FILE NO. 0201
Content warning: this case file describes a mass suicide, self-castration within a religious group and the deaths of 39 people. It contains no images of the dead. If you are struggling, in the United States and Canada you can call or text 988 to reach a suicide crisis line.
The Heaven’s Gate Cult: Marshall Applewhite, Hale-Bopp and the 39 Deaths at Rancho Santa Fe
Legal status: No one was ever charged in connection with the Heaven’s Gate deaths. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and Medical Examiner found that all 39 members who died at Rancho Santa Fe in March 1997 took their own lives, and that the deaths were caused by alcohol, phenobarbital and asphyxiation. Investigators said they saw no indication of murder. The group’s leader, Marshall Herff Applewhite, died with his followers. Some scholars and former cult members have argued that the deaths should be understood as something closer to murder; that is an interpretation, not a legal finding.
The minister’s son from Spur, Texas
On the afternoon of Wednesday, 26 March 1997, a sheriff’s deputy named Robert Brunk drove up a long private driveway in Rancho Santa Fe, one of the wealthiest enclaves in Southern California. The call had come in as a welfare check. An anonymous caller had told dispatchers something so strange that, as Brunk remembered it, “I don’t think anybody really believed what the person was saying.”
The windows of the house were closed and the curtains drawn. Two rented vans sat in the driveway. Brunk found an unlocked side door and opened it. “I noticed an odor that in my past experience has been associated with death,” he told reporters two days later. “Once you get that smell . . . it doesn’t ever leave your head.”
Inside, in bunk beds and on cots in room after room, lay 39 people dressed alike in black shirts and black trousers, wearing new black Nike trainers, most of them covered from the face to the chest by a square of purple cloth. On each sleeve was a patch that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team”. In their pockets most carried a five-dollar bill and some quarters. Packed bags sat beside the beds. The house was spotless. “There was a computer flashing ‘Red Alert,’ sort of like ‘Star Trek,'” Brunk said years later. “There was still a load of laundry in the machine. It was surreal.”
The dead were the last active members of a religious group that had existed, under one name or another, for more than two decades. They believed a spacecraft was travelling behind Comet Hale-Bopp, then blazing across the night sky, and that their souls would leave their human “vehicles” and board it. Their leader, a former music professor from Texas who called himself Do, had told them this was their graduation. It remains the largest mass suicide to have taken place inside the United States.
This case file traces how the Heaven’s Gate cult came to that house: the meeting of two people in Houston in 1972, the disappearance of a score of people from a small Oregon town, two decades of wandering and discipline, a leader’s grief, eight castrations, a web design business, a comet, and a group decision recorded on videotape. It also sets out where the official record and the later accounts disagree.
Sources: San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007); Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days (1997); CNN, Mass suicide involved sedatives, vodka and careful planning (1997); Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite.
Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. was born on 17 May 1931 in Spur, Texas, one of four children of a Presbyterian minister and his wife, Louise. He grew up very religious. He studied philosophy at Austin College, graduating in 1952, and enrolled at Union Presbyterian Seminary intending to become a minister himself. Around that time he married Anne Pearce; they had two children.
He did not stay at the seminary. Applewhite had a trained baritone voice and a love of spirituals and Handel, and he left theology for music, becoming music director at a Presbyterian church in North Carolina. Drafted in 1954, he served in the Army Signal Corps in Austria and New Mexico, then took a master’s degree in music at the University of Colorado Boulder, concentrating on musical theatre.
An attempt at a professional singing career in New York did not work out. He taught at the University of Alabama and lost that job after a sexual relationship with a male student. His wife learned of the affair in 1965 and they separated; they divorced three years later. When he told his parents he was gay, his father rejected him.
In 1965 Applewhite moved to Houston as chair of the music department at the University of St. Thomas. Students found him an engaging speaker and a sharp dresser. He sang with the Houston Grand Opera and directed a church choir. He resigned in 1970, citing depression. The sociologists Robert Balch and David Taylor, who studied his group for years, speculated that the departure followed another affair with a student; the university’s former president later told the San Diego Union-Tribune that St. Thomas officials had denied firing him for a “morals problem”. In 1997 the Washington Post, as reported by CNN, said Applewhite had gone to a psychiatric hospital in the early 1970s asking to be cured of homosexual impulses.
In 1971 he ran a delicatessen in New Mexico for a few months, then returned to Texas. His father died around that time, and Applewhite sank into a severe depression. His debts grew. He borrowed from friends. He was 40 years old, divorced, estranged from his family, out of work and, by the accounts of people who knew him then, mentally disorganised.
Sources: Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; CNN, Suicide probe focuses on cult’s stash of pills (1997).
Bonnie Nettles and “The Two”
In March 1972 Applewhite met Bonnie Lu Nettles, a 44-year-old registered nurse, married with four children, who had drifted from her Baptist upbringing into astrology, Theosophy and the occult. She held weekly séances with a Theosophical group in Houston and believed she was in contact with “Brother Francis”, a 19th-century Franciscan friar. Fortune tellers had told her she would soon meet a tall, fair-haired man.
Exactly where they met is disputed. Applewhite wrote that he had been “visiting a hospitalized friend when Mrs. Nettles entered the room and their eyes locked in a shared recognition of esoteric secrets.” The historian James Lewis has suggested that Applewhite was himself a patient at the facility. Nettles’s daughter Terrie, who worked at a theatre where Applewhite produced children’s shows, remembered it differently: someone had been hurt at the theatre’s drama school, and Applewhite took the injured person to the hospital where her mother worked.
Whatever the setting, the connection was immediate. Nettles did an astrological reading for him. Applewhite later said he felt he had known her for a long time and decided they had met in a past life. She told him extraterrestrials had foretold their meeting. Their relationship was close but, by both their accounts, not sexual. Nettles’s husband divorced her and she lost custody of her children; Applewhite cut off his own family. According to the Wikipedia account of Nettles’s life, the pair left together on New Year’s Day 1973. Her three youngest children stayed with their father; her eldest, Terrie, then 20, was left to fend for herself.
They opened a bookshop, the Christian Arts Center, and a teaching venture called Know Place, and closed both soon after. In February 1973 they began driving around the western United States. They had almost no money. They sold their blood, took odd jobs, lived on bread rolls, camped, and sometimes skipped out on lodging bills. They read Helena Blavatsky, R. D. Laing and Richard Bach, studied the King James Bible and devoured science fiction by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.
By June 1974 their ideas had set. They believed they had been chosen to fulfil biblical prophecy and had been given higher-level minds than other people. They were, they decided, the two witnesses described in the Book of Revelation. They called themselves “The Two”, or “The UFO Two”. They expected to be killed, restored to life and lifted onto a spaceship in full view of the public, an event they called “the Demonstration”, which would prove everything. Churches and spiritual groups they approached were not impressed.
Sources: Wikipedia, Bonnie Nettles; Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group).
A stolen car and a jail cell
Their first convert, in May 1974, was a friend from Houston, named in the Heaven’s Gate history as Sharon Morgan, who left her children to join them. She returned to her family a month later. Nettles and Applewhite were arrested and charged with credit card fraud for using her cards; she had consented, and the charges were dropped.
