Elizabeth Clare Prophet, 70, the spiritual leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant, which gained notoriety in the late 1980s for its followers’ preparations for nuclear armageddon, has died.
Prophet suffered from dementia for years and was at her apartment in Bozeman, Mont., when she died Thursday, said legal guardian Murray Steinman. Steinman said he was not aware of any other complicating health issues.
Prophet led the Park County church that once boasted 50,000 members. In the late 1980s, church members amassed assault rifles and armored vehicles in preparation for a nuclear missile strike that Prophet predicted was on the way. The plan brought national notoriety and a federal investigation.
The church declined in the 1990s after doomsday didn’t happen, but it lived on.
Stuart Kaminsky, 75, a prolific mystery writer whose 70 books included one the Mystery Writers of America deemed the best mystery novel of 1989, died Friday at a hospital in St. Louis.
Kaminsky had suffered from hepatitis C and moved to St. Louis this year awaiting a liver transplant. A stroke shortly after the move made him ineligible for the transplant.
His son, Peter, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the author grew up reading Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and began writing himself as a boy.
He published his first novel, “Bullet for a Star,” in 1977. The Mystery Writers of America honored “A Cold Red Sunrise” as the best mystery novel of 1989. A past president of the group, he was named a Grand Master, the organization’s highest honor, in 2006.
Willard Varnell Oliver, 88, a member of the Navajo code talkers who confounded the Japanese during World War II by transmitting messages in their native language, died Wednesday. Lawrence Oliver said his father died at the Northern Arizona Veterans Affairs health care system hospital in Prescott. He had been in declining health for the past two years.
