4. The Heaven’s Gate Suicides
The Heaven’s Gate cult was founded by self-proclaimed mystic Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles. The cult was based in a suburb of San Diego, Rancho Sante Fe. Police received a call about a mass suicide in March of 1997; the premise seemed so absurd the police were hesitant to respond and treated it as the equivalent of getting a call for littering or jaywalking. When the police finally entered the compound, they were horrified by what they found.
Applewhite had convinced 38 adherents of Heaven’s Gate to commit ritual suicide to board an alien spacecraft that Applewhite believed was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp, which traveled through the sky in early March 1997. His followers drank a mixture of vodka and the depressant phenobarbital and placed bags over their heads to expedite asphyxiation.
When police entered, they found 38 men and women neatly arranged on beds with purple cloths covering their faces and torso. Every corpse was laid out peacefully on an identical bed, in identical clothing, and with $5.75 in a pocket. Every corpse also had an armband that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” All computers in the compound also had an alert flashing on the screen. The uniformity of the dead must have presented a disconcerting scene.