A routine check then turned up something else. In August 1974 Applewhite was arrested in Harlingen, Texas, for failing to return a car he had rented in Missouri months earlier. He was extradited to St. Louis and spent six months in jail, insisting he had been “divinely authorized” to keep the car. In his cell he reworked the theology. When he came out in early 1975, the occult language was gone, replaced by talk of extraterrestrials and evolution.
Sources: Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group).
Waldport, Oregon: “A score of persons”
Out of jail, Applewhite and Nettles began advertising public meetings. At them they claimed to represent beings from another planet, the Next Level, who were looking for volunteers for an experiment. Those who took part would be lifted to a higher evolutionary level. Applewhite did most of the talking, describing himself as a “lab instructor”; Nettles interjected corrections. For a time they called themselves “Guinea” and “Pig”. The organisation had a series of names, beginning with the Anonymous Sexaholics Celibate Church and then Human Individual Metamorphosis.
The poster they used for those meetings in 1975 and 1976 still sits on the group’s website. Under the heading “UFO’S” it promised three answers: “Why they are here.” “Who they have come for.” “When they will leave.” It was, it said, “NOT a discussion of UFO sightings or phenomena”. Instead: “Two individuals say they were sent from the level above human, and are about to leave the human level and literally (physically) return to that next evolutionary level in a spacecraft (UFO) within months!” It denied being what it was. “This is not a religious or philosophical organization recruiting membership.” And it closed with a line pitched straight at the seekers of the mid-1970s: “If you have ever entertained the idea that there may be a real, PHYSICAL level beyond the Earth’s confines, you will want to attend this meeting.”
The message was not metaphorical. Applewhite told his early followers they would undergo a literal biological change, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, and he chose the words “biology” and “chemistry” deliberately. The ancient astronaut theories then popular through books like Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? gave the idea a frame: extraterrestrials had planted humanity long ago and would return to harvest the few who were ready.
The idea was already on paper. In March 1975, from Ojai, California, the pair mailed out what the group later archived as the First Statement of Ti and Do. It mocked the ordinary hope of heaven after death as “as inaccurate as the caterpillar believing that if he dies a good caterpillar he will mysteriously awaken in a rose blossom and live there forever with the King butterfly.” The change had to be made in life: “As the caterpillar, the human can complete this changeover only before his death as a human.” The same statement laid down the claim that would carry the group to the end. Jesus, it said, had been “an individual of that next kingdom” who had “entered a human female’s womb”.
In April 1975 they spoke to a New Age audience in Studio City, Los Angeles, and around two dozen people chose to follow them. In September 1975 they held a meeting at a motel hall in Waldport, a small town on the Oregon coast. Within days a group of local people had sold their possessions, said goodbye to their families and vanished. On the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite told the nation: “A score of persons from a small Oregon town have disappeared. It’s a mystery whether they’ve been taken on a so-called trip to eternity” or, he added, “simply been taken.”
Waldport remembered the couple as strangers who put up bulletins around town promising salvation by UFO. Everett Hockema, the Lincoln County sheriff at the time, said in 1997 of the people they drew: “That was back in the hippie days, and that was the main bunch”. Albert Volpe, a Dallas handyman and musician who followed them in the mid-1970s, gave the pitch in one sentence: “Their message was that as the caterpillar changes into a butterfly, so can the human go through a metamorphosis and become a higher being capable of traveling through timeless space.” Bo and Peep taught, he said, that the Christmas star had been the “physical manifestation of the vehicle that brought the higher being of Christ into this portion of the universe”.
The coverage was mocking. Commentators and some former members accused the pair of brainwashing. The sociologists Balch and Taylor concluded the opposite about early recruitment: Applewhite and Nettles avoided pressure tactics and wanted only the devoted. Most recruits were young, already steeped in New Age ideas and living outside the mainstream. One was John Craig, a Republican rancher who had come close to winning a seat in the Colorado House of Representatives in 1970.
The offer was put most starkly in Santa Fe in 1976. “Something is happening in the deep heavens,” the audience was told, according to the Santa Fe Reporter as quoted by the Los Angeles Times. “Light is coming to this planet. An opportunity is offered to humans. Those ready can graduate from this garden. You must leave behind loved ones, security, possessions. This time is known as the harvest.” Not everyone who heard it stayed. One of the pair’s first followers broke away in 1975 and left a warning: “There is the danger of suicide for the followers. They are suicidal anyway, having already killed off their lives as they have known them.” The same defector added: “It is obvious these people are on an ego trip.” The first half of that warning took 22 years to come true.
Sources: Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Heaven’s Gate, First Poster Used for Public Meetings in 1975-1976; Heaven’s Gate, First Statement of Ti and Do (1975); Seattle Times, Cult’s Leader Preached Metamorphosis In Space (1997); Los Angeles Times, From the ’70s, an Eerie Portent of Things to Come (1997).
Bo and Peep: the wandering years
By 1975 the leaders had taken the names “Bo” and “Peep”, shepherds with a flock of about 70. Followers were told to give up friends, family, media, drugs, alcohol, jewellery, facial hair and sex. They took new names, at first biblical ones, then two-syllable names ending in “ody” with three consonants in the first syllable, such as Rkkody, Jmmody and Lvvody. Applewhite said the names marked them as spiritual children and separated them from the lives of their “human vehicles”.
The group went underground. Members lived at remote campgrounds, slept in tents, begged and kept their beliefs to themselves. Applewhite and Nettles stopped holding public meetings and saw little of their scattered followers, many of whom drifted away. The leaders feared assassination and taught that their deaths would mirror those of the two witnesses in Revelation; later they explained that Applewhite’s treatment by the press had been a kind of assassination that fulfilled the prophecy.
By early 1976 they had settled on the names “Do” and “Ti”, which Applewhite said meant nothing. In April 1976 the group stopped recruiting altogether. In June they gathered their remaining followers in the Medicine Bow National Forest in southeastern Wyoming and promised a UFO visit. Nettles then announced it had been cancelled. The followers were split into small units called “Star Clusters”.
The religious studies scholar Benjamin Zeller describes the change as a move “from a loosely organized social group to a centralized religious movement comparable to a roving monastery”. Sex and drugs were banned outright. From 1976 to 1979 the group lived in campgrounds, mostly in the Rocky Mountains and Texas, and the leaders tightened control over daily life.
Sources: Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group).
The craft: discipline, partners and “flexibility”
In the late 1970s the group came into a large sum of money, possibly an inheritance or members’ pooled income. It paid for rented houses, first in Denver and then in Dallas, with windows covered. The leaders called each house a “craft” and ran it like a boot camp for the Next Level, regulating their students’ lives down to the minute.
Members were taught “flexibility”, which in practice meant strict obedience to orders that changed without warning. Individual revelations were forbidden; Do and Ti were the only source of truth. Close friendships were discouraged as a risk to discipline. Contact with outsiders, even potential recruits, was limited. Applewhite told his followers to be like children or pets in their submission. He set arbitrary rituals he called “games”. On one occasion in Texas the leaders announced an imminent visit from extraterrestrials, had everyone wait outside all night, and then told them it had been a test.
