True Crime Campfire - Away Team: The Story of Heaven's Gate

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

I have vivid memories of the night of March 22, 1997. Part of it has to do with, y’know, young dumb love—but most of it has to do with the Hale-Bopp Comet, also known as the Great Comet, which was brilliantly visible from my hometown that night. I had a huge crush on this guy, and he invited me to watch the comet with him. We climbed up on the rooftop of this neighborhood bar with a bottle of screw-top wine, and we watched the sky—and suddenly, there it was, a bright silvery ball with a long glowing tail. Magic. I’ll never forget it—wrote some bad poetry about it later that night. And then a couple mornings later, I woke up to the strangest news story of my life. A group calling themselves Heaven’s Gate had taken their own lives en masse out in California—and they’d left behind a video explaining why. They were catching a ride on the comet, with the full certainty that it would take them to paradise. They were leaving their human bodies behind, chasing the pure perfection of enlightenment. These were smart, educated people with families who loved them. What led them to this? Join us for the story of one of the deadliest cults in American history: Heaven's Gate. Sources:Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, Benjamin Zeller https://web.archive.org/web/20081003124716/http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070318/news_lz1n18timelin.htmlCult Education Institutehttps://www.heavensgate.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080122002236/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,986136-1,00.htmlWikipedia "Comet Hale-Bopp" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Hale%E2%80%93BoppFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. I have vivid memories of the night of March 22nd, 1997. Part of that has to do with, you know, young, dumb love, but most of it has to do with the hail Bob Comet, also known as the Great Comet, which was brilliantly visible from my hometown that night. I had a huge crush on the sky, and he invited me to watch the comet with him, and we

climbed up on the rooftop of this neighborhood bar with a bottle of screwtop wine, and we watched the sky. And suddenly, there it was, a bright, silvery ball with a long glowing tail. Absolute magic. I'll never forget it. Wrote some terrible poetry about it later that night, and then a couple mornings later, I woke up to the strange. news story of my life. A group calling themselves Heaven's Gate had taken their own lives en masse out in California, and they'd left behind a video explaining why. They were catching a ride on the comet, with the full certainty that it would take them to paradise. They were leaving their human bodies behind, chasing the pure perfection of enlightenment. These were smart, educated

people with families who loved them. What led them to this? This is a way. team, the story of Heaven's Gate. So, campers, for this one, we're in Rancho Santa Fe, California, just outside of San Diego, March 26, 1997. A little after 3 p.m., the San Diego County Sheriff's Department received a strange 911 call from a man who didn't give his name. name. This is regarding a mass suicide and I can give you the address. This was a weird call and the police were initially skeptical and they were even more dubious when they heard the address

on Colina Norte in Rancho Santa Fe, a short street that was home to multi-million dollar mansions. The address the caller had given was one of them. They sent one deputy up to do a wellness check on the mansion's inhabitants. It was a cool sunny spring afternoon as he stood outside the front door waiting for someone to answer. No one did. The deputy tried a side door and found it was unlocked, and even before it had swung all the way open, he gagged at the smell. Sickly sweet and putrid, a smell any first responder knows all too well. Death. Even knowing that, though, there was no way the deputy could have prepared for what he was about to see inside. Bodies everywhere, all lying neatly on bunk beds, faces covered with purple cloths. He hurried outside to call for backup.

When more deputies arrived, they quickly searched the mansion to see if they could find anyone still alive and in need of medical attention. But no, there was nothing living left. Then they had to clear out of the crime scene and wait for a search warrant. The scene was bizarre and disturbing. There were 39 dead, 21 women and 18 men, ranging in age from 26 to They were all wearing what you can only call a uniform, identical black shirts and sweatpants, new black and white Nike decade sneakers, and armbands with patches that read Heaven's Gate Away Team. In their pockets, each person had one five-dollar bill and three-quarters. They lay in their own beds, all but two with their faces and upper bodies shrouded.

The other two had plastic bags secured around their heads. They died of as fixation. In fact, all 39 of them had. When investigators pieced together what had happened in the mansion on Kalina Norte, the events became no less strange. Starting on March 22nd, in three distinct waves, everyone in the mansion had taken their own lives in the same ritualized way. First, they dosed themselves with a strong sedative and respiratory depressant, mixed with pudding or applesauce.

Then they swigged some vodka, which made the drug more potent. Lying in bed, sedated and only breathing lightly, each person fixed a plastic bag around their own head until they asphyxiated and died. When a person was dead, others removed the bag, cleaned them up, and placed the purple cloth over their faces and upper bodies. The two bodies found with bags still over their heads were the last to die. They hadn't had anyone to clean them up. It didn't take long to get an answer about why these people had done them. this. Marshall Applewhite, the leader of the group that had just recently started calling itself Heaven's Gate, had recorded a long video message explaining their motives. Along with farewell

