On March 26, 1997, following an anonymous tip, police entered the group’s sprawling Mediterranean-style compound. There, they found the bodies of the members neatly lined up in bunk beds, wearing matching outfits and identical Nike sneakers.
The members left video diaries explaining their reasons for the mass suicide: Applewhite had convinced them that, in order to reach heaven, theymust abandon their human formsand board an alien spacecraft that would trail behind a comet.
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Who They Were
At its peak, in the late ’70s, the cult had several hundred members, and Applewhite was strict in enforcing group discipline. Members had to sign out to get their driver’s licenses and car keys before they could leave the compound. For a while, Applewhite and Nettles would impose something known as “tomb time,” during which members could not speak to each other for days on end. Occasionally, tuning forks would be tapped on cultists' heads in an effort to dispel human thoughts. Nettles was determined to impose order, insisting that daily routines be spelled out to the minute. “It was like the military,” says Dick Joslyn, 48, who was a cult member for 15 years, starting in 1975. “There were all these procedures that drove some people crazy.”
Above all, the members were assigned partners with whom they were supposed to do everything — eat, sleep and work — during the day. To ensure that no one got too friendly, to say nothing of becoming romantically involved, the leaders rotated partners regularly. “They set you up with the partner you’d least likely be attracted to,” says Leslie Light, now 48 and a therapist in Fallbrook, Calif., who was in the cult briefly in 1975. “They put me with this crazy street person.”
Yet Applewhite eschewed some of the cruder methods of mind control. One time early on, he and Nettles, who died of cancer in 1985 at 57, had called a meeting, which several members failed to attend. Rather than browbeat their recalcitrant underlings, the Two announced, sadly, that they were going to leave the group for a time to meditate on why they had failed in their leadership. When they returned hours later, members wept with shame and relief. “There was a bonding with them,” says Joslyn. “It wasn’t like a commander saying, ‘You’ll do this’ or ‘You’ll do that.'”
As for the attempt to suppress sexual desire among recruits, that took on a kind of perverse logic all its own. Joslyn insists that for the eight men in the cult, including Applewhite, who submitted to surgical castration, the decision made perfect sense once they had firmly decided to become celibate. “Why not end the battle with the sex drive?” he says. “I’m real glad now that I didn’t do it. But it’s not as bizarre as people think it is.”
Perhaps shrewdly, Applewhite was flexible in some elements of his doctrine. Over the years, he often saw various natural disasters — the eruption of Mount St. Helens and various earthquakes — as portents of the moment at which he and his followers would ascend to the Higher Level. When that didn’t happen, he and Nettles would acknowledge with disarming candor that they had goofed. Indeed, Applewhite often reminded his flock that they were free to leave any time they wanted. In the case of 72-year-old Jacqueline Leonard of Des Moines, Iowa, who was among the dead at Rancho Santa Fe, the cult allowed her to bend the rules and stay in regular touch with her family. (“They told her, ‘Jackie, do what you have to do,'” says her daughter Chris.) And for those who did stay, Applewhite made it a point to provide numerous, if carefully chosen, opportunities for relaxation and entertainment. Most of the television shows the cultists watched and the movies they attended had mystical or science-fiction themes:Star Trek,The X-Files,Cocoon,Close Encounters of the Third KindandStar Wars.Joslyn concedes that though he enjoyed himself as a member, it was not always the most stimulating experience. “Sometimes it got pretty boring,” he says, “especially when you were waiting 10 years for the spacecraft to come down.”
But it is clear now that Applewhite was determined that his earnest, gentle flock not go soft. At the Rancho Santa Fe headquarters, police discovered that the place for food items had been carefully labeled in the refrigerator, and there was a seating chart for members watching television on the 72-inch set. In much the same way, Applewhite apparently wanted to leave nothing to chance when it came to Hale-Bopp and the UFO supposedly trailing behind that was to transport him and his flock. This time he would seize the portent before it fizzled. “I still get teary-eyed when I think about it,” says Culpepper. “When I think of [them] lying in bed as bags were being put over their heads, I could almost hear them say, ‘I’ll see you on the spaceship.'”
