Cult Members: The People Who Lived Next Door To You

RANCHO SANTA FE, Calif. - Heaven's Gate cult members told people they hailed from "Middle America," and by that they meant the middle-class heart of the country.

As details emerged of the 39 men and women who joyfully took their lives, believing death freed their souls to ascend to heaven aboard an alien spaceship, they sounded disturbingly like the people we all live next door to: an Iowa grandmother, an English teacher from Washington state, the son of a telephone-company executive from Connecticut, the daughter of an engineer from New York.

So seemingly normal, until a charismatic leader led them to renounce their families, their jobs, their possessions, even their sexuality.

A postal sorter from Ohio abandoned her children, including newborn twin daughters. An Idaho man walked out on his girlfriend, leaving his expensive stereo equipment and two cars. A daughter didn't return home to Nebraska to watch her father sworn in as a federal judge.

For months, sometimes even decades, families had virtually no contact with them. So as the coroner's grim calls went out Friday, the death notifications were often anticlimactic. The most recently that any of the relatives contacted by late Friday by San Diego County sheriff's deputies had heard from a cult member was two years ago. So relatives expressed little surprise.

If Heaven's Gate was a cult for the '90s, with members who made money by designing Web pages and who cast off expensive

high-technology equipment in yard sales as if it was so many old towels, it was also a cult that kept its members in tow through old-fashioned brainwashing.

Heaven's Gate had a long list of forbidden behaviors, designed to encourage acquiescence and group-think.

Most rules were calculated to erase individuality and encourage group identity. Cult members were advised not to do anything without being accompanied by a "check partner." It was an offense to "trust my own judgment or use my own mind." Likewise, "having my own likes and dislikes" and "having inappropriate curiosity" were taboo.

Reflecting cult leader Marshall Applewhite's obsession with damping all vestiges of sexuality, it was an offense to be "vain about my appearance, vibrating femininity or masculinity in any way."

But perhaps the ultimate, defining rule that discouraged any degree of critical thought by cult members was Offense No. 31: "Overexamination - finding a negative where there isn't one."

As in most cults, members were encouraged to sever all ties with their families and old friends.

Gail Renee Maeder, 28, had mailed letters and postcards to her parents back in Sag Harbor, N.Y. They bore no return address, so all contact had to be initiated by her.

"You are probably wondering exactly what I've decided to do with my life," she wrote them in late 1994. "Until recently nothing had ever been able to offer me any real motivation. I wanted & needed more. This is why I couldn't play the regular games of this society. I felt like I had outgrown it & I just didn't see the point of it."

Her mystified, concerned parents joined a support group of parents whose children had joined cults.

LaDonna Brugato's family was close to finding her when her body turned up among the suicide victims at the Heaven's Gate mansion, her father said yesterday.

"I did everything to find her," Joe Brugato said. "I personally and my family have been searching for her for three years, but always seemed to be one step behind her."

A private investigator hired by Brugato, a real-estate agent and father of nine in Newberg, Ore., finally had tracked her to an address - a private-mailbox company - in La Jolla, Calif., within 10 miles of the mass suicide.

LaDonna Brugato, 40, was working as a computer programmer in Colorado when she disappeared about three years ago.

"I want everybody who may see this to know that I have chosen to leave," said Gary Jordan St. Louis, 44, on a videotape he left his girlfriend in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, when he joined the cult in 1992. "I want to rejoin my heavenly father, and my classmates, the students of my heavenly father. . . . I'm really happy about this. . . . To walk away and begin doing some work for my real father means more to me than anything."

Some cult members clearly were disturbed, even lost, until they found a measure of salvation in the cult.

The mother of David Geoffrey Moore, 40, described her son as an emotional, angry teenager who had become involved with the cult when he attended a meeting in a Los Gatos, Calif., park in the mid-1970s. He had contacted his family only twice in the ensuing 21 years, Nancie Brown said.

Most relatives didn't even try to explain why a loved one had joined the cult. Their silence was telling. Lyle Strom, a retired U.S. district judge from Omaha, said he hadn't spoken with his daughter in a long time and didn't even know how long she had lived in California.

"One of their purposes was to separate themselves from family and friends and to be very private in what they did," said Nichelle Nichols on "Larry King Live." The "Star Trek" actress had a younger brother, Thomas, 59, who was among the dead.

Others' relatives sounded as if they had long ago resigned themselves to a bad ending.

Peggy Bull, 54, had joined the cult two decades ago after teaching English in Spain for a few years. She was last home, in Ellensburg, when her mother died three years ago. She told relatives she was living communally with people who were self-supporting, drove expensive cars, moved frequently and were celibate.

"I thought it was harmless," said her brother, John Bull. "But when we received a video from Peggy that had (the cult leader) declaring himself the Second Coming of Christ and that he intended to lead his flock to redemption, I got a real bad feeling."

Information from the Associated Press is included in this report.