messages from other members, this was put onto two VHS tapes and mailed to people who'd been previously affiliated with the group. Heaven's Gate believed they were not dying, just leaving behind the human bodies that Applewhite described as vehicles or human clothes. They would be reincarnated an extraterrestrial next-level bodies in a giant UFO and transported to a physical kingdom of heaven. The Hale-bop comet, then clearly visible in the night sky, was a sign that it was time for the group to leave Earth, and as they put it, graduate from the human evolutionary level. Okay, so how did we get here? Thirty-nine people from across a wide variety of ages and backgrounds ending their lives in the apparently completely sincere belief that they'd wake up in a flying saucer

on their way to heaven. The organization that would become Heaven's Gate was founded by two Texans, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. And while I don't think you could call either of them ordinary until they met each other, I don't think you'd call them extraordinary either. Marshall Hurf Applewhite Jr. was born in 1931 in Spur, Texas, a tiny town in the middle of a whole lot of nothing. His dad was a Presbyterian minister, and little Marshall, who everyone called Herf, was a religious kid. As he grew a little older, Herf focused less on actual

religion and more on religious music. And if you've ever spent time in or around churches, this is probably a familiar type, someone who's in it mainly for the music. Herf graduated from Austin College with a philosophy degree in 1952 and briefly enrolled in a Presbyterian seminary with the aim of becoming a minister. He also got married to his girlfriend, Anne Pierce, and soon they'd have two kids. Not long after his wedding, Herf decided to focus on music. He ditched the seminary and became a music director of a church in North Carolina, although he didn't have much time to enjoy it before he was drafted into the army for a couple of years. After that, he got a master's degree in music from the University of Colorado, and like a lot of people with brand new music degrees

briefly tried and failed to carve out a singing career in New York City. New York City. Instead of the bright lights of Broadway, he had to settle for the sweatier charms of Tuscaloosa and a teaching gig at the University of Alabama, and it was there that his life started falling to pieces. Herf was bisexual, and he'd had several affairs with men during his marriage to Anne. She was oblivious to this. It's not something you really talked about back then. In 50s and 60s, Texas and Alabama,

you had to be real careful about any sexuality other than 100% hetero. In 1965, Hurf lost his job when the school found out about his relationship with a male student, and when Anne found out about the affair, she left him. Oh, student. That ain't cool.

Yeah, yikes. Herf moved back to Texas to become chair of the music department at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Things were more freewheeling in the big city, and Herf dated both men and women, though he didn't necessarily enjoy it much. He told a friend his relationships were all failures, and that he felt, quote, any kind of relationship is stifling and short-lived. He was toying with the idea of giving up relationships completely.

Later on, one of the main features of Heaven's Gate would be its rejection of intimacy, both physical and emotional. Obviously, Marshall Applewhite didn't invent the idea of using celibacy as a route to spiritual enlightenment, but it does make you wonder if this whole story might have been different if our void had better luck dating in the late 60s. I know. And maybe if he wasn't so, like, repressed about his sexuality, like, if he didn't live where he did and grew up where he did and be so religious, like, totally.

Makes you think, you know? It does. There's always a moment in these stories where one different choice could have made somebody a different person and yeah it's really wild it's always and it's always just and it's it's never about one choice right but it's always it always feels like it's like one tipping point well yeah there's a moment where it could turn yeah let him let him be bisexual whatever go go go fly your fly your pride flag marshal just as always struck me as a very strange thing for people to get working out i know same yeah by 1970 her flu

He wasn't doing so hot. He suffered from headaches, depression, and anxiety, and his colleagues at the university noticed he seemed disorganized and confused. Finally, things reached a crisis point, possibly instigated by another affair with a student that went south and Herf quit, which, my dude. Man. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Stop. Looking at your students as a dating pool. Collie. Like, he's having bad. luck dating, so he's like, let me look at the group of people that I have power over. Wonderful. I know. So gross. In what looks like

a pretty desperate attempt at a fresh start, he moved to New Mexico and started running a deli. But it turned out that neither the land of enchantment nor a wide selection of salted meats could cure what was ailin him, and Herf was soon back in Houston. Not long after he got back to

Texas, his dad died. They'd been estranged ever since Hurf had come out to his parents and his father's death flung him into a deep depression. So at the start of 1972, he was 40 years old, and his life was a mess. He was only sporadically employed, had little to no contact with his family, he was sinking into debt, and his mental state was increasingly fragile. But things began to change for Hirf in March of 1972 when he met a nurse named Bonnie Lou Nettles. Exactly why Hirf was in the hospital where Bonnie worked is unclear. His sister had said that.

that Herf had a near-death experience and was hospitalized for a heart blockage. There have been some claims that Herf was hospitalized as a psychiatric patient, although the sourcing on that seems to be pretty thin, if not non-existent, and it kind of feels like an attempt to just rewrite history to make it fit what happened later. Herf himself later wrote that he was visiting a hospitalized friend when Mrs. Nettles entered the room and their eyes locked in a shared recognition of esoteric secrets. But by the time he wrote that, Herf liked to put almost everything down to predestined fate

and was often just full of shit. Bonnie Lou Truesdale was born in 1927 in Houston and lived there all her life until she met Marshall Applewhite in 1972. She was a registered nurse when she married a businessman, Joseph Nettles, in 1949, and together they'd have four children. Bonnie's family was Baptist, and Bonnie kind of sort of was, too. To her, church was mainly a social thing, and she just went because her friends did. I think a lot of people are like that, actually.

