Lives on the Fringe

Befitting the space alien he claimed to be, Marshall Applewhite never really succeeded here on Earth, never made the desired inroads in human society.

His message was aimed at the fringe, but it seemed a bit too far out for most, almost a caricature of wacky California thought. A redeemer descended from the “Next Level,” he was locked in decades of spiritual war with rival space aliens. His opponents--fallen souls aligned with Satan--were burrowing in underground bases, controlling the world’s religions and deploying vast wealth to dupe humanity into subservience.

Applewhite had the answer, and the answer was Applewhite: 65. Gray-haired. Castrated. A smooth talker. A man who touted his severe doctrines as the one true path to heaven.

But it was a tough sell, as one follower described before the whole operation folded, before Applewhite and 38 members of his Heaven’s Gate cult poisoned themselves in one of America’s worst mass suicides--their way to board a spaceship to the stars.

“How do we present the information in a credible fashion, when to most [people] our truth is definitely stranger than fiction?” the recruit known as Jwnody asked in a treatise that Heaven’s Gate posted on the Internet. “How do we avoid being seen as religious, in order not to ‘turn off’ those who rightfully despise the hypocrisy of what religions have become?

“At the same time, how do we acknowledge our past associations with this civilization, which are primarily recorded in your Bible, so as to offer those who are waiting for prophecy to be fulfilled enough clues to put it together?”

In the end, they never did get it together--at least not by any earthly standard. The 39 decomposing bodies discovered Wednesday in a Spanish-style mansion in the north San Diego County community of Rancho Santa Fe appeared to be nearly all of Applewhite’s following, the gleanings of 22 years of work.

That work is a tale of the disaffected--a sad, bizarre odyssey framed in time by two comets and climaxed by a symbolic last supper at a Marie Callender’s restaurant. It is littered with the black-clad, Nike-wearing dead, a disparate cast of believers who went to the trouble of preparing for their interstellar journey by packing travel kits.

Heaven’s Gate was the brainchild of a sexually troubled former opera singer, Applewhite, and Bonnie Lu Nettles, a small-town Texas nurse. Nettles, who practiced astrology with the purported help of a dead Franciscan monk, embarked on her own celestial travels when she died of liver cancer in 1985.

The pair got their start together under the Comet Kahoutek, dubbing themselves “Bo” and “Peep,” nomadic shepherds roaming the Southwest in search of lost sheep. Later they would adopt new monikers, “Do” and “Ti”--as in notes on a scale, an apparent nod to Applewhite’s musical background--as they toiled in their erratic promotional efforts to attract a following.

Long after Nettles’ death, the remaining members of the cult ended their sojourn under the Comet Hale-Bopp. Those found dead in the seven-bedroom, $1.6-million estate that the cult had rented were a relatively unhomogeneous group: 21 women and 17 men, besides Applewhite. Their ages ranged from 26 to 72 and most hailed from open-sky regions where UFO watching is a pastime--New Mexico, Texas, Colorado. Five were from California. Many had been out of touch for years, no word to families and relatives.

A case in point was David Geoffery Moore, 41, of Los Gatos, near San Jose, who disappeared into the cult 21 years ago. His mother, Nancie Brown, told a reporter that he had been a poor student and a sometimes-angry teenager when he first attended a meeting of the cult, near San Francisco, in the mid-1970s. Then he vanished, except for occasional phone calls and Christmas cards.

Jacqueline Opal Leonard was another. At 72, she was the oldest, a woman from Des Moines who raised a son and two daughters before moving to Colorado in the early ‘70s. She met cult members there and abandoned the world she knew.

It is telling that the devotees were known to be avid fans of the TV series “Star Trek.” One among them, Thomas Alva Nichols, 59, was the younger brother of actress Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on the show. This week, she appeared on “Larry King Live” talking about how Nichols had disappeared for 20 years--until recently, when he resurfaced to seek advice on getting publicity for the group.

