Jehovah’s Witnesses Vanish : Mystery Surrounds Fate of 4 Americans in Mexico

Something was amiss. Patricia and Benjamin Mascarenas called a friend and backed out of lunch.

“It’s better that we don’t,” Pat Mascarenas explained, “because we’re being followed.”

On a warm Sunday morning a couple of weeks later, the Mascarenases and their neighbors, Dennis and Rose Carlson, walked down a tree-lined street in an upper-class district of this colonial city--and vanished.

Three months later, the four clean-cut young Americans are still missing, their fates obscured completely--”just like they drove off the face of the Earth,” one mystified U.S. official said.

In this city, caught in a diplomatic cross fire over the subsequent kidnaping of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Mexican detectives continue the search for the four friends, whose disappearance sparked a spate of publicity about assaults on Americans here.

They have little to pursue. Their one promising clue--a reported sighting in Puerto Vallarta two weeks ago--dissolved upon inspection, like the fine dust that blows across Guadalajara when the wind rises from the west.

“We are totally confused,” admitted Police Cmdr. Gabriel Gonzalez Gonzalez, who heads the investigation.

From Guadalajara to Redding, Calif., relatives and friends of the Carlsons and Mascarenases juggle hope and despair, alternately describing them brightly in present tense and longingly in past tense, searching themselves for what happened and why.

Lacking a definite explanation, they have settled on a speculative one: that the missing were abducted because they were practicing Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose presence angered someone enough to drive them to violence.

Whether they are alive or dead is an unknown, pondered daily by those left behind. Much of the time, the relatives and friends console themselves with the hope that they are alive somewhere and will surface someday.

“Sometimes you want to believe what you need to believe,” shrugged Hector Barbosa Villanueva, a member of the tightly knit Jehovah’s Witnesses community in Guadalajara.

“You don’t want to think they’re dead.”

On the spring-like morning of Dec. 2, when Dennis and Rose Carlson walked out of their Guadalajara apartment for the last time, they had lived there less than 72 hours, barely enough time to unpack the boxes they had jammed into the compact car they had driven down from the United States.

Their journey had taken 10 days, beginning the day before Thanksgiving in the Northern California town of Redding, winding past loved ones’ homes in Sacramento and Vacaville, down to Southern California and into Baja California, across the gulf by ferry to Puerto Vallarta and over the highway southeast to Guadalajara.

Its planning took longer, nearly a year.

Dennis Carlson--”32 in January,” his mother, Rosalee, says hopefully--grew up in the state of Washington, indulging in the outdoors and in Jehovah’s Witnesses work. Dennis, his two brothers and a sister were raised as Witnesses, who interpret the Bible literally and shun association with secular government.

By the end of his teens, Dennis Carlson was spreading “the truth,” spending hours moving door to door with his instructional pamphlets.

With his family he moved to Redding, where he worked at fitting hearing aids and cleaning restaurant machinery--jobs that gave him time for religion. He was a Witness “pioneer,” one who spends at least 90 hours each month walking door to door seeking converts. In his congregation, he also served as an “overseer,” directing other door-to-door Witnesses.

Rose Carlson, four years older than her husband, had moved to Redding and joined the Witnesses a decade ago, after a brief marriage ended in divorce. A slight, likable woman with sparkling green eyes, she met Dennis Carlson at a roller-skating rink four years ago and married him barely six months later. Their vices were, in retrospect, remarkably tame: They liked to roller skate and to snack at a downtown Redding ice cream parlor. Together they traveled, twice to Hawaii.

“He’s always wanted to travel,” said Dave Carlson, Dennis’ brother. “He always had those books--’How to see . . . in $5 a day.’ ”

A year ago, they found a way to combine travel and Witness work. Dennis and Rose Carlson had headed for Cancun, Mexico, and when they couldn’t find accommodations, they dropped in on an old friend, fellow Jehovah’s Witness Phil Ackland, living in Guadalajara.

“They really enjoyed it,” said Ackland, who left Mexico last fall to return to Vancouver, British Columbia. “They were looking for a place to go, and here it was.” On the Carlsons’ first night in Guadalajara, Ackland arranged a barbecue. He invited his neighbors, Pat and Ben Mascarenas.

