Sloppy, Verbose, Pseudo Journalism – Geoffrey Gray’s Alta Journal piece
Playing card illustration from Gray’s article that misidentifies Taisha, aka Maryann Simko, as a “Chacmool” and uses a photo that is not Taisha
by Richard Jennings
I was underwhelmed by Geoffrey Gray’s lengthy June 19, 2024, Alta Journal piece about Castaneda, his cult and the five women missing since his death (Gray says “six,” but he apparently can’t count). The 22,000 word report, supposedly documenting 14 months of investigative reporting by someone self described as a “New York Times bestselling author [and] longtime investigative reporter,” is long on atmospherics and speculation but skimpy on new info or insight. It’s also sloppy about some basics when it comes to Castaneda and his world.
Although he is capable of creating vivid scenes, he makes numerous errors throughout the piece. He uses the terms “chacmools” and “witches” interchangeably, applying them to all the women in Castaneda’s group, without apparently being aware those terms were mutually exclusive and applied only to specific individuals: i.e., the Witches being Carol, Florinda and Taisha, while the short lived Chacmools were Kylie, Nyei and Reni, and briefly a few other women. He describes Carol and the Blue Scout as living in the Pandora compound with Castaneda, which wasn’t the case. He also writes that Carol “developed Tensegrity” with Castaneda, an erroneous and silly assumption on his part. He writes of Kylie entering the scene once the Tensegrity workshops and Cleargreen were well established, which gets the chronology all wrong.
There are also a series of “playing card” type pull-out descriptions of Castaneda and the women illustrating the story. The picture used for “Taisha Abela [sic]” inaccurately titles her a “Chacmool” instead of a Witch, and is not Taisha. I don’t know who the pictured woman is but it doesn’t look anything like Taisha.
His main sources of material besides a few of Castaneda’s books are Margaret Runyon and Amy Wallace’s books about Castaneda, which he summarizes at length and liberally quotes from. He also obviously relies on info from Sustained Action, including Carol’s lecture to Cleargreen in Tula that Castaneda scripted for her, but never mentions the site and its wealth of information regarding the women who are the subject of his “reporting.”
His own dogged but largely pointless legwork amounts to the following:
1. Chatting by phone with Kylie’s older sister, Chris Ahlvers, who recalls when Kylie (then Dee Ann Ahlvers) left Chris with Kylie’s two children in 1985 or ’86, and headed to LA to find freedom. Despite not having had contact with her sister after that, Chris speculates on Kylie’s relationship with the Blue Scout, coming to a totally erroneous and baseless conclusion that Gray dutifully reports.
2. Dining in Long Beach with Jennifer Stalvey, whom he describes as a forensic accountant and private investigator with expertise in cults. Stalvey apparently worked for the Marquez family who employed her to look into the disappearance of former Cleargreen President Talia Bey, originally Amalia Marquez. When asked about the theory that the five women closest to Castaneda committed suicide in an attempt to somehow join him, Ms. Stalvey opines, “In my experience, once the cult leader is gone, then everyone kind of snaps out of it.” While that may have been true of other cults Ms. Stalvey investigated, we know it wasn’t true of the true believers in Castaneda’s group.
3. Visiting UCLA’s Haines Hall, where the Anthropology Department is housed, to soak up vibes.
4. Driving to Castaneda’s former compound in Westwood, where he peers through the hedges, knocks on the door and leaves a note in the mailbox for the current occupants. Ultimately he hears back from a Stephen Ross, the doctor who says he bought the home from “the Witches” in 2009. He and his wife indicate they think one of the women involved in the sale was German, so Gray leaps to the conclusion it must have been Florinda and that she was still alive at that point, not apparently knowing that there were other, much younger, German women in Castaneda’s circle who might have been living in the home or otherwise involved at that point.
5. Road tripping to the Panamint Springs Resort in Death Valley where Gray thinks the Blue Scout stayed and had a visit from Carol before wandering into the desert to her death. He also takes a short hike to the Panamint Dunes imagining he’s retracing the path Nury might have taken from where her car was found abandoned. For some reason this brief hike in the heat makes Gray conclude definitively that the other missing women didn’t come to the Panamint Dunes (I don’t have any reason to quarrel with that) and that Nury didn’t commit suicide there.
6. Meeting with former park ranger Dave Brenner, who discovered the car Nury abandoned near the Panamint Dunes following Castaneda’s death. This encounter yields a small amount of new info in that it causes Brenner to retrieve the photos he took of the car when it was originally found. One of those pictures that he shares with Gray is an out-of-focus image of the car’s trunk lock where Gray thinks he makes out a hole. He leaps to the conclusion it might be a bullet hole, speculating ludicrously that Nury might have been a “victim in a dispute with one or more of the other chacmools following Castaneda’s death.” More interestingly and fact based, Brenner recounts that he called Cleargreen after finding the car was registered in Nury’s name at the Cleargreen office address. He recalls that the person answering the phone there took in Brenner’s report about finding the abandoned car with virtually no reaction, and expressing no concern whatsoever as to Nury’s well being.
7. Visiting CJ Castaneda (now Adrian Vashon) in the outskirts of Phoenix. When Gray asks CJ whether he knew Carol, Kylie, Talia and the Blue Scout (in a question where he lumps them with Taisha and Florinda), Vashon reportedly claims they were his babysitters when he was little. That’s not possible, since Kylie, Talia and Nury didn’t get involved with Castaneda until years after Castaneda no longer had anything to do with Adrian (and he was in his mid-20s by then), and Carol was unlikely around either. Gray is so oblivious of the facts that he fails to note that discrepancy. Vashon also blames the women around Castaneda for cutting Vashon out of his “inheritance” from Castaneda, which is simply nonsense. Castaneda told us during Sunday sessions that Vashon was a lost cause and someone he didn’t want to have anything to do with. Castaneda also made all decisions regarding everything in his world, especially regarding the disposition of his assets.
