HE HAD, ACCORDING TO EVERYONE who knew him, a beautiful voice, and there were traces of it even in the tapes he made at the end of his life–calm and resonant, a soothing counterpoint to his intense and unblinking gaze. That is, if you didn’t listen to what Marshall Herff Applewhite was actually saying, his farrago of early-Christian heresy and 1970s-era science fiction. But others listened, and therein lies the real mystery at the heart of what is probably the largest mass suicide in American history. Over the years, hundreds of people spent at least some time in Applewhite’s cults, tens of thousands must have heard him speak and millions in theory might have seen his newspaper advertisements or Web pages. And of these. 38 followed him into the grave. Why them?
Unfortunately, the expected answer that no one but a hopeless misfit and loser would travel the West in a pickup truck for 20 years, hoping to be transported to a higher plane in a flying saucer doesn’t seem to fit the facts. Not much is known of the cult members’ lives, in part because many had been out of touch with their families since the 1970s. A few of them, to be sure, were dropouts and rebels, and several seemed to have joined up with Applewhite after a personal loss–the death of a brother, a broken romance. But for the most part, the portraits that emerged through the recollections of parents, friends and children were disconcertingly ordinary. Virginia Norton’s judgment on her 43-year-old daughter, Cheryl Elaine Butcher, who died at Rancho Santa Fe, is as chilling as it is touching. “She wasn’t a weird crazy person,” says Norton, whose daughter had gone to a lecture on UFOs one day in 1976 and left a few days later. “She was a normal person. There was nothing about her to make you think she was bad. She was a little different. But aren’t we all?”
WHY HER, THEN: A 21-YEAR-old college student living with her mother in Springfield, Mo.–a bit of a loner, by Norton’s account, but an amateur actress, a college journalist and a musician? Or, more baffling yet, why John M. Craig of Durango, Colo., who was 41 when he joined Applewhite’s cult in 1975? Craig was a successful rancher and businessman, a strapping outdoorsman who had bit parts as a cowboy in several movies. He also had six young children. One day in July an old college friend came to visit; two days later Craig drove off with him to hear Applewhite and his partner then, Bonnie Nettles, speak in Denver. The next morning, according to a family friend, Craig’s wife woke up “and there was a note that said he was gone to meet the spaceship because the end of the world was coming.” Craig never returned; his wife divorced him two years later and raised the children herself. Stories in the local papers last week mentioned rumors of financial troubles, but other sources, including his former wife, denied them. “Nobody,” she said, “will ever be able to explain why he did it.”
He went to a meeting, and then he was gone. Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, a 38-year-old postal worker from Cincinnati, read something about Heaven’s Gate on the Internet last August, shortly after giving birth to twin girls. “She just quit her job and took her money and said, ‘Hey, I’m moving’,” said her family friend the Rev. H. L. Harvey. She left her children, but took her husband, Steven; he didn’t stay, but she did.
Susan Strom saw a flier at Oregon State University at Corvallis, where she was studying botany and geography, and went to hear Applewhite along with her friend David Cabot Van Sinderen. She was the daughter of Lyle Strom of Omaha, who would go on to become a U.S. district court judge (he has since retired); David was the son of Alfred White Van Sinderen, president and future chairman of Southern New England Telephone Co. Susan’s father described her, last week, as extroverted and athletic; a statement by Van Sinderen’s family called him “gentle and creative.” “He always had a delightful sense of humor,” the statement went on, “and it is clear to us from watching the farewell video that he maintained it to the end.” “David was seeking, as many of us are seeking,” his sister, Silvia Abbate, said. Whatever this couple sought, they found it with Heaven’s Gate. Both families say their children seemed happy and fulfilled by their life in the cult; there are, obviously, worse fates than living in a California mansion, working as a computer programmer and abstaining from drugs, alcohol and sex. Or so it seemed until last week.
But although Applewhite apparently never tried to keep members by force, he discouraged contact with their families, and that was perhaps the hardest thing for parents to bear. Nancie Brown, of Carmel, Calif., saw her son, David Geoffrey Moore, only twice in the 21 years he spent as one of Applewhite’s followers; for the first seven years after he joined, she got only occasional postcards. He explained, unconvincingly, that parents would “tug at [members’] vibrational level.” “I’ve been grieving for 20 years,” Brown said after the call came from the coroner’s office. “You would never know when you would see him next or if you would ever see him again. It was open-ended grieving.” Robert Maeder, of Sag Harbor, N.Y., describes his daughter, Gail, as having been “mentally kidnapped” by the cult, which she joined in California around three years ago, after she broke up with her boyfriend and her gift shop failed. She sent some postcards, a few letters (some written on the back of the cult’s fliers), and there was a phone call a year and a half ago. Then not a word until the phone rang last week: it was the coroner’s Office.