But by the 70s, her spiritual interests were definitely drifting more to the left field. For reasons that'll be obvious a little later, by the 90s, Heaven's Gate was very much the Marshall Applewhite show, but actually, the bulk of its weird theology came from Bonnie Nettles. She'd been a member of the Houston branch of the Theosophical Society in America. Theosophy was founded in New York at the end of the 19th century and was essentially a grab bag of mystical ideas that at the time weren't well known in the U.S. Reincarnation, karma, and the idea that there were highly evolved masters with supernatural abilities, attempting to reintroduce ancient wisdom to humanity. We got into some of that in the Bretherian episode. Bonnie held seances where she claimed to channel the spirit of a 19th century monk named Brother Francis.

Sometimes she'd channel Marilyn Monroe, too. I'm pretty sure Brother Francis's vows wouldn't let him be inside a woman's body, especially if he's sharing her with Marilyn Monroe, you know? But then again, what do I know about it? Wait. That's a sitcom. Two ghosts being roommates, like one being like Marilyn Monroe and one being like a literal monk. Roommates or like boo-mates.

Boomates. Because they're ghosts. I'm going to smack you. No, I'm sorry. Bonnie was also super into astrology and deeply fascinated with UFOs. I think in general that nowadays popular conceptions of UFOs and space aliens lean more into the creepy threatening side of things, thanks Mulder, but in the 60s and 70s, there was still a spiritual, hopeful edge to the whole thing. UFOs would be manned by wise old elves who were coming to Earth to guide us into a new age of

enlightenment. That sounds so nice, doesn't it? Yes, please. Come on down and save us, y'all. It's getting real weird down here. We could use some help. Bonnie would go out walking at night with her daughter, both of them looking up at the starry sky. Bonnie's saying she hoped a UFO would land and take them away. As you might have gathered from that, Bonnie's marriage to Joe wasn't going so well. Bonnie's ever-growing interest in esoteric mysteries probably didn't help, seeing as they came with an increasing that she was meant for something special, something beyond the relative humdrum of a career in a family. By the time she met Marshall Applewhite in 1972, Bonnie was separated and in the process of getting divorced. I think it's fair to say that the two of them fell in love very quickly.

Applewhite would later call Bonnie his soulmate, although for him, the soul was definitely separate from the body. His relationship with Bonnie was 100% platonic, nothing involving the underpants regions. At their first meeting, Bonnie offered to do Marshall's astrological chart. He was so excited he ran straight out to his car and got his birth certificate. He'd been wanting someone to read his chart for a while. It was all pretty normal stuff, but for Marshall, it was a sign of the slowly turning wheels of destiny. The two of them were soon spending almost all their free time together, and before long, they moved in together. They spent hours driving all over town and throwing around elaborate ideas. They decided they'd known each other in past lives, and now

they'd joined together again to perform an important mission. Their recent chaos and relationship problems they'd both suffered had been purposeful and tended to remove them from their ordinary lives. They'd be free to do their important work. They started by opening a bookstore, the Christian Arts Center. The name was most likely to encourage Normies to come in, because what they actually sold were books on just about every kind of New Age Woo you can think of. The store failed after a couple months, which is shocking, considering their entire premise was lying to their customer base. Like you'd go in there expecting like, you know, an Amish romance novel or something and

you'd come out like, what the hell is all this stuff? Yeah. Like you go in looking for a purpose-driven life and you like, see, look around and see books with like gray aliens all over the cover. You'd make a Kool-Aid man impression out of there. So they moved out to the country and set up a retreat they called No Place, No, K-N-O-W, place, where they taught classes in astrology and theology and theosophy and spent a lot of time trying to figure out what their great purpose was. But No Place didn't quite scratch the itch they were feeling.

And in January 1973, they hit the road. For the next year or so, they just wandered around the country, camping out more often than not, reading everything related to mysticism, or science fiction they could get a hold of. They talked constantly, trying to hammer out what the feelings of revelations they both felt inside them meant. Sounds like a perfect storm to create a little light folly adieu, doesn't it? Together all day, every day, convincing each other you're destined for some kind of supernatural greatness.

This does not seem like a recipe for great mental health to me. They became that meme. Two dumb bitches telling each other, exactly. Exactly. Is that an exact meme? In July, camping on the Oregon coast by the rogue river, they firmly decided on who they were and what their purpose was. They were the two witnesses described in the book of Revelation, who the Bible describes as being slain by the great beast but then resurrected three days later and taken up to heaven in a cloud. The cloud in this case would be a UFO.