The cult’s recruiting struggles continued to the end. In 1995, after a cycle of alternately reaching out and withdrawing into seclusion, Heaven’s Gate went online, using the Internet to carry out what it called its sixth public interaction. Statements promulgating Applewhite and his theology were posted in cyberspace, the first under the headline “Undercover ‘Jesus’ surfaces before departure,” and a second, a month later, under the banner, “ ’95 statement by an ET presently incarnate.”

“The response,” as one Heaven’s Gate member acknowledged on the group’s World Wide Web site, “was extremely animated and somewhat mixed. . . . The loudest voices were those expressing ridicule, hostility or both--so quick to judge that which they could not comprehend.

“This was a signal to us to begin our preparations to return ‘home.’ The weeds have taken over the garden and truly disturbed its usefulness beyond repair. It is time for the civilization to be recycled--’spaded under.’ ”

A Background of Religion

Marshall Herff Applewhite was born into religion, the son of a barnstorming Presbyterian preacher who roamed the wide open spaces of Texas, gathering the faithful and establishing churches. Marshall Applewhite Sr. left as his legacy a string of modest tabernacles scattered across the Lone Star State--in small west Texas towns such as Sweetwater and Roscoe, as well as in bigger cities such as San Antonio and Corpus Christi.

“We lived like gypsies,” said Louise Winant, now 69, the eldest of the four Applewhite children, who still resides in Texas.

The father was a “terribly authoritative” man, one former family friend told an Arkansas newspaper. “He always had the answer in two seconds to everybody’s problem,” the woman said. “They loved him, but they were afraid of him. I worried about that child.”

Winant’s brother’s itinerant style would come to resemble their father’s, but “Herff,” as the future cult leader was known, only flirted with the ministry in those early years. His real love was music. Contemporaries recalled him as a strapping, gregarious young man with a wonderful baritone. He earned a music degree at the University of Colorado and appeared in the likes of “Oklahoma” and “Annie Get Your Gun.”

In 1966, Applewhite joined the music faculty at Houston’s University of St. Thomas, a Catholic school run by Basilian Fathers. He soon became a respected figure in the Houston opera scene, twice sharing the stage with a young Placido Domingo in productions of “Carmen” and “Faust.” Opera fliers noted performances with the Houston Symphony, the Corpus Christi Symphony and the J.S. Bach Society.

“[Applewhite] was one of the better baritones, if not the best around, at the time,” said Charles Rosekrans, a former stage and chorus director for the Houston Opera. “I wouldn’t say he was destined to be a world-class singer, but we felt lucky to have him in town.”

Notwithstanding, Applewhite was troubled. Faculty members at St. Thomas whispered questions about his sexuality, noting his apparent disinterest in women. Much later, in 1975, Robert Balch, a cult expert and sociology professor at the University of Montana, would infiltrate Applewhite’s newly formed cult and chronicle his wrenching identity crisis in an anthology titled “The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds.”

Applewhite became involved in a series of homosexual affairs, even though he was married and the father of two, Balch wrote. The trysts caused him great guilt. He ended up leaving St. Thomas school in 1970 amid a scandal never fully publicized. According to Balch’s published account, his dismissal resulted from a relationship with a student.

“Herff was devastated,” Balch wrote. “Friends described him as bitter, confused and deeply depressed. Not long afterward, he reportedly began hearing voices, which only added to his confusion.”

Father Patrick O. Braden, a physicist and president of the university from 1967 to 1979, disputed Balch’s account in an interview Saturday, saying he never fired Applewhite and never knew of any affair. Rather, Braden said, Applewhite agreed to leave after his mental health appeared to deteriorate inexplicably.

“It’s very difficult for me, not being a psychologist or psychiatrist, to know the terminology, but he was just not behaving entirely rationally,” Braden said. “You can tell if a person doesn’t have it all together. He wasn’t entirely of this world, shall we say.”

There would be other crises, but Applewhite’s departure from St. Thomas appeared to be monumental, the point at which he touched the spinning wheel of fate and shot out in a new direction.

Health problems followed. His sister Winant said a heart blockage--a “near-death experience”--resulted in his admission to a hospital. Enter nurse Bonnie Lu Nettles, the wide-eyed, dark-haired woman who would become his platonic soul mate.

