Cultists’ Final Hours Before Death Revealed : Religion: Adults, children were shot, set afire by 2 other members in grisly ritual, investigators say.

A team of French investigators concluded Wednesday that two of 16 cult members found dead in the Alps last weekend “methodically” shot and killed the other adults and three children before setting fire to the bodies and turning the guns on themselves.

The revelations, following autopsies completed Wednesday by authorities in Grenoble, painted a detailed and gruesome portrait of the final hours of the members of the mysterious Order of the Solar Temple, 69 of whom have been killed or committed suicide in Switzerland, Canada and France in the past 15 months.

Jean-Francois Lorans, the Grenoble prosecutor in charge of the case, said he still has not excluded the possibility of “acts of complicity” by others outside the group. But he said the list of cult members reported missing before the discovery of the bodies appears to match the identities of the dead. And no arrest warrants have been issued.

Investigators said the group, half of whom were Swiss and the remainder French, arrived in four cars at the edge of a forest near the village of St.-Pierre-de-Cherennes in eastern France between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. on Dec. 17. They based that estimate on timed and dated receipts from a French toll road found inside the cars.

Among the sect members were Jean-Pierre Lardanchet, 36, a French border policeman, who was joined by his wife and their two children, ages 2 and 4. Lorans said Lardanchet and an unidentified Swiss man had shot the others. The victims also included Edith and Patrick Vuarnet, the wife and a son of French Olympic ski champion Jean Vuarnet, two architects and a homeopathic nurse.

The bodies were found in a clearing in the forest about a mile from the cars. Fourteen of the 16 were found on their backs, in a star formation, with their feet facing a fire. The sect members had taken sleeping pills and were probably unconscious when they were killed, according to forensic scientists who did the autopsies.

Eleven of the 13 adults were shot in the head with a .22-caliber rifle, apparently by Lardanchet or the Swiss man, whose bodies were found nearby, outside the circle of bodies. Of two such rifles found at the scene, one was licensed to Lardanchet. The other rifle belonged to another sect member, also a policeman, who was among the dead.

Lardanchet’s two children and another child, the 6-year-old daughter of Patrick Vuarnet’s Swiss girlfriend, were shot in the forehead with one of the rifles as well.

The two men then poured paint thinner over the other bodies and set them on fire, investigators said. Many had plastic trash bags tied around their heads.

The two presumed killers each were shot in the head with .357 magnum pistols, which were found near their outstretched right hands, suggesting suicide, the authorities said. Those pistols were licensed to the two police officers.

Lardanchet was among 400 people questioned and released after the October 1994 suicide-murder of 53 adults and children following similar rituals in Switzerland and Canada. He had been spotted near the farmhouse in Salvan, Switzerland, where people died from gunshot wounds or asphyxiation and were then arranged in a star formation around an altar.

At the time, Lardanchet denied being a member of the cult, Swiss police say, although he admitted knowing some of its adherents. He was released without charge. Also questioned last year was Patrick Vuarnet, who mailed suicide notes written by the sect members who died in Switzerland.

Jacques Barillon, a Swiss attorney representing some families of the dead, criticized Swiss police Wednesday for failing to prevent the murder-suicide. Members of the temple met often in an apartment near Geneva, authorities have said. Several weeks ago, Swiss police warned some temple members’ families that the group was still operating. But, citing laws allowing freedom of religion in Switzerland, they declined to intervene.

Barillon, who last year founded an association to defend victims of the cult, said two of his new clients, the parents of the homeopathic nurse found among the dead last weekend, will soon file a criminal murder complaint with French authorities.

“These people have reasons to believe in complete seriousness that their daughter was killed,” Barillon said, although he added that the complaint will not try to name a culprit.

Although the two main leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple died in the rituals last year, cult experts say the ideology was kept alive by their followers, some of whom were disappointed to have been left out of the original mass deaths.

Many of the sect members who have died came from the upper levels of society. Some were wealthy and highly educated, and most were respected members of the community. Colleagues of Lardanchet, the border policeman, for example, described him as an exemplary officer.

Experts have said the group’s members believe that they will be reunited in an afterlife and that the star formation symbolizes their desire to die in the shape of the sun, purified by fire.