Leaders Lived Life Of Nomads -- Odyssey Took Duo Around U.S.

Marshall Applewhite's journey to the fringe and beyond - which climaxed last week with the suicide of he and 38 of his Heaven's Gate followers - began in the early 1970s, when he was a music professor in Houston.

A charismatic man just entering his 40s, he taught at a conservative Catholic college. In private he used drugs with the neighborhood crowd. And although it was the height of the so-called sexual revolution, Applewhite found that his own sexuality brought only agony and guilt. He had been married with two kids, but had secret homosexual liaisons.

"Herff (Applewhite's middle name) always had a kind of struggle with sexual guilt," said Ray Hill, a friend and neighbor. "If Herff could cloak his sexual encounters with a spiritual ritual event, he would." After his divorce, Applewhite moved in with another man. There followed a period of "severe upheaval and personal confusion," in the words of a Heaven's Gate treatise written in 1988, apparently by Applewhite.

Applewhite had himself castrated. It was the most sexually revolutionary act anyone could imagine. Years later, some of his male followers would do the same. Applewhite's torment had been converted into a vaporous dogma, a belief that to rise to the Next Level, one had to give up any use of "reproductive organs."

In 1971, Applewhite met Bonnie Nettles, an astrologer and nurse. They felt like they had known each other all their lives, and decided that their acquaintance went back to previous incarnations. Nettles left her husband, Joseph Nettles, and their four children.

Applewhite and Nettles opened a New Age bookstore in Houston called the Christian Arts Center, but it quickly flopped.

They did not drink, smoke or have sex, but the old programming of their "vehicles" as they called them "had to be kept at bay like an annoying puppy," according to the 1988 memoir.

They gave away everything they owned except one thing: a sports car. For the next few years they bombed around the country in their convertible.

An erratic itinerary

Their precise itinerary in those years is unknown. At one point, they tried to start another business, this one a restaurant in Taos, N.M., called Sunshine Company. That venture failed and they were back on the road.

Then, while camping one day near Gold Beach, Ore., their "awakening" took a great leap. They became convinced they were the two witnesses mentioned in the Book of Revelation:

"And I will grant my two witnesses authority to prophesy for one thousand two hundred sixty days, wearing sackcloth."

Their theology was starting to come together, dazzling if somewhat incoherent. They came to believe UFOs were the key to salvation. Flying saucers were means of transportation to the Kingdom of Heaven. It would be via the spaceships that they would leave this planet behind. In the meantime, they had received a nice insurance check from an automobile accident. They kept driving.

"They seemed to just go where "the spirit' led, lacing the country up and down and from side to side as if they were being used as cameras and microphones for the Next Level," said the 1988 document.

They also ran into trouble with the law. In 1974, Applewhite and Nettles were thrown into the jail in Brownsville, Texas, charged with stealing a rental car and using stolen credit cards.

Applewhite got out after six months and with Nettles bought another used car and some camping gear.

In March 1975, camping in Ojai, north of Los Angeles, they issued their first statement, a jailhouse treatise written by Applewhite. It was all about caterpillars and butterflies, the metaphor for the human metamorphosis they envisioned for themselves.

"A member of the next kingdom finds favor with one who is willing to endure all of the necessary growing pains of weaning himself totally from his human condition."

In the psychic confusion of the '70s, Applewhite and Nettles - now calling themselves "Bo" and "Peep," or just "The Two" - were able to convince scores of educated, middle-class people that there was a spaceship in their future.

They met with 100 people in Hollywood, and began holding what they called "classrooms" in places like their old campground near Gold Beach.

A 17-step process

They offered potential followers a 17-step process of personal transformation. Examples:

"1. Can you follow instructions without adding your own interpretation?"

"8. Do you use more of something than is adequate (for example, excessively high cooking flame, more toothpaste than necessary, etc.)?"

"11. Do you needlessly ask a question when the answer is obvious or a moment of silent observation would quickly reveal the answer?"

The cult grew quickly and became a road show, a "traveling asylum," as former member Todd Berger told a reporter at the time. At its peak in the mid-1970s, there were about 200 members.

Group activities were few. They worried when their relationships became "too human." They traveled in pairs with each member responsible for monitoring the asexuality of the other.

"We constantly changed partners. Maybe every six weeks. And just about the time you had worked through all the personality quirks with the person you were partnered with, they'd switch you to that person you hoped you'd never really be partners with," said Dick Joslyn of Tampa, a member of the cult for 15 years.

Then, in April 1976 at a meeting in Kansas, Nettles announced that the "Harvest" was over and no new members would be accepted. From there the cult moved to Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming to camp for the summer. Dissension erupted. Bo and Peep cracked down on drug use and sex, telling their followers to get serious about the group's guidelines. Many members drifted away.

Around this time, the UFO cult vanished from America's radar. Someone in the cult inherited a large sum of money and the core of the group moved to a rented house in suburban Denver.

Bo and Peep became "Do" (pronounced Doe) and "Ti," respectively. The new names were from the end of the musical scale - a reminder of Applewhite's profession. The cult meanwhile reveled in the movies "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

In 1981, with Nettles and his followers, Applewhite opened a spiritual center on Houston's Lovett Boulevard. There, Applewhite talked about the next life and the promise of outer space with anyone who wandered in.

