by Ann Rule
Years before I ever wrote about Marcia Moore, she was familiar to me. I first saw her image in the seventies when so many of us were caught up in the yoga craze, hard on the heels of the study of reincarnation and astrology. The lithe, gorgeous woman who demonstratedyoga positions in Jess Stearn’s books was Marcia. She seemed to all of us in that bemused decade to be the very essence of perfection. My friends and I would have been shocked to know that her life had been as beset by heartbreak as it had been blessed by wealth and genetic gifts.
Seeing her then as she posed in leotards and tights, a study in grace and beauty, no one could ever have imagined the tragedy that lay ahead of her.
In 1928, Marcia Moore was born into a family of high achievers. She was the cherished daughter of Robert Lowell Moore, a thirty-two-year-old Bostonian with a scrupulously blue-blooded background. Undeterred by the financial climate of the Great Depression, Marcia’s father founded the Sheraton Hotel chain in the 1930s and his business knowledge made the luxurious hotels flourish. The Sheraton Corporation stayed in the family until it was sold to ITT in 1968 for an estimated $20 million.
Marcia’s parents were involved in the New England Theosophical Society, which she always called laughingly, “kind of blue-blooded spiritualists.” Later, they built a “meditation mount” in Ojai, California, where they often joined friends who were interested in the same spiritual pursuits.
One of Marcia’s brothers became a successful attorney in Greenwich, Connecticut. The other was Robin Moore, whose books The Green Berets and The French Connection stayed at the top of the best-seller lists for months and then were made into blockbuster movies.
Marcia herself was a talented writer, but her field of expertise was far more ethereal than her brother’s. She saw beauty in nature, secrets of life beyond the veil of reality, and she trusted more than the average human, using her special sense to guide her. She was considered a true psychic by those who believed that the mind was capable of perceiving far more than the concrete things that can be rationally explained.
Marcia Moore’s life story and her expertise in the mystic arts of yoga became familiar to a million readers when Jess Stearn wrote a book about her in 1965: Youth, Yoga, and Reincarnation. Stearn, who also published Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet and The Girl with the Blue Eyes, spent three months with Marcia Moore and her third husband at their Boston home, and he, too, became a devotee of the yoga philosophy.
Marcia appeared in the picture section of the book, wearing leotards and demonstrating the complicated yoga positions or “asanas,” her body so perfect that there wasn’t a hint of cellulite or the slightest bulge of fat. She was almost forty, but she was completely flexible, her muscles elastic and trained. Indeed, she appeared to be a girl in her teens. That was important to her; she had a fear of growing old.
Oddly, although Marcia was a brilliant woman with an exceptionally strong mind, she had never been successful at choosing men. By the time she was fifty, she had four husbands. The first three were men who had disappointed and hurt her. Though she charted her life through her knowledge of astrology, letting the stars guide her, they often failed to guide her well when it came to romance.
There were dark sides to the men she chose. “Marcia was drawn to brutal men,” a friend said sadly. “She was so lovely and so good—she deserved better.”
Marcia Moore referred to her first three marriages as “unfortunate,” and didn’t say much more. “She felt her first husband treated her like a writing machine,” her friend recalled. “She was basically kept behind the typewriter—being a little ‘word merchant,’ as she called it.”
When Stearn wrote about her in the mid-sixties, Marcia Moore was in the midst of her third marriage—to a man who was twelve years younger than she. He was also an astrologer, but their marriage was to be no advertisement for selection by the stars. Marcia probably knew that when she spoke with Jess Stearn. He quotes her in the book as saying that her destiny and her husband’s might not always lie together. She told him that she only knew that it was meant for them to be together at that point in their lives.
