Published: March 8, 1988
LEAD: An heiress who won a $6.6 million judgment against her church last year won the 69-acre Bible Speaks campus in Lenox today with a $3.23 million bid in an auction supervised by the Federal Bankruptcy Court.
An heiress who won a $6.6 million judgment against her church last year won the 69-acre Bible Speaks campus in Lenox today with a $3.23 million bid in an auction supervised by the Federal Bankruptcy Court.
After the hearing before Judge James F. Queenan Jr., Jonas Dovydenas, whose wife, Elizabeth, is an heir to the Dayton Hudson department store fortune, said the family would break up the campus and sell parts of it in an attempt to recoup the family's loss.
Mrs. Dovydenas, who is 34, won the $6.6 million claim against the Bible Speaks church last April, convincing Judge Queenan that the church's leader, the Rev. Carl H. Stevens, had defrauded her out of about $7 million she had contributed from 1983 through 1985. The judgment forced the church into bankruptcy.
After Judge Queenan certified Mrs. Dovydenas as the high bidder, her husband told reporters the family planned to sell part of the land and use the rest ''in a way that's best for the town.''
''We'd like to get a school in there,'' Mr. Dovydenas said. ''We'd like to use the cultural center.''
The property, with 26 buildings and a fully equipped television studio, has an appraised value of $6 million.
Gordon T. Walker, a Boston lawyer who represented Mrs. Dovydenas, said other church assets include a church in Scarborough, Me., that has already been sold for more than $1 million and a Palm Beach, Fla., condominium equipped with a vibrating bed and floor to ceiling mirrors once used by Mr. Stevens.
Mr. Walker said he expects Mrs. Dovydenas will receive more than $4 million as a result of the property sales.
In his decision last May, Judge Queenan said Mr. Stevens convinced Mrs. Dovydenas to give the church nearly one-third of her fortune, ''even though he did not explicitly appeal to her for donations.'' Judge Queenan said the 13- day trial revealed ''an astonishing saga of clerical deceit, avarice and subjugation on the part of the church's founder, Carl H. Stevens.''