Duh. What else could it be? Marshall and Bonnie were fascinated by the ancient. ancient astronauts theory, which was popular by then, and which you might have heard of more recently if you've ever watched the history channel. That channel used to be cool. Now it's just ancient aliens all day every day. Yeah, with a little sprinkling of Hitler thrown in just for texture. Well, you've got to keep your dad audience watching. You can't alienate them literally with ancient aliens. I bet my dad loves ancient aliens. Roughly, the theory goes that in ancient and prehistoric times, aliens visited Earth and influenced the human civilization in all kinds of

ways, especially technologically and architecturally. And of course, these visitors from another planet ended up being referenced in a lot of the world's ancient religious texts. Marshall and Bonnie decided that nearly everything in the Bible referenced real physical events that involved extraterrestrials with a level of technology similar to, say, the original Star Trek, which might not have been a coincidence because they both frickin' love them some Star Trek. Prophecy was the result of alien communication. Miracles such as healing or the creation of food

came from advanced technology. Angels were aliens in disguise and the various heavenly chariots and clouds were the attempts of ancient peoples to describe UFOs. I mean, you can see, like, you know, if you think about it for not that long, it makes perfect sense. Two seconds.

Don't think about it any deeper than that. make perfect sense. Heaven, or the next level, was a literal physical place somewhere in outer space, a utopian society whose members inhabited highly evolved bodies free from illness and aging. Probably due again to Marshall Applewhite's terrible love life, they were also free from any sexual desire. Herf really should have done a rewatch of Star Trek, which has aliens are kind of horny as one of its foundational beliefs, especially the original series. My God, Kirk would stick it in anything bi-pedal and vaguely feminine. He wasn't married to the bipedal thing.

Like, it was more a guideline than a rule. I feel like I remember one episode where one of the crew falls in love with a sentient gas cloud. A sparkly one so that you knew it was a lady. Because we can't have any gay shit, right? No, that gay shit in my space show about aliens. Cross-species, fornifference. Fornication is fine, but God, fornification. Fornification is, uh, it's a strong, strong fucking.

Anyway. In Bonnie and Marshall's sci-fi-inspired theology, Jesus had been an extraterrestrial. So, too, were Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, whose bodies, their human clothes, had been inhabited by aliens in the early 70s, and the country. confusion of that transition explained all the messiness in their personal lives. This is convenient. It couldn't be anything I did. It also accounted for the ease with which they performed another of Heaven's Gate's signature moves, walking out on their past lives and families without so much as a backward glance. To start your evolution toward the next

level, you had to give up all human attachments. For all the sci-fi stuff, the structure Marshall and Bonnie came up with stuck pretty closely to the Christian Bible. and their belief that the end times were imminent had a lot in common with various apocalyptic Christian movements that sprang up as the millennium approached. It was in the details where things got really weird. Before the rapture slash UFO visitation, anyone who wished to be taken up with Marshall and Bonnie

would have to prepare their bodies under their guidance. Through fuzzily described chemical and biological changes, their followers' bodies would evolve to a degree where they could make the jump to the next level. In the early days, this was one of their core beliefs that you could take your actual physical body with you up to heaven. You do not have to die, they said in 1976. You must take a changed over physical body with you to the next level. Excited by their discoveries, and by discoveries, I mean a bunch of weird shit they made up,

Marshall and Bonnie headed back to Houston to try to pick up their first converts from the new-age folks they knew from the Christian Arts Center bookstore and the no-place retreat. They convinced exactly one person, a woman named Sharon Morgan, who was in a troubled marriage, and like a lot of their future converts felt kind of overwhelmed by life. Sharon left behind her wedding ring and a note for her kids and hit the road with Marshall and Bonnie. Or rather hit the road ahead of them. Sharon's role was to pave the way for Marshall and Bonnie,

advertising their arrival and trying to set up audiences. The only two of those audiences we know about for sure were with a professional psychic and a Boise State anthropology professor. The professor remembered they were very sincere in a intense but had weird eyes. That quote, by the way, comes from Heaven's Gate, America's UFO Religion by Benjamin Zeller, which was one of our main sources for this story. And feel free to Google Marshall Applewhite if you want to see what he meant by weird eyes. Literally every picture of this man is a jump scare. But after just a couple months of this,

with no converts made at all, Sharon went back home to her family. So far, Marshall and Bonnie were abussed as religious leaders. And not, Not long after Sharon's departure, they were also busted, as in no money. Extraterrestrial profits can't be expected to pay attention to piddly little things like, say, returning rental cars on time. But authorities in Missouri, where Marshall had rented his van nine months ago, disagreed. Wow. Yeah. And he got six months in the slammer for car theft.

Bonnie went back to work as a nurse during this time, but gave it up as soon as Marshall got out of James. If anything, his time in the joint had just made Marshall more focused and energized, and he had realized that the most fertile ground to look for converts to their cause was among people who had already joined New Age movements, who had already shown a willingness to walk away from normal lives in search of spiritual growth. Most of the people who joined Heaven's Gate would be of this seeker type, and a lot of them would leave the movement as easily as they joined. Specifically, in 1975, Marshall and Bonnie visited a Los Angeles metaphysical group led by Clarence Krug, although they decided to change their names to something softer and more soaked in 70s whimsy.

