February 10, 2006

Remains of guru's disciple identified
BONES FOUND IN DEATH VALLEY CONFIRMED TO BE THOSE OF
PATRICIA PARTIN/NURY ALEXANDER

By ROBIN FLINCHUM
SPECIAL TO THE PVT
Shortly after the 1998 death of "A Separate Reality"
guru Carlos Castaneda, whose peyote-fueled sorceric
journeys into the Mexican desert captured the
imagination of a generation in the 1970s, five of his
closest disciples made out their wills, disconnected
their telephones, and disappeared into thin air.

Some believed the five women, three of whom were known
as "the witches," might have "burned from within," or
vaporized into balls of light that joined with the
eternal universe as Castaneda had promised to do but
failed. Last week, positive identification of a set of
human remains found in a remote area of Death Valley
National Park revealed that at least one of them had,
like Castaneda, died an ordinary human death.

Although the remains were actually found some three
years ago by a pair of hikers in the Panamint Dunes
region of the national park, the bones were so
desiccated that extracting a DNA sample proved
impossible at the time. However, according to Inyo
County Sheriff's investigator Marston Mottweiler, the
development of new forensic technology recently
produced a workable specimen.

Mottweiler said the sheriff's office had long
suspected that the remains were those of Patricia
Partin, also known as Nury Alexander, the adopted
daughter of Carlos Castaneda and one of his closest
disciples. The newly recovered specimen, when compared
to DNA samples taken from Partin's mother and three
sisters, proved Mottweiler's theory to be true.

Officially, the cause of Partin/Alexander's death is
undetermined. Only 70 percent of her skeleton was
recovered, along with a few scraps of a pair of pink
jogging pants. The skull was never found, but in a
land populated by hungry coyotes, this is not unusual.
After five years under a brutal desert sun, any
secrets the bones might have revealed were long ago
worn away.

But most who knew Partin/Alexander suspect that she
took her own life. Gaby Geuter, a retired Los Angeles
travel agent who had known Alexander for six years,
said she believed there were many compelling reasons
Alexander might have chosen suicide; disappointment
over Castaneda's ordinary death from liver cancer,
disappointment over not having been transported into
the infinite universe with her master, and an
inability to contemplate the future without her sole
source of financial and emotional support.

In his popular books, Castaneda had described how his
Yaqui teacher left the world in 1973 by "burning from
within," or dispersing his physical form into a ball
of light that joined with the universe. Castaneda's
followers believed he would leave the world the same
way, and that he might even take his closest followers
with him.

"The way Carlos died was a great disappointment,"
Geuter said. Castaneda had woven a web - a sort of
separate reality - around the women he supported in
his secluded Los Angeles home and, Geuter said, they
believed in him so strongly that his ordinary death
from a lingering form of liver cancer may have
shattered their confidence in the life they'd been
living for decades.

For Geuter, who began studying with Castaneda in
small, private workshops in the early 1990s, the news
of the identification of Alexander's bones was sad,
but not unexpected. Though she called Alexander's
death tragic, Geuter suspects the four other women
probably made the same choice.

During the last two years of his life, Geuter followed
Castaneda in secret, filming and documenting his
movements in order to learn whether the private man
truly lived the life he preached to his students. The
results of her quest were published in a book called
"Filming Castaneda; the Hunt for Magic and Reason."

Geuter first met Alexander at movement workshops given
by Castaneda in 1992. The master introduced Alexander
as his daughter and called her Blue Scout. The
sorcerer/philosopher sometimes told a tale of having
retrieved Alexander from another dimension when she
was only seven years old, and that she had been
educated in a Mexican orphanage. He often held her up
to his followers as a spirit being, a model of
perfection, and he legally adopted her in the
mid-1990s, making her an heir in his will.

In reality, Alexander had a more prosaic past. Born
Patricia Lee Partin in Pasadena, Calif., in 1957, she
grew up in a middle class home, the fourth of five
sisters. Partin dropped out of high school in the
1970s just as Carlos Castaneda's books, "A Separate
Reality" and "Tales of Power" were causing a cultural
phenomenon in the United States. Castaneda's claim to
have met a Yaqui Indian sorcerer in the Mexican desert
and to have learned from him the secrets of
controlling one's own reality appealed to a
disillusioned generation searching for something to
believe in.

