From the ‘70s, an Eerie Portent of Things to Come

The quiet, tragic end of 39 lives inside a palatial home in Rancho Santa Fe this week may have had its roots in a chance meeting more than 20 years ago of two disaffected people--one a nurse and the other her patient in a Texas hospital.

The two were Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles and Marshall Herff Applewhite, who, according to experts and a videotaped history produced by the Heaven’s Gate cult, has more recently been known as “Do” (pronounced Doe), the cult’s charismatic leader.

The 1972 meeting of the former college music professor and opera singer and the nurse and mother of four set off a protracted odyssey across America that from the outset seemed destined to end sadly.

“There is the danger of suicide for the followers. They are suicidal anyway, having already killed off their lives as they have known them,” one of the pair’s first followers warned after severing ties in 1975. “It is obvious these people are on an ego trip. They have set themselves up to be something important.”

As they hopscotched the countryside, frequently focusing their attention on Southern California, Applewhite and Nettles became Bo and Peep, the Pied Pipers of Space, Winnie and Pooh, Chip and Dale, or simply The Two. In the early and mid-1970s, Applewhite and Nettles were among America’s best-known devotees of UFOs, gathering around them a coterie of disciples who often sold their belongings, left their families and abandoned their lives in the hopes of being taken up into space.

Then, just as suddenly as they had arrived, The Two seemed to disappear.

But early in the 1990s, they appear to have resurfaced, with Applewhite proclaiming that he was now Do, and that he and his followers were presenting humanity a “final offer” before Earth was “recycled.”

While Do never flatly said that he and Applewhite were one and the same, the description Do offered of his own life on his group’s Web site and in publications meticulously match the known details of Applewhite’s life. And those who knew Applewhite well in the past say they have no doubt about the identity of the suicide cult’s leader.

“The man on the tape is Marshall Applewhite . . . I recognize him,” said J. Gordon Melton, head of the Institute for the Study of American Religions and an authority on alternative religions. Melton, who had frequently crossed paths with Applewhite and Nettles during the 1970s, received a videotape from the Rancho Santa Fe group in October, which he did not get around to viewing until after the suicides.

With the fervor of an evangelist, Applewhite traveled the country in the 1970s, preaching about strange new worlds and transformed lives and inviting seekers who were willing to give up their possessions and security to join what was often called HIM, or Human Individual Metamorphosis.

The group’s posters said they were neither a religious nor philosophical group. But their fascination with space and worlds beyond was apparent from the start. And they claimed that a flying saucer was going to pick them up and carry them off.

After a flurry of activity, the cult sank out of the headlines in the mid-1970s.

Robert Balch, a University of Montana sociology professor who infiltrated the group for two months in 1975, said the group kept a low profile for many years before reemerging about 1994. The cult’s Web site history describes this period of inactivity: “The Two then took the ones who followed them into seclusion, completely separate from the world for almost 17 years. . . .”

“Some of them came through Missoula and they told me they had just resumed recruiting after a long break and they were down to two dozen members” from an earlier high of a couple of hundred, Balch said Thursday. “They had decided to go back on the road.”

In the interim, Nettles died of liver cancer, but Applewhite declared that she had ascended into the Kingdom of Heaven under the name Ti (pronounced Tee), where she became a deity called Father or Older Member.

In its latest incarnation as Heaven’s Gate, the organization had taken on a slightly different ideology, positioning itself as the true inheritor of the Christian tradition and offering to lead followers to heaven, although still by a spaceship, whose arrival they believe was connected to the arrival of the comet Hale-Bopp.

While the group timed its cataclysmic departure with the arrival of Hale-Bopp, it had been founded around the time that another renowned comet, Kahoutek, had preoccupied much of the public consciousness in 1973.

The group’s early acolytes were sometimes sent off in unlikely pairs--an 18-year-old teamed with a 70-year-old, for instance--and given $25 for two weeks’ expenses, The Times found in a 1975 report on the group.

The group was then sometimes known as HIM. The message from the disciples was the same--an eerie portent of those found this week on the Internet.

“Something is happening in the deep heavens,” the group told a Santa Fe audience in 1976, according to the Santa Fe Reporter. “Light is coming to this planet. An opportunity is offered to humans. Those ready can graduate from this garden. You must leave behind loved ones, security, possessions. This time is known as the harvest.”

One of the group’s biggest early successes came in October 1975 in Walport, Ore., when more than 20 townspeople joined up, some reportedly leaving children behind. They camped in Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma that year. Applewhite combined strokes, assuring members they were superior to ordinary humans, and fear--”telling us the spirit entities would kill or maim or harm our friends and loved ones if we didn’t go along,” one lapsed recruit said at the time.

Such tactics soon had the pair under investigation by various law enforcement agencies, after complaints by many families complained of relatives recruited by HIM. But the group moved frequently--often recruiting on college campuses in the West--and there are no accounts of any of its members suffering criminal convictions for recruiting activities.

The cult and its followers insisted, however, that their motivations were pure. The leader Do said this integrity of his cause was exemplified by his relationship with his beloved Ti, the one-time nurse.

“The only relationship they shared, certainly having no physical attraction toward each other, was the compulsion to discover what had brought them together and what might be their purpose,” their 1988 manifesto said.