Marshall and Bonnie sounded like an old West cowboy and the gal who served cheap whiskey down at the saloon. For their introduction to Krug's group, they would be Guinea and Pig, although they'd soon switch those out for Bo and Peep. for the love okay and they advertised their talks with a flyer that said something like do you believe in UFOs so you show up to one of these meetings like I might go to one of those meetings when I was in college or whatever like just

maybe out of curiosity thinking aliens sound like an interesting topic for a lecture and here's this lady and this dude whose eyes look like hypno-toed pinwheels calling themselves guinea and pig and like apparently for some of these folks the reaction was sign me up

I just do not get it and I really, I really genuinely do say that with compassion. Like, I, I get it intellectually, the kind of psychological stuff that's going on with cults. I get it. But like, Bo and Peep, I'm just saying, the 70s were a different time. There's, okay, there is something about cults that is just a little bit fun. And I don't mean to say this, like, in a disrespectful way whatsoever. But, like, there is something fun about Bo and Peep and Guinea and Pig. Like, that is a fun, that feels like a sci-fi. In the beginning. Those, yeah, those feel like sci-fi characters. Yeah, yeah. That feels like a sci-fi, like sci-fi narrative, right? Like, oh, these are two entities, right, that are presenting themselves to me. They're guinea and pig. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. How funny. How clever.

And when your other option is like, you know, especially people who grew up when they did, you know, born in the 30s and 40s, when your other option is leave it to beaver, you know, like I can see how people are attracted to it because it does seem fun and whimsical and kind of supernatural and interesting. It's fun until it isn't anymore. are, right? Right. And like, again, like the aesthetics of Heaven's Gate attracted a lot of people. Oh, absolutely. And a lot of people who were sci-fi nerds and like, absolutely. You see this in like Om Shinrikio, cults like that, where it's just, it's, they attract the nerds. They get the, they get the geeks. The away team, that's just a really clever way of gamifying their manipulation, basically. Especially because Star Trek was so huge at the time. and everything. And I wish we had time to go into the lives of,

I guess you call them the victims, the cultists, the people who participated in this, the people who lost their lives, because there are some really interesting people, but we would have had to make it like a five-part series. And there is actually a whole podcast about this cult if you want more information.

It's really, really interesting. And it does go into the lives. It's a very sad story at the end of the day. It's really sad. Krug's group had some beliefs that were superficially similar to Ginnian pigs. Through alchemy, they would ultimately transcend into beings of pure light. Krug also introduced some element of tantric sex into his theology, which is the kind of thing that makes me immediately suspicious. Some dude in California piecing a path to enlightenment that just happens to involve him getting, you know, his dick wet.

There's something weird there, right? There's something hanky going on. Yeah, that tends to. to go badly. And I suspect that was why, or at least part of why, Krug's group was in bad shape by the time Gideon Pig arrived. Membership, which it had one point been over 100 people, had dropped. And there was gossip and relationship drama everywhere. Of course. Over 50 people attended Guinea and Pig's introduction to their ideas and over 20 would leave with them. People who saw them described them as charismatic and magnetic. And Chrisma is one of those things.

that depends on the listener just as much as the speaker. The same weird intensity that can freak out a Boise State professor can seem like a divine inspiration to people who are actively seeking an ideology and familiar with other New Age gurus. Guinea and Pig told their new followers to leave their lives behind and gather at a campsite on the Oregon coast the following month. For the first few years of its existence, Heavens Gate mainly existed in public campsites like that. Later in the year, the group gave a talk

in the Oregon town of Waldport. Over 100 people attended and over 20 joined the group, which by then was calling itself human individual metamorphosis, which sounds like a pretty awesome prog rock album. Too much of a mouthful.

It's the same thing with Terry Hoffman and her call. It was just too long of a name. What was it? Conscious development of body, mind, and spirit, something like that. It's too long. It's got to be more snappy.

Heaven's Gate is way better. Yeah, Heaven's Gate is way better. But with human individual metamorphosis, you know they just liked it because you could shorten it to him, you know? They just liked it. You know, that's what the hymn in the Bible is talking about, the human individual metamorphosis. That's what God is. I can just see it.

I can listen. I've seen a million fucking YouTube videos, just like they were given. To join, you had to give up all your possessions and relationships. Only adults could join. People with children had to either abandon them or not join. And it's worth pointing out that when we say give up their possessions, we mean leave them behind, not like give them to the group's leaders. Guinea and Pig, although now they were Bo and Peep, were not getting rich. Yeah, and whenever we get into culty terrain, you have to ask yourself whether it's a scam or whether the people at the top really believe in what they're selling.

And it seems very clear to me that Bo and Peep believed wholeheartedly what they were preaching. When you're talking about groups with apocalyptic leanings, things will most likely. be better for everybody if it is all just a big scam. I mean, I think Jim Jones started out believing in his vision, too. He just got poisoned by narcissism and cocaine and paranoia, and we know how that one turned out. Heaven's Gate was not a scam. At the end of this retreat in Oregon, Bo and Peep again instructed their followers to meet up in a few weeks at another campsite, this time in the Rockies. It was all pretty loosey-goosey. Having gone from years with no followers to gaining more than 50 in a brief period, Bo and Peep didn't seem to know what to do with them.

