Search Intensifies for Alamo, Cult Leader Sought by FBI, IRS

The hunt for fugitive cult leader Tony Alamo has intensified because he has threatened to kidnap a federal judge and has admitted stealing his wife Susan’s body from an Arkansas mausoleum, federal authorities said Thursday.

Susan Alamo’s daughter, Christhiaon Susan Coie, on Thursday issued a public plea to her stepfather to return her mother’s body.

“My mother is entitled to be buried like a human being,” Coie, 40, said in a telephone interview from her Los Angeles home.

Alamo has been a fugitive since fleeing California in 1989 after being charged by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office with beating the child of a follower in a Saugus commune operated by the secretive Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation. Federal officials say he is believed to be supported in part by revenues from the cult’s sale of designer denim jackets, sold in trendy shops for up to $600.

Alamo was quoted in an Arkansas newspaper last month as saying that his wife’s body is rightfully his.

“I stole nothing,” he said, according to the Southwest Times Record in Ft. Smith, Ark., on Feb. 21, five days after the body was found to be missing from its small, granite mausoleum on Alamo’s 250-acre compound in Georgia Ridge, Ark. U.S. marshals began seizing the compound on Feb. 13 to settle a $1.8-million U.S. District Court judgment against the Alamo Foundation. The judgment was won in a civil case filed in Arkansas by a former Alamo follower who alleged that Alamo beat his children and alienated his family at the Arkansas commune.

Alamo has been sought since 1989 by the FBI for illegal flight to avoid prosecution on the Los Angeles charge, and by the Internal Revenue Service for several million dollars in unpaid taxes. But the search intensified late last month after he threatened in the Arkansas newspaper interview to kidnap the federal judge who presided over the civil trial.

After his wife died of cancer in 1982, Tony Alamo predicted she would be resurrected and prayed over the body. He had her body embalmed and reportedly kept it on display in Arkansas for six months until it was placed in the mausoleum on the Arkansas compound.

Arkansas attorney Charles Carr said Coie was granted a restraining order Feb. 15 demanding that her mother’s body remain on the property. A day later, officials discovered that the mausoleum had been smashed and Susan Alamo’s casket removed.

Alamo was quoted in the Times Record as saying he took his wife’s body to prevent federal authorities from “desecrating” it. In the same interview, Alamo threatened to kidnap U.S. District Judge Morris Arnold, saying Arnold “will stand before me in my court.” Criminal charges were filed against Alamo in Ft. Smith the next day.