SAN DIEGO - Police found at least 49 bodies in a luxurious home in the elite northern San Diego county suburb of Rancho Santa Fe last night and described the gruesome scene as a mass suicide.
Distraught neighbors said they believed members of a religious cult or some out-of-state group had been living at the ranch house. They reported that the people living in the house dressed in black and called themselves monks.
Deputies reportedly approached the sprawling ranch house after receiving a phone tip. One told a television reporter that he stopped tallying the bodies after he had counted 10.
District Attorney Paul Pfingst said the count was at least 49, and deputies said all the bodies were male. "This is a Jonestown," Pfingst said.
As media helicopters roared overhead, sheriff's deputies congregated the residence on Colina Norte. The home, like most in the posh neighborhood of Rancho Santa Fe, was set in lush, palm-fringed grounds complete with tennis courts and a swimming pool.
Property records show that the nine-bedroom, seven-bathroom home on more than three acres of land was sold in May 1994 to a married couple for $1.325 million. The home was considered owner-occupied, though the buyers - Sam Koutchesfahani and his wife Fatt Maghadam Yekta - maintain a post-office box in Rancho Santa Fe.
A prominent San Diego criminal defense attorney, Milton Silverman Jr., called a local radio station to say he represented Koutchesfahani. Silverman said his client had rented the two-story home to a religious group several months ago and was trying to sell it for $1.6 million.
Neighbor Bill Strong said the new tenants moved in last fall and were quiet. "I never heard them speak," he said. Strong, who lives next door to the home where the bodies were discovered, said he saw five or six adults but no children coming in and out of the property.
"They were very low key," agreed neighbor Carol Kaplan.
And Drummond Doroski, a 16-year old resident of Colina Norte, said the residents of the home "weren't really social."
A real estate agent, who did not want to be named, said she tried to show the home to buyers but "there was always some sort of religion meeting going on."
The deaths jarred neighbors in the tranquil neighborhood of Rancho Santa Fe - known more for its genteel debates over proper landscaping aesthetics than for its cults or criminals.
The last time their neighborhood received such notoriety was back in 1992, when a mysterious English businessman named Ian Spiro apparently shot his wife and three children to death in their home and then committed suicide by swallowing cyanide in a remote desert spot.
The Spiro case bedeviled local residents because, even though police concluded that Spiro killed his family and committed suicide, conspiracy theories about the deaths abounded. Spiro's background as an intelligence operative on the fringes of Middle East espionage offered ample ground for theories about assassins and terrorists targeting the entire family.
The neighbors' talk about a religious cult sparked memories of other mass suicides. The most notorious in recent years having been the murder-suicides of followers of the Order of the Solar Temple, a cult based in Switzerland but with branches in Europe and Canada. Just this week, five followers of the cult died after rigged propane tanks caught fire in a house they were occupying about 40 miles southwest of Quebec City.
in Canada.
That incident brought the total number of murder-suicides linked to the cult over the past three years to 74.
The most dramatic cult suicide occurred in 1978, when 913 followers of the Rev. Jim Jones died in Jonestown, Guyana. Most had committed suicide, apparently by drinking a grape beverage laced with potassium cyanide.
Carl Raschke, a prominent cult watcher and author of a book on the links between the occult, violence and terrorism, said the mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe points to a possible cult involvement.
"This is a large group of people and we know they killed themselves. It is very likely it did have some cult-like or odd religious motivation," Raschke said in an interview from Denver where he is religious studies professor at the University of Denver.
But he cautioned, "It could have been a mass murder as well." He noted that in the case of the deaths of members of the Solar Temple doomsday cult in 1994 in France that some of were later found to have been murdered, as were followers of Jim Jones in Guyana.
Police released few details about the deaths in Rancho Santa Fe last night. San Diego County Sheriff Bill Kolender and Undersheriff Jack Drown were in Sacramento when word of the tragedy reached them. They were flying back to San Diego as the investigation continued after darkness fell yesterday.