The Missing Bridegroom

Was it kidnaping or cold feet?

At first it seemed like a sad, familiar story--in-law problems and a bride-to-be left in the lurch. Christine Cox, 24, a librarian's assistant, a maid of honor and the best man were waiting in her apartment near Boston to attend the wedding rehearsal. When the bridegroom, Kenneth Levitt, 25, failed to show, Christine phoned his parents' home and was told, "Ken just left." But hours later, with the wayward groom still missing, Christine says, Ken's parents told her that their son had gone off to consider whether he should back out of the marriage.

Fifteen days later, Levitt reappeared to tell a totally different story. He said that during all that time he had been imprisoned against his will at three different locations. His mysterious captors not only wanted to break up his marriage, he said, but to talk him out of his new-found religion. He had been the victim of a bizarre and forceful "deprogramming" technique, he claimed. Levitt was no convert to a weird new cult, however, but a Jew who had lately converted to Christianity and wanted to marry a Gentile.

As Levitt recalls it, he stopped by his parents' home in Newton, Mass., for dinner before attending the wedding rehearsal. His father was going to give him money from stock sales, and his sister wanted to borrow his guitar. No sooner had his father greeted him, he says, than three men tied a hood over his head and wrestled him into a truck. After being driven for about an hour, he found himself prisoner in an attic. There he was kept awake for 36 hours and fed only a matzo and a piece of chicken. Day and night young Jewish activists angrily tried to get him to renounce Christianity.

Levitt says he was eventually transported to still another location, perhaps on Long Island, kept in a basement and treated to an even harsher harangue by as many as 30 people. After a week he was taken to a girls' camp in New York's Catskill Mountains. Finally, just before dawn on the 15th day, he says, he eluded sleeping guards, made his way through the woods and phoned state police.

As a result of Levitt's story, his father Albert Levitt, a government engineer, faces a preliminary hearing on a kidnaping charge July 18, and a grand jury in New York State is considering whether to indict others. The father has pleaded innocent to the charge.

Christine says that Ken's mother once demanded that she convert to Judaism and, when rebuffed, said she would do anything to stop the wedding. The father's defense lawyer, however, says the Levitts opposed the wedding not because Christine was a Gentile Evangelical but because their son was unstable. Weeks before the original wedding date, a man who said he was with the Jewish Defense League called the pastor who planned to marry the pair and warned him not to.

Ken Levitt has had lengthy psychiatric treatment. Family friends portray him as a disturbed young man who flunked out of one university and dropped out of another, was rejected by the draft on medical grounds, and is capable of having made up the whole kidnaping story.

While doubts and charges swirled about them, the young couple had a quickie marriage in Reno and a second ceremony in San Francisco at the headquarters of the controversial Jews for Jesus, whose Cambridge branch was responsible for Levitt's conversion. On the walls were paintings of a Menorah, a Torah scroll and Jesus bearing the Cross. Below, a banner proclaimed MAZEL TOV KEN AND CHRIS. -

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