Was Marcia Moore murdered?

The death of the ketamine priestess, part two

This is the second and final part of our deep dive into the mysterious death of Marcia Moore, Sheraton heiress, New Age celebrity, and leading advocate of ketamine therapy in the 1970, before she disappeared on January 14 1979, and her skull was discovered two years later. You can read part one here.

At 4:38 AM on January 15 1979, Howard Alltounian called the police and reported his wife, Marcia Moore, as a missing person. The police report read:

SUBJECT IS DISTRAUGHT & THREATENED SUICIDE THIS DATE. SUB. POSS. MAINIC DEPRESSANTE [SIC], HAS THREATENED SUICIDE IN THE PAST, AND HAS LEFT RESIDENCE ONLY TO RETURN SEVERAL HOURS LATER”, “SUBJ MAY BE SUFFERING FROM AMNESIA OR OTHER MENTAL DISORDER FROM USE OF KETAMINE (SNOHOMISH COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE RUNAWAY/MISSING PERSONS REPORT).

Although Howard’s testimony claims that Marcia might be wandering in the woods near their home, Mac Mac Laughlin, a close friend of Marcia’s in 1978, maintained that Marcia would never go walking alone at night in freezing conditions.

Over the next month, the Snohomish Sheriff Department conducted an extensive missing persons search.  Lt. Darryl Bemis was assigned to the case, and he began reading Moore and Alltounian’s Journeys to the Bright World for clues. The media’s coverage on the case began to focus on sensationalistic angles—drug abuse, the kidnapping of an heiress, vengeful witches, occultism. Even Lt. Bemis got carried away, at one point in the investigation using Sheriff Department funds to hold a séance with local psychics to bring up Marcia’s whereabouts.

Perhaps the most florid aspect of the case was Howard’s public meltdown in interviews with the press and in Moore’s New Age newsletter, The Hypersentience Bulletin. During Marcia’s absence, Howard took over editorship and penned several over-the-top entries. In one passage, Howard describes visiting numerous psychics and receiving a message from Marcia through a third party on 3/23/1979:

[MARCIA]: I AM IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION, EXPERIENCING A DIFFERENT FORM OF LIFE STYLE. I DEMATERIALIZED MY PHYSICAL BODY BY CHANGING MATTER INTO THE ENERGY OF LIGHT AND I TRANSCENDED TO A DIFFERENT LEVEL OF BEING. SINCE THERE IS NO TIME HERE, I AM NOT AWARE OF HOW LONG I HAVE BEEN GONE. I AM PUTTING MY MEMORY [INTO] A STORY OF THIS DIMENSION AND I WILL WRITE IT WHEN I RETURN…I KNOW HOWARD WILL FORGIVE ME. TELL HIM I LOVE HIM AS MUCH AS HE LOVES ME…

A page written by Howard from the Hypersentience Bulletin

Howard’s emotional entries in The Hypersentience Bulletin documented his mental deterioration and apparent inability to accept Marcia’s disappearance and likely death. The press and the New Age community felt sorry for him.  

The case went cold until two years later when the skull was found in a swamp behind a barn nearly two miles away from the Alltounian residence. There was a hole in Marcia’s skull.  Although the Snohomish County Search and Rescue Department conducted an extensive grid search, no additional body parts or bones were found. Since no bullet was found in the immediate area, the hole in the skull was thought to be a byproduct of deterioration. However, Robin Moore, Marcia’s older brother, believed that the severed skull suggested that Marcia might have been the victim of a ritualistic killing by a coven of witches or a satanic cult.

In the time since Marcia’s skull was found in March of 1981, a consensus has emerged that Marcia’s death was the result of a ketamine misadventure. When Dr. Karl Jansen first analyzed the case in Ketamine: Dreams and Realities (2002), he argued that existing “evidence is more suggestive of an accident rather than a suicide, bears some similar hallmarks to death from exposure in a person intoxicated with alcohol” (55). Speculation goes that she climbed a tree in the woods on a very cold night in the middle of winter and shot herself up with all the ketamine she could find. Howard certainly suggested this was the case. In her writings on past life regression, Marcia had fantasized about jumping in front of a truck to find out what lies beyond the veil..

Was her death a misguided attempt to reach the “other side”? Or simply a ketamine accident in the freezing outdoors ? In 2021, a new book was published by two true crime enthusiasts Joe and Marina DiSomma, which presents convincing evidence that Marcia was murdered.