On July 25, 2009, Colleen Conaway plummeted to her death in San Diego’s Horton Plaza mall; an apparent suicide. She had no history of mental problems. She was by all accounts very happy with her life and her direction.
So how did the Minnesota native meet such a sad and inexplicable fate so far from home? She was participating in a James Arthur Ray Creating Absolute Wealth seminar, for which she had paid thousands of dollars.
The exercise was one in which seminar participants were directed to dress as homeless people and wander around downtown San Diego. They were not allowed to carry money, identification, or cell phones. In what would become a pattern for those who had the misfortune to be severely injured during James Ray seminars, Colleen Conaway spent many hours listed as “Jane Doe.”
Connie Joy’s daughter Erica participated in that same seminar and both Connie and her husband Richard attended the final dinner. None of them were aware that a participant had died.
Only Ray and his closest staffers knew that Conaway was lying on a slab in the San Diego County morgue. And they weren’t telling. People who asked about why she hadn’t returned were told that she was fine but wasn’t coming back to the seminar.
It was over two months later, in the wake of yet another horrific tragedy on Ray’s watch, that his long-time followers learned that the unnamed woman who had died in the mall that day was the seminar participant who had never returned from her homelessness adventure.
Less than two weeks after losing one of his students to a deadly fall, Ray had a select group of the high paying World Wealth Society members hiking a mountain trail overlooking Machu Picchu — blindfolded. When concerned local tour guides tried to steer the hikers away from steep drops and around sharp turns, Ray became irritated at their interference.
He was going to teach his students about the value of living life to the fullest by flirting with death and no one was going to stop him. As his group of students removed their blindfolds to take in the view from the cliff they were standing on, he asked, “Are you just taking up space or are you really living your lives?”
Ray’s fascination with the theme of death was not new. But it seemed to increase rather than diminish after Colleen Conaway’s inexplicable plunge. In early October, just over two months after her demise, Ray would lead his Spiritual Warrior seminar in Sedona, Arizona, in which he relied heavily on death metaphors. And three people would die from exposure to extreme temperatures in a sweat lodge ceremony.
When Joy learned of the deaths of James Shore and Kirby Brown and that her good friend Liz Neuman was in critical condition in an Arizona hospital, she was shocked and saddened but not surprised.
Joy had been trying to warn people about Ray’s sweat lodge since she, herself, had gotten sick from the heat during Spiritual Warrior 2007. She knew the dangers of heat stroke and had long thought it was only a matter of time before someone was severely injured in one of Ray’s super-heated sweat lodges.
In Tragedy in Sedona, Joy offers an insider’s perspective on what led up to the tragic deaths and multiple injuries that resulted from a sweat lodge that was “too hot for too long.” As World Wealth Society members, she and her husband Richard got as close to Ray as anyone but his closest staffers were allowed to get.
She also saw that limited access diminish as Ray’s star rose. Over a three-year period, the Joys attended 27 of Ray’s events as either paying participants or Dream Team volunteers.
Joy witnessed numerous injuries at Ray’s events: broken bones, a punctured eyelid, and other medical emergencies, for which Ray took no responsibility and implemented few precautions. His recklessness escalated dramatically as his Oprah-fueled popularity increased and he began packing his events to capacity.
As the number of these incidents mounted the Joys posited that Ray would never really risk anyone’s life because, if for no other reason, it would be bad for business. Besides, they knew that Ray was extensively trained by native shamans and other practitioners. Surely he knew what he was doing. But as his recklessness increased, they became less and less convinced that people were safe and increasingly concerned until the World Wealth Society trip to Peru shattered what was left of their trust.