The Week Magazine...World Report

FROM the moment Deputy Robert Brunk of the San Diego county sheriff's office pulled up at the big house on the hill on the after noon of March 26, he knew something was wrong. The drapes were pulled, the windows were closed, and the outdoors lights were burning in the sun-shine. And as Brunk-dispatched in response to an anonymous 911 call-approached an unlocked side door, he sensed something else; the unmistakable stench of death. Dreading his instincts and hoping against hope, he radioed his partner, Laura Gacek, and waited.

Together, the deputies moved through a silent hallway, a kitchen, and dining room, seeing nothing amiss. Then in the central hall, they saw the first body on a cot, then two more, then four more, until they stopped at 10. They notified their commanders, put on surgical masks and gloves and went methodically through the seven-bedroom house, counting 39 bodies in all. "It was one of the most bizarre things you'd ever expect to see," Gacek recalled. "It was surreal." Surreal only begins to sum up the story that has unfolded since the deputies opened the door of 18241 Colina Norte. It is a tale of lost souls, of sect members estranged from their families and living a monastic, nomadic life that took some of them through a 20-years odyssey across the American west before they came to this southern California paradise to die.

But for the members of the Heaven's Gate sect who swallowed vodka and barbiturates or smothered themselves with plastic bags in meticulous stages starting as long as a week earlier, death was nothing to be feared. Instead, according to the testimony they left glowing like some ultra-modern illuminated manuscript on a home page on the Internet, it was the first step in a millennial flight to the heavenly "Level Above Human". Their desired transport was sleek: a spaceship trailing in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet that was so visible in the clear desert skies when they started taking their lives. But their preparations were simple: rolls of quarters and $5 bills stuffed in the pockets of their right sides.

The group's quarters in the sprawling Spanish style house they rented in the semi-rural area of eucalyptus trees and hillside scrub contained a map of the world, studded with color pins that appeared to mark their desired destinations on earth, as well as pictures of alien figures suggesting their outer-worldly ambitions. About one-third of the 18 men who died were castrated, in adherence to the celibate lifestyle the group espoused. But these monks supported their existence bot by making wine or honey but by designing commercial home pages on the World Wide Web.

"They were nice people and very talented," said Tom Goodspeed, general manager of San Diego Polo Club. "But we used to joke in the beginning that they were beamed down from somewhere." Those who knew them best, from former group members to the family members who had not heard from them in years, were not shocked by their final fate. About 12 hours after Brunk and Gacek made their discovery, detectives from the sheriff's office found themselves in Beverly Hills police station, interviewing the anonymous caller who had alerted them to the deaths. Richard Ford, a former member of the sect initially described only by the pseudonym Rio, had left it to work for a company that makes home pages for the Internet. After receiving two videotaped messages from his former colleagues announcing their intentions, he drove over the next day to learn the worst, then alerted the authorities.

Under the leadership of Marshall Heriff Applewhite, a one-time Episcopal choir master who also sang with the Houston Grand Opera, the sect had moved around the US for two decades. The members' reasons for arriving in this particular corner of the country remain unclear, but the authorities speculated that it might have been a prime viewing spot for the comet's brush past earth. "He was religious, but he was not fanatically religious at all," said John Alexander, a collegemate of Applewhite. "Herrf wasn't weird or strange or anything like that. you just wonder what makes a person do such a radical change."

The only real theory was offered by his sister, Louise Winant, who said her brother had undergone a "near death" experience in the early 1970s, when he was hospitalised with a heart blockage. "One of the nurses told him he had a purpose, that God kept him alive," Winant said. "She sort of talked him into the fact that this was the purpose- to lead these people - and he took it from there." The nurse was Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles, who would become a companion to the then-divorced Applewhite and who would join him, soon afterward, on the first leg of his evangelical journey. He began calling himself Bo, to Nettles's Peep.

THE SECT owed its tenancy in the palatial estate to the financial troubles of the home's owner, Sam Koutchesfahani, an Iranian entrepreneur. For the last 10 months, according to his lawyer, Milton J. Silverman, Koutchesfahani has been cooperating with federal prosecutors and working as an informer in a bribery investigation of local college officials. Last year, he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and fraud charges after admitting that he took up to $350,000 from west Asian student over six years, ending in 1995.