The Mascarenases, too, had followed a casual path to Mexico, led by the whims of travel and Witness work.

An extrovert, Pat Mascarenas was born in Germany 27 years ago and moved to the United States one year later, growing up in South Carolina and Reno. As a 16-year-old, she broke from her Catholic upbringing and joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“She felt it was the most honest religion: It studied the Bible, it seemed plausible and logical,” said her sister, Phyllis Word of Redding.

Through a Reno congregation she met Ben Mascarenas, a slight young man two years her senior, a native of Ely in eastern Nevada. One year later, in October, 1976, they married.

They were working at a motel in Ely when its owner popped a question: Would they house-sit his home in Guadalajara?

“They just went,” said Ben’s mother, Mercy Mascarenas, from her home in Ely. “They thought it might be an adventure.”

By midsummer, 1983, they had moved into the four-bedroom house, with maid’s quarters and interior gardens, fronted by a wide gate on Jose Maria Robles Street in the affluent Chapalita neighborhood of Guadalajara.

From the moment they arrived, they were embraced by Guadalajara’s Jehovah’s Witnesses community, then nearly 10,000 strong and growing. “They said they planned to stay for some time,” said Victoria Cajiga, a Guadalajara Witness.

Bearing limited tourist visas, the Mascarenases were barred from working at conventional jobs. Although they were not formal missionaries, they immersed themselves in Witness activities, spending six or more hours a day talking door to door and attending five weekly Witness meetings, as they had in the United States. They explored Guadalajara, visiting open-air markets and adopting local customs.

In October, Mercy Mascarenas and a sister arrived in Guadalajara for a three-week visit, a vacation she remembers as “a beautiful time.” Her son and daughter-in-law took them to the artisans’ shops in nearby Tlaquepaque, and they celebrated at fiestas.

Then, in mid-October, came an unwelcome jolt, darker in retrospect than it was at the time. Ben and Pat Mascarenas and their visitors returned from an outing and found their home rifled.

“My suitcases and his aunt’s suitcases were all ransacked, our drawers were ransacked and their room was ransacked,” Mercy Mascarenas said. “The rest of the house was left untouched.”

Recollections Vary

The Mascarenases later determined that 10,000 pesos--about $50--and Pat’s jewelry, including some keepsakes, were missing. In comments to Mexican friends, and in letters home to her mother and sister, Pat Mascarenas made light of the burglary.

“When she wrote, she said there was nothing to worry about,” her sister, Phyllis Word, said.

But Mercy Mascarenas remembers it differently.

“It worried them,” she said. “They didn’t know how come they were robbed. . . . They wanted to leave the home. . . . They didn’t want to have the responsibility.”

Mercy Mascarenas left for Ely, carrying with her a promise that her son and daughter-in-law would return home in January, when their visas expired.

Within two weeks, Pat Mascarenas canceled the Saturday lunch. Although she told her friend, Victoria Cajiga, that she and her husband were being followed, she was not panicky. Everyone figured that she thought the house was being watched by prospective burglars, Victoria said.

“We really don’t know what she meant,” she added, looking back.

Dennis and Rose Carlson returned home from their spring trip to Guadalajara intent on living there. By November, they had saved $3,000--enough, they thought, to live on for six months. After that, they would see.

Bill Covert, a neighbor, and Gary Daniel, another Witness whose house shared a lot with the Carlsons’ home, kidded the couple about danger.

“ ‘You’re going to Mexico; watch out for bandits,’ ” Covert recalled telling them with a laugh.

There seemed little cause for concern. Guadalajara, the second-largest city in Mexico after Mexico City, has a reputation for idyllic life--a mild, sunny climate and easy access to the United States. And there is a large American community, about 30,000 strong year-round.

“This has never been regarded as a high-risk area,” said Alan Rogers, a spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses community also provides a cushion of support for newcomers. In addition to Mexican-born Witnesses, foreign Witnesses filter through the city, most on tourist visas. Many are young, like the Mascarenases, and most live low-key, anonymous lives.

“All of us thoroughly enjoyed ourselves,” said Ackland, the Carlsons’ Vancouver friend. “We were all going through life as merrily as can be.”