The sheriff’s lead investigator in 1997, Detective Rick Scully, later summarised what the group’s own records showed: “Members led a regimented lifestyle. Particular attention was paid to: punctuality, cleanliness, orderliness, personal possessions, how to dress, what to eat, how to phrase a question, and most importantly desires. Each member was assigned a partner to watch over him or her in order that they could constantly fight their ‘human desires.'”
Yet many followers did not experience Applewhite as a tyrant. Former members described him as relaxed and fatherly. He watched science fiction on television with the group and framed his wishes as preferences rather than commands, telling students they were free to disobey. The sociologist Janja Lalich, herself a former member of a different group, calls this the “illusion of choice”. People who were not committed were encouraged to leave and given money to go.
By 1980 there were about 80 followers, many with jobs, often with computers or as car mechanics. In 1982 they were allowed to call their families, and from 1983 to visit relatives on Mother’s Day, on condition that they said they were studying computers at a monastery.
Sources: Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007).
Ti’s death and the “vehicle”
In 1983 Nettles had an eye removed because of cancer. Her doctor told her the disease was already spreading. She called him ignorant; she and Applewhite believed she could not die, because the two of them had to ascend together. The cancer reached her liver. On 19 June 1985 Bonnie Nettles died at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, registered under the name Shelly West. She was 57.
Her death broke the group’s central promise. The Two were supposed to be lifted, bodily, onto a spacecraft. Instead one of them had left behind an ordinary corpse. Applewhite had her body cremated and her ashes scattered on a lake in Texas, and told his followers that Ti’s “broken-down vehicle was left behind”: she had gone ahead to the Next Level because her work on this one was done. The explanation held. All but one member stayed.
Privately, Applewhite was devastated. He said Nettles still spoke to him, but he went through a crisis of faith, and his students rallied around him. He held a ceremony in which he symbolically married his followers. He began calling Nettles “the Father” and referring to her with male pronouns.
The theology changed in a way that would matter in 1997. Before 1985, ascension was physical: living bodies transformed aboard a craft. After 1985, the body became a mere container, a “vehicle” that a soul could step out of and leave behind, to be given a new body on the spacecraft. Applewhite now taught that he was a “walk-in”, a higher being occupying an adult human body, and that the same being had once occupied the body of Jesus. A relationship with Do became the only route to salvation.
He grew paranoid. He avoided new recruits, fearing infiltrators, worried about a government raid and spoke admiringly of the Jewish defenders of Masada, who chose death over surrender to Rome. He began describing the Earth as an overgrown garden about to be “spaded under”, and humanity as a failed experiment. From 1988 he taught that evil extraterrestrials he called “Luciferians” were working against his mission, and that sexual desire was their work.
Sources: Wikipedia, Bonnie Nettles; Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group).
Total Overcomers Anonymous and the web
Through the late 1980s the group was almost invisible. In 1988 it mailed a statement of its beliefs to New Age organisations. In 1992 it recorded a 12-part video series that went out by satellite. Membership had shrunk to as few as 26, and the losses gave Applewhite a sense of urgency.
In May 1993, under the name “Total Overcomers Anonymous”, the group spent $30,000 on a full-page advertisement in USA Today warning that judgment was about to fall on the Earth. About 20 former members came back. Public lectures in 1994 doubled the membership from its low point. A January 1994 article in LA Weekly brought in Richard Ford, who took the name Rio DiAngelo and would play a central part in what happened at the end.
The advertisement ran on 27 May 1993 under the headline “‘UFO CULT’ RESURFACES WITH FINAL OFFER”. It opened with a warning about itself: “The following statements could sound very presumptuous.” Then came the verdict that would drive the rest of the decade. “The Earth’s present ‘civilization’ is about to be recycled”, the ad said, “spaded under.” “Its inhabitants are refusing to evolve. The ‘weeds’ have taken over the garden and disturbed its usefulness beyond repair.” It named an enemy as well. Space aliens it called Luciferians held humanity “in unknown slavery”, and it shouted the point in capitals: “These ‘Luciferian’ space races are the humans’ GREATEST ENEMY.” That summer the same statement ran in alternative weeklies and New Age directories from Atlanta and Boston to Minneapolis, and in Australia.
The group supported itself by building websites under the business name “Higher Source”. Between 30 and 40 percent of that work was done under contract to InterAct Entertainment Group, run by Nick Matzorkis. Members were skilled and reliable; the Los Angeles Times later found that they had knocked on the doors of some of San Diego’s most exclusive businesses looking for web design work, and that one, David Geoffrey Moore, was remembered by an employer as so honest he once fixed a client’s plumbing for free.
In the early 1990s Applewhite posted some of his teachings on the internet. He was stung by the criticism. That year, according to the scholarly accounts summarised by Wikipedia, he first spoke of suicide as a possible way to reach the Next Level. The group took the name Heaven’s Gate. The group’s teaching set out four methods by which a member could “graduate” to the Next Level: physical pickup by a spacecraft; natural or accidental death; death through outside persecution; and a willful exit from the body in a dignified manner. After the deaths of the Branch Davidians at Waco and the standoff at Ruby Ridge, Applewhite was afraid the government would kill his followers, and the group’s website described its business as a potential target for law enforcement. On the same site the group insisted it was against suicide. “The true meaning of suicide is to turn against the next level when it is being offered,” it said.
Sources: Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days (1997); CNN, Mass suicide involved sedatives, vodka and careful planning (1997); Heaven’s Gate, “UFO Cult” Resurfaces with Final Offer (1993); Heaven’s Gate, Publications Where ’93 Statement Appeared.
Vehicles, the Next Level and the “Away Team”
By the mid-1990s the group spoke a closed language. The body was a “container” or a “vehicle”. Heaven was the Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human, or simply the Next Level. The 1993 statement spelled out the logic: “each kingdom level has its own unique physical containers (bodies) for the souls that reside in that kingdom level.” A human could move up only by rising “out of all human mammalian behavior”, which meant “sexuality and gender consciousness”, and had to “complete this change to the point of abhorring human behavior” before the soul could be matched with a body of the Next Level, which was “genderless and incapable of functioning at a human level.”
On 18 August 1994 the group drew up a poster that, by its own note, was never used in public. Its headline read: “The shedding of our borrowed human bodies may be required in order to take up our new bodies belonging to the next world.” Beneath it: “If you want to leave with us you must be willing to lose everything of this world in order to have life in the next. Cling to this world and you’ll surely die.” The poster said the members’ bodies had been “picked” and “prepped” in advance by beings from the Next Level, and that the planet was “ruled by malevolent adversary races of space aliens”. The deaths were two and a half years away.
One member, writing as Jwnody, gave the group the self-image it died with: “Metaphorically speaking, in 20th Century human vernacular, I am a member of the current ‘Away Team’ deployed from deep space.” The team, Jwnody wrote, had been on the “surface” for “22 years plus, Earth time (approximately 31½ minutes by our time).” The phrase came from Star Trek, which members watched avidly. In March 1997 it was stitched on every sleeve in the house.