He used the money to bribe instructors at three San Diego colleges into illegally enrolling the students in the schools and certifying them as residents of California. Koutchesfahani owed $150,000 in penalties arising from the case, and expected to sell the house to help pay them. His real estate agent's glossy brochure said "seller will entertain offers between $ 1.2 million and $ 1.6 million", yet the house drew no buyers-despite its tennis court, swimming pool, putting green, rose garden, elevator and citrus grove.

Last October, the group installed itself in the house, filing it with folding tables, computer equipment, metal bunk beds and cheap plastic lawn chairs arranged in semicircle in one large room that appeared to have been used for meetings. They paid the $7000 monthly rent in cash, eschewed Social Security numbers and banks. But the county medical examiner's office had a list with Social Security numbers for almost all of the group's members,and the manager of Postal Annex mail service where the group maintained a box said members had called four times a week before, frantic to know if a bank statement had arrived.

Detectives had not yet reviewed any bank or telephone records, or information contained on the computers, which will be analysed with the help of the FBI. The local authorities say that no crime appears to have been committed. Autopsies have shown that all victims died after ingesting lethal does of Phenobarbitol mixed with vodka, or of asphyxiation, with plastic bags around their heads or of a combination.

GAIL MAEDER loved animals, especially cats. She did not like to use too much paper because it meant killing trees. And she would have turned 27 this August if she had not joined what her parents called 'the UFO cult' and ended her life with 38 others. "We kept hoping that someday she would just appear at the front door and we could throw our arms around her and tell her how much we loved her," said her father Robert. The Maeder family, like dozens of others grieving families, is wondering what had beneath magnetic pull that led the cultmen to commit suicide.

When the authorities released the names of the victims at first glance they were a curious mix: Thomas Nichols, the brother of Nichelle Nichols, the woman who played St. Uhura on the original Star Trek; Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, 41, a veteran postal worker and mother of five; Jackie Leonard, a 72-year-old grandmother. But the common thread among them was the bafflement they caused their families. They often had left home suddenly. They were rarely in touch. They moved from place to place.

At first, Nancie Brown told herself that her son, David Geoffrey Moore, was just going through a phase, searching for himself under the auspices of a mysterious group. That was in 1975, when Moore, then a wiry 19-year-old with no immediate job prospects, dipped into one of the group's meetings in California, and told his mother soon afterwards that he as leaving with the cult. "He came and said, "Mom, I don't know if this is for me, but it's something I want to go check out'," recalled Nancie.

In the 22 years that followed, she saw her son only twice. Each time, she said, he seemed "calm, rational and quite happy." Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, on the other hand, seemed an odd candidate for reaching out towards intergalactic experiences. She had five children: twin girls who are still babies and three boys who range in age up to 19. She had attended a girls' Roman Catholic high school. She had a husband. She had friends. She had a steady job, sorting mail.

She was also a computer whiz who loved playing around on the Internet. It was there that she read about the group called Heaven's Gate. Last September, Yvonne and her husband, Steven Hill, abruptly left the children, bound for California and some curious new path. Steven quit the group but Yvonne stayed on, devoted to the wisdom of a computer-age cult and prepared to separate herself from her earthly body. Her family never understood. They still don't.

The suicidal sects

THE incident inevitably prompted comparisons to a series of recent mass suicides by members of a small, socially isolated religious group that have occurred close to the change of the seasons. The Order of the Solar Temple, an organisation with a belief that suicide can lead to reincarnation, emerged from obscurity with the mass deaths of 53 members in Switzerland and Canada in October 1994, shortly after the winter equinox.

A second round of suicides, this time claiming 16 lives, took place in a forest outside Grenoble, France, about the time of the winter solstice in 1995. And five people were found dead two weeks ago near Quebec City, Canada, in a burning house owned by members of the Solar Temple sect. This peculiar link between mass death and the natural rhythms of the solar year appear to have an echo in the bizarre deaths in Santa Fe. The discovery of the bodies came within a week of the first day of spring, on March 20.

