Cultist From Ellensburg: Intelligent, High Ideals

ELLENSBURG - The photographs of Margaret "Peggy" Bull in her high school and University of Washington yearbooks are remarkably similar - softly styled hair, porcelain skin and a calm and gentle face staring at the camera.

That Peggy Bull - kind, friendly, nice, intelligent - is the one her relatives, classmates and friends from Eastern Washington remember.

Yesterday, in home, at work, even at local restaurants here, people were trying to comprehend how Bull traveled the long road from this small farming town to a mass cult suicide in the posh Southern California suburb of Rancho Santa Fe.

"It's really, really sad," said Doreen Chamness, a classmate at Ellensburg High School. "She was an extremely intelligent girl and very kind. It's really sad because she had so much to offer and it's been taken away from us."

Like many of Bull's classmates and friends, Chamness had not seen Bull since high school. While planning a class reunion years ago, Chamness learned that Bull had joined a cult. Other classmates had learned the direction Bull had chosen from her family.

Bull, who was 54, had last returned to Ellensburg in 1993.

Bull "was the closest thing to a sister" Jake Kilpatrick ever had. Even for cousins, the two were extremely close, he recalled yesterday.

His voice catching with sobs, Kilpatrick recalled that "when Peg came back home in '93, my wife and I drove right over to the farm near Ellensburg to pick her up."

She stayed with the Kilpatricks for three days in their home northwest of Colville, Stevens County.

"She was just very much into being present in the moment," Kilpatrick recalled. "That was very important to her. She had very high ideals and put freedom above love.

"To her, freedom was the ability to know more dimensions than the world we are in," he remembered. "Eating correctly, not just with the taste buds, was very important to Peg, and we talked a lot about what food had to do with enlightenment."

That contact was only the second of any length in almost 20 years between Bull and Kilpatrick.

Kilpatrick, his mother and brother lived for 18 months in the early 1960s with the Bull family on their farm outside of Ellensburg.

"There was no time that I didn't like Peg. She probably is one of those people unable to live within a system. That is too confining to allow for the human spirit to go where it needs to go," Kilpatrick said.

When Bull joined the Heaven's Gate group in Texarkana, Texas, in 1974, "it was very hard on her parents. They didn't talk about it much but I am sure they thought her mind was controlled by the group. But I never saw an indication of that."

Bull grew up in a farmhouse on Kittitas Highway on the outskirts of Ellensburg. Here, in a wide valley embraced by hills, horse trails are as wide as the streets and the horses are almost as abundant as automobiles.

She was a member of the "Wranglerettes," a girls riding drill team that performed in turquois-and-white costumes riding sorrel horses, said Gwen Sorenson, another member of the riding group.

Bull was selected an Ellensburg Rodeo princess in 1962 - chosen by judges for her riding and speaking abilities.

Her high-school classmates remember Bull as being studious. She belonged to a club called the Gadflys, in which members focused on literature and philosophy.

"Everyone would be envious," Chamness said. "It was like she had a photographic memory."

The leap from 4-H Club and high-school pep squad to mass suicide is still shocking in a town where news travels faster than the biting valley wind.

"I was surprised because she just didn't seem like that kind of person," Sorenson said.

After graduating from high school in 1962, Bull attended the University of Washington. According to UW records, Bull graduated in 1966 with a bachelor of arts degree in English.

UW English instructor Roger Sale taught Bull in a junior Shakespeare class.

"She was one of those students who had never learned they had to learn things in a certain way," he said. "She was very intelligent and very refreshing."

Sale recalled that Bull appeared at a Halloween costume party that year as Alice in Wonderland.

After graduation Bull spent time in Spain, said Carolyn Sorenson, a childhood friend and no relation to Gwen Sorenson.

Bull still has family in Ellensburg, but they declined to speak to the media. Her death came only a few weeks after the death of her father, Jack Bull.

It was not clear if her body would be brought back to Ellensburg.

As the news sinks into Ellensburg, those who knew Bull reached back 35 years to remember her - down to earth, smart, though a bit of a loner. But after that, there is little more than speculation.

"I didn't know her religious philosophy," Chamness said. "Maybe for her, it (the cult) was something she needed and filled that void in her life."

Information from Seattle Times staff reporter Marsha King is included in this report.