Heeding A Spiritual Voice Leads To Abduction And Family's Pain

WICHITA, Kan. - The phone rings. Jeanne Cvetkovich is not home. The answering machine whirs.

"Simon and Livy, if it's you calling, Mommy has not forgotten you. I'm still looking for you every day. Where are you?"

Tall blue and yellow flowers bloom along the sidewalk of Cvetkovich's home in Wichita. The living room is neat but sterile. No toys scattered in the yard. No half-finished children's projects cluttering the floor.

In August 1991, Cvetkovich's 33-year-old former husband, Chris, disappeared with their two small children.

Chris Cvetkovich fled to the forests and rugged mountains of Oregon, following a voice he heard on the radio. He became a fugitive, fleeing from a federal warrant for his arrest and state charges that he kidnapped his own kids. He left Wichita driving an old station wagon with his two children in the back.

He had little money and no place to go.

Jeanne Cvetkovich has not seen her children in 10 months. She has handed out hundreds of posters with their pictures: cute, round-faced Olivia, 6, and Simon, 8, short-haired and neat in a striped summer shirt.

"I have dreams sometimes," said the 33-year-old registered nurse. "I am with friends. They are mothers - but I'm not. I know I am, though. I just can't prove it to them."

This is a story of three unique and star-crossed people:

-- Chris: an intelligent but unfocused young man when he married Jeanne in 1983. He drifted between jobs: disc jockey, piano player, carpenter. The couple was usually broke. But he was determined to make his family the one shining success in his life.

-- Jeanne: friendly and outgoing in college, she had known Chris since ninth grade. She married him because she thought he was creative and loving. But troubles soon darkened their optimism. When he told her that a good wife is obedient to her husband, and a good mother does not need a job, she quit working, even though they needed her income. When he said they couldn't trust their own families, she distanced herself from parents and friends. When he said the children didn't need toys, television, Christmas or public schools, she went along with it.

-- Roy Masters: an Oregon radio personality. An improbable combination of preacher, hypnotist, commentator and entrepreneur.

Masters told his followers that "life is a wretched, dog-eat-dog, chain-gang of victims," and that human love was "the root of all human misery." He warned husbands to beware of their wives because "every woman instinctively inherits this black-widow-spider knowledge, tempting her man and sucking out his life juices."

Masters never knew what a strong effect his radio performance had on Chris Cvetkovich.

"The greatest deception perpetrated upon the human race is the myth of woman's love."

-Roy Masters

Meeting Jeanne today, it is hard to imagine her being the strict, silent and unfamiliar woman that her family and friends say they saw at various times from 1983, when she married, to 1989, when she separated from, and later divorced, her husband.

Two things stand out about her now.

First, she loathes Masters, whom she calls "a virus." She believes Masters brainwashed her and her husband with a bizarre blend of themes borrowed from the Bible, $10 tapes on how to meditate and a maddeningly elusive patter of radio-shock talk that erupts suddenly during calls from people who pour out their problems to him.

Secondly, she lives for finding her children.

She endured taping a show with Geraldo Rivera to be broadcast next month - the producers are calling the segment "Kids, Moms and Crazy Cults" - "because I wanted to get the kids' pictures on TV."

She has hired a private detective and holds garage sales to raise money for printing posters and making long-distance phone calls in search of leads.

She has learned the hard way that life is not like a movie. There is no Perry Mason to take her case and solve it two hours later. When the FBI and Oregon State Police questioned the owners of a farm east of Portland and confirmed that her husband and children had stayed there before disappearing again, she was not satisfied with the few sketchy details the investigators told her.

She called the farm owner's wife. She kept the reticent woman on the phone until she began to open up. Investigators were surprised at how much she found out.

"We had a lot of unanswered questions," said Detective Fred Hawkins of the Oregon State Police. "She got a lot more information than we did."

The woman on the farm told her, Jeanne said, that:

-- Chris and the children had stayed on the farm from September to February. Chris worked for room and board as a laborer and builder. He did not want to talk about himself or the kids, and he told the farm owners so from the beginning.

-- The older child, Simon, knew his father was in trouble for running away with the kids. When the couple divorced, Jeanne got legal custody of both children. On the farm, Simon often worked alongside his father. Simon could "pray like a preacher," the woman told Jeanne, when he was allowed to say grace at meals.

