Marshall Applewhite

• 1. Introduction

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  Marshall Applewhite was one of 39 people found dead in a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, on the 26th of March 1997. An anonymous tip had sent the San Diego County Sheriff's Department to the house. Applewhite had founded and led the Heaven's Gate movement, and the deaths there remain the largest mass suicide to occur inside the United States. His body was found seated on the bed in the mansion's master bedroom. Nothing in his early life seemed to point toward