One member wrote to their family, it's real. It's the second coming. We don't know what's next. The mountains are nice. We are all going home. I feel so bad for the kids, like whose parents just abandoned them to join this thing. It makes me so sad every time I think about it. And it's ultimately a good thing that kids weren't allowed to join, of course. But I don't know any parent that would abandon their child for anything. And that shows that what kind of staggering pressure was happening within this group and how well they knew their audience. Like they knew that which pressure points to press to get these people to leave their families. Yeah. And as you'll see, you know, to me, the fact that Applewhite and Nettles actually believed in what they were preaching doesn't make it benign for me.

Like there was definitely culty manipulation going on. And, you know, to me that doesn't make it like non-sinister. Correct. Yeah. It's still evil. It's an evil thing to do. Yeah. And I mean, the families left behind. Like, I've seen documentaries where the family members of the cultists will talk and stuff. It's just heartbreaking. The tragedy of that. Like, so many families just bereft and they worried about them for years. And it's just like this person that you've known and loved your whole life is a completely different person now and is cold to you. And I can't even imagine how hard that would be. So eventually, Bo and Peep sent their new followers out into the world to try and win converts with very little supervision or instruction. They were sent in groups of two, each serving as a check partner on the other to try and ensure they didn't give in to the temptations of human attachments and recreation. No sex, no drugs, and very little fun was allowed. Maybe a little Star Trek if you were good, even though that Captain Kirk was a total slut.

The pairs were deliberately set up to test the members. straight men and women were paired together. Gay men were put together, gay women too. Overcoming sexual desire was one of the core beliefs of the group. It was a haphazard arrangement. The group would gather together at campsites across the country every now and again, but there wasn't much communication, and quite frequently pairs would miss a gathering, which meant they wouldn't hear where the next meeting was supposed to be and would never be able to find the main group again, because again, no cell phones, no internet yet, you know. so predictably quite a few people didn't even try and find them

Heaven's Gate always had a high turnaround of members with lots of people drifting in and drifting out just as easily and that was especially pronounced in these early days with matched pairs wandering around the country with little guidance and no observation a lot of them just quit neither went home or moved on to other New Age groups I bet some of them ended up in Scientology don't you

the theology of Heaven's Gate was very clear and precise but the organization of the group was almost non-existent. The whole movement was in danger of falling apart. In April of 1976, Bonnie Peep Nettles said, The harvest is closed. There will be no more meetings. The group wouldn't make any real recruitment efforts again until the 1990s. They would concentrate on the members they had. About 80 showed up at the last gathering in Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming.

Around 20 would be expelled later in the year for not a adhering to the group's increasingly strict rules. For the next few years, Heaven's Gate was a kind of weird traveling monastic group, moving from campsite to campsite and quite deliberately avoiding contact and communication with other people. With all the members no longer traveling across the country, Bo and Peep, they had now taken on their final names of Doe and T, could limit their exposure to the outside world. The ideology of Heaven's Gate was essentially a trap. To ascend to the utopian next level, you had to give up human attachments to your family and friends your whole previous life. So you became completely reliant on dough and tea, who were now also

calling themselves the two. That dismissal of human attachments also extended to discouraging close friendships between members, which also made it less likely that clicks would form that might challenge the two's authority. And this is where I say, this is cult stuff. You send a check partner in these pairs of two. So you know you're being watched, you know, you're being judged. That's really severe psychological pressure. And then you're isolated from everybody. I mean, this is how it works. This is how mind control works. It's really disturbing. Yeah. The two were often deliberately unpredictable, changing their demands and instructions. They explained this as teaching their members flexibility. It also trained them to

do what the two told them no matter what. Members were discouraged from thinking for themselves. If a decision had to be made, they would ask the two. More often, just Marshall slash Doe. Former members mostly describe Bonnie Nettles as the main driver of the group. She was the mystic heart of it, the visionary who had built and maintained their theology. Applewhite, who was a better communicator, operated as the voice of the two. When they had something to announce, Doe would speak with T jumping in to clarify.

sometimes. What little property the group had was held communally. When they ran out of money, members would take on short-term jobs, often as car mechanics. In the 80s and 90s, computer technician was added to the short list of acceptable jobs. In 1979, money became less of an issue. From somewhere or other, Heaven's Gate got a ton of money, most likely via a member's inheritance. They rented three houses, first in Denver, then in Dallas, There were about 40 members by this point who crammed themselves into two houses.

Doe and T got a house of their own. Rank has its privileges. They were a secretive group. They covered up their windows, avoiding contact with their neighbors as much as possible. If you had to go out, you were to keep a $5 bill in your pocket to avoid local vagrancy laws in three quarters in case you needed to use a pay phone. The two strictly scheduled their members' activities around lessons in preparing their minds and bodies for the next level.

