Instead Of Rising From Dead, Cult Leader Laying Low

Denver Rocky Mountain News/May 12, 2001

Monte Kim Miller hasn't risen to heaven. But he hasn't been seen on Earth lately either. Miller, a one-time Colorado anti-cult expert who now has his own cult followers, has kept a low profile since his prediction that Denver would be destroyed by an earthquake in 1998.

He hasn't been spotted publicly since he proclaimed he would die in a gun battle on the streets of Jerusalem on Dec. 31, 1999, and rise three days later, in time for the Second Coming.

That bit of Apocalyptic prophecy got several members of his group, Concerned Christians, thrown out of Israel and Greece. His voice can still be heard on the Internet, but his actual physical whereabouts, and that of his followers, remain cloudy. "We're figuring that maybe 60 are in Greece, with the rest believed to be somewhere in the Philadelphia area," says Mark Roggeman, a Denver police officer who monitors cults on his own.

Miller's a mystery, though. "None of us know where he is now," says Bill Honsberger, a local Baptist minister who has studied Concerned Christians. "I suspect Kim has been back to visit Denver," he says. "But we don't know that for sure. He's not exactly announcing his itinerary to us." Miller's Web site, while short on information, is rich in marketing: visitors are informed that Miller's gospel is the only true gospel, and are urged to purchase any of his 156 audio tapes.

The absence of new information about the cult's goings on has a sad ring of familiarity for the families of cult members. Sherry Clark has not seen - or heard from - her daughter, Robin Malene Malesic, in more than four years. "I have no idea where she is. I've heard rumors about Greece, Canada or Great Britain, but nothing factual." "It's like a living death. There's no closure."

But it isn't just family members who have to swim in the information vacuum. Not even cult trackers seem to have a firm grasp on how many members are in the group, with estimates hovering between 70 and 200, although 100 seems most likely. Nor is there a clear consensus on the threat posed by the group.

"I'm more worried about their own safety than I am about them being a threat to the outside," says Hal Mansfield, director of the Religious Movement Resource Center in Fort Collins. "As Miller gets going further and further down the nutty path, he might think, `I've got nothing to lose; let's do a suicide pact.' "

However, "I consider them dangerous to others," says Honsberger, who claims Miller threatened his life. "I've heard tapes where Miller says, `Jesus died for us, there's a time we have to die for him. ' " Keeping a low profile while preaching to high heaven has been Miller's style. After gaining notoriety as an avowed opponent of religious cults in the mid-1980s, Miller shifted gears. He claimed to be one of the two divine witnesses cited in Chapter 11 of the book of Revelation. He also announced that God spoke through him.

After persuading his flock to quit their jobs and sell their possessions, he led his followers out of Colorado - just ahead of what he prophesied would be a devastating earthquake. In January, the group surfaced in Israel. There, authorities worried about the group's potential for violence, expelled 14 followers.They returned to Denver and holed up in the downtown Holiday Inn, shunning relatives and media hordes. In February, they flew to Greece, where they stayed until December 1999.

At that point, the Greek government, fearing the group's potential for millennial mayhem, deported 16 members, citing expired visa documents. Included among that group was John Cooper of Boulder, whose fortune had subsidized the cult to the tune of an estimated $1 million before his daughter had his funds frozen in a conservatorship.

The last time Jennifer Cooper saw her father was December 1999. "I started crying and telling him I loved him," recalls Cooper. "I told him why I did the conservatorship, and that nobody could touch the money. I told him we were here for him anytime he chose to come back." In return, John Cooper told his daughter, she said, that, "They were not a doomsday cult and that I hadn't been listening to the tapes that Kim Miller had sent to me."

Jennifer Cooper's last contact with her father was last December, when he responded to an e-mail with one sentence. Cooper's contact with her father may seem tenuous, but it's more than other cult relatives have had with their loved ones. Nelma Smith, whose son Terry was one of the men Israeli authorities implicated in the prophesied gun battle, hasn't spoken to him since "he became totally brainwashed."

She hasn't told him that one of his sisters died in November. "We chose not to write him and tell him; we know we'd be blamed for that." What cult experts find confounding about Concerned Christians is there have been no defections, despite Miller's erroneous predictions about the end of Denver and the world.

"I've been dealing with cults for over 25 years," Roggeman says. "And when something major like this doesn't happen, people will usually start asking themselves, `Is he really a true prophet? Not only did the world not end, we didn't get to stay in Israel.' "I'd give money to find out how he managed to spin things around and `correct' that false prophesy."