In 1985 the Two became One when Nettles died of cancer.

The cult dwindled to a few dozen members. The doctrines evolved. After watching the movie "Cocoon" the members of the group thought they might be picked up by aliens if they could get themselves a boat. So they moved to Galveston and bought a used houseboat and spent thousands of dollars making it seaworthy. The aliens didn't come.

"I finally left because I felt I had to break the isolation, be my own person," Joslyn said. "I saw Do cracking under the strain of being without Ti."

The cult began to reemerge in 1992. It produced and sold a video, "Beyond Human." In 1993 it put a one-third-page advertisement in USA Today, titled "UFO CULT Resurfaces With Final Offer."

For several years, until last summer, Heaven's Gate members camped high in the New Mexico mountains above the plains southeast of Albuquerque. Cult members had plans to build a dormitory-style building, an infirmary, a bakery, and a nursery. The land was owned by a cult member, David Cabot Van Sinderen, son of the former chairman of South New England Telephone, Alfred White Van Sinderen.

Patsy Gustin, who rented office space to the cult members in 1995, said they ran a business called "Computer Nomads." Every day, the members' van would arrive at the office at precisely 8 a.m. and leave at 5. In between, about 10 members would sit at their computer terminals working, apparently without a break.

The perfect tool

The rise of the Internet gave the isolated group the perfect recruitment tool. Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, a science-fiction buff, encountered the group on the World Wide Web. She joined up and left behind five children.

The cult began touring the country again, talking at colleges and public libraries. In Minneapolis, about 100 people showed up for a 1994 talk. The cultists dressed identically in collarless shirts. They had buzz cuts. Twin Cities Reader reporter Sari Gordon remembers that one person in the audience asked if aliens had genders. No, said the cultists.

Last summer, the group moved to San Diego County. It rented a house that looked a little bit like a spaceship. In October, the cult moved again to the mansion in Rancho Santa Fe. They ran a business making computer Web sites.

The Internet, meanwhile, buzzed with news that a UFO or "companion object" had been detected in the shadow of comet Hale-Bopp.

At about 2 p.m. on March 21, all 39 members of the group walked into Marie Callender's Restaurant in Carlsbad, about 15 miles from Rancho Santa Fe. They ordered the same meal: turkey pot pie, ice tea and cheesecake with blueberries, according to David Riley, a waiter who served them.

The restaurant staff was amused by these strangely identical people. But the diners were polite. At the end of their main course, they methodically stacked their dishes.

The next day Hale-Bopp made its closest approach to the Earth. The suicides began. It took three days, in shifts.

No spaceship came. No one rose from the dead. The coroner's office said the bodies will be shipped out tomorrow, sent across America one more time, back to their families.

----------------------- Some victims identified -----------------------

Names of dead whose families have been notified. Names are arranged according to the state listed on their identification documents. Names of cities were provided by the San Diego County Medical Examiner and other sources:

Arizona:

Nancy Dianne Nelson, 45, Mesa.

Thomas Alva Nichols, 59.

California:

Lawrence Jackson Gale, 47, Lake Forest.

Margaret Ella Richter, 46.

Erika Ernst, 40.

David Geoffery Moore, 41, Los Gatos.

David Cabot Van Sinderen, 48.

Colorado:

Dana Tracey Abreo, 35, (female) Denver.

Ladonna Ann Brugato, 40, Englewood, formerly of Oregon.

Jacqueline Opal Leonard, 71, Littleton.

Michael Sandoe, 26, Boulder.

Florida:

Raymond Alan Bowers, 45, Jupiter.

New Mexico:

Suzanne Sylvia Cooke, 54.

John M. Craig (aka Logan Lahson), 63.

Julie Lamontagne, 45, Las Cruces.

Steven Terry McCarter, 41, Albuquerque.

Susan Elizabeth Nora Paup, 54.

Brian Alan Schaaf, 40.

Joyce Angela Skalla, 58.

Gary Jordan St. Louis, 44.

Ohio

Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, 39.

Texas

Marshall Herff Applewhite, 65.

Robert John Arancio, 46.

Cheryl Elaine Butcher, 43.

Michael Howard Carrier, 48.

Betty Eldrie Deal, 64.

Jeffrey Howard Lewis, 41.

Norma Jeane Nelson, 59.

Judith Ann Rowland, 50.

Susan Frances Strom, 44.

Denise June Thurman, 44.

Utah

Darwin Lee Johnson, 42, Orem.

Gail Renee Maeder, 28, Salt Lake City.

Joel Peter McCormick, 29, Salt Lake City.

Washington

Margaret June Bull, 54, Ellensburg.

Descriptions of those whose names have not been released:

Male, 50, Arizona license, born in New York, passport issued in Los Angeles.

Female, 63, Albuquerque, N.M.

Male, 44, Minnesota, born in Michigan, passport issued in Los Angeles.

Female, 41, license unknown, born in Texas, passport issued in Seattle.

Relatives seeking information can contact 800-600-0646.