Marshall Herff Applewhite, 65, music teacher turned cult leader
Missouri prosecutor Tim Braun never forgot the car-theft case that came his way in 1974, when he was a novice St. Louis County public defender. “Very seldom do we see a statement that ‘a force from beyond the earth has made me keep this car,'” he says. The defendant: Marshall Herff Applewhite. The sentence: four months in jail.
A sharp dresser whose taste in cars ran to convertibles, and in liquor to vodka gimlets, he became a fixture of Houston’s arts scene — and, less overtly, its gay community. “Everybody knew Herff,” says Houston gay activist and radio host Ray Hill. But in 1970, Applewhite left the college, apparently after allegations of an affair with a male student.
Cheryl Butcher, 42, computer trainer
David Van Sinderen, 48, environmentalist
“When I was 4, he saved me from drowning,” says publicist Sylvia Abbate of her big brother David. The son of a former telephone company CEO, David became an environmentalist. “‘Don’t be hurt, I’m not doing this to you,'” Abbate says he told his family after he joined the cult in 1976. “‘It’s something I have to do for me.'” Visiting his sister in ‘87, he puzzled her with his backseat driving, then apologized, explaining that cult members drove with a partner so they would have an extra set of eyes. Says Abbate: “That’s the kind of care they had for one another.”
Alan Bowers, 45, oysterman
Bowers had spent eight years with the cult in the ’70s before returning to Fairfield, Conn., in the early ’80s to work as a commercial oysterman. In 1988 his life derailed when his wife divorced him and his brother Barry drowned in a boating accident. Bowers, who had three children, moved to Jupiter, Fla., near his stepsisters Susan and Joy Ventulett. “He came down here to make a new start,” says Susan, but he could never quite get it together. Then in 1994, Bowers, while working for a moving company, ran into someone he knew from Applewhite’s legions at a McDonald’s in New Mexico. “He felt it might have been destiny,” says Joy. “He was a little vulnerable. He was searching for peace.”
Margaret Bull, 54, farm girl
Peggy Bull, among the cult’s first adherents in the mid-’70s, grew up on a farm outside little Ellensburg, Wash. Though shy, she was in the high school pep club and a member of the Wranglerettes, a riding drill team. Later “she belonged to all the intellectual-type groups,” says Brenda McIntosh, a roommate at the University of Washington, where Bull earned her B.A. in 1966. “It was sometimes hard to talk to her because she was so smart.” Recalls English professor Roger Sale: “She was open and ready intellectually.” Her father, Jack, died less than three weeks before Bull’s suicide, says Margaret’s childhood friend Iris Rominger, who assumed that Bull had left the cult. “I guess it’s kind of a blessing.”
Alphonzo Foster, 44, bus driver
On the surface, he was full of promise. Intelligent and handsome, he devoured books on philosophy and spirituality. But, says James Hannon, who roomed with Alphonzo Foster in Minneapolis in the ’70s, “he didn’t do so well on the practical details of his life.” A free spirit who was rarely able to hold a job, Foster sank into a deep depression after his mother died in 1980. Hannon wasn’t surprised when Foster joined Heaven’s Gate in 1994 after talking on the phone with Applewhite for 20 minutes. “He didn’t like much about life in this dimension,” says Hannon. “He wanted to go beyond.”
David Moore, 40, computer ace
Moore was an angry, often emotional 19-year-old with a shock of dark, wavy hair when in 1975, he stumbled on a cult meeting in a park near his home in Los Gatos, Calif. He disappeared soon afterward, and for 21 years, his mother, Nancie Brown, tried to track him down and organized parent support groups. Finally, after seeing him twice over the years, she accepted his choice and even became proud that he had become a certified computer network engineer. But his long absence didn’t diminish the pain when she learned of his death. “It’s been, I’d say, 21 years of losing,” she toldThe Washington Post. “It doesn’t end.”
Julie LaMontagne, 45, nurse
Darwin Lee Johnson, 42, musician
A firm believer in UFOs and space aliens, Johnson had briefly joined Heaven’s Gate in the ’70s. But he appeared to have found a new home as the guitar player and lyricist for the Utah-based rock band Dharma Combat. Then, in 1994, according to the band’s then-producer, Joe Clarke, Johnson saw an ad for a Heaven’s Gate seminar. Two days later, he was gone. Says Clarke: “He told me he was removed [earlier] because he couldn’t measure up to their standards. He always felt bad about that.”
