Cult Left No Survivors, Police Say

Investigators probing the mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe are convinced that the 39 dead constituted the entire Heaven’s Gate cult and that the organization had no splinter groups or links to other cults, authorities said Monday.

San Diego County Sheriff’s Department homicide investigator Lt. Gerald Lipscomb said that the only other active member of the cult, identified as Richard Ford, 43, left four to six weeks ago because he disagreed with plans to commit mass suicide in preparation for ascending to a higher plane.

“He wasn’t ready to go to the next level at this time,” Lipscomb told a news conference.

Ford is apparently the person who has previously been identified as Rio and who traveled to the Rancho Santa Fe mansion on Wednesday with his boss and was the first one to discover the bodies.

Medical Examiner Dr. Brian Blackbourne told reporters that eight of the 18 male suicide victims--including cult leader Marshall Applewhite--had been castrated. He said that in all eight cases the castrations were not new and appeared to have been done expertly.

“This is not something they did themselves,” Blackbourne said. “This is not something done recently.”

Blackbourne also released the names of the two victims whose families had not been located: Alphonzo Foster, 44, and Lindley Ayerhart Pease, 41, born in New Hampshire and known to have a sister, Sylvia Pease, who once lived in Palm Springs. A few hours after the news conference, Foster’s family was located, according to the medical examiner’s office.

Blackbourne also reiterated what he told reporters Sunday: Visual inspection of Applewhite’s internal organs during an autopsy found no indication that he had cancer or any other terminal disease. Reports have circulated that Applewhite told his followers he was dying and that this disturbing news convinced them to commit suicide rather than live without their beloved leader.

But Lipscomb said that interviews with four former cult members and an initial review of documents, computer tapes and a “farewell” video left at the mansion in Rancho Santa Fe have uncovered no evidence to confirm the cancer story.

“The documents we have state nothing about him having cancer,” Lipscomb said. A full review of the voluminous information left by the cult will take at least a month.

Lipscomb said that investigators, along with FBI experts, will check the computer diskettes to find out, among other things, where the cult got enough phenobarbital to kill 39 people. But he held out little hope of finding the source, noting that controlled drugs of all descriptions are readily available in nearby Tijuana.

He added that the Sheriff’s Department has received tips about other cults, including one in southwestern Arizona, allegedly planning to ascend to the heavens in the same spaceship that the Heaven’s Gate cultists were awaiting. None of those tips has proved credible, he said.

A third of the bodies have been released to mortuaries. Any bodies left unclaimed for more than 30 days will be cremated, Blackbourne said.

The Heaven’s Gate philosophy held that sexual organs were unneeded in the next world and could actually be a hindrance to gaining admission to that world. Just who performed the castrations is unknown.

“It’s not something a legitimate physician would do on an individual person upon request,” Blackbourne said. Questioned by reporters, he noted that none of the cultists was a doctor but that two of the women were nurses.

Autopsies have concluded that the cultists committed suicide by ingesting phenobarbital and vodka. The two cultists thought to be the last to die had also injected the narcotic painkiller Vicodin, Blackbourne said.