The same website carried a page headed “Our Position Against Suicide”. It held up Masada, where a besieged Jewish sect had “determined that it was permissible for them to evacuate their bodies by a more dignified, and less agonizing method.” The group said it had “thoroughly discussed this topic” and had “mentally prepared ourselves for this possibility”. Then came a line that reads very differently now: “this act certainly does not need serious consideration at this time, and hopefully will not in the future.”
Sources: Heaven’s Gate, “UFO Cult” Resurfaces with Final Offer (1993); Heaven’s Gate, The Shedding of Our Borrowed Human Bodies (1994); Heaven’s Gate, “Away Team” from Deep Space Surfaces Before Departure; Heaven’s Gate, Our Position Against Suicide; Los Angeles Times, 39 in Cult Left Recipes of Death (1997).
The Earth ship, the castrations and the mansion
In June 1995 the group bought about 40 acres near Manzano, New Mexico, in the Manzano Mountains southeast of Albuquerque, and began building a compound that they called the “Earth ship”, out of tyres and lumber according to Wikipedia, or tyres and cement according to CNN. Applewhite hoped it would become a monastery. Applewhite, now in his sixties and in poor health, was afraid he had cancer. The winter was bitterly cold and the project was abandoned unfinished. By 1996 the group had moved to San Diego County, first to a house on Camino de Estrellas, the Street of Stars, just east of Rancho Santa Fe.
The focus on suppressing sexual desire reached its extreme. Applewhite taught that Next Level beings had no reproductive organs, and that only the Luciferians had genders. A group text found online after the deaths read: “It seems you could not inherit one of those [more advanced] bodies until you no longer have any use for activities involving the reproductive organs.” Eight men, including Applewhite, chose to be surgically castrated, according to the Wikipedia accounts of the group and its leader. A first attempt, performed by a member who was a former nurse, almost killed the patient and caused at least one member to leave. The group had difficulty finding a willing surgeon, but eventually found one in Mexico. The San Diego County Medical Examiner, Dr. Brian Blackbourne, said the operations had been performed so long ago that all the scars had healed. Christina Stanley, then a fellow in training, conducted 11 of the autopsies. She told the Union-Tribune in 2007 that the first male body she examined made her doubt her own skills, because she could not find the man’s testicles, until another doctor told her he had found the same thing. “So I thought, ‘OK, this is real.'”
Members wrote about the choice without embarrassment. A student who signed as Glnody, in a statement dated 19 March 1997, mocked the reaction a believer could expect from the outside world: “ask a physician to neuter your vehicle for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven and you will more than likely be referred to a psychologist”. Of human sexuality the same statement said: “Being from a genderless world, this behavior is extremely hideous to us.”
In October 1996 the group rented a 9,200-square-foot mansion in Rancho Santa Fe for $7,000 a month, paid in cash, according to Wikipedia; CNN put the house’s value at $1.6 million. The same month the group bought an “alien abduction” insurance policy covering up to 50 members for $1 million each against abduction, impregnation or death by aliens. That autumn it recorded two videos offering viewers a last chance to leave: one dated 29 September 1996 and another dated 5 October 1996, titled on the group’s website “Planet Earth About To Be Recycled”.
Sources: Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days (1997); San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007); CNN, Suicide probe focuses on cult’s stash of pills (1997); Heaven’s Gate website; Heaven’s Gate, Earth Exit Statement by Glnody (1997).
“Planet About To Be Recycled”: the 1996 tapes
The two autumn videos were the group’s last recruiting drive, and Applewhite fronted both. The first, recorded on 29 September 1996, carried the title “Last Chance to Evacuate Earth Before It’s Recycled”. “This planet is about to be recycled, refurbished, started over,” he told the camera. He did not dress up the regime: “our discipline is strict, that we teach ‘overcoming human ways,’ overcoming human addictions.” The point, he said, was not morality or righteousness. “The purpose of that is to go to the heavens”.
Six days later, on 5 October, he recorded the tape the website titles “Planet About To Be Recycled” and subtitles “Your Only Chance To Survive”. “This is a very exciting time for us,” it begins. He was careful about what he was not predicting. “We’re not saying that planet Earth is coming to an end. We’re saying that planet Earth is about to be refurbished, spaded under, and have another chance to serve as a garden for a future human civilization.” Then he made the claim at the core of the faith, that the mind that had been in Jesus had come back in him. “That mind, that spirit, that soul is me, and in this body called ‘Do’ that you’re looking at?” he asked. “My Father is not a human father.”
Copies went out by post. In October 1996 J. Gordon Melton, a scholar of alternative religions in Santa Barbara, received a video and a letter about the group’s plans to depart Earth for a “Kingdom of Heaven”. He did not watch it until after the deaths. A month earlier the group had emailed Nick Matzorkis, the businessman who later hired DiAngelo: “We are at an extremely critical crossroads”, it said, “considering going significantly more public than we ever have in our history.” It invited him to a meeting and promised: “We suspect you will not find the meeting boring or routine.” On the website, a writer signing as Do summed up how the world would see them: “We take the prize, I guess, of being the cult of cults.”
Sources: Heaven’s Gate, Last Chance to Evacuate Earth Before It’s Recycled (1996); Heaven’s Gate, Planet About To Be Recycled (1996); Los Angeles Times, 39 in Cult Left Recipes of Death (1997); Los Angeles Times, From the ’70s, an Eerie Portent of Things to Come (1997); Deseret News, Video offers a chilling look at suicide scene (1997).
Hale-Bopp and the “companion object”
On 23 July 1995 two Americans, Alan Hale in New Mexico and Thomas Bopp in the Arizona desert south of Phoenix, independently found a faint new comet near the globular cluster M70 in Sagittarius. Comet Hale-Bopp, formally C/1995 O1, turned out to be extraordinary: it was visible to the naked eye for a record 18 months and passed perihelion on 1 April 1997. By 9 April 1997, 69 percent of Americans had seen it.
In November 1996 Chuck Shramek, an amateur astronomer in Houston, photographed the comet and noticed a fuzzy object beside it that his sky software did not identify. He called Art Bell’s late-night radio show Coast to Coast AM and announced a “Saturn-like object” following Hale-Bopp. Bell discussed the “companion object” on several programmes. Courtney Brown, an Emory University political scientist and proponent of “remote viewing”, was among those who concluded it was an alien spacecraft.
It was a star. Hale explained that the object was an ordinary eighth-magnitude star in the background, missing from Shramek’s program because of its settings. Astronomers at the University of Hawaii said an image Bell had promoted as proof was an altered copy of one of their own pictures. None of that reached the house in Rancho Santa Fe. Applewhite took the comet as the sign the group had waited for. Its approach meant the window was closing, and the spacecraft behind it had come to take them home.
In early March 1997 the British documentary maker Louis Theroux emailed the group, hoping to film them for his BBC series. The reply declined: “at the present time a project like this would be an interference with what we must focus on.”
Sources: Wikipedia, Comet Hale-Bopp; Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group).
“Do’s Final Exit”
On 19 and 20 March 1997 Applewhite recorded a video titled Do’s Final Exit. In it he spoke of mass suicide as “the only way to evacuate this Earth” and told viewers: “We do in all honesty hate this world”. He was 65. Nearly every member recorded a short farewell message. Lt. Jerry Lipscomb of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department later described those statements: “The essence of those statements were that they were going to a better place.”