‘On Their Way’

Dennis and Rose Carlson sold most of their belongings and gave away their plants. They left Redding on Nov. 21, their car jammed with clothes, pots and pans and toiletries. They spent the night, Thanksgiving Eve, with his parents, Norman and Rosalee Carlson, at their home in Vacaville. The next morning, they squeezed into the crowded car “and they were on their way,” Rosalee Carlson said.

Witnesses in Guadalajara were ready to greet the Carlsons--many of them had met the newcomers during their earlier visit. They never got the chance.

According to what has been pieced together by detectives and eyewitnesses, the Carlsons arrived in Guadalajara on Nov. 30. By the next night, a Saturday, they had moved their belongings into Ackland’s two-bedroom, third-floor apartment. It was directly across the street from the Mascarenases’ home, and the Carlsons had agreed to sublet it until February.

On Sundays, Witness meetings are held at 12:30 p.m., and the morning hours are not to be wasted. Customarily, Witnesses meet a few hours before the meetings and spend the time working door to door.

That Sunday, Dec. 2, the Mascarenases and Carlsons headed for a section of the upper-class Chapalita neighborhood 20 blocks away, carrying Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets and books.

‘There They Are!’

They knocked on doors--several people recall the well-dressed couples approaching their homes that morning. Then the couples split up. Ben Mascarenas and Dennis Carlson worked some homes and their wives worked others. At 10 a.m., the men approached a street corner and appeared to be waiting for their wives. Pat Mascarenas and Rose Carlson were halfway down the block, perhaps 50 yards away.

Suddenly, young men rushed from the curb. One of them shouted in Spanish, “There they are!” They grabbed Rose Carlson and Pat Mascarenas, who yelled in Spanish for an elderly woman bystander to note the car’s license plate and call the police. The car pulled away before the woman, who was returning home from church, could identify it.

At the corner, the same well-dressed men jumped from their car and approached Ben Mascarenas and Dennis Carlson, speaking a few words. An elderly man who saw the scene believes that the men were told that their wives were captives. They followed wordlessly. They entered the car.

None has been seen since.

Within the Jehovah’s Witnesses community, news of the abduction spread swiftly.

“We thought that some people thought they were someone else,” said Ramiro Hernandez Rodriguez, a Witness, “and once they found out, they’d release them.”

But no release came. Jehovah’s Witnesses fanned out throughout Guadalajara and the surrounding area, visiting prisons, jails and hospitals in search of the Americans. One woman viewed all the bodies in all the morgues, just in case.

Two days later, the Jalisco state attorney general’s office, which investigates Guadalajara crimes, was notified of the disappearance. Gabriel Gonzalez Gonzalez, the head investigator, said no action was taken until days later, when the U.S. Consulate, informed by Witnesses, sent a formal letter asking for assistance.

“A (written) report had to be filed,” Gonzalez said through a translator.

Mexican investigators searched the Mascarenases’ and Carlsons’ homes for any hint of their fates. “All of their belongings were there,” Gonzalez said. “Everything looked normal.”

Word of the disappearances reached relatives nearly a week later. The U.S. State Department called Dennis Carlson’s parents, Norman and Rosalee Carlson, in Vacaville; Rose Carlson’s family in Sacramento; Pat Mascarenas’ mother, Johanna Poovey, in Redding and Mercy Mascarenas in Ely. Early reports were couched in cautious terms: The couples were missing but it could be a fluke; perhaps they had just taken a vacation.

‘Something Was Wrong’

“That wasn’t like them,” Poovey recalled. “We knew something was wrong.”

There were other possibilities to consider--among them robbery and kidnaping for ransom. Those possibilities have faded with time. The Carlsons carried $3,000 in traveler’s checks; no one has attempted to cash them. No ransom demands have been forwarded. Flyers offering a $5,000 reward from the families for information were plastered across Guadalajara; no one has responded.

Relatives and friends vehemently deny that the disappearances could be connected to drugs. Guadalajara has recently been touted as the new headquarters for major Central American drug rings, which are blamed for the kidnaping of Mexican-born U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena Salazar.

“They don’t believe in anything like (drugs),” Ben Mascarenas’s sister, Patricia, said. “They’re not wild people.”

Also discarded was a theory that the Carlsons and Mascarenases were singled out because of their citizenship. Although officials in recent months have noted an increase in robberies and assaults of Americans visiting Mexico, none fit the pattern of the two missing couples.

