting to call Jones "Father," children could be locked 
into wooden boxes for weeks on end, or forced to eat hot peppers, 
vomit, and eat that.  When the children were beaten, Jones himself 
usually joined in with a few well-aimed kicks and slaps, and held the 
microphone to broadcast their screams on loudspeakers installed all 
over the compound: "I'm sorry Father!  I'm sorry, Father!"
     Beaten, held underwater, terrified with live snakes at their 
faces, children were required to say, "Thank you, Father."
     During the nightly meeting@, while he harangued the congregation 
for hours, Jones also read "news reports" from home that painted a 
bleak picture of deteriorating life in the U.S including word that 
Los Angeles was being evacuated in anticipation of racial warfare.
     All the while, Father's grasp of reality was worsening on a steady 
diet of amphetamines and quaaludes.
     At the same time, psychoactive drugs commonly used in mental 
hospitals to calm.  severely ill patients were routinely administered 
to Jonestown "troublemakers," including children, who were confined to 
a shacklike psycho ward called the ECU-extended care unit.
     Yet escape was not a viable option.  Day and night, armed guards 
patrolled the perimeters to discourage anyone foolhardy enough to try 
to flee into the dense jungle.  Three times a day the entire camp 
population was required to assemble for roll calls.
     Nor was there any sign of rescue.  Outside visitors were 
discouraged, but the few who did obtain permission to visit the jungle 
outpost saw only happy faces in the fields and at the playground, 
sawmill, and basketball court.  Before they were escorted out, visitors 
enjoyed a special dinner, always with entertainment by the camp choir, 
band, and children's chorus.
     Given the protection Jonestown received from the Guyanese 
government, the U.S. Embassy in the capital of Georgetown was not 
inclined to aggressively investigate complaints coming from California. 
 An embassy cable noted the "serious allegations" about conditions at 
Jonestown, but warned that unannounced surprise visits were impossible 
since "a minimum of two to three days" was needed to get access to the 
camp.
     Another diplomat later said there was no clear understanding of 
what Jonestown was.  "We thought they were something like Quakers," he 
said.
     Hopelessly isolated, manipulated into a state of irrationality by 
Jones's unbending barrages of fear and paranoia, the Jonestown 
community was ready to die.
     Macabre "White Night" drills-preparations for mass suicide-became 
a routine part of life.  Without warning, usually in the hours just 
before dawn, camp sirens would scream as loudspeakers bellowed, "Alert! 
 Alert!"  Silently, the men, women, and children of Jonestown would 
awake, dress, and fall out to assemble at the pavilion, where a 
wild-eyed Jones would be ranting from his throne, bathed in white 
light.  "There are CIA mercenaries out there waiting to destroy us," he 
would shriek, wa@ing his arm at the dark jungle all around them.
     Dutifully at White Nights, everybody drank cups of a 
fruit-flavored beverage that Jones said was poison.  There were 
forty-three White Nights during the last year in the jungle.  On every 
occasion but the last, the residents of Jonestown drank the liquid and 
were told to go back to bed, that it was "just a drill."
     Alarmed by reports from the Concerned Relatives and others, a 
crusading Democratic congressman from San Mateo County, Leo Ryan, 
decided to get some answers late in 1978.
     Lauded by supporters as a liberal reformer with a social 
conscience, but derided by critics as a fuzzyminded publicity seeker, 
the fifty-three-year-old Ryan used his membership on the House Foreign 
Affairs Committee to arrange a fact-finding trip to Guyana to look into 
what he called the potential "hijacking of a thousand people."  If 
reports were true that people were being held there against their will, 
Ryan said, he would escort them home.
     The trip was set for November.  Ryan would not come back alive.
     Ryan tried to enlist national news organizations to accompany him 
on his fact-finding trip to the jungle colony.  In all, eight 
journalists signed on, among them reporters for the Washington Post, 
NBC News, and the San Francisco Chronicle, The core of the delegation 
consisted of Ryan, his assistant Jacqueline Speier, and a House aide 
named James Schollaert.
     They would also be accompanied by thirteen representatives of the 
Concerned Relatives.
     From its first days, the Jonestown settlement's medical officer 
was Dr.  Larry Schacht, a physician whose professional education had 
been financed by People's Temple.  As the Ryan delegation was in the 
air en route to Guyana, Dr.  Schacht was busy in the camp pharmacy, 
unpacking a newly arrived shipment of a chemical that Jones had 
ordered.  It was liquid cyanide.
     The visiting Americans arrived at the air-port near Georgetown on 
November 15, 1978.  But they had to cool their heels in the capital for 
a few days until permission came from Guyanese authorities to make the 
trip north to Jonestown.  While they waited, there was an unmistakable 
signal that their presence was not welcomed, when an aide to Jones 
arrived at the Georgetown hotel where the Americans were staying to 
hand Ryan a petition signed by six hundred Jonestown residents 
demanding that the intruders go home and leave them alone.
     Accompanied by Washington Post reporter Charles Krause, Ryan 
stalked over to the office the People's Temple maintained in Georgetown 
at 41 Lamaha Gardens.  "I'm Leo Ryan, the bad guy," he announced.  
"Does anybody want to talk?"
     No one did.  He was told that Jones was not available for 
interviews either.  Back at his hotel, Ryan told reporters that he was 
going up to Jonestown whether he was welcome or not.  On Friday 
morning, when governmental permission was finally granted for the trip, 
lawyers Mark Lane and Charles Garry, representing People's Temple in 
Georgetown, phoned Jones at the compound to urge him to receive the 
visitors.  Garry told Jones, "You can tell the Congress of the United 
States, the press, and the relatives to fuck themselves.  If you do 
that, it's the end of the ball game.  The other alternative is to let 
them in and prove to the world that these people criticizing you are 
crazy."
     Jones finally agreed-to receive the delegation, but he wasn't 
happy about it.
     With visitors coming, word was passed within the Jonestown commune 
that everyone was to be on their best behavior.  The loudspeakers 
broadcast a warning: "If you mess up, you will get the severest 
punishment."
     The Ryan delegation left that afternoon in a chartered twin-engine 
plane that had room for only nineteen passengers.  On board with the 
congressman were his two aides, nine journalists, a U.S. Embassy 
officer, Richard Dwyer, a representative from the Guyanese government, 
and four of the Concerned Relatives.  The trip to Jonestown was an 
hour-long flight over an impenetrable canopy of jungle.
     Around four o'clock the plane bumped down on the airstrip, which 
was little more than a wide gravel path and a tin shed.  Beside it was 
a sleepy village called Port Kaituma, on the edge of the jungle, six 
miles down a dirt road from Jonestown.  The plane was met by a yellow 
truck containing six Temple members.
     When they arrived at the compound, Krause was taken with the 
primitive scene that unfolded before them.  He thought it looked like 
something out of Gone With the Win& "Old black women were baking bread 
in the bakery, people were washing clothes in the laundry, black and 
white children were chasing each other in the little park, and long 
lines of people, mostly black, were waiting for their suppers."  
Initially, he thought the camp seemed both "peaceful" and "bucolic."
     Marceline Jones received the delegation graciously, ushering them 
to a long wooden dining table at the head of the pavilion.  There they 
were introduced to a smiling Jim Jones, clad in neat khaki pants and a 
sport shirt, wearing his trademark dark sunglasses.
     While the NBC crew set up for an interview with Jones, Ryan 
wandered off to speak casually with some of the residents.  Dinner was 
both ample and delicious, the visitors discovered to their surprise: 
hot pork sandwiches, collard greens, and potato salad, served on 
plastic trays.
     After the meal, the lights dimmed.  The Jonestown band struck up 
the Guyanese national anthem, followed by "America the Beautiful."  
Then the visitors sat back for two hours of entertainment that included 
the huge People's Temple choir, as well as dancing by groups of 
children.
     Taking it in, Ryan began to wonder if the dire reports about 
conditions he had been hearing from the Concerned Relatives had been 
gross exaggerations.
     When asked to rise and say a few words after the show, the 
congressman seemed favorably impressed.
     "Despite the charges I've heard about Jonestown, I am sure that 
there are people here this evening who believe that this is the best 
thing that ever happened to them in their whole lives," he said.  When 
he was finished speaking, the seven hundred Jonestown residents crowded 
into the pavilion rose to give him a rousing ovation.
     But Ryan wasn't finished.  "I want to pull no punches.  This is a 
congressional inquiry."
     Jones, fortified by a heavy dose of amphetamines, couldn't leave 
well enough alone.  Speaking with reporters after dinner, his eyes 
hidden behind the sunglasses despite the darkness that had fallen, he 
became defensive and combative.  "They say I want power," he said 
bitterly, waving a ring-studded hand at the multitudes of smiling 
followers.  "What kind of power do I have, walking down the path to my 
little old seniors?  I hate power.  I hate money.  All I want is peace. 
 I'm not worried about my image."  But the outside criticisms of 
Jonestown must stop, he warned abruptly.  "If we could just stop it!  
But if we don't, I don't know what's going to happen to twelve hundred 
lives here."
     The visitors were suddenly asked to leave and return for breakfast 
the next day, Saturday.  They were driven back to the airstrip, where 
they spent the night in sleeping bags.
     Returning the next morning, they noticed a palpable difference in 
the atmosphere at the camp, as if they had already overstayed their 
tentative welcome.
     After breakfast, reporters wandering around found that despite the 
jungle heat, some of the barracks were locked tight, the shades tightly 
drawn over their windows.  Guards curtly informed them that the people 
inside were afraid of harm from the visitors.
     But the reporters managed to gain access to one of the barracks 
buildings.  Inside they discovered more than a hundred bunk beds, 
stacked two and three high, occupied by old black people.  One of the 
elderly residents, Edith Parks, a nurse, anxiously whispered to a 
reporter that she would like to leave with him.  Her son, 
daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren were also in the compound, she 
confided.
     The reporters sought out Jones, whose attempts to put the best 
face on things were unraveling even as the NBC camera rolled.  Jones 
was red-eyed, haggard, and extremely agitated.  NBC correspondent Don 
Harris asked him about rumors-which could now be clearly verified by 
the visitors-that the compound was patrolled by heavily armed guards to 
prevent people from leaving.
     "A bold-faced lie!"  Jones shouted, rapidly losing control.  "It 
seems like we are defeated by lies!  I'm defeated!  I might as well 
die."  As the television camera zoomed in on his face, he railed about 
conspiracies and threats.  "I wish somebody had shot me dead," he 
cried.  "Now we've substituted the media smear for assassination!"
     Harris was astonished.  The man seemed to be coming apart in front 
of him, on camera.  Pressing the advantage, he handed Jones a 
handwritten note that had been given him by one of the residents, 
asking to be rescued.
     "People play games, friend," Jones retorted, crumbling the note in 
disgust.  "They lie.  What can I do with liars?"  Eyes darting, panic 
flushing his face, he looked like a trapped animal.  "Are you people 
going to leave us?  I just beg you, please leave us!  Anybody that 
wants to go can get out of here.  They come and go all the time.  The 
more that leave, the less responsibility we have.  Who in hell wants 
people?"
     Clouds were piling up ominously above the trees.
     The wind picked up.  A slight drizzle was falling as Ryan stepped 
up to Jones.  With the congressman was a nervous resident who said he 
wanted to get out with his children.  "There's a family of six that 
wants to leave," Ryan told Jones.  In fact, fifteen people in all had 
asked Ryan's delegation to take them from Jonestown.  Ryan was concerned 
now, worried that the nineteen-passenger plane sitting back at the 
airstrip would be inadequate.
     Jones exploded.  "I feet betrayed!  It never stops!"
     But he offered to provide money to transport out anyone who wanted 
to leave.  "American dollars!"  he was screaming, but guards had 
already moved to herd the delegation toward the truck that would take 
them to the airstrip.
     Jones accosted Mrs.  Parks, who had been with him since 
Indianapolis and who looked at her leader with great sadness in her 
eyes.  "You're not the man I knew," she said with pity.
     "Don't do this to me, Edie," Jones pleaded.  "Wait until the 
congressman goes and then I'll give you the money and your passports."
     "No," the old wohlan said, summoning her courage.  "This is our 
chance.  We're going."
     There was a commotion as her son tried to find a child who had 
wandered off.  The rain was falling heavily now, pounding on the 
leaves.  Suddenly, a burly guard grabbed Ryan from behind and held a 
long knife to his throat.
     "Congressman Ryan, you are a motherfucker," said the assailant as 
some of the terrified residents standing by cheered nervously.
     Aghast, the two lawyers, Lane and Garry, struggled with the guard, 
forcing him to release the startled Ryan.  In the scuffle, the guard's 
hand was slashed.  Blood splattered on Ryan's white shirt.
     A tense truce was worked out.  The fifteen who had approached the 
delegation would be allowed to leave.  After three P.m. a dump truck 
was provided to carry the Ryan party and the fifteen defectors back to 
the airstrip, where they would be ferried by plane to Georgetown.
     But as the truck started out of the camp, one of Jones's top 
aides, Larry Layton, jumped on board.
     His presence frightened the defectors crowded into the well of the 
truck.  "He'll kill us!"  one cried.  Worried about nightfall coming 
before the plane could get everyone back to the capital, Ryan tried to 
calm the group as the truck lumbered down the rutted jungle road in low 
gear, its wheels churning through mud from the torrential downpour.
     The truck reached the airstrip around 4:30 P.m.
     The plane was not there.
     Hoping to film another interview with Ryan at the airstrip while 
they waited for the plane, NBC's Don Harris helped his crew to set up 
as the group, still rattled by the attack on Ryan, milled around 
watching the gray sky drain of light.  A photographer from the San 
Francisco Examiner unpacked his camera and began snapping more 
pictures.
     With great relief, the group saw the nineteen-seat twin-engine 
Otter appear over the treetops.  Behind it was another aircraft, a 
six-seat Cessna.  One after the other the rescue planes landed and 
bounced up to the tarmac in front of the shack.
     With clipboards in hand, Ryan and his aide Jackie Speier went 
about organizing the loading of passengers, assigning seats and 
designating those who would have to wait for the next trip.
     The Cessna was loaded first.  Ryan was standing back by the Otter, 
helping others to board.
     Layton insisted that Ryan get on board the first plane.  There was 
a shout from the group.  A tractor pulling a flatbed trailer drove up 
and parked between the two planes.  Three of Jones's guards hopped off 
the trailer and raised automatic weapons.
     Without a word of warning, they began firing.
     In a panic, the bystanders ran or hit the ground.
     Dwyer, the Guyanese representative, was shot.  Edith Parks's 
daughter Patricia slumped beside the door of the Otter, her head blown 
apart by bullets.  The gunmen fired point-blank at Chronical 
photographer Greg Robinson, who was still snapping pictures when he 
fell dead.
     Chronicle reporter Ron Javers took a bullet in the shoulder and 
also went down.  Washington Post reporter Charles Krause was shot in 
the hip.
     Methodically, the gunmen moved around the plane, where the NBC 
cameraman, Rob Brown, had found a place to keep filming.  He was hit in 
the leg and crumpled beside his camera.  One of Jones's guards strode 
up to him, calmly pressed the barrel of his rifle at his temple and 
fired.
     Futilely seeking refuge behind the fat tires of one of the planes, 
Ryan and Harris were riddled with bullets.  Finishing them off, a 
gunmen stepped up to the two men and blasted them both in the face.  
For good measure, they did the same to Robinson, already dead.  Then 
the gunmen got back on the trailer and drove off.
     The Cessna with survivors on board managed to take off.  The Otter 
was disabled by gunfire.  All around it lay the dead-Ryan, Harris, 
Brown, Robinson, and a Jonestown defector-and the eleven others who had 
been wounded.  Shivering, crying in pain, they would spend the night on 
the ground before a plane arrived to take them to Georgetown at 
daylight.
     As the carnage was raging at the airstrip six miles away, Jones 
furiously ordered a night of unspeakable horror to begin.  The two 
outside lawyers on the scene with Jones-the fifty-one-year-old Lane and 
his seventy-two-year-old colleague Garry-had no idea of what had 
occurred at the airstrip.  Shaken by the attack on Ryan before he had 
left, they were anxiously planning to depart Jonestown the next 
morning.
     An aide to Jones approached them.  "Father wants to see you."
     They were taken to a clearing where they found Jones, disheveled 
and frantic, crying on a bench.
     "This is terrible, terrible," he said.  He tried to explain that 
three gunmen from Jonestown had gone off in pursuit of the Ryan 
delegation and he didn't know what they might do.  "They love me and 
they may do something that will reflect badly on me," he sobbed.  
"They're going to shoot at the people and their planes.  They want to 
kill somebody .  . .
     they've taken every gun in the place!"
     Jones was lying.  He had ordered the assault.  He also had ordered 
the final White Night.  Just then the compound's dreaded loudspeakers 
boomed to life.
     "Alert!  Alert!  Alert!"
     This time it was not a drill.  Instructions were passed for 
everyone to wear their best clothes.
     Ignoring the commotion, Jones stared morosely at the two worried 
lawyers.  "Feeling is running very high against you," he said, getting 
up and walking toward the pavilion.  "I can't say what might happen at 
the meeting."  He ordered the lawyers to go to a guest cottage and stay 
there until further notice.  As they passed a porch of a bungalow, they 
encountered a guard who told them simply, "We are going to die."
     Out of the fetid dorms to where they had been confined, dutifully 
filed the followers of Jim Jones.
     As they had done so many times before, they silently filed into 
the pavilion area as the loudspeakers screeched.
     In the kitchen, Stanley Clayton, a cook, had been preparing dinner 
when the loudspeakers boomed the alert.  By now, White Nights were 
routine occurrences.  He was stirring a vat of black-eyed peas when 
armed guards barged in and ordered him to go to the pavilion with the 
others.  At once, he knew that this was no drill.
     Jones had taken his place on his throne, which sat in the center 
of the open-sided pavilion on a wooden platform that he called the 
"high altar."  As usual, he held a microphone to address his flock.  On 
a table beside him was a tape recorder that he would use to save his 
final sermon for posterity.
     At first there was a little commotion around Jones as top aides 
ascertained his intentions.  At various escape points on walkways 
leading to the pavilion, armed nards silently took position.  The two 
lawyers watched the activity with a growing sense of peril.
     Lane managed to stop a guard, who told him that Jones had ordered 
a mass suicide to protest "racism" and "fascism."  This would not be a 
drill, he said.
     "Then Charles and I will write about what you do, the history of 
what you believed in," Lane replied.
     "Fine," said the guard.
     Assessing the situation, the lawyers dashed out of the cottage and 
hid in the jungle.  Both would escape with their lives.
     From the high altar, his speech starting to slur as the community 
filed into the staging area, Jones announced that the end of the 
journey had come.
     "I want my babies first," he said.  "Take my babies and children 
first."
     Nearby on a long dining table nurses filled syringes with cyanide, 
to squirt the poison into the mouths of small children.  Guards now 
ringed Jones's place on the high altar.  Some raised crossbows, cocked 
taut and ready.
     As the congregation filled in the spaces around the stage, more 
than a thousand people in all, a senior aide's orders to the guards 
resonated on the loudspeakers: "If you see anyone doing a suspicious or 
treacherous act, if you see anyone trying to leave, I want them shot."
     Jones's voice then was heard.  "Let's don't fight one another.  
Let's do it right."  He kept a finger on his tape recorder, switching 
it on and off, editing himself as he rambled.
     "In spite of all I've tried, a handful of people with their lies 
have made our lives impossible," he said, decrying them for "the 
betrayal of the century."
     The old magic was working.  Some of the congregation screamed in 
religious ecstasy.  Others danced feverishly in the aisles.  Many sang.
     "What's going to happen in a matter of a few minutes is that one 
of those people on the plane is going to shoot the pilot," he said, 
adding that he hadn't planned it that way.  There would be retaliation, 
he warned.  "They'll parachute in here on us."
     He spoke of "so many, many pressures on my brain," because of the 
"treasonous" behavior.  Then he told them to drink the poison: "Take 
the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over 
quietly," he said, calling it a "revolutionary" act.
     "They're now going back to tell more lies, which means more 
congressmen," he warned.  Again he prodded them to die.  "Take my 
babies and children first."
     Jones spiraled inexorably into the mad he@.  The event, so 
well-rehearsed, had assumed a momentum of its own.  In the medical tent 
near the pavilion, Dr.
     Schacht supervised the preparation of a big washtub of red-colored 
FlaVor-Aid.  He poured in cyanide from big pharmacy bottles.
     Jones railed on, "Anybody that has any dissenting opinion, please 
speak."
     Surprisingly, someone did, asking why the children had to die 
first.
     "If the children are left, we're going to have them butchered," 
Jones responded.
     Someone else asked, Couldn't they leave the jungle and find a new 
home farther away?
     Jones said the die was cast.  "It's too late.  They've gone with 
the guns."  Ryan and others were dead!
     Enemies were moving through the jungle, coming by air to take 
Jonestown and avenge the deaths.
     A young mother strode up to the edge of the altar and said, "I 
look at all the babies, and I think they deserve to live."
     Jones snapped off the tape recorder and fixed her with a cold 
stare.  "I'm going to see that you die," he said.
     Then Dr.  Schacht and a nurse moved into view in the pavilion as 
the battered washtub was carried in and placed on a table.  Beside the 
tub were arranged the syringes and paper cups.  Security guards shouted 
orders.  Compliantly, as always, the congregation silently formed a 
line.
     "Please get us some medication," Jones exhorted them.  "It's 
simple.  There's no convulsions with it."
     Jones handed the microphone to an excited man who had pushed his 
way through the crowd to the high altar.  "I'm ready to go," he 
screamed in eerie joy.  "If you tell us we have to give our lives now, 
we're ready.  All the rest of the sisters and brothers are with us!"
     This was not exactly the case.  There was in fact some grumbling 
from the crowd.  But as usual, troublemakers were quickly identified by 
guards and isolated.  Some were taken aside, beaten in the shadows of 
the jungle, and then roughly pushed back into place in line.  The 
lightning suppression strategy worked well.  Murmurs of protest died on 
the wind.
     "Hurry!"  Jones shrieked madly on the loudspeakers.  "Hurry, my 
children!  It's just something to put you to rest .  . . Children, it 
will not hurt!"
     As the men, women, and children who had followed him to the jungle 
shuffled forward for their lethal communion, Jones stood red-faced and 
wildeyed, bathed in harsh bright light before his throne.
     "I tried to keep this from happening!"  he moaned.
     "Now I don't think we should sit here and take any more time for 
our children to be endangered."
     The first to drink the poison was a young mother with a little 
girl in her arms.  She held the cup filled with the sugar-flavored 
poison to her child's lips and the child daintily sipped a little.  
Then the mother drank the rest.  They wandered off into a cleared area, 
beyond the glaring penumbra of the floodlights, and sat quietly on the 
ground.  In a few minutes their bodies shook with convulsions; a bloody 
foam formed on their mouths.  The woman screamed and jerked violently, 
and then she was still.  The child burrowed close to her mother, 
whimpered a little, and died.
     Listlessly, the queue of the doomed filed along the table, hands 
mechanically dipping cups into vats of death.  From the gathering 
darkness hellish screams rose in crescendo.
     Darkness brought salvation to a few Jonestown residents who fled 
into the jungle and watched the grotesque tableau from hiding places.  
But they were only a handful.  Most went blindly to their deaths, some 
of them shouting praise to their leader as they died, some hugging each 
other and saying calm good-byes before they drank.  A few had to be 
prodded to drink.  Sometimes a gun had to be used as persuasion.  The 
nurses used the syringes to force the poison into the throats of crying 
babies.
     As they drank, the doomed filed silently out of the pavilion and 
found space in clearings, where they were directed to lie facedown in 
long rows.  One after the other the bodies convulsed and then were 
still.
     Using the toes of their boots, guards worked to keep the rows of 
the dead lined up neatly.
     His voice hoarse, his mouth dry, his clothing soaked and stinking 
with amphetamine sweat, Jones raved in the spotlight as the hollow 
faces of the dying faded from the light.  "I don't know what else to 
say to these people," he croaked, as if addressing himself.  "To me, 
death is not a fearful thing."
     The wails of the dying annoyed him, especially the crying of 
children.  "Let's get it done!  Let's get done!"  he cried impatiently. 
 "We tried to find a new beginning, but it's too late."
     "Are we black, proud, and socialist?"  the white preacher 
demanded, his eyes blazing.  "Or what are we?"
     The long night crept quietly over the death camp.
     As dawn finally streaked the sky, the only sounds were the shrieks 
of birds and the chatter of wild monkeys in the trees.  Jonestown had 
died.
     With daylight, Guyanese troops could be seen in the thick 
camouflage of foliage at the perimeter of Jonestown.  Rifles ready, 
expecting armed resistance from the settlers, they moved cautiously 
into the camp.  But there was no resistance from the corpses, stacked 
like firewood, already bloated and putrefying in the fierce morning 
heat.  In all, there were 914
     bodies on the ground, 276 of them children.
     Only a few had been spared the indignities of a wretched death by 
poison, Jim Jones and his wife prominent among them.  They had been 
shot.  The soldiers found Jones, faceup, his eyes open, on the altar 
where he had killed himself with a single bullet to the right temple.
     In time the shocked headlines faded.  The jungle reclaimed 
Jonestown as its own.  But somewhere still in there is a wooden sign 
that Jones himself had nailed on a beam above the altar, which 
displayed the words of the philosopher George Santayana: "Those who 
cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