-- Olivia, the younger child, thought she was on a long vacation with her father and brother. She talked often about her mother. She spent days with the farm owner's wife while Chris and Simon worked outside.

"An ancient flaw in her nature draws a woman to a weak man. This flaw teaches her to feel secure by making him fail."

- Roy Masters

Frank Cvetkovich blames Masters, whom he calls "a screwball hypnotist," for the trouble that Chris, his son, got into when he ran away with the children. Since Chris ran away, his father has listened to Masters' radio show to find out what his son was hearing. What he heard, he said, disgusted him.

"I can't understand how radio stations allow people like that to get on the air," he said.

The harder question, though, is what Chris saw in Masters.

"I can't figure out what went wrong with his thinking," Frank said. "Chris is no dummy."

Like Jeanne, Chris grew up in a Roman Catholic family. Religion was part of the boy's family life, Frank said, but not a big part. And there was nothing unusual about their spiritual beliefs, he said.

"It is the nature of a woman to serve. She was created for that purpose only."

- Roy Masters

Chris and Jeanne both were 24 when they married in January 1983. She had graduated from Wichita State University in 1980 and had gone to work as a nurse. He was studying graphic arts and music at the University of Kansas but gave up without graduating.

They both played piano. He played saxophone and flute, too. He was "lighthearted," "creative" and "interesting," she said.

He had a "mysterious," intellectual side, too, she said. He talked about political and spiritual topics with intensity. His prospects as a breadwinner were uncertain, but the first year of marriage was happy. Simon was born late in 1984.

"We had fun before Roy Masters came along," she said. "I worked part time at the Masonic Home. We'd go out and eat sometimes after work. We played music. We played tennis - inside the house. We just had fun."

Late in 1984, there began what Jeanne calls their conversion to "Roybots." She can't remember now where they first got the idea to listen to Masters, but it quickly became a habit.

Perhaps because "we were young, exploring," or maybe because Masters sounded strong and self-confident and "pro-family," the couple listened to him almost every night for a year. Jeanne was not as interested in Masters as Chris was, but she saw no threat in what they were doing.

"A lot of times I didn't actually listen," she said. "I laid on the couch while he listened, and I fell asleep."

Chris began to change, she said, until "he just wasn't Chris anymore." He became stingy and preoccupied: "No gifts, no cards, no holidays," she said. "I didn't need anything. I shouldn't even want anything."

Chris' idea of himself as the unquestioned head of the family grew, and he cited Masters as his authority on the subject. He looked down on his own family and Jeanne's family and warned her against associating with them.

The change in their lives was gradual at first. By the time Jeanne grew alarmed, it was too late to change Chris' mind. They both had become accustomed to her role of submissive wife.

"If you disagree with your husband, right there you're already wrong," she said. "You never do that."

By the time Olivia was born in December 1985, the family was living under Chris' strict rules against "worldly" habits of wasting money, eating out, buying birthday presents, celebrating Christmas or allowing women to work and make decisions that Chris thought a man should make for his family, she said.

As money problems grew, a gulf opened between Jeanne and Chris. They stopped listening to Masters as often, but Chris remained fixed on his teachings. He even decided once to go alone to Los Angeles, where Masters was located at the time, to see one of Masters' shows.

"He was having a lot of problems," she said. "He could hardly work. He was depressed. He thought the solution was to go talk to Roy. He actually flew to L.A."

Jeanne was depressed, too. She was lonely and frustrated. Finally, she got sick with a thyroid condition. Chris didn't think she needed a doctor, she said. He told her she felt bad because she had stopped doing Masters' meditation exercises.

"I'd drop by, and they'd be in the midst of shouting or crying," said Rosemary Brooks, Chris' sister. "There was something bad going on."

Jeanne and Chris separated in August 1989 and divorced in July 1990.

The divorce was complicated by a custody battle. A dispute arose when Jeanne announced she was going to send the children to public school, which Chris opposed.

From the beginning, she said, she feared that Chris, who was allowed to take the children every other weekend, would run away with them.

On Aug. 20, a Tuesday, Chris was due to drop the children off at home by noon. But he didn't come. At 6 p.m., Jeanne called the police.