“I felt I had known her forever,” Applewhite later told an interviewer.

Nettles could explain that feeling: “We have known each other in previous lives.”

At Last, a Soul Mate

A 1948 graduate of Houston’s Hermann Hospital School of Professional Nursing, Nettles was interested in far more than just the physical body. She was concerned with the soul, the light within. She professed to practice astrology with the guidance of Brother Francis, a Franciscan monk from Greece who died in 1818.

“He stands beside me when I interpret the charts,” Nettles told the Houston Post in the early 1970s. “There can be several meanings to them, and if I’m wrong, he will correct me.”

Applewhite spoke of seeing the monk’s presence--shown in a transformation of Nettles’ face--and acknowledged that it sounded wild.

“We are aware . . . that some people will think we are crackpots,” he told the Post.

Nettles exercised strong influence over Applewhite. Winant distrusted her and tried to steer her brother away from the nurse, selecting Bible passages for him to read that seemed “completely against” his budding mystical beliefs.

“But he just didn’t see it. I have no idea of anything that any of us could have done to stop it.”

Though the spiritual message they soon began preaching was never malicious, Winant said, she was left to wonder whether her brother might have suffered brain damage during his heart blockage.

“He was never quite the same after that.”

Applewhite’s father died in 1971. Herff talked later about seeing his spirit. Increasingly, he and Nettles lost interest in their worldly pursuits.

In an Internet posting a quarter-century later, Applewhite would describe what had occurred: The arrival of “two individuals” from the Kingdom of Heaven who had “incarnated into (moved into and took over) two human bodies that were in their 40s. I moved into a male body and . . . [Nettles] took a female body.”

The bodies--”vehicles” for their work on Earth--had been “tagged and set aside for us since their birth,” Applewhite wrote. “We brought to Earth with us a crew of students whom we had worked with (nurtured) on Earth in previous missions. They were in varying stages of metamorphic transition from membership in the human kingdom to membership in the physical Evolutionary Level Above Human (what your history refers to as the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven).

“It seems that we arrived in Earth’s atmosphere between Earth’s 1940s and early 1990s. We suspect that many of us arrived in staged spacecraft (UFO) crashes, and many of our discarded bodies (genderless, not belonging to the human species), were retrieved by human authorities (government and military).”

The Search for Followers

Having thus landed, Applewhite and Nettles began, in the early 1970s, to look around. They went first to the Texas hill country and then took off in a “little sports car convertible” to follow their spirits and a series of odd jobs--from carving crosses in Las Vegas to digging septic tanks along the Rogue River in Oregon, according to the group’s own Internet-published story.

It was at the Rogue that the two had an epiphany--that they were the two witnesses cited in the Book of Revelations. They believed they would be assassinated and lie in the street for 3 1/2 days before rising again in a cloud--or a spacecraft.

The full nature of their identities and purpose on the planet was revealed to them only slowly, as the cult also explained on its Web site: “The Next Level does not always let us in on the overview of their strategy. ‘Next steps,’ timetables and even conceptual understandings are given to us only on a ‘need to know’ basis,” the member Jwnody said.

At times this proved “extremely frustrating” for Heaven’s Gate leaders because they “were not permitted to access the mind/knowledge and even the memories that were previously their own (in the Next Level), but which were not a compatible match with their temporary human condition and current task assignment.”

“The irony here is that they were likely the ones who, before coming into these bodies, designed these ‘limitations’ into their task--so they had only themselves to blame. This is a bit of what we would call Next Level humor.”

The purpose of the limitations was not revealed, but the official account is that Applewhite and Nettles did not welcome their messianic role--it was thrust upon them.

There were rocky times. An early follower donated credit cards. After they turned out to be stolen, Applewhite spent four months in jail. A judge ordered a psychiatric exam, a review that Applewhite said he passed, but which caused him sufficient trauma to swing him further from the mainstream.

