Once a dynamic overachiever, a woman saw her world deteriorate after she took classes offered by a Halfmoon-based group

Kristin Marie Snyder’s life as an “Espian” lasted just four months. From November 2002 to February 2003, the 35-year-old Alaskan immersed herself in Executive Success Programs (ESP), the teachings of Halfmoon residents Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman. She attended four ESP “human potential” courses in Anchorage, and traveled to Halfmoon and Colonie to meet ESP leaders on their home turf.

An overachiever, Snyder believed ESP would improve her career, personal life and outlook, just as advertised.

But her family and police say that by February, during her second 16-day “intensive” in Anchorage, Snyder’s health and enthusiasm had disintegrated.

The formerly productive environmental consultant seemed delusional, had stopped sleeping and was threatening suicide, said her domestic partner, Heidi Clifford.

ESP, also known as NXIVM, offers its controversial classes at 455 New Karner Road, Colonie; in Saratoga Springs, Manhattan, Anchorage and in Mexico. Its public profile increased markedly last summer, when it applied to the Halfmoon Planning Board for permission to build a 67,000-square-foot headquarters on eight acres off Woodin Road. Several dozen neighbors oppose the pending project.
Clifford, in a telephone interview last week, recalled seeing her distraught partner leave the Westmark Hotel in Anchorage, where the NXIVM training was held, on Feb. 6. No one has seen her since.

Alaska State Police investigators believe that Snyder drove the couple’s Toyota Tacoma to a campground along Resurrection Bay in Seward. Before dawn on Feb. 7, they theorize, she paddled a creaky 16-foot kayak into the bay and intentionally capsized in the glacier-fed water.

Her last words were scribbled in a spiral notebook found in her truck.

“I attended a course called Executive Success Programs (a.k.a. Nexivm) based out of Anchorage, AK, and Albany, NY,” she wrote. “I was brainwashed and my emotional center of the brain was killed/turned off. I still have feeling in my external skin, but my internal organs are rotting. Please contact my parents … if you find me or this note. I am sorry life, I didn’t know I was already dead. May we persist into the future.”