      CHAPTER THREE

     k6 kto kto

     Gordon Kahl

     nearing, HIS mid-fifties, Gordon Weldell Kahl was hardly an 
impressive figure-about five feet seven inches, running to fat on his 
stocky build, balding, with a fringe of closely trimmed gray hair.  At 
first glance he might resemble a friendly grocer-but more careful study 
would show a hardness of the eyes, the tiny omnipresent sneer, the 
detached glare not of a grocer but of perhaps a retired Nazi deathcamp 
guard.
     Still, Gordon wasn't the sort of man you'd expect to find 
commemorated on T-shirts and bumper stickers.  It was a bit 
disconcerting to connect that stolid round face with the baseball caps 
proclaiming "Go, Gordie, Go!"  that sprouted all over the heartland of 
midwestern America after Gordon Kahl, professional patriot, killed 
those cops and ran for it.
     "At last!  We Have a Hero!  Gordon Kahl, the First American Hero 
of the Second American Revolution," right-wing militant propaganda 
crowed in the aftermath of Gordon's spectacular 1983 standoff with the 
authorities.
     An "Ode to Gordon Kahl" was published in dozens of neo-Nazi and 
other far-right newspapers, and called his death a heroic struggle, 
comparing him to Davy Crockett.  "A soldier of our race has died," the 
song said.
     There was even a ballad recorded and distributed to radio stations 
throughout the Farm Belt.  It warns the federal government "just what 
happens when you mess with Freedom Fighter Gordon Kahl."
     Gordon Kahl lived modestly and died spectacularly.  To members of 
the small racist underground group he helped to lead to prominence, he 
was nothing less than the herald of Armageddon.
     For years, Kahl preached his message of hate and revenge to people 
gripped in an intellectual isolation that belied the physical 
boundlessness of open prairie and wheat fields on which they lived.  
Jewish conspiracies to control the world through Moscow; prison camps 
being built by the U.S. government to confine millions of American 
patriots on the Axizona desert; Russian troops massed below the Rio 
Grande; MIG fighters training over Mexico; Vietcong guerrillas creeping 
through Texas-all were grist for the mill.  Belief in one outlandish 
plot easily led to belief in them all.  What was left was puregrain 
paranoia.
     Far-right populist agitators like Kahl had a standard and 
exhausting genealogy of villainy in America's farmland.  The nearest 
line went through the regional bankers, the after-shave-lotion-scented 
swindlers at the savings and loan on Main Street who held the farmer's 
burgeoning debts and orchestrated the waves of foreclosures sweeping 
the Farm Belt during the 1980s.  It then ran to their perfidious 
masters on Wall Street, laced up through the Federal Reserve Board to 
the dupes in the White House and Capitol Hill, lopped into the 
international Communist conspiracy, and tied the knot at the 
perpetrators of the diabolical master plot to wreck the American way of 
life.  These masterminds were, of course, the Jews.
     Since the late nineteenth century, similar conspiracy sentiments 
have sometimes found fertile ground in the aggrieved American Farm 
Belt, but the farm crisis of the 1980s-when an economic way of life was 
endangered by soaring debt and unrealized expectations-was a 
particularly propitious time for such sentiments.  And Gordon Kahl was 
a master at exploiting the dark side of nativist American populism, 
even in death.
     Despite the hate and contempt for outsiders constantly simmering 
just beneath his placid surface, Gordon Kahl usually managed to exhibit 
a natural midwestern gregariousness.  He was a good talker, but more 
importantly, an attentive listener-an amiable fellow who could alight 
from his pickup at a farm protest rally and mix easily with the boys, 
nodding with commiseration, joking about hard times, always gently 
prodding a discussion toward the same profound conclusion: that a man 
had a God-given right to farm prosperously, that this right was being 
stolen away by a secret international monetary conspiracy led by the 
Jews and abetted by traitors in the U.S. government; and that, 
furthermore, the situation had reached the point where the biblical 
Final Days were actually at hand.  The ultimate war between good and 
evil had begun.
     Quoting the old labor-organizing song, Gordon would close the deal 
with the question: "Which side are you on, boys?"
     Many of them said they were on his.
     Gordon was born in 1920 on a North Dakota farm homesteaded since 
1906 by his father, Fred-that is, on land received at low cost from 
federal subsidy policies.  In the 1930s, many farm households in the 
Depression-ravaged prairies fell under the spell of radical populists 
and demagogues who identified international Jewry as a scapegoat for 
the fears and miseries of an embattled population, and accused the 
federal government of plotting against Americans.  Like Father 
Coughlin, the Kahis derided President Roosevelt's economic initiatives 
as the "Jew Deal."
     After high school, Gordon left the farm to roam the West, but like 
his father, he never got far away from the government largesse that he 
denounced others for depending on.  There was a federal job in Montana 
as a laborer with the federal Civilian Conservation Corps, followed by 
a state highway work job in California, where he also picked fruit.
     He spent the Second World War in the Army Air Corps as a turret 
gunner, flying more than fifty combat missions in the European and 
Pacific theaters and receiving the Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds 
over Germany.  After his discharge, he married Joan Sell, a local farm 
girl.  His wedding present to his wife was a 20-gauge, double-barrel 
shotgun.
     "When Gordon returned from World War Two, he realized something 
was drastically wrong in the United States," Joan later told James 
Corcoran, recorded in his book, Bitter Harvest.  "But he didn't know 
what."
     He discovered his answer soon enough.  For a little over a 
semester, he attended North Dakota Agricultural College on the GI Bill, 
but dropped out when he decided that the school was run by Communist 
sympathizers.
     For a time afterward, he dallied with the Mormon church, but left 
when he became convinced it, too, had unsavory international 
connections that led to the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.  During the 
1950s Gordon, his wife, and children-there would eventually be 
six-joined the migration of the disillusioned from the Midwest to the 
suburbs of Los Angeles, where he found odd jobs as a car mechanic.  But 
in the spring he always returned to the farm in North Dakota for the 
planting.
     The 1960s were a growth era for right-wing conspiracy-theorist 
groups like the southern Californiabased John Birch Society.  More 
influential to Kahl, however, was a far-right religious movement called 
Christian Identity, which would later form the philosophical bedrock of 
his own racist organization.
     Christian Identity's theories are directly descended from 
Anglo-Israelism, a cult movement that sprang from Elizabethan England 
and peaked at the height of the British Empire.  It maintains that 
Anglo-saxons are descended from the ten "lost" tribes of Israel-the 
inhabitants driven from the northern kingdom of Solomon by the 
conquering Assyrians in 721 B.C. According to Anglo-Israelism, these 
lost tribes migrated westward to become the Saxons, who eventually 
conquered England.  The throne of England is actually the throne of 
David, according to the doctrine, and on this throne Christ will 
literally sit on Judgment Day, after the annihilation of the children 
of Satan-the modern Jews.
     By the 1960s, Christian Identity had adapted these theories for 
American consumption, asserting that the Mayflower brought the 
descendants of the lost tribes to America, the true promised land.  In 
modern America, as the righteous count off the fulfillment of the 
prophesies-each one a mark of the beast-Armageddon would soon be 
fought.  The site of the battle would be on the plains of Kansas or 
Nebraska.
     This is what Gordon Kahl believed by the second half of the 1960s. 
 Armed with such beliefs and a determination to express them, he 
naturally drifted into neo-Nazi and other far-right militarist 
cultures, including the then-moribund Ku Klux Klan.  With such a basis, 
it was easy for him to augment his beliefs with whatever theories 
seemed to fit-for example, Gordon insisted that President Kennedy had 
been assassinated in 1963 on the orders of world Jewish leaders because 
Kennedy had discovered their secret plot for international domination.
     Meanwhile, the wanderlust remained with him.  In 1972, while 
working as a roustabout in the oilfields of West Texas, he flirted with 
fringe neo-Nazi and Klanlike groups, finally discovering Posse 
Comitatus in 1974.  Within a year he was named its statewide 
coordinator.
     Springing from its Christian Identity roots, Posse Comitatus had 
been founded in 1969 in Portland, Oregon, by Henry L. Beach, a retired 
dry-cleaning shop owner who belonged to an American Nazi offshoot group 
called the Silver Shirts, which had been popular during radical 
populist stirrings in the 1930s.
     Posse comitatus, a Latin phrase, means, literally, the power of a 
county.  Its basic doctrines are expressed in the organization's 
handbook, which stated that "a county government is the highest form of 
government in our Republic [and] the county sheriff is the only legal 
law enforcement officer in the United States."  Furthermore, it says, 
"the sheriff is accountable and responsible only to the citizens who 
are the inhabitants of his county."  If the sheriff fails to 
satisfactorily perform his duties, "the Posse Comitatus has the lawful 
right under natural law to act in the name of the sheriff .  . ."
     In other words, the Posse can take the law into its own hands, 
without regard to higher authority.  The Posse believes that the 
federal government has no right to interfere in any local affairs.
     Some nativist right-wing groups merely railed about the federal 
government.  Others were militant and action-oriented, looking toward 
the day when a republic could be proclaimed in which only white 
Christian males would have legal standing.  Posse members were 
encouraged to underscore their "individual sovereignty" by eschewing 
government-issued instruments such as driver's licenses.  Among many 
members, not paying federal income taxes was viewed as an act of valor.
     At the Posse's base was the belief that the United States was 
founded as an exclusively Christian nation but that its Constitution, 
firmly rooted in the Bible, had been corrupted by an international 
Jewish conspiracy.  To destroy America, that conspiracy had created a 
rapacious federal income tax at the behest of the hated Federal Reserve 
Board.  The Posse maintained that the Fed, under secret control of 
eight Jewish-owned international banks since 1913, deviously manipulated 
interest rates to ruin the American economy and destroy Christianity, 
to bring about the triumph of the "Synagogue of Satan."
     It was a conspiracy theory tailor-made for a man like Gordon Kahl, 
and for a place like the distressed American agricultural heartland of 
the late 1970s and the 1980s, where farmers-in debt up to their 
ears-were losing hope, facing ruin, and looking for reasons why.  That 
was when Gordon Kahl came back to the heavily mortgaged farm that he 
had inherited from his father near Medina, North Dakota, 125
     miles west of Fargo.  This time, he came home with all the 
answers.
     The FBI first began taking a serious look at the Posse in 1975, 
when rumors spread that members were plotting an assassination attempt 
against Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.  By then the Posse had 
chapters in twenty-three states, mostly concentrated in the prairie and 
farm states.  Posse recruiting also was picking up in the industrial 
Midwest, where auto workers were being laid off in droves.  By the end 
of the decade, Posse membership was estimated at over 25,000.
     At one central Posse location in Wisconsin, James Wickstrom, the 
group's "national director of counterinsurgency," had even founded a 
"township" on a wooded 570-acre compound.  There, about two hundred 
followers lived, and trained in survivalist skills.  Wickstrom's radio 
lectures were beamed throughout the U.S. heartland and his taped 
sermons were widely distributed at farm shows, state fairs, and other 
public events.  The message was incessant and simple, according to 
Wickstrom: "Stinking Jew bankers" in control of the federal government 
were responsible for the plight of American farmers.
     As the FBI warned its field offices that Posse members should be 
considered armed and dangerous, Gordon Kahl easily expanded on that 
message while working to place himself at the center of Posse 
Comitatus.  Even before he inherited the North Dakota farm in the late 
seventies, Gordon had announced that he would no longer pay federal 
income taxes.  He set up his own "church," named it the Gospel Doctrine 
Church of Jesus Christ, and appointed his eldest son, Yorie, as its 
bishop.  In 1977, Gordon was convicted of tax evasion and spend eight 
months in prison before being released on parole, on condition that he 
pay his taxes.  He refused to comply, setting up what would become a 
series of confrontations with authorities.
     At the same time, he became something of a folk hero.  Always an 
effective speaker, he was becoming as adept at radio and television as 
he was in small gatherings of farmers.  Sensing the tenor of the times, 
he successfully added a big dash of tax protest theory to the existing 
racist and conspiratorial mixture-and farmers loved, it.
     The farm crisis worsened throughout the decade, with interest 
payments breaking the backs of smaller farmers who had unwisely 
overexpanded to compete with corporate agricultural giants.  At the 
heart of the expansion was the easy money of the era@ncouraged by the 
government, bankers lent farmers funds readily, often without 
sufficient collateral.  By 1983, with farm foreclosures sharply 
accelerating in states like North Dakota, farm suicides and other 
violence were becoming common phenomena.  Wherever farmers gathered to 
talk over their woes, Posse Comitatus was there.  With boundless 
energy, Gordon Kahl saw to that.
     Gordon, Yorie, and an associate, farmer Scott Faul, drove in a 
pickup truck to farm rallies and farm foreclosures throughout the 
heartland, fanning the flames of protest.  The Posse meetings they set 
up were often tumultuous affairs, as purely local concerns about 
lawsuits and contracts bumped shoulders with international conspiracy 
theories and calls to armed revolt and Armageddon.  Gordon deftly 
balanced the buffeting winds of protest, preaching the Book of 
Revelation on one hand while passing out "legal karate kits" to use 
government regulations and snarl court foreclosure proceedings with the 
other.  To this day, Posse suits against lenders on such pretexts as 
the federal Truth in Lending Act are still creeping their way through 
court systems.
     Meanwhile, Posse agitators stepped up efforts to exploit the 
violence.  In radio speeches broadcast throughout the farm states, 
Posse "guerrilla warfare" expert William Gale, a retired Army colonel, 
exhorted listeners to "cleanse the land" and start making dossiers with 
names, addresses, phone numbers, and car license plate numbers of Jews. 
 FBI investigators turned up evidence of a Posse-issued "arrest 
warrant" that condemned to death a Kansas sheriff and his deputy who 
had displeased the Posse.
     Gordon steadfastly refused to file federal income tax reports on 
his meager income, which seldom exceeded $10,000 a year.  By 1983, with 
good reason, he believed his activities were being monitored by the 
federal government.  In fact, the Internal Revenue Service hoped to 
move against him, but hadn't yet.
     On his organizing trips, however, Gordon maintained that in every 
town he and his loyal band visited, secret agents for Mossad, the 
Israeli intelligence service, were on hand to spy on him and anyone he 
came in contact with.
     Back at home in North Dakota, Gordon and other Posse members were 
organizing a "township" modeled along the lines of Wickstrom's in 
Wisconsin.
     The group, known to be well-armed, had frequently and vociferously 
vowed a "struggle to the death" against all oppressors.  Few tax agents 
or local sheriffs deputies, let alone the Israeli intelligence service, 
were interested in tangling lightly with such a force.
     That changed on a Sunday in February of 1983, when five men were 
dispatched to arrest Gordon, who had an IRS lien against his farm for 
nonpayment of taxes and was named on a warrant for violation of parole. 
 Kahl had finally gone too far by threatening to kill anyone who 
interfered with him.
     Dispatched to arrest the Posse leader were Marshal Kenneth Muir, a 
twenty-year veteran of the U.S.
     Marshal's office in North Dakota; Deputy Marshals Robert Cheshire, 
James Hopson, and Carl Wigglesworth; and Deputy Sheriff Bradley Kapp of 
Stutsman County.
     Kapp had spotted Gordon's vehicle in the parking lot of a medical 
clinic in the dusty farm town of Medina, where a meeting of the planned 
township was under way.  Aware that Muir had a warrant for Gordon, he 
radioed his office with word that he had spotted him.  Was it time to 
make the arrest?
     There was no great enthusiasm about any such confrontation among 
the law enforcement officers in the area.  Not only did Kahl and his 
Posse have weapons and determination, they enjoyed widespread public 
support.
     Darrell Graf, the town police chief, who had been listening to the 
police radio, cut in to suggest to Kapp: "This is a misdemeanor deal, 
it's no big thing.
     It's not worth creating a big problem over."  Graf knew Gordon 
well, and firmly believed him when he said he'd never be taken alive.  
"If you're going to take him, you'd better have a thirty-man SWAT 
team," the chief warned.
     Instead, the marshals decided to set up a roadblock.
     The meeting, attended by dozens of local Posse members and a 
number of other local people, was in the town doctor's clinic on Water 
Street.  Gordon, Yorie, and Scott Faul had arrived in mid-afternoon, 
toting rifles with banana clips.  Yorie also had a holster with a 
pistol.  Gordon had called the meeting to begin laying the path for the 
setting up of a selfcontained, self-ruled, and self-sufficient 
community from whence to plot the end of the world.  The atmosphere was 
one of paranoia.
     As the meeting wore on, Scott Faul ducked outside for some air.  
He rushed back in.  "We're being watched," he said.
     There was discussion about agents from Mossad storming the clinic. 
 But the lookout was only Deputy Sheriff Kapp, sitting in his green 
pickup a block and a half away with a pair of binoculars.  He was 
waiting for the U.S. Marshals to come.
     Driving a Dodge Ram Charger, Marshals Cheshire and Hopson, and 
Muir and Wigglesworth in an unmarked sedan, soon arrived in town and 
parked nearby.  Except Muir, all of the men wore bulletproof vests.
     The meeting broke up around five o'clock.
     Gordon, in a blue windbreaker, his usual baseball cap with farm 
equipment logo perched on his head, left the clinic in a Hornet driven 
by David Broer.
     Gordon's own brown station wagon followed them, driven by Yorie, 
with Joan Kahl in the front passenger seat.  In the rear seat were 
Scott Faul and Vernon Wegner, a farm taborer who had been fired from a 
job as a small-town police chief for purchasing teargas grenades that 
he planned to give to a radical farmers' group.
     On the deserted main street the marshals rendezvoused with Kappa.  
who climbed into the Ram Charger behind Cheshire.  They set out after 
Gordon and his associates.  Muir had gone north, meanwhile, to set up a 
roadblock ahead.  Accompanying him in a separate vehicle was Steve 
Schnable, a town police officer.
     At 5:40 P.m. police chief Graf happened to look out the window and 
see the Hornet come by on the road north out of town with Broer and 
Gordon, followed by the station wagon driven by Yorle-followed two 
minutes later by the marshals in their vehicles.
     Another car came by, with a young couple in it.
     Graf flagged them down and warned them away from the road.  "Get 
the hell out of here.  There's going to be a shootout," he said.
     Less than a mile out of town, Broer apparently became aware of the 
marshals' vehicles following.
     He stopped and made a U-turn in a driveway outside a mobile home.
     Yorie pulled up beside him.  "I think somebody is following us.  
Let's get out of here!"
     But there was no time for that.  The Charger with two marshals in 
it bounded up, lights flashing, blocking the sedan and station wagon.
     Peering out a window from inside the mobile home, Wayne Reardon 
saw men with rifles getting out of their cars.  Just then the phone in 
the Reardon home rang.  It was the town police dispatcher.  "Lock your 
doors!  There might be a shootout."
     "What the hell is this?"  Scott yelled across at Yorie.
     "I don't know.  But I'm getting my gun!"
     Yorie shouted at his mother to get down, and jumped out of the 
vehicle with his rifle aimed at the Charger.  Faul followed, with 
Gordon right behind him.  Now there were three armed men training 
weapons on the marshals in the Charger.
     Cheshire, with a rifle, and Hopson, with a shotgun, tumbled out 
onto the ground and took cover.
     "U.S. Marshals!"  Cheshire yelled.  "Put down your guns or we'll 
blow your fucking heads off!"
     Gordon shouted back from his position behind a car.  "Put your 
guns down and back off.  There is no reason for anybody to get hurt 
over this."
     From the back seat of the Charger, Kapp suggested getting out 
fast.  But Muir was radioing for assistance from the Highway Patrol.  
The situation had already gotten out of control.
     Faul called out, "What do you want?"
     "I want him, " said Cheshire, pointing his rifle barrel at Gordon.
     Faul backed away slowly, keeping his rifle at waist height.  Then 
he cut across the road and dashed toward the woods beside the mobile 
home.
     Wigglesworth pursued him, stomping through freezing muddy puddles 
in the woods.  But Faul got away.
     Meanwhile, Hopson stole up to the Hornet and approached Broer, 
frozen at the wheel.  "We have a warrant for his arrest," Hopson said, 
nodding to where Gordon was crouched on the other side of his car.
     "What do you guys want?"  Gordon yelped again.
     "All we want is you," said Hopson.
     Gordon made no reply.
     Muir and Schnable were edging on foot down the road from the 
roadblock they had set up a little ways north.
     A shot rang out.
     Cheshire cried, "I'm hit!"  fell into the open door of the 
Charger, grabbed the radio mike and said, "Officer hit!  Officer hit!"
     There was another shot.  Kapp fired, hitting Yorie in the stomach.
     "I'm hit!  I'm hit!"  Yorie yelled to his father.
     Gordon fired several rounds at Kapp, shattering the windshield.  
Kapp saw with astonishment that one of his fingers was blown off.  Now 
Gordon fired up the road, hitting Schnable once.  Another shot struck 
Muir in the chest and killed him immediately.
     In a crouch, Gordon approached Schnable, still alive on the 
ground.  "Don't shoot!  I quit," the officer said.
     "Give me your gun," Gordon demanded.
     Quietly, Gordon took it and moved to the Charger, where he found 
Cheshire slumped bleeding in the front seat.
     He raised his rifle and fired two bullets that blew apart 
Cheshire's head.
     Astonishingly, at the town medical clinic where the meeting had 
been held, survivors of both sides of the shootout found themselves 
looking at each other.
     Gordon, his son critically wounded, brazenly approached Kapp, 
sitting there with his blood-soaked hand.  Gordon patted his rifle.
     "We could have talked this over without shooting.  "
     "Was it worth it?"  a terrified emergency technician on the scene 
asked Gordon.
     "It was worth it to me."  Gordon said.
     Gordon walked out of the clinic, where the dead and wounded lay, 
and stole Schnable's police cruiser.
     He fled Medina, to become a fugitive and a martyr.
     That night, Faul read a note Gordon had handed him before he drove 
off, emphasizing the dangers of being an enemy of the 
"Jewish-Masonic-Communist Synagogue of Satan."
     Other Posse leaders adopted Gordon as a folk hero and eagerly 
spread the notion that somehow God had allowed Gordon to make monkeys 
out of his would-be captors in the government.
     "It is the general feeling that the government has declared war on 
the people of this country," James Wickstrom crowed to his radio 
listeners in many states as news of the Medina shootout spread.
     Ranting, racist letters from Gordon himself began arriving at 
Posse offices, and were immediately published in periodicals 
distributed throughout heartland Posse social networks, where the 
legend of Gordon Kahl was fast taking root.
     As the T-shirts, bumper stickers, and radio ballads sprang up, the 
Posse widely presented the shootout as an aborted government attempt to 
set up Gordon as an example.
     While on the run, Gordon wrote a sixteen-page manifesto-postmarked 
from Texas-depicting the shootout as an act of self-defense and calling 
Christian patriots to arms.
     The meeting, he said, concerned the implementing of the "Third 
Continental Congress" to rebuild the "power and prestige" of the 
Constitution "and put our nation back under Christian common law."  
Suddenly, he said, information was received "that we were to be 
ambushed" on the way home.
     He described encountering the two cars just north of Medina.  
"About this time they turned on their red lights, and I knew the attack 
was under way," he wrote.
     ".  . . At the time the shot rang out, I heard Yorie cry out 'I'm 
hit!  I'm hit!"' Gordon wrote.  He looked at the two men, he said, and 
"the one in the passenger side aimed at me, and I was sure then that 
they felt .  . . the only thing to do was kill us all .  . ."
     After exchanging shots, and watching several of the lawmen fall, 
Gordon reported that he noticed the third man in time to see him 
"raise up to shoot at Scotty, who had run over to Yorie."  Gordon said 
that he fired and the man fell to the ground.  Then, "I saw the man who 
was behind the front end of the green Mercury raise up and aim at 
Scotty."  The man took cover behind his car.  "I fired, striking him 
and putting him out of the fight," Gordon wrote.
     Gordon insisted that neither Vernon Wagner nor Dave Broer shot at 
anyone, and added that his wife had "nothing to do with it, other than 
the fact that she rode along with us" to the meeting.
     He concluded: "I want the world to know that I take no pleasure in 
the death or injury of any of these people .  . . When you come under 
attack by anyone, it becomes a matter of survival .  . .
     "I would have liked nothing better than to be left alone," he 
wrote.  He denounced Jews and spoke of efforts to amend the 
Constitution to prohibit them from living in the U.S.
     "We are a conquered and occupied nation; conquered and occupied by 
the Jews" and their allies, determined to "destroy Christianity and the 
white race."  The coming struggle, Kahl said, was "between the people 
of the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan .  . ."
     He implored, "Let each of you who says that the Lord Jesus Christ 
is your personal savior sell his garment and buy a sword" to use 
against the "Synagogue of Satan."
     He signed it, "Gordon Kahl, Christian Patriot."
     After a few months of this heroic odyssey, Gordon turned up at a 
ranch owned by a Posse supporter in Arkansas.  There he was treated as 
a hero by the farmer, but betrayed by the farmer's daughter, who was 
distressed about his agitated condition and his talk of killing more 
federal officers.
     She called the FBI, but Gordon had moved again, this time to his 
final destination, a survivalist compound built like a military bunker 
complex into a hill near the Arkansas-Missouri border up a deep hollow 
of the Ozark Mountains.  There, in the leafy cover, stood mobile homes 
and shacks, primitive residences of more than a hundred adults and 
children clad in combat fatigues, encamped in the belief that Doomsday 
was near.
     Kahl had found refuge in a small house on the edge of the 225-acre 
compound, which was owned by a newly emerging far-right group called 
the Covenant of the Sword and the Arm of the Lord.  The Covenant had 
begun billing itself as the paramilitary arm of the Christian Identity 
movement.
     A government assault team found Gordon at the compound on June 2.
     He fired on FBI agents who tried to serve the arrest warrant.  
While the agents took cover and secured the rest of the compound, 
Lawrence County Sheriff Gene Matthews stole up from the rear of the 
house and gained entry.  As he entered the kitchen, Gordon stepped out 
from behind a refrigerator and began firing.
     As the two men blasted away at each other, the house filled with 
tear gas from canisters shot through windows.  The assault lasted for 
an hour.  Finally, a smoke grenade dropped down a stove flue, ignited 
some diesel fuel, and the flames began licking at the floor.
     Sheriff Matthews's body was dragged out of the burning house.  
Gordon's was later dug out of the rubble.  But the Posse refused to 
concede the death of one of its most prominent leaders.
     Donald Laveme Hollenbeck, a national Posse organizer, publicly 
insisted that law enforcement officials were lying and that Gordon had 
survived the assault.
     "He is in hiding, and he is going to show up," Hollenbeck insisted 
on the radio.
     Nevertheless, the family held a funeral.  The casket with Gordon's 
remains was flanked by an honor guard made up of members of local 
American Legion posts.  Gordon was eulogized as a patriot, like Patrick 
Henry, Nathan Hale, or George Washington.
     Hundreds of friends and supporters from many states crowded around 
to pay their last respects.  The minister, Reverend Peter Dyck, noted 
his many disagreements with Gordon but described him as an outstanding 
citizen who "paid a great price" in a brave attempt "to awaken a 
pacifistic public to the dangers facing these great United States of 
America."
     Avenging Gordon's death became a major goal of the Posse and its 
associated far-right cults like the Covenant, which later dispatched an 
assassination squad to hit the federal judge presiding over the trial 
of supporters who had helped to harbor Gordon at the Arkansas compound. 
 (The hit squad had a highway accident en route to the judge's house 
and called off its mission.) Gordon Kahl was awarded a prominent spot 
in the pantheon of the racist right.
     An umbrella group of far-right militant organizations called Aryan 
Nations, adopted Kahl's call to form a self-sufficient racist state to 
do battle with what Kahl had called "ZOG"-the Zionist Occupation 
Government that was secretly running the U.S.
     One offshoot defined a "point system" to award credit for killing 
Jews and blacks.  On a nationwide computer bulletin board called "Aryan 
Liberty Network," there appeared a list, "Know Your Enemy," that 
included the addresses of "traitors," prominent Jewish organizations 
and names and addresses of some reporters.  One Kahl admirer declared 
that the "Satanic" U.S. government was guilty of "murdering Christians 
like Gordon Kahl, who you burned in Nebuchadnezzer's oven because he 
would not bow to your golden Babylonian God and pay your tribute to 
finance Israel."
     The furor over Kahl resonated throughout the far right, tied as it 
was to the well-publicized plight of the American farmer.  It 
encouraged and galvanized festering neo-Nazi groups, most notably a 
Christian Identity-based movement called the Order, which members 
referred to by its German name, Bruder Schweigen, the Silent 
Brotherhood.
     On June 18, 1984, four members of the Order approached a Denver 
radio talk-show host, Alan Berg, outside his home.  Berg was an 
outspoken liberal, a Jew who had frequently argued with right-wing 
agitators who phoned his radio program.
     The Order hit men machine-gunned him to death.
     Gordon Kahl would have been proud.
      CHAPTER FOUR k6 k6 kto Palace of Gold KEITH HAM, A prematurely 
aging twenty-eightyear-old who looked like the missing link between the 
beatnik and the hippie generations, was wandering the streets of 
Manhattan's East Village in 1965
     when he spotted the old swami.  Little did Ham know it then, but 
his ship had finally come in.
     The son of a fundamentalist preacher, Ham had managed to get a 
doctorate in religious studies when he drifted into Greenwich Village's 
eastern edge, to a neighborhood where gentrification was still a decade 
away.  A downscale version of San Francisco's Haight district, the East 
Village offered cheap rents and cheaper thrills.  Its weed-strewn parks 
and vacant lots often formed a battleground between generations of 
derelicts-the old boozers and the young druggies.  It was a place where 
a frustrated rock musician without much talent could somehow see a 
future as a star, where a narcissistic loudmouth with half-baked 
opinions could imagine he was a philosopher.
     Such a man was Keith Ham, already the self-styled dean of the 
"Mott Street Gang," a collection of street professors who listened to 
the radio, argued into the night, and thought they were leading a 
revolution.
     On this fortunate day in 1965, Ham watched with some fascination 
as a new neighborhood character wobbled his way up the block.  This was 
no ordinary denizen of the East Village.  Approaching was a grizzled 
old man with a shaved head, smiling beatifically, his saffron monk's 
robe furling in the wind like a battle pennant.
     Ham recognized the accessories of eastern mysticism because he had 
a roommate, a man named Wheeler, who had been flirting for years with 
Indian religions.  Indeed, the roommate had already been singing the 
praises of a Hindu sect that claimed as its sacred text the glorious 
and ancient Bhagavad-Gita, the "Song of the Lord."  The Bhagavad-Gita 
spun a wondrous tale of a wandering soldier en route to battle who 
hitches a ride with a charioteer.  The driver turns out to be the 
sometimes playful, sometimes vengeful, Krishna, incarnation of Vishnu, 
the many-lived Lord of the Universe.  As the hitchhiker learns the ways 
of Krishna, he is led, chanting and step by step, to understand the 
secrets of the universe and finally to achieve eternal bliss.
     In fact, Ham had even accompanied his roommate on a cheap trip to 
India the previous summer to search for such a man, just as the Beatles 
had done, although with more money and greater success.  And now, on 
teeming Houston Street, not two blocks from home, hard against the 
Bowery, Keith Ham encountered a monk chanting the mantra of that 
mysterious sect: "Hare Krishna, Hare )Wshna.  Hare Rama The swami, it 
turned out, had recently journeyed from his home in Vrindaban, India, 
to preach among the street kids then flocking into the East Village, 
practically in the shadow of the soon-to-be famed temple of rock, the 
Fillmore East theater.  These were people often willing to believe in 
anything with a melody, and the swami found fertile ground for his 
message of simple love and blind devotion.
     Especially attractive was the traditional image of Krishna: 
boyish, mischievous, wise, perpetually young.  Krishna was a god who 
played the flute and frolicked in flowers surrounded by doting, 
beautiful women.  In short, he was a hippie's dream.
     Ham struck up a conversation with the swami and followed him to 
his storefront headquarters.  The name stenciled on the window said: 
Swami A.C.
     Bhaktivedant ' a Prabhupada.  Inside was a curio shop where brass 
gimcracks, incense, books, and other accoutrements of the movement were 
sold, and in an adjoining room a gathering of devoted followers, all, 
like the swami, in saffron robes with heads shavedeven the women-all 
chanting in euphonious harmony: "Hare @shna Very soon, the 
impressionable Ham was among them.  Following him to the swami's 
storefront were other members of the Mott Street Gang, who first showed 
up for cynical amusement.  But in time Ham and others from the 
neighborhood were wearing robes and chanting along with the rest of 
them.
     Charisma, an authoritarian bent, and a good eye for a dollar were 
among the swami's chief attributes.
     The swami had grandiose plans to convert all of America.  In time, 
the word of Krishna would prevail, a national movement of yoga would 
engulf the continent.  While most of the swami's followers swooned, 
more level-headed ones did some mental calculations.  The swami's cash 
registers were ringing loudly with business from the gift shop; Krishna 
devotees who spent their workdays panhandling all over the city were 
bringing home collection cans stuffed with money; new recruits were 
joining up every day.  And the swami was an old man.  He would be 
needing a successor one day.
     After he moved into the swami's fold, adopting the new Krishna 
name of Kirtanananda Bhaktipada, Ham was content for a while with a 
simple life of chanting Krishna's name incessantly, avoiding meat, and 
following the path to eternal bliss by fund-raising and preaching on 
the sidewalks.
     The swami, devoted to the spirit of the god Krishna, was evidently 
a holy man who practiced what he preached and lived a life of chastity, 
vegetarianism, and pacifism, if not self-sacrifice.  But Swami 
Prabhupada was also a phenomenally busy man, traveling constantly 
between his home in India and major U.S. and urban centers to set up 
new communes.  As the movement burgeoned, it drew into its fold not 
only simple believers but con men, opportunists, and street toughs 
intent on lying low for a while.  To them, chastity and pacifism were 
too much to ask.  They settled for vegetarianism, chanting, and, of 
course, raising money.
     In the swami's long stretches of absence, the newly devout 
Kirtanananda soon emerged-by virtue of his age as well as his 
overbearing nature-as a kind of deputy in the growing East Village 
Krishna commune.
     Though loyal to the old swami, Kirtanananda realized that his 
master's ways were conservative-"fundamentalist," as he put it.  The 
swami had spent many years rewriting the fabled Bhagavad-Gita, which in 
its original form runs less than a hundred pages.  The swami's version 
came in at over nine hundred pages and was retitled, with a nod to the 
sixties vernacular, Bhagavad-Gita: As It Is.  It sold well, but it was 
incomprehensible.
     Once, while accompanying the old swami on a trip to India, 
Kirtanananda had gingerly approached his master with suggestions about 
sprucing up his image for the American market, with more sophisticated 
advertising extolling the heroic nature of his quest, or perhaps even a 
television series or a moviefunded by the Krishna movement and produced 
by Kirtanananda himself.  But it was useless.  The old man just smiled, 
raised a hand and chanted.
     "Kirtanananda decided that Swami Prabhupada was an old fart who 
didn't know as much as he did about marketing a new idea," one former 
associate later said.
     Of course, Swami Prabhupada's saintly mien, that wizened and 
inscrutable face beaming from posters pasted up on walls all over urban 
America, was eminently useful in recruiting and fund-raising.  Even 
Kirtanananda acknowledged that.  But to make the movement grow to its 
full potential, good old American entrepreneurship was required.  
Competition between sects in big cities was growing.  The money was 
pouring in.  Capitalistic instincts followed close by.
     Throughout the late sixties, the Krishna movement took root in 
U.S. cities, with its main centers of strength and recruiting in New 
York and Los Angeles.  But Krishna communities also prospered in 
Britain and other countries as well.  The indefatigable Swami 
Prabhupada named his movement the International Society for Krishna 
Consciousness.
     In 1969 the English connection gave the Krishnas their best single 
publicity boost when the swamis disciple, the leader of the London sect 
in his absence, met and befriended George Harrison, the Beatle who had 
fallen under the strongest influence of eastern mysticism when the band 
made its famous journeys to India in the sixties.  Harrison, who often 
said that he believed he had been a yoga in a past incarnation, agreed 
to produce a recording of the tuneful "Hare Krishna Mantra."  Recorded 
at Apple Records, with Harrison and Paul McCartney joining in, the 
Krishna anthem became an international hit and greatly increased the 
number of young recruits flocking to the Krishna way of life.
     Meanwhile, with the swami consumed with work tending his far-flung 
religious empire from his base in India, Kirtanananda decided that 
there was too much competition in New York.  At the urging of a friend, 
he traveled to West Virginia and looked over an abandoned farm in the 
hills, about eighty-five miles below Pittsburgh, not far from the 
interstate highway.  But it was far indeed from the disruptive 
influences and distractions of the big city, where law enforcement 
authorities had begun to pay unwanted attention to the hordes of hippie 
and religious-cult panhandlers and solicitors-and more importantly, 
where "deprogrammers" working to reclaim cult members on behalf of 
distraught parents had started to cause serious problems for Krishna 
recruitment activities.
     Kirtanananda, aware of the importance of both Prabhupada's image 
and his continuing goodwill, excitedly told the swami that he and his 
adherents from New York would move to West Virginia and build a new 
rural community there in his honor.  The community would also be 
available to the swami as his home away from home, Kirtanananda 
explained.
     The swami, weary of big cities, blessed the idea.
     It was an huge undertaking, building a working commune and a 
suitably opulent headquarters in the hardscrabble farmland in an alien 
environment.
     Kirtanananda and more than a hundred Krishnas from New York moved 
down, naming their dreamedof earthly paradise New Vrindaban, after the 
sacred Indian village where the youthful Krishna was said to have 
performed his epic deeds, subjugating river serpents in splendid 
raiment while dancing with milkmaids and vanquishing enemies.
     In Krishna communities elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, 
Kirtanananda's counterparts-the Prabhupada disciples who headed the 
various individual sects and had become known as the "gurus"-Chuckled 
at the audacity of their New York colleague.
     "Empire-building," one said.  As it turned out, he was right.
     Kir-tanananda and his followers settled in for the',r first winter 
on the sprawling farmland along a mountain ridge in West Virginia's 
impoverished northern panhandle.  The site was in the outskirts of a 
town named Moundsville, population 12,000.  As the oddly dressed 
religious devotees moved in.  neighboring farmers watched with some 
bemusement.  It was, however, an area where Appalachian hospitality is 
a basic value, and during that first winter, neighbors generously 
assisted the new arrivals, donating food, helping with construction of 
cabins and sheds, offering advice when the spring came on keeping 
livestock and raising crops.
     With the arrival of the glorious mountain spring, flocks of new 
devotees found their way down to New Vrindaban, drawn by Krishna 
recruiters still aggressively at work in the streets of New York, 
Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. By the scores they came, in vans and 
pickups, as hitchhikers and bus passengers-teenagers, young couples 
with tiny children, single men.  All had shaved heads and wore robes.
     And in a very short time the daily routine of Moundsville and 
surrounding communities was changed by their presence.  Areas that had 
never known panhandlers now were teeming with them.  In a place where 
people minded their own business, Krishnas even began soliciting 
door-to-door.  There were reports that they had stepped up recruiting 
among local high school kids.
     This, coupled with the fact that the Krishna community generated 
money and even a few menial jobs in an area where unemployment often 
reached 25
     percent, created a basic conflict in attitudes toward the new 
neighbors in their rapidly expanding commune.  On the one hand, the 
Krishnas had money.
     Most astounding to neighbors was the amount of money the Krishnas 
apparently were prepared to spend to buy land.  Heads shook in 
amazement at the prices the Krishnas paid farmers for adjoining acres 
of land-prices five and ten times what any sensible buyer would have 
had to offer to get it.  Very rapidly the Krishna spread expanded.  In 
a little over a decade, New Vrindaban's original hundred acres of 
rolling fields with a few shacks that had neither running water nor 
electricity would grow to over 2,800 acres, with modern buildings and, 
ultimately, a palace of gold.
     On the other hand, as their presence grew, the Krishnas raised 
concerns among many neighbors, who brought back rumors of child abuse 
and weapons accumulation, even of sexual wantonness at the Krishna 
paradise.  In a fairly short time the word " cult" was being applied 
to the new neighbors.
     One local resident told a reporter that the Krishnas, once 
welcomed, had come to be regarded as "no-good, tax-exempt vermin."
     Inside the prospering New Vrindaban compound, Kirtanananda 
ingeniously manipulated the outside suspicion, and occasional 
hostility, into the cult leader's chief weapon: a sense among his 
followers that they were under siege by unseen enemies.  The neighbors, 
Kirtanananda scoffed, were "rednecks and materialists who resent our 
spiritualism."
     Like most Krishna communities, at New Vrindaban most devotees 
worked sixteen-hour days at panhandling or menial jobs and were 
expected to blindly follow the swami's dictates.  Married couples, 
whose partners often were chosen arbitrarily by Kirtanananda, were 
usually restricted to sexual relations once a month.  Children were 
removed from their parents at an early age and segregated in 
dormitories.
     Paranoia flowered.  In 1973 it was fertilized by reality when 
several local men attacked New Vrindaban at gunpoint, to "rescue" a 
fifteen-year-old daughter who had been recruited into the cult.  The ' 
assailants shot up the place, but no one was hurt.  However, 
Kirtanananda seized on the incident as a rallying cry.
     Soon, in the telling, the relatively small incident became a major 
armed assault on the Krishna compound by wild-eyed bikers, while the 
local police looked the other way.
     In great alarm, Kirtanananda wrote to Prabhupada in India to tell 
him of the battle, which he now likened to the opening skirmishes of 
Armageddon.
     "Why are you not keeping guns?"  the swami wrote back, according 
to reporters John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson in their book, Monkey on a 
Stick.- Murder, Madness and the Hare @shnas.  "We are not followers of 
Gandhi's philosophy."
     Into New Vrindaban from the hard city streets poured a new breed 
of Krishna devotee: young men with records of violent crime, with a 
familiarity with guns and a readiness to use them.  Soon, an armed 
"defense force" patrolled the grounds to enforce rules, under the guise 
of providing protection from hostile outsiders.  Quietly, stockpiles of 
weapons and ammunition built up.
     The isolation intensified with the fear that the outside world was 
poised to attack.
     In his preaching, some followers who fled in alarm would later 
say, Kirtanananda began to sound less an exponent of Hindu mysticism 
than a paranoid religious fanatic.  Perhaps inevitably, the joyous 
Bhagavad-Gita as Kirtanananda interpreted it began to sound more like 
the grim, apocalyptic Book of Revelation.
     By the mid-1970s the community at New Vrindaban numbered about 
five hundred people.  As old age slowed him down, Pradhupada's visits 
became less frequent.  Increasingly regarding himself as the swami's 
logical successor at the head of the international movement, 
Kirtanananda became more autocratic, enforcing codes on what could be 
discussed and when, arbitrarily choosing marital partners, and 
separating children from their parents in locked dormitories.
     Prabhupada died in India in 1977, at the age of eighty-one.  At 
the master's death, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness 
claimed adherents in temples all over the world, but chiefly in the 
U.S.
     On his deathbed, Prabhupada had designated eleven new "gurus," 
regional swamis who would be responsible collectively for running the 
international movement in its blissful endeavors once he was gone.
     Ruling the East Coast Krishna kingdom from his bastion in West 
Virginia, Kirtanananda, of course, was one of the eleven.
     "He thought he was leaving the movement to eleven bishops," one 
former follower said.  "What he really did was create eleven competing 
popes."
     A power struggle was inevitable.  Kirtananandaheading the richest 
and most influential of the Krishna communities, building an earthly 
paradise in the hills of West Virginia-vowed to win it.  Other gurus, 
Kirtanananda declared, were "in maya'@living lives of sin.
     At the base of his power was an impressive flow of money.  From 
1981 to 1985, federal prosecutors would later claim, Krishna devotees 
based at New Vrindaban generated $10.5 million just from street sales 
in various cities of counterfeit caps, T-shirts, and bumper stickers 
bearing trademark characters from "Peanuts" and other comic strips.
     The first major public sign of trouble in the Krishna empire had 
come a few years after Prabhupada's death, when a Krishna sect in 
California was implicated in charges of drug-money laundering.  Its 
leader, Alexander Kulik, was convicted in 1979 of heroin distribution.
     But in West Virginia all still looked rosy, as devotees worked day 
and night to complete New Vrindaban's greatest monument.  In 1980, 
Kirtanananda dedicated New Vrindaban's crowning glory, the spectacular, 
Ozlike Palace of Gold, an ornate domed temple to Krishna that stood on 
an Appalachian,foothill, its roof gleaming with a layer of 22carat gold 
leaf, its walls sheathed in two hundred tons of marble inlaid with 
Italian onyx.  Inside the temple, whose chambers were adorned with fine 
wood fittings and gold scrollwork, soft colors glowed through 
intricately designed stained-glass windows, bathing bronze statues of 
Hindu gods and paintings depicting the life of the Lord Krishna.  In 
one central chamber stood a great statue of Prabhupada himself 
Interestingly, it was cast not in bronze, but in wax.
     The grounds were landscaped to slope gracefully down from the 
palace in cascades of roses-more than three thousand bushes in 
all-bordered with well-tended mazes and splashing fountains.  At the 
base of the hill was a man-made lake where a goldand-white swan boat 
provided rides for the tourists who had started arriving by the 
busload, drawn by advertisements the Krishnas had placed around the 
country.
     It was an amazing monument to faith and to one man's will, 
constructed over the years by the hands of hundreds of devotees, who 
did the work using do-ityourself manuals bought in hardware stores.  
Visitors drawn to the site paid their four-dollar admission, roamed the 
grounds, flocked to the restaurant and the gift shops where Krishna 
goods were sold, snapping pictures of the idyllic scene and the 
chanting, saffron-robed devotees who never seemed to lose their energy 
for devotion.  Soon, the Palace of Gold was a major tourist attraction 
in the region, generating more than 200,000 visitors and millions of 
dollars a year.  The New York Times Sunday travel section called it 
"West Virginia's Taj Mahal."
     Never one to miss an opportunity for favorable publicity, Swami 
Kirtanananda exulted to reporters, "This is a Krishnaland, for devotion 
of the spirit."
     By now the hardy band of devotees who had built New Vrindaban out 
of the hard-luck farmland of the West Virginia hills had grown to over 
seven hundred in number.  They lived, outwardly, in simple devotion, 
chanting, dancing, meditating, and working the land.  Visitors had no 
inkling of the authoritarian nature of the commune.  The guns and other 
weapons stayed out of sight when strangers were around.  So did the 
guards, who dressed not in monks' robes, but in camouflage military 
fatigues and enforced the rules.
     The first bloody incident involved Charles St.
     Denis, who used the name Chakradara.  St.  Denis was a cocaine 
dealer living on Krishna land, where he ran a garden nursery business, 
with 50 percent of the official gardening profits going to his master, 
Kirtanananda, down the road at New Vrindaban.
     St.  Denis was a garrulous, hefty 250-pounder with a 
seventeen-inch neck and a prodigious taste for booze and drugs.  He was 
a burned-out hippie and LSD fanatic whose ambition to find religion as a 
fullfledged Krishna and join the commune down the road was in constant 
conflict with his determination to have a good time and answer to no 
one but himself.  This formed a critical dilemma for St.  Denis, who 
tried to have it both ways-he wanted the impossible: Animal House with 
serenity.
     He died when he thought he was going to a party.
     In June of 1983, St.  Denis accepted an invitation to a party from 
a Krishna friend, Daniel Reid@yen though he knew well that Reid had 
been publicly accusing him all over New Vrindaban of raping his wife.  
Thinking his denial was sufficient, and utterly unconcerned about a 
real-estate dispute he had recently been involved in with several other 
Krishnas, St.  Denis happily drove to a shack on one of the New 
Vrindaban hills where Reid had told him the party was.
     It turned out to be a party of three-St.  Denis and the two 
Krishnas who were waiting for him when he arrived, Reid and Thomas 
Drescher, the much feared chief enforcer of New Vrindaban.
     Drescher, who went by the name Tirtha, was a pistol-packing goon 
who thought that St.  Denis's nursery business was encroaching on some 
mountain property he himself owned.  A combat veteran, Drescher led the 
cadre of Krishnas who maintained the commune's arsenal of weapons and 
patrolled the community in camouflage uniforms to root out signs of 
dissent and betrayal.
     "Hare Krishna," St.  Denis said when he opened the door of the 
cabin and saw the other two men.
     "Chant," Drescher ordered, pulling the trigger.
     St.  Denis was shot twelve times.  When he kept moaning, refusing 
to die, they stabbed him in the chest and then finished him off using a 
hammer to drive a screwdriver into his brain.  They buried him in a 
muddy three-foot-deep grave they had prepared on New Vrindaban land..
     It was another devotee, Steve Bryant, who brought the rumors into 
the open-and paid for his treachery with his life.
     At the time, the best estimates were that there were about 10,000 
full-time adherents of various Hare Krishna sects, about half of them 
in the U.S where they were most visible panhandling, proselytizing, 
and selling merchandise in airports and other public places.
     A lifelong gun nut and member of the fanatic John Birch Society, 
Bryant was living miserably with his wife Jane and their young son in 
the London Krishna community in the late 1970s.  There, Steve had a 
menial job in a Krishna incense factory.
     He had heard about the spectacular activities at New Vrindaban, 
and shortly after the Palace of Gold was dedicated, he moved to West 
Virginia with his wife and son to join the energetic Kirtanananda.  At 
New Vrindaban, Bryant made it his mission to get Kirtanananda's 
attention with much talk of grandiose money-raising schemes.  At one 
point Kirtanananda suggested that Bryant would become the manager of 
the New Vrindaban resort hotel, which was under construction near the 
Palace of Gold.
     Bryant did not get the job.  Unwisely, Kirtanananda had made an 
enemy, a disgruntled job-seeker.
     In 1984, Bryant finally left New Vrindaban in a rage after 
returning from a Krishna recruiting trip and finding that his wife no 
longer shared his bed.
     Bryant believed that Kirtanananda had brainwashed his wife Jane to 
divorce him and to stay behind in New Vrindaban, where he had bestowed 
her and their two sons-Sarva and Nimai-like a present to another 
husband.
     Bryant began condemning New Vrindaban to anyone who would listen, 
voicing his disgust at the growing Disneylandlike atmosphere, where 
money was all that mattered.  After he left, Bryant returned one morning 
and tried to take his little boys with him.
     But he didn't get far with them.  Two van loads of New Vrindaban 
armed defense forces gave chase, cornering him at a suburban shopping 
center.  They forcibly took the boys back.  Obsessed, Bryant spent 
nearly a year roaming the country to spread the word that Kirtanananda 
was a fraud.
     In his agitating, Bryant found a receptive audience in other 
Krishna communities, partly because of jealousy over Kirtanananda's 
spectacular achievements, and partly because refugees from the abuses 
at New Vrindaban had formed a network of exiles throughout the country. 
 Along with Bryant, they maintained that Kirtanananda and other gurus 
appointed by Prabhupada had betrayed Krishna principles.
     Bryant was vociferous in his charges against Kirtanananda.  He 
traveled the country railing against Kirtanananda in his beat-up van, 
distributing his charges in a lengthy expose that he had typed and 
photocopied, which he titled The Guru Business, and an abridged version 
of the same, Jonestown in Moundsville.  Bryant summarized allegations 
that had come to swirl around New Vrindaban in dissident circles of 
autocratic rule, weapons stockpiling, and drug trafficking.
     Bryant's obsessions had gone beyond allegations, to a plan.  He 
told fellow dissidents that he was hoping to kill Kirtanananda and the 
other "bogus gurus" himself.  He insisted that Krishna himself had 
called upon him to do so.
     In the late summer of 1985, Bryant made a desperate foray back to 
Marshall County, West Virginia, the location of New Vrindaban, where he 
notified the local sheriff of his charges and discussed the likelihood 
of a holy war at New Vrindaban.  He asked for and got protective 
custody in the county jail, where he went on at great length, but 
failed to give the wary cops what they really needed, which was names, 
dates, places: evidence.
     "Steve told all kinds of incredible stories about what was going 
on up there," the sheriff, Donald Bordenkircher, said.  I kept saying, 
'Steve, you've got to substantiate it.  Give us names.'
     Bryant told the sheriff he couldn't do that because people were 
afraid for their lives.  Suspecting that Bryant was merely a lunatic 
with frustrated ambitions, the cops threw him out of the jail and sent 
him on his way.  Bryant got into his van and roamed as usual.
     Back in West Virginia, paranoia was aided by reality.
     About six weeks after Bryant left the area, Kirtanananda was 
attacked without warning at the Palace of Gold by a wild-eyed new 
devotee.  The assailant whacked the swami across the head with a steel 
pole, sending him into a coma from which 'he barely recovered.  Weeks 
later, feeble, suffering fainting spells, unable to walk without a 
cane, Kirtanananda called a press conference.  With menacing-looking 
guard dogs on each side of him, the swami charged that Steve Bryant's 
calumnies had motivated the attacker.
     While there was no evidence of direct collusion, the swami may 
have had a point.  Sentenced to fifteen months in jail for the assault, 
Kirtanananda's attacker received an unsigned letter from Berkeley, 
California-where Bryant was known to be stayingassuring him that he 
would be "spiritually rewarded for attacking Swami Kirtanananda."
     Retribution soon followed.
     On May 22, 1986, the thirty-six-year-old Bryant had come to the 
end of his road.  He was weary of roaming the country in his 
ten-year-old Dodge van, preaching his Jeremiad to Krishna followers and 
anyone else who would listen.  New Vrindaban was, Bryant maintained, a 
pasteboard kingdom crowned by a Palace of Gold.  The famed Palace of 
Gold, he and other dissidents maintained, had been financed not by 
women and children begging on the streets, as Kirtanananda liked to 
say, but by money from product counterfeiting.
     Even now, he said, hit men were in pursuit of him.
     In the predawn hours of May 22, 1986, Bryant had parked the van on 
a lonely street in West Los Angeles.  He began his ritual chant.  He 
did not see the other vehicle slide into the shadows of the street, and 
he did not see the New Vrindaban assassin creep up to the van while he 
chanted: "Hare Krishna, Hare @shna The police found Bryant slumped over 
the steering wheel, dead of two bullets fired into his head point-blank 
with a .45.
     Bryant's death, coming as it did after he had told police that 
someone from New Vrindaban was out to kill him, brought to life ongoing 
criminal investigations by the FBI, the IRS, and local and county law 
enforcement agencies in West Virginia.  In all, thirty active and 
former members of the New Vrindaban commune were subpoenaed for 
testimony.
     As word crackled through the Krishna communities that Bryant had 
been murdered, it was whispered that he was meant to be seen as a 
"Monkey on a stick," an allusion to a practice in India where banana 
plantation owners discourage monkeys from raiding banana groves by 
impaling a monkey on a stake as an example.
     Within months Drescher was charged with the murder of Bryant, which 
law enforcement authorities maintained he 
had done under orders.  Drescher also was charged in the St.  Denis 
murder.  He was convicted of both.
     With active criminal investigations intensifying, Kirtanananda 
professed to be unfazed by the allegations made by people like Bryant, 
which he dismissed as "absurd."  His West Virginia community was by far 
the largest and most famous in the Hare Krishna empire, he noted: It 
stood to reason that other swamis at less-prosperous Krishna 
communities were jealous, and using people like Bryant to spread lies.
     In May of 1990, after a two-year inquiry, a federal grand jury in 
West Virginia indicted Kirtanananda and two followers with three counts 
of racketeering, one count of conspiracy to commit murder, and six 
counts of mail fraud.  Among the charges was that Kirtanananda had 
taken part in a conspiracy to murder Bryant.
     A year later, Kirtanananda was sentenced to thirty years in prison 
after being convicted of racketeering as well as mail fraud.  He was 
not convicted on the charge of conspiring to murder Bryant.
     A federal appeals court later ruled that Kirtanananda should have 
a new trial because some of the evidence introduced at the first trial 
about the sexual molestation of children and abuse of women at New 
Vrindaban was prejudicial and should not have been admitted.  That new 
trial was set for late in 1994.

