|
REMEMBER
SEEING ORANGE??
Twenty years ago (1985) CCG
Ministries issued a
‘CLARIFICATION STATEMENT ON THE ORANGE PEOPLE’.
This was issued as a general handout and also published in TACL (No.2
Mar-May 1985, pp.7-10 & No.3 June 1985, pp. 14-18). In it we stated:
‘We are sure that available evidence earlier this year indicated possible
plans for Rajneesh and leading members of his hierarchy to consider
Australia, probably W.A., as their next home…We want to share the reasons
for that belief and our concerns with this particular cult.
We
believe that the recent outrageous statements and behaviour of Rajneeshee
leader, Sheela Silverman, has clouded the issues of genuine concern over
the teachings, activities and plans of the Rajneesh movement. We believe
that the majority of the Orange People are NOT as ill-mannered as Sheela
Silverman. There is a real danger that her amateur dramatics will
over-excite people and throw a smoke-screen around less obvious activities
and plans of the Rajneeshees. At the same time, Sheela Silverman
represents a top-level example of the affect of total commitment to
Rajneesh as Bhagwan (God).
Our
concerns have not been with the average follower, or majority of the
members, of the Rajneesh movement. Nevertheless we believe there is a real
cause for concern as a result of five years of ongoing extensive research
into this group. These concerns have NOT been adequately expressed in
brief newspaper comments, loaded questions on radio, or brief interviews
on televisions.
We have
general concerns about the Orange People, as well as specific concerns
relating to the current tensions at Pemberton.’
We listed some nine areas of
general concern including the anti-family and anti-society teachings of
Rajneesh; the
‘long
track record of denial, deception and deceit’
on the part of many of the leaders; the manipulation of members, media and
more; the build-up of weapons; the paranoia and persecution complex
instilled in members; – including our comments:
‘The
increasing inflammatory statements of Sheela Silverman, and other leaders,
about “civil war”, “bloodbaths”, “bulldozers covered in
blood” and a repeat of “Jonestown”, as pressure against the
legal status of Rajneeshpuram (Rajneesh’s
city on his Oregon ranch) and several top aides, continues to mount up
from U.S. government authorities. Perth woman, Catherine Jane Paul (Ma
Shanti Badra), was quoted by the German Magazine Stern
earlier this year, in reference to outside pressure and concern and
concern over possible illegal activities and the arms build-up: “We are
not creating a second Jonestown, they are doing it. I say we are looking
forward to dying by their bullets”.’
Our statement went on to list
some fourteen points of specific information and concern in relation to
Rajneesh activities and developments in Western Australia, especially in
relation to Pemberton; the Rajneeshee takeover of the Karri Valley tourist
resort (and the setting up of a school on part of the resort); the
evidence indicating Rajneesh and his tops aides were planning to move to
Western Australia; Sheela Silverman’s antics on Australian television as
she confronted our Director; and more. Our statement also included the
comments (in relation to late 1984):
‘Rajneesh
corporate structures underwent changes of directorships, and Perth
Rajneesh follower, Jennifer Margaret Cornish became director of several
Eastern States Rajneesh corporations; Jenny Cornish also incorporated the
official Rajneesh umbrella organisation, The Rajneesh Foundation
Australia, in Perth, in 1984 – Cornish is its Hon. Treasurer,
Catherine Jane Paul (Shanti Badra) (now in Oregon, married to an American
Rajneeshee [at the
time of our statement in 1985])
is its President, one of the other three Board members is West Australian
teacher, Susan Elizabeth Menzies Kell.’
American authorities began
closing in on the Rajneesh empire, and Sheela Silverman and a few of her
top associates (collectively dubbed by other Rajneesh followers as the
‘dowager duchesses’) made sudden replacement appointments and took off to
Germany in mid-September 1985. One of the women who left with Sheela was
Perth-born Catherine Jane Paul – Catherine Jane Lalor – Catherine Jane
Elsea – Catherine Jane Stubbs – NOW Catherine Jane Stork – (aka Ma
Shanti Bhadra/Shanti B).
Catherine Jane Paul followed
in the footsteps of her father, John Paul, a school teacher who became a
headmaster. Though she failed to gain a degree at the University of
Western Australia during the early 1960s, Jane Paul did become a school
teacher and briefly taught at several metropolitan primary schools. In
September 1966 she married geologist, Roger Lalor (3 years her senior).
After her marriage she gave up teaching and ran a health-food shop for
some time. Roger Lalor became a successful businessman and owner of a
Kalgoorlie mine, and family fortunes prospered, eventually owning ‘an
opulent home’, several cars, and a yacht.
Jane Paul had been brought
up as an active Roman Catholic, a faith shared by Roger Lalor. Together
with their two children, Peter and Kylie, they were a practicing Roman
Catholic family – until the late 1970s. In 1977 Catherine Jane Lalor went
to visit the Rajneesh commune in Pune (then Poona) in India. She became a
totally committed Rajneesh convert, being given the name Ma Shanti Bhadra.