After the excesses of the sixties, America was ready for a lifestyle that was pure and healthy. Marcia Moore was right at the forefront of all the new fads. She espoused vegetarianism as well as yoga. Except for her relationships with men, it all worked for her wonderfully well. She had everything, seemingly, that anyone might need to be happy—beauty, intellect and vibrant health. Indeed, Marcia had such control over her body and mind that she could actually control her heartbeat, her breathing and her blood pressure. She taught these techniques to her then-husband. By following her directions, he was able to beat a lie-detector test in a clinical situation by controlling those responses that would indicate he was not telling the truth. With his mind alone, he stopped perspiring, slowed his heartbeat, and lowered his blood pressure.
Marcia Moore’s whole life was directed toward learning as much as she could about the other side of reality. She believed there were hidden doors she might step through, ways to step beyond her physical body into a world most people never glimpsed. Even as a young woman attending Radcliffe College, Marcia had been fascinated with the world of the occult. She took correspondence courses in meditation and traveled to India to study yoga. Blessed—or cursed—with psychic ability, she searched for keys to open doors to the “other�� world.
Despite the bitter disappointment she felt when her marriages failed, Marcia Moore continued to believe she had the ability to make the right choices about her future through astrology charts and her psychic gift.
Initially, and despite urging from associates who had taken pharmacological shortcuts to enlightenment, Marcia found nothing that convinced her that drugs were the answer. Later, she reluctantly tried marijuana, mescaline, LSD, and even ingested seeds from the heavenly blue morning glory, but she was not impressed. None of them expanded her mind enough.
She wrote that “. . . these endeavors left me with the tantalizing sensation of having caught a few sneak previews of a show that never came to town.”
Always seeking, Marcia Moore wrote or co-authored seven books dealing with the psychic world, including the popular Diet, Sex, Yoga and Reincarnation, and Key to Immortality. She coined the term “hypersentience” for a technique she had discovered that seemed to open her mind and let her get in touch with other lives she had lived before her current existence on earth.
Reincarnation as a philosophy is as old as mankind. It predicates that all of us have lived many times before. Proponents believe that souls choose each life as a vehicle that will help them refine and perfect their souls to a point where utter bliss, purity, and Nirvana are reached. Believing in reincarnation allows believers to deal with the tragedies and disappointments in life, because they can be seen as being preordained by karmic design. Sadness and disaster give the believer the opportunity to cope in order to achieve spiritual growth.
There was a tremendous interest in reincarnation in the seventies. Even the Beatles were spending time with gurus and mystics. With deep hypnosis, many people said they had been able to go back far beyond birth to recall past lives. Interestingly, the most vocal of the previous life travelers had all been someone famous—or infamous—in their earlier lives.
Marcia Moore took reincarnation more seriously than most. She believed that while hypnotized, she had gone back into Egypt, back to the days before Christ. She described former lives and deaths. It was a fascinating theory that could not be proven or disproven.
Marcia Moore, in her present life, resembled Cleopatra. Her silky black hair was cut in a sleek cap; her features were perfectly symmetrical. She had many suitors. Although her first three marriages fell apart, Marcia bore and raised three children to adulthood. She rarely spoke of them to her friends on the West Coast. Sometimes even her life seemed mundane and disappointing, but she searched continually for answers to questions that most of us never think about seriously.
Marcia didn’t have
to worry about money; there was the trust fund set up by her family plus the money that she received from her lectures and books. She was involved with groups who were searching for meaning, just as she herself was.
Marcia had a talent for friendship; she was sincerely concerned about her women friends and kept in touch with notes and cards, always urging them on to better things. She often drew pen and ink sketches of flowers on her cards and included quotations from Thoreau and Emerson.
One of Marcia’s dearest friends was Elise Devereaux* who was president of the Seattle Astrological Society. The two women had met through a mutual friend, a psychologist in San Francisco, who had known Marcia since the sixties when he was in college. Elise was responsible for bringing Marcia to Seattle in 1975 to speak to the Astrological Society. “She was a most gracious and professional guest speaker,” Elise would recall. “She helped the society significantly.”