The press quoted the tapes found after the deaths only in fragments. On what the New York Times called the second tape, Applewhite said human bodies were temporary parking places for the soul, and ended: “We have no hesitation to leave this place, to leave the bodies that we have.” The line was not new. In the group’s own transcript of the 5 October 1996 tape he had already put almost the same words into his students’ mouths, as a pledge to his Father: “we have no hesitation to leave this place”. One of the videos sent out before the deaths showed a bald, elderly man the Associated Press took to be Applewhite, sitting in a white plastic patio chair. “I can be your shepherd,” he says. “You can follow us, but you cannot stay here and follow us.”
In the weeks before, members had been tying up loose ends. Three who worked as computer consultants for an insurance company in San Diego quit, though they were offered more work, saying they had to prepare for a trip; among their preparations were getting their glasses fixed. To the people who saw them during those weeks, nothing seemed wrong. They breakfasted on strawberry crêpes at a local pancake house and watched Star Trek.
At about 2 p.m. on Friday, 21 March, all 39 members came into the Marie Callender’s restaurant in Carlsbad, about 15 miles from the mansion. They all ordered the same meal. The Los Angeles Times reported turkey pot pies and iced tea with extra lemons; the Union-Tribune, a decade later, reported salad, chicken pot pies and cheesecake. They paid the $350 bill in cash and left in under 45 minutes. “We thought it was odd. . . . But they were very nice,” said a waitress, Alisa Bunnell. The general manager, Chris Turner, was struck by their appearance. “I thought they were all cancer victims,” he said. “I thought it was kind of a sad scene.”
Sources: Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days (1997); San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007); CNN, Mass suicide involved sedatives, vodka and careful planning (1997); Spokesman-Review, Castrated Men Among Cult Victims (1997); Deseret News, Video offers a chilling look at suicide scene (1997); New York Times, The Overview: Families Learn of 39 Who Died Willingly (1997); Heaven’s Gate, Planet About To Be Recycled (1996).
The Earth Exit Statements
On the farewell tape the members sat in pairs in front of the camera, dressed alike, most of them smiling. Excerpts ran on television and in newspapers across the country. “It’s just the happiest day of my life,” one said. A woman who looked to be in her twenties stared into the lens and said, grinning: “We are all choosing of our own free will to go to the next level.” Another woman, her voice catching: “We couldn’t be happier about what we’re going to do.” A man described death in the language of a video game: “We take off the virtual-reality helmet. We take off the vehicle that we’ve used for this task.” Another dismissed his doubters: “People who thought I completely lost my marbles, they’re not right.”
Some sounded less certain than resigned. One woman told the camera: “Maybe they’re crazy, for all I know. But I don’t have any choice but to go for it, because I’ve been on this planet for 31 years and there’s nothing here for me.” The plan appealed to her, she said, because “if that’s what it takes, that’s better than being around here with absolutely nothing to do.” Several insisted no one had pushed them. “I am doing this of my own free will,” one man said. “It is not something someone brainwashed me into or convinced me of or did a con job on.” He added: “If anybody feels bad about that, that’s just their problem.” A woman said simply: “Everyone in this class wanted something more than this world had to offer.”
In the last week the group posted written statements to its website under the heading Earth Exit Statements by Students. Glnody, on 19 March, framed life on Earth as one long concession: “We have had to compromise our Next Level principles at every turn.” On family: “We value our Next Level family over any human family these vehicles might have issued from.” And on the end of recruiting: “Our classroom is over”. Chkody, on 22 March, rejected the idea of a damaged past: “This vehicle had good parents and the vehicle’s life was happy and ‘normal’ by any standards.” The trouble was the world itself. “This type of environment is suffocating and intolerable.” And: “There is only one real family and it is not determined by the flesh”.
Srrody, on 18 March, called it “a profoundly joyous time for me” and turned on the reader’s world: “Either you never knew life or you have already died.” Of everything that world offered: “Thanks, but no thanks.” The statement ended in praise of the leader as the one “who has pulled off a Next Level miracle that any of us made it out of this world alive.”
Sources: New York Times, The Overview: Families Learn of 39 Who Died Willingly (1997); Spokesman-Review, Castrated Men Among Cult Victims (1997); Los Angeles Times, 39 in Cult Left Recipes of Death (1997); Heaven’s Gate, Earth Exit Statement by Glnody; Heaven’s Gate, Earth Exit Statement by Chkody; Heaven’s Gate, Earth Exit Statement by Srrody.
Three days in Rancho Santa Fe
The deaths began on 22 March 1997 and took place in three groups over three successive days. Members took the sedative phenobarbital mixed into applesauce or pudding and drank vodka, and most then used plastic bags to bring on asphyxiation. Those still alive cleaned up after each group. They removed the bags, laid each body neatly on its own bed and covered the face and chest with a square of purple cloth.
All 39 were dressed alike, in black shirts and sweatpants, new black and white Nike Decades trainers and armband patches that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team”, one of many borrowings from Star Trek. Former members later said the Nikes were chosen because the group “got a good deal on the shoes”. Each person had a five-dollar bill and quarters in a pocket, a habit for members leaving the house; former members called it “a humorous way to tell us they all had left the planet permanently”. Packed bags with clothes and identification sat beside most of the beds. People who wore glasses had them placed carefully at their sides.
Applewhite died in the upstairs master bedroom, which he had to himself. Wikipedia’s account of the group says he was the third to last to die and that the two who followed him were the only ones found with bags still over their heads and without purple cloths. Its account of Applewhite himself says he was among the last four, and that three assistants helped him and then killed themselves. The medical examiner’s final report, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, said only one member was found with a plastic bag on her body: Susan Frances Strom, 44, of Texas, whom investigators thought was possibly the last to die.
Sources: Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Los Angeles Times, Coroner Confirms Cult Death Causes (1997); CNN, Mass suicide involved sedatives, vodka and careful planning (1997); San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007).
The package, the call and the deputies
Before the last of them died, the group mailed packages to people connected with Heaven’s Gate. One went to Rio DiAngelo, the former Richard Ford, a former member who was by then working for InterAct. He received it on the evening of 25 March. It held two VHS tapes, one of Do’s Final Exit and one of the members’ farewell messages, and a letter that said, among other things, “we have exited our vehicles just as we entered them”.
Accounts of that letter’s wording differ. The Los Angeles Times, quoting Matzorkis, gave it as: “By the time this letter is being read, we will all have shed our containers”. DiAngelo’s lawyer said in April 1997 that the delivery that day included two farewell videos, three letters and a computer diskette setting out plans for the web design business.
The group had also written its own news release, dated 22 March 1997, marked “To be issued to the News Media” and posted on its website under the headline “‘Away Team’ Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space”. It began: “By the time you receive this, we’ll be gone”. Then: “We came from the Level Above Human in distant space and we have now exited the bodies that we were wearing for our earthly task, to return to the world from whence we came”. Bodies, it explained, “are merely containers, suits of clothes”. “The body is merely a tool for that individual’s use”. The release ended with an appeal to anyone who believed the message to follow them.
