Cultist Accused of Kidnaping Held in Schooner Theft

The leader of a religious cult who allegedly kidnaped the two young sons of an Arcadia woman five years ago is being held in Australia on a warrant charging him with stealing a 94-foot luxury schooner from an Israeli charter company, an Australian police official said today.

Arthur James Hempel, 52, founder of Christ Circle Inc., an organization that once operated beauty and boarding schools in California, arrived in Albany, Australia, last January with a party of 12 American followers aboard the schooner Oriania, said Frank C. Pimm, the western regional commander of the Australian Federal Police.

Hempel and the ship’s skipper, Laurence Ethridge, were arrested after federal police and customs officials identified the ship as the one allegedly stolen in 1983 from an Israeli pleasure boat charter company, Oriania Propriety Ltd., Pimm said. A hearing on an Israeli request for extradition is scheduled for Thursday in Perth, Australia.

Hempel and his organization figured in a local controversy in 1981. An Arcadia secretary, Sondra Elkins, persuaded a Nevada district attorney to file kidnaping charges against Hempel, after he allegedly refused to surrender her sons whom she had enrolled in one of Hempel’s schools two years earlier.

On the strength of the Nevada warrant, the boys, now 9 and 15, were taken from Hempel by British police in early 1983, while Hempel’s group was living in England. But no request was filed for Hempel’s extradition to the United States.

Elkins told authorities that she had once been a student at a beauty school operated by Hempel in Temple City, and in 1979 had accepted his offer to enroll her sons at a Christ Circle boarding school in the Santa Cruz Mountains. From that school, Hempel moved his group--and the boys--to Nevada, Austria and finally to England.

A U.S. magistrate once described Christ Circle Inc. as a “cult-type organization” and said members of the group venerated Hempel as “God incarnate.” The magistrate ruled that Hempel had fraudulently enrolled non-students in his beauty schools to collect federal job training money.

Pimm said Hempel’s group had most recently sailed from Christmas Island, about 1,750 miles northwest of Perth. Pimm said he understood the group was “. . . looking for somewhere to settle themselves. . . , trying to set up some sort of religious village.”