“Not a 24-hour period slipped by that he didn’t question his own sanity,” the group’s history recounts. The feeling was: “Now they couldn’t turn back.”

What followed were far-flung travels, barnstorming tours similar to his own father’s. One of the first stops was Los Angeles. The two drew 80 people for a two-hour session at a large tract house in Studio City. The event’s hostess, a former advertising employee named Joan Culpepper, now a grandmother, remembered the couple as physically unassuming, even plain, except for Applewhite’s riveting blue eyes.

They referred to themselves as “The Two,” Culpepper said Saturday. “They said they would die, be assassinated, and anyone who followed would travel with them by spaceship to a higher level, to heaven.”

Culpepper said she was stunned when more than two dozen of the people, including many of her friends, made immediate plans to trek to the Oregon coast to rendezvous with the mysterious couple.

A part of her worried that she might be missing out on something if she didn’t go. Another part was concerned: “Every nerve in my body was screaming, ‘This is not right, this is not right.’ ”

From Gold Beach, Ore., Applewhite and Nettles moved to other towns, attracting mostly disillusioned young men and women, people for whom the free-living ideals of the 1960s were fading. Some were ready to give up drugs and alcohol, even newspapers and television. Some were willing to abandon their own families, as Applewhite himself had done; published reports suggest that his own wife and children ended up in North Carolina, never having joined the ministry.

Heavy leafleting by the group drew more than 200 to a meeting in Waldport, Ore., adding 33 new members to the rolls. But public outcry was growing too. Abruptly, “Bo” and “Peep” announced that their assassinations were near and retreated to the wilderness to prepare for the cosmic journey.

Harsher Asceticism, Then Real Homes

Membership, which peaked at about 200, dwindled. Changes were needed. In early 1976, in Manhattan, Kan., Nettles announced over a crowd of hecklers that “the harvest” was closed; no new members would be accepted. The group’s own history records that “The Two” then took a group of about 70 followers to a campground near Medicine Bow, Wyo., the first of a series of camps in the Southwest and Mountain states.

A harsher asceticism was adopted. Members began wearing uniforms and going for days, at times, without speaking: “tomb time.” They applied tuning forks to their heads to achieve a mental uniformity and to wipe out “human” thoughts.

Unfit members--19 in all--were asked to leave. The rest benefited from a financial windfall when two members received inheritances totaling $300,000, said cult scholar Balch. That enabled the group to give up camps for real homes, first in Denver, later near Dallas-Forth Worth.

“The Two” began calling themselves Do and Ti. Regimentation was reflected in personal schedules timed to the minute, as one former member, who left in 1981, told Balch: “At 5:57 [p.m.] she bathed. Twenty four minutes later she took a vitamin pill, one of 32 consumed every 24 hours. At 6:36 she drank a liquid protein formula and one hour later she ate a cinnamon roll. At 9:54 she was back in bed for another two hours.”

Such rigor intensified the sense of purpose in some members, Balch wrote. Others were overwhelmed. They fell away not for lack of faith, but because the cult had become “an extreme case of religious totalism,” he wrote.

Nettles, the more visionary of the group’s leaders, died in 1985, but Applewhite insisted that he remained in close contact with her, channeling her messages to the group. Her death came during a long period--17 years, between 1976 and 1993--when the group all but vanished from sight. In its own written history, Heaven’s Gate said this time was spent tuning members’ minds with Nettles, the “Old Member.”

Former disciple Richard Joslyn, who accompanied Applewhite during that period, described it as the group’s diaspora, a great scattering, when members traveled and lived “underground,” concentrating on their work and spiritual lessons.

In 1993, when the group reached out to the public again, it had a new name, Total Overcomers Anonymous, and a more urgent message. An advertisement in USA Today announced: “UFO Cult Resurfaces With Final Offer.”

Variations of the ad ran in magazines and alternative newspapers throughout the country, saying the apocalypse would soon be at hand, and that Earth’s inhabitants were “refusing to evolve.”

