Barely four months after Oakland Black Muslim leader Yusuf Bey died of colon cancer, his hand-picked successor to run the organization's bakery chain and other businesses disappeared without a trace.
This week, authorities identified a decomposing body found last month off a fire trail in the city's foothills as that of the missing businessman.
And the very public discovery of Waajid Aljawwaad, 51, has once again put the spotlight on one of the most socially isolated groups in the Bay Area.
Members of the local religious sect that Bey founded -- fashioned after the nationalist Black Muslim movement begun in the United States in the 1930s -- are courteous but rigid around outsiders, and universally tight-lipped about the organization and its activities.
The group has been suspected of using violence and intimidation to secure its business interests, which include four bakeries, a Muslim school and commercial properties across from its main office, on San Pablo Avenue in northwest Oakland. Bey, 67, was awaiting trial on multiple charges of sexual abuse at the time of his death in October. He stood accused, among other things, of having sex and fathering a child with a 13-year-old girl.
Soon after the woman, now 33, made the accusation, three other women, all former members of the organization, made similar accusations.
Police have not identified any suspects in Aljawwaad's death and are still looking into motives for the killing.
"The victim was the CEO and president of the organization at the request of Bey,'' said Sgt. Bruce Brock, a homicide investigator for the Oakland Police Department. "I think people (in the organization) may be jockeying for position, but we don't know if it was an internal fight at this point,'' he said.
Police have not said how Aljawwaad died, but it apparently wasn't an accident.
"I don't get the feeling he was up there jogging," Brock said.
Investigators may have a rough time cracking this one.
I visited the headquarters of Your Black Muslim Bakery on San Pablo Avenue this week, where the employees told me to talk to the manager.
When I called Your Black Muslim Bakery on San Pablo Avenue the next day, the manager said the organization was in mourning and had no comment on Aljawwaad's death.
He was curious however, as to how I learned that he was in charge.
At Bey's memorial service last year, some members predicted an internal fight to determine who would take control of the group's substantial business holdings.
Aljawwaad's sister told The Chronicle that she feared "something like this might happen'' when her brother disappeared in February. She asked that her name not be printed because she feared reprisal.
Bey's followers have been accused of assaulting people with whom they have had differences, whether those differences were business or religious, and such stories have circulated in Oakland for at least a decade.
Last year, members of the organization told the owner of a barbecue restaurant who leased space from the group that he could no longer sell pork because their religion outlawed eating it.
When he objected, saying many people wanted pork ribs, Bey's followers politely asked a customer to leave, locked the door and allegedly assaulted him.
In another case, members of the organization allegedly beat an Oakland man with a heavy-duty police officer's flashlight in March 1994 and threatened to kill the white police officers who came to investigate.
Then there are the stories of neighbors of the group's school who have heard and seen instructors take kids outside for gym class, set up a punching bag, identify it as a white man and order kids to beat it.
Such stories have received little attention individually, but together they suggest that the image the group projects about itself -- as a haven for troubled young men -- may not present the full picture.
After Bey's death, his followers spoke of him as a great man who founded a business and a religious way of life that emphasized self-determination, discipline and piety. When Bey died, his followers spoke openly about his relationships with several young girls.
"He was a born leader in the sense of an African chief or Muslim caliph, '' Maleek Al Maleek told the Los Angeles Times. "What is prohibited here is not prohibited in East India, where there are child marriages. I can show you chiefs in Africa who have 30 wives. The ways of the high priest are not shared by the commoner.''
The truth is much less dramatic.
Bey was born J.H. Stephens of Greeneville, Texas, and discovered the teachings of Elijah Muhammad when he was 30. He moved to Oakland, set up a bakery like his father before him and began spreading his religious beliefs to others in Oakland.
He was obviously a persuasive, intelligent man with a smart business sense, but also susceptible to the same temptations shared by the common man. There was nothing supernatural or magical about it.
But the Aljawwaad murder investigation raises more questions about an organization that remains a mystery to outsiders.