A leaked police report has revealed the horrifying final moments of participants in a new age retreat where a "sweat lodge" session killed three and injured 20. The spiritual retreat, whose wealthy participants paid thousands of dollars for five days of motivational talks and physical tasks, was led by James Arthur Ray, one of America's best known spiritual gurus.
The retreat's Arizona sweat lodge ended up steaming people to death last October. The tragedy was at first hailed as a terrible accident, but Ray is now the subject of a murder investigation.
The police report has cast a spotlight on America's self-help industry, where self-proclaimed gurus make millions by urging people into ever more bizarre and extreme behaviour.
The report showed that participants in a sweat lodge ceremony vomited, passed out and screamed for help. Ray told them not to leave. He was outside the only entrance into the lodge, controlling the flap that let people in and out. One witness, Theodore Mercer, who helped run the sweat lodge, said Ray told scared participants three times: "You are not going to die. You might think you are, but you are not going to die."
The two-hour ceremony, which saw red-hot rocks passed into the lodge every 15 minutes, came after two days of fasting and not drinking water. After an hour, two people were dragged out, one saying: "I don't want to die, I don't want to die." Ray allegedly responded: "It's a good day to die."
Almost at the end of the ceremony, with just one more round of rocks to be put in, it emerged that two people had passed out. They were kept inside. When the ceremony was finally over and panicked people were trying to get the victims out, Ray called attempts to remove blankets from the lodge's walls "sacrilegious". One of the victims had been subjected to such intense heat that his lungs were scorched.
Ray has so far not been charged with any crime, although he has been sued by some of the victims. "The tragedy was a terrible accident that no one, including James Ray, could have seen coming," Ray's lawyer, Brad Brian, said in a statement.
But the leaked report does reveal previous incidents when problems arose at Ray's sweat lodge and other strange ceremonies. One man described Ray telling him to shatter bricks with his bare hands, which he did, breaking bones in his hand in the process.
Critics say that such tasks are a sort of confidence trick that exists at the extreme end of America's $11.5bn (£7bn) self-help industry. Ray, who was born into extreme poverty in Oklahoma, recently bought a multimillion-dollar home in Beverly Hills. There is little doubt that he exercised a powerful psychological hold over many of those who took his courses. The man who broke his hand shattering a brick described the experience to police as "amazing". The same man was at the fatal October sweat lodge ceremony. He staggered out halfway through, severely burned by the hot rocks, yet went back in for the last round.
In explaining such behaviour, the police report concluded simply: "Participants thought highly of James Ray and didn't want to let him down by leaving the sweat lodge." It was a decision that cost some of them their lives.