      CHAPTER FIVE

     k6 kto koo

     Come and Get Us!

     FOR DAYS, FORENSIC technicians worked grimly to piece together the 
remains scooped out of the rubble of a neighborhood in West 
Philadelphia that had been burned down by police serving a final 
eviction notice in 1985 on a cult that called itself Move.
     The bones were sorted by size and whatever other little could be 
found: big or small, male or female, adult or child.  When the pieces 
were finally assembled into skeletons, the body count was made.  There 
were eleven dead in all.
     The children were supposed to be the future of Move, which called 
itself a back-to-nature group, even though its members stubbornly 
insisted on living in a crowded city neighborhood, where they 
instigated complicated confrontations.  with neighbors and police.
     The children would be the pure generation, raised on raw foods, 
unsullied by modern education, protected within the commune from the 
oppression of the world.
     Five of the bodies were children.  The youngest, a girl of six, 
had never known any life but this.
     In May of 1985, Philadelphia authorities clumsily ended a 
frustrating standoff with the cult by dropping a bomb on a rooftop, 
killing all Move members inside a house and starting a fire that 
destroyed a city neighborhood.  And it had not been the first standoff 
with Move that ended in tragedy.
     Through it all, Move remained maddeningly impervious to the 
application of logic.  And that was perhaps the greatest tragedy of 
all.  No one ever really understood that they believed in nothing more 
than defiance to the death.
     Move's founder was a middle-aged black man, Vincent Leaphart, a 
grade-school dropout, one of ten children raised in West Philadelphia 
by parents who had migrated to the city from the south in the 1920s.  
But Leaphart had a most unlikely partner in the endeavor: Donald J. 
Glassey, a white man in his middle twenties, a product of the 
comfortable suburbs who was teaching classes at Penn while completing a 
master's degree in social work and, as he would later say, "looking to 
make the world a better place."
     The two met at a fair-housing protest in the early 1970s and 
discovered that they had many things in common.
     Their alliance was forged at a propitious time, in the racially 
mixed neighborhood called Powelton Village, an area of run-down 
Victorian homes, sideby-side row homes, and rooming houses in West 
Philadelphia bordering the campuses of the University of Pennsylvania 
and Drexel University.  Along with the college population drawn by the 
cheap rents, the neighborhood attracted young professionals busily 
fixing up the rambling old houses, as well as a collection of 
disaffiliated street preachers, aging hippies, and simple drifters.
     Leaphart, who had an extensive arrest record, including time 
served for armed robbery and car theft, had been scratching out a 
living in rapidly gentrifying Powelton Village as a handyman and 
dog-walker.
     But what he did best was talk-at length, and to anyone who would 
listen-about the injustices of what he denounced as the "System."
     Leaphart's firebrand black-radical intensity impressed Glassey at 
a time when liberal reformers such as himself also felt under siege in 
Philadelphia, a blue-collar city whose African-American population had 
long bristled with racial grievances, many directed at the police.  In 
1972, Philadelphia had just elected a new mayor, Frank Rizzo, a 
barrel-chested, reactionary former police commissioner known for both 
braggadocio and ruthlessness.  Rizzo, who once vowed to "make Attila 
the Hun look like a faggot," was widely reviled among blacks and white 
liberals, who remembered him as the street cop who delighted in raiding 
coffeehouses to root out "subversives."  As police chief, Rizzo had 
once humiliated a group of Black Panthers by ordering them to strip as 
their girlfriends looked on and news photographers snapped pictures.
     By the time he met Glassey, Leaphart-who wore his hair in tangled 
Rastafarian dreadlocks-had already attracted a small assembly of 
followers.  Glassey added academic cachet to the mix.  Besides a 
surfeit of idealism and a pedantic readiness to explain complex 
political theories, Glassey had another virtue that the calculating 
Leaphart found quite enticing.  Glassey owned half of a huge, decaying 
old Gothic house at 307 North 33rd street-a house with room enough for 
a crowd.  In 1973, Leaphart moved in with his menagerie-more than 
thirty mangy dogs and cats-and a band of followers: five males, three 
females, two of them Leaphart's sisters, and their small children.  The 
small commune called itself the American Christian Movement for 
Life-Move, for short.
     Assuming a role as head of the commune, Leaphart changed his name 
to John Africa.  Except for Glassey, the followers all took the same 
surname, Africa.  Glassey, meanwhile, went to work immortalizing John 
Africa, telling him, "You have some fascinating ideas here.  You should 
write them down."
     Leaphart could barely read or write, but he certainly could talk.  
For nearly a year, as Leaphart rambled on, devising a convoluted 
philosophy, Glassey dutifully typed away.  The result was a 300-page 
manifesto titled "The Teachings of John Africa" and later retitled 
simply "The Book."  It was Move's bible -a bewildering compendium of 
nostrums about healthy living based on a return to nature, laced with 
conspiracy theories-among them that street drugs were a government plot 
to subjugate blacks-as well as detailed lessons on disparate subjects 
such as veterinary care, the tyranny of science, breast feeding, and 
the inevitability of confrontation with the System.
     Gradually, the house filled up with more followers of John 
Africa-by 1975 about thirty-five people were jammed into the household: 
adults and children, male and female, including a number of excons and 
drug addicts.  All of the adults were united in hatred of the "System." 
 And all were blindly obedient to the often whimsical dictates of John 
Africa, which were enforced by a small cadre of his top aides who had 
assumed grandiose titles such as Defense Minister and Minister of 
Information.  Group unity was instilled in nightly meetings, during 
which the leader would expound passionately.  "It was like he 
communicated with life itself," one of the early Move followers would 
later recall.
     Women were expected to procreate and raise the next generation of 
pure Move soldiers.  When a woman gave birth, she was required to sever 
the umbilical cord with her own teeth and then lick the baby clean.  
Dissent was unheard of.  Physical fitness was ensured in daily exercise 
meetings, when as many as three hundred pushups were required.  Though 
a rigid dietary regime centered on uncooked food, and vegetables were 
mandatory, John Africa occasionally rewarded the faithful with 
"distortion days," when they could hinge all day on take-out junk food.
     Meanwhile, as its numbers grew, Move's community activism 
intensified.  Members skillfully sought news media attention.  For 
years Move seemed to be everywhere with its vociferous presence, 
screaming threats through ever-present bullhorns at political and 
protest rallies, picketing a baffling array of events and institutions, 
from the city zoo to local hospitals, colleges, and even veterinary 
clinics.
     Given this public militancy, confrontations with neighbors and 
with police became commonplace.
     Denouncing police brutality, Move members were frequently hauled 
into court on various misdemeanor or civil complaints, most of them 
having to do with public nuisance, sanitation, and zoning violations.  
In one seven-month period ending in 1974, Move members were arrested a 
total of 150 times.
     Move defendants always represented themselves in court, with their 
colleagues in rowdy attendance, raising constant objections and 
shouting denunciations of the System.  These spectacles drew even more 
media attention, as court sessions dissolved in comic chaos with judges 
often reduced to frustrated sputtering.  No one had ever seen anything 
like it.
     Judges, lawyers, cops, and reporters alike were dumbfounded by the 
ranting and raving, unkempt and unwashed, screaming band of 
wild-haired, foulsmelling revolutionaries who appeared to have no 
discernible political goal other than pure confrontation in a 
particularly bizarre form of street theater.
     A reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer marveled at Move's antics 
when the group protested at a 1974
     meeting of governors of the thirteen original states in a downtown 
restaurant.  "It was this night that Move members demonstrated their 
most baffling ability: How can they talk continuously, punctuating each 
phrase with an obscenity, without ever saying anything comprehensible?"
     In time Glassey himself became disillusioned enough to split with 
John Africa.  He moved out, telling friends that he was worried about 
the growing talk of violence.  "He wanted absolute control over 
everyone," Glassey said of John Africa.
     By then the Move house had become a civic nuisance that strained 
even the liberal tolerance of Powelton Village.  Neighbors regularly 
called the cops about the Move dogs, cats, and other animals roaming 
freely; the junk, garbage, and human waste tossed out of windows; the 
naked toddlers wandering around unsupervised; the racket and the 
threats.  As the group's notoriety grew, Move erected a stockade fence 
around the house and built a plank stage out front.  They set up 
loudspeakers and used them day and night to bellow invectives and issue 
challenges to the police.  Goading wary police surveillance officers 
who frequented the site, they even bragged about acquiring the means to 
build an atomic bomb.
     At the nightly meetings, John Africa exhorted followers to prepare 
for a showdown with police.  In the winter of 1976, Move upped the 
ante.  After a scuffle between Move members and police, Move's 
loudspeakers suddenly boomed with the charge that clubwielding cops had 
stormed into the house during the melee and killed one of their 
infants, a six-month-old baby named Life Africa.
     After police furiously denied the charge as ridiculous, two city 
councilmen, along with a community activist and a newspaper reporter 
and photographer, were invited into the Move house, served a 
ritualistic dinner, and then escorted to a dimly lighted upstairs room. 
 They gasped at what they were shown: a dead infant decomposing on a 
bed of dirt and garbage inside a cardboard box.  A former member, 
Valerie Janet Brown, later confirmed that.  the baby had died of 
natural causes in a commune where modern medicine was prohibited.  Move 
used the death "for propaganda purposes," she told a reporter years 
later.
     The publicity had its intended effect, keeping Move in the 
headlines.  Move's stridency was soon echoed by a loud clamor from its 
long-suffering neighbors, who demanded that the city do something about 
blatant zoning, health, fire, and other licensing violations as the 
Move house grew louder.  In May of 1977, when the city obtained an 
order to evict a Move member -from a nearby building, a half-dozen 
Move members wearing army fatigues appeared on the stage of their 
headquarters brandishing shotguns, rifles, handguns, and clubs to 
protest.  Their loudspeaker blared with a demand for the release of all 
Move members then in jail.  Otherwise, no one was coming in.  "The only 
way you will come in is over our dead bodies," the loudspeaker boomed.
     Police began round-the-clock surveillance of the compound.  The 
next month, as authorities intensified their investigation, Donald 
Glassey himself was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana 
as well as falsifying information on federal firearms forms.  In 
exchange for a reduced sentence and a place in the Federal Witness 
Protection Program, Glassey agreed to become an informant against Move. 
 His work led to the discovery of a cache of Move armaments-including 
time bombs and pipe bombs-in cars near the house.  Federal weapons 
charges were added to those against John Africa.
     Unknown to police, however, John Africa managed to slip out of the 
compound and flee.
     As the defiance continued, mayor Rizzo finally had had enough.  
"Move," he growled ominously, "has had its day.  They're going to be 
removed from the community for a long time."
     As it turned out, like most other vows the blustery mayor would 
make, this would be a lot easier said than done.
     The standoff became a full-fledged blockade in March of 1978, when 
Rizzo ordered a large force of police to surround the house.  Whatever 
his faults, however, the mayor was a skilnl police tactician, and 
negotiations for a surrender continued for months.  But in early 
August, calling Move "a bunch of complete idiots," Mayor Rizzo said 
that time had run out.  Plans were made to storm the house.
     Delbert Orr Africa, a cocky -and street-smart young black man who 
seemed to take special delight in goading the cops, declared that this 
was fine with Move.  He broadcast a response guaranteed to infuriate 
the mayor: "We're not giving up.  Rizzo's going to get his fat face 
punched all over the fucking United States as the killer of black women 
and children."
     Rizzo made his move on August 8. Just before dawn, three hundred 
flak-jacketed cops and firemen, covered by sharpshooters in windows of 
nearby houses, moved toward the ramshackle Move headquarters.  As 
hundreds of spectators strained against barricades blocks away, Move's 
floodlights and loudspeakers snapped to life.
     "If you want us out, you'll have to bring us out dead!  " Police 
Inspector George Fenci, who had been directing the blockade, raised a 
bullhorn to his lips.
     "You have exactly two minutes.  in which to come out."
     "The gate's open!"  Move crowed.
     Fenci passed the bullhorn to a priest, who implored, "I plead with 
you, let the children come out . . . No one is going to get hurt.  Let 
me come in and I'll walk out with you."
     "Fuck you, priest!"
     Move members filed silently into place onto the stage and took up 
a chant, "Baby killers!  Baby killers!  " At 6:30 a small group of cops 
rushed the side of the house with a battering ram, smashing through a 
window.  Rats streamed out.
     "Any force will be met with force!"  Move's loudspeaker boomed.
     Within minutes two dozen cops in battle gear were over the wall 
and inside the compound.  But they held their positions as cannon 
blasts of water from fire-truck snorkles were drilled at the house, 
flooding the basement.
     At 8:15, with Move still stubbornly dug in, gunshots rang out from 
the house.  Police responded in force.  For two minutes the air was 
thick with furious gunfire.
     A cop crouching in the yard heard someone shout out a window, 
"Come on in!  But call home first and make sure your insurance policy 
is paid up."  Other cops claimed to have seen Move members holding 
small children and babies in front of them as shields.
     The cops were in the house in raging fury now, and further 
resistance was impossible.  On the street, police officer James J. 
Ramp, fifty-two, lay dead of a rifle wound.  Three other cops and four 
firemen were wounded.
     Mayor Rizzo, nearly apoplectic that a cop had been killed and 
others wounded by Move, ordered that the house be torn down.  That 
afternoon, city workers bulldozed it into a mound of rubble.  Nine of 
the Move cultists would subsequently receive life sentences for the 
shootout.
     Philadelphians breathed a collective sigh of relief, thinking they 
had heard the last of Move.
     So it was with a startled sense of deja vu that city residents 
learned a few years later that another Move house was in full 
operation, this time with a military-like bunker on the roof.
     The new location was at 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia, a 
working-class black neighborhood of well-tended row homes in neat lines 
of blocks just off the expanse of a park called Cobbs Creek.
     In many ways, the coming confrontation would resemble the one of 
1978.  But this time the death count would be higher, and the city 
would never live down how it ended.
     In the years after the 1978 shootout, Move members who weren't 
arrested had scattered, some to an affiliate chapter in Richmond, 
Virginia; others to a house in Rochester, New York, where John Africa 
soon reappeared.  A force of federal and local cops stormed that house 
in 1981 and successfully arrested him on the outstanding fugitive 
weapons charges.  He was subsequently acquitted of the charges, 
however, and again dropped out of sight.
     That was the same year that his followers began gathering again 
back in Philadelphia, in a row house in the middle of the block on 
Osage Avenue owned by Louise James, a sister of John Africa, who would 
herself leave the group in fear within a year.
     At first, only women and children moved in.  Some of the children 
were those of Move members imprisoned after the 1978 shootout.  But 
gradually, male Move members drifted in.  With them came the usual 
collection of cats and dogs, followed by the usual complaints from 
neighbors: filth, noise, harassment, and threats to anyone who raised 
an objection to the disruption of the neighborhood's normal serenity.
     Loudspeakers went up; the all-night harangues began.
     The situation deteriorated further in 1984, when Move began 
working on additions and interior alterations to the house.  
Neighborhood alarm intensified when the cultists nailed boards over the 
windows and began building a bunker on the roof.
     Rizzo was long out of office.  Philadelphia now had its first 
black mayor, Wilson Goode, a soft-spoken son of rural sharecroppers, a 
respected former city administrator who watched the Move build-up with 
a gnawing sense of apprehension as city officials tried to find a way 
to deal with the mounting complaints against the cult.
     In April, a large force of police rushed to the scene when a Move 
member identified as Frank James Africa, twenty-six years old, appeared 
on the roof brandishing a shotgun.  But he quickly disappeared back 
inside.  A very long standoff had begun.
     Throughout the summer, as police stood by, Move members strutted 
on the platform outside the house.
     "Come August eighth, we will take care of you people!"  they 
taunted.  August 8, as city and police officials well knew, was the 
anniversary of the Powelton Village shootout.
     When August 8 arrived, the scene on Osage Avenue bore an eerie 
resemblance to the one in Powelton Village six years earlier.  At dawn, 
three hundred cops and firefighters assembled in battle gear in a 
bivouac area near the park.  Move's loudspeakers blasted away, but the 
battle remained rhetorical.  The cops didn't make a move.
     A violent confrontation appeared inevitable, and the last thing 
Mayor Goode wanted was to preside over another Move shootout.
     In fact, he would preside over something worse.
     For months police officials debated how to storm the .  house if 
it became necessary.  In command of the tactical planning was the city 
managing director, Leo Brooks, a retired Army two-star general.  As 
police officials argued over tactics, Brooks pointed out a basic 
problem: Annoying as it was, Move had not committed an overt criminal 
act.  Building a bunker on a roof was perhaps a zoning violation, one 
of many-but hardly cause for storming the house in force.  Others 
argued history that showed that the longer they waited, the more likely 
the outcome would be violent.  Police did have outstanding arrest 
warrants for two men known to be in the house, but serving them with 
the risk of bloodshed-with children in the house-was another matter 
altogether.
     Still, with a former general running things, the planning began to 
take on the feeling of a military campaign, and indeed it was given a 
military-type code name, "Operation Move."  Aerial surveillance had 
spotted a trapdoor opening onto the Move roof behind the bunker-meaning 
the cultists could quickly get into a good strategic position if police 
decided to storm the house.  Initially, the plan under discussion 
centered around the idea of using highpowered water cannons, capable of 
shooting 1,000 gallons a minute, to blast away at the plywood bunker 
and demolish it.  However, an alternate plan also was under discussion. 
 It was predicated on a much different approach: The police 
department's bomb squad said that it could scale the roof and place a 
tear-gas generator at the mouth of the trapdoor to force the residents 
out onto the street.
     Inside the house, Move quietly prepared for the final 
confrontation.  Again the loudspeaker told the cops to come and get 
them.
     Neighborhood pressure increased throughout 1985 as 
residents-people proud of their homes in a safe, decent 
neighborhood-complained that the danger at the Move house had become 
obvious.  At least three neighbors reported that they had been 
assaulted by Move members.  Some threatened to get guns and take 
matters in their own hands if police refused to act.
     In April neighbors reported that armed men were seen inside the 
twelve-by-twelve-foot rooftop bunker, which had now been reinforced.  
For months, police surveillance officers had watched Move members 
hauling out boxfuls of dirt, which were placed neatly at the curb for 
removal by the city Sanitation Department.  Neighbors had seen the same 
thing, and rumors swept Osage Avenue: Move had dug underground tunnels 
to wire the block and blow it up.
     In fact, Move was excavating the cellar of the house to use as a 
bunker.
     Responding to the furor, Mayor Goode announced that the police had 
no "legal basis" to make arrests simply to "remove the problem from the 
neighborhood."  An editorial in the tabloid Philadelphia Daily News, 
summing up popular reaction to Goode's recalcitrance, demanded action.
     The police stepped up their preparations, still worried about the 
difficulties of placing a tear-gas dispenser on the roof.  A key figure 
in the planning, Lieutenant Frank Powell, the supervisor of the bomb 
disposal unit, argued that with the bunker reinforced by steel and 
timbers, scaling the rooftop now appeared to be too dangerous.  
Explosives, however, could do the job.
     On May 7 an exasperated Mayor Goode made the first of what would 
be several key and fatal mistakes, when the police commissioner met 
with him to apprise him of the tactical plan.  "You are the 
professional," Goode said.  "You need not keep me informed of the 
details."  Goode later would say that his main concerns were the 
protection of lives@ivilian and police-and that officers who executed 
the plan not be "emotionally attached" to the events of 1978.
     Meanwhile, community negotiators had been inside the house, where 
they spoke with Gerald Ford Africa, the "Minister of Information."  On 
Friday, May 10, the negotiators told authorities there were hopeful 
signs: "Move wants out."
     But the optimism faded fast on Saturday, when the cult insisted on 
an impossible demand: it would not leave the house unless all Move 
members convicted in the 1978 shootout were first released from prison.
     That day, a judge signed new search and arrest warrants charging 
Move members with illegal riot, firearms violations, and making 
terroristic threats.
     "Move is determined to provoke an armed confrontation and will 
resist with deadly force any effort to serve lawful process," a police 
affidavit filed with the warrants said.
     At the police academy, bomb squad officers were now considering 
the use of explosives to blow out an opening somewhere in the Move 
house.  The best option was to blast a hole in the common wall from the 
house next door and insert a gas-delivery machine directly into the 
Move house.  There were two dangers in this: the possibility that Move 
had already broken through walls and had access to the houses on either 
side; that bullets could rip right through foot-thick walls.
     The backup option had none of those problems.  If the walls 
couldn't be breached to pump tear gas into the house, the roof could.  
A helicopter and explosives could do the job.
     At City Hall the mayor's office distributed copies of a four-page 
hand-printed letter that Move member Ramona Africa had sent to the 
mayor.  It sounded ominous: "You can not surprise Move .  . . any 
surprise attack on this house .  . . will end up in not only you 
planners getting fucked up, but a whole lot of these neighbors getting 
fucked up."  If police came in, she warned, it would be a "mess."  And, 
"If Move go down, not only will everybody in this block go down . . . 
we will burn this house down and burn you up with us."
     Warily, the mayor told the police department to proceed with its 
plan to force Move out.
     Sunday, May 12, was Mother's Day.  Neighbors on Osage Avenue 
strolled home from church; children played on the sidewalks in a warm 
sun.  Even some of the Move kids were outside, raggedly dressed, 
squinting into the bright sky, staring at police helicopters that 
clattered noisily over rooftops.
     Down the street, wooden barricades were being slapped into 
position.  Knots of police officers gathered at various locations in 
the neighborhood.
     Throughout the day, police officers went door-todoor to homes in a 
six-block area surrounding the Move residence, telling people they had 
to be out of their houses by ten P.m. or face arrest.  By midnight 
about three hundred people had been evacuated.
     Most carried belongings for what they had been told would be a 
one-night absence, and found lodging with relatives, friends, or in 
shelters set up by churches.
     Inside the perimeter, a small team of community mediators had been 
shuttling back and forth all day between the Move house and police 
command headquarters, hoping to resolve the situation.  But time was 
running out.  One of the mediators, Novella Williams, spoke to the 
mayor on the phone Sunday night, pleading with him to call off the 
assault and allow negotiators to continue talking.  "Your Honor, you 
can't allow this to happen.  If you allow the attack to be made at 6221 
Osage, they will not come out alive."
     The mayor replied that he had."the best experts in the country on 
this, and that something had to be done about the situation.  What good 
would giving you more time do?  If I don't go in now, I will appear 
irresponsible."
     She told him, "You can't kill those people.  It would be wrong."  
She said the mayor hung up on her.

     T

     After one last fruitless visit to the Move house, she approached a 
group of reporters at the scene and told them wearily, "As far as the 
Move people are concerned, that's it.  There is no compromise.  Their 
position is, come in and get them."
     All night long, as the police assault force grew grimly larger, the 
Move loudspeakers screeched: "Send in the FBI!  Send in the CIA!  Send 
in the FBI!
     We have something for you!  Send in the SWAT team!  Bring in 
machine guns!  We're going to swat you the fuck down!"
     The police department's four stakeout unitseighty officers in 
all-had been at their posts since midnight, augmenting a force of 
another two hundred uniformed cops and firefighters surrounding the 
house.  Fire trucks and emergency vehicles lumbered into place at 
nearby intersections.  Police bomb-squad officers crept into position 
in the common alley behind the Move house.  As dawn's first light 
streaked the sky, sharpshooters could be seen poised tensely behind 
sandbags on the flat roofs of nearby row houses.
     Another eviction notice was about to be served.
     Police who had been on hand for the last one in 1978
     prayed that history wasn't about to repeat itself.
     Shortly after dawn the Move loudspeaker blasted that it was time 
to get on with it.
     "Cops, come on in and get this thing started.
     We're going to kill you motherfuckers.  We're going to turn this 
city into a ghost town!"
     Police Commissioner Gregory Sambor was on Osage Avenue to take 
command.  Sambor, an official whose fondness for gold-braided caps and 
shiny brass uniform accessories once prompted a local newspaper to 
describe him as being "dressed as gaudily as a Third World admiral," 
took a bullhorn at 5:30 A.m. and made his announcement: "Attention 
Move.  This is America.  You have to abide by the rules of the United 
States."  He told the barricaded cultists-thirteen in all were now 
inside the house-that they had fifteen minutes to come out.
     Move wasn't budging.  "We ain't got a motherfucking thing to 
lose," the loudspeaker shot back.  "Come and get us.  Remember we 
killed Ramp.  Is your insurance paid up?  Your wives will cash them in 
after today, motherfuckers!"
     Inside the house, one of the six children, a frail 
thirteen-year-old boy named Birdie Africa, was awakened by the 
commotion.  He heard his mother, Rhonda Africa, shout: "If one house 
get it, all of these houses are going to get it!"
     The males ordered the women and children into the bunker in the 
cellar.  "It was like I was going to die," Birdie Africa would later 
recall.  In fact, he would be one of only two people inside the house 
to survive.
     Twin fire department water cannons were trained on the roof, 
blasting columns of water at the bunker.
     It didn't go down.  A few minutes after Six A.M. police started 
firing.  Tear-gas canisters were lobbed into the backyard.  A 
single-file squad of cops started down the alley.
     From inside the house came a roar of automatic weapons fire.  The 
battle was on.
     Under fire, a team of officers forced their way into the next-door 
house at 6223 Osage.  Move members could hear the shrill whine of 
drilling in the common wall.  This was followed by an explosion.  At 
6223
     Osage the cops scattered.  The blast they had set to break through 
the wall did not do the job.  From the other side, Move bullets tore 
through the wall back at them.  A cop pointed an Uzi machine gun at the 
wall and blasted away.
     In the Move house, water from firehoses was filling the bunker in 
the cellar, where the women and children huddled in soaked blankets.  
"Long live John Africa!"  the children chirped on cue.
     Mayor Goode was at home monitoring the attack with a small group 
of city officials and state legislators.  As the mayor served orange 
juice, they watched the assault on television.  It looked like a war 
zone on Osage Avenue, but there was no way of telling which way the 
battle was going.
     On the second floor of 6223 Osage, bomb-squad cops struggled 
valiantly under gunfire, nauseous from the tear-gas fumes that were 
spreading from the canisters outside.
     Finally, a charge broke an eighteen-inch hole through the wall.  
Two cops, Lieutenant Frank Powell and Officer William Klein, peered 
through the smoke and dust into a bedroom of the Move house, seeing no 
one.  They pushed through a gas-delivery machine called a pepper fogger 
and switched it on.  It didn't work.  Then they tossed tear gas 
grenades into the Move house.
     At the same time, other cops blasted into 6219
     Osage, the house on the opposite side of the Move house.  Inside, 
they encountered Move members crouching in the smoke and began taking 
heavy fire.
     A cop was hit and went down.  His bulletproof jacket saved his 
life, but the word that a cop had been shot spread through the police 
command.  Officers were exhausted, frightened, and now enraged.
     At 7:20 A.M Sambor ordered a cease fire.  By then police had 
expended more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition.
     The assault was being broadcast live on television.
     As the smoke drifted away during the lull, the Move house looked 
like it had been shelled by a battleship.
     The front porch was demolished.  But the cult was still dug in.
     On nearby rooftops, beyond the perimeter, neighbors could be seen 
watching the action, settling into a morning of war on lawn chairs set 
up on flat rowhouse roofs.  Helicopters swooped overhead.  On the 
street, cops slumped behind sandbags in sheer exhaustion.  Rubble and 
grime was everywhere.
     The police next tried to bring in a big construction crane to 
knock the house down.  For over an hour workers struggled to maneuver 
the giant crane down the narrow street, but there wasn't enough room.
     Besides, no one wanted to drive it into a hail of bullets.
     At the police academy bomb-squad headquarters, as frustration 
mounted on Osage Avenue, the backup plan-to somehow get tear gas onto 
the roof -was now the operative one.  After all of the firing, after 
650,000 gallons of water had been blasted at it, the bunker still stood 
on the Move house, a blatant reminder to the cops that they had so far 
accomplished almost nothing.
     At two P.m Commissioner Sambor and the mayor's top aide, 
Managing Director Brooks, conferred five blocks away at the command- 
post near Cobbs Creek.  As they met like two generals near a 
battlefield, a state police helicopter was busily landing and taking 
off from a grassy area off Cobbs Creek Parkway, providing 
surveillance reports on the house.  The men discussed the possibility 
of going with the plan to use the helicopter to put a tear-gas charge 
onto the roof.  They hurried back to the scene and studied the Move 
house through binoculars.  The bunker loomed on the roof.
     Goode had gone to City Hall, where he held a press conference at 
three P.m. and restated his determination.  "We intend to evict them 
from the house.
     We will do it by any means necessary.  I hope to God those 
children will not be injured.  We will do everything that we can to 
prevent that."
     Ninety minutes later on Osage Avenue, police escorted a 
middle-aged woman to a vantage point on 62nd Street, about a hundred 
yards from the house.
     She was Mary Clare Leak, the mother of Theresa Brooks Africa, one 
of the women inside the house.
     Nervously, the woman raised a bullhorn.
     "Theresa, respond to me.  This is the only chance I have to talk 
to you.  Please come out with the children!  You can't do this!  
Theresa, come out please before it's too late.  The children are 
innocent victims, let them come out.  They don't have a chance."
     The Move loudspeaker was mute.
     The order was passed.  At the police academy, where some of the 
bomb-squad officers who had been in combat on Osage Avenue now had 
reassembled, final preparations were under way on the hastily concocted 
plan to use a bomb to blow a hole in the roof, through which the gas 
would be inserted.  A commercial explosive, Tovex TR2, was to be 
employed.  Lieutenant Powell, who had been under heavy fire all 
morning, supervised the building of two bombs-one to be kept as a 
backup.  Each consisted of Tovex, a gray jellylike substance, stuffed 
into a sixteen-inch tube, which was placed in a satchel with a tear-gas 
canister inside.  The satchel was fitted with a 45-second fuse, a 
blasting cap, and an igniter.
     Tovex TR2 was designed by its manufacturer, DuPont, for use in 
mining operations, where it was inserted into holes in the ground and 
ignited to excavate soil and underground rock.  It was not meant for 
open-air use, DuPont would later say, in part because a Tovex explosion 
could generate heat approaching 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
     At 5:10 P.m Managing Director Btooks phoned the mayor and told 
him, "We have decided to blow the bunker off the roof, blow a hole in 
the roof, and put tear gas in."
     Goode paused.  "Does Mr.  Sambor know about this?"
     "Yes, it was his idea."
     "Okay," said Goode.  "Keep me posted."  The mayor would later 
claim that he did not realize that with these words he had authorized 
the police to bomb a neighborhood.
     Lieutenant Powell himself would drop the bomb.
     Just before 5:30, a blue and white Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, 
with a pilot, copilot, and Powell on board, came in over the low-slung 
rooftops and made four passes at the Move house in the middle of the 
block on Osage Avenue.  On the fifth pass the helicopter hovered above 
the Move roof.  Straining against his seat harness, Powell leaned out, 
pulled a cord, and dropped a green satchel onto the roof.  It tumbled 
close to the bunker.  As the chopper lifted away, it was buffeted by a 
great explosion that kicked smoke and debris thirty feet into the air.
     From nearby rooftops and street corners hundreds of bystanders 
cheered lustily.  But some shouted in horror.  "They dropped a bomb on 
babies!"  one man screamed.  Like hundreds of thousands of others, the 
mayor watched on television.
     The bunker was still standing.  But the bomb had made a hole in 
the roof and smoke was pouring out.
     The smoke steadily thickened.  Fifteen minutes later flames began 
licking at the roof.  As firefighters waited, the flames spread.  Move 
members began shooting again from the house.
     At 6:19 P.m. police reported twenty-foot-high flames.  Soon the 
flames were a hundred feet high.
     The front of the Move house began caving in.
     Around 6:30 fire hoses were trained on the flames.
     By seven P.m. the Move house and six adjoining houses were on 
fire, and the flames were spreading fast.
     I'n the thick smoke billowing from the Move house, ghostly figures 
could be seen running for cover.  The shooting kept up.
     Behind the houses on Osage was an alley, sixteen feet wide.  
Police sharpshooters, positioned at key points overlooking the alley, 
spotted two figures emerging from the back door of the Move house 
through a blanket of smoke.  They were thirty-year-old Ramona Africa and 
the thirteen-year-old boy, Birdie, who was naked.  As they stumbled 
outside, the boy tripped and fell into an eighteen-inch pool of water.  
Ramona tried to pull him out, but shots were being fired from the Move 
basement at cops who came into the open to offer help while their 
colleagues covered them with gunfire.
     "I had enough!  Don't shoot no more!"  Ramona cried.
     "Come to us.  We're not coming to you," a cop bellowed from behind 
the wall across the alleyHollering at his colleagues to hold their 
fire, another officer dashed across, dodging Move bullets, and grabbed 
the badly burned child, pulling him to safety.  The woman ran across 
the alley and was taken into custody.
     The shadowy figures inside the house faded back into the billowing 
darkness.  Police poured bullets into their receding forms.
     At City Hall the mayor held forth on what everybody was watching 
on television.  "What we have out there is war," he said.  "I knew from 
the very beginning that once we made that decision to go in there, it 
would in fact be war."  Goode said that the police commissioner had 
made the decision to drop what he called the "explosive device."  The 
mayor said he himself was "fully accountable" for the decision.
     By now, the entire 6200 block of Osage Avenue was engulfed in 
flames, and houses on adjoining streets were starting to burn.  After 
six alarms had been called in, firefighters finally brought the fire 
under control at 11:41 P.m six hours after it started.
     In a late night press conference, a stunned Sambor said that 
police intelligence indicated that Move had built tunnels under the 
house, and this was the reason for the bomb being dropped.  "In the 
morning we will go through the rubble and hope to find survivors," the 
police commissioner said.
     There were none.
     The neighborhood was in ruin, with more than sixty homes destroyed 
by fire as a result of the bomb dropped to blow a hole in the Move root 
With the exception of Ramona and Birdie Africa, everyone who had been 
in the Move house died, most of burns and suffocation, some of gunshot 
wounds.
     Commissioner Sambor defended the bombing as a "tactical necessity" 
and said that Move had been threatening to create a terrorist incident 
that would 61 shock the nation, if not the world."
     Likewise, the mayor told reporters, "You don't cry over spilt 
milk.  We have to understand that sometimes we win and sometimes we 
lose."  Mayor Goode said the authorities were afraid that Move would 
"blow up the entire neighborhood" and "create an international 
incident."
     Ironically, it was Goode and his police force who created the 
international incident.  The astonishing television pictures of an 
American neighborhood that had been bombed in order to save it were 
broadcast around the world.  Never before in U.S. history had civil 
authorities dropped a bomb on an America city, and the reaction to the 
debacle was fierce.  A columnist for the Inquirer asked sarcastically, 
"Who coordinated this thing-Moe, Larry, and Curley?"
     "They broke every rule in the book," said Gerald Arenberg, the 
director of the American Federation of Police.  "To burn down sixty 
homes in order to serve an eviction notice seems incredible."
     "You don't just bomb a house!"  gasped Hardy Williams, the 
Democratic state senator who represented the district.  "It was stupid 
and tragic to bomb a house in the city.  The Russians weren't coming!"
     On Osage Avenue the grim work of digging through the rubble began. 
 Now that the houses were destroyed, the giant crane could be 
maneuvered easily enough down the street, where it took up a position 
in front of what had been the Move house.  For days the crane's monster 
scoop chewed into the stinking rubble, depositing the soggy debris onto 
a huge heap in the middle of the street.  As the demolition went on, 
all that remained of the houses that had lined Osage Street were brick 
walls of varying heights towering over fields of blackened debris.  The 
scene reminded some of the pictures of the German city of Dresden after 
the air-raid firestorms of the Second World War.
     Rearing its head like a brontosaurus, the crane sometimes came up 
with body parts tangled in the debris, with blackened and twisted 
limbs, a child's torso, the charred carcasses of dogs.
     Inside the house, in the mud of the twenty-footdeep basement 
bunker, a worker dug a soggy tablet of paper out of the muck.  On it 
was a note signed by none other than John Africa himself.  Authorities 
had no idea how the founder of Move, long in hiding, had managed to 
slip back into the house for the final confrontation.
     The crudely lettered note said that the police would come.  "Pick 
them out one by one."
     On Wednesday afternoon the crane's big scoop roared up with a 
grotesquely charred male corpse in its teeth.  John Africa's body was 
dropped onto the junk heap, where workers from the medical examiner's 
office pulled it out and removed it for identification.
      CHAPTER SIX kto kto k6
     Blood Atonement JEFFREY DON LUNDGREN was thirty-four years old in 
1984, a Navy veteran and religious fanatic who had chronic problems 
holding a steady job.  Now he was ready for the big move.
     He was mowing the grass outside the modest little house in 
Independence, Missouri, where he lived with his wife and four children, 
when it came to him.
     Rushing inside the house, he found the citation he was looking for 
in a book of Mormon scripture in which the founder of Mormonism, Joseph 
Smith, reports that God told him: It.  . . you should go to the Ohio, 
and there I will give unto you my law and there you shall be endowed 
with power from on high Suddenly, all was clear.  The repeated firings 
and dead-end jobs, the wife and in-laws who wondered if he was a born 
loser, the debts, the sullen-faced kids -God had wanted him to fail so 
that he could see the way.  It was all part of the divine plan.
     Jeff gathered around him his wife, Alice, and their four children: 
Damon, fourteen; Jason, ten; Kristen, five, and Caleb, four.  He said 
it was time to start packing.  "We are going to Ohio," he exulted.  
"The Lord has chosen me for a great mission."
     To finance the sudden move, he even sold off part of his prized 
gun collection.
     Less than a month later, when the Lundgrens arrived in rural 
Kirtiand, Ohio, with the threadbare family belongings piled into a 
U-Haul trailer, the puffy-faced man at the wheel of the old station 
wagon looked more like the stereotype of an American couch potato than 
he did a prophet.  But make no mistake about it, a prophet is what he 
believed himself to be, and a very important one at that.  He had come 
to Ohio to work diligently on a plan that he believed would bring about 
the end of the world.
     Jeff would fail in that, as he had in everything else.
     But before he was apprehended in 1990, five people -a man, woman, 
and their three children-lay dead in a cold pit dug in the dirt inside 
a barn.  Jeff and his cult of followers had put them there, preparing 
for Armageddon.
     The Lundgrens' move from their home in Missouri had actually 
followed a series of religious visions experienced by Jeff, who had 
become impatient in recent years with what he regarded as liberalizing 
trends in the small sect of Mormonism to which he and his wife had 
belonged since birth.  In the most dramatic of these visions, Jeff felt 
that he was bodily transported through time to Calvary, where Christ, 
dying on the cross, had fixed him with a long and baleful gaze.
     "I looked at him and I knew, and he knew, that I had been 
rejecting him," Jeff had warned his wife before the move to Ohio.  "I 
understand what it is like to be rejected, and he knew too."
     "But what does it mean?"  she asked.
     "God is preparing me for something," he replied.
     "What will you do?"
     "Preside over the end of time," he said modestly.
     Kirtland is an unlikely place from which to contemplate the 
destruction of the world.  A bucolic farming community in the rolling 
landscape just beyond the urban sprawl of Cleveland, its main claim to 
fame is as the site of a historic Mormon temple that soars atop a hill 
on the northern edge of town.  The Kirtland temple was built by the 
founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, and shortly after his death in 1844 
it became the headquarters of a conservative sect of Mormons who had 
stayed behind in the Midwest while the mainstream Mormon following 
migrated to Utah.  The Midwest branch called itself the Reorganized 
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints-RLDS, in short.
     Mormonism is a uniquely American religious movement that brims 
with the promise of earthly reward.  It sprang from religious visions 
experienced in the 1820s by the teenage founder on his parents' farm in 
upstate New York.  Joseph Smith told a strange tale that an angel named 
Moroni had appeared to him to disclose the hidden location of magical 
golden plates documenting the history of a band of ancient Hebrews who 
had migrated across the sea from Jerusalem to establish a civilization 
on the American continent, six hundred years before the birth of 
Christ.  By the early 1830s, after he claimed to have unearthed and 
translated these golden plates into the Book of Mormon, Smith was 
declaring himself the Prophet, the designated one who would lead the 
lost tribe of Israel in the rebuilding of Zion and command the forces 
of righteousness in the final great battle against Satan that would 
herald the Second Coming, after which the faithful would join Jesus 
Christ to rule rapturously over an earthly paradise for a thousand 
years.  The faithful were called the Latter Day Saints.  Unbelievers, 
called Gentiles, were the doomed.
     Joseph Smith had had several brushes with the law during his early 
ministry, having been implicated in counterfeiting and in the deception 
of a farmer in a buried treasure scheme.  This did not adversely affect 
his later ability to recruit followers into a radical new religious 
sect.  With its promise of a prosperous godly existence in this world, 
its emphasis on male domination and native-born white supremacy, its 
disdain for alcohol and smoking, and its preoccupation with 
Masonic-like secret rituals and symbols, Mormonism rapidly gained 
adherents in a conservative, restless agrarian society.  The movement 
quickly migrated westward with the shifting farm population.  Smith, 
always adept at raising cash, soon set up his headquarters-as commanded 
by God-in Ohio, in Kirtland, where he rewrote the entire Bible and, in 
1836, on a fifteen-acre site atop a hill, built the first Mormon 
temple.
     Smith kept moving westward, however, after God revealed to him 
that the actual site of the Second Coming would be Independence, 
Missouri.  But the quest to establish a New Jerusalem met with fierce 
resistance in Missouri, where the Mormons' proclivities for real estate 
deals and banking speculation added to the simmering resentment over 
their practice of polygamy.  Vilified, hounded by creditors, Smith 
himself was eventually murdered by an angry mob in 1844.  The Prophet's 
death left the sect split between adherents of the founder-who vowed to 
continue pressing west, and ultimately settled in Salt Lake City, Utah, 
under the leadership of Smith's chief aide, Brigham Young-and those of 
Smith's eleven-year-old son, who remained behind at the temple in 
Kirtland.
     Young's Utah Mormons became the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ 
of Latter Day Saints, eventually gathering more than five million 
members and vast financial holdings.  The Ohio branch, renaming itself 
the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, scratched 
out a meager existence around the site of Smith's temple in Kirtland, 
never numbering more than 200,000 members, most of them living in the 
Midwest, where they awaited the arrival of the next great prophet-whom 
they anticipated as the legitimate successor to Joseph Smithto lead 
them to Judgment Day.
     They were still waiting in 1984 when the Lundgrens lumbered into 
town.
     On the day they arrived, Jeff and Alice went directly to the 
temple grounds in Kirtland and got jobs as members of the historic 
site's tour-guide staffpositions that qualified them to occupy a modest 
church-owned house near the temple grounds.  However, Jeff was not a 
typical RLDS tour guide.  Staring at the stately old temple in 1984, 
its stucco walls inlaid with crushed glass and porcelain that caused 
the building to glitter in the sunlight, he did not see just a 
venerable religious site that was the center of his religion.  He saw 
divine opportunity.