‘Because They’re Witnesses’

Relatives, friends and investigating officials have come to depend on the sole remaining theory--that the four Witnesses were abducted by a group opposed to the presence of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Guadalajara.

“They probably were picked up because they’re Witnesses and they’re gone,” said one American official in Guadalajara.

Jehovah’s Witnesses in Guadalajara said there is little open friction between them and other religious groups in the primarily Roman Catholic country. But in some Guadalajara homes, signs have appeared to thwart door-to-door Witnesses: “This is a Catholic household,” the signs read. “We are not interested in your Protestant propaganda.”

Witnesses say a recent jump in membership may have angered members of other religious groups. At the end of 1984, there were 151,000 Mexican Witnesses, 16% more than a year earlier; today members estimate the number to be 159,000.

“It would have to be somebody who has a lot of money,” said Hector Barbosa Villanueva, a Guadalajara Witness. “The Catholics are the only group to have money. I know they’re fed up with us.”

The abductions hit home. Immediately, more than a dozen foreign Jehovah’s Witnesses fled Guadalajara, Witness leaders and U.S. Consulate officials said. Mexican-born Witnesses have continued their door-to-door activities, but they say they are more discreet, more watchful.

‘We Feel Uneasy’

“It took us all as a surprise,” said Victoria Cajiga. “As the days and weeks and months go by, we feel uneasy.”

Hopes rose among detectives recently, but they were dashed amid curious circumstances. On Feb. 16, nearly 11 weeks after the disappearances, a woman called the Jalisco state attorney general’s office.

She said she was Rosa Medina and worked in the Vallarta Market in Puerto Vallarta. She had read about the disappearances in local newspapers and she said she had something to report: She had seen the Mascarenases, alive and well, in Puerto Vallarta. Moreover, she said, she was certain of their identity: She had met them before their abduction.

Gonzalez and two other investigators rushed to Puerto Vallarta.

“We did find a Rosa Medina who was a helper in a dinky restaurant kitchen,” Gonzalez said a few days later. “She did not even know how to read or write, and so could not have read about it in the press.” The woman insisted that she had not called investigators and that she had never met the Mascarenases.

He and his detectives have investigated numerous disappearances, Gonzalez said, “definitely not as baffling as this one.”

Back in California, the relatives and friends wait. They wait for it to sink in; they wait for someone to let the four go; they hope and despair. The Jehovah’s Witnesses among them take solace in their beliefs in martyrdom and resurrection.

“If Dennis and Rose were murdered, we look at it as a hope of seeing them again,” said Dave Carlson, sitting on the couch in his Redding apartment, fresh from a morning of door-to-door Witness work. “We want them now “--he said with a wan smile--”but we still have that to think of.” Others feel, in the words of Pat Mascarenas’ sister, Phyllis Word, caught between screaming and silently going crazy.

“How can anything like this make sense?” she asked, anger flaring. “I don’t think a lot of things in life make sense.

“I keep thinking one of these days I’m going to get a phone call from her and she’ll say ‘I’ll be home!’ ” Word peered out the window, where a late-night storm drenched the streets of Redding. “She was just”--Word interrupted herself, her voice falling into the same resigned monotone the police commander used. “I’m getting used to was and were .”

Norman Carlson has led the relatives’ push for some solution. A graying, dry-witted man of Swedish ancestry, he can discuss the abduction without a trace of emotion, steely-eyed. People from all over have called in support, he said; a surprising number have called to tell him not to expect much.

‘It Can Happen’

“Even right from the start you have to assume the worst can happen,” he said, setting down a glass of beer in a Mexican restaurant near his Vacaville home. “Nobody’s got special protection. It can happen to any of us.”

A few weeks after the kidnapings, Norman Carlson flew to Guadalajara. He talked to American officials and signed an official denuncio , a missing persons complaint.

Then, with the help of friends, he packed up his son’s and daughter-in-law’s belongings and jammed them into the same compact car in which they had arrived in Guadalajara only three days before the couple vanished. He closed up their apartment and headed north, across Mexico and the Western United States.

Norman Carlson took almost everything, but he left behind a tangible whisper of hope: two changes of clothes for Dennis and Rose Carlson. “In case they come back,” he said.