DEAD
OR ALIVE
pered pleas to at the wake, was not
Kaufman’s, but that of the husband
of Maddox’s mother. Both families —
the Kaufmans and the Maddoxes —
were supposedly in on the plot. As for
AKLives, Maddox said he’d designed
the website as a beacon to lead
Kaufman back to him.
Maddox told the disciples he’d only
just learned all the details from his family. After the press conference, he said,
a relative gave him Kaufman’s current
address, leading to an apartment
complex in New Mexico.
No one at the other end of the line
asked for proof of any kind. The story,
Clendenin told HuffPost, simply made
sense. When asked how he could judge
its veracity, he said, “Steve Maddox told
me that Kaufman is still alive. In fact,
he told me where he is.”
If there’s anything close to an objective
party, it may be Nora, who mined his experience as a disciple for his talk show without getting emotionally tied to Kaufman’s
state of being. And yet, while Nora agrees
that all of it — the website, the lurid backs ܞK H[ۜ