However, one Canadian researcher who has studied the Solar Temple and other small religious groups doubts that the Santa Fe deaths were linked to Solar Temple. Group suicide have recurred with increasing frequency in the last 20 years. It claimed the lives of more than 900 people, most of them Americans, in November 1978 at Jonestown in Guyana, victims of a failed experiment in communal living under an authoritarian preacher. In April 1993, more than 75 people who had gathered around another charismatic figure, David Koresh, died when a fire swept through their fortified compound near Waco, Texas, in the midst of a violent confrontation with Federal agents.

Cults on the Internet

LIKE EVERY other group in society, religious cults have embraced the Internet, using it as a means to communicate among themselves and distribute their millennial messages. The Internet offers private instantaneous communications, and the World Wide Web has, in less then seven years, become the most powerful publishing system in the world. The Internet has already profoundly changed how both news and rumour is spread in society. In the San Diego case, the believers may have based the timing of their suicides on a rumour posted on the Internet that an alien spaceship was lurking behind comet Hale-Bopp.

Computer hackers have traditionally been known as social outcasts, loners and even libertarian. Nevertheless, the Internet has proven a powerful recruitment tool for cults, said Rick Ross, a cult expert. It allows them to cheaply disseminate information and to reach upper middle-class loners who may be more likely to own computers. "More sophisticated cults are looking for people who are in a high socio-economic bracket," he said.

A number of social scientists said the Internet represented a significant shift from the era of mass media. In a world where it is possible to tailor all the information you receive, it is increasingly possible to isolate yourself from opposing points of view. "You can select your own diet of information," said Barry Karr, executive director of the Sceptical Inquirer, which focuses on debunking paranormal claims. The magazine's current issue contains an article by astronomer Alan Hale that attempts to refute the claims that an alien spaceship is hiding behind the comet that he co-discovered. "The Internet aggravates the problem of what I call information pollution," said Ray Hyman, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. "Much of the stuff you find is nonsense, but because it comes off the computer it has the mark of being credible."

JOHN MARKOFF
in New York

Blame it on Hale-Bopp

WHENEVER the predictable clockwork of the heavens has been jarred by a comet hurtling unexpectedly through the sky, people throughout the ages have feared the unthinkable horrors would inevitably follow. When Halley's Comet made its appearance in 1910, a religious group in Oklahoma, known as the catastrophe. (They were stopped by the police.) Now, investigators suspects show a couple of weeks ago, prompted the simultaneous suicide in Sant Fe.

The Heaven's Gate cult-adept in the profitable craft of making Web pages-was in the clutches of a rumour that has reverberated through the Internet for months: that hiding behind Hale-Bopp is an extra-terrestrial spaceship ready to destroy the planet or to beam especially enlightened earthling aboard. Weird though it may sound, but comets were believed to have portended the birth and death of Julius Caesar, the fall of Jerusalem, the invasion of Gaul by Attila the Hun. When Halley's Comet appeared in the ninth century, Louis I, king of France an emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, was driven to build more churches - shelters against a will-armed and very angry God.

Sometimes the prophecies were self-fulfilling. Genghis Khan is said to have been so taken in by the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1222-he considered it his personal star- that he was inspired to sweep down from Mongolia and invade southeastern Europe, massacring millions. And in 1066 William the Conqueror, urged on by the visitation of Halley's - "a wonderful sign from heaven" - carried out the Norman Invasion. Even Kepler himself, whose equations so beautifully explained the motions of the planets, thought that comets were an exception to cosmic law, devilish visitor not bound by mere mathematics.

In the 20th century, astrophysicists have learned that comets are just exotic members of the solar system, orbiting the sin at so great a distance that their appearance, no matter how rhythmic, comes a surprise. But no amount of scientific explanation has completely quelled the irrational fears. For months Internet groups like al.conspiracy and sic.astro have rung with rumours about a UFO supposedly hiding behind Hale-Bopp. When astronomers posted correction to the comet's predicted trajectory, the new data were taken as proof that Hale -Bopp was changing course, that it was under intelligent control.

The rumour reached fever pitch when an amateur astronomer in Houston said that he had photographed an object, several times larger than earth, hovering behind Hale-Bopp. The mysterious presence turned out to be an ordinary star.

GEORGE JOHNSON
in New York

	April 13, 1997
HURRYING TO HEAVEN'S GATE For the 39 cult members who swallowed vodka and barbiturates, death was nothing to be feared.