     Quietly, the Lundgrens settled in to their new life.

     Millenialist religions, which believe that the end of the world is 
near and will herald a period of a thousand years of prosperity and 
justice for the chosen who have defeated Satan at Armageddon, have 
always attracted to their ranks people like Jeff Lundgren, who have a 
score to settle with the world.
     The Book of Mormon, for example, says: "And it came to pass that 
the spirit said unto me, 'Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him 
into thy hands.  Behold the Lord stayeth the wicked to bring forth his 
righteous purposes .  . ."
     Jeff was born in Independence in 1950 to well-off and stern RLDS 
sect parents who encouraged his intense youthful interest in 
interpreting Scripture.
     Some friends who grew up with him would describe him as a loner, a 
bitter young man who had few friends and an exalted opinion of his own 
status.
     Others, including a core of followers who would ultimately leave 
Independence to follow him to Kirtland, saw him as a visionary.
     Not quite a year younger, Alice Lundgren had grown up in a trailer 
in Independence, where she was remembered as shy, homely, and even more 
desperate for status than her husband.  Like him, she was deeply 
religious.  In 1970, at church summer camp, she reported that she had 
been accosted in her bed by Satan.  Shortly afterward, she met Jeff, 
and was immediately taken by his domineering presence, his fervent 
faith, his detailed knowledge of Scripture, and-most of all-his 
confidence.
     Alice soon became pregnant; Jeff's parents denounced her, but not 
him.  With the baby-a son, who would be named Damon-about to be born, 
Jeff enlisted in the Navy and was sent to San Diego.
     There, the young married couple found a cheap apartment outside 
the naval base, where they withdrew in horror from the freewheeling 
southern California lifestyle of the early seventies.  Instead, the 
devout young couple spent their free time, when they weren't bickering 
over money or over Jeff's incessant demands for sex, reading the Book 
of Mormon aloud together.  In time, their evangelism attracted a 
handful of kindred souls-typically conservative young couples who had 
grown up looking for religious comfort.  The Lundgrens' tiny apartment 
became the location of weekly and then twice-weekly prayer-group 
meetings.  Jeff led them avidly.
     Briefly, in 1972, Jeff was stationed on board a Navy destroyer 
that spent about a month off Vietnam.  The ship encountered a few 
rounds of hostile shore fire that splashed harmlessly into the sea.  
Although U.S. naval vessels never came under serious attack during the 
entire Vietnam War, in Jeff's mind the minor incident took on Battle of 
Midway-like dimensions.
     "God showed me a sign," he would say of what he came to regard as 
a harrowing escape in combat conditions.  "He had protected the ship 
because he didn't want me to die in Vietnam."  Later, he would 
fantasize to his awestruck followers that he had been in furious 
hand-to-hand combat in Vietnam when God interceded to spare his life.
     And not just from a mortal enemy.  While at sea, Jeff experienced 
more vivid religious visions, not the least of which was one in which 
Satan attacked him from a cloud.
     "I have always known from that moment that God had a special 
purpose for me," he told his wife shortly after they arrived in 
Kirtland.  "But now I know that at last I am worthy."
     As always, his wife assumed that he knew what he was talking 
about.
     Jeff's supreme confidence had taken many years to attain.  After 
his Navy discharge, he struggled to define his divine mission, while 
working odd jobs to support a growing family back in Independence, and 
often being fired.  His fervid evangelism again attracted a small group 
of followers-young RLDS members, many of them, like the Lundgrens, 
disenchanted by church elders' attempts to broaden membership by 
liberalizing long-held positions toward worn, en, traditionally 
relegated to a subservient role in Mormon church and family.  When the 
RLDS actually proposed allowing women to become priests, Jeff and his 
followers in Independence coalesced into a small but radical dissident 
movement.  If, as it appeared, the forces of Satan were assembling for 
the final battle, the army of the righteous needed a general, and Jeff 
Lundgren had come to regard himself as that person well before the 
decision to move to Ohio.
     The preparations would take time.  While contemplating Armageddon 
from its supposed site in Missouri, Jeff had managed to supplement his 
unsteady income by writing bad checks.  A man of voracious appetites, 
he also began to have affairs.
     Almost imperceptibly, the dozen or so adults who gathered at the 
Lundgrens had come to accept him as their leader.  As his position 
solidified, Jeff manipulated group psychology to isolate and intimidate 
anyone who dissented.  In the home, his authority was demonstrated in a 
less subtle way toward his wife and children-with the back of his hand.
     In the bedroom, meanwhile, Jeff was less prophet than pervert, his 
wife would later claim.  While he complained constantly of her 
frigidity, she found it difficult to enjoy sex with a chronically 
unfaithful husband who also, she said, collected sadomasochistic 
pornography and liked to tie her up and defecate on her breasts.
     "Jeffrey was fascinated with his own feces," she would tell 
investigators.  "'He would smear it on himself and masturbate with it." 
 On one occasion, she said, he dressed up in her nightgown, panty hose, 
and hair rollers and demanded that she act out raping him with a dildo. 
 Alice also later claimed that Jeff beat her repeatedly.
     Projecting an air of religious mysticism, Jeff managed to keep 
both family and followers firmly in place.
     In Ohio, galvanized by his sens@ of mission, he surreptitiously 
began recruiting, and organizing an army of God.  It would require 
stealth, money, and years of planning to outwit the forces of Babylon 
under their very eyes in the temple.  But Jeff was well-positioned to 
do it.  As temple tour guides, lecturing to the hundreds of RLDS 
pilgrims who visited the historic site each day, he and Alice quietly 
recruited, and Jeff stealthily took advantage of easy access to the 
donation boxes as well as the cash drawers at the gift shop and 
bookstore.  Before the Lundgrens were ousted three years later, when 
temple elders discovered the missing funds, Jeff would manage to walk 
off with about $20,000 in petty cash to help finance his plan to 
reclaim the temple from Satan.
     Meanwhile, he had diligently used his popular tours, augmented by 
his role leading a well-attended Bible class, to firmly establish a 
secret group of several dozen RLDS dissidents before the church's 
elders realized what was going on.
     Situated close to the pilgrimage site, the Lundgren household was 
always open to those who believed.
     Accepting room and board, or merely seeking company and spiritual 
uplift, men and women gathered nightly for Jeff's religious 
instructions.  During the day, the adults worked in whatever local jobs 
they could find, including as part-time temple tour guides.
     Some referred to Jeff, the head of the household, as "Dad," and to 
his wife as "Mother."
     While luxuriating in unaccustomed if moderate financial stability, 
Jeff managed to find plenty of time at the temple to diagram scriptural 
verses and wander the building indulging his fascination for 
deciphering secret meanings in the intricately carved ritualistic 
symbols that decorated the somber rectangular chambers.  In the blazing 
intensity of an obsessed mind, the patterns became inexorably more 
striking.
     In the autumn of 1986 he excitedly told Alice that he now knew 
that he was the last of eight great prophets who had lived since the 
beginning of time.
     In a vision, Joseph Smith himself appeared to him to declare that 
the torch was being passed, that he, Jeff Lundgren, the greatest 
prophet of all, had been chosen at the beginning of time to bring about 
the kingdom of God on earth.
     Alice was thrilled.  "Jeffrey had finally found a niche in life," 
she would later say.  "I decided he was truly my lord and master."
     Given to gossip herself, she had difficulty keeping this 
revelation from the regulars in Jeff's prayer groups, as he said she 
must for the time being.
     "I have a secret," she once giddily told the faithful group after 
Jeff had finished a four-hour harangue and wandered off to the bedroom 
in exhaustion.
     "But I can't tell you yet what is in store for us all."
     Since it was well-understood that discussion of Jeff's teaching 
outside his supervision was absolutely forbidden, no one asked for 
details.  Jeff insisted that, like Christ, he would merely intimate his 
divinity.  It would be for the disciples to arrive at the truth on 
their own.
     Jeff's growing folk-hero reputation among restive RLDS followers in 
Kirtland finally did get the attention of RLDS elders, who were anxious 
about rumors of heresy being spread in the, Lundgren prayer group.  But 
the president of the RLDS in Kirtland, Reverend Dale Luffman, a 
soft-spoken and modest man not given to direct challenges, urged 
caution as the Lundgren contingent drifted into what would soon become 
an open break.  Luffman had no idea of how divisive that break was 
about to become.
     The rift opened with the discovery of the missing money.  A 
visiting church official, curious about the drop-off in cash receipts, 
looked over the gift shop and visitor center books in the summer of 
1987 and discovered the odd coincidence that the three-year decline in 
revenue-a total of about $20,000-had begun shortly after Jeff and Alice 
came to work at the temple.  But with no evidence linking Jeff directly 
to the thefts, and hoping to avoid a public scandal, RLDS officials 
visited the Lundgrens and offered Jeff a quiet way out.  If he and 
Alice would resign, there would be no accusations.  They would have to 
vacate their church-owned house, but they could leave without 
recrimination.
     Jeff presented himself as a scapegoat, falsely accused and 
persecuted by treacherous RLDS elders who wanted to destroy his efforts 
to preach the truth.
     The embezzlement episode merely enabled him to tighten his hold on 
the dissident group and isolate people under his control even further.  
The Lundgrens rented a ramshackle five-bedroom farmhouse isolated on 
fifteen acres of land at the southern edge of town.  Beside the house, 
along a muddy apple orchard, stood a dilapidated red barn.  There was 
plenty of ground for training.  It was the perfect place for a commune. 
 Jeff and Alice spoke of plans to make the homestead self-sustaining; 
they would prosper, growing their own food, perhaps even starting an 
antiques business in the barn.
     Furthermore, banishment from the temple was merely another 
prophesy fulfilled.  "The Scriptures say that prophets are cast out," 
Jeff informed the group.  "That is happening."
     An impressive arsenal of guns had been accumulated by this time.  
Throughout 1986 and 1987 the group had been buying weapons, using them 
in paramilitary training for the assault on the temple.
     Meanwhile, Jeff had pored over the temple's cryptic symbols and 
endlessly diagramed verses of Scripture, looking for the hidden clues.  
Late in the summer of 1987, he had made the long-awaited announcement.  
"I am the last messenger that God has sent to the Kirtland temple to 
prepare the way for Christ's return," he said.  "And you are going to 
help me protect it."
     After the move to the farm, where he was free from the proprieties 
necessitated by living on church property, Jeff's message became even 
more strident, alarmist, and violent.  Cannily, he instilled a sense of 
impending crisis and drama over the armed assault on the temple, which 
would be heralded by an explosion of nature: earthquakes would rend the 
ground; the temple would be physically lifted high onto a mountain.  
Then the legions of Satan would storm Kirtiand, perhaps led by 
battalions of U.S. Army troops seeking to unite with the evil forces 
within the temple.  As prophet, Jeff told his followers that if they 
were "free of sin," God would give them the means to repel these 
armies.
     The paramilitary training in the apple orchard drew some outside 
attention, but no one really understood the level of insanity that the 
Lundgren group was spiraling toward in its farmstead isolation.
     However, getting wind of the rumors that Lundgren's heretical 
teachings had taken on violent overtones, Reverend Luffman finally took 
the drastic step of excommunicating Jeff, Alice, and 
their two older sons, Damon and Jason, from the RLDS.
     A few days after this action, the area was hit with a violent 
thunderstorm, after which a double rainbow appeared in the sky.  Jeff 
pounced on the weather as a grave new sign-the fabled seven seals 
described in the Book of Revelation were being broken open, one by one.
     There was time to prepare, however.  In the near future, he 
suddenly announced, they all would have to leave Kirtland for a period 
of time, "living off the land" in the wilderness.  Jeff said that they 
would have one year to "show blood" and break the remaining seals to 
open the way to Armageddon.
     "There will be lots of blood spilled," he confided.
     The Luffman family's blood would be first, according to Jeff's 
plan.  When the time came to take the temple, he declared, Luffman 
would be the first one captured.  He would be bound and gagged, then 
forced to watch the execution of his wife Judy and their three 
children, ages thirteen, ten, and five.
     Then he would be killed.
     In general, the Lundgren group kept to itself, out of sight on the 
farm.  But Luffman wasn't the only one with serious concerns.  Rumors 
of armed men playing soldier are sure to interest the local police, and 
the chief of the six-member Kirtland police force, Dennis Yarborough, 
himself an RLDS member, had decided to play closer attention to 
whatever was going on at the Lundgren place.  Yarborough had thought 
there was something odd about Jeff Lundgren from the first day he laid 
eyes on him, back in 1984, when Jeff-newly arrived at the temple barged 
into the police station shouting that people were peeking into his 
windows at night.  Jeff later painted the windowpanes of the house dark 
green.
     Now, aware of the rumors about Jeff's resignation from his temple 
job, and deeply curious about reports of weapons stockpiling and the 
wild rumors about storming the temple, Yarborough visited Lundgren to 
look things over and ask about the "paramilitary group" that had been 
seen training in the apple orchard.  Jeff said he knew nothing about 
it.
     From that point on, the police chief and the Lundgren group kept 
their eyes on each other from a distance.
     What little of a disturbing nature that people had seen on the 
outside was no indication of the true emotional deterioration within a 
frightened, exhausted, and fanatically loyal group who saw enemies 
everywhere outside their own numbers.  Besides Jeff, Alice, and their 
children, five unmarried adults now lived in the farmhouse, with their 
numbers supplemented by married couples with children who lived in 
nearby apartments.
     Residing at the farmhouse were: Kevin Currie, who had arrived in 
Kirtland on a pilgrimage in 1984 and moved in with the Lundgrens, whom 
he had known from their study group in San Diego.
     - Richard Brand, a well-muscled man in his midtwenties, an 
unemployed civil engineer who fell in with the Lundgrens during a 
pilgrimage to the temple in 1985.  Richard had a new pickup truck that 
he was willing to sell for $5,500, and donate the money to the 
Lundgrens.
     0 Shar Olsen, tall and pretty, in her late twenties, met the 
Lundgrens when she toured the temple in 1987.  Though Jeff was 
particularly attracted to her, Shar was the most skeptical of the 
group-and would prove to be the most troublesome.
     0 Danny Kraft, born in Iowa in 1964, he was an aspiring musician 
with a lifelong fascination with symbols and Mormon archaeology.  He 
joined the group after taking one of Jeff's temple tours in 1985.
     0 Sharon Bluntschly, born in 1958.  At 225 pounds, she was 
withdrawn and painfully shy.  She met the Lundgrens on a temple 
pilgrimage in 1985.

     And these followers lived in apartments:

     Greg Winship, a childhood friend of Richard Brand, a business 
major in college who was introduced to Jeff Lundgren as a "prophet" 
when he visited Richard in 1986.
     The Patrick family: Dennis and Tonya Patrick, fellow church 
members who had moved to Kirtland in 1986 at the invitation of Jeff and 
Alice.  Both in their early thirties, they had been members of Jeff's 
prayer group in Independence.  Dennis was tall, skinny, and meek.  
Tonya was heavyset, pretty, and vivacious.  Jeff disliked Dennis but 
was attracted to his wife.  The Patricks had a six-year-old daughter, 
Molly.
     - The Luff family: In their late twenties, Ron and Susie Luff and 
their two children, Matthew, five, and Amy, two, had joined the 
Lundgrens from Independence in 1987.  He was nervous and wiry; she was 
slender, attractive, and chatty.
     . The Avery family: Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their three young 
daughters had moved to Kirtland from Independence to join the Lundgrens 
shortly before the move to the farm.  Cheryl was plain and brooding, 
but with a sharp tongue.  Dennis was fussy, pudgy, and pedantically 
argumentative, but essentially submissive, especially in the company of 
other men.
     In all cultlike groups, certain people or persons inevitably 
become scapegoats on whom other members of the organization can focus 
their rage, disappointment, and frustration when things inevitably go 
wrong.  Haplessly, the Averys would play such a role in the Lundgren 
cult.
     Dennis and Cheryl Avery referred to the Lundgrens as their best 
friends, unaware that Jeff and Alice ridiculed them mercilessly behind 
their backs.
     Jeff especially disliked Dennis, whom he thought dim-witted.  and 
dominated by his wife.
     Alice had in fact tried to dissuade Jeff from encouraging the 
Averys to move to Kirtland, but Jeff had his reasons.
     "I want their money," he told her, aware that the Averys would 
realize about $20,000 profit from the sale of their house in 
Independence.
     it paid off.  Not long after they arrived, Dennis gave Jeff a 
check for $10,000.  But Jeff was furious that the Averys had apparently 
used the rest of their profit to pay off bills and buy things to 
furnish the apartment they rented in Kirtland.
     The facade of an idyllic communal life barely covered a reality of 
daily drudgery.  The farm was badly run-down.  Members worked hard 
fixing it up and performing chores on their free time.  As the 
prophet's wife, Alice, was accorded deferential treatment and expected 
to be catered to and waited on by the other women.  She lay around the 
house most days drinking beer, watching television, gobbling take-out 
food, barking orders, and screaming at the other couples' children.  
Her major group responsibility was the only chore she willingly 
performed: she shopped.
     In fact, both of the Lundgrens were dedicated shoppers.  Jeff's 
favorite haunts were gun shops, video stores, and home centers; Alice's 
were discount stores and antiques shops.
     Jeff had designated his eldest son, Damon, as his 
second-in-command.  A sullen, lazy youth who was a member of the high 
school wrestling team, Damon was in charge of physical training within 
the group.
     The young man, who had learned bullying techniques from his father, 
was especially fond of ordering one male member to fall to the ground 
in training and kiss his feet.
     This kind of activity only reinforced the submissiveness that Jeff 
had already ruthlessly imprinted on the psyches of the other male 
believers.
     Even the younger Lundgren children claimed special status.  They 
were referred to as the "naturals," and could not be corrected by 
anyone.  Children of all other members were the "unnaturals."
     The lengthy nightly religious study sessions-now conducted in the 
drafty barn-deteriorated into angry denunciations and recriminations 
directed toward anyone whose attention wandered, or who failed to come 
up with correct answers to Jeff's incessant metaphysical questions.
     Along with the harangues, Jeff required the group to watch rented 
VCR movies nearly every night.
     Most nights, the movies were war epics and bloody, Rambo-type 
thrillers, but Jeff occasionally changed the pace and rented old 
Hollywood romantic filmsto show, he said, how women could better become 
submissive."
     But romance had little priority by 1989.  Again and again Jeff 
said, "God is commanding us to take over the Kirtland temple."  The 
battle would be long and arduous, he warned.  "We will have to live off 
the land" while protecting the temple, he said.  He began referring to 
himself as the "destroyer."  Scripture itself proved that "God is not 
afraid to kill," he maintained.
     Military training moved out of the orchard.  On some moonless 
nights the men@lad in dark fatigues, their faces blackened with 
paint-tngaged in guerrilla-type covert exercises on the grounds of the 
temple itself.  Military code names were assigned to each of them.  
During the assault on the temple, not only the Luffman family would 
die.  Every person living in a one-block area near the temple-in all, 
more than two dozen members of RLDS families-would be beheaded.
     By 1989 the sessions were often lasting all night.
     Jeff, now constantly with a pistol on his belt or waving in his 
hand, had designated himself a four-star general in command of what he 
called the "Army of Israel."  As befit his status, Alice-who also had 
begun drinking, something virtually unheard-of for a devout 
Mormon-roused herself enough to sew him a flag-a white star and an 
eagle on a background of regal purple.
     The other women learned how to clean and care for weapons.  
Supervision at the farm became vigilant.  When Jeff was away from the 
house, a "sheriff' was designated to oversee the group.  Mail and 
telephone calls were strictly monitored.  Everyone outside was the 
enemy, the "Gentiles."
     As these bizarre preparations intensified, the Averys made a fatal 
mistake that would significantly alter the Lundgren battle plan: they 
began complaining about money.
     With mounting financial problems, the Averys strongly implied that 
since they had donated so much money to Jeff, he owed them additional 
financial consideration.  After Jeff publicly denounced them for their 
presumption, the Averys began missing some of the nightly meetings.  
Without knowing it, they were scapegoated in their absence.
     Only those without sin could take part in the temple assault, Jeff 
stressed-and the Averys were not without sin.  But it wasn't just the 
Averys, he said.
     Other members would be found not worthy before the final plan went 
into effect.  Only he could read their souls, Jeff said, and know who 
they might be.
     To atone in blood for their sins, they would be killed.
     At one point Jeff claimed that only twelve adultsthe same number 
as the apostles-would survive along with him.  While he refused to name 
them in group sessions, in several private conversations he assured 
people of their own safety.  Later, when survivors compared notes, they 
would learn that the names of those who would be spared kept changing, 
depending on whom he was talking to.
     But the unwelcome Averys and their "disrespectful" children were 
certainly at the top of the list of the condemned.
     "By not attending my classes, the Averys have hardened their 
hearts to the word," Jeff said, making every effort to ostracize the 
Averys as traitors, even though the Averys were making every effort to 
return to the group's good graces.
     Years later, from death row in prison, Jeff would tell Pete 
Earley, author of Prophet of Death: The Mormon Blood Atonement 
Killings: "I told my people they should thank God for the Averys .  . . 
God had provided the Averys to us to be used as sacrifices."
     The others marveled at the Averys' obliviousness to the peril they 
were in.  While behind their backs Jeff was discussing killing them, 
the Averys were whining about being owed money and not being invited to 
dinner.
     There were two key defections from the group at about this time.  
The first was Kevin Currie, who fled when he decided he was among those 
designated to die.
     The next was Shar Olsen, who had become alarmed by the buildup of 
weapons in the house, and troubled by doubt about Jeff's claims to 
being the last prophet.
     Both Kevin and Shar left and independently approached authorities 
to report their fears about Jeff Lundgren's plan to storm the temple.  
Quietly, police surveillance of the Lundgren farm was stepped up.
     Jeff recruited several new members to make up for the defections.  
One was Debbie Ofivarez, a cousin of Jeff's who worked as a nurse at a 
local hospital.
     Additionally, a new family moved to Kirtland and joined the group 
in March 1989: Larry Keith and Kathy Johnson and their four children.  
The Johnsons also had been associated with the Lundgren prayer group in 
Independence.
     But the plans were changing, thanks in part to the opportunity for 
retribution presented by the Averys.
     While the police worried about rumors of an armed assault on the 
Kirtland temple, the Lundgren group prepared to flee to the wilderness.
     Since blood had to be shed to fulfill prophecy and cleanse the 
group, the killing plan was refined under Jeff's increasingly erratic 
direction.  Men designated to die would be beheaded, but those with 
wives and children would watch them die first, he said.  Adult females 
were to be stripped naked and disemboweled with a sword.  Children were 
to be picked up by their heels and have their skulls smashed against a 
wall.
     Soon the plan was simplified to focus just on the Averys.  They 
would be killed and all of the others would flee to the wilderness, 
where they would wait for the sign to assault the temple.
     This required frantic shopping for outdoor clothing, camping gear, 
guns, and used vehicles to carry the hardy band into the wilderness, 
although none of them had any idea where they would be going.  But 
evidentally it would not be far, since Jeff and Alicewho alone would 
decide-were seen studying maps of Ohio and West Virginia.
     There were many so small details.  For instance, Becky Avery, who 
had just turned thirteen years old, presented Jeff with a dilemma.  He 
wondered aloud whether she should be considered a child or an adult for 
the purposes of the killing.
     Alice suggested that "it would depend on whether or not Becky had 
started her period."  Jeff mused that this was something that would 
need to be found out, and went back to his maps.
     By the spring of 1989 there were more than two dozen members of 
the Lundgren cult who expected to go to the wilderness.
     In early April, Jeff made a great show of going at dawn to a 
hilltop on the farm where he often retreated for personal guidance from 
God.
     "What is thy will?"  he cried out to the slate-gray sky.  "Give me 
a sign!"
     On April 10, Jeff ordered Keith and Ron to start digging a grave 
in the dirt floor of the barn.  It was for the Averys.
     A few nights later, seemingly full of forgiveness, Jeff and Alice 
had dinner at the Averys to discuss the trip to the wilderness.  The 
next day, Jeff told officials at the Kirtiand elementary school that 
the Avery children would miss school for a week.  He said he was taking 
the family to Disney World.
     The pit was to be finished on April 16, the day designated for the 
execution.  But on the fifteenth, Dennis Avery, ove@oyed at the 
opportunity to regain Jeff's good graces, came to the farm and happily 
showed Jeff a MasterCard he had just managed to acquire.  It had a 
$1,000 limit.
     After dinner Jeff told his wife that the Averys had bought 
themselves some extra time on earth.  "I'm going to take that boy 
shopping," he said.
     He did.  He and Dennis ran up the $1,000 limit on the new credit 
card, buying several guns-including an electric stun gun.  After the 
shopping trip, Dennis felt that all was forgiven when Jeff told him to 
bring his family to the farm the next day-Monday, April 17.  Within 
days, he said, they all would leave for the wilderness.
     At the farm that night, Jeff took Richard aside.
     "Tomorrow is D-Day," he said.
     On Monday the excitement level was high at the farm as the final 
preparations for the trip were made.
     The children were giddy at the prospect of what they considered 
would be an extended vacation.
     The Averys arrived for dinner like relatives visiting at 
Thanksgiving.  Little Karen Avery had even drawn a picture in crayon 
for Alice.  Giggling, the child pressed it into her hand at the front 
door.
     At a congenial dinner with everyone crowded around the huge table, 
the same child happened to get Jeff's attention when she refused to eat 
her corn.
     "Daddy, I don't want to," she protested.
     Jeff watched with cold satisfaction.  It was a sign of rebellion 
and wickedness," he would later say.  it was just further proof of what 
had to be done.
     After dinner, as the other women went to the kitchen to clean up, 
Alice announced that she had to leave for the store to buy some last 
minute supplies.
     She took her own children-Jason, Kristen, and Caleb-out with her.  
Damon stayed behind.
     "Call before you come back," Jeff said as his wife and younger 
children filed out.
     Jeff left the table and went to his bedroom.  Several of the other 
men came in and found him with a pistol in his hand, a .45 caliber.  
Dennis Avery was still eating with the women and children.
     "Let's do it," Jeff said.
     Dennis, busy with a second helping of dinner, did not comment as 
the rest of the men-Jeff, Damon, Richard, Ron, Danny, and Greg-went out 
to the old barn.  There, they stood beside the pit that had been dug, 
four feet deep, six feet wide, eight feet long.  It was big enough.
     When Jeff gave a nod, Ron went inside to fetch Dennis from the 
table.  He said Jeff wanted to see him in the barn.
     When Dennis entered, one of the men grabbed him.  Ron pressed the 
electric stun gun against his neck and pulled the trigger.
     "This isn't necessary!"  Dennis shouted as he fell backward.  He 
was grabbed by four others, who had been hiding in the dark.  They 
bound him with duct tape on his hands, feet, and mouth.  A single 
lightbulb dangling from a wire in the ceiling was snapped on.  Dennis 
saw himself being held at the edge of a pit.
     Jeff approached him, looking steadily into his eyes, and leveled 
the .45 at his heart.  Avery fell to his knees.  Jeff squeezed the 
trigger two times.
     The door opened.
     "Is it done?"  a man asked.
     "Come and see what death is!"  Jeff called.
     The men stood silently.
     "Okay," he said, "bring out the next one."
     Ron went to the farmhouse and told Cheryl Avery, helping to clean 
up, that her husband needed to see her in the barn.
     She was set upon as Dennis had been, her hands, feet, and mouth 
taped, as well as her eyes-Jeff had said that Scripture dictated that 
only the man had the right to see his executioner.
     "Be calm," she was told in her last seconds.  "Don't struggle.  
Just give it up."
     They threw her into the pit on top of her husband's blood-soaked 
body.  Jeff shot her three times, twice in the chest and once in the 
belly.  She lay writhing for several minutes.
     Jeff went outside to get a breath of fresh air with the others.  
He was worried that neighbors might have heard the shots, but no one 
was stirring across the fields.
     "Bring out the next one," he said.
     Trina Avery, fifteen years old, was reading a magazine in the 
living room when Ron came for her.
     "Your mother wants to see you out in the barn," he said.
     Trina was subdued, as her mother had been.  But the men told her 
it was a game as they taped her hands, feet, and eyes.  She submitted 
without protest.
     Two of the men carried her through the barn to the edge of the 
pit.  She was laid down in the grave.
     Jeff stepped forward and shot her once in the head, and then twice 
more in the back as she struggled to climb out.
     When she was still, they went back to the house and found the 
other two children, Becky and Karen, playing a video game in the living 
room.
     "Who wants to see the horses in the barn?"  Ron boomed merrily.
     Both of them did.
     "One at a time," he insisted.
     Being thirteen, Becky went first.  In the barn, she was bound and 
dragged to the pit, where Jeff shot her.  The child died groping for 
her mother's body beneath that of her older sister's.
     The six-year-old came next.  Karen was made to sit blindfolded at 
the muddy edge of the pit.  Then Jeff fired a hollow-point slug into 
her skull.  He fired again, trying to hit the same place.  The little 
girl toppled into the pile of bodies now filling the bloody grave.
     The men slit open a bag of lime and emptied it over the corpses.  
Gingerly, they shoveled dirt on top, and then piled on rocks and debris 
that had been gathered in the barn for the purpose of hiding the grave.
     As they tidied up, Jeff was out in the apple orchard gazing to the 
twilight sky.
     "God, I have been thy sword of judgment this day," he bellowed at 
the gloom.  "May my offering be acceptable!"
     He then came back to the barn and assured the men, "Now that the 
sin is gone, we can go into the wilderness and see God."
     They did not see God, nor did they even see the wilderness.  
Instead, the group frantically packed its belongings and drove off in 
several vehicles, finally assembling a few days later at a run-down 
public campsite in the Appalachian plateau of West Virginia.  They 
pitched their tents in muddy ground that had been landfilled by a 
strip-mine operation.
     Shortly after they fled, the police arrived for an unannounced 
visit to the farm, hoping to check for weapons violations.  They found 
no one there.  They did not find the grave.
     I Through a cold spring and summer, the Lundgren group lived in 
campgrounds, where Jeff proclaimed himself Moses and made incessant 
sexual demands on the women.  Gradually, misery and wretchedness 
triumphed over faith and fear, and people began leaving.  Meanwhile, 
police investigating the group's disappearance found the bodies.
     By the time Moses came back from his wanderings in the wilderness, 
only his wife and a few adult stragglers remained with him.  And all 
were under arrest.
     A county grand jury indicted Jeffrey, Ron, Richard, Damon, and 
Danny for aggravated murder, a crime punishable in Ohio by death.  
Dennis Patrick, along with Alice, Greg, Susie, Tonya, Sharon, and 
Kathy, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
     Later, the prosecutoris office offered a deal to allow Richard to 
plead guilty to simple murder and Greg to complicity, in exchange for 
their testimony.
     At one of the trials, the defense attorney argued that Jeff was a 
victim himself, an "emotionally abused" child who had suffered all his 
life from low self-esteem and had fixed on the Averys because Dennis 
Avery reminded him of his own shameful inadequacies.  But Jeff sounded 
a more assured note in his own five-hour courtroom harangue, 
proclaiming himself a "prophet of God" and warning of retribution on 
sinners.  It took the jury less than two hours to find him guilty of 
five counts of aggravated murder.  The judge sentenced him to die in 
the electric chair.  He is still awaiting execution.
     Damon was found guilty of aggravated murder.
     The others all pleaded to avoid trial, except for Ron Luff, 
who was found guilty of murder and kidnapping and sentenced to 170 
years in prison.  Tonya, Dennis, and Kathy were permitted to plead to 
obstruction of justice, and given minimal sentences.
     Alice, despite a defense partly predicated on allegedly being a 
battered woman, was convicted of conspiracy to commit aggravated 
murder.  At her trial she insisted she did not know what Jeff was 
planning.
     "Everyone knew but me!"  she wailed.  But in a videotaped 
statement she had made when she was arrested, the jury had heard her 
say, "You had to be stupid not to know what he was up to."
     No one believed Alice was stupid, least of all the judge, who 
sentenced her to 150 years in prison.  Led out of the courtroom, she 
cried to the crowd, "I am not the Angel of Death!"
     Later, in prison, Alice would recall without emotion the childish 
drawing that six-year-old Karen had given her when the Averys came to 
dinner on the night they all were killed.  It was a picture of a 
rainbow, its rays brightly colored with crayons.  On the bottom the 
little girl had scrawled, "To Alice-I love you.  Karen."

