Trail Gazette
April 3, 2021
The story of the Heaven’s Gate cult has been told multiple times since San Diego police responded to an anonymous tip and found the lifeless bodies of 39 men and women from ranging from ages 26-72. It was March 26, 1997 when the largest mass suicide on United States soil took place, but the story of Heaven’s Gate begins over two decades prior in small-town Oregon.
The town of Waldport had a population of roughly 987 people in 1975 when the two people who would later go on to start the Heaven’s Gate cult held one of their first recruitment meetings at the town’s Bayshore Inn. That night, 25-35 residents seemingly went missing, attracting nation-wide attention.
“Those who disappeared are said to have given away their property to friends and relatives and renounced their families after attending meetings conducted by a man and a woman in Waldport,” an Oct. 6,1975 New York Times article reported.
After months of speculation and rumors circulating through the town about what had happened, a member of the cult returned to Waldport on Dec. 7.
One of the men who attended the meeting and left town the same night with the leaders known as ‘The Two,’ Robert Rubin, told the Newport News-Times that 34 people were recruited from the ‘poorly publicized’ meeting, many of whom left immediately.
What or who could cause than many grown adult to abandon their lives after a few hours of conversation?
Marshall ‘Herff’ Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles were the birth names of the leaders known as ‘The Two.’
Applewhite was the homosexual son of a Protestant minister born in Spur, Texas. He graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1969 with a Master of Music degree. While there, he played starring roles in two musicals, ”Oklahoma!” and ”South Pacific.”
After his father died in 1971, Applewhite was hospitalized for severe depression. It was around that time he met Nettles, a nurse who was fascinated with mysticism and the divine. The two became close friends saying they felt they had met in a past life and that the meeting of their current ‘vehicles’ (bodies) was foretold to Nettles by extraterrestrial beings.
Nettles was married with two children when she met Applewhite, but soon both broke off contact with their families and began traveling around the west recruiting kindred spirits. During their time wandering the west, the group stayed at Bonny Reservoir in Colorado near the Kansas border.
The two initially changed their names to Bo and Peep, but the connection between those names and a following of sheep caused them to reconsider. Due to the couples’ affection for musical theatre, they changed their name Do and Ti, a reference to the song in The Sound of Music.
What made their far-out beliefs easier to swallow for the ones they recruited was the interweaving of fundamental Christian beliefs and new age fascinations with space travel. While the beliefs of the group changed throughout its long existence, they famously said the heavens existed among the stars and that with a powerful enough telescope, one could see the Christian idea of God.
The group’s early beliefs were more focus around the idea of metamorphosis and members believed that as the impending apocalypse approached, they would be physically transformed into a more alien-like being fit for space travel. They believed this process was travelling to the ‘Next Level,’ both consciously and physically.
In 1985, Nettles died after a long battle with liver cancer. The death of her physical body threw a wrench in the group’s beliefs that the transformation was as much physical as it was spiritual.
Applewhite told followers that she had gone to the Next Level because she had ‘too much energy to remain on Earth.’
After Nettles’ death, he again became severely depressed and, for the first time ever, allowed Heaven’s Gate members to return to their families and reassess their commitment to the group’s beliefs.
His attempt to explain her death in the terms of the group’s doctrine was successful, preventing the departure of all but one member. Applewhite would go on to say that Nettles left the rest behind because they still had more to learn and that she occupied a higher spiritual role than he and the others.
It was after Nettles’ death that the group’s core beliefs began to revolve around a spiritual ascension in which they would leave their bodies behind and be reborn among higher life forms.
The group’s recruiting numbers shrank as they became increasingly focused on the suppression of sexual desire, going so far as to have one of the members who had formally been a nurse attempt to castrate a willing fellow member. After that grotesque failure the group found a surgeon in Mexico who performed the procedure on Applewhite and seven other members.
In Applewhite’s opinion, sexuality was one of the most powerful forces that bound humans to their bodies and hindered their efforts to evolve to the Next Level. He believed and taught that Next Level beings had no reproductive organs and that Lucifer was responsible for genders.
In the late ’90s, with Applewhite’s failing health and the groups continuing troubles recruiting a new generation, it was clear that something was coming to a head. Over the course of the group’s existence, several hundred people joined and left, but by 1993 the group’s numbers had dropped below 50 and it was clear something needed to change.
Later that year, according to the group’s website, they ”took a much more overt step toward the conclusion of our task.” They published a $30,000 advertisement in USA Today that year that was titled ‘U.F.O. Cult Resurfaces with Final Offer,’ along with advertisements in other publications that proclaimed, ‘Last Chance to Advance Beyond Human.’
After trying to build membership for a few years, news of the coming Hale-Bopp comet presented Applewhite the grand theatrical conclusion he was looking for. The group would shed their mortal coils and have their spirits abducted by the comet as it passed by earth.