Robert Arancio, 45, artist
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Miami, Arancio had studied architecture at two Florida colleges before moving in the mid-’70s to Berkeley, Calif., where he met the cult leaders then known as Bo and Peep. “He felt he had a purpose, he was part of a community,” sister Joanne Bosma, 40, says of his decision to become part of the group. After joining in 1975, Arancio, an artist, returned to his parents’ Florida home only twice — for two-day visits in 1984 and ‘87 — each time alerting them just a day before he arrived. Though he told relatives he had considered leaving the cult in recent years, he never acted on the impulse. “We’re grieving the loss of my brother,” says sister Joanne. “But we’re also grieving the loss of our hope that he’ll ever come home.”
Gary Jordan St. Louis, 43, computer programmer
Even as a child in Modesto, Calif., Gary Jordan St. Louis was asking the tough questions. Like: What am I doing here? Are there spaceships? And why does Mom drink? “He would drive my mother nuts, and my mother was half nuts already,” recalls younger brother Guy of the tense times after their parents divorced and the two boys went to live with their mother, Carolyn. “He was always searching for answers to questions that had no answers.”
Gary’s relentless queries eventually wore down Carolyn—who had remarried, given birth to daughters Erin and Dana and divorced again — and at 10, he rejoined his father, Louis, a general contractor. Handsome and bright, he earned straight As at Downey High School in Modesto, where he was junior class president and devoured books on astrophysics and extraterrestrial life.
Ladonna Brugato, 40, computer consultant
Al Wallace was fixing his tenant’s bathroom faucet in Englewood, Colo., in 1993 when he discovered she was a New Age devotee. “On the four corners of the bed, there was a chiffon canopy running up to a crystal in the center, like a pyramid, and on each corner, there was a pyramid crystal,” he recalls. Crystals and candles also decorated an altar beside the bed of Brugato, a divorcée who had recently moved to Englewood from the Northwest with her young daughter Jacqueline. In 1994 the friendly but private Newberg, Ore., native sold all her belongings and left town, telling neighbors she was off on a “religious hiatus.”
Joel Peter McCormick, 28, Trekkie
When Joel McCormick was 6, he climbed behind the wheel of his mother’s car, turned on the ignition and started to drive. The strong-willed boy didn’t get very far. “He had no sense of fear,” says Geoff Van Valkenberg, a stepbrother, who recalls that when older kids went out at night to catch frogs with flashlights, Joel had to go too. After graduating from high school in Madison, Wis., in 1986, McCormick, an ardent Star Trek fan whose parents had divorced when he was 2, moved to Seattle “to sort out the direction he wanted to go,” says his father, James, a Ford Motor technician. By 1994, having trouble finding work as a masseur, he made a decision to join the UFO cult. His mother, Megan McCormick, was beside herself. He wrote to reassure her: “Trust me. I’m doing fine and continue to grow toward the future.”
Gail Maeder, 27, boutique owner
However far Gail Maeder wandered from the comfortable home where she had grown up in Sag Harbor, N.Y., her parents always hoped she would find her way back. “We hoped she’d marry and settle down — give us some grandchildren,” says her father, Robert, a design engineer for a manufacturing company. But Gail had never done the expected thing. Even as a skinny teenager, she had gone her own way at Pierson High School. “I hate to say she was a hippie,” says her mother, Alice, a homemaker. “She was more a bohemian.”
Before she could complete her fashion-design degree at a local community college, Gail moved to California in 1991 with her boyfriend Chad, a construction worker. They settled in a forest cabin outside Santa Cruz, where, with $5,000 from her father, she opened a small boutique selling clothing and jewelry. But in 1993, she broke up with her boyfriend — “Chad said she seemed to be searching for something,” Robert recalls — and soon afterward traveled with a friend to the Southwest. There she started chatting with some friendly people in a passing van — members, it turned out, of the Heaven’s Gate cult. “Gail wasn’t street smart,” says Robert. “She just got sucked in and couldn’t get out.”
From then on, the Maeders would hear from their daughter only occasionally, primarily in cryptic letters, each from a different location. “Knowing you’ve taught me good judgment in choosing what’s best for myself, I hope you will respect this learning I’ve decided to pursue,” she wrote in April 1994 from Arizona. “I really want you to be aware that I’m doing exactly what I want, and it makes me very happy,” she wrote in August 1995 from Lubbock, Texas.