     CHAPTER SEVEN

     El Padrino

     MARK @LROY WAs any parent's pride, a good-looking 
twenty-one-year-old with manners and brains, well-liked, a premed 
student with a ready smile that said he knew he was going somewhere in 
life.  That promising life ended in the most grisly way possible, when 
he stopped at the Mexican border one night, apparently just to be 
polite to a stranger.
     The end of Mark's short and happy life was grim proof that horror 
doesn't always have a prelude.  One minute he was in the company of 
close friends he had known since grade school.  The next, he was in the 
hands of the devil.
     The nightmare had begun innocently enough, during spring break 
1989, along the sunny beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.  Like a quarter 
million other collegeage kids, Mark and some friends had headed down to 
South Padre Island, a resort town on the Gulf just outside of 
Brownsville, at the heel of Texas.  The trip to the spring bacchanal at 
South Padre was a major excursion for the boys, who had to drive all 
night down the Texas coast to get there.  Mark's close high school 
buddy Brent Martin was at the wheel of his Olds Cutlass.  In the back 
seat were Bradley Moore and Bill Huddleston.  All of the boys had been 
working hard at college and looking forward to a rollicking vacation.
     They checked into the Sheraton, but had no intention of spending 
much time in the room.  Like their fellow revelers, the boys spent the 
days sunbathing on a beach overrun with college boys and girls, and 
their nights cruising the strip and partying.  On a couple of nights, 
like thousands of others, they ventured in small groups across the Rio 
Grande to enjoy the less expensive and more freewheeling atmosphere of 
Matamoros, the dusty Mexican city that huddles close to the U.S. 
boundary and entices spring breakers with boisterous bars, thumping 
live music, cheap beer, and no minimum drinking age.  For those so 
inclined, there are more lurid attractions available in 
Matamoros-prostitutes, drugs, sex shows.  In Matamoros, it was said, 
anything goes.
     Because of international car insurance restrictions, most 
Americans park on the Texas side of the border, walk through the 
customs portals, and hop into one of the dozens of tiny Mexican cabs 
always waiting on the other side for the short drive into the clutter 
and clamor of Matamoros.  This is what the four youths did on Monday 
night, March 13, leaving the Cutlass in the vast parking lot on the 
U.S. side and piling into a cab for the ride into Matamoros.
     Mark and his pals were clean-cut kids, adventuresome enough to 
enjoy the border-town attractions, but not foolhardy enough to ignore 
the often repeated warnings: Violence from the border towns was already 
spilling over into places like Brownsville, and everyone knew not to 
venture alone into Matamoros at night.
     Mark, especially, was no fool.  "I know just enough Spanish to get 
into trouble, but not enough to get out," he had recently joked in the 
self-deprecating way that people admired about him.
     There is no reason whatever to believe that on this night the boys 
did anything other than bar-hop, drink, laugh, swagger, and listen to 
music.
     Late in the evening, as throngs of weary revelers head back home 
into the U.S the Mexican streets leading to the border-crossing plaza 
between Matamoros and Brownsville are crowded bumper-tobumper with 
taxicabs, motorcycles, cars, pickups, and bicycles.  The sidewalks are 
jammed with clamoring peddlers hawking a bewildering array of 
wares-jewelry, ceramics, pifiatas, burritos, fireworks, blankets, straw 
hats, cold beer, papiermache tropical birds on a stick.  Especially 
during spring break, when Matamoros competes feverishly with more staid 
Brownsville and South Padre for the college students' dollars, the 
plaza is also filled with street hustlers-prostitutes trying to entice 
customers for one final fling in the shadows, drug dealers offering 
that last minute impulse purchase for anyone brazen enough to try to 
get it past U.S.
     customs, con men looking for one more score before the customers 
disappear over the border.
     Mark and his friends were among the mob of returning revelers on 
that night, filing into place in the long lines of Americans snaking 
toward the customs gates at the middle of the plaza as the peddlers and 
hustlers worked the thick crowd like street vendors outside a rock 
concert.
     Exhausted from a night of partying and beer, not particularly 
alert, looking forward only to bed, the boys drifted separately into 
several of the long lines waiting to pass through customs.  There was a 
social protocol to the scene: Hustlers routinely approached you, and 
you politely (but firmly) said no thanks.
     Under the protocol, there was no badgering-the hustler merely 
moved on and approached someone else in line.  It was business.
     The wait to get through customs was about fifteen minutes that 
night.  On the U.S. side the boys reassembled on the floodlit sidewalk 
to walk to the parking lot.  But they couldn't see Mark anywhere in the 
sea of faces around them.
     "Where's Mark?"  someone said.
     "He was right beside me before we went through customs," Bill 
said.  "Maybe he went back to the car already."
     Though he didn't think much about it at the time, Bill recalled a 
fleeting image he'd had of Mark-in fact, it would be the last one he 
would know of his friend.  As they were shuffling ahead in the lines on 
the Matamoros side of the plaza, Bill noticed a young Mexican man step 
out from a knot of people on the street and approach Mark, who was in a 
slower line several rows away.
     Bill hadn't paid much attention, since being approached was so 
routine.  He'd heard the stranger say something like, "Hey man, you 
want .  . . ?"  He thought he saw Mark turn and step a few feet out of 
line to reply to the stranger, or perhaps to hear him better above the 
noise.  Then the crowd edged forward, listlessly filling in the blank 
spaces in Bill's sight line.  As they filed through customs, Bill 
assumed Mark was still among them.
     But Mark wasn't waiting at the car.  The boys looked for him in 
the parking lot, but there was no sign.  it simply was not like Mark to 
wander off without a word.  Worried now, they crossed back through 
customs, searched the Mexican side of the plaza, and then took a 
taxicab back into Matamoros.  All night long they combed the 
now-deserted bars and walked the seedy main drag and dirty side 
streets, inquiring about an American boy.  No one knew a thing.
     As dawn approached, the only explanation that made sense was that 
perhaps Mark had been delayed at customs and then found his own ride 
back to the hotel.  But the customs officers knew nothing about him, 
and when the boys drove to the hotel, he wasn't there.  Could he have 
met a girl and be spending the night somewhere else?
     The boys slept fitfully for only a few hours.  Mark's absence 
simply didn't figure, not for a guy as conscientious as he.  Mark would 
have called or left a message.
     In fact, he would leave their lives without any further word.  As 
they searched for their friend, finally calling Mark's parents, who 
notified police on both sides of the border, they had no way of 
suspecting the terrible truth.  Mark Kilroy, who had only wanted to be 
polite, had been abruptly kidnapped from a public place.  Before anyone 
knew what had happened, he was pushed into a car, tied up, and driven 
to a foul-smelling shack on a forlorn ranch south of Matamoros.  His 
captors were a drug-dealing cult, one of the most feared gangs in 
northern Mexico.
     They had snatched Mark off the street simply because they needed 
a young American male to mutilate and offer up as a human sacrifice in 
a blackmagic ritual.
     Within days Mark's parents, James and Helen Kilroy, along with a 
small group of relatives and friends, were familiar figures desperately 
canvassing the Matamoros area.  As they searched, they began hearing 
disturbing reports that other young men had been reported 
missing-Mexican men, even young boys.
     Beyond the brazen commerce of the border town, Matamoros and its 
environs were a landscape of brutal poverty, besieged in recent years 
by warring drug gangs, where violence had grown as common as smoke from 
a chimney.  Still, young men who otherwise stayed out of trouble had 
never before disappeared without a trace-even the ruthless local drug 
gangs tended to leave evidence of their violent work.
     A concerned U.S. customs officer named Oran Neck worked on his off 
hours helping the small group of people looking for Mark.  They combed 
the streets and back alleys of Matamoros, handing out flyers that had 
the young man's picture on them and offered a reward of $5,000.  
American helicopters buzzed the border scrublands, clattering low over 
the shallow Rio Grande, looking for a body.
     As the search dragged on, they heard reports of other people who 
had simply disappeared from the area, people without well-financed 
families to alert the authorities.  In Matamoros Mark's parents met a 
local couple, Isidoro and Ericada Garcia, who told them their 
fourteen-year-old son, Jose Luis Garcia Luna, had been missing since 
the same time Mark disappeared.  Worse, other people whispered rumors 
about a mysterious new drug gang that had been taking over business in 
the region.  The gang had supernatural powers, people whispered: its 
members could not be killed with human bullets.  And it also had 
temporal protection, they confided, since membership included 
Federales, members of the Mexican federal police.
     The rumors were confounding and frustrating to a group of rational 
people trying to find a missing young man in a place where corruption 
breeds cynicism, where superstition, magic, and incantations are called 
on to explain things that reason cannot Meanwhile, as the searchers for 
Mark Kilroy stumbled around this wilderness of cracked mirrors, in a 
town not far away two federal police officers stood on the banks of a 
dirty river in the hot sun and watched some bare-chested men pull a 
badly decomposed human leg from a bush where it had snagged.
     "That seems to be more of him," one of the officers muttered.  The 
dismembered leg belonged to a well-known drug dealer, a man who had 
made his living in the local marijuana and cocaine-shopping trade since 
the 1970s, but who had lately run into some trouble from the outside 
gang of bloodthirsty brutes from Mexico City who had moved up to the 
border to claim the business for themselves.  For several days now, 
body parts of the local drug dealer had been turning up at various 
places along the river.
     The police knew that ritual mutilations were a trademark of the 
Mexico City gang.  Dismembered bodies often came floating down the 
river, usually with the spines ripped out.  This is the way the ancient 
Aztecs prepared humans for sacrifice-ripping out the spines.
     The federal officer watched the men on the riverbank and then 
looked without emotion at his partner.  They both knew who was 
responsible.
     "El Padrino," the officer said.
     Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was a deadly serious young man, born in 
Miami in 1962, to a mother who was fifteen years old, divorced already, 
and just off a boat from Cuba.
     A good-looking boy with dark eyes and light skin, he grew up a 
fussy and apprehensive child who was afraid to get his clothes dirty 
and always stayed close to his mother.  His meticulousness was 
remarkable, considering he grew up in a small apartment where his 
mother kept an altar in the living room on which she displayed ceramic 
busts of saints and sacrificed live chickens and the occasional baby 
goat, as part of her voodoolike Santeria religious devotions.  Beside 
that altar was a companion shrine, just a little smaller, which his 
mother had devoted to another icon, Marilyn Monroe.
     At the same time, she insisted that little Adolfo present to the 
outside world a respectable middleclass picture of upward mobility.  At 
her urging, he became a Roman Catholic altar boy, getting up at dawn to 
pick his way through the goats and chickens in the yard to make his way 
to church carrying his neatly pressed cassock.  She boasted that he was 
going to be a doctor and live with the rich in Boca Raton when he grew 
up.
     Small wonder that the boy began experiencing visions by the onset 
of adolescence.  At the age of fourteen the intense Adolfo held his 
mother spellbound with his description of a startling spiritual 
experience: Marilyn Monroe herself had appeared to him to tell him that 
she had not committed suicide.  She had died of natural causes!  His 
mother was fascinated by the boy's SUPERNATURAL powers.  Eventually, he 
dropped out of high school to pursue them.
     There was a job market for mystics in the Miami of Adolfo's youth. 
 As hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Caribbean poured into 
southern Florida during the 1970s, many brought with them a religious 
culture in which a Roman Catholic facade had been constructed over a 
foundation based on African-Caribbean spiritual beliefs in the worship 
of ancient gods who must be appeased with various offerings.  
Botdnicas-stores that sell herbs, religious statues, candles, and other 
supplies for these occult practices-sprang up like delis all over 
immigrant neighborhoods of South Florida.  The greater the favor, 
bigger the problem, or darker the vendetta, the larger the offering.  
In a botdnica one can also hire practitioners who cast spells, summon 
spirits, exorcise demons, and cure sicknesses.
     After working a series of odd jobs and shoplifting to buy drugs, 
Adolfo began to make a living as such a person, casting spells in 
storefront botdnicas.  After an apprenticeship, his reputation began to 
grow; as his clientele expanded, he became more deeply immersed in the 
murkier occult world where everyday Santeria crosses the line into the 
deeply demonic, black-magic dark side of Santeria, palo mayombe, a 
belief devoted to evil and obsessed with threats, greed, violence, and 
bloodshed.  Those who have studied palo mayombe maintain that it 
attracts the worst elements in society.  As such, it is the perfect 
religion for the drug trade.
     The secret priests of the cult, called mayomberos, preside over 
rituals that employ witches' caldrons into which a gory stew of 
ingredients-often including human remains, sometimes dug up from graves 
-are assembled for offering to voodoo gods.
     Santeros cleanly kill their animal sacrifices, avoiding 
unnecessary pain.  To mayomberos, torture and pain are inherent to the 
ritual.  At its most extreme, palo mayombe ritual uses live humans.
     The streets where this violent spiritual world displays its wares 
are the same ones from which the most violent manifestations of the 
brutal new Caribbean drug culture transformed South Florida life in the 
1970s.  By the time he was eighteen, Adolfo swaggered along those 
streets with a sense of entitlement, radiating menace.  Mayomberos 
dealt with enemies through evil spells; drug dealers had more direct 
methods.  Having a foot in both worlds, Adolfo sensed a certain 
symbiosis in combining the two.
     Still, competition was fierce.  Drug dealers-even those claiming 
spiritual gifts-were in abundant supply in Miami; gunfire had become a 
common part of the business day.  Adolfo had more visions.  In one of 
them he saw the future for a smart, urbane entrepreneur, fluent in 
Spanish, such as himself: Mexico City.
     Not that the Mexico City that Adolfo moved to in 1980 had any 
great need for another small-time drug dealer with big plans and a gun 
in his pocket.  It had thousands of those, with hungry new recruits to 
the drug trade pouring in every day from South America and the 
Caribbean.  Breaking into that business didn't require brains-it 
required raw courage.
     With plenty of the former and none of the latter, Adolfo assessed 
the situation through an instinctive grasp of market forces that would 
have served him well in any business he entered.  Beneath its 
cosmopolitan veneer as a world-class city, Mexico City harbors a darkly 
superstitious indigenous culture, where spirits and magic run as major 
subcurrents just below the surface of everyday life.  Even well-to-do, 
educated citizens routinely seek advice or purchase spells-to ensure 
good luck, repel bad luck, or even invoke harm on enemies-from seers 
and storefront witches.
     With his expertise in selling both sorcery and drugs, Adolfo 
decided he could make his fortune in such a place.  To the indigenous 
Mexican superstitions of Brujeria, which has Aztec roots and concerns 
itself with witchcraft and herbal healing, maternal security and stern 
justice, he added the dark and frightening elements of palo mayombe, 
and opened for business.  Realizing that the high end of the market 
was underserved, as street crime discouraged more affluent citizens 
from seeking out witches in run-down neighborhoods, Adolfo set himself 
up in a luxury office like a doctor, and waited for the carriage trade 
to come.
     "Welcome to the house of the devil," he would intone as affluent 
clients, some of them recruited in gay bars or flashy singles 
nightclubs, walked nervously through the door with their money in hand.
     This ability to move with ease through the capital's expensive and 
cliquish nightclubs had been honed well in South Florida, where 
Adolfo-unable to maintain close relationships with anyone except his 
mother-had for years prowled the anonymous leather bars and pickup 
joints of the Florida Gold Coast, moving from one temporarily intense 
homosexual relationship to another.
     "He seemed to prefer men who were mirror images of himself- 
handsome, smooth, and nicely dressed.  He treated his lovers well, 
showering them with generous gifts and writing passionate love letters 
and poems," author Cliff Linedecker wrote in Hell Ranck a 1989 book 
about the Constanzo drug cult.
     As the money came in, Adolfo dressed the part and refined his act, 
sometimes moving with an expensive and stunning companion-male or 
femaleon his arm, always moving with the flow of cocaine, hash, and 
boutique drugs by the handful.
     Everything was business, day and night.  In a short time Adolfo 
numbered among his clients well-known movie and television performers 
and business and government figures, who might bump with drug kingpins, 
transvestites, or street thugs in his outer office.
     All of them seemed to be afraid of something or someone, and many, 
he realized, had good reason for their anxiety.  He was in a position 
to help.  As the layers of clients and supplicants piled up in growing 
complexity, the services he could offer multiplied as well.  With 
police officers and politicians in his fold, the spiritual protection 
he could offer through rituals took on aspects of political and 
criminal protection as well.  Money, drugs, guns, and spirits all 
flowed through this rapacious network of contacts.  There was a certain 
logic in purchasing spiritual protection from a mayombero who 
associated with so many violent thugs and knew so many people with 
influence.
     It all interlocked.
     For a price-determined by exactly what he wanted at the 
time-anyone could be protected from evil within a magical shield of 
blood that Adolfo could cause to envelope them.  Even an enemy could be 
made to die.  Adolfo personally knew the very people who could arrange 
it.
     In 1985, after a devastating earthquake killed thousands and 
rocked Mexico City's corrupt aristocracy to its social foundations, 
Adolfo spread the rumor through his networks that he had predicted the 
quake.  By now Adolfo had a villa and a downtown apartment.  Traveling 
in the ostentatious style that only a drug kingpin can affect, 
constantly surrounded by an entourage, he even made several noisy trips 
home to South Florida to see his mother and show her what a personage 
he had become.  Everywhere he traveled, drug deals trailed along.
     Ultimately, Adolfo's path led to the northern Mexican border town 
of Matamoros, hard by the Texas city of Brownsville- Given its 
geography, Matamoros is a logical transshipment point for smugglers 
looking for the closest gateway to the key importing operations run by 
the Chicago Mafia.  As such, it is one of the half-dozen most important 
smuggling channels into America.  In such a place, drug money and its 
corrupting influence not only pervades all layers of daily life, it 
almost defines that life.  Fear of official intimidation coexists with 
the fear of criminal retribution-on the street, in the courts and 
municipal offices, in the home, in commerce and industry.
     Here, it is said, one does not demand justice.  One bargains for 
it.
     This atmosphere often seeps slowly across the border, where 
violent crime rates have skyrocketed in South Texas towns.  U.S. law 
enforcement officials and customs agents have become deeply frustrated 
by the flagrant corruption they encounter among their counterparts in 
border boomtowns like Matamoros, where drug lords flashing 
diamond-studded Rolex watches swagger openly like princes, commuting to 
town by helicopter from seaside mansions.
     These criminal overlords support a virtual welfare state of 
functionaries, layered downward from corrupt officials who provide 
protection to battalions of young boys who work as "mules," smuggling 
and distributing the contraband.  Kidnapping, torture, murder, and 
assassination are routine occurrences.
     Poorly paid, badly trained, and barely supervised, Mexican federal 
police officers often are regarded as little more than badge-carrying 
assassins.  Worse, law enforcement standards are so abysmal that drug 
kingpins routinely manage to obtain badges and appointments to the 
police force for whomever they designate.
     "Federal narcotics police are accountable for a large number of 
the cases of murder, torture, and abuse of due process in Mexico 
today," the international human-rights group Americas Watch declared in 
a 1990 report, which found that Mexico's federal officers "routinely 
commit criminal acts far worse than those they are trying to stop."
     But at least that was business, murderous as it was.
     In recent years an influx of ruthless Central American thugs has 
brought an even more frightening complication into the mix-an overlay 
of magic, superstition, and demonic ritualism.
     "We see more Cubans and Colombians infiltrating the drug trade, 
either working with old-line Mexican drug families or taking over," one 
U.S. narcotics agent said about the intensifying problems coming from 
towns like Matamoros during the second half of the 1980s.  Members of 
these new gangs sometimes came from cultures where occult religious 
practices were an integral aspect of criminal life.  "As they come in, 
they're bringing this supernatural stuff with them," said the agent.  
The old rules no longer applied.  Violent criminals were problem 
enough, but at least they feared a bullet.  Criminals who believe they 
have a pact with the devil-a pact that ensures them eternal life-are a 
cop's worst nightmare.
     Such a man-moving in a big way into the Matamoros drug scene in 
the late eighties-was Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo.  By 1987, Adolfo was a 
well-known sight in Matamoros, a swaggering mayombero who prowled the 
gay whorehouses of the Boy's Town district by night, set up a 
protection racket by day, and traveled to and from Mexico City in a new 
Mercedes with a driver.
     Besides being adjacent to the spring break party town of South 
Padre Island, Matamoros's U.S.
     neighbor, Brownsville, is the site of Texas Southmost College, an 
institution that attracts a large number of students from Mexico.  This 
is where, late in 1987
     while on an informal mission to recruit new followers, Adolfo met 
the beautiful Sara Maria Aldrette Villarreal, a tall and slender 
twenty-three-year-old Mexican student who fell immediately under his 
influence.  Sara saw Adolfo as handsome, accomplished, and, most of 
all, rich enough to satisfy her expensive whims.
     He saw her as a necessary final ingredient for his plan to take 
over the Matamoros drug-smuggling operations.  Sara had a brief love 
affair with Constanzo, whose homosexual preferences were well-known to 
everyone who knew him intimately-except his mother in South Florida.  
Adolfo's mother, in fact, was the main reason for the sexual affair 
with Sara.
     He brought the statuesque beauty home to his mother in her now 
well-furnished apartment, which still had the Santeria altar beside the 
one to Marilyn Monroe.
     "Mommy, this is the girl I am going to marry," he said proudly, 
having no intention of doing anything other than pleasing his mother 
with a fantasy before going back to business in Mexico City.
     "Very beautiful," she said appraisingly.  "She is a Mexican?"
     Adolfo and Sara went back to his villa outside of Mexico City for 
a few weeks.  By the time they returned to Matamoros, the affair was 
over.  But Sara had graduated to a much more important role in his 
scheme-she became his high priestess, the necessary female acolyte in 
the dark rituals of palo mayombe.
     With Sara at his side, Constanzo moved easily as he quietly 
recruited followers in the northern Mexico border towns, where the 
flashy Cuban from Mexico City had to contend with a suspicious and 
deeply machismo local drug culture.  This entre was important because 
a deeply entrenched Mexican drug organization, the Hernandez gang, 
already controlled the business in the Matamoros region and had no 
intention of yielding ground.  From its distribution center at the 
isolated Rancho Santa Elena, south of Matamoros, the Hernandez gang 
moved thousands of pounds of marijuana and quantities of cocaine each 
week through its long-established contacts in U.S. crime organizations 
north of the border.
     But the Hernandez group was being torn apart by bloody gang warfare 
when Adolfo arrived on the scene, and he adroitly manipulated the 
warring factions to his own use.  As he had in Mexico City, he offered 
protection from harm.  Again, he depended on a well-paid network of 
corrupt officials, a cadre of gun-toting thugs, and a surfeit of 
magical spiritualism to accomplish the task.
     Sara herself brought in one of the major figures in a warring 
faction of the Hernandez gang, a quick-tempered Matamoros strong-arm 
specialist, twenty-two-year-old Alvaro de Leon Valdez, whose nickname 
was El Duby.
     Adolfo and Sara recruited him like a hot job prospect in the 
corporate world.  They introduced him to the other major members of the 
organization.  They wined him and dined him.  And in the Mercedes, they 
drove him to Mexico City to spend a few days at Adolfo's villa.  It was 
an sprawling hacienda, with a pool and a tennis court, a house framed 
with palms and surrounded by a fence with a great iron gate.
     The neighbors were lawyers, government officials, and Federales.
     Adolfo tried to explain the interlocking spiritual and the 
financial aspects of the business to El Duby.
     He and his cohorts had capital, influence, firepower -and access 
to the major Colombian and other South American manufacturing 
operations that were revolutionizing the drug business and driving the 
Mexicans out of their own trade.  What they needed was the solid inroad 
that El Duby would provide into the Hernandez operation.  With El Duby 
on board, it would only be a matter of time before the entire operation 
would fall to Adolfo's control.
     Adolfo was very persuasive.
     "Listen, you can stay where you are and get killed with those 
fucking greasers," he said, "or you can come with me and live forever, 
and live with class."
     El Duby looked at the beautiful Sara.  His eyes roamed over the 
luxurious, sun-splashed, whitewashed rooms of the villa.  He did not 
need any more time to think about it.
     "I'm with you, man," he said.
     Within a month Adolfo had established himself as the kingpin of 
the border smuggling operation.  He did this through the usual blend of 
mysticism and terror-the dismembered bodies with their spines severed 
were one graphic calling card.  Adolfo used Sara, El Duby, and others 
in a brilliant campaign of psychological warfare that convinced many of 
the warring gang members of the wisdom of enlisting in the temporal and 
spiritual protection ring that he offered.  Everybody would make a. lot 
more moneyand, they said, live forever-once they joined up.
     Adolfo even obtained a Mexican Federal Judicial Police badge.  
Among his close friends, it was known, was Commander Florentino Ventura 
Gutierrez, the man who headed the federal police.
     Before long the Hernandez gang did not exist.  In its place, 
indeed operating with impunity from the old Hernandez hideaway at Rancho 
Santa Elena, was a bloodthirsty drug cult that answered to one man, a 
man whose name was now just whispered: El Padrino.
     Adolfo used the hideaway for the palo mayombeinfluenced rituals 
that served to hold his gang together in spiritual bondage.  From the 
ranch more than a ton of marijuana was baled and shipped north each 
week.  The ranch also was used to cut and package shipments of cocaine 
bound for America.  And when the work was done, the cult assembled 
there for the demonic rituals led by Adolfo.  With Sara at his side as 
priestess, he drew "magical shields" in blood around gang members, 
offering them protection from all harm, even bullets.  At first the 
rituals were based on animal sacrifices.  But very quickly this 
changed.  Human blood was needed, Adolfo said, for the magical shield 
to continue working.  By now the cult had about three dozen regular 
members.  Its core was a group of thugs led by El Duby, whose loyalty 
to El Padrino was unquestioned.
     In 1989 a young man from a nearby village hitchhiking to a bus 
station along the Rio Grande was given a ride by two of Adolfo's men.  
He never was seen alive again.  At the ranch, he was ceremoniously 
slaughtered and his blood drained into a witch's caldron.
     He was buried in a grave on the ranch, the first of many to come.  
Soon afterward, young men and boys began vanishing from Matamoros and 
the small towns near the Rio Grande.
     Though conceding her association with Adolfo, Sara would later 
steadfastly deny ever taking part in any of the human sacrifices.  "It 
was like hell," she would claim about her life in the Constanzo drug 
cult, maintaining that she was a victim, not a perpetrator of the 
horrors.  "They treated me like a prisoner.  I don't know how I got 
into this without knowing what it was."  Sara insisted that she 
followed Adolfo's orders because he threatened to harm her family with 
his witchcraft.
     But some members would later claim that she was called La Madrina, 
the Godmother, and her name was whispered in the same hushed tones as 
that of El Padrino.
     The name was no longer whispered after a day in April of 1989, one 
month after the disappearance of Mark Kilroy.  A task force of special 
anticorruption Mexican police on routine drug-interdiction patrol in 
the Matamoros region chanced upon a suspicious pickup truck bouncing on 
the rutted coastal road in the barren scrubland where armadillos roamed 
and skinny cattle sagged in the heat, thirteen miles south of 
Matamoros.
     They gave chase, following the pickup up a dirt road in a cloud of 
dust before the truck ran off the road into a ditch.  Just beyond was a 
small collection of run-down clapboard buildings.  The police followed 
the fleeing men into a small tin-roofed warehouse.  Inside they 
encountered five men in all, along with the remnants of a big marijuana 
shipment and some odd statues and implements that the cops initially 
did not have time to study, since they were expecting armed resistance. 
 But there was no gunfire.
     The officers were baffled by the nonchalant way the suspects stood 
there, unarmed, facing them.  One of them was even giggling.
     "What's the matter with you?"  asked one of the cops.  "Don't you 
know you're going to prison?"
     "You will never take me," the man said.  "Your bullets will bounce 
off."
     "Why is that?"
     "Because I am invisible.  Around me is a magic shield."
     The fallacy of - this assertion was demonstrated when the 
arresting officers roughly slapped handcuffs on the suspects and pushed 
them into a corner, where their predicament sank in and they cowered as 
the police began to inspect the scene of horror inside the shack.
     The stink of the place repulsed them, but not nearly as much as 
what they encountered inside.  Beside the door, crawling with flies and 
maggots, was a great cast-iron pot, a veritable witch's caldron inside 
which was a congealed soup of repulsive liquid in which could be seen a 
horseshoe, a boiled turtle, a stump of a goat's foot, and, one of the 
officers realized with a surge of nausea, what appeared to be pieces of 
rotted of human flesh and brain matter.
     Arrayed on one shelf were garishly painted statues of saints, the 
icons of palo mayoinbe.  Beside them were candle stumps, ceramic bowls 
caked with blood, and empty bottles.  The plank floor was strewn with 
cigar butts, tequila bottles, a rotted goat's head, rusty wire hangers. 
 In a corner was what appeared to be a bird's nest that, on closer 
inspection, seemed to be made of human hair.  A blood-caked machete lay 
nearby.
     The arresting officers called for additional assistance, not 
knowing what more they might encounter on the isolated ranch.  Within a 
short time Mexican reinforcements arrived at the ranch, along with 
American agents working on the case.
     By now the cultists' faith in their supernatural invulnerability 
had entirely disintegrated and they were ready to answer any question 
they were asked.
     "These guys caved in like cheap suitcases," one American agent 
said.  They began to name names.
     Among the reinforcements who arrived at the ranch were Oran Neck, 
the U.S. customs agent who had been helping Mark Kilroy's parents lead 
the search for their son.  Neck always carried one of the missing 
persons flyers with Mark's picture on it, and he took it out and showed 
it to the men at the ranch, asking, "Have you seen this boy?"
     "Yes," whimpered one of the men.  "He is out there."
     Outside, in a corral surrounded by a sagging wood fence, they 
found the crudely dug graves.  The horrified arresting officers 
discovered twelve bodies under a few inches of dirt.  All had been 
beheaded.  One of them was a police informer who had disappeared while 
on a drug investigation.  Others were young men who merely had the 
misfortune of being noticed by El Padrino, who would simply point them 
out at random on a street and tell his.henchmen, "That one."
     Then they dug up the remains of Mark Kilroy.
     One of the men now in custody, Serafin Hernandez Garcia, who had 
been introduced to the cult by Sara Aldrette, explained that the 
American college boy had been kidnapped near the customs plaza at the 
border.  The young man@hosen at random because El Padrino had decreed 
that a blond-haired Anglo male was required for a human sacrifice-had 
merely looked up and turned when he was approached by two emissaries of 
the cult.  In a flash they pushed him into a car and drove off to the 
ranch, where he was bound.  The next day he was led into the shed.  The 
last thing Mark Kilroy saw before a machete hacked off his head was the 
face of a man dressed in a ceremonial white robe, smiling serenely in 
the flickering yellow glow of candlelight.
     "Who made this sacrifice?"  a cop demanded.
     "El Padrino."
     "We killed them for protection," another of the men in the cult, 
Elio Hernandez Rivera, twenty-two years old, explained.
     At the police station, as the men were interrogated further, El 
Padrino was identified as Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo.  They also gave 
the name of Sara Aldrette.  "She is the witch," one of the men 
explained casually.
     What's more, there were two addresses, one an apartment in Mexico 
City, the other a villa outside of the capital.
     After learning about the raid on the ranch, Adolfo and Sara had 
fled Matamoros in his $60,000 Mercedes.  By now there was no talk of 
any magic shield.
     Instead, El Padrino found a phone to call his mother in Miami and 
wail that he was being persecuted by the corrupt police, but he had 
done nothing wrong.
     "Mommy, do not believe the terrible things you will see on 
television!"  he sobbed.
     As he made this plea to his mother, Mexican police were raiding 
his home in Matamoros.  At the same time, the Federales had arrived 
with machine guns at his empty villa outside Mexico City.  Inside they 
discovered ritualistic altars and the other claptrap of the occult 
paranoia, along with the accoutrements of a fine entrepreneurial life 
such as thousand-dollar suits, diamond 'ewe@, and gold watches.
     "He was a fine neighbor," said a man who lived down the street.  
"No trouble."
     In the Mercedes, Adolfo and Sara hurtled south across the 
mountains.  They arrived at the apartment in Mexico City, where El Duby 
had been staying while working on a business deal.  Like Adolfo, El 
Duby saw himself as a debonair figure.  His nickname, in fact, was owed 
to his nervous habit of crooning the Frank Sinatra lyric 
"dooby-dooby-do" as he worked.
     Ever loyal, El Duby welcomed El Padrino and Sara into the 
apartment and said they would be safe.
     But shortly after they got there, Adolfo had another vision: the 
police were coming.  This vision turned out to be entirely correct.
     An hour later, when the wail of sirens rose up from the street, 
Adolfo grabbed a gun and went berserk for fear of being taken away in 
disgrace like a common criminal.
     "They're here!  Why run?  Don't hide!"  he shrieked.
     "He went crazy, crazy," El Duby later recalled.
     "He began shooting out the window.  He said everything, 
everything, was lost.  He said, 'No one is going to have this money!' " 
So Adolfo threw the money out the fourth-floor window onto the police 
rushing the entrance of the building.  Neighbors hurried out to try to 
snatch up bills that sifted down like so much confetti.
     In the apartment, while Sara cried, Adolfo slapped El Duby in the 
face and then ordered El Duby to kill him, "because it is the end and I 
want to die."
     El Duby raised his machine gun.  As always, he did as he was told.
      CHAPTER EIGHT k6 kt 0 kt# Yahweh HE CALLED HIMSELF the son of 
God.  Yahweh Ben Yahweh was not a modest man.
     "Egypt has the pyramids," the towering black religious leader 
declared in a 1990 speech to a gathering of admiring South Florida 
business executives.  "India has the Taj Mahal.  France has the Eiffel 
Tower.
     Rome has the Pope.  Orlando has Disney.  Miami has the son of 
Yahweh.
     "The world's greatest attraction is in your midst," he said.  "I'm 
here."
     He is now in prison, but before his time ran out, Yahweh had quite 
a run in South Florida.  For many years his mate followers, known as 
"Yahwehs," were familiar figures in Miami, steely-eyed men dressed 
completely in white, with turbans on their heads.  In Esquire magazine 
the writer Pete Hamill recalled covering the Miami riots in 1989 and 
encountering a quartet of burly Yahwehs who looked "like the house band 
from one of those velvet-roped mob joints with names like the Oasis or 
the Aladdin."  Hamill described Yahweh's real name, Hulon Mitchell, 
Jr as C4a name right out of a Elmore Leonard novel."
     But there wasn't anything amusing about the Yahwehs, despite their 
comic-opera costumes and banana-republic military deportment.  To cross 
Yahwells was to flirt with danger.  A severed head was only one of the 
Yahwehs' grisly calling cards.
     "I am the Messiah, I am the word.  I am incarnate," Mitchell 
proclaimed in a 1986 interview with the New York Times.
     But later he would argue that grandiose claims of omnipotence 
aside, he wasn't really aware of what was going on.  The murders, 
mutilations, beatings, firebombings, and extortions all had been done 
without his knowledge, the son of God would insist.
     Until they were finally brought down by federal prosecutors, 
Yahweh and hundreds of his followers ran a criminal enterprise under 
cover of the Nation of Yahweh, a religious sect headquartered in a 
former supermarket that had been burned and looted in the 1980 Liberty 
City riots in Miami.  They called the headquarters the Temple of Love, 
but it was really a den of inequity.
     For over a decade the Temple was a politically potent, 
well-organized community force that depended on business acumen and 
well-orchestrated publicity to cover up the truth about its real 
activities.
     Actually, law enforcement authorities and others suspected the 
truth almost from the beginning.  In 1981, just two years after Yahweh 
founded the Temple of Love, the first headless body turned up with what 
looked like Yahweh's imprint on the crime.
     Joining Yahweh was regarded as a lifelong commitment, which is 
something the victim of that beheading, Aston Green, apparently forgot 
when he and two roommates decided to leave the sect that year, ignoring 
Yahweh's warning that "heads will roll" unless they returned to the 
fold.  It turned out he meant it literally.
     On November 12, according to court testimony many years later, ten 
Yahweh members took Green into a back room of the Temple of Love, beat 
him, bound and gagged him, wrapped him in a carpet and drove to a 
secluded area, where a machete was taken to him while he was still 
alive.
     A jogger found Green in a field.  His head turned up nearby.
     Horrified, Green's roommates, postal worker Mildred Banks and 
accountant Carlton Carey, told police that they suspected the Yahwehs 
had executed Green in retaliation for leaving the sect.  Shortly after 
they returned from the police station, the two roommates were slashed 
and shot in their North Dade home by two men wearing ski masks and 
brandishing guns and swords.  Banks, who managed to crawl to a 
neighbor's house and call an ambulance, recovered from her wounds.  
Carey did not.
     Detectives investigating the crimes found evidence at the Temple 
of Love, similar pieces of carpet, which seemed to implicate the 
Yahwehs.  Yahweh and his chief deputy, a woman who had taken the name 
Judith Israel, refused to talk.  So did everyone else.  The case went 
nowhere.
     A newspaper story at the time speculated on the reason for the 
impotent investigation: Authorities were reluctant to be seen going 
after a black religious leader with an enthusiastic following, a man 
who courted politicians, who had been lionized in the media as a savior 
of the ghetto and a paragon of black community enterprise.  Instead, 
the police waited and kept files.
     "We always felt somewhere along the line someone would trip up and 
they'd start talking," an investigator said.
     It would take almost another decade to bring Yahweh and his killer 
cult to justice.
     The self-proclaimed messiah Yahweh Ben Yahweh was born Hulon 
Mitchell, Jr in 1935 in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, the oldest of fifteen 
children.  His father was a grainery laborer who worked weekends as a 
Pentecostal preacher.  Mitchell and his brothers and sisters all sang 
in the church choir.  Though they grew up in a poor, racially 
segregated environment, the children apparently gained some sense of 
life's possibilities.  In fact, one of Hulon's sisters, Leona Mitchell, 
went on to become a featured soprano with the Metropolitan Opera.
     For a time Hulon Mitchell looked as if he too was on the right 
track.  After a hitch in the Air Force, he used the GI Bill to get a 
B.A. in psychology at Phillips College in Oklahoma, and even went on to 
law school at the University of Oklahoma.  But he dropped out, moved to 
the Chicago suburbs, and became involved with the Black Muslim sect.
     This is where he first changed his name-to Hulon Shah.  But the 
blue-eyed firebrand was expelled from the Chicago sect because of his 
violent racial views.
     Over the years, he would move frequently, often changing his name 
and religious identity.  In Atlanta he turned up as Father Michel and 
had his own storefront church during the 1970s.  There, he cobbled 
together a religious philosophy based on the theory that whites are the 
root of all evil.  This he later imported to a new undertaking in the 
Liberty City neighborhood of Miami.  Now calling himself Brother Moses, 
he wrote of the white race as "the devil, Satan, serpent, and beast," 
with special invective against Jews and the "synagogue of Satan."
     Philosophically, the beliefs he brought to Miami were a hybrid 
offshoot of a black triumphatist sect founded in Detroit in 1930, which 
proclaimed that blacks, the original humans and true heirs to the 
Promised Land, have been persecuted throughout history by a bastard 
race of whites that sprang from a diabolical prehistoric breeding 
experiment.  With their compelling appeal to black self-esteem and past 
cultural greatness, such claims are often heard on corner soapboxes from 
Times Square to Golden Gate Park.
     But Brother Moses was no ordinary street hustler by the time he 
got to Miami.  Claiming that he had died in his thirties and risen from 
the dead as messiah of the lost black tribe of Israel, the dapper 
charismatic renamed himself Yahweh Ben Yahweh@od the Son of God-and 
founded a new church, the Temple of Love, gathering hordes of new 
followers, who renovated the burned-out supermarket into a fortress.
     The Yahwehs churned out publications and tapes to distribute their 
racist theories nationally.  At the center of the enterprise, Yahweh 
himself was an imposing figure.  Tall, turbaned, and bejeweled, 
invariably surrounded by white-robed bodyguards who carried six-foot 
wood staffs, Yahweh and his twin message of hope and retribution 
attracted not only poor and disenfranchised neighborhood residents, but 
also scores of young black professionals, including teachers and 
lawyers.  It was a message that found especially fertile ground in poor 
black Miami neighborhoods, still enraged over the beating death of a 
black insurance executive by police officers in 1979.
     The message was fairly simple, especially to people desperate for 
hope and overwhelmed by misery.
     White people were the root of all evil, the thieves of a long-lost 
nobility rightfully belonging to the black race.  One of the first 
widely distributed Yahweh publications was titled, "You Are Not a 
Nigger.  The World's Best-Kept Secret."
     A typical follower was B'Ruraw Geela Israel, who grew up in 
Liberty City.  After reading one of the Yahweh pamphlets handed to her 
on a street corner in 1984, she went to the Temple and heard the leader 
deliver his compelling message of individual responsibility and black 
pride.
     "It blew my mind," she told the Miami Herald.
     "Some of us can truly see he is the son of God."
     Another follower, Ruth Israel, recounted the first time she went 
to the Temple to hear Yahweh Ben Yahweh speak.  "He came in and walked 
on stage.  He was handsome.  He spoke, and it just hit me.  He started 
giving me the wisdom of the word and I said, 'This has to be it.' I had 
never heard anyone speak like this man before."
     "When I read 'You Are Not a Nigger,' I knew he had to be somebody 
divine," said another, Shalisha Israel.  "The answers that he gave, the 
documentation he gave from the scripture .  . ."
     Perhaps the most important follower recruited by Yahweh was Judith 
Israel, a woman with a flair for business, who would become the 
leader's second-incommand and treasurer and, police said, commonlaw 
wife.  Her real name was Linda Gaines, and she met Yahweh in Orlando 
during the late 1970s, when he was still calling himself Brother Moses. 
 She was in charge of the sect's nonreligious activities, especially 
its finances.
     Outwardly,'the Temple of Love was a model of initiative and 
self-sufficient resourcefulness.  The complex was neat, scrubbed, and 
well-maintained.
     Like Black Muslims, Yahweh members eliminated their "slave names." 
 Yahwehs adopted the last name Israel.
     Except for the assertive Judith Israel, whose position as YahWeh's 
aide-de-camp was unassailable, women were expected to stay in the 
background and remain silent.  Raising money through panhandling and 
street vending was their major duty.
     When they weren't fanning out through the community to solicit 
donations and proselytize for new members, Yahwehs were expected to 
lead a monastic life at the Temple, where a fearsome squad of elite 
guard known as the Circle of Ten rigidly enforced discipline.  Many of 
the women-and some girls as young as fourteen-were expected to provide 
sexual services to Yahweh.
     The Yahwehs established an impressive business record in Miami.  
In the entrepreneurial spirit of the 1980s, they rehabilitated crack 
houses as residences for sect members.  Under Judith Israel's 
direction, they deftly acquired minority-enterprise loans and 
government contracts.  They opened shops, a beauty salon, even an 
elementary school called Yahweh University, where children paid strict 
attention and chanted their lessons for admiring visitors.
     By the end of the decade the Temple of Love's holdings would 
include twenty-six properties worth about $9 million, and the group was 
claiming to have more than 10,000 members.
     Like the Move cult in Philadelphia, the Yahwehs delivered their 
own babies, since the leader forbade the use of hospitals for 
childbirth.  Several infants who died during birth were buried on the 
Temple grounds, followers later said.
     As the sect prospered, Yahweh kept up a steady drumbeat of 
invective against dissidents and defectors.
     Neighbors who complained about noise and threats, or who ran afoul 
of Yahweh street organizers, quickly learned not to call the police.
     The long-dormant criminal investigation into the Yahwehs stirred 
back to life in the mid-eighties.  Police interviewed numerous 
defectors who told them of a public execution of a Yahweh that had 
taken place in the Temple in 1983.
     The victim, a twenty-two-year-old national karate champion named 
Leonard Dupree, had been beaten to death inside the Temple after 
becoming involved in an argument with a woman member.  After Dupree was 
beaten, police were told, sect members kicked him to death while Yahweh 
watched.
     Thirty to fifty disciples set upon Dupree, some using clubs and a 
tire iron.  The body was loaded into a truck and buried in the 
Everglades, authorities were later told.
     Though they had witnesses who claimed to have seen the attack, 
police had no corpse.  Prosecutors decided there was not enough 
evidence for any criminal indictments.
     But the investigators' case files kept growing.
     In May of 1986, after a group of Yahweh solicitors were roughed up 
by drug dealers, sect members stormed the block and firebombed several 
homes.
     "Yahweh took vengeance on his enemy," a participant would later 
testify.
     "I heard people screaming," sect member Neariah Israel, one of the 
participants who threw Molotov cocktails, would recall.  "I lit another 
one."
     Later that year Yahweh named Neariah Israel as a "death angel" 
charged with killing enemies of the sect.  It would be the biggest 
mistake of Yahweh's life.
     Quietly, the FBI joined the case in the aftermath of the 
firebombing.  For a brief time anti-Yahweh publicity flared on the 
still-unproved reports of the sect's involvement in the firebombings.
     "They are a hate group," Willie Simms, a member of the Dade County 
Community Relations Board, said in 1986.  "These p&ople are 
brainwashed.  I fear for the city."
     Another violent outbreak was laid to the Yahwehs in late 1986.  As 
part of its aggressive business expansion, the sect purchased a 
rat-infested apartment complex in the poor Miami suburb of Opa-Locka.
     The hundred existing tenants, all blacks, were ordered to vacate 
their apartments.  But some refused.
     In October, a seventy-five-man Yahweh eviction squad rolled up to 
the building in two limousines, six buses, and several cars.  In their 
white robes and sandals, the menacing Yahwehs piled out with their 
sixfoot clubs and surrounded the building.
     'Rvo men who resisted being evicted from their apartments were 
shot, beaten to death, ahd then beheaded.
     Police immediately arrested a man found hiding near the complex 
and charged him in the murders.
     The suspect gave his name as Neariah Israel and said that he was 
404 years old.
     But his real identity created quite a stir when it became known.  
The thirty-three-year-old Neariah Israel was actually Robert Ernest 
Rozier Jr a former defensive end for the St.  Louis Cardinals and 
Oakland Raiders in the seventies.  He had joined the sect after turning 
over his bank account and other holdings.
     Rozier was the man who would bring down the empire.
     Yahweh made the mistake of taxing Rozier's loyalty by letting him 
stew unhappily in jail.  After seven months Rozier angrily demanded that 
Yahweh provide him with a new lawyer.  The request did not sit well 
with the son of God, who denounced Rozier as a "black devil" and 
presided over a public ceremony at the Temple of Love in which Rozier 
was excommunicated from the sect.
     Police and prosecutors worked for over a year to leverage this 
rift and engineer a deal with Rozier, who in 1988 finally pleaded 
guilty to participating in four murders for the Yahwehs.  In exchange 
for the plea and for agreeing to give detailed evidence against the 
Yahwehs, Rozier was able to avoid the electric chair and receive a 
twenty-two-year prison sentence instead.
     Soon after Rozier started talking, the rumors took on graphic 
dimensions.  Crimes like the Opa-Locka killings were clearly the work 
of the Yahwehs, but authorities were astonished at the story Rozier 
told of widespread murder, retribution, and greed.
     Rozier implicated the Yahwehs in a number of unsolved murders that 
had perplexed Miami police for years.  He also described how Yahweh 
controlled members of his inner circle, the security force known as the 
"Brotherhood," with demands that they provide grisly proof of their 
devotion.
     "Kill me a white devil and bring me an ear," Yahweh ordered, 
according to Rozier.
     Police shuddered at hearing that.  In the mid-eighties, eight 
white vagrants had been found murdered, with their ears cut off, in 
alleys and other places throughout Miami.  Until Rozier told them that 
the vagrants had been chosen at random and murdered by himself and 
other Yahwehs, authorities had suspected the mutilation killings were 
the work of a single deranged serial killer.
     Yahweh, who insisted on seeing proof of the kill, liked to carry 
the ears around and often showed them to people for fun.  Prosecutors 
later obtained testimony from more than fifty other witnesses who 
corroborated Rozier's accounts.
     One follower recalled Yahweh taking an ear out of