There were still some of their original recruits left at this point. I feel like if I'd been promised that my body would undergo radical chemical and biological changes to prepare me for entry to heaven and five years later it hadn't happened yet, I might have questions, but I guess that's not the way Colts work. No. In 1982, with a roof over their heads and confident in their hold over their followers, the two started letting people call their families and tell them they were okay. The next year, members were permitted to briefly visit their families on Mother's Day.

They were given strict instructions to answer any questions by saying they were studying computers at a monastery. Sure, that's a real thing that people do, and definitely not a clear sign that you're in a cult. Who knows where Heaven's Gate would have ended up if things had continued on like this, but in 1983, Bonnie Nuttles had to have an eye surgically removed due to cancer. The disease had already spread through her body. including her liver. And in 1985, she died in a Dallas hospital at the age of 57. Wow, so young. Yeah. This was a huge blow to the movement into Marshall Applewhite. His relationship with Bonnie had by far been the most significant one in his life and he

fell into the kind of depression that hadn't afflicted him since he and Bonnie first met. Her death was also a direct challenge to the whole Heaven's Gate theology. No member had died since the group was founded. They weren't supposed to die. They were supposed to be building perfect bodies that would carry them to heaven. Yeah, and for tea, of all people, their seer and spiritual heart, for her to die was unthinkable. And this happens a lot in cults. It happened in love has won. It happened in the Tony Alamo cult. Happened in Scientology. When the leader dies, you risk upending the whole theology. But once he got his head together a little, Doe did some quick thinking to explain what had happened, and it's pretty much exactly what the higher-ups

of those other cults did in the same situation. Like, in Scientology, when Elron Hubbard died, they said he dropped his body. You know, they're just moving on. Applewhite would write, We could say that because of the stress, due to the gap between her next-level mind and the vehicle's genetic capacity, that the cancer symptom caused the vehicle to break down and stop functioning. Basically, Bonnie's true extraterrestrial self just had too much wadage for her weak human skin suit to cope with. It was the next piece of Doe's statement, though, that would eventually have fateful consequences for the movement. We're not exactly sure how many days it might take her to return to the next level vehicle she left behind prior to this task. He would refine

this idea in the days and years to come, but it began a fundamental shift in the Heaven's Gate ideology. No longer would members take their human, if improved, bodies directly into the UFO that would transport them to the next level. They settled on the idea that they would have to follow T's apparent example and abandon their vehicles when the UFO arrived, transferring their improved consciousnesses into new bodies waiting for them on board. The test for the group was whether years of being trained to unquestioningly trust the two would hold up to this radical and contradictory shift.

They did. Only one member left in the wake of Bonnie's death. With only Marshall Applewhite at the helm, things changed slowly, but they did change. The always-present biblical foundations of the group started to become more prominent than the pseudoscientific ones. Paranoia and conspiracy theories became central to the group's belief, with Doe introducing Lucifer as an antagonist to their work. Most of humanity, he taught, had been brainwashed by Lucifer, and only Doe's followers could be confident of avoiding his control. Sexual desire, he said, was the specific,

creation of Lucifer. Obviously, that's not something that stands up to much scrutiny, although I do kind of like the image of the devil, like, diligently working to make sure that, like, two fruit bats really want to go to Poundown together. Doe now claimed that there were evil extraterrestrials, luciferians, trying to prevent the group from achieving their goals. Most politically correct politicians and media personalities were Luciferians in disguise, which suggests to me that he'd just seen John Carpenter's they live. even as his thoughts turned more paranoid and apocalyptic Doe still worked hard at being a genial fatherly figure to his followers

and would often sit with them to watch some sci-fi on TV By this time Heaven's Gate had reduced to Doe and maybe 25 other people The group had come to see planet Earth as a lost cause A corrupt society controlled by malevolent extraterrestrials And one that would inevitably soon destroy itself The botched government sieges of Ruby Ridge and Wals and Waco in 1992 convinced them of something else, that their long-predicted martyrdom

would come at the hands of sinister Lucifer-controlled government agents, thus freeing them from their bodily vehicles. Oh, boy, that's some dangerous shit right there. But as the years passed, fleets of black helicopters notably failed to appear. The group continued with some significant changes, although not in their beliefs. Thumbing their noses at Lucifer

and his devilish sexual desires, Applewhite and several other male members searched for a doctor willing to perform a particular surgery, eventually finding one in Mexico. They had themselves surgically castrated. Yeah, take a second if you need to. After he'd recovered, Applewhite had his followers adopt similar clothes and similar haircuts, trying to erase any sense of gender distinction. The benevolent next-level aliens, he said, had no genders and no reproductive organs. The evil Luciferian aliens, on the other hand, had genitals and probably enjoyed them, too, the dirty little green perverts. The group started recruiting again, thanks mainly to the internet.

Doe's fascination with computers was shared by many of their followers, and the group was a pretty web-savvy crowd. Their website is, at the time of recording, still up, maintained by former members in all its 90s internet glory, unchanged from 1997, before the suicide set up. ended Heaven's Gate. In 1995, the group bought 40 acres in rural New Mexico and started building a compound. We've said it before, campers. Nothing good ever happens at a compound. Nope. They built the place out of lumber and discarded tires.