DiAngelo told his boss, Nick Matzorkis, and the two drove from Los Angeles to Rancho Santa Fe. DiAngelo went in through a back door left unlocked on purpose and filmed what he found. “He looked as white as a sheet,” Matzorkis recalled. At 3:15 p.m. on 26 March the sheriff’s department received an anonymous tip through 911 asking deputies to “check on the welfare of the residents”. The caller, it emerged days later, was DiAngelo.
Deputy Robert Brunk had just started his shift at the Encinitas station. The call, as he heard it, was that 40 people had killed themselves and that they were cult members. He found the windows closed, the curtains drawn and two rented vans in the drive. After the side door and the smell, he called for backup. Deputy Laura Gacek arrived a few minutes later. “She walked up to the door, smelled the same odor and confirmed what I had been thinking deep down inside,” Brunk said. It was, he added, “for real.” The deputies made a brief search, found no one alive and withdrew until a search warrant could be obtained.
Brunk remembered checking each body for rigor mortis by shaking a foot. “The Nike symbol triggers my memory more than any one thing,” he said. “I remember their shoes, all 39 pairs.”
Detective Rick Scully, a veteran homicide investigator, led the inquiry. As a whodunit, the Union-Tribune wrote, it was easy. Once a hazardous materials team had cleared the air, Scully went in. “We were wandering from room to room to room, and every room we went into we were finding bodies,” he said. In the master bedroom he found Applewhite, propped up with pillows on a large bed. “As soon as you walked in, you knew this guy was the head chief. He was the leader.”
The sheriff’s department found no blood in the house. The only weapon was a 9mm handgun packed in a suitcase. “The drugs were taken for a very specific purpose and that was to take their own lives,” Lipscomb said. A sheriff’s report concluded: “Members wrote that their only purpose was to make Do happy”.
Sources: Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007); Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days (1997); CNN, Mass suicide involved sedatives, vodka and careful planning (1997); CNN, Suicide probe focuses on cult’s stash of pills (1997); Los Angeles Times, 39 in Cult Left Recipes of Death (1997); Los Angeles Times, Ex-Cultist, County Fight Over Heaven’s Gate Firm (1997); Heaven’s Gate, Exit Press Release.
What the medical examiner found
“It seemed to be a group decision,” the San Diego County Medical Examiner, Dr. Brian Blackbourne, told a news conference. “There were different stages, suggesting it was planned. They all had IDs. The house was immaculate.” Investigators repeatedly stressed that they saw no indication of murder, and no sign that anyone had survived.
Toxicology results announced on 4 April 1997 showed phenobarbital in the blood of all 39 and alcohol in 33. Blackbourne said four also had the painkiller Vicodin in their blood, including the two members believed to have died last; Applewhite had also taken it. All 39 tested negative for HIV, a test carried out at the request of families and in response to media questions.
On 11 April 1997, with 38 of the 39 bodies claimed by relatives, Blackbourne issued his final report. The members had died from the effects of alcohol, phenobarbital and asphyxiation. The report listed coronary arteriosclerosis as a possible contributing cause in Applewhite’s death; at 65 he had the degree of narrowing common in men his age, which may have hastened his death. His fear of cancer had been unfounded. Five of the 39, including Applewhite, had taken an additional painkiller. Nine plastic bags were recovered from the house.
Sources: CNN, Mass suicide involved sedatives, vodka and careful planning (1997); CNN, Tests confirm cult members ingested drugs, alcohol (1997); Los Angeles Times, Coroner Confirms Cult Death Causes (1997); Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days (1997); Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite.
The 39
The dead were 21 women and 18 men, aged 26 to 72. More than half were in their forties. Most had joined in the 1970s; eight had come to the group in the 1990s. Membership was open only to adults over 18, and every one of the 39 was an adult. Because all wore the same clothes and kept their hair cropped close, deputies at first identified every victim as a man.
Their driving licences told a story of a group always on the move: 11 from New Mexico, eight from Texas, four each from California and Colorado, three from Arizona, and others from Washington, Ohio, Florida and Minnesota. Many New Mexico licences gave addresses that turned out to be churches, businesses or inventions.
Behind the uniforms were people with families who had spent years wondering about them. Thomas Nichols was the brother of Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on Star Trek. “He just dropped out,” the actress’s manager, Steven Stevens, told the Los Angeles Times. Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, a postal supervisor in Cincinnati, left her family shortly after giving birth to twin girls; she also had three sons. After joining she made a single 10-second phone call to her mother. David Geoffrey Moore was remembered by an employer, Mike Afshin, as a skilled computer consultant so honest that he once fixed a client’s plumbing for free because he felt guilty about charging her $79 for a ten-minute job.
Days after the bodies were found, a man who gave his name as Ernst arrived at the San Diego morgue and told reporters he had come to claim his daughter; Erika Ernst, 40, was among the dead. Applewhite’s own sister, Louise Winant, said she had not heard from him in more than 20 years, and that he did not know he had grandchildren.
Sources: San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007); Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days (1997); CNN, Suicide probe focuses on cult’s stash of pills (1997); CNN, Mass suicide involved sedatives, vodka and careful planning (1997); Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group).
“Every person in the world was there”
Word leaked at about 5 p.m. on the day the bodies were found. The Academy Awards had been held two nights earlier, and many national and international crews were still in Southern California. Within two hours hundreds of reporters and photographers were racing to Rancho Santa Fe. Capt. Don Crist, who ran the sheriff’s media office with the late Ron Reina, saw the glow of television satellite trucks from miles away. “I came over the hill and every person in the world was there,” he said.
The next day the department held the largest news conference in its history, in an auditorium at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, and made the controversial decision to show a 90-second videotape shot inside the mansion. “You could hear a pin drop,” Crist said. The release had an unintended effect: DiAngelo had filmed the scene himself, hoping to sell the footage, and the official tape made it worthless.
Heaven’s Gate was front-page news across the world. Time magazine put a close-up of a wild-eyed Applewhite on its cover under the words “Inside the Web of Death.” Saturday Night Live parodied the group. David Letterman did a Top Ten list. Jay Leno, recalling the 1996 Republican convention in San Diego, quipped: “It was the biggest suicide in San Diego since the Republicans nominated Bob Dole.” People online spoofed the group’s website.
The astronomer whose name was on the comet was not laughing. “Almost from day one, I have heard claims that Hale-Bopp is an alien mother ship or is under intelligent control or some such,” Alan Hale said. “Thirty-nine people have now lost their lives as a result of this ignorance and superstition.” He urged people to go outside and look at it. “It’s one of the most magnificent celestial objects you will ever see. But for all its beauty, its magnificence, its splendor, all it is is a dirty snowball that’s orbiting the sun,” he said. “Nothing more.”
Sources: San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007); San Diego Union-Tribune, Back Story: Recalling the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide (2017); Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days (1997).
The deaths that followed
The dying did not stop at the mansion. A 58-year-old man living near Marysville, California, killed himself in imitation of the group and left a note dated 27 March saying he was going “on the spaceship” with the comet “to be with those who have gone before me”.