8. Telephoning Thomas Cajka, the CPA who prepared many of Castaneda’s estate forms and his taxes for several years. Cajjka stonewalls him.
9. Visiting Casa Tibet’s Tony Karam in Mexico City (where Gray lives) and totally buying into Tony’s story that he was Castaneda’s intended successor (which Tony has continued to embellish in a number of interviews over the past two and a half decades). Tony does tell him, accurately, that the women around Castaneda “talked often about committing suicide together when he passed away,” and that Florinda claimed to have a pilot’s license and vowed that when he died, “if they could not follow him [into the next life], they would fly into a volcano in Hawaii.” But he also quotes Tony as nonsensically claiming that when Castaneda designated Carol as the nagual woman, there was “blowback” from the other “chacmools.” Gray adds this ridiculous quote he attributes to Tony, indicating to me that, if Tony said it, he had no real sense of the group’s dynamic. “Pohlman did not have the spiritual training, or the time logged with Castaneda, to be their leader, they argued. She lacked gravitas. ‘They didn’t believe in her,’ Karam says.”
10. Reviewing probate and other court records in the L.A. County Courthouse (something I did from 1998-2000 as reported years ago on Sustained Action).
11. Telephoning Castaneda’s lawyer Deborah Drooz and Castaneda insider Bruce Wagner but not surprisingly getting no answer or return call.
12. Driving to the Pasadena address he locates for Castaneda’s agent Tracy Kramer but finding no one home. Talking to a neighbor who tells him Kramer is “very secretive,” citing the fact he had never invited the neighbor in for a beer.
13. Supposedly paying a visit to Carol Tiggs’s current address, in the Pacific Palisades, where Carol refuses to talk to him. [I say supposedly because I doubt he had an accurate address for Carol. In the article Gray says he’s on Ritter Avenue in Pacific Palisades when he gets out of his car to find Carol’s home. There is no Ritter Ave in Pacific Palisades. There is a Rimmer Ave, and 1276 Rimmer Ave is where Carol’s mother Harriet lived for years until she died in 2006. The home was sold in November 2007 and Carol has not lived there since according to real estate records. Gray says he stops on the cul de sac where the home is located and asks a man on the street where Kathleen Pohlman is. The man reportedly says, “Oh you mean Kate,” and points to an apartment across the street. There is no apartment in the immediate vicinity, just large homes. Finally, he describes the hair of the woman who won’t talk to him as “a silvery black like a raven.” That’s not an accurate description of Carol’s current hair color, which is not black at all. So I don’t know whose privacy Gray attempted to disturb, or whether the encounter he describes happened at all, but if it did, that wasn’t Carol Tiggs.]
14. Touring the church and plaza in Tula with a bogus guide who claims to have met don Juan at a peyote ceremony in Tula. The guide supposedly tells him that one story is that the missing women, who Gray continues to mistakenly but repeatedly refer to as “chacmools,” placed Castaneda’s ashes at an altar in Tula and then each took off in a different cardinal direction. He also claims the women meet annually at a house in Tula. Gullible Gray has the guide take him to the house, which turns out to be a laundromat.
In sum, despite its length and the author’s claim to be an experienced “investigative reporter,” this piece contains virtually no new information regarding the missing women, other than some further details from the park ranger who found the Blue Scout’s abandoned car and the call Gray received from the current owners of Castaneda’s Westwood compound, who indicate they purchased the property in 2009. Everything else seems to be a summary of material that’s already been long available in the public record, especially here on Sustained Action, along with Gray’s fanciful speculations on that material. Then there are those significant errors, summarized above.
Postscript: In a live session/interview with an Alta Journal editor that’s now up on YouTube, Gray talks about his piece, repeating some of the inaccuracies and sloppy use of the term “chacmools.” He also refers to Kylie Lundahl as Kylie “Lundgren.” During the course of this interview, it becomes clear that the “six” missing women referred to in the article includes Carol Tiggs/Kathleen Pohlman, who is obviously not missing, and Nury Alexander/the Blue Scout/Patricia Partin, whose remains were positively identified in 2006. When asked if there was additional material that didn’t make it into the already overlong piece, the longest Alta Journal has ever published, he tells a story about going to meet the “king shaman” of the area in Mexico that included Tula, someone who lives in a hut in a small village in the Sierra Madre mountains nine hours drive from Geoff’s Mexico City base. He had gotten the man’s name and location by “asking around” in Mexico, which he describes as rife with shamanism, including two shops devoted to the subject on the main street in the town where Geoff lives outside of Mexico City. He asked this guy, whom he describes as approaching 80 years old, if he ever heard of Castaneda. The man hadn’t. For Geoff that was definitive proof that Castaneda made it all up, since “the real don Juan” had never heard of him.
I note, if it’s not obvious, that Castaneda would now be 99 years old if he had lived and his supposed don Juan was considerably older than he was. What kind of journalist thinks that a random shaman who is considerably younger than the teacher Castaneda invented (by decades) is the definitive source for Yaqui shamanism and whether or not Castaneda had dealings with an authentic shaman? Not a good one.
Here’s the YouTube video of that “interview”:
©️ 2024 by Richard Jennings, all rights reserved
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About the author
DarkWarrior
Author Richard Jennings is the founder and webmaster of SustainedAction.org. He was a student and follower of Carlos Castaneda from 1995 until Castaneda's death in 1998. He is currently working on a memoir about his involvement with Castaneda and his group, and the role SustainedAction played in the aftermath of Castaneda's death. Richard was a practicing lawyer, founder of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in Los Angeles, a wine writer, an HR exec and is now retired from those roles and enjoying landscape photography and writing.
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