The Karjala Family inside Mary Henderson's Underground House
Las Vegas, Nevada (June 1987)
My name is Brian Karjala. For a time during the 1980s my mother Suzie worked as a phone counselor for Pat Robertson's The 700 Club TV program. An elderly widowed woman by the name of Mary Henderson contacted Robertson's organization and was connected locally to my mom who was living within her city.
Not long after Mary had shown my mom the inside of her Vegas home my entire family was invited to take the slow moving elevator ride several feet underground. Mary gave us a personal tour of several rooms.
In one room was a display case containing the necklace Mary's friend actress Elizabeth Taylor wore in the 1963 movie Cleopatra.
Todd, Scott, Mary, Brian, Kristy, Suzie
There was a year-round Christmas theme in that very elaborate and fancy large bunker home.
The Karjala Kids with Mrs. Henderson
That moving Santa started out low to the ground and was elevated to a high position with the push of a button. The process of the elevation sounded like a loud vacuum cleaner. You can see that my sister Kristy was not too crazy about that freaky Kris Kringle.
Mary's husband was Jerry Henderson. Mary confided to my mom on at least two occasions that her husband was murdered for greed by people posing as family friends (Mary said these individuals worked their way into their lives and even attended church services with them... but after Jerry died these people quickly disappeared from her life without even consoling her for her loss). From what I remember Mary lost some of her family's fortune after her husband's death. (The official cause of Jerry's 1983 death was listed as a heart attack. Mary believed that at an earlier time when her husband was in the hospital he was asked to sign his name to papers while he was incapacitated.)
Mary died less than 16 months after these pictures were taken.
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