In 1976, Marcia wrote to Elise:
Dear Elise,
Delighted to have your letter of May 23, and especially to hear that you are regressing people. As for the truth or falsity of the material in terms of scientific validation, it is still too early to judge. All we know is that some of them do check out. . . . Interesting about your life as a monk who ran an orphanage in the valley. But actually these were the ones who did such fine work in raising abandoned children. It is easy to imagine you in such a situation.
Marcia wrote that she hoped to come back to the Northwest, but would have to wait until she had a paid book tour. “But I’d love to plan on the regional conference in the summer of ’77. That sounds a long way away, but it isn’t really. By then, I should have some genuinely new conclusions and not just a bunch of case histories as I have now. I have a fairly long story with the astrological correlates in the September Bulletin. In fact, I plan to give more space to Karmic Astrology from now on . . .”
Marcia Moore and Elise Devereaux had become fast friends, even though they didn’t see each other in person that much. Elise was living in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains and Marcia was either traveling or head-quartered in Ojai. They kept in touch by letter and the occasional phone call. “Marcia was very reserved,” Elise said. “If it had not been for my friend [who introduced them] I would never have guessed there had ever been anything seamy in her life. She was just attracted to the wrong men. Marcia was like a princess, small, beautiful and wealthy; there was a sadness about her. I think she was always looking for a ‘Bright World.’ She was very eloquent and educated, and somehow she could make the damndest things seem reasonable.”
Sometime after she posed for the pictures in Stearn’s books, Marcia had a face lift. She was nearing fifty, and she had the kind of fragile thin skin that showed wrinkles early. The operation was a complete success, and she looked under forty again, although she never actually admitted to having had plastic surgery. One thing that Elise noticed was that Marcia never showed her legs; she wore either long flowing skirts or slacks. Elise remembers that Marcia was in a fire as a child, and suspected that her legs were badly scarred as a result. She never spoke about it, though.
After three marriages, Marcia Moore was essentially alone. She still hoped to find the man in the world she was destined to be with. Elise Devereaux was alone too, divorced and raising her small daughter. She was giving astrological readings, and an older woman who was cutting down on her clientele sent Elise several referrals. One of them was a handsome, dark-haired man named Steve Monti*. Monti was an anesthesiologist who was on staff in a Seattle hospital. Although he was awfully good-looking and masculine, Elise was somehow not attracted to him.
“I did his chart,” Elise said. “And gave him a reading in my home. Dr. Monti recorded the reading. But then I received a call from him saying that the recording was blank—and he asked if I would do the reading again.”
She told him that, of course, she would. At the time Dr. Monti was going through a divorce, and talked to Elise about it. He showed her pictures of a very pretty blonde woman and explained that this was his second divorce from the same wife. There were children from their marriage, and Monti said that his family lived in North Bend, Washington.
It wasn’t unusual for Elise’s clients to confide their most intimate concerns. Steve Monti told Elise that he hated his name—that he had always hated it because it was his stepfather’s name. He said the man had sexually abused him when he was small, and he was going to get rid of the name as part of a healing process for the scars left behind. Henceforth, he would be known as Walter “Happy” Boccaci*.
Monti-Boccaci had had a life full of catastrophes, it seemed. He told Elise that he had survived a terrible car accident a few years before. He had been driving his Volkswagen which was crushed by a larger vehicle. “I think the only reason I survived,” he confided, “was because the doctors knew I was a physician, too, and they went to extraordinary effort to save me.”
Dr. Boccaci said that his aorta had burst, which was usually a “death sentence.” Indeed it was; unless a patient is actually on the operating table when the main artery of the body tears or bursts, death by exsanguination almost always follows. But Happy Boccaci had survived, although he was in sorry shape. He showed Elise pictures of himself on crutches. His legs seemed to be limp and paralyzed.
However, by the time he’d come to her for an astrological reading, he looked to be in perfect health. The only sign that he’d been in an accident, he said, was that he could no longer drum or roll his fingers on a hard surface. He had lost control of those nerves.