At least three former members died by suicide in the following months. On 6 May 1997 Wayne Cooke and Chuck Humphrey, known in the group as Rkkody, attempted suicide at a motel in Encinitas in the same manner as the group, wearing Nikes. Cooke died. Humphrey was found barely alive and survived. On 11 May another former member, James Pirkey Jr., shot himself. In February 1998 Humphrey’s body was found in a tent in the Arizona desert, with a five-dollar bill and four quarters in his pocket and a note that read “Do not revive”.
On 22 March 1997, the day the Heaven’s Gate deaths began, five members of the Order of the Solar Temple also died in a group suicide. Both groups believed death could carry souls into space, and there was early speculation of a link. The Solar Temple deaths had been timed for the spring equinox and delayed by failed attempts. Investigators found no connection between the groups.
Sources: Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007).
Belief, control or murder?
The question of how 39 adults came to die together has divided commentators ever since. Most people called it a mass suicide. Janja Lalich, a sociologist and former cult member, called it “murder”. The UCLA psychiatrist Louis J. West described the dead as “victims of a hoax […] There was villainy here.” The writer Evan Thomas called Applewhite a “master manipulator”. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton compared him to Shoko Asahara of Aum Shinrikyo, “equally controlling, his paranoia and megalomania gentler yet ever present”.
Scholars of new religions push back against the idea that the members were simply brainwashed. Benjamin Zeller, whose 2014 book was the most recent full study of the group when the Union-Tribune revisited it in 2017, argues that Heaven’s Gate reflected currents in American life that remain in play: “It is far too easy to dismiss the members of Heaven’s Gate as either insane or victimized, and in both cases we fall into the same sort of trap of demonization that colors the dehumanizing political discourse of the 21st century.”
Both readings fit parts of the record. The members were intelligent, employed and, by the accounts of those who met them, kind. Many had chosen the life deliberately, over many years, and left messages saying they were going willingly. They had also spent two decades under a leader who controlled what they ate, how they dressed and how they phrased a question, who assigned partners to watch them, who taught that the body was a husk and that his happiness was their purpose, and who told them the comet in the sky was their last chance. Applewhite never named a successor. The religion scholar James Lewis has speculated that he settled on suicide because he had said the group would ascend during his lifetime, which made appointing a successor unfeasible.
Speaking to the Union-Tribune a decade later, Lalich offered a simpler lesson: “If only people put as much thought into joining a cult as they did in buying a car.”
Sources: Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; San Diego Union-Tribune, Back Story: Recalling the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide (2017); San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007).
The house, the website and the film
The mansion carried a stigma. Neighbours had the street renamed Paseo Victoria. In 1999 a local developer bought the property at a foreclosure sale for $668,000, less than half its assessed value of $1.4 million. Neighbours then bought it, razed the house, built a new one and changed the address to 18239.
The group’s website did not die with it. It is still online, and still offers its book, How and When “Heaven’s Gate” May Be Entered, for $45 through TELAH Services in Phoenix. It still promises a “boarding pass” to anyone who studies the material, and it still carries a page headed “Our Position Against Suicide”.
In 2026 The Leader, a historical drama written and directed by Michael Gallagher, premiered at the Tribeca Festival and the Fantasia International Film Festival, with Tim Blake Nelson as Applewhite and Vera Farmiga as Nettles. Gallagher was eight years old in 1997 and lived in the San Diego neighbourhood where the deaths took place.
Sources: Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); Heaven’s Gate website.
Where the accounts disagree
- The address and size of the house. Wikipedia places the mansion near 18341 Colina Norte and gives it as 9,200 square feet. The Union-Tribune’s 2007 account gives the address as 18241 Colina Norte and the size as 9,000 square feet. CNN in 1997 valued it at $1.6 million; the assessed value at the 1999 foreclosure sale was $1.4 million.
- How many men were castrated, and when. Wikipedia’s accounts of the group and of Applewhite both give eight men, including Applewhite. The Union-Tribune in 2007 said Applewhite and six members had been castrated in Mexico “a few months earlier”. In 1997 the medical examiner said the operations had been done so long before that all the scars had healed. Wikipedia’s group article says the operations after the first failed attempt were done in a hospital; its Applewhite article says the group found a surgeon in Mexico.
- The painkiller. CNN’s report of the April 1997 toxicology results said four members had Vicodin in their blood. The Los Angeles Times report of the final findings a week later said five of the 39, including Applewhite, took an additional painkiller.
- Who died last, and with bags. Wikipedia says two members died after Applewhite and were the only ones found with bags still over their heads. Its Applewhite article says he was among the last four and was helped by three assistants. The Los Angeles Times, reporting the medical examiner’s final findings, said only one member, Susan Frances Strom, was found with a plastic bag on her body.
- Applewhite’s date of death. Wikipedia gives 24 March 1997. The medical examiner’s public findings, as reported, did not fix individual dates; the deaths spanned three days from 22 March.
- The last meal. The Los Angeles Times in 1997 reported turkey pot pies and iced tea; the Union-Tribune in 2007 reported salad, chicken pot pies and cheesecake. Both agree all 39 ordered the same thing on 21 March.
- The money in their pockets. Wikipedia says each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters, and repeats one former member’s claim of a Mark Twain line about $5.75 that has never been found in Twain’s writings. CNN said most had a $5 bill and “some quarters”.
- The recruiting numbers. Accounts of the April 1975 Los Angeles meeting differ between about 25 recruits out of 80 and about half of 50. Accounts of Waldport range from about 20 to about 30 people; Cronkite said “a score”.
- The New Mexico compound. Wikipedia’s Applewhite article says the group lived there from June to October 1995 and built with tyres and lumber. Its group article says tyres and concrete and that the group left in April 1996. The Los Angeles Times said they lived there until June 1996, and CNN said tyres and cement.
- How Applewhite and Nettles met. Applewhite described meeting Nettles at a hospital while visiting a friend; James Lewis suggested Applewhite was a patient; Nettles’s daughter said he brought an injured person from the theatre to the hospital where her mother worked.
- The wording of the farewell letter. Wikipedia quotes the letter sent to Rio DiAngelo as saying “we have exited our vehicles just as we entered them”. The Los Angeles Times in 1997, quoting Nick Matzorkis, gave it as “By the time this letter is being read, we will all have shed our containers”. DiAngelo’s lawyer said three letters arrived that day, so both may be accurate.
Sources: Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Wikipedia, Bonnie Nettles; San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007); Los Angeles Times, Coroner Confirms Cult Death Causes (1997); Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days (1997); CNN, Tests confirm cult members ingested drugs, alcohol (1997); CNN, Suicide probe focuses on cult’s stash of pills (1997); Los Angeles Times, 39 in Cult Left Recipes of Death (1997); Los Angeles Times, Ex-Cultist, County Fight Over Heaven’s Gate Firm (1997).
Timeline
- 29 August 1927: Bonnie Lu Trousdale, later Nettles, born; raised in Houston.
- 17 May 1931: Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. born in Spur, Texas.
- 1965: Applewhite becomes chair of music at the University of St. Thomas, Houston.
- 1970: Applewhite resigns from St. Thomas.
