Michael Lane, a British motivational speaker and “spiritual healer” told police he wanted to help 44-year-old Ginger Candela achieve a deeper state of meditation. Then he hit her with a frying pan and killed her, say Las Vegas police.
Lane told investigators that he and Candela were in her bedroom when he compressed her carotid arteries to help her achieve a deeper state of meditation, an arrest report released Monday says.
Police say Lane told them he then decided to kill her, striking her with a frying pan and using an electrical cord to strangle her.
On November 30, police detectives got a missing person report on Candela and went to her home.
The house was in disarray and evidence led detectives to call homicide Lt. Lew Roberts, according to CBS affiliate KLAS.
“She was found in the garage. She was found in a trashcan – a rather large trash can – deceased. Obviously a homicide,” Roberts said. Bleach was poured into the trashcan to mask the smell.
Lane, a British citizen, was arrested Dec. 3.
He faces charges of murder and robbery with a deadly weapon, as well as another charge for one count of grand larceny auto.
Las Vegas police said Tuesday that they tracked Lane, who also goes by the name “Chae Saville,” to a motel in Ventura, Calif. after he fled Nevada.
Detectives say Lane has been involved with “spiritual healing” for quite some time and may have befriended women to defraud them.
He is being held without bail.
Candela’s friends and neighbors say she survived a bad marriage and “turned her life to helping battered women through her church,” according to KLAS.
4 Comments. Leave new
why is this included in your articles? What good do these details do to be repeated? This information is not useful.
I guess you’d have to define “useful.” Not long ago a “spiritual teacher” allegedly killed a couple of people by preventing them from leaving a sweat lodge on a retreat. And Radovan Karadzic, who is up for trial on charges of genocide, masqueraded as a spiritual healer while he was on the run. Perhaps if Candela had been more aware that people calling themselves spiritual teachers may not be what they seem, she’d have been more careful about inviting Lane into her home. So the news story may have a useful function in reminding people to be careful.
Bodhipaksa is absolutely right. Sometimes we are so eager to believe that we ignore the truth, calling ‘faith’ what we might better call ‘danger’.
I don’t know why this is so, but often people who become mentally ill develop “religious preoccupation”. It can be difficult to discern a religious experience from signs of budding psychosis.
I’m not declaring that mentally ill people are dangerous, but it could be emotionally devastating to follow a spiritual person for some time and observe them eventually descend into his/her own personal depths.
The key word here is “observe.”