They saw a flier, they went to a meeting. . .and they were gone. They followed Applewhite through all the name changes (his as well as the group’s), through the death of Nettles, through various twists and turns of his cosmology as the promised aliens failed again and again to show themselves. “They taught that sometimes we’re given instructions that completely contradict the previous instructions, and we have to go with the flow as part of the faith,” explained Dick Joslyn, an actor and model in Hollywood when he joined the group in 1975. He left it, not without some pain and regret, in 1990.
It must have been very powerful, this call to a higher purpose, even cloaked as it was in gibberish. And although two decades without sex probably seems like a long time to many people, for Applewhite (who, it now appears, was struggling against his own homosexuality) and perhaps for some of his followers, chastity had its own seductiveness. “It may comfort you to know I am still not participating in any sexual acts,” Gail Maeder wrote to her parents in 1995. “It is really nice to establish better relationships, especially with males.” But that still is a long way from explaining how 38 men and women picked up and left their homes and families over the last 22 years, and then, at a word from their leader, left their lives as well. “I’m no longer surprised by anything people believe,” says William Martin, an expert in the sociology of religion at Rice University, “including the idea that somebody’s got a bunch of quarters to catch a spaceship.” But left behind are 39 corpses, and the question of what it was that people heard when Applewhite spoke.
BY T. TRENT GEGAX
EVEN IN THE REALM OF cultdom, the rite of castration is unusual. “Quite strange. Quite strange” is now the medical examiner put it after autopsies last week of Marshall Herff Applewhite and some of his male followers revealed surgical removal of the testicles done years earlier–by whom, no one yet knows.
The most common reasons for castration these days are medical and legal. Patients with advanced prostate cancer sometimes elect castration, whether by surgery or ongoing pharmaceutical injections, to slow tumor growth. In the courts, sex offenders are increasingly being ordered to undergo castration to reduce sex drive. The procedure is controversial, but most clinicians say it works. California this year put into effect a law, still untested, requiring repeat child molesters to be castrated.
The Heaven’s Gate castrations seem to harken back to another time. Before the revolution in 1917, Russia had the Skoptsi, who castrated themselves to guarantee obedience to vows of chastity. They may have been related to the Sect of the Castrated dating to the 18th century and led by Kondraty Selivanov, who claimed to be both Christ and Czar Peter III. Selivanov believed celibacy was the key to heaven and that castration was the way to avoid sexual temptation. James Charlesworth, religion professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, also cites a Syrian cult called the Galli in the first century A.D. “This was a weird, wild group of priests,” he says, “who would get inebriated and whip themselves into this frenzy and then take out a knife and cut their balls off.” Quite strange.
title: “Far From Home” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-12” author: “Herminia Masser”
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES. USC is home to more than 5,000 international students. (Its promotional brochure spotlights an Australian student of Vietnamese origin.) Newcomers might be tempted to befriend only their compatriots, but most find the atmosphere friendly enough that they fit in with any group.
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK CITY. What better place for foreign students to learn than in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty? NYU makes the city manageable, coaching foreign students on everything from travel planning to getting off-campus jobs.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK CITY. Between Hispanic neighborhoods, Harlem and the Hungarian Pastry Shop (a favorite landmark), Columbia holds an obvious charm for global nomads. Its topnotch American Language Program offers English classes for law, business and tech types.
PURDUE UNIVERSITY, WEST LAFA-YETTE, INDIANA. Purdue has more stu-dents (37,871) than the town has residents (28,778). It boasts a top-ranked engineering program. The international office pairs foreign students with locals and teaches them the finer points of American football.
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN. UT-Austin draws Central and South American students. The PALS Program hooks them up with American students, and an entire department helps their families settle in.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY. Boston is home to some 50 institutions of higher learning, but BU has the biggest number of international students, 139 of whom hail from South Korea.
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, COLUMBUS. Solid business and engineering departments–both popular with international students–combine with a vibrant social scene.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN. Almost every country is represented–there are two undergraduates from Mauritius. Students bond in the Cosmopolitan Club (like the United Nations with cocktails).
