Fear for Flock Without Shepherd

Newsday 4/15/98
By Andrew Metz. STAFF WRITER

The moment he stepped in the house Monday night, Mark Lurtsema sensed something was wrong.

"I walked in the door and my wife said, `I have to talk to you.' And just from the tone of her voice, I knew somebody had died," said Lurtsema, 38, a former follower of guru Frederick P. Lenz III. "I asked her who died . . . and she said Lenz."

In reflexive response, without uncinching the knot in his tie, Lurtsema picked up the phone and began coast-to-coast calls. A day after Lenz, the self-fashioned spiritual leader and high-living bachelor, was found dead on the bottom of a cove on Long Island's North Shore, former followers and cult monitors across the country have taken to telephones and the Internet, dredging up old emotions and contemplating a chaotic and potentially suicidal future for the New Age guru's students.

Suffolk police have not specified how Lenz died, but they have said they are not ruling out anything in their investigation, including accidental drowning or suicide.

Over two decades, Lenz, 48, had spread a hybrid of Buddhism, computer science and the quest for wealth that attracted hundreds of devotees. He was revered as an incisive intellect and a persuasive personality.

"We all have very mixed emotions," said Lurtsema, who left Lenz's fold in 1991, like many disillusioned with Lenz and his philosophy. "Now he can't hurt anybody else, but on the other hand, I followed him for six years; there was something I obviously liked." Since 1988, the author of "Snowboarding to Nirvana" and "Surfing the Himalayas" had maintained a coiffed and secure 2-acre compound in Suffolk County's elite enclave of Old Field.

Police said Lenz and a 37-year-old female acquaintance may have been using drugs before the guru crossed his backyard, went down the blue gangway to his dock and went into Conscience Bay's cold water. Monday morning, police found the dock's railing bent into the bay and said the substances may have contributed to the death. Former followers said suicide or drugs seemed plausible explanations.

"He used to talk about that he didn't expect to live into the next century," Lurtsema said. "And as he said, he was like a salt-water shark in fresh water, they don't survive."

Cult experts and former followers said it is unlikely that Lenz, who was also called Zen Master Rama, groomed an heir. And in the leader's absence, they said, students and the already dispersed cult might totally unravel. "Since there is no apparent heir designated to his spiritual throne, I am really worried about everybody," said Steve Hassan, a former member of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church who now counsels people leaving cults and the families of cult members. "Hundreds of people have been totally programmed by him and are completely devoted to him."

Hassan, who has worked with former Lenz followers, said the guru fostered isolation and now he is worried that desperate devotees "are going to flip out and go psychotic and possibly kill themselves." Said Francis Kohl, who left Lenz's tutelage in 1991 and now lives in Southern California: "Their world is just about fallen apart. It has got to be an enormous shock that someone that you looked up to has died, whether it is inadvertant, whether it's suicide or whatever." Experts and former followers alike urged Lenz' students to reach back to their families, to retreat from the guru's grip.

A message seeking comment from current students that was posted yesterday on one of Lenz' websites, Ramalilia, was not answered. However, the site is full of undated, glowing accounts of how the man known as Rama changed lives.

"I enjoy the freedom to listen to Rama without the pressure to `follow' him," wrote a man named Shawn. "I don't believe he wants `followers' - just participants on the journey to perhaps getting a glimpse of Eternity." Copyright 1998, Newsday Inc.

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