Suicide Cultist Left Area for ‘Kingdom’ in ’75

After graduating from an Ojai high school, marrying and having two children, Judith Ann Rowland walked away from her Ventura home in 1975, leaving a goodbye note to her husband, but taking her diamond wedding ring with her.

“Try to forget--I have!” Rowland, then 29, wrote Bob Rowland after deserting him and their young son and daughter for a pilgrimage across the country to recruit others to the group that became known as Heaven’s Gate.

“Each day He gives me new strength and you are all but a memory,” read a letter from Rowland a month after she suddenly disappeared. “Think what you will--I am doing Greater work for ‘Him’ and will have eternal life. . . . I don’t love you any more or the children. They belong to Him as I do.”

As much as that letter shocked her abandoned family, Rowland’s death in the largest mass suicide in U.S. history last week stunned her old high school friends in Ojai. They knew the 1964 Nordhoff High School graduate as a vivacious and strait-laced girl involved in sports, music, theater and clubs.

*

“She was real active, always having fun. She was on the pep squad,” said Chris Neary, a high school chum.

In fact, according to Nordhoff High Assistant Principal Susana Arce, Rowland, then Judi Wilber, was a typical product of small-town America.

“She was pretty mainstream,” Arce said. “With her involvement in activities, she seemed to be pretty stable. But there are a lot of people that seem to find Ojai a place of spiritual enlightenment, and that’s what this group was seeking when they came to Ojai.”

When Rowland met Heaven’s Gate founders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles in 1975, she was a 29-year-old wife of a heavy-equipment operator and mother of Cindy Lou, 8, and Joseph, 6.

But, following her mother’s lead, she became one of the earliest disciples of Human Individual Metamorphosis, or HIM, a cult reported to have grown from just 24 members in April 1975 to about 1,000 by the end of that year by promising deliverance by UFOs to the “next kingdom.”

*

Rowland’s old friends say now that they saw nothing in her demeanor to indicate what was to come. She was a B or C student who got A’s in citizenship. She went to her graduating class’ five- and 10-year reunions. Two friends did note, however, that Rowland’s closest high school companion committed suicide before the 10-year reunion in 1974.

Bob Rowland, who still lives in the couple’s east Ventura home, would not comment on his ex-wife’s death. Their two children could not be reached for comment.

But Joseph Rowland’s wife, Dolores, said her husband is handling his mother’s death as well as can be expected and was in San Diego on Tuesday to sign a release for her remains so his grandmother could claim them.

“He’s not falling apart,” said Dolores Rowland of Ventura. “He’s dealing with it.”

Joseph had not talked with his mother for the last eight years at least, Dolores said. “I don’t think they stayed in touch.”

Divorce records, a 1975 Times interview with Bob Rowland and letters Judith Rowland sent her husband and friends in the months after she disappeared tell the story of an increasingly religious woman who had been baptized three times and was seeking a meaning in life beyond the safety and comfort of her home and family.

“Well, she did seem awfully depressed and moody,” Bob Rowland said in a Times story about the emerging HIM cult. “Those people have done something to her mind. I’d like to help her all I can. . . . But I don’t think she’ll ever be back.”

At the time, Bob Rowland blamed his mother-in-law, Lorraine Wilber, who had left her home in Ojai to live in a trailer park in the area. Wilber had met Applewhite and Nettles, then known as Bo and Peep, a year earlier when they were traveling in California. And just a month before Judith left home, the metaphysical couple returned to Ojai, visiting her mother several times. On April 10, Judi Rowland left a note, took $1,000 and a $1,300 diamond ring and never returned.

The farewell note explained that she was ill with cancer and expected to live only two more months, and that she took the valuables to pay for her treatment.

“Dear Bobby,” the letter began, “if you are not sitting down now, please go to a quiet place to read this. My darling how do I tell you I have decided to go away? Because I love you so much I couldn’t bring myself to tell you of my illness.”

*

But a month later, Rowland wrote a second letter to her husband and made no mention of illness, explaining instead that she no longer loved him and their children and had left forever to do a divine work.

“I am doing the ‘FATHERS’ work,” she wrote. “I have given Him my life and in return he has given me mine.

“Bobby, you have given me so much, but I no longer want material things,” she continued. “. . . I wish I could spare you the hurt. For in your world, I deserted you and the children. . . . You’re a great man and loving person--don’t deprive yourself of a new love and mother for your children. . . . My love is the FATHER now.”

After his wife disappeared, Bob Rowland said at the time, he told his children that their mother was sick in the head. “I told them we just have to go on and start a new life for ourselves. I don’t see any sense in lying to them.”

But within a few weeks, Judi Rowland, who was in Oregon with other followers, admitted in a letter to a friend that she had been forced to mislead her husband about her true feelings. She did that, she said, “so that he could go on and be a good father to them and find a new person to love.”

“I am not alone doing this,” she continued. “There are about 24 to date. My mom is still with me and I don’t think anyone would recognize either of us. We have really changed.”

She signed the letter with her new name, “Fleece.”

Indeed, in an interview later that year, Joan Culpepper, now a 62-year-old grandmother from Diamond Bar, told a reporter that she had encountered the two Ventura County women in Oregon. She remembered a young woman named Fleece, whose mother went by the name Chris.

“They told Chris she was the Virgin Mary before,” Culpepper said, shaking her head.

*

The fate of Judi Rowland’s mother could not be determined. But she was not among the 39 cult members found dead in Rancho Santa Fe. Rowland’s father, Roscoe Wilber, lived near Ojai until his death two years ago.

Even 22 years ago, Judi Rowland was looking for a spaceship in the sky to take her to a greater place, her letters reveal. She wrote of her two leaders with reverence.

“These two people are from our Father’s Kingdom,” she wrote. “And that bright ‘star’ we talked about has some connection to us. It’s a space ship. . . . There is a big moment being started. Watch for news of this to happen. We are chosen disciples.”

Times researcher Nona Yates and correspondent Scott Hadly contributed to this story.