Twenty-two years ago today I was living in Kingston, Ontario and driving along Peterborough County Road 2, just outside of Hastings, when I learned of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide on the car radio. It was a Wednesday. The suicides took three days, in shifts.
Members of Heaven’s Gate took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce and washed it all down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. Authorities found the dead lying neatly in their own bunk beds, faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth. Each member carried a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of actress Nichelle Nichols, best known for her role as Uhura in the original Star Trek television series.
Heaven’s Gate was an American UFO religious millenarian celibate cult based in San Diego, founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles. Applewhite also wrote under his cult moniker “Do.” Nettles was known as “Peep.” Later they became known as “Do” (pronounced Doe) and “Ti” respectively, from the end of the musical scale.
On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group, who had participated in the mass suicide in nearby Rancho Santa Fe, California, in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp, as it approached Earth. They believed an alien spaceship hiding in the tail of a speeding comet was coming to collect their souls.
A tragically surreal moment in the now almost forgotten and often surreal years of the late 1990s, leading to the end of a millennium and the Year 2000.
Applewhite’s theology was based in part on the notion he and Nettles were the “two witnesses” spoken of by John of Patmos, also known as the John the Revelator, in his apocalyptic Book of Revelation (11:3-12); two witnesses who are killed, but stay dead for only 3½ days and then are taken up to heaven in a cloud. While Biblical scholars are not certain of their identity, many believe the two unknown witnesses are either Moses and Elijah or Enoch and Elijah. One of my favourite scenes from the 2002 movie, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, shows the fire-breathing two witnesses at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, as rabbinical scholar Tsion Ben-Judah and journalist Buck Williams cross the militarized no-man’s land during the Tribulation to meet them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SJipNpSFnQ&feature=share)
At their final celebratory meal at Marie Callender’s Restaurant in Carlsbad, about 15 miles from Rancho Santa Fe. the weekend before they committed suicide, eating 39 identical turkey pot pies, ice tea and cheesecake with blueberries, waiter David Riley asked where they were from,” Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher wrote in the Washington Post a few days later in a story headlined, “The cult that left as it lived,” published on March 30, 1997.
The answer they gave the waiter as to where they came from? “From the car,” one replied.
Applewhite’s journey to the edge of the zeitgeist and beyond began in the early 1970s, first when he was a music professor in Houston, teaching at the University of St. Thomas, a conservative Catholic college. In 1970, he was fired from his post after administrators there learned that Applewhite was in a relationship with a male student, according to local news accounts. The University of St. Thomas called the reason for the firing “health problems of an emotional nature.” Applewhite would wind up having himself castrated.
Nettles, who died in 1985, was an astrologer and, according to several academic studies of the group, had dabbled in numerous metaphysical theologies, combining Christian ritual with elements of paganism, science fiction and millennialism. Applewhite, who died in the Rancho Santa Fe mass suicide in 1997, was 66.
Born in Spur, Texas., Applewhite attended Austin College, a Presbyterian-affiliated school in Sherman, Texas., then studied music at the University of Colorado, where he played the lead in both South Pacific and Oklahoma. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he directed choruses at First Presbyterian Church in Gastonia, North Carolina, and later St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and at First Unitarian Church of Houston, before joining the faculty of the University of St. Thomas in 1966.
There are believed to be four surviving members of Heaven’s Gate. Two of the surviving members still maintain the group’s website, making sure the hosting bills are paid annually and the domain name continues to be actively registered, although the Heaven’s Gate website has not been altered since the 1997 mass suicide. The two do not identify themselves in interviews, but they are believed to be Mark and Sarah King, a couple in their sixties, from Phoenix, Arizona, who left other cult members in the late 1980s and set up a company called the TELAH Foundation, which stands for The Evolutionary Level Above Human.
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