Key Figure in Bizarre Death Dispute Dies

Ariya Dhamma Thera, a central figure in one of the most bizarre and highly publicized death and custody battles in Southern California legal annals, has died in a Riverside convalescent hospital at age 84.

The Riverside County coroner’s office said the Buddhist monk died Tuesday of natural causes.

Thera, who was born Benjamin Martin Marshall in India, founded the American Institute of Buddhist Studies in Los Angeles. But it was not his theosophical concepts that brought him national prominence.

A Promise of Care

In 1979, Thera’s wife, Georgia, adopted Raymond La Scola, a 63-year-old pediatrician and hypnotist who had a successful practice in Malibu. She did that, La Scola later said, in exchange for a promise that as a son he would care for Thera, then 79, after her death. Her husband at the time was confined to a rest home and La Scola said she was fearful taxes would take much of her estate.

La Scola, who had met Mrs. Thera when he purchased a house the Theras owned, was made heir to their estate, valued at up to $3 million. The friendship further blossomed after the doctor, widely utilized and praised by police and prosecutors as an expert in clinical hypnosis, helped treat her high blood pressure

But 18 months later, La Scola had been charged with killing Mrs. Thera by injecting her with massive doses of insulin.

Ashes Saved in Car

Prosecutors said La Scola signed Mrs. Thera’s death certificate, forged her husband’s signature to a document that enabled him to cremate her body before an autopsy could be performed and drove around with her ashes in the trunk of his car for more than a year.

(La Scola, who denied the killing, said the ashes were in his car because he had promised her he would scatter them in the family garden the following spring.)

Charges against him were dropped in March, 1981, when it was learned the key prosecution witness had perjured himself in an unrelated murder case in Pasadena.

La Scola’s adoption was voided in September, 1980, and Thera become a ward of the county, kept in convalescent homes until his death. Doctors had testified that Thera, who sometimes wore diapers during court appearances in 1980 and 1981, was senile and unable to control his bodily functions.