They called it an earth ship, and it was intended to be a monastery. But it turns out that building a monastery at a junk is hard work, and winters in New Mexico can be cold. So they gave up and moved to sunny, warm San Diego instead, and burned a big hole in their savings, renting luxury houses. They weren't worried about hurting for cash in the future. No one was planning to be around for long. So why did they decide to end their lives in March of 1997? I mean, I say they, but it was Marshall Applewhite who made the decision.

To all appearances, his followers went along not only willingly but enthusiastically, but it was Doe who made the call. You have to remember that they viewed their journey to the next level as something wonderful, and they viewed it as imminent since Waco in 1992. They were getting tired of waiting, and Doe was getting old. And then there was Halebop. There was nothing in the Heaven's Gate theology about a comet, but almost as soon as Halebop was spotted, there were rumors across the internet about a companion traveling in its wake, a UFO.

To Marshall Applewhite, who had been seeing the hand of fate and coincidental events for decades, this was a clear sign. The group's website was updated right up to the end. On it, you can see that Doe had some doubts about whether there was really a UFO in the comet's wake, and you can also see that he didn't really care. He wrote, Its arrival is joyously very significant to us at Heaven's Gate. The joy is that our older member in the evolutionary level above human, by this humant Bonnie Nettles, has made it clear to us that Hail Bob's approach is the marker we've been waiting for. And that was it.

T had spoken to Doe and declared that it was time to go. The group started making arrangements. I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect they decided on sedative-aided asphyxiation as their method years previously and had what they needed on hand. They got their identical black uniforms together and made their Star Trek-inspired armbands. Doe got them all-identical brand-new Nike decades. He liked Nike's and had been able to get a good deal for buying them in bulk. As they always had when leaving home, each member put a $5 bill and three quarters in their pockets. Doe and several others recorded their exit videos, which they mailed to past members they were still in touch with.

Doe updated the website one final time. Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion, graduation from the human evolutionary level. We are happily prepared to leave this world and go with T's crew. And then, in carefully coordinated waves, they started ending their lives. One of the former members who received the package of videotapes was Rio DeAngelo, up in Los Angeles. The tapes came with a letter saying, we have exited our vehicles just as we entered them. Knowing what this meant, Rio asked his boss for advice.

His boss drove him down to San Diego and waited outside as Rio looked inside the mansion. When he came out, Rio made the anonymous call to the place. police that started this story. Immediately after the story broke, three other former members of Heaven's Gate also took their own lives. Several other former members spoke of their regret at not being with their former colleagues when they abandoned their vehicles. The impediments that Heaven's Gate put in the way of people trying to leave were entirely non-physical. When somebody did actually leave, they usually went with a friendly farewell and some money to help them out on their way, but that doesn't mean there weren't tight restrictions keeping people in place.

It's not an easy thing to shake off years-long cult programming telling you that being with dough and tea was the only way to true salvation and that nobody else could truly be trusted. It wasn't at all unusual for people who left to come back, even if it was years later, and many of those who did get out still felt a sense of deep connection with the group and their ideals. Five years after the deaths, Rio de Angelo,

the guy who made the anonymous call to the cops still viewed his experience with Heaven's Gate as overwhelmingly positive and was still convinced that Marshall Applewhite was an extraterrestrial, telling the Associated Press, if he's just a gay music teacher from Texas, how could he teach all these advanced ways of being that really work? And that, of course, is the attitude that Heaven's Gate was built on, the belief that simple normal human beings aren't capable of extraordinary or awful things. It all has to be aliens or demons or undead ascended masters pulling the strings. I think this story can be split into two parts. The first is a very weird case of Fali Adieu, the madness of two, where two fragile people at crisis points in their lives connected and built up an increasingly elaborate fantasy world

in which they occupied positions of vital importance. We all want to feel special, right? And this could have just led them to writing novels or making weird art, but instead we got the second part of the story, the cult. The sexlessness and deliberate tamping down of emotions in Heaven's Gate made it a safer place to be than many of the cults we've talked about before, but it still followed many of the prime features of those, deliberately isolating members from outside society,

and in particular their personal support systems. I mean, if you don't talk to anybody in your family for years, imagine the effect that that has, and the only people in your lives are the other people, people in the group. I mean, that's huge. Channeling all significant decision-making to the group's leaders and promising insight and spiritual rords that the common masses would never receive, offering the chance to be special, to be chosen. This is a mindset that can be really dangerous, and there's no shortage of horrifying acts performed by cults, but I can't think of any both

weirder and sadder than this one. The whimsical, even kind of cheerful ending, I mean, they were cheerful about it of 39 lives over what was when you get right down to it a second-rate sci-fi story with delusions of grandeur. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Alyssa, Hannah, Jennifer, Kathy, the Pantechrist, and you should know that I snorted water out my nose when I read that. Oh, man. Christy and Rush 76. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back,

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