     KILLER CULTS

     a brown-paper lunch bag and displaying it with a grin.
     "See this hairy devil!"  Yahweh said.
     "Praise Yahweh," the follower replied uneasilyFor Rozier and 
certain members of the Brotherhood, the ears were the price of 
admission.
     While Rozier was in jail after the firebombings of 1986, the 
Nation of Yahweh changed course, curtailed its violence and toned down 
the racist rhetoric.
     it redoubled its efforts to establish black-owned businesses in 
poor areas of Miami and South Florida.
     The Nation even enrolled in the Chamber of Commerce.
     Diligently courting politicians and business leaders in much the 
way Jim Jones had done more than a decade earlier in San Francisco, 
Yahweh managed to transform the image of his followers from menace to 
virtue.  The Nation of Yahweh and its Temple of Love established 
antidrug programs.  Under the guidance of Judith Israel, the Temple's 
coffers filled and its real estate holdings grew.
     In their flowing robes and turbans, Yahwehs became familiar sights 
at political rallies and community meetings and were especially active 
in voter registration drives.  Under Judith Israel's direction, the 
group's rapidly expanding business holdings encompassed a $9 million 
portfolio of well-tended apartment complexes, motels, strip malls, 
bakeries, warehouses, and other businesses.  Among them was a grocery 
store given rent-free to the Yahwehs by the city of Miami, whose 
taxpayers funded $300,000 worth of equipment and renovations.
     Yahweh became an emblem of successful black enterprise.  Drawn by 
the impression of black political power, local, county, and state 
politicians were eager to be seen at his Temple and receive Yahweh's 
endorsement-since it was clear that Yahweh's followers voted the way 
they were told.  Visiting dignitaries were always videotaped by Temple 
publicists.  The videos were used for promotion and fund-raising 
purposes.
     Still, as with Jones's People's Temple in San Francisco, 
disturbing rumors about abuses in the Nation of Yahweh were never far 
below the surface-for anyone who cared to look for them.  To many black 
residents, the name Yahweh was always associated with violence, 
intimidation, and terror, no matter what the Yahweh public relations 
machine said.  Furthermore, Dade County child-welfare authorities had 
been hearing reports about the abuse of children at the Temple for 
years.
     The Yahwehs' blatantly racist antiwhite literature left no room 
for ambiguity.  Moreover, the sect published paranoiac tracts that 
sounded eerily reminiscent of Jim Jones and his Temple.  "We have come 
to the point where we must find justice for ourselves or commit 
suicide," one Yahweh publication said.  "Suicide" and "race riot" were 
common terms in Yahweh's writings.
     Yet the political acclaim persisted even after Yahweh's name had 
been publicly connected to murder and other criminal activities.  For 
example, in October of 1990-four months after the Miami Herald 
published startling allegations linking the Yahwehs to murders and 
other violent crimes-Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez issued an official 
proclamation making October 7 "Yahweh Ben Yahweh Day."  Writing later 
in Esquire magazine, Pete Hamill noted the irony of this act: "Miami, 
after all, was the only city in the country that refused to honor 
Nelson Mandela during his American tour."
     Yahweh's honors did not last much longer, however.
     It had taken too many years to put the case together.  Law 
enforcement officials would later privately concede that worries about 
the appearance of racial or religious prejudice in prosecuting a 
successful black community enterprise were partly responsible for the 
slow pace of the investigation, which was handled by the U.S. 
Attorney's office as the result of an agreement with the state.  But by 
the autumn of 1990, federal prosecutors felt they were finally ready 
with a solid case.  On November 7, 1990, Yahweh and fifteen of his 
followers were charged with conspiracy and racketeering in what U.S. 
Attorney Dexter Lehtinen called a "reign of terror" masterminded by 
Yahweh Ben Yahweh throughout South Florida.
     Lehtinen called the Yahwehs a "cult" and said the indictments had 
ended an "era of extreme violence .  . .
     "The defendants engaged in violence as a mechanism for keeping 
discipline, and violence as a mechanism for making money," Lehtinen 
said.
     "Yahweh Ben Yahweh trusted no one," the prosecutor said-not even 
those who killed on his orders.
     "He made them bring back parts of the body."
     The indictment accused the group of killing fourteen people, 
including former members who displeased Yahweh with disloyalty or 
"blasphemy," and of terroristic activities such as the neighborhood 
firebombing.  Among those indicted was Judith Israel.  The indictment 
called her the "financial brains" of the operation.
     The indictment also made note of the plight of children in the 
cult, and charged that Yahweh "exercised control by separating families 
of followers within the enterprise, by regulating the personal and 
sexual lives of married followers and by having sexual relations with 
both adult and minor female followers."
     Yahweh was on business in New Orleans when the indictment was 
handed up.  FBI agents had already staked out the French Quarter hotel 
where he was staying in an expensive suite, accompanied by several 
bodyguards.  The phone in that suite rang at five A.M.
     on the morning of the indictment.  The leader himself answered.
     "FBI," he was told.  "We have a warrant for your arrest."
     About thirty-five FBI agents were waiting for him in the lobby.  
Wearing his white robe and turban, Yahweh was taken away in handcuffs.
     As soon as Yahweh was in custody, word was flashed to agents and 
local cops in seven states, who had staked out locations of others 
named in the indictment.  They sprang into action in precision raids.
     In Miami more than fifty FBI agents and local police SWAT units 
moved on the block-long Temple of Love complex at 2766 NW 62nd Street, 
using a battering ram to break down the door.
     Judith Israel was arrested in Atlanta at the same time.  Other 
defendants were nabbed in raids the same day in North Carolina and 
Lafayette, Louisiana.  In all, thirteen of the people named in the 
indictments were in custody within minutes of Yahweh's arrest.
     In the bail hearing after the arrest, Yahweh identified himself as 
"the first begotten son of God."
     Responding to the arrests, the Nation of Yahweh intensified its 
public-relations campaign.  Some newspaper ads commissioned by Yahweh 
cited various cold weather spells, floods, hurricanes, disease 
epidemics, and even locust plagues as the result of Yahweh's arrest.  
Other printed and broadcast ads relentlessly reiterated the theme that 
Yahweh was being persecuted because of his race and religion.
     Yahweh's defense attorney was Alcee L. Hastings, a former federal 
judge who was impeached by Congress in 1989 amid accusations of 
bribery, a charge on which- he was later acquitted.  Calling the 
government's case against his client a "travesty of justice," Hastings 
said the persecution of Yahweh should be a warning: "If they can indict 
this religion they can go after any religion."  During the trial, he 
described his client as a "Gandhiesque" figure persecuted for his good 
works among the poor.
     Rozier was the prosecution's star witness but F sixty-three others 
also testified, including a dozen former followers, many of whom had 
eyewitness accounts of murder and mayhem ordered by Yahweh.
     For his part, Yahweh insisted that he was innocent of murder.  He 
maintained that he found out about the murders only after followers 
came to him and confessed their sins, although he did describe himself 
in court as the "Grand Master of the Celestial Lodge, Architect of the 
Universe and Only Potentate and Founder of the Nation of Yahweh."
     He said, "They were telling me about it after they had done it," 
and compared himself to a priest bound by the confidentiality of 
confession.  Yahweh also said that the 1986 firebombing in Delray Beach 
was solely the work of renegade members of the sect, led by Rozier, 
whom he called a "serial killer."
     In a television interview during the trial he said that "one or 
two people got together on their own" to cut the head off one victim.  
Yahweh cast himself as a man betrayed even by his own sister, Jean 
Solomon, who had testified that he watched the beating and execution of 
Leonard Dupree, and then ordered followers to pummel the dead man's 
body.
     "The man called Christ had many false witnesses against him," 
Yahweh lamented.  "It's a racist trial," he said, venturing a 
prediction on the outcome: "I expect, absolutely, divine intervention."
     It didn't work out that way.
     After hearing four months of testimony, the jury convicted Yahweh 
and six followers-including Linda Gaines-of conspiracy, including the 
commission of murders.  Seven other followers were acquitted; the jury 
deadlocked on two others.  The jury acquitted or was hung as to all the 
racketeering charges.
     In September 1992, U.S. District Judge Norman Roettger shocked 
prosecutors by giving Yahweh eighteen years in prison-two years less 
than the maximum sentence.  The judge maintained that Yahweh's 
community work warranted some consideration.
     Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Scruggs protested: "Judge, there 
are literally hundreds of victims in this case.  Some died in pain, 
others will have to live in pain.  This man is a classic con man, a 
classic megalomaniac.  This is a man who used religion as a shield to 
amass power and money and commit horrendous crimes."
     The judge conceded, "From the evidence I heard, the crimes were so 
horrendous, so gross, that the maximum twenty-year sentence is simply 
not commensurate with the crimes."  But he noted the sect's record in 
establishing grocery stores, hotels, and apartment complexes in poor 
neighborhoods.  "I think that deserves some reward," Roettger said.
     "The Nation of Yahweh, under the direction of the defendant, 
cleaned up its act@r acts-and tried to be a good citizen."
     During the trial, Rozier-who had already pleaded guilty to four 
murders and was serving his sentence in a federal prison under a new 
identityadmitted that he actually killed six people on behalf of his 
leader.  "As an order coming from Yahweh Ben Yahweh, I didn't question 
it," he said.
     Still sporting a ponytail, Rozier was cheerful as he recalled 
riding the regional Metrorail transit line after dark with his sword in 
hand, looking for the right "white devils" to follow off the train and 
kill.
     Initially, Rozier said, he was squeamish about Yahweh's 
requirement of bringing in a dead man's ear.  But he learned that 
Yahweh meant what he said when the leader refused to credit his first 
two "white devil" murders because he hadn't brought in a trophy from 
the corpse.
     He said he remedied that in September of 1986
     when he and another defendant sliced off both ears of one murdered 
drifter.  The act pleased Yahweh.
     "We got the day off and went to the movies," Rozier recalled.
     Implicating other defendants in similar murders, Rozier recounted 
how one of them carried his proof in a jar.  "The ear was floating in 
it," he said.
     Rozier insisted that there was nothing personal about the killings 
as far as Yahweh Ben Yahweh was concerned.
     "Any white devil would do," he said.
     CHAPTER NINE k6 kt 0 kt 0 King of the Israelites HE LIKED To refer 
to himself as a "Renaissance man," but he had the era wrong.  He was 
more like a mad Medieval monk.
     Nevertheless, by the end of the 1980s, Roch Theriault-middle-aged, 
balding, with pink-tinted eyeglasses and a bushy moustache that 
diverted attention from a weak chin and a perpetual, prissy scowl-was 
living what might have looked like the good life in a rustic utopia 
sixty miles northeast of Toronto.  He was absolute ruler of a commune 
waiting for the end of the world-a man with eight wives, four male 
attendants, a golden crown, and even a royal title: King of the 
Israelites.
     The world did not end, as Roch (pronounced Rock") had predicted it 
would, in the cold Canadian woods.  But after an eleven-year run, his 
selfcontained world of glory did come crashing down in that most 
ignoble of personal apocalypses: with the police pounding on the door.  
In January of 1993 the sordid story of Roch Theriault and the Ant Hill 
Kids -a cult centered on twisted homeopathic medicine, millenarian 
doom, and polygamy-began to unravel as Roch, forty-five years old, 
pleaded guilty to murder.  He went to prison with followers still 
professing their belief in him, despite the fact that Roch had left two 
people dead and several others maimed for life, and bequeathed 
emotional duress to the twenty-five children that the Ant Hill leader 
and his eight wives brought into their wretched world.
     It was the surgery that finally brought him down.
     Roch, whose medical knowledge came from an anatomy book, called it 
surgery, but the authorities had a more pointed term for it: butchery.
     A prison psychiatrist would later evaluate him as "bright" and 
"sensitive," but neither description seemed to apply to Rochon 
September 28, 1988, the night the self-styled homeopathic healer and 
amateur anatomist operated on one of his wives.
     Most cults have at least some connection with drugs, but the Ant 
Hill Kids were different.  For Roch, battling cabin fever in the 
interminable Canadian winters, it was booze.  And Roch was well-oiled 
already when thirty-two-year-old Solange bollard-beautiful, trusting, 
looking for nothing more in life than certitude-complained that her 
stomach hurt.
     Roch often took care of the medical needs of the commune with a 
complicated prescription of herbal remedies combined with prayer and 
New Age nostrums.  But as time went on and the group's isolation and 
paranoia worsened in its run-down camp-and as the much-awaited end of 
the world failed to occur, as Roch had constantly predicted-more 
dramatic gestures were required.  He completed the preparations wearing 
his ceremonial red velour robe and gold crown.  Then he had Bollard 
strip naked and lie on a wooden table while the others gathered around.
     Eerily calm, he prodded her abdomen, then suddenly punched her 
violently in the stomach and rolled her over.  Pushing a plastic tube 
up her rectum, he forced a solution of hot molasses and vegetable oil 
into her.
     She was told to turn on her back again for the next phase of the 
treatment.  As she lay still, with her eyes closed, he raised a long 
hunting knife and slit her belly from the sternum to the navel.  
Ignoring her screams, he reached into the gaping wound in her abdominal 
cavity with bare hands and grabbed a section of her large intestine.  
He sliced it off and tossed it aside.
     "There," he said.  "That should do it."
     Like surgeons he had seen in the movies, he held up his bloody 
hands.  Ignoring the agonized screams coming from Bollard, Roch turned 
to Gabrielle Lavallee, who was standing by the table.  "Close her up," 
he ordered.
     Lavallee used a needle and thread to crudely stitch up the awful 
wound.
     Astonishingly, Bollard lived through the night, shrieking in pain, 
before she finally died.  The Ant Hill Gang buried her in the yard.
     Roch Theriault was born in the tiny village of Riviere-du-Moulin, 
near Chicoutimi in Quebec Province, in 1947.  The region is at the 
farthest point of deepwater navigation of the Saguenay River, one of 
the great water routes from the north and east down to the St.  
Lawrence.  It is a rough-and-tumble commercial center, with a brisk 
tourist business and a prosperous trade in native handicrafts, 
especially wood-carving.  This is where Roch first learned how to use a 
knife.
     But he used it to make things at first.  When he was about ten his 
parents moved with their seven children into a chilly cement bungalow 
in a small city of 20,000 called Thetford Mines, among the 
Frenchspeaking population northeast of Montreal.  The town's sole 
distinction is its unsightly expanse of open-pit mines, which supply 60 
percent of the world's asbestos.
     The boy was miserable.  Back in Chicoutimi he had loved to wander 
the waterfront on errands with his father, who was a house painter.  On 
these outings he would poke into the tiny galleries and shops clustered 
on wharves.  The delicately carved artifacts, fashioned out of 
materials as ugly and crude as driftwood, had fascinated him.  Life in 
Thetford Mines, in the industrial exurbs of Montreal, was grim and 
depressing.
     "There was always somebody screaming or throwing something in that 
little house," a friend of one of his brothers said.
     Roch's father liked to play an after-dinner game called "bone" 
with his three sons at the kitchen table.  The rules of the game were 
that each person, in their heavy leather boots, would in turn kick the 
shins of the one sitting next to him, and the game would continue, with 
the pain escalating until someone cried 'Assez!"  Enough!
     The game often went on for an hour or more.
     Roch was always the one to shout 'Assez!"
     In his abject unhappiness as a teenager, some of Roch's future 
attitudes took root in the political and religious extremism of his 
father, who was a member of a secret right-wing Catholic organization 
called the "White Berets."  Group members dressed in ceremonial 
costumes and engaged in rituals centered on their aim to combat liberal 
tendencies in the church.
     Even in hard-bitten Thetford Mines, the Therfaults were considered 
low-class and odd, and the boy frequently wandered for long periods of 
time in the fields and woods, where he imagined he was communing with 
nature.
     Later he would describe how he used these periods of solitude to 
learn about herbs and roots that could be used to cure disease.  He 
cultivated an odd fantasy that he had hiked far into the wilderness and 
encountered a female bear tending to her cubs.  The bear welcomed him 
into her lair and treated him like a cub until he wandered off again, 
Roch insisted.
     Amazingly, people listened to him, perhaps because he was an 
entertaining talker in a place where lots of talk-and copious 
drinking-were the social nexus of life.  "The girls especially liked 
him," a former friend said.  "I think because he was so different from 
everyone else.  He wasn't boring, you know?"
     Even as a teenager, his friends turned to him for advice, 
especially about medical ailments.  At a time in life when ailments are 
fairly simple-a cold, a toothache, a hangover, menstrual pain-this 
posed little problem for anyone, least of all Roch, who craved the 
attention.  In time, he claimed to have begun experimenting on animals, 
and said he had learned to castrate cattle and pigs without any loss of 
blood.
     In 1967, at the age of twenty, Roch married a pretty local girl 
named Franeine Grenier.  They soon had two children, and lived in a 
wood bungalow down the road from his parents' house, where Roch set up 
a small studio and shop to make and sell handcrafted things-wood beer 
mugs, hand-carved clocks, and souvenirs-to the trickle of hardy 
tourists who had came through town in the warm months to take guided 
tours of the asbestos pit mines or stop at the local museum devoted to 
fossils and mining equipment.  He always had a knife in his hands, and 
for a time it seemed to be providing him and his family with a modest 
living And it seemed like a happy marriage-for a time.
     But then Roch began making requests that his young wife found 
strange.  He insisted that she begin wearing a long dark gown with a 
bonnet, "like a pioneer woman," he said.  Then, unaccountably, he would 
suddenly change his mind and order her to wear a tiny miniskirt in 
public.
     Meanwhile, he went to see her stern Catholic parents, who had a 
farm nearby, and asked them if they would allow him to operate a 
campground for tourists on a section of their farm.
     It would be a different kind of campground, he told them.  It 
would be for nudists.  This is quite acceptable now, he explained.
     His inlaws declined the offer to-turn their acreage into a nudist 
camp, and went to see their daughter.
     Not long afterward, she left her husband, took the two children, 
and moved back in with her parents on the farm.
     The single life allowed Roch to pursue his anatomy studies 
virtually full-time.  He became obsessive about it, and friends who 
knew him learned to avoid chance conversations with Roch, who would 
capture any hapless audience and lecture for hours on the wonders of 
the human body.
     At the same time, he joined a Catholic social organization to 
further enjoy his newfound bachelorhood.  The group supported a local 
charity by holding regular dances, card parties, and other affairs.  
But soon after he became a member and was asked to head the initiation 
committee, Roch began lobbying to change the nature of the 
organization.
     "He wanted us to wear these robes with religious symbols on them," 
said another former friend.  "And he wanted us to elect him the 
leader."
     Instead, he was stripped of his position.
     Roch was a man who did not take rebuffs lightly.
     Furious, he quit not only the club, but the entire Roman Catholic 
church over the insult, and applied instead at the local Seventh Day 
Adventist church, where he quickly became obsessed with the sect's 
belief that the end of the world was imminent.
     To prepare for the event, Roch began dressing in a hooded, 
ankle-length monk's robe.  He said he was a prophet, and as such, he 
insisted that he be put in charge of the small but well-established 
local Seventh Day Adventist congregation.
     He soon left them as well.
     Again, Roch wandered in the wilderness.  But this time he 
resurfaced not with a tale of a bear's kindness, but with a new role in 
life.  He settled into a town north of Quebec, where he opened a shop 
that specialized in herbs, roots, and other supplies for the practice 
of homeopathic medicine.  And he hung out a shingle as a healer.

