TONY ALAMO CALLED KEY TO BODY'S THEFT : WOMAN SUES TO LOCATE HER MOTHER'S REMAINS.

Byline: Mary Schubert Daily News Staff Writer

For six years, Christhiaon Coie has been trying to win a macabre game of hide-and-seek with Tony Alamo, the jailed preacher who she and an Arkansas court believe knows the location of her mother's body.

Alamo, 62, will have a parole hearing this week to request his release from federal prison. He was married to Susan Alamo at the time of her 1982 death from cancer. In February 1991, somebody removed Susan's body from a mausoleum at the Alamo compound in Dyer, Ark.

In the years that followed, Tony Alamo was convicted of assorted income tax violations and sentenced to a federal prison term. If his parole is approved this week, Alamo could be released from the Federal Correctional Institute in Texarkana, Texas, on June 24.

But an Arkansas judge ruled 17 months ago that Alamo would go directly from federal prison to the Crawford County Jail unless he tells Coie, a San Fernando Valley resident, where to find Susan Alamo's body.

Coie, 46, said she wants to give her mother a proper, long overdue burial in a Crawford County cemetery where many of Susan Alamo's relatives are interred.

``Aside from being illegal, it's so distasteful, so disgusting, so perverse to steal a body from a grave,'' Coie said.

Alamo, whose real name is Bernie Lazar Hoffman, also ran a church in Saugus. His followers lived and worshiped at a Sierra Highway compound that still stands. In fact, members of his Twentieth Century Holiness Tabernacle Church took out building permits last July to refurbish the sanctuary and prayer room at the compound.

The charismatic evangelist's legal woes began in 1988 when he was accused of ordering the paddling of an 11-year-old boy at the Saugus church.

The child was struck 140 times; he and other church members later won a $1.4 million judgment against Alamo.

Government officials seized much of Alamo's property in Arkansas and Tennessee so that the preacher's assets could be liquidated to pay the civil court judgment and overdue taxes. It was during one such incident that Susan Alamo's body vanished.

Federal marshals seized the 300-acre Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation compound in Dyer in February 1991 to satisfy a $2.4 million judgment against Alamo.

Charles Karr, Coie's attorney in Fort Smith, Ark., said it was in the wake of that raid when Coie heard rumors that her mother's body might be disinterred by Tony Alamo or his followers. Karr said he and Coie quickly obtained a temporary restraining order and posted it on the mausoleum, prohibiting removal of the corpse.

While federal officials were taking inventory of the vast estate, Alamo church members were free to come and go on the Dyer compound, Karr said.

``Some time in the middle of the night, after the restraining order was placed, the body was removed, and all the followers . . . for reasons known only to them, left the place,'' Karr said.

``We have no idea where (the body) has been since then,'' Karr said.

Coie filed a civil lawsuit against Alamo alleging a ``tort of outrage,'' which Karr said is a section of law the covers conduct and actions that are ``atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized society.''

The Arkansas judge awarded Coie damages of $100,000 in that September 1995 trial, and further ruled that Alamo would remain incarcerated until he produced Susan's body. If recovered, Susan Alamo's remains would have to be positively identified by the Arkansas medical examiner, the judge ruled.

Coie isn't certain whether the threat of more jail time will prompt Tony Alamo to tell what, if anything, he knows about the body's whereabouts.

Coie, married with 28- and 26-year-old daughters from her first husband, left the religious compound in Saugus when she was 21. Susan's marriage to Tony Alamo strained Coie's relationship with her mother, Coie said.

``My mother and I had been at odds for many years over the foundation. That's not a secret,'' Coie said, explaining she didn't subscribe to the Alamo style of religion.

Born Susan Jane Lipowitz to a Jewish father, Coie adopted a new first name as a teen-ager so it would be different from her mother's. Susan had divorced Coie's father to marry Tony Alamo. Coie's father died in 1969, and she was raised by her mother.

Although the two were estranged at the time of Susan Alamo's death, Coie said blood ties are a thick bond. ``She was my mother, and I will always love her. No one has the right to rip her out of her final resting place,'' Coie said.

Mike Brouillette, spokesman for the federal prison in Texarkana, said privacy laws restrict the information that can be released about inmates. Alamo was transferred from a federal prison in Colorado to Texas on Jan. 16, 1996, he said.

All inmates at the low-security prison are assigned to one of Texarkana's many work details, Brouillette said. He couldn't reveal what Alamo's jobs have been or the amount of his prison pay.

Alamo has been housed in the regular inmate population at the 1,200-man prison, and his time there has been uneventful, Brouillette noted.

Karr said he took a deposition from Alamo before the Arkansas trial, during which Alamo acknowledged that Susan had been interred in the mausoleum.

At the trial, the editor of a Fort Smith newspaper testified that Tony Alamo had told him on Feb. 21, 1991, that he had Susan's body and that it was removed because Alamo feared federal authorities would desecrate the tomb and its remains, Karr said.

Coie wants to bring the saga of Edith Opal Horn, her mother's birth name, to an end - and if that means Tony Alamo will stay behind bars even longer, that's just fine with her, she said.

``I want to be able to, at some point, go see my mother's grave . . . and just bury her like a human being,'' Coie said.