Her radical conversion shocked her parents, and others. Roger Lalor took
Peter (then 9) and Kylie (7) and went to Pune to join Jane. Media reports
suggesting that
‘all
joined the sect’
were rather misleading – nine and seven year old children don’t have much
personal choice when their parents join religious communities. Roger also
became a Rajneesh follower and both children were given Rajneeshee names:
Peter became ‘Santosh’ and Kylie ‘Aruna’. Roger Lalor’s move to Pune did
not save his marriage. He and Jane separated in 1979, as Jane became even
more entrenched in living for Rajneesh. In 1981 Jane Lalor helped the
Rajneesh movement set up their Oregon commune on the ranch near the
township of Antelope. She contributed her personal life savings of
$25,000 to the movement and became one of the top women running the
movement under Sheela Silverman’s overall direction, one of a number of
powerful ‘dowager duchesses’ in control of the Rajneesh movement in Oregon
and worldwide.
In March 1983 Jane divorced
Roger Lalor and, six days later, married American Rajneeshee, Robert
Franklin Elsea (aka Harida – he was 8 years her junior) and gained
US rights, becoming Catherine Jane Elsea. Catherine Jane Elsea
– rose rapidly in the ranks, becoming Treasurer of the Rajneesh
Foundation International; vice-president of the (notorious) Rajneesh
Medical Corp; briefly Director of Rajneesh Investment Corp. (Australia);
President of the Rajneesh Foundation of Australia.
Life was not all love,
joy and peace at the Oregon commune, however. The bullying and other
problems that had existed in Pune, India, became worse in Oregon. With
its own police (‘peace’) force, weapons build-up, plots to take over local
government, the deliberate salmonella poisoning of local food supplies
leading to some 750 people becoming very ill, illegal telephone tapping,
and a whole range of other activities, including immigration fraud,
brought scrutiny and action against the movement.
These pressures led to
leaders attempting to set up structures in Australia for a move ‘down
under’. But Sheela mishandled things in Australia, and her television
appearances with our Director, plus our public exposure of the nature of
the group, its activities and plans, thwarted some of these intentions.
It was all starting to crash
around them when Sheela, Jane and others suddenly left Oregon for Germany
in September 1985. In October 1985 Rajneesh himself, with a number of
other leaders of his movement tried to flee the US in two rented Learjets.
Rajneesh and six others were arrested in Charlotte, North Carolina while
on their way to Bermuda; Sheela, Jane and several others were arrested
near Freiburg in southern Germany; others were arrested in Portland
Oregon, and one surrendered to Scotland Yard in London.
Sheela Silverman and
Catherine Jane Elsea were extradited to the USA where they were charged
with attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder and first degree
assault. Jane Elsea had been part of a conspiracy to murder Rajneesh’
personal doctor: George Alexander Stowell Wynne-Aubrey Meredith – aka
Devaraj. Affidavits submitted in the USA, claimed that she had directly
attempted the murder (by injecting poison), resulting in the doctor
becoming extremely ill, but ultimately surviving the attempt. In July 1986
Jane Elsea had pleaded guilty to the charge and was sentenced to 10 years
imprisonment, but was released on parole in June 1987 as a result of plea
bargaining agreements. She returned to Western Australia and stayed with
her elderly parents in the South West, while under the supervision of the
Department of Corrective Services.
At the times she claimed
innocence of any wrong doing, declaring her guilty plea was just part of
the legal bargaining, and she could not have afforded to do otherwise.
She openly declared her loyalty to
‘Sheela…a
genius, a jewel in existence’
(with whom she shared a US jail cell for some time) and declared that she
would prepare the way for Sheela Silverman to return to WA:
‘I am
personally here ready to roll out the red carpet when she does come.’
In November 1988 Catherine
Jane Elsea left Western Australia for Germany, still vowing to come back
and roll out the red carpet for Sheela Silverman:
‘I’ve
promised Sheela that I will come back to Western Australia with her and
Savita will be coming, too.’
[Savita, English woman, Sally-Anne Croft, was the Rajneesh movement’s top
financial advisor and treasurer, and Sheela’s closest friend.]
Catherine Jane Paul/Lalor/Elsea
didn’t move back to Perth to roll out any carpets. She stayed in Germany,
where she eventually became a naturalised German citizen. Somewhere along
the way became Catherine Jane Stubbs and then, apparently later
married Hans-Georg Stork.
The US and Oregon
authorities took years to unravel all the plots, intrigues and criminal
activities of the Rajneesh hierarchy during their time in Oregon. One of
the plots that was uncovered was the planned assassination of the Federal
US Attorney for Oregon, Charles Turner. In 1990, the year the deported
Rajneesh died in India, seven top Rajneesh leaders, including Catherine
Jane Paul/Lalor/Elsea/Stubbs/Stork, were indicted for the attempted
murder of the chief federal prosecutor appointed to head a federal grand
jury investigation of the commune.