     T

     220 lames 1. Boyle

     "Roch was really a smart businessman," a person who knew him in 
this guise would later recall.  "This was in the seventies, right 
around the time of all this 4 whole-earth' interest in organic food and 
natural cures, and there he was.  The place became like a local 
community center for the organic food nuts."
     His shop and clinic, in a clapboard building on the main street in 
town, became a center of New Age culture.  And besides selling herbs 
and books, while dispensing medical advice, Roch also ran health 
seminars-including sessions on stopping smoking and losing weight.  
From these, he drew a following of young women who considered him 
something of a guru.
     One of the most enthusiastic of these acolytes was 
twenty-six-year-old Giselle Lafrance, whom Roch married in 1977.  Also 
frequent visitors at the clinic were a young married couple, Jacques 
and Maryse Giguere, who lived in town with their infant daughter.  The 
Gigueres were so completely won over by Roch's "natural" approach to 
life and health medicine that Jacques even quit his construction job 
and Maryse quit her job at a local bakery; they sold their possessions 
and moved into Roch's house.
     In time, Roch's clinic and residence began to resemble a commune.  
With Roch as the head of the business and the household, communal 
lifestyle began to resemble a family.  Then, in late 1978, with winter 
setting in and the household strained under the crowded conditions, 
everything changed when Roch had his Great Vision.
     It had come to him directly from God, he said to the assembled 
commune: the world was soon going to end in "a shower of boulderlike 
hailstones."  Only a few of the chosen would survive.  And the only way 
to do that was to flee society and live in the wilderness.
     In his wanderings, Roch had already found his spot, if not in 
wilderness, at least in great desolation.
     It was on the north shore of the Gasps Peninsula, at the mouth of 
the Gulf of St.  Lawrence.  Piled into two old cars and a pickup 
pulling a U-Haul with all of their possessions, the group-which now 
was comprised of Roch, four men, nine women, and four 
children-relocated to, the Gasps.  They moved into three rented log 
cabins in a rugged valley where caribou and moose freely roamed.  
There, against the spectacular backdrop of the Chic-Choc Mountains, 
Roch presided over his commune with a new name.
     He called himself Moses.  Each of the followers also took a name 
from the Bible.
     As winter locked the commune in together, Moses said that the path 
to redemption would be arduous and full of pain.
     He was not exaggerating.
     During the first year of utopian isolation, cabin fever set in 
with a cold fury.  Prayer, intimidation, and exhaustion held the group 
together.  Scratching out a living was an exhausting drudgery of 
thirteen-hour days not far removed from the toils of the pioneers.
     For direction, the group was entirely dependent on Roch, who did 
little work himself.  Instead, he drank starting in the late afternoon, 
and raged through dinner and long into the night, when anyone who 
crossed his path-man, woman, or child-was likely to feel the force of 
his boot or his hand.
     The children especially were vulnerable.  "He said the children 
were disobedient and the devil had to be beaten out of them," Jacques 
Giguere recalled.  "He justified beating our kids because he said we 
were too spiritually weak to do it ourselves."
     The drunken, surly despot managed to keep his followers 
intimidated and dependent.  After his drunken rages, he would collapse 
into bed and sleep until mid-afternoon, when he would get up to start 
the cycle all over again.  Like most people close to a severe drunk, 
his followers were constantly off balance, not least because they 
themselves were drinking heavily.  Sometimes Roch would spend his sober 
hours in nearly hysterical tears of shame and contrition, begging 
forgiveness, beseeching God to hear his pathetic pleas.
     "Please God, do not ask me to beat the children any more!"  he 
would wail, eyes heavenward.
     But the prayers went unheeded.  And the violence began anew, the 
women frightened into total submission, the men emasculated, the 
children anxious just to find a place to hide.
     As theological glue to hold together this dysfunctional 
assemblage, Roch had cobbled a religious philosophy based on the tenets 
of Seventh Day Adventism, proclaiming over and over that "Jesus Christ 
will return in a premillennial, physical, imminent second advent.  It 
will be visible, audible, and personal."  While waiting for the great 
event, he was also enamored of certain historical aspects of another 
religion that is centered on the imminent end of the world-Mormonism.  
Polygamy especially attracted him, since he had already claimed for his 
own exclusive sexual use most of the women in the commune and convinced 
one man that, as a monk, he needed to remain celibate.
     On several occasions during the first few years on the commune, 
Roch traveled to the U.S. to visit a well-known Mormon polygamist named 
Alex Joseph, who headed his own commune with at least nine wives and 
dozens of children in southern Utah, not far from the Grand Canyon.  The 
fifty-five-year-old Joseph, himself a powerful figure who might have 
stepped from the Old Testament, liked the garrulous and intense 
Canadian well enough to invite him back at least twice during the 
1980s.  On their last meeting, the Utah patriarch held a solemn 
ceremony to present Roch with a gold-colored crown and conferred upon 
him a new title, King of the Israelites.
     Imperially, Roch hurried back north and began acting the part in 
full glory.  In the past, he had kept his relations with each of the 
women separate, but now he bedded them two and three at a time, and 
sometimes presided over contests to see which could claim the most 
orgasms.
     He also staged games like a Roman emperor.  That is, he ordered 
followers-men and women-to strip naked and compete in "gladiator" 
contests, fighting each other in a marked-off area while he casually 
held a stopwatch and awarded points for punches and knockdowns.  
Winners had to defend their victories from the next contender until the 
final contestant cried 'Assez!"  The contests went on for hours.
     Roch and his wives were prolific all the while.  Maternal 
instincts were still at work in 1981, when several of the women finally 
convinced Roch to allow the children to remain in a separate cabin 
while the adults gathered for their nightly prayer meetings, which 
always ended with one of Roch's tantrums.
     Guy Veer, a twenty-three-year-old who had wandered into the 
commune after walking out of a hospital near Quebec, was designated to 
act as babysitter in the adjoining cabin.  He was performing that duty, 
one night when a two-year-old baby-the son of Jacques and Maryse 
Giguere-was severely beaten.
     When the other adults discovered the battered child, they 
beseeched Roch to do something to help.
     Gathering everyone around, he put the baby on the wooden table.  
Then he took a hunting knife and sliced into the boy's testicles to 
"relieve the pressure."
     The child died screaming.
     Roch accused the babysitter, Veer, and demanded that he be tried 
for murder.  In a hastily convened "trial" presided over by Roch, the 
followers listened lo to testimony, weighed the evidence-and und Veer 
not guilty "by reason of insanity."
     Unsatisfied with the verdict, Roch insisted that something had to 
be done to prevent Veer from ever fathering children himself.  He 
ordered Veer held down on the table, where Roch sliced off the young 
man's testicles in a crude operation.
     The next day, after Veer managed to stumble into town to get 
emergency medical assistance, the local clinic notified the police 
about the shocking case of mutilation on their hands.
     For the first time, the authorities began interfering with Roch 
Theriault's twisted lifestyle.  Though Roch tried to stonewall the 
police investigation, he and six of his followers were convicted of 
criminal negligence in the death of the baby, while Roch was also 
convicted in the castration of Veer.
     He did not spend much time in jail.  Released in 1984 after 
serving eighteen months, Roch set about reassembling his followers and 
attracting new ones in the organic-food circles.
     Late in 1984, to circumvent a Quebec parole order barring Roch and 
his followers from associating again, the rejuvenated group moved to 
Ontario province, to a remote 200-acre tract of land that Roch had 
bought for $12,000 near Burnt River, about sixty miles northeast of 
Toronto.
     Here they went to work again, like "busy ants," said one of the 
members, establishing a new utopia to await Armageddon under the 
direction of their master.  This new community was financed by welfare 
checks, supplemented by a small crafts business opened in town.- There, 
they sold wood carvings, knitted caps, handicrafts, and baked goods to 
locals and tourists.  They called their business the Ant Hill Kids, a 
name that came to be applied to the commune as well.
     At home, the sexually indefatigable Roch again kept the women 
barefoot and pregnant.  Reestablished in his place, Roch was no longer 
content to be merely Moses and King of the Israelites.  Now he was 
Abraham.  As such, "he had to have many wives and children to keep the 
tribe going," said Gabrielle Lavallee, who had become his favorite 
wife.
     However, the cult, having inserted itself into commercial society, 
drew the attention of local child-welfare authorities, who were 
interested in the large number of children living in a commune.  Social 
workers with the Kawartha-Haliburton Children's Aid Society begin 
monitoring the commune closely, and stepped up their vigilance in 1985, 
after one of the babies at the Ant Hill Kids commune died of what the 
coroner ruled had apparently been natural causes.
     By the end of the year they had accrued enough evidence of child 
abuse and neglect to move.  In December, ten social workers and six 
police officers raided the commune, taking away fourteen children aged 
five months to sixteen years.  The children-all fathered by 
Theriault-were placed with foster parents.  In a very short time, 
authorities begin hearing stories some of the children were telling 
their new foster parents-that Theriault had forced them to take part in 
sexual acts.
     Court records later quoted a six-year-old girl saying that he made 
the children masturbate him.
     Sometimes, she said, "Mom and me take turns."
     Children's Aid workers questioned some of Roch's women.  "They 
gave me two choices: 'Stay with Roch and lose your child, or leave Roch 
and keep him,"' Francine Laflamme, a cult member who was mother of one 
of the children taken away in 1985 and another in 1987 later told 
Maclean's magazine.  "I decided I wasn't going to leave him, so they 
took my child.  It was a very difficult decision."
     All the while, the Ant Hill commune was a beehive of procreation.  
Between 1986 and 1988, Theriault's wives give birth to nine more of his 
children, but the child welfare authorities were utterly vigilant.  As 
each child was born, it was removed to foster care.
     Finally, the commune was devoid of children.
     That's when the violence got worse.
     Roch punished anyone who displeased him, for minor infractions 
such as "massing."  One man who had said the wrong thing had a rubber 
band wrapped around his testicles.  When the testicles swelled up to 
the size of an orange, Roch insisted that they had become infected.  He 
had the others hold down the man, and he used a knife to slice open his 
scrotum, from which he cut out one testicle.  Roch then cauterized the 
wound with a red-hot iron from the fire.
     For the rest of the spring and summer, the Ant Hill Kids were busy 
with unending work.  In late September, as the first signs of winter 
coming began to crawl over the northern trees, Bollard complained of 
the stomachache that led to her death at Roch's hands.
     A week after they buried her in the yard, Roch ordered the Ant 
Hill Kids to dig up Bollard's corpse, insisting that death was merely a 
state of unconsciousness and that she could be brought back to life.
     As the group stood around the newly unearthed grave, gagging from 
the stench, Roch bent down and sliced open the decomposed flesh of the 
corpse's chest.  He snapped off a skeletal rib, which he placed in a 
leather case he had made and wore around his neck.  The body was then 
reburied.
     A few weeks later, after drinking heavily for several hours, Roch 
again ordered everyone outside into the frigid pasture to dig up the 
grave.  This time, while the others stood shivering in the cold, 
Rochhis red robes billowing in the icy wind@hanted prayers to bring 
Bollard back to life.
     Crouching above the moldering remains, he ordered one of the men 
to go to a shed and bring back a hand saw.  As he waited, he pulled the 
skull from the body.
     Blowing on his hands to warm them, he used the saw to cut off the 
top section of the skull.
     Then he ordered one of the women to masturbate him into the 
decomposed brain inside the skull.
     Afterward, the remains were cremated.
     Life at the commune went on for nearly one more year before the 
grisly incident that brought the police back.
     In July of 1989, Gabrielle Lavallee, who had already lost eight 
teeth to Roch in an "operation" to treat a toothache, made the mistake 
of complaining about stiffness in one of her fingers, which adversely 
affected her work in the fields.
     Gathering the others around, Roch had her place her hand on a 
wooden table.  He then plunged a hunting knife into Gabrielle Lavalle's 
right hand, impaling it.
     She stood there with her hand pinned to the table for almost an 
hour, afraid of losing consciousness "because if I did I knew he would 
kill me."  Her arm turned black and blue during the ordeal.  Roch said 
he knew how to treat that too.
     He had her held, and then took a meat clever and hacked off her 
arm between the shoulder and elbow.
     "On the first try, he didn't do the job because the blade was so 
dull," Lavellde later recalled.  "The second time, the job was done."
     She spent the night in agony, after which a fellow Ant Hiller 
crudely stitched the wound up.  Several days later, when it had not 
stopped oozing blood, Roch used a blowtorch to heat up a piece of a 
drive shaft from a broken truck.  As Lavellee shrieked, he cauterized 
the wound with the rod.
     She managed to flee, using her good arm to flag down a motorist on 
a nearby road.  She was taken to a hospital near Toronto, where the 
police questioned her about the injury.
     When police arrived to raid the commune, everyone had fled,.  For 
six weeks police and Mounties searched the rugged terrain using 
helicopters and dogs.  Finally, they captured Roch hiding with two of 
the women in a wilderness camp where he said he planned to spend the 
winter.
     He spent the winter in court instead.
     In October of 1989, Roch pleaded guilty for the assault on 
Lavalide.  He was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
     But then one of Roch's followers in custody told police about the 
death of Boillard.  The police went to the site of the Ant Hill Kids 
commune and found her cremated remains.
     Finally, in January of 1993, Roch pleaded guilty to the murder of 
Bollard, doing so with the expectation of leniency.
     Before sentencing, Roch addressed the court with a long statement 
that expressed regret, but seemed to cast himself as the ultimate 
victim.  Speaking in French, he said that being in prison had thus far 
afforded him the opportunity to do an "about-face" while enjoying "good 
vibrations" in assessing what he referred to as the "storm of unusual 
behavior in my inner self."
     "Over several years, I made of myself an odious character, an 
incontestable master compelled undetectably by my own will and the 
oddities and debaucheries of my way of thinking, into which I had 
surreptitiously mixed love, hate, religion, labor, alcohol, and 
violence in my body's helpless state.  I nourished my soul with the 
follies of grandeur.
     "I have inflicted on myself mental wounds whose invisible scars I 
will carry for the rest of my life.
     Some of these scars will remain particularly vivid, such as the 
ones created when I carried out the folly of my fury, traumatizing, 
mutilating, and inflicting suffering on the members of my entourage, 
and most particularly the events that led to the premature death of 
Solange Bollard.  I made a criminal of myself."
     He acknowledged being the "leader of that commune" and accepted 
responsibility for what he called his "misdeeds."
     And he concluded, "With dignity and a new integrity, I will serve 
whatever sentence the court deems suitable."
     The sentence deemed suitable by the court was life in prison for 
the murder of Solange Bollard.
     Roch was transferred to a maximum security ' prison, Millhaven 
Institution, where he qualified to have regular conjugal visits in a 
trailer on the prison grounds from Francine Laflamme, the mother of his 
children.  TWo other of his "wives" moved in with Laflamme and opened a 
bakery, less than a mile from the prison gates.
     Laflamme, meanwhile, maintained that she remained "madly in love" 
with Roch, whose "misdeeds" she blamed on alcohol and a difficult 
childhood.  "People try to make Roch sound like a monster, like a 
butcher," she told Maclean's magazine in 1993.  "But he is not that.  
Most of the time he was not drinking and performing his operations.  He 
was a marvelous man who was full of passion, intelligence, and 
originality.  He loved to laugh and dance."
     Roch also used his charm to win over some of his jailers, who 
judged him to be a model prisoner.  A prison psychiatrist described him 
as "bright, inquisitive, and sensitive."  Another prison evaluation 
described him as being "amenable to the rehabilitation process."  He 
was even offered a transfer to a lesser security institution, but Roch 
turned it down when he found it would not include privileges of 
conjugal visits.
     Under Canadian law, Roch Theriault, King of the Israelites, will 
be eligible for parole in the year 2000 -the year of the millennium.

      CHAPTER TEN

     kto kto kto

     Ranch Apocalypse

     BEFORE HE WENT down in flames and fury, Vernon Wayne Howell was 
living the good life, for a thirtythree-year-old prophet.
     He was the absolute dictator of his own small world, which 
consisted of more than a hundred subjects living on seventy-seven acres 
of Texas brushland with, it turned out, enough guns to defeat a neavily 
armed force of federal agents.
     As prophet, the gangly young man with unruly hair and 
soda-bottle-thick eyeglasses had the luxury of ranting and raving at 
his followers all night, and then sleeping all day while they went to 
work to pay the bills.  There was money for travel, for vacations and 
recruiting in Australia, for pilgrimages to the Holy Land, for trips to 
Los Angeles to hook into fantasies of being a working musician.  There 
was money to outfit a music room with expensive recording equipment to 
indulge Vernon's delusion that he was an accomplished heavy-metal 
guitarist who had merely chosen a more important line of work.
     His command covered every aspect of life at the commune on the 
stubby prairie of central Texas, a half hour out of Waco.  Vernon 
decided what food they ate-at one point decreeing a steady diet of 
nothing but bananas-what they thought, and who they slept with (Vernon 
himself had the right to select any woman to be his bed partner at any 
time).
     "The angel.of Revelation is what I claim to be," Vernon once said 
when asked who he thought he was.
     The angel of Revelation heralds the end of the world.  And for his 
gullible cult of followers, Vernon Howell in fact did just that.
     Vernon was the illegitimate son of a mother who had given birth to 
him when she was fourteen.  As a boy growing up near Dallas, he was a 
slow learner in school, where he claimed the other boys picked on him 
for his religious beliefs.  When other boys were out playing, Vernon 
studied the Bible.  According to his mother, Bonnie, he "memorized much 
of the New Testament before his thirteenth birthday.  As a teenager, 
Vernon compensated for his awkwardness by body-building and playing the 
guitar, though he h .  ad no discipline for music lessons and preferred 
to rip along noisily with heavy-metal records drowning out his 
ineptness.
     By the time he was twenty-one, Vernon had already been thrown out 
of his Seventh Day Adventist congregation for disrupting services by 
"ranting and raving."  Imagining that he was being persecuted for his 
beliefs rather than for being an annoyance, Vernon drifted through 
Texas working menial jobs.
     In the early eighties he happened to come upon a small compound of 
people who were looking for a new prophet just about the same time that 
he was looking for an easier way to make a living.
     He found it within this strange sect of religious fanatics who 
called themselves the Branch Davidians.  When he found them, they were 
still encamped on a farm near Waco, as they had been for generations, 
waiting patiently for the end of the world.
     The Davidians were a radical breakaway sect of the Seventh Day 
Adventists, a religious movement that began in the late 1830s amid the 
great fundamentalist and largely anti-Catholic religious "reawakening" 
that swept rural America.  The founder was an evangelist named William 
Miller, who gathered a zealous group of followers who called themselves 
Adventists and were certain that the Second Coming was approaching.  
Miller even fixed the date: October 22, 1844.  When the great day 
finally arrived without a sign of the triumphant Jesus on the horizon, 
the Adventists, in the indomitable logic of the true believer, decided 
that God had postponed the event because of the prideful expectation of 
the chosen, as well as the unworthiness of a sinful world.  More 
diligent preparations were required.  A disciple of Miller's, Ellen 
White, led the resurgent movement, now known as the Seventh Day 
Adventists, into the twentieth century.
     The offshoot of Adventism that would be tapped by Vernon Howell 
was founded in 1930 by a Bulgarian immigrant, defrocked Adventist 
preacher and part-time washing machine salesman named Victor T. 
Houteff, who drifted from California with some followers and bought 189 
acres of cheap farmland near Waco.  There, he recruited new members for 
his commune through a Bible school, while refining a complicated 
theology based on scriptural "codes" that would unlock prophesies.  
While the leader was the only one who fully understood the complexities 
of the codes, all of the followers fervently believed the gist of the 
message, which was that Armageddon was about to a ' rive and that they 
themselves were the Elect who would rule the earth with Jesus Christ.
     Houteff believed that he had been personally chosen by God to 
cleanse the world of wickedness in preparation for the great event.
     By the time Houteff died, with his sword still sheathed, in the 
mid-1950s, the commune had become something of a local joke: the 
Davidians' regular announcements that the end was coming, with the 
inevitable disappointments, were treated with gentle amusement in the 
local press.  Still, the commune had the look of a permanent 
settlement.  Besides the rambling wood-frame main building, with its 
meeting rooms, dining hall, and apartment for the prophet, there were a 
group of outbuildings, including dormlike barracks to house ;ollowers 
and their families, though their number had declined to about forty at 
the time of Houteffs death.
     Membership began picking up again when a paranoid evangelist named 
Ben Roden proclaimed himself prophet of the Davidians.  He instituted 
mandatory daily worship services, and wisely resisted setting an actual 
date for the Second Coming.  Roden was an avid pamphleteer who, among 
other things, blamed Watergate on the Pope.  He also traveled 
frequently to Israel.  When Roden died in 1978, he was succeeded by his 
wife, Lois, an energetic woman whose engaging personality and adeptness 
for publicity made her a well-known figure in the burgeoning world of 
fundamentalist evangelists branching out from the Southwest during the 
1980s.  Lois also liked to travel, and was especially fond of 
Australia, where she recruited new members.
     She was prophet in 1981, the year that Vernon Howell, twenty-three 
years old, a ninth-grade dropout, itinerant con man, and frustrated 
guitarist with an exhaustive memory for Scripture-a fast-talking 
egotist with a love of the spotlight-wandered into the compound and 
asked to be accepted.
     A humble supplicant, he introduced himself to Lois, now 
sixty-eight years old and beginning to lose her grip on the loyalty of 
the Davidians.  Along with his quest for spiritual fulfillment, Vernon 
told Lois and her followers, he sought help to overcome what he said 
was his major vice, excessive masturbation.
     Sensing that her group needed new blood, Lois welcomed the intense 
young man into the fold.
     Though many of the older followers regarded him as the camp bum 
and shiftless would-be hippie, Vernon quickly made himself useful doing 
clean-up work in the kitchen, making small repairs to the run-down 
communal buildings, even fixing broken-down cars that members used for 
routine errands to and from town, where many worked day jobs.  His 
quick smile and religious zeal soon won him many friends-including Lois 
herself.  By the end of 1983, after persuading the old woman that he 
had a vision in which God had shown him that they must conceive a son 
together, a son who would become the last prophet, Vernon and Lois were 
having a sexual relationship.
     This relationship became known at a time when some Davidians were 
already muttering misgivings about Lois, who had taken to reciting the 
Lord's Prayer with a new twist: "Our Mother, which art in heaven."
     From his position as Lois's lover, Vernon craftily began to 
exploit the power vacuum he perceived within the Davidians, who he 
Maintained had become spiritually flabby and undisciplined-and more 
than ready for rigorous rejuvenation under a younger leader ordained by 
God.  Calling on his natural if undeveloped abilities as an 
entertainer, Vernon emerged as a Bible-thumping camp revivalist, 
thrilling long-bored Davidians to the souls of their beliefs with 
hellfire-and-brimstone sermons that the Apocalypse at last was near and 
preparations for the great battle must begin.  Under his urgent 
preaching, the commune united in an atmosphere of impending crisis.
     Sensing his growing power, Vernon became emboldened enough to 
leave Lois for a wife at the other end of the age scale-a 
fourteen-year-old girl, Rachel Jones, whose parents were members of the 
group.  She bore Vernon's first two children, a son, Cyrus, and a 
daughter, Star.  Venturing to describe himself to wide-eyed Davidians 
as "the ultimate sex machine," Vernon also induced other young females 
into his bed, among them one girl aged ten.
     All the while, the upstart's growing influence was monitored 
resentfully by Lois's heir-apparent, her forty-five-year-old son, 
George, a surly and rotund man with a great bushy beard, who wore a 
ten-gallon hat on his head and a pistol on his belt.  Behind his back 
some of the more worldly Davidians had taken to referring to George 
derisively as the "Prince of Whales."  It was a cruel allusion both to 
his ungainly size and to the- fact that he had reached middle-age, like 
the heir to the British crown, still waiting for his mother to die so 
he could assume the throne.
     When Lois did die suddenly in 1984, George moved decisively 
against his rival, whom he had denounced in a newsletter as a "rock and 
roller musician and a Satan worshiper," an "adulterer," and a " .  
bastard" who was "prohibited from the congregation unto the tenth 
generation."
     Vernon was not yet prepared to fight.  He announced he was leaving 
the commune.  To George's astonishment, twenty-five followers, 
including many of the younger members of the group, left with him.
     This began a year-long period of wandering for Vernon and his 
devout band of believers.  Now regarding themselves as the chosen 
people in exile, they traveled in a couple of beat-up vans like a band 
of Gypsies, picking up odd jobs and Social Security checks for support, 
recruiting new followers throughout the Southwest, even managing to 
gather enough money to send Vernon on trips to Israel-where he became 
convinced that he was the prophet who would lead the righteous to 
battle with Satan.  Like his predecessors the Rodens, he also visited 
Australia, and brought new believers back with him.
     Meanwhile, in New Orleans proselytizing on the fringes of a 
national convention of Seventh Day Adventists, Vernon concluded that 
the classic rock anthem by the Animals, "House of the Rising Sun," 
somehow contained the code that would unlock his prophesy that the end 
of time was rapidly approaching.
     Working uncharacteristically hard,; he even managed to learn to 
play the song on the guitar, in the company of a handful of other 
failed rock musicians who had wandered into the group, which now 
numbered more than sixty people, including young couples with children.
     Vernon's splinter group eventually settled back in Texas, on a 
small commune in a town called Palestine,.  In 1987, Vernon and his 
Praetorian guard of body-builders and bullies who called themselves the 
Mighty Men came up with a plan to sneak down to Waco and storm the 
Mount Carmel compound, to wrest it from the control of George Roden.
     Alarmed by Vernon's reappearance on the scene, George had 
challenged the upstart to the ultimate faith-healing test: On Halloween 
night of 1987, the corpse of an eighty-five-year-old Davidian buried on 
the property was dug up.  Only if Vernon could raise it from the dead, 
George declared, would he be able to call himself prophet.
     Vernon had a better idea.  Declaring George the anti-Christ," 
Vernon led seven armed cohorts in military camouflage uniforms onto the 
Mount Carmel compound in a predawn raid a few days afterward.  In the 
skirmish, George was shot and wounded.
     Vernon and his men were charged with attempted murder.  While on 
bail, they moved back into the Mount Carmel compound and began 
fortifying it.
     George wisely fled.  After a highly publicized trial during which 
Vernon and his cohorts held court regularly with reporters, a jury 
failed to reach a verdict on Vernon and returned a verdict of acquittal 
on the others.  The triumphant Vernon-rejoicing in the publicity-invited 
the public to the compound for an ice cream social.
     New recruits came in, not only from Texas but from the network 
that Vernon had established on his travels at home and abroad.  The 
resurgent Davidians now had about 125 members, and Vernon declared 
himself their prophet with an edict that left little uncertainty about 
the extent of his authority.  "It means that the prophet owns 
everything-your house, your money, even your underwear," he explained.  
"That means when the prophet comes to your house at night and asks you 
to strip naked, you are obligated by God to hand over your underpants."
     With such sweeping powers, Vernon decided he needed a new name.  He 
legally changed his to David (after King David) Koresh (the Hebrew name 
for Cyrus, the Babylonian king who allowed the Jews back into the 
Israel), and announced that he was the seventh and final prophet, the 
man who would prepare the Davidians to stand up to Satan.  Armageddon 
would begin-soon-with a U.S. Army attack on the Davidian compound, 
Vernon declared.  Mount Carmel itself was renamed.  It became Ranch 
Apocalypse.
     Meanwhile, it was imperative that the prophet himself be prolific. 
 Compliant followers allowed Vernon to choose his "wives" at will from 
among their own spouses and daughters; the wives' status was indicated 
by Star of David pendants they wore.
     At the same time, compound life became markedly militaristic, with 
armed guards posted at the perimeters and regular defensive drills 
scheduled to prepare for the imminent battle.  Carefully, Koresh 
introduced paranoia into the general sense of crisis, deftly tightening 
the group's psychological isolation.
     The effect was calculated: Every day, the outside world was made 
to seem an ever more hostile place, brimming with enemies and 
treachery.  Within the compound, the prophet provided security and 
solace, and all the answers.  Every form of activity, from sexual 
relationships to the games children were allowed to play, was subject 
to Koresh's direct supervision.
     Nightly, Davidians assembled to watch video war movies chosen by 
Koresh.  Afterward, they sat through the prophet's harangues, sometimes 
in allnight sessions.  Any whisper of dissension was promptly reported 
to the prophet, and dealt with severely.
     By 1989, with Koresh claiming the right to have sex with anyone he 
chose at any time he chose, families were effectively destroyed as 
functioning social units.  Men and women were segregated in separate 
dorms, and children were housed apart from their parents.  To 
compensate the men for the loss of their self-esteem, Vernon even 
thought of a safety valve, encouraging them to drink heavily.
     "We as Davidians aren't interested in sex," one of the men whose 
wives had been claimed by Koresh would later explain to reporters.  
"Sex is so assaultive, so aggressive.  David has shouldered that burden 
for US."
     In such an atmosphere, each outlandish assertion built the 
foundation for the next one.  According to another Davidian, Koresh 
told devotees that "if they remained faithful, God would one day return 
and take them to heaven in his spaceship."  Increasingly, Koresh's 
harangues centered around the idea that many of the followers would 
have to die, violently, before that could come about.
     While followers stayed awake through the allnight ravings that 
sometimes didn't end until it was time to stagger off to work in the 
morning, Koresh and his Mighty Men maintained an active social life 
outside the compound, regularly visiting local rock and country-western 
bars to hang out with musicians, or poking around regional gun shows 
looking for weapons to buy or trade.  They amassed an arsenal at Ranch 
Apocalypse.
     Outwardly, the usual sense of dotty serenity appeared to prevail 
at the compound.  Davidians had always been known as good neighbors, 
quietly pleasant if somewhat eccentric, God-fearing, always available 
to jump-start a stalled car or help out a neighbor in need.  There were 
rumors, however.  Little girls being used for sex.  Beatings.  And, of 
course, the guns and other weapons piling up.  A UPS man delivering a 
package that ripped open was surprised to find a box of hand grenades 
inside.  It was said the Davidians had enough armaments on hand to 
supply a small army-which of course was exactly what Koresh had in 
mind.
     For four years, one follower, Mark Breault, an amateur musician 
who had once believed fervently in Koresh, watched the world turn 
upside down at Ranch Apocalypse.  Breault was, in fact, one of the 
original Mighty Men.  But in 1989, after his wife had already left the 
compound to return to Australia, he decided it was time to rejoin her.  
At dawn one day, Breault was listlessly playing a Star Trek video game 
in an office near Koresh's quarters in the main building when he 
encountered a thirteen-year-old girl who had just spent the night with 
the prophet.
     "Good morning," he told the child.
     "What are you doing here?"  she demanded imperiously.  Breault, 
who had been keeping a detailed diary of his time at Ranch Apocalypse, 
thought the girl was acting "like the Queen of England."
     I'm just doing s me work," he told her.  De n0 fe sively, he 
deleted the video game from the computer screen and called up a 
business document, to show that he was working.  The girl came over to 
examine the screen briefly, nodded, and walked away.
     Feeling a mixture of relief and disgust, Breault decided it was 
time to go.  He had seen Vernon repeatedly break nine of the Ten 
Commandments.  He didn't plan on being around to see the last one go 
down: Thou shalt not kill.
     To get the money to flee without stirring Koresh's suspicions, 
Braeult slipped away from the compound to call his wife in Australia, 
where a small group of former Davidians were openly expressing their 
fears about what they had seen going on at the Waco complex before they 
themselves had left.  She agreed to send him the money for air fare 
from Los Angeles to Melbourne.  To get to.Los Angeles, he told Koresh 
that his keyboard mixer was on its last legs and he needed to drive 
there to buy a new one.  Koresh said he would go along.  They would 
stay for nearly a month at a house in Pomona owned by Davidians.
     The thirteen-year-old girl made the drive with them.
     Koresh brought along an AK-47 hidden in the trunk.
     Breault almost didn't escape.  At the California house, Koresh 
confronted him, saying he had heard reports from California associates 
about Breault's bad "attitude."  Breault was ordered to pack his bags 
and fly back to Waco to await his punishment.
     Breault packed his bags but went in the opposite direction, 
getting on the plane to Australia.  It was a decision that saved his 
life.
     In Australia, Breault began organizing the former followers-people 
still living in terror of death threats from Koresh and associates back 
in America.
     Finally, they decided to sound the alarm, hiring a private 
detective to further their case and spread the warning that Koresh, a 
madman exercising maniacal control over a group of largely innocent 
people, was planning to go down in flames to fulfill his prophesies, 
and kill them all in the process.
     Under constant threats from Texas, but fortified by Breault's 
detailed diaries, tape recordings of Koresh's rantings, and their own 
memories, the frightened Australian rebels went to work documenting 
evidence that they hoped would get the attention of U.S. law 
enforcement authorities.  Segments on the group's warnings were aired 
by the Australian edition of A Current Affair.  One former member 
recounted that Koresh "always said the authorities would never take the 
children away from him.  He'd rather kill them before giving them up.
     "The only time the authorities are going to do something is when 
there's a pile of bodies," a sympathizer at the Waco compound wrote 
secretly to the breakaways in Australia.  "It'll be another Jonestown . 
 . ."
     For two long years, as Koresh armed his camp and prepared for 
Armageddon, their warnings went largely unheeded.
     In 1992, however, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and 
Firearms-A T F-did begin an investigation into the widespread reports of 
weapons at the Waco compound.  A T F undercover agents dispatched to the 
scene tried to inflitrate the group.  Their efforts were a joke to 
Koresh, who openly ridiculed the undercover agents-middle-aged men 
trying to pass themselves off as college students trying to befriend 
Davidians- By now Koresh and his lieutenants had stockpiled eleven tons 
of arms-including three hundred firearms and battlefield armaments such 
as .50 caliber antitank rifles.
     "We will put a weapon in everyone's hand," Koresh had told his 
followers.  "If you want to die for' God, you must be willing to kill 
for God."
     At other times, he warned Davidians that their own deaths would 
not be enough-they would also have to kill outsiders who would be 
coming for them.
     "You can't die for God if you can't kill for God," he warned.
     By November of 1992 the A T F had enough evidence to obtain a search 
warrant and a warrant for Koresh's arrest on federal firearms charges.  
But executing it was not going to be easy.  For months the A T F force, 
which had grown to a hundred agents, supplemented by local police and 
Texas Rangers, drilled for the raid on the compound.  The operation roj 
was given the code name Operation T an Horse.
     From inside Ranch Apocalypse, Koresh watched with grim amusement.
     "They are w@iting to get zapped up to heaven, where they'll be 
transformed to fight a war where they get to kill all their enemies," 
according to a newspaper account in early 1993, when the sect's growing 
size and the activities of the A T F had begun to attract more media 
attention.
     They didn't have to wait long.
     The A T F raid was set for Sunday, February 28, 1993.  The day 
before, the Waco Herald-Tribune had begun publishing a series of 
articles on the cult, based on months of reporting about what the paper 
called "this menace in our community."
     Though the A T F plan was predicated on secrecy, it was clear to 
anyone in the vicinity of the Davidiao compound what was going on, as 
agents and cops donned battle gear, and assault and communications 
vehicles lumbered along rural roads.  Agents were transported to the 
scene in two cattle trailers.
     Nearby, a public relations officer for the A T F was waiting with a 
stack of press releases announcing the successful arrest of Koresh.
     As three National Guard helicopters clattered in over the plains, 
the raid began.  Agent Roland Ballesteros, a six-year veteran of the 
A T F, was the first one to the front door, which was open.  Koresh was 
standing just inside, apparently unarmed.  Ballesteros saw that he was 
smiling.  Then Koresh slammed the door.
     At the wheel of one of the cattle trailers, A T F agent Dan Curtis 
was worried about the eerie quiet at Ranch Apocalypse, where people 
usually could be seen moving about.
     "I think we're in trouble," he told the men with him.
     Within seconds gunshots erupted from within the compound.  The 
raiding force was immediately pinned down under intense fire.
     Though it had been planned on the premise of secrecy, the 
operation could have taken an ad out in the paper announcing its 
schedule, for all the stealth involved.  All night long local roads had 
been crowded with emergency vehicles.  By first light, reporters and 
neighbors in the vicinity were openly discussing the raid.  A woman on 
the scene in a truck hired to supply agents with doughnuts and coffee 
even encountered Davidians discussing the imminent assault outside the 
compound.
     Koresh was clearly aware.  Nevertheless, the raid went on as 
scheduled in the belief that with a quick show of force, Koresh could 
be made to come to reason and give up.
     Early Sunday morning, Koresh had been leading a Bible session when 
a follower rushed into the compound to say he had encountered a local 
televi ' crew setting up to cover the raid.  sion "They're coming," the 
prophet announced, looking out the window across the frame buildings to 
the scrub brush where the assault force, wearing blue jumpsuits and 
flak jackets, was assembled.  "The time has come."
     Over the police radio, reporters monitoring the traffic heard a 
report from an unknown person.
     "There's no guns in the windows.  Tell them it's a go."
     In a great rush, agents rushed out of the cattle trailers and 
hoisted ladders to the roof of the main building.  Suddenly, gunfire 
erupted from points all over the compound.  Some of the agents went 
dovm.
     As the battle raged, Koresh picked up the phone and called the 
county sheriffs department, where Lieutenant Larry Lynch took the call.
     "You killed some of my children!"  the prophet screamed.  "There's 
a bunch of us dead now, and a bunch of you guys dead now.  That's your 
fault!"
     "Who am I speaking with?"  Lynch asked, trying to stay calm.
     "The notorious," Koresh replied.  "What did you guys do that for?"
     "What I am doing is trying to establish some communications links 
with you."
     "No, no, no, no, no!"  said Koresh.  "Let me tell you something.  
You see, you brought a bunch of guys out here and you killed some of my 
children.  We told you we wanted to talk.  We knew you were coming and 
everything.  We knew even before you knew!"
     Lynch tried to persuade Koresh to stop shooting, but it was 
useless.  Knowing the call was being widely monitored, Koresh took the 
opportunity to deliver a sermon.  "See, we will serve God first," he 
declared.
     "We will serve the god of the church .  . ."
     After listening to this for a minute, Lynch interrupted, "We can 
talk theology, but not now."
     Koresh protested, "No!  This is life and death!"
     "That's what I'm talking about," Lynch said.
     Retorted Koresh, "Theology is life and death!"
     During the battle, Koresh claimed he had been shot in "the gut" 
and phoned his mother in Chandler, Texas, leaving a message on her 
answering machine: "Hello, Mama, it's your boy.  They shot me and I'm 
dying, all right?  But I'll be back real soon, okay?  See y'all in the 
skies."
     The battle lasted less than an hour.  When the smoke cleared, four 
A T F agents and six Davidians were dead.  Another twenty-four A T F agents 
were injured.  In all, more than a quarter of the A T F force had been 
casualties.  Inside Ranch Apocalypse, at least one of the dead 
Davidians had been wounded in the shooting and executed by comrades to 
"put him out of his misery."
     The raid, broadcast on national television, was a debacle for the 
A T F, which found itself on the defensive against charges of lax 
security, poor planning, and gross incompetence.  "We were outgunned," 
a spokesman for the A T F weakly explained.  As reinforcements poured in, 
the FBI was put in charge of what would become a fifty-one-day siege at 
Ranch Apocalypse.
     Inside the compound, Koresh was now a man looking into the pit of 
hell, but he seemed to have made a miraculous recovery from the gunshot 
wound he reported to his mother.  In no time he was back on the phone, 
giving long and rambling interviews on radio and television stations.  
All the while, he harangued the FBI's elite squad of terrorist-hostage 
negotiators with ravings about the end of the world.
     At first the FBI negotiators on the scene pursued a conciliatory 
approach, aware that Koresh's followers were desperate religious 
fanatics engage'd in what criminologists call the "gamble with death."  
There were some initial signs of success in the approach, since at the 
end of the first week of the siege, Koresh allowed twenty-one children 
and two elderly women to leave the compound.  That, authorities 
calculated, left forty-seven women, forty-three men, and seventeen 
children inside.  It was known they had food stockpiled to last for 
over a year.  It was not known at that point how many weapons they had, 
or how determined Koresh was to go down in flames and take everyone 
with him.  All anyone had were guesses.
     And soon they began guessing wrong.  As the siege stretched on 
through the weeks, FBI negotiators cautioning patience began losing 
ground to more tactical-minded agents pressing for "tightening the 
noose" with a show of force, and employing psychological warfare 
techniques to show the Davidians who was in charge.  A memo from two 
FBI agents on the negotiating team cautioned that such tactics, "if 
carried to excess, could eventually be counterproductive and could 
result in loss of life."  But the warning was discounted by authorities 
determined to show the Davidians that they meant business.
     Koresh harangued his followers by night and his tormentors by day. 
 Hostage experts on the scene apparently were unprepared to deal with a 
madman who had convinced more than a hundred people that their deaths 
meant their salvation-it seemed the cops and the cultists barely spoke 
the same language.
     Once, when Koresh told negotiators that he was working to put into 
effect his final interpretation of the fabled seven seals that 
apocalyptic Scripture stated had to be opened before the end of the 
world, one of the agents believed that Koresh was making an 
environmental allusion about, the plight of sea seals.
     In Australia, Mark Breault and his associates watched with 
mounting horror.  One of those "seals," as interpreted by Koresh, was 
mass suicide.
     "I told the FBI that Koresh believed the fifth seal taught suicide 
and martyrdom," Breault said later.
     "Koresh further believed that God had ordained a fixed number of 
martyrs, and this number was almost complete.  The end of the world 
could only take place when this was done .  . . I emphasized over and 
over that a mass suicide posed the greatest danger.  I said further 
that I did not believe Koresh would ever give up."
     As the siege continued for months with no end in sight, FBI 
hostage negotiators were reaching the point of exhaustion.  In 
Washington, federal authorities were baffled by conflicting reports and 
theories about the situation in Waco.  Some echoed the dire warnings 
that Koresh's group was an insane cult, ready for mass suicide.  Others 
insisted that Koresh was holding his followers hostage and would listen 
to reason if forced to, pointing to the fact that he had already let 
some people go.  Meanwhile, agents on the scene stepped up the campaign 
of psychological warfare.  They set up a bank of loudspeakers that 
blasted the Davidians for nights on end with rock music, chanting of 
Tibetan monks, even recorded screams of dying rabbits.  Searchlights 
were pointed at windows of the compound's main building and dorms.
     Inside Ranch Apocalypse, Davidians hauled bales of hay in to 
barricade walls and windows.  Windows were covered with cloth.  The 
electricity from the camp's generator failed.  The flicker of camp 
lanterns glowed through the night in darkened windows.
     In Washington in mid-April the FBI went to Attorney General Janet 
Reno, who had been on the job for less than a month, with a detailed 
plan to storm the compound and release the hostages in a lightning 
strike that would begin with armored vehicles pumping in tear gas.  
Reno, who already had been apprised that children were being sexually 
abused by Koresh, was also worried about the effect of deteriorating 
sanitary conditions inside the compound.  She was assured that the tear 
gas to be used was nonlethal and would not start what authorities 
feared most, perhaps recalling the Move disaster in Philadelphia: a 
fire.  Furthermore, the FBI's vaunted @sychological profile team, which 
had been dispatched to the scene to evaluate Koresh, had concluded that 
he was a personal coward who probably didn't have enough claim on his 
followers' loyalty to enact a mass suicide like the one in Jonestown.  
After assuring President Clinton that gassing the compound and ' 
flushing them out was "the best way to go," Reno warily gave the 
goahead on April 17.
     On the morning of April 19, fifty-one days after A T F agents had 
been mowed down on the first assault in February, after weeks of tense 
negotiations and broken promises from Koresh, the raiders donned battle 
gear and moved into place starting at 4:30 A.m. There were 170 FBI 
agents on the scene.
     They had fitted two M-60 tanks with booms to poke holes into the 
walls of the compound's buildings.  Armored personnel carriers lumbered 
into place behind them.
     A brisk wind whipping over the plains caused concern that the tear 
gas could dissipate too quickly.
     Tensely, the agents waited for the wind to die.
     Finally, a minute before Six A.M FBI hostage negotiator Byron 
Sage called the compound and spoke with one of Koresh's top aides, 
Steve Schneider.
     "There's going to be tear gas injected into the compound.  This is 
not an assault.  Do not fire.  The idea is to get you out of the 
compound."
     "You're going to gas us?"  Schneider asked incredulously.
     In response, the phone was ripped a,.vay from the wall and thrown 
out the window.
     "Everybody grab your gas masks!"  agents heard someone shout from 
within as the loudspeakers blasted a warning to Davidians waking 
sleepy-eyed in their dorms: "This is not an assault!  Do not fire!  
Come out now and you will not be harmed!"
     Inside, preparations quickened.  Some of the children were fitted 
with gas masks.  Koresh, wearing sweat pants and a tank top, put on a 
camouflage hunting vest with pockets for ammunition.  Knots of 
Davidians quietly gathered to read Bibles and pray.
     At Six A.m. a tank lumbered up to the outside of the main building 
and halted while the loudspeaker continued to blare, "This is not an 
assault!  Do not fire!  Exit the compound and follow instructions!"
     In response, a burst of gunfire came from inside the compound.
     Under fire, the tank lurched forward, its ram knocking a hole in a 
corner of the building.  Behind it, other armored vehicles advanced, 
leveling their rams to punch more holes in walls.  Tear gas began 
hissing inside.  By now, firing from within the compound was intense.  
The agents did not return fire.
     The first phase of the gassing operation went on for a half hour.  
The plan, an FBI official said, was gas and negotiate, gas and 
negotiate."  When none