If Elise had begun to wonder if Dr. Boccaci was full of tall stories, she soon had proof that he was on the staff of a highly respected hospital. “I have a genetic bone disease,” she said. “One morning, I woke up with stress fracture of my knee. Happy had me come to his hospital and I was given the royal treatment. I didn’t have to pay for anything. I really felt that Happy took a real, altruistic interest in my health.”
Elise was in her thirties and attractive; Dr. Happy Boccaci was about forty and newly single. Soon he began to visit her on a social basis, although she tried to keep their relationship platonic. It wasn’t that he wasn’t attractive because he was. But there was something that put her off.
“He began buying my two-year-old daughter gifts,” she said. “This was making me uncomfortable and I tried to make some distance. I remember my daughter crawling on his lap once and asking, ‘Are you nice or are you mean?’ He told her he was a nice Italian man.”
The question of Dr. Boccaci’s interest in Elise Devereaux soon became moot. Marcia Moore came back to Seattle to speak for a second time in the summer of 1977. Happy Boccaci was in the audience and was totally taken with the fragile heiress. He learned that Elise was a friend of Marcia’s and began a campaign to get an introduction to Marcia.
Something made Elise hold back. She knew that Marcia was involved with a young man, whom Marcia sensed to be a reincarnation of Lord Byron. She had always been fascinated by Lord Byron, and felt they had had a connection in another life. Although the man she was seeing was much younger than she was, she was drawn to him. He had a lot of medical problems, and Marcia was taking care of him. He was her “Lord Byron.”
Even so, Elise knew that Marcia was often lonely, and so was Happy. There was no real reason they shouldn’t meet, although Marcia was about a dozen years older than Happy. “He kept badgering me to introduce them,” Elise recalled. “I was reluctant. He actually called me on the phone and had a temper tantrum. I must have felt intimidated because I invited him to a private reception. The rest is history. Marcia and Happy were drawn to each other immediately.”
Anyone could see that they made a striking couple—the big bear of a man with thick dark hair, beard and mustache, and heavy features, and the petite woman with the features of a porcelain doll. Dr. Happy Boccaci swept Marcia Moore into his arms and she felt, finally, as if she had come home.
Walter “Happy” Bocacci at forty was the deputy chief of the anesthesiology d
epartment at Seattle’s Public Health Hospital. He had held that highly responsible position for ten years. Until his second divorce from his wife, his interests had been in the scientific world where everything was explainable. It would seem that he would be an unlikely mate for the ethereal Marcia Moore, but he had already plunged into the world of astrological projection by the time he met Marcia.
They both felt a karmic link. Who could argue that the meeting of Bocacci and Marcia Moore did not seem preordained? It did seem as if they were meant to be together.
Happy always told the story of their meeting in a way that did not include Elise Devereaux. He explained that he had been browsing in the Quest Bookstore in Seattle, a shop specializing in works on the psychic world, in late May 1977, when he picked up a volume titled Astrology, the Divine Science. “I was mesmerized by the picture of a woman on the dust jacket.”
It was Marcia Moore.
As he confided to Marcia later, “It flashed through my mind. Wow! Would she make a perfect wife! I actually felt some electrical impulse coming off the page and penetrating me—such as we visualize with magnetism.”
And so when Marcia came to Seattle to lecture, Dr. Happy Boccaci was there, sitting in the front row, taping her remarks so that he wouldn’t lose the sound of her voice or her insights into this new world that enthralled him. He knew that he would see her again, that he was already half in love with her.
After Elise’s private reception, Happy invited Marcia to walk with him. They strolled through the fragrant summer night and talked until the sun came up.
Marcia had to leave Seattle for lectures in Vancouver, British Columbia, but Happy Boccaci pressed his suit with letters he had a friend hand-carry to Marcia in the Canadian city. He invited her to visit him in Seattle, saying, “Marcia, I know my destiny is either with you or through you.”