- March 1972: Applewhite meets Bonnie Nettles.
- 1 January 1973: The pair leave together, by the account in Nettles’s biography.
- May 1974: First convert joins; credit card charges later dropped.
- August 1974: Applewhite arrested in Harlingen, Texas, over a rental car; jailed for six months in Missouri.
- April 1975: Recruiting meeting in Los Angeles.
- March 1975: The First Statement of Ti and Do is mailed from Ojai, California.
- September 1975: Waldport, Oregon, meeting; a score of residents disappear.
- June 1976: Promised UFO visit in the Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming, is called off.
- 1976 to 1979: The group lives in campgrounds.
- Late 1970s: Rented houses in Denver and Dallas.
- 1983: Nettles has an eye removed because of cancer.
- 19 June 1985: Nettles dies in Dallas.
- 1992: 12-part video series broadcast by satellite.
- May 1993: “Total Overcomers Anonymous” advertisement in USA Today.
- June 1995: The group buys land near Manzano, New Mexico.
- 23 July 1995: Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp discover the comet.
- 29 September and 5 October 1996: Applewhite records the two “recycled” videos.
- October 1996: The group rents the Rancho Santa Fe mansion.
- November 1996: The “companion object” claim spreads on Coast to Coast AM.
- 18 to 22 March 1997: Members post Earth Exit Statements to the website.
- 19 to 20 March 1997: Applewhite records Do’s Final Exit.
- 21 March 1997: Last meal at Marie Callender’s, Carlsbad.
- 22 March 1997: The deaths begin.
- 25 March 1997: Rio DiAngelo receives the farewell package.
- 26 March 1997: 911 tip at 3:15 p.m.; deputies find 39 bodies.
- 27 March 1997: Sheriff’s news conference at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.
- 1 April 1997: Hale-Bopp reaches perihelion.
- 4 April 1997: Toxicology results announced.
- 11 April 1997: Medical examiner’s final report.
- 6 May 1997: Wayne Cooke dies in Encinitas; Chuck Humphrey survives.
- February 1998: Humphrey found dead in Arizona.
- 1999: The mansion is sold at foreclosure for $668,000, later razed.
- 2026: The Leader premieres at Tribeca.
Sources: Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite; Wikipedia, Bonnie Nettles; Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group); Wikipedia, Comet Hale-Bopp; San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited (2007); CNN, Tests confirm cult members ingested drugs, alcohol (1997); Los Angeles Times, Coroner Confirms Cult Death Causes (1997).
Frequently asked questions
What was Heaven’s Gate?
Heaven’s Gate was a religious group founded in the 1970s by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. It blended Christian end-times prophecy with belief in extraterrestrials and taught that members could leave their human bodies and reach an “evolutionary level above human” aboard a spacecraft.
How many people died at Rancho Santa Fe?
Thirty-nine people, 21 women and 18 men aged 26 to 72, including Applewhite. They died over three days beginning on 22 March 1997 and were found on 26 March.
Was anyone charged?
No. The sheriff’s department and medical examiner found that all 39 deaths were suicides and saw no indication of murder. The leader died with his followers.
Why did they wear Nike shoes?
Members dressed in matching uniforms as a sign of unity. Former members said the group got a good deal on the shoes and that Applewhite liked Nikes.
What did Comet Hale-Bopp have to do with it?
Applewhite took the comet as the sign the group had been waiting for, after claims spread on talk radio that a spacecraft was following it. Astronomers showed the supposed object was a background star.
Is the Heaven’s Gate website still online?
Yes. The group’s website remains online and still offers its book and video transcripts.
Citations & Sources
Citations & Sources
Every source cited in the sections above, in one list. Online sources were consulted on November 1, 2026.
News
- CNN, Mass suicide involved sedatives, vodka and careful planning, 27 March 1997.
- CNN, Suicide probe focuses on cult’s stash of pills, 29 March 1997.
- Los Angeles Times, As Families Grieve, a Portrait Emerges of Cult’s Final Days, 29 March 1997.
- CNN, Tests confirm cult members ingested drugs, alcohol, 5 April 1997.
- Los Angeles Times, Coroner Confirms Cult Death Causes, 12 April 1997.
- Los Angeles Times, 39 in Cult Left Recipes of Death, 28 March 1997.
- Los Angeles Times, From the ’70s, an Eerie Portent of Things to Come, Hector Tobar, 28 March 1997.
- Seattle Times, Cult’s Leader Preached Metamorphosis In Space, 28 March 1997.
- Deseret News (Associated Press), Video offers a chilling look at suicide scene, 28 March 1997.
- New York Times, The Overview: Families Learn of 39 Who Died Willingly, 29 March 1997.
- Spokesman-Review, Castrated Men Among Cult Victims; Voices Of The Dead Flood Airwaves, 29 March 1997.
- Los Angeles Times (Associated Press), Ex-Cultist, County Fight Over Heaven’s Gate Firm, 16 April 1997.
- San Diego Union-Tribune, Heaven’s Gate revisited, J. Harry Jones, 18 March 2007 (reproduced by World-Wide Religious News).
- San Diego Union-Tribune, Back Story: Recalling the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, John Wilkens, March 2017.
Primary sources
- Heaven’s Gate, Heaven’s Gate: How and When It May Be Entered, group website, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, First Statement of Ti and Do, Ojai, California, March 1975, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, First Poster Used for Public Meetings in 1975-1976, 1975 to 1976, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, “UFO Cult” Resurfaces with Final Offer, USA Today advertisement, 27 May 1993, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, Publications Where ’93 Statement Appeared, 1993, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, The Shedding of Our Borrowed Human Bodies, poster dated 18 August 1994, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, “Away Team” from Deep Space Surfaces Before Departure, Jwnody, undated, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, Last Chance to Evacuate Earth Before It’s Recycled, edited transcript of videotape, 29 September 1996, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, Planet About To Be Recycled, edited transcript of videotape, 5 October 1996, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, Our Position Against Suicide, undated, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, Earth Exit Statement by Srrody, 18 March 1997, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, Earth Exit Statement by Glnody, 19 March 1997, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, Earth Exit Statement by Chkody, 22 March 1997, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Heaven’s Gate, “Away Team” Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space, exit press release dated 22 March 1997, accessed November 1, 2026.
Wikipedia
- Wikipedia, Heaven’s Gate (religious group), accessed November 1, 2026.
- Wikipedia, Marshall Applewhite, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Wikipedia, Bonnie Nettles, accessed November 1, 2026.
- Wikipedia, Comet Hale-Bopp, accessed November 1, 2026.
Images
- Wikimedia Commons, Comet Hale-Bopp, Mkfairdpm (English Wikipedia), CC BY-SA 3.0.
- Wikimedia Commons, Comet Hale-Bopp (opo9708a), Harold Weaver (Johns Hopkins University) and NASA/ESA, public domain.
- Wikimedia Commons, Alsea Bay Bridge, Waldport, Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives, CC BY 4.0.
Image credits
- Photo: Mkfairdpm (English Wikipedia), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
- Photo: Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.
- Photo: Harold Weaver (Johns Hopkins University) and NASA/ESA, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
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