     -254 James J. Boyle

     of the Davidians surrendered, more gas was pumped in.  By 8:30 
A.M. the wind was picking up again.
     Davidians with rifles silently fell into place beside the haystack 
barricades at windows.  Fleetingly, Koresh himself was seen at an 
exposed window, checking gas masks on followers before he ducked out of 
sight.
     At 11:50 came another round of tear gas.  Again the authorities 
waited.  As they did, a high-tech listening device that had been placed 
ten feet from the front door of the compound picked up the following 
comments from unidentified voices: "I want a fire around the back.  
Let's keep that fire going."  Within minutes FBI snipers on high ground 
overlooking the compound reported seeing two men setting small fires at 
either side of the complex.
     Thin curls of smoke now rose from the front of the compound.  At 
the same time, an FBI surveillance plane circling overhead reported 
that small fires had broken out behind the tower and at several other 
points inside Ranch Apocalypse.  A few terrified Davidians ran out into 
the clear and were taken into custody.  Bales of hay began burning at 
several locations inside the main building.
     With the wind now blowing briskly, the ramshackle compound burst 
into huge flames.  Explosions roared as ammunition stockpiles caught 
fire.  The rickety watchtower over the main building collapsed in a 
fireball.
     "What is the plan?"  one man inside shrieked to Koresh.
     "Well, you always wanted to be a charcoal briquet," the prophet 
replied.
     Inside the compound Koresh unleashed a torrent of bloody 
choreography as the Davidians' world came to an end.
     When it was done, horrified authorities would find in the rubble 
the charred bodies of Koresh and seventy-five of his followers, 
twenty-five of them children under the age of fifteen.  Ttveive of 
those children had been fathered by Koresh.  Autopsies would reveal 
that Koresh had died of a bullet wound in the forehead, apparently 
self-inflicted.  The body of his chief lieutenant, Steve Schneider, had 
a gunshot wound in the mouth.  Seventeen other Davidians, including 
five children, died of gunshot wounds before they were burned.  One 
woman was shot in the back.  A two-year-old boy had been stabbed to 
death.  Eight members of the cult had managed to escape the holocaust, 
some of them fleeing with their clothes in flames.
     Later, eleven Davidians-several of whom were not at the compound 
during the initial February 28
     raid-were charged with murder and conspiracy in the deaths of the 
A T F agents.  One Davidian, thirtyfour-year-old Kathryn Schroeder, a 
former Air Force sergeant whose husband had been killed in the initial 
shootout and whose four children were among those released by Koresh in 
March, and who had herself fled the compound on March 12, pleaded 
guilty to a reduced charge of resisting arrest in exchange for 
testimony that the Davidians had a well-established shoot-to-kill 
battle plan to repel any raid on the compound.
     At the trial in 1994, the prosecutor, assistant U.S.
     Attorney William Johnston, declared that Koresh and all those who 
stayed in the compound were willing participants in a "conspiracy" that 
led to the deaths of the federal agents.
     Dick DeGuerdn, a Houston lawyer who had represented Koresh 
throughout the fifty-one-day standoff, told reporters, "They sincerely 
believed the world was going to end-and end in catastrophe."
     In February 1994 the jury sent a clear admonishment to the 
government, rejecting the murder and conspiracy charges against all 
eleven defendants.  Instead, five were convicted of voluntary 
manslaughter in the killing of the four A T F agents.  They and two 
others were also convicted of various firearms violations.  Four 
defendants were acquitted of all charges.
     Clearly, authorities had learned little from the lessons of 
Jonestown and Philadelphia.  They still had not come to understand and 
appreciate the ferocious determination of a cult that would kill, and 
die, in order to survive.
     Koresh's movement did not completely vanish in the flames of Waco. 
 Some survivors who had not been criminally charged remained faithful 
to Koresh in the months after the showdown.  One, Mary Jones, one of 
the prophet's mothers-in-law, maintained her loyalty even though 
her'husband was killed in the February shootout, and two of her 
daughters, a son, and four grandchildren all perished in the April 19
     fire.  "I just find great relief in the prophesies of the coming 
kingdom," she would insist afterward .
     Failure and defeat simply does not exist in such a mind-set.  "We 
see his departure as a sign from God," said Janet McBean, a Koresh 
follower who had been away from the compound when it was destroyed.  
She insisted that survivors were awaiting Koresh's resurrection from 
the dead.  Then the Davidians would themselves rise from their 
blackened ashes to battle the legions of Satan on earth.
     "The next meeting point for all of us is in heaven," she said.  
"Then we'll come down and we'll set it up."

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

     Circle of Fire

     utside is darkness," "HERE EVERYTHING is white.  0 ell-eduLuc 
Jouret would lecture his disciples, w cated, affluent believers in New 
Age metaphysics who dressed in ceremonial robes and banqueted in secret 
chambers.  "We are in a circle of fire.  Everything is being consumed.  
We are about to make a leap in macroevolution," said Jouret, a 
handsome, soft-spoken environmental idealogue, a forty-sixyear-old 
homeopathic physician with sparkling eyes, curly black hair, and a 
gentle face-a man who would never hurt a tree, but had no problem 
consigning fifty-three men, women, and children to their deaths in a 
holocaust of flames and gunfire.
     Jouret's followers, members of.  a group called the Solar Temple, 
made that great leap on a cool night early in October of 1994 and went 
to their deaths in a blazing orgy of murder and suicide on two 
continents.
     "Death can represent an essential stage of life," Jouret had said 
on one of the dozens of motivational audiotapes he and his followers 
marketed through New Age bookstores and outlets.
     As always, authorities searching through the embers and trying to 
identify the bodies could only shake their heads in bafflement at what 
would cause a close-knit group of people to follow a man to their 
deaths for no apparent reason other than blind faith.
     At least some members of the group left behind rambling suicide 
notes that began arriving in the offices of law enforcement authorities 
and news organizations days after the bodies were found at two 
locations in Switzerland and one in Canada.  "We are leaving this earth 
to find in all lucidity and freedom a new dimension of truth and 
absolution, far from the hypocrisies and oppression of this world, in 
order to achieve the seeds of our future generation," said one.  A 
document received by the New York Times was titled "Transit for the 
Future," and predicted that the earth would soon suffer destruction 
along with lines of the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah.  Still other 
documents intimated that Luc Jouret and other leaders of the cult chose 
to "leave this earth prematurely" because they were being persecuted.
     Of course, not all of the victims died willingly.  As usual, there 
were those who resisted.  One Solar Temple document sent to newspapers 
alluded to that fact, saying that some of those who went to their 
deaths that terrible night had to be "gently" killed, for their own 
eternal good.
     One Of Switzerland's leading cult specialists, JeanFrancois Mayer, 
told reporters he had received three such documents in the mail 
after the deaths.  They were signed, "Mr.  Depart."
     Who were these people who called themselves "Knights of Christ" 
and thought they had the key to eternal life?  Most of what they left 
behind was depressingly familiar: weapons stockpiled against an 
imagined assault; evidence of a fanatical, paranoid belief that the 
world was coming to an end and that they somehow were at the center of 
the great drama; denunciations of persecution.  But as the millennium 
approaches and doomsday cults grow in number, the Solar Temple 
contributed something new to the evolution.  These were no wild-eyed 
Bible-thumpers holed up on a remote farm, waiting to do battle with 
Satan.  Rather, these were affluent people, for the most part 
well-educated and accomplished.  They formed a thoroughly modern killer 
cult that deftly dipped into the zeitgeist of the 198OS-the Solar 
Temple evidently was plugged into international financial networks of 
the global economy-and cloaked it with 1990s elements of New Age 
mysticism and environmental activism.
     They died on a night of horror.
     The first alarm was raised on October 5, 1994, by a farmer named 
Fernand Thierrin, gazing out his window while he sipped a postmidnight 
nightcap of cognac in a pastoral Swiss farming village of Cheiry, about 
fifty miles northeast of Geneva.
     Thierrin noticed a red glow on the hill about a mile from his 
house.  Then he saw flames lick at the dark autumn sky.  He called the 
village fire department and got into his car to drive toward the 
flames.
     The first one to arrive at the blazing farmhouse, Thierrin smashed 
his way inside and found the owner, seventy-two-year-old Albert 
Giacobino, a retired businessman, dead in his bedroom.  But even in the 
smoke and danger of a burning house, it was clear that fire hadn't 
killed the man.  Giacobino had been shot to death.
     As firemen arrived and brought the flames under control, a more 
thorough search was made of the main house and outbuildings.  In the 
spacious barn, untouched by the flames, firefighters opened a door to 
find a chapel with red-satin walls and an occult pentagraph drawn on 
the red-carpeted floor.  There were twenty-three bodies fanned in an 
sunburst circle around a triangular pulpit, under a painting of a 
Christlike figure, which in fact resembled Luc Jouret, holding a 
chalice and with a rose above its head.  Ten of the dead were men, clad 
in ceremonial robessome red, some black, and a few white, indicating a 
hierarchy of sorts.  Twelve were women, all dressed in flowing gold and 
white gowns.  And one was a twelve-year-old girl, later identified as 
the daughter of Joseph DiMambro, Jouret's chief lieutenant.
     Half of the corpses had plastic bags tied around their faces.  
Several had died with their hands bound.
     And twenty of the bodies had bullet wounds in the head; some had 
been shot as many as eight times.
     Around the corpses were empty champagne bottles, which were also 
found in an adjoining chapel that had walls of mirrors.
     Undamaged in the fire was a cassette recording, a rambling 
discourse on the earth and astrology, with allusions to mass suicide.  
The mystery deepened when police realized that three rifles had been 
found on the scene, but that the fifty-two bullet casings on the floor 
had come from a .22 caliber pistol that was not found.  Where was the 
gun, and more important, where was the person who had fired it?
     The answer to that aspect of the mystery, at least, came four 
hours later, as dawn streaked the jagged mountain peaks looming over 
the Alpine hamlet of Granges-sur-Salvan, fifty miles to the southeast 
of Cheiry.  Suddenly, there was an explosion that rocked the village a 
mile away; flames leaped out at three adjoining ski chalets that had 
been used by Jouret and members of the Solar Temple.
     When firefighters battled their way inside and subdued the flames, 
they found twenty-five bodies, mostly lying on beds.  Five of them were 
children.  No one here had been shot, but some of the bodies showed 
signs of severe beatings.  In the smoldering ashes were supplies of 
tranquilizers, hypodermic syringes, and intravenous drips.  The victims 
had been heavily drugged, and then burned to death.  Residues of 
plastic trash bags were found melted on some of the heads, indicating 
they had died with the bags over their faces.  On the floor was the .22 
pistol that had been used hours before in Cheiry.
     During ceremonies, members were said to have worn plastic bags on 
their heads to symboue the defilement of the earth's environment.  The 
Village Voice sardonically referred to that as "the Solar Temple's most 
imaginative rite: confessing your sins against nature with a plastic 
bag on your head."
     But the carnage of October 5 was not confined to Switzerland.
     In Canada, at a duplex ski chalet fifty miles northwest of 
Montreal that was among the extensive real estate holdings of Jouret 
and DiMambro, the news from Switzerland came with a direct connection 
to a horror scene police had just discovered there.
     Early on the morning of October 5 a fireball had suddenly exploded 
and engulfed the Canadian chalet in flames.  Firefighters responding to 
the blaze found the bodies of a man and a woman in a bedroom.
     Each wore medallions with a double-headed eagle and the initials 
for the Solar Temple.
     But these were not the only victims.  As investigators worked 
through the chalet, they found in the basement the bodies of two adult 
members of the sect, a thirtY-five-year-old Swiss man, Antonio Dutoit, 
and his thirty-year-old British wife, Nicki Dutoit- Antonio had been 
DiMambro's chauffeur and handyman; Nicki had been a babysitter for 
DiMambro.  A tew hours later still another body was found in the 
basement, wedged behind a water heater under the stairs.  This was 
Dutoits' son, Christopher Emmanuel, three months old.
     The infant had a plastic bag tied around his head and a wooden 
stake through his heart.
     The baby's parents had also died before the fire, stabbed to death 
with a knife that was found near their bodies and dragged into the 
basement near their child.
     The local police would later discover in interviews with former 
sect members that the baby had been ritually murdered several days 
earlier by cult members on the order of DiMambro, who claimed that the 
child was the anti-Christ described in the Book of Revelation.  
DiMambro reportedly was incensed that the parents had chosen to 
conceive the child without his permission.
     The Canadian chalet where the bodies were found had been 
elaborately booby-trapped, and there were indications the explosion had 
been set off by people who fled the scene beforehand.  Explosive 
devices had been fashioned from electric coils and wired to bags of 
gasoline, set by timers to explode at five A.m.
     The night before the bodies were found, Jouret and DiMambro had 
been seen leaving the chalet.
     Investigators believe they took a ten o'clock flight to 
Switzerland.  Their plane was just about due to land in Zurich when the 
Canadian chalet burst into flames.
     At first, police believed that the two key leaders of the sect, 
Jouret and DiMambro, the seventy-year-old financial genius and 
"enforcer" of the Temple, had perpetrated the mass suicide-murder and 
then fled.
     But dental charts showed that DiMambro's was one of those burned 
beyond recognition.  And a few days later, so was Jouret's.
     The unlikely duo-a personable young physician and a dour, retired 
businessman with a violent streak -had planned the events carefully.  
At lunchtime, after arriving from Canada, Jouret and Di Mambro had 
driven to the village of Salvan.  It was early in the season; the 
skiers who had begun turning the area into a resort in recent years 
weren't expected to start trickling in for another month or so.  
Nevertheless, Jouret and DiMambro shopped like they were planning a 
party.  Among their purchases were dozens of boxes of plastic trash 
bags.  Claiming they had forgotten their keys, they also enlisted the 
aid of the town locksmith to open the doors of the sprawling 
mountainside chalet.  The locksmith would later recall noticing the 
strong smell of gasoline in the chalet.  After Jouret and DiMambro 
opened up the houses, the cars of other followers began winding their 
way up the mountain to the chalet meeting place.
     Swiss police believe that after that, Jouret and DiMambro made the 
seventy-five-minute drive to Cheiry, where the sect maintained a temple 
and conference center at the farmhouse, to supervise the killings, 
suicides, and arson there.  Then they drove back to the Salvan ski area 
for the final phase of death, which included their own.
     Again, there were indications that not everyone had gone willingly 
to their deaths in Salvan.  In apartments that had been rented in the 
area by some of the victims, suitcases were found fully packed, 
suggesting that their owners believed they might be about to embark on 
a somewhat more worldly trip.
     Where that might have been remained a mystery.
     In the village of Salvan, where they gathered often for weekend 
retreats, Solar Temple members had been an object of curiosity for many 
months among the permanent population of about a hundred.  Locals found 
the sect's expensive cars and well-heeled tastes curious.
     However, Solar Temple members kept to themselves and gave no one 
cause to report them to the police.  In Salvan, a waitress at the 
village restaurant told reporters, "Dr.  Jouret was tall and handsome 
and behaved quite normally.  I never saw anything odd about him."
     In Cheiry, villagers felt both shock and fear in the days after 
their rural calm was shattered by the flames and explosions inside the 
farmhouse, and from the world attention that followed.
     "God speaks through events, like the phenomenon of sects," 
Reverend Claude Morel told a congregation in a church near the village. 
 Another cleric, Reverend Jean Richoz, told his flock that "sects are 
signs of demonic influence."
     But as investigators unraveled the clues left behind, it appeared 
that money, not supernatural demons, had a lot to do with the horrors 
of December 5. At the time of the mass deaths, there were an estimated 
400 to 500 members of the Solar Temple, perhaps a hundred of whom were 
in Canada.  In recent months the group had been roiled by dissension 
over money, much of it centering on the freewheeling spending habits of 
Jouret and DiMambro.
     Some followers saw disaster coming and managed to avoid it.  In an 
interview with the French weekly L'Express, Patrick Vaumet, a 
twenty-six-year-old former member, said that in Solar Temple meetings 
in the year before the disaster, "the theme of the transit from life to 
death came up more and more," and that Jouret had assured members that 
death was nothing to fear.  Vaumet is the son of Jean Vaurnet, a French 
businessman and former Olympic champion .  skier.
     The elder Vaumet said he did not know that his son had been a 
member of the sect.
     Who was Luc Jouret?
     Jouret was born in 1947 in the Belgian Congo, now Zaire.  Later, 
his brother would recall him as sociable, intelligent, and intensely 
competitive as a boy.
     As a young man, Jouret returned to his parents' country of Belgium 
and served in the army.  After the army he studied medicine in 
Brussels, graduating in 1974 from the Free University of Brussels with 
a degree in medicine.  His original intent was to specialize in 
obstetrics, but in time he became involved in homeopathic healing-which 
depends on using small amounts of chemicals and other natural 
substances to attempt cures for disease.
     Jouret dabbled in mysticism and was fascinated with the rituals, 
intrigues, and trappings of secret societies, especially the fourteenth 
century Order of the Knights Templar, a French cult with militarist 
proclivities that claimed to be descended from the warrior Knights 
Templar of the Crusades.  After the final Crusade in the thirteenth 
century, the historical Knights Templar dispersed throughout Europe and 
the Mediterranean, but maintained their ties and used the immense 
financial resources they had amassed to establish international secret 
networks of finance, influence, and political power.  Their most 
successful financial achievement was to establish an influential 
international banking system that controlled the national debts of 
France and England for generations.
     In 1307, lung Philip the Fair of France confiscated Templar 
properties and had dozens of their leaders publicly executed.  Templar 
leaders throughout Europe were also executed, effectively destroying 
the organization.  However, the persecutions created a romantic and 
mystical legend, and from then on hundreds of sects arose around the 
world-many of them merely fraternal, theological or scholarly in nature, 
but some conspiratorial and fanatically religiou@laiming to be the 
heirs of the Templars.
     The Solar Temple was such a group.  It claimed a lineage traced to 
the fourteenth century secret Order and later resurrected as a branch 
of European Freemasonry that admitted only Christians.  By the 1970s, 
Jouret had found his way into a modern French offshoot that called 
itself the Renewed Order of the Temple.  The Renewed Order augmented 
the mysticism and intrigues of the medieval Templar orders with 
measures of neo-Nazi occultism and Indian transcendentalism.  It also 
adopted theatrical techniques@ostumes, incantations, and 
ritualsstraight from Hollywood horror movies.  The Renewed Order had 
its headquarters in a medieval chAteau in France, not far from the 
Belgian border.  At the time Luc Jouret found his way into its 
membership, the Renewed Order was still led by a former Gestapo officer 
named Julien Origas.
     Jouret was philosophically restless.  In 1977, while experimenting 
in southwest France with organic nutrition and herbal medicine, he 
visited the Philippines and became intrigued with psychic healers who 
claimed to cure diseases and make tumors disappear.
     During a year spent traveling in Asia, primarily India, he 
reported a spiritual awakening.  By the time he returned home he had 
decided to switch his practice to homeopathic medicine, and set up a 
practice in an Ardennes village.  Around that time, he was married 
briefly, had a child who died in infancy, and was soon afterward 
divorced.
     He steadily rose through the sedret ranks of the Renewed Order, 
meanwhile.  But in the mid-eighties, after a power clash following the 
death of Origas, and while quarreling over finances with other sect 
members, Jouret set out on his own.  With a small group of followers, 
he moved to Switzerland and founded the International Chivalric Order 
Solar Tradition, called Solar Temple for short.  It in turn absorbed an 
existing sect in Geneva led by DiMambro called Foundation Golden Way.  
After the merger, the organization was headed by Jouret, who functioned 
as its religious leader and philosopher.  To the mystical base that was 
already in place, Jouret added a modern blend of New Age spiritualism, 
apocalyptic environmentalism, homeopathic medicine, and-in a nod to the 
decade in which the movement had its greatest growth-high finance.  The 
financial end was the responsibility of DiMambro, a prosperous investor 
who handled the bank accounts and also maintained group discipline.
     With Jouret acting in the role of high priest, the group in 
Switzerland coalesced around the idea that the apocalypse would arrive, 
soon, in the form of a great Cosmic ecological disaster.  The Solar 
Temple was organized to draw loyalists ever closer to the central theme 
of submission and paranoia.  As adherents approached that center, the 
belief grew more intense that here alone could be found the definitions 
of true reality in a universe of conflicting claims.  Rituals often 
ended with wine, champagne, and food, and animated conversation.
     Ecology was theology in the Solar Temple.
     "Scenarios of ecological disaster have become particularly 
prominent among contemporary apocalyptic @ectarians, especially those 
influenced by New Age ideas," Michael Barkun, an authority on racist 
cults at Syracuse University wrote in the Los Angeles Times after the 
disaster.  "At a time when many natural disasters have lost their power 
to shock, and the end of the Cold War has reduced fears of a nuclear 
holocaust, environmental disasters emerge as a potent expression that 
the world is ending."
     Unlike Old Testament authoritarian cult charismatics such as Jim 
Jones and David Koresh, Luc Jouret maintained control using techniques 
of group coercion and management that he perfected over the years in a 
sideline as a free-lance corporate motivational lecturer and 
facilitator.  But for his followers, the effect was chillingly similar. 
 When summoned by Jouret, they dropped everything and heeded the call, 
and they died for it.
     Over the years, Jouret energetically recruited new members-people 
with money to pay the steep Solar Temple "dues."  Many of these first 
entered his influence through a homeopathic clinic Jouret ran in 
Geneva, where he told patients, "A physician should also be a priest."
     Switzerland, with its ample farmland, liberal banking laws, 
central location, affluent population, and traditional tolerance toward 
offbeat religious movements, was an ideal location for such an 
organization.  Switzerland has in recent years become a hotbed of 
millenarian religious activity, drawing believers from all over the 
world who are convinced the world is about to end.  With its 
well-established reputation as a refuge from war, a haven of civility 
and prosperity, Switzerland had became an international center of new 
religions and cult activities.
     Many of them are peaceable New Age and gnostic groups claiming to 
trace their lineage to pre-Christian and pagan sects.  They seek "a 
safe place in Switzerland," said Massimo Introvigne, head of the Center 
for Studies on New Religions.
     The two bases of the Solar Temple, Geneva and Montreal, "have the 
richest variety of esoteric and gnostic groups in the world," 
Introvigne said.
     Such groups claim membership of about 200,000 in Switzerland, 
which has an overall population of 7
     million.
     The Solar Temple, with its moralistic advocacy of organic farming, 
brandishing its politically correct cachet of the "Green" environmental 
movement, adroitly attracted lots of disaffiliated but nevertheless 
wealthy and educated followers, some of whom had been recruited to 
Switzerland by Jouret on his frequent travels throughout Europe and to 
Canada and Australia.
     "His followers were not backpackers on the Katmandu trail," a 
Swiss historian who had been studying the Solar Temple at the time of 
the disaster told the Sunday Times of London.  "One of the most 
surprising features about them is that they were respectable and 
sometimes prominent people.  They led ordinary lives but had been 
converted to his message.@l The trouble that spelled doom for Jouret 
started not in Switzerland, where the group was left alone, but in 
Canada, where Jouret had an active following but came to believe the 
sect was being persecuted.
     Around 1986 the restless Jouret and DiMambro had led a handful of 
French and Swiss followers to a new settlement that they called the 
"Promised Land" in Quebec province, which, Jouret believed, was one of 
the few places on earth that would largely escape the ecological 
calamity he insisted was about to destroy the rest of the world.  
Jouret and DiMambro purchased a former monastery with 1,000 acres of 
farmland in a rural Laurentian area about fifty miles north of 
Montreal.  The land was cultivated by followers who raised organic 
vegetables.  Members, who also operated a bakery and were expected to 
contribute their worldly possessions to the group, lived in a commune, 
while Jouret and DiMambro enjoyed the luxury of the ski resort.
     "We knew they were a religious commune of some sort, but they 
never bothered anybody," the town secretary told reporters.  But town 
resident Jeanine Brenon gave the Toronto Star a different view: "They 
frightened me.  All this dark talk of famines and fire and apocalypse 
Like Roch Theriault and his Ant Hill Kids, Jouret and his followers 
found fertile philosophical ground in Quebec, wher@ homeopathic healing 
groups flourish and the organic farming and other ecological movements 
have spawned literally thousands of rural New Age communities.
     In Canada, Jouret was known as a skilled speaker and an ingenious 
social "networker" who quickly branched out from the rural environment 
to the corporate realm, where the money was.  He moved skillfully into 
the burgeoning corporate motivational business-where inspirational 
lecturers and so-called facilitators sponsor improvement and 
self-realization seminars that many businesses require employees to 
attend.
     Jouret was especially successful with Hydro-Quebec, the big 
regional power company.  In 1988 and 1989 he was hired by Hydro-Quebec 
to present a series of motivational seminars to employees, with topics 
such as "Self-Realization and Management."
     In these seminars, Jouret gradually identified likely recruits, 
and then spent extra effort to lure them from the philosophical 
periphery of business dynamics and office relationships toward the 
darker circles of authoritarianism, paranoia, and ultimate submission.  
It was a measure of his success at just one company that after the 
holocaust in Switzerland, HydroQuebec officials said that seventeen of 
its employees still had links to the Solar Temple.
     At the same time, Jouret kept busy traveling to small cities and 
towns to recruit followers with lectures on homeopathic medicine and 
organic nutrition.  Authorities believed that Jouret attracted several 
hundred followers in Quebec to add to the estimated three hundred Solar 
Temple members in Switzerland and France.  Throughout the years he 
spent in Canada, Jouret and DiMambro traveled frequently to 
Switzerland, to maintain their hold over followers there and to 
supervise new recruiting efforts.
     By 1993, Jouret's cultlike organization had achieved a deft fusion 
of the 1980s and the 1990s, blending aggressive financial energy with 
New Age narcissism.  Holding it all together was the usual specter of 
authoritarianism in which petty rules about food and behavior were 
rigidly enforced.
     The Solar Temple had three distinct membership tiers.  The lowest 
level cost about fifty dollars a week in dues and was largely comprised 
of new recruits who attended .  lectures and bought motivational tapes. 
 The next level was called Club Arcadia and cost about $150 a week.  
Its members became more closely involved in Solar Temple religious 
rituals and recruiting activities, and worked in the cult's organic 
farming businesses.  The highest rank, which cost about $200 a week in 
dues, was called the Golden Circle, and its members were designated the 
chevalier order and conducted secret rituals, magical and occult in 
tone.  The chevaliers formed the inner circle around Jouret and 
DiMambro.
     Besides paying dues through day jobs or othei sources, members of 
the two top levels were expected to donate property and savings to the 
Solar Temple.
     But Solar Temple hierarchy does not seem to have indulged itself 
in the perverted or promiscuous activity that characterizes the 
leadership of other killer cults, although some complained that Jouret 
maintained the right to approve marriages and to dissolve them at will. 
 Instead, focus was intensely centered on organization and cohesion, 
with the internal creative strain to ensure discipline in the belief 
that only a hundred of the group would form the Elected, those who 
would be transported from this world en masse to survive the end of 
time.
     The public heard little about Jouret's activities in Canada until 
1993, when police placed the Solar Temple under surveillance on 
suspicion of weapons violations.  Later that year, Jouret pleaded 
guilty to a weapons charge in Canada.  He was fined $750 for the 
charge, which involved the possession of illegal gun silencers.
     In the publicity surrounding that case, Rose-Marie Klaus, one of 
the Solar Temple members who had followed Jouret and DiMambro to Canada 
from Switzerland, told a Radio Canada reporter that she and her husband 
had given Jouret and DiMambro $500,000 to invest in the organic farm 
before I eaving the sect in disgust.  "Jouret told people that a great 
cataclysm is going to take place and that only the elected will 
survive.  He persuaded several people to leave Europe, sell everything, 
and invest in his projects.  Jouret thinks he's Christ."
     Canadian police later theorized that Jouret and DiMambro began 
discussing the mass suicide and killing in March 1993, during the 
investigation into the weapons allegations, when police raided a burial 
crypt the Order maintained near Morin Heights.
     That raid evidently prompted Jouret and DiMambro to abandon their 
dream of setting up a Promised Land in Canada.
     Furious about the publicity that Klaus and other critics had 
managed to attract after the weapons plea, Jouret apparently left 
Canada in disgust in late 1993 and returned only sporadically during 
the last year of his life.
     But the trouble in Canada followed him back to Switzerland.  Among 
those dead in the Swiss chalets were Canadian followers who had told 
friends they were flying to Switzerland to confront Jouret over the 
sect's financial affairs.  These Canadians included sect members Robert 
Ostiguy, fifty years old, a businessman and mayor of Richelieu, a small 
city about twenty-five miles south of Montreal; Joce-Lyne Grand'Maison, 
forty-four, a reporter for the newspaper Le Journal de Quebec; and 
Robert Falardeau, forty-seven, a minor official of the Quebec finance 
ministry who had abandoned his job and flown to Switzerland several 
months earlier to help straighten out "questionable" business dealings 
in the group.
     According to a Montreal newspaper, Ostiguy had secretly joined the 
sect in the late 1980s.  The other two also kept their membership 
secret.  There were other reports that Jouret had recently been 
replaced as Grand Master of the Canadian branch of the Temple, 
deepening the rifts.
     Some of the dissension may have been merely strategic.  As real 
estate portfolios lost value during the 1990s, assets declined in value 
and Solar Temple investment income dropped sharply.  Some current and 
former members who survived spoke of growing tensions because of the 
vast sums of money invested by DiMambro and Jouret in property.  Others 
remarked that in Canada there was growing dissent over Jouret's 
arbitrariness in approving and sometimes capriciously dissolving 
marriages between members.
     Jouret always kept up his frantic traveling pace.
     For years he had remained active in Australia, where he and 
DiMambro visited frequently in the second half of the eighties, 
networking among New Age groups there.  Jouret had plans to hold 
regular religious services at Ayers Rock, a huge formation that rises 
in the desert of Uluru-Kat ' a Tjuta National Park, and which has 
become a kind of religious shrine for New Age spiritualists.  However, 
the local aborigine community, which controls access to the site, 
refused him permission.  Nevertheless, Jouret continued his travels and 
organizing in Australia.
     The trigger to the tragedy of October 5, 1994, evidently, was 
money.  After the deaths, investigators in Canada quickly discovered 
millions of dollars of deposits by DiMambro and Jouret in the banks on 
three continents.  DiMambro, who had spend six months in a Canadian 
jail on a fraud conviction in 1972, was found to have owned more than 
sixty properties.  His personal credit-card charges were averaging 
about $35,000 a month at the time of his death.
     There also were reports that the Canadian police had been 
investigating DiMambro for illegally laundering as much of $95 million. 
 A few days after the bodies were discovered in Canada and Switzerland, 
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Gilles Deziel confirmed to 
reporters in Montreal that the federal police agency had "an ongoing 
investigation of money-laundering involving certain members of the 
Order of the Solar Temple."  But he declined to identify those being 
investigated.
     There were also reports that police suspected Jouret had been 
linked to a right-wing paramilitary group called Q-37 and had plotted 
to blow up Hydro-Quebec transmission towers and made threats against 
government officials.
     At the same time, Canadian police for several years had been 
looking into reports that Jouret and his followers there were 
stockpiling weapons and plotting to infiltrate government and business 
organizations.
     A few days after the deaths, the French interior ministry received 
a letter from the Solar Templemailed in Geneva the day of the 
tragedy-that denounced the "relentlessness" of government 
investigations of the cult.
     "Faced with the police intimidation that we are constantly victims 
of .  . . we have decided, in all consciousness, to leave this world," 
the letter said, according to the Toronto Star.
     Jouret and DiMambro had spent much of 1994
     shuttling back and forth between Switzerland and Canada.  In 
Quebec during the latter part of the year, Jouret began warning 
followers that the "Day of Cataclysm" was at head.  He meant it.
     Police later were told that cult members were convinced that they 
would be reborn on a distant planet they called Sirius after passing 
through a fiery death on earth.
     Robert Falardeau, the minor finance ministry official who was 
believed to have been the leader of the Canadian branch of the cult, 
apparently returned to Canada from Switzerland late in September 1994.
     During the last week of the month, he stayed at Hotel Bonivard in 
Veytauxa.  Hotel employees said that on the night of September 26, 
Falardeau received a mysterious phone call and left hurriedly, 
indicating there was an emergency.  Police believe Farardeau urgently 
flew to Switzerland that night or the next morning.
     A few nights after that, Jouret was seen with DiMambro attending a 
tense dinner with seven others in a private dining room of the hotel.  
Umberto Tiinmoneri, supervisor of the restaurant, told the lbronto 
Star, "They were tense and had a serious air about them.  Visibly, they 
had very low morale.  I shudder to think that it may have been here 
that they finalized their disastrous massacre."
     And two nights before the killings, DiMambro and twelve close 
followers in Canada had a ritualistic "Last Supper" at an expensive 
restaurant nearby.
     Jouret did not attend.
     Looking at it strictly as a criminal case, money was the most 
immediate cause of the disaster.  There was so much at stake.  As 
authorities began to unravel the secrets, they turned up a huge bank 
account in Austria, where banking sources described for a Swiss 
newspaper-How a DiMambro associate opened up an account there in 1993 
with a fortune-some sources placed the amount at more than $90 
million-in money transferred from a Swiss bank.  According to police, 
Jouret and DiMambro spent most of the winter of 1994 in the Australian 
state of Queensland.
     But money does not explain why so many cult members in Switzerland 
went willingly to their deaths.  The money problems were largely hidden 
from the followers in Switzerland and France, who came when Jouret 
called them because they believed in the literal truth that doomsday 
was on its way and that the Solar Temple provided the means to achieve 
"purification" through the cosmic fire and to rise from the ashes of 
destructive humankind as higher evolutionary life forms.
     Some experts claimed that New Age cults-Ariven by modern marketing 
techniques, keyed to environmental moralism-are spreading more rapidly 
than the older millenarian cults based on Protestant Christianity and a 
literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation.  While most New Age 
cults are much more likely to focus on spiritualism and 
self-improvement, the Solar Temple was a quick reminder that killer 
cults can take on new forms and blaze with the same degree of extremism 
that brought the multitudes to die in Jonestown and Waco.
     Professor Peter Bayer of the University of Toronto's religious 
studies department told the Toronto Star, "The religious marketplace is 
wide open to an entrepreneur to create a unique product."
     Always a marketing genius, Luc Jouret's deadly new religious 
product was carefully designed for New Age appeal.  Former followers 
recalled visits to Stonehenge, and midnight ceremonies beneath a full 
moon where druidlike priests in hooded robes embroidered with crosses 
chanted slogans, and Jouret urged them all to prepare for the 
apocalypse.
     A sixty-three-year-old villager in Cheiry on that night recalled 
the awe and confusion: "There was a little fire, then a big flame, then 
the gas canisters went off.  I first thought they were having a party, 
with firecrackers.  Then it really started burning."
     Hours later he learned what had happened.
     "It was horrible," he said, "a temple of death."

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