In May 1985 Sheela Silverman
called a meeting to plan Turner’s death. Catherine Jane Elsea at that
meeting. She was involved in the plotting, surveillance of Turner,
purchase of guns and silencers to be used in the assassination, and had
volunteered to be the assassin. The plan was cancelled late in the
development of the conspiracy.
Jane Elsea/Stubbs/Stork
remained in Germany. In spite of USA attempts to extradite her during the
past couple of decades, the German authorities refused to hand her over to
US authorities. All the others indicted for the assassination conspiracy
have faced the US courts and been dealt with, all except Catherine Jane
Stork aka Ma Shanti Bhadra.
That was, until September
2005.
During the past two decades
the former Jane Lalor’s fractured family moved on. Her parents had died.
Roger had remarried, eventually purchasing some land near Byron Bay in New
South Wales, where he later died. Peter and Kylie had also married and
moved on. Jane remained a ‘free’ captive of her German citizenship,
unable to leave the country without risk of arrest and extradition to the
US on further attempted murder charges.
In late October 2004 Jane
received a call from her daughter-in-law, Jennifer Lalor, informing her
that her son was seriously ill. Her daughter Kylie, with her husband
Greg, was in Germany visiting and so also heard the news. It turned out
that Peter Lalor, just before his 36th birthday,
suffered seizures due to an inoperable and terminal brain tumour.
In spite of the efforts,
advice, and support of various former Rajneeshee and other New Ager
friends, Peter Lalor’s condition did not improve. He and his wife,
Jennifer, set up an Internet website in which they share diary entries
recording their experiences and feelings in dealing with Peter’s brain
tumour. The website provides some sad insights into lives of people
dealing with love, fear, pain, uncertain future, and the efforts of others
to help them through. While lots tried with advice, homeopathic mixtures,
visions, diets, detox baths, and a lot more – (one advised that Peter
should pray and
‘call on a
personal team of 500 Light Warriors to help. Ask to have {removed} any
and all dark energies from any and all incarnations and through all space
and time and through all bodies…clear all entities, ancestral
imprinting…ask for millions of microscopic Light Warriors to go in and
clear out any cancerous cells on sub-atomic level’).
Confusion added to the pains and problems of the young couple involved.
This was especially so when some of their New Age Spirituality friends and
healers declared Peter healed. One spiritual healer claimed that she
channelled an American Lakota Indian spirit guide, as well as Jesus
Christ, Mary Magdalene and someone else. She later declared:
‘Jesus has
assured me that you are cancer-free.’
Another person had also told him the same, so Peter recorded in his
website journal, on June 5, 2005:
‘This is
our second confirmation that I am now tumour-free.’
Unfortunately, the medical
evidence did NOT support or confirm these two ‘spiritual’
pronouncements from well-intentioned people.
Catherine Jane Stork came to
realise that the situation with her son was becoming desperate. However,
if she tried to leave Germany to visit her dying son in New South Wales
she would be arrested before she got anywhere near Australia. As a result
she initiated contact with federal USA law authorities and, over some ten
months, negotiated her return to face the court. She faced US District
Judge Malcolm F. Marsh in the federal court in Portland Oregon, on Monday
September 26, 2005, with her current husband, Hans-Georg Stork. The judge
ordered that she be permitted to leave the USA to visit her dying son in
New South Wales, Australia, on condition that she returns to the court by
December 6, 2005, for sentencing. While the others indicted with her in
1990 have all completed there prison sentences, ranging from two to five
years, she could potentially face a life sentence.
Over the two decades since
initially leaving Oregon with Sheela, Catherine Jane Stork has given no
public statements of repentance or remorse. In the late eighties she was
declaring herself innocent of any wrongdoing. There has been little
public evidence of change, only an obvious concern for her son, which
motivated her to face her past in court. She is reported as stating,
after the ruling by Judge Marsh:
‘I came
because I want to take responsibility for what I’ve done. I’ve been
carrying this burden for 15 years. It’s enough now.’
Still
Available
Published in 1983, two years
before Sheela’s Perth performances and the break-up of the Oregon
leadership in 1985, O IS FOR ORANGE is still the most
thorough and detailed examination of the Rajneeshees and the making of a
cult. You can uncover interesting history, discover how people can be
manipulated and deceived, and a whole lot more. With ten chapters and
three appendices this large A4 manuscript format book is still available
in very limited numbers for the original, pre-inflation, price of $10 plus
postage (at parcel rate in which a distance fee has to be added to
standard parcel rate- usually around $10). Contact our office for your
copy before they all run out - once gone they won’t be reprinted. |