Castaneda became an instant guru, though he led a
secluded and very private existence, forbidding
photographs of himself.

Partin met Castaneda in the late 1970s, soon changed
her name to Nury (or Nuri) Alexander, a name with
spiritual significance for her, and moved in with some
of Castaneda's female disciples. In his nearly 30-year
career, Castaneda's disciples tended to be attractive
women and the teacher/student relationship was also a
sexual one, according to many of the women who studied
with him.

One of these was Amy Wallace, daughter of celebrated
author Irving Wallace. Her recently released book "The
Sorcerer's Apprentice" detailed her life as
Castaneda's lover and student, and his voracious
appetite for physical/spiritual relationships with
women.

These relationships were often very intense, with his
closest disciples depending upon Castanada as an
emotional center as well as for their financial
support, according to Geuter. Among the women
Alexander, the Blue Scout, occupied a special place of
prominence. She was described by those who knew her as
temperamental, ethereal and driven by whim - as likely
to take her friends on a shopping spree or a trip to
Disneyland as to reject or insult them, according to a
chronology of her life published by another former
Castaneda student named Corey Donovan.

"She was very thin and fragile looking, childlike
almost," said Geuter, "but strong willed. She was
convinced of herself because she was Carlos' favorite
and was allowed to do things no one else would have
dared to do, like coming in late for workshops."

Alexander looked out of her thin, fragile body with a
pair of commanding, steely eyes that Castaneda often
made much of. But as to her temperament, Castaneda
once said, "her humanness is paper thin."

In keeping with Castaneda's insistence that his
disciples sever all ties with their families of
origin, Alexander stopped communicating with the
Partin family in the late 1970s and they never saw her
again. An attempt to contact her in the 1990s
reportedly ended badly when Alexander rebuffed her
family in particularly vicious terms.

But when investigators contacted members of the Partin
family asking for DNA samples to help identify the
bones, Alexander's mother and three of her sisters
readily contributed in an effort to finally put the
mystery of their missing sister to rest.

Alexander's disappearance was often lumped together
with that of the four other women who vanished, but
Geuter said she believes Alexander left at least
several days later. "We saw her driving around town
after the others were gone," Geuter said, "and it
surprised us." And, Geuter added, if the women had
gone together, Alexander's 1991 Ford Escort would not
have been the vehicle of choice when there were other
newer, larger vehicles available.

Alexander drove to Death Valley's remote Panamint
Dunes probably around the first or second of May,
where the parked Escort was spotted by park rangers.
They kept the vehicle under surveillance for nearly a
week, said Inyo County's Mottweiler, and then had it
impounded as abandoned. A notice was sent to the
address listed on the car registration, but no
response was received. A basic search of missing
person databases revealed no matches. Some time later,
the car was sold at a mechanic's auction and no one in
Inyo County paid the matter any further attention
until nearly five years later, when the remains were
discovered in the dunes some two and a half miles from
where the car was found.

In the pocket of the jogging pants recovered with the
remains was a knife, too small and flimsy to have been
an implement of self-destruction, but unusual and
familiar enough to convince Geuter that the remains
were those of Alexander. But for Mottweiler, even
though all the clues pointed in the direction of Nury
Alexander, conclusive evidence was lacking until last
week.

Now the mystery of at least one of Castaneda's missing
disciples is solved, and for the Partin family the
saga has come to an end. Mottweiler said the remains
would be released to the family, though he did not
know whether they had plans to conduct a memorial.

Whether Partin/Alexander actually killed herself or
succumbed to the Death Valley elements as so many
before her have done is impossible to say, said
Mottweiler, though there is currently no suspicion of
foul play.

Why she chose Death Valley also remains a mystery,
though Geuter had a theory. "The Castaneda story
starts in the desert," Geuter said, "and at least for
this woman it also ends in the desert."

The case remains officially open while the Inyo County
Coroner conducts final tests, but it seems likely that
Nury Alexander took her secrets with her, leaving only
Patricia Partin's scattered bones behind.