Thomas Nichols, 58, dreamer
Long ago, Nichols confided to his older sister Nichelle that he was awaiting a rendezvous with a comet. Ironically, asStar Trek’s Lt. Uhura, it was Nichelle who played the communications officer torn between earthbound domesticity and a career on the starship Enterprise. OnLarry King Live, she said that until their mother died in 1992, “we hadn’t heard from [my brother] in 20 years.”
John Craig, 62, developer
Mary Ann Craig’s husband, John, had spent several days working late in his Durango, Colo., real estate development office. Then, one hot July morning in 1975, Mary Ann packed their six kids, ranging from 8 to 18, into the car to attend an out-of-town swim meet. When she returned later that evening, she found a note from her husband outlining his business dealings and finances. Just like that, John “Mickey” Craig had disappeared, taking only pocket cash, a change of clothes and his four-wheel-drive Chevy Blazer. “This was a real switcheroo,” says Mary Ann, now 61. “I’m the one who likes to read Stephen King.”
When Craig’s University of New Mexico fraternity brother Dale Mackey visited in 1975 and talked all night about his recent immersion in a UFO cult, Mary Ann, the high school sweetheart Craig had married in 1954, paid little heed. But after Mackey left, Craig told her he had a meeting in Denver and drove to Stapleton Airport to meet Bo and Peep.
Within a week, he was gone. At first, a shocked Mary Ann — a registered nurse who had to go back to work — believed Craig would grow disillusioned. Instead, he became the ethereal Brother Logan, the cult’s second-in-command. The Craigs divorced in 1977 without ever speaking again.
Margaret Richter, 46, computer whiz
Class of ‘69 valedictorian at Las Plumas (Calif.) High School, award-winning orator and drum majorette of the marching band, Margaret Field was “successful at everything she tried,” recalls a teacher. “We expected her to become governor or President,” says classmate Fred Carion. But her 1969 marriage to Berkeley classmate David Richter fizzled after just a few years, leaving her shattered. “That’s what changed her,” says her father, Emery, 76. Though she earned a master’s degree in computer science at UCLA, she seemed to be losing interest in life in 1975, when she encountered the cult. She wrote her family that May: “Here’s hoping I get a UFO trip for Christmas.” After 21 years of little contact with her daughter, her mother, Virginia, concludes, “If you’re going to change the world, you stay here to change it.”
Susan Elizabeth Nora Paup, 53, editor for a computer company
Michael Barr Sandoe, 25, ex-paratrooper
A UFO sighting might not have been much more startling to residents of rural Abingdon, Va., in the Blue Ridge foothills, than the news that one of their own was among the Heaven’s Gate dead. Sandoe, son of an evangelical minister, had been decorated for his service as an infantry paratrooper in Desert Storm in 1991, and friends remember him as a popular senior class president. “He seemed carefree, wanting to have fun,” says Patricia Pasco. “He was always the class clown.” To Sandoe’s family, word of his suicide came as a double shock. “The other families seemed to know their son or daughter was involved [in the cult],” says half-brother James. “We didn’t.”
Norma Jeanne Nelson, 59, artist
Even at the Dallas apartment complex where she and her motorized wheelchair were a familiar sight from 1990 to ‘94, artist Brandy Nelson kept her private life private. Though making no secret of her disdain for men or estrangement from her ex-husband and three children, Nelson, who told people she was a polio victim, was tight-lipped about her many mysterious visitors. A few days ago, former neighbor Patty Falkner says she finally learned who they were — members of Heaven’s Gate.
Suzanne Cooke, 54, drifter
Jacqueline Leonard, 72, medical assistant
In the Des Moines home where Leonard and her husband, Charles, an optometrist, raised their three children, conversation about religion and serving God was commonplace. That deep sense of spirituality was what enticed Leonard to leave her family — including mother Neva Garrity, now 94 — to join Marshall Applewhite’s group in the mid-’70s. But she remained so torn over the decision that she was among the few members who kept in regular touch with relatives. She last showed up three years ago with seven other cult members for a brief dinnertime visit. “I’ve been luckier than some,” says daughter Chris, 43. “I’ve had a lot of time to sort some of these things out.” Over the years, she had taken that time to learn about the cult’s philosophy, which did not equate suicide with death. Says Chris: “Mom always said she would leave in a beam of light.”
