Sydney cult leader found dead

The leader and co-founder of a Sydney based healing cult facing trial on multiple alleged sex abuse offences against two 12-year-old Sydney girls was found dead today.

Police will not reveal the circumstances in which Kenneth Emmanuel Dyers, 85, the founder of Kenja Communications died or where his body was found.

Police from Sutherland and forensic officers were called to his home in Crammond Avenue, Bundeena, earlier today.

Sutherland Police have declined to comment on the death as detectives prepare a report for the State Coroner.

His death comes as a trial in the Sydney District Court was deferred pending a decision by the Mental Health Tribunal as to whether he was fit to plead.

He faced 22 charges of aggravated indecent and sexual assault upon two 12-year-old girls.

Dyers, who had been on bail, had been contesting the charges since his arrest by officers from the Child Protection and Serious Sex Crimes Squad in October 2005 after a long-running investigation by Strike Force Caroola.

When he was first charged on October 28, 2005, his lawyer Harland Koops told Sutherland Local Court that he could not have sexually assaulted the girls at Kenja’s Surry Hills offices between December 2001 and July 2002 because he suffered erectile dysfunction for 15 years.

The charges included four counts of aggravated indecent assault in relation to one victim, as well as a further 17 counts of aggravated indecent assault and one of aggravated sexual assault relating to the second girl.

Throughout successive court appearances Dyers’s wife and Kenja co-founder, the former actress Jan Hamilton, and followers have maintained his innocence.

Police alleged in evidence presented during his committal the offences took place during one-on-one “energy conversion sessions” inside the Kenja office designed to assist in clearing negative energies.

His followers have claimed he has been the victim of a campaign to destroy him by “bitter and disaffected” former followers.

This included Dyers defeating in the High Court a previous unrelated sexual assault allegation levelled against him in 1993.

Dyers and Ms Hamilton founded Kenja in 1982 preaching the positive power of a form of meditation called energy conversion.

Among those who undertook a course was Cornelia Rau, the former airline steward woman wrongly detained at Baxter Detention Centre, who attended Kenja workshops in 1998.

While on bail Dyers has been treated for a series of illnesses including a lumbar condition.

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