Deported cult members stay in Denver hotel

[February 3, 1999]

"It's hard to second-guess Kim Miller, but I think he wants them out of this country," Mark Roggeman, said Denver police officer and cult watcher, according to the Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News.

Roggeman was referring to 14 members of the Concerned Christians cult who were deported from Jerusalem by Israeli police for plotting to initiate a gun fight with the belief it would hasten the second coming of Christ. In January of 1999, an escort returned the cultists to Denver International Airport, where the group took refuge from the press and anxious relatives who awaited them, in a downtown Denver hotel.

The holed-up cultists, eight adults and six children, have settled into four rooms. Hotel staff say the group has plans to stay "into February," but declined to elaborate, insisting on their right to privacy. Some have cell phones, and splurge for room service, hotel staff observed. Worried family members and friends have been largely unsuccessful in establishing contact with group members.

Relatives and cult experts alike, including Roggeman, who has been tracking the Denver-based Concerned Christians cult since its inception in the 1980s, believe the cultists are waiting for travel instructions from their leader, Monte Kim Miller. Miller disappeared with his followers in late September 1998; some members resurfaced in Jerusalem and were deported. Miller's whereabouts are unconfirmed.

Miller, who originally prophesied an apocalypse would strike Denver in the fall of 1998, now predicts he will die in the streets of Jerusalem in December 1999 only to rise again in three days. He has made other doomsday predictions and claims to be the voice of God.

Source: The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News (Stuart,FL), February 1, 1999