Members took their message on the road. Eight showed up in early 1994 for two meetings near Minneapolis, where they presented renderings of what the next life would be like, journalist Sari Gordon remembered. A group--perhaps the same eight--walked into the offices of the Los Angeles Weekly. They said the membership was divided into three units, based in Los Angeles, San Diego and Dallas, that moved around the country, frequently changing homes and jobs.

Freelance writer Dave Gardetta, who spoke with them, said they talked of subsisting for 38 days on nothing more than lemonade.

“It was all part of the cleansing--purifying their bodies for the change,” Gardetta said in an interview. “They thought a UFO was going to pick them up and they wanted to share it with the world. At that point, it didn’t have anything to do with suicide. It had to do with having your soul, somehow magically or scientifically, removed. It was just walk out and get lifted up.”

They expressed hope that the spacecraft would pick them up from the end of the Santa Monica Pier, Gardetta said.

“They knew they sounded crazy and they’d laugh: ‘Yes, this sounds totally nuts, but we know it to be true.’ ”

Buildup to Their Final Act

That summer, 15 members addressed 80 people at a New Age bookstore in Phoenix. About half walked out during the first break, store owner Jan Ross said. “Some of them pulled me aside and said, ‘Jan, these people are sick.’ But they had one young woman, about 30 years old, who left with them. She was crying and they were hugging her. Outside, I told her, ‘I don’t think you should go with them.’ She said, ‘No, this is what I am looking for.’ ”

Though their manner and clothing often struck people as strange, members were mostly courteous and sometimes even popular with outsiders.

In June of 1995, a faction bought a former youth camp near Mountainair, N.M., on property studded with cedars and pinyon pines. Frustrated that they could not get enough phone lines, the members rented office space next to a hardware store. They registered under the name “Computer Knowmads” and wore black nylon jogging suits and tennis shoes in a town better suited to cowboy hats.

“You knew they were different,” said Larry Gustin, who rented them the office. “But they were really friendly. They never mentioned their religion. I thought they were with a health group or something.”

The members arrived at work every day, together, in a van with vegetables, which they would cook up in their pot while they worked on their computers, Gustin said. They paid their bills on time, in cash, and in September announced--with apparent reluctance--that they had been summoned back to California. They followed up by sending a postcard, saying they missed everyone.

“They were nice people,” said Patsy Gustin, Larry’s wife. “They were always happy, always smiling. It would make you feel good to run into them.”

The house that Heaven’s Gate members took last year in Rancho Santa Fe was lavish--9,200 square feet, a pool, tennis court, putting green--but cult members appeared to live a spartan life--bunk beds, walls decorated with little else beyond pictures of bubble-headed aliens.

After the Internet posting of Applewhite’s much-ridiculed “ ’95 Statement,” a cosmic event galvanized the group, unwittingly assisted by a discussion on a late-night radio talk show. A photograph taken by an amateur photographer named Chuck Shramek appeared to show an object behind the approaching Comet Hale-Bopp. Shramek sent the picture to syndicated talk show host Art Bell, who posted it on his Web page.

That same night, last Nov. 14, Bell received a call from an Atlanta-based psychic named Courtney Brown, the author of a book titled “Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth.” Bell put Brown on the air and Brown professed to have proof that the apparent object was a UFO.

In January, Bell publicly debunked the theory, but by then the cult appeared to have placed considerable importance on Hale-Bopp’s arrival. Members issued a statement on the Internet:

“Whether Hale-Bopp has a ‘companion’ [UFO] or not is irrelevant from our perspective. However, its arrival is joyously very significant. . . . Our Older Member [Nettles] . . . has made it clear to us that Hale-Bopp’s approach is the ‘marker’ we’ve been waiting for--the time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home to ‘Their World.’ ”

In one of his final Internet missives, Applewhite seemed to narrow his target audience, reaching out to those perhaps closest to his own heart, the outcast and the suffering.

“If you have grown to hate your life in this world and would lose it for the sake of the Next Level, you will find true life with us--potentially forever,” he said. And he added: “If you cling to this life--will you not lose it?”

The comet’s nearest approach to Earth occurred March 23. Three days later the bodies were found.