To further the Hale-Bopp mythology, in January of 1997, doctored photos surfaced that were manipulated to show an unknown object trailing the comet. Applewhite considered this object the alien space ship sent to take him and the rest of Heaven’s Gate home.
It is believed that the suicides took place in three stages, over three days, according to the coroner who worked the case, Dr. Brian Blackbourne. Thanks to notes left in the pockets of the deceased, authorities had a pretty good idea of how it happened.
“Basically it just said, ‘Take the little package of pudding or applesauce, and eat a couple of tablespoons to make some room to pour the medicine in, stir it up, and then eat it fairly quickly. Drink the vodka beverage. Lay back and relax,'” Blackbourne said.
Plastic bags found near the trash indicate that suffocation may have been used to speed the process. Packed flight bags or suitcases stood at the foot of many mattresses, and victims often carried $5 bills and quarters.
The money found was a reference to Mark Twain’s short story, ‘Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.’ In the story, when the Captain sets off into outer space he takes along a passport and money for his travel. One line reads, “The fare to get to heaven on the tail of a comet was $5.75.”
Many of the members recorded ‘exit interviews’ in the months and weeks leading up to the suicides. By all accounts they seemed happy and of sound mind. They mailed those interviews to friends and family member along with notes, many of which began, “By the time this letter is being read, we will all have shed our containers.”
What might be considered the most interesting or most shocking aspect of the entire Heaven’s Gate sage is how the members of the cult were not all what people would consider ‘wandering hippies,’ or transients. Many of Applewhite and Nettle’s crew hailed from these very diverse backgrounds; most of them are described by researchers as having been ‘longtime truth-seekers.’
One recruit was John Craig, a respected Republican running for the Colorado House of Representatives when he joined in 1975. He walked out on his wife and six children to follow Applewhite and Nettles.
To his banker, R. W. Turner Jr., Craig ”was a perfect cowboy, always dressed like the Marlboro man, pressed Levis, Stetson hat.’
One hotel owner who knew Craig said of the man who almost won a seat in the state legislature in 1970, “’He was a totally normal guy until he became a moonie. That’s what people used to say — that he was going to the moon.”
Two months after he left, Craig invited his daughter, Cathy Murphy, who was then a sophomore at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, to come to the Denver Y.W.C.A. to attend a meeting of the group, then called Human Individual Metamorphosis.
“Dad didn’t appear to be a zombie at all,”Murphy said. “I was looking for drug-induced brainwashing. But he was very articulate, very animated. He was my dad.”
Of the 39 that showed the ultimate dedication to Applewhite and his teachings, Craig was one of six with ties to Colorado.
Ladonna Brugato was a 40-year-old computer consultant who lived in Englewood before joining the cult in 1993. Lucy Eva Pesho was a 63-year-old computer trainer from Pueblo who joined Heaven’s Gate in the late ‘70s. Her family said the last time they received communication from her was 1989.
Jacqueline Leonard was a medical assistant from Littleton who was living in Des Moines with her husband and three children when she was enticed to leave her family in the ‘70s. She was 71-years-old when she died.
Gary Jordan St. Louis was a computer programmer who had followed Applewhite and Nettles since the early days of the cult. He disappeared with them in 1975, not resurfacing until 1989. He struggled for three years to get back into society before he returned, this time taking his half sister Dana Tracey Abreo with him.
Of all the ghouls and goblins that go bump in the night, the story of John Craig might be the most terrifying take away from the entire tragic ordeal. The idea that someone you know or love, someone successful and popular, someone with friends and family, could have the foundations of their personality warped and washed overnight.
Who is to say that any of us are truly above that level of susceptibility? While many of us believe there is no way we could ever be so foolish, so manipulated, the catch is, you will never know for sure. Maybe you just haven’t heard the right pitch yet.
In the 24 years since that tragic day in San Diego, technology has advanced exponentially and the influence of the internet has never been stronger. It is hard to look at the extreme division being created in our country over the last five years and not wonder if some of Applewhite and Nettles’ techniques aren’t being used on social media.
The placement of the proper words and images related to your beliefs is broken down into an equation and you are directly targeted to be influenced. Applewhite and Nettles had flyers and a few hours in a conference room and look what they accomplished.
Imagine what kind of manipulation can and has taken place in the Facebook age. Are we any more advanced in recognizing and preventing this kind of manipulation than the 39 people who fell asleep for the last time 24 years ago?
Just before the mass suicide, the Heaven’s Gate’s website released this message: ‘Hale–Bopp brings closure to Heaven’s Gate …our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion — ‘graduation’ from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave ‘this world’ and go with Ti’s crew.”
Tim Mosier
No comments:
Post a Comment