Susan Strom, 44, outdoorswoman
An aspiring botanist and frequent summer camp counselor, Strom was just shy of graduating from Oregon State University in 1975 when she left with Applewhite’s people. “I guess this group just came around with flyers and she decided to join,” says her father, Lyle Strom, a senior U.S. district judge. Unlike many other parents, Strom and his wife, Regina, received occasional letters and phone calls from Susie, the second of their seven children. “I always considered it a cult,” says her father, who encouraged her to come home. “But she always seemed happy. She had plenty of opportunity to leave.”
Judith Rowland, 50, homemaker
Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, 38, United States Postal Service employee
The nightmare began for Eartha Hill last August, when her son Steven and his wife, Yvonne, invited her to their Cincinnati home and told her they were forsaking everything and everyone — including their newborn twins and three other children — to be with God. “He said, ‘Mom, I love you so much. But I have to go away,'” says Hill. Then he played a song about friends and relatives meeting again after death. “I’d never felt that kind of fear,” says Hill. “It just drained me.”
Steven, an inspector at a tile company, was the first to learn about Heaven’s Gate, pulling everything he could off the Internet. But Yvonne, a mail sorter at the post office, turned out to be the true believer. Apparently, Applewhite was careful to keep the two apart once they had joined. While Yvonne responded to the regimentation, Steven soon rebelled. “He saw something was wrong in there,” says Hill. “He said they were bickering inside the cult.”
Denise J. Thurman, 44, seeker
The long and winding road from affluent Locust Valley, N.Y., to Rancho Santa Fe began in 1973 for Thurman, a once-vivacious high school cheerleader. Midway through her junior year at Boston University, where she had been majoring in psychology, she dropped out and took off with her boyfriend for a West Coast commune. “She was deeper than most people at 17 or 18 can be,” says her college roommate Sandy Nash, now a theater producer living in Garden City, N.Y. “Denise was into a less materialistic way of life; she was a hippie, but didn’t go overboard. The last birthday card she gave me said something like, ‘Dear Sandy: There is no purpose to friendship other than the deepening of one’s soul.'”
Lindley Ayerhart Pease, 41, car salesman
Jeffrey Howard Lewis, 41, masseur
A Lubbock, Texas, native who spent a decade in the cult after serving in the Navy, Lewis left, then returned 12 years later after working as a masseur in San Antonio. “I told him he should think about anything that requires you to give up your friends and family,” says his friend David Tayloe, “but he said he wanted to go back.” Lewis’s brother Jerry told theLubbock Avalanche-Journal, “He felt he didn’t have the meaning he had when he was in the group.”
Erika Ernst, 40, cult accountant
Independent and an inveterate traveler, Ernst, who grew up in Calgary, Alberta,had been dating Frank Lyfordfor two years when the pair, recently back from a six-week sojourn in Europe, came across Applewhite and Nettles during a 1975 Oregon camping trip. Soon afterward, they sold their belongings and left home — thoughLyford defected in 1993. “I made my choice,” he says. “She made the choice to stay.” Says Ernst’s sister Heidi Sherrington: “They wanted to see the world. I wish they had done that on their own. She would still be here.”
Lucy Eva Pesho, 63, computer trainer
As a kid in Pueblo, Colo., Pesho hated wearing dresses, had a paper route and was the best marble player on the playground. She was a real tomboy, says older sister Jean, and “told all the kids at school her name was Tommy.” Always shy, even when she moved to Los Angeles and began working for Packard Bell, “she didn’t have too many friends,” says her brother Joseph. In the late ’70s, she found some in Heaven’s Gate. The last time she called Jean, in 1989, she had a simple message: “I’m alive — and I’m happy.”
The mysteries inside the enigma
Even a week after their deaths, seven members of the Heaven’s Gate cult remained somewhat shadowy figures. In the case of Betty Deal, her family had hired a private detective to locate her after she vanished from the Seattle area in 1975, abandoning her four children. Last week it turned out that she had gone under at least seven names over the years. Gordon Welch, like many of his fellow cultists, used a post office box for receiving his mail. “He was generous and kind and a great worker,” says a former employer in Encinitas, Calif. “[But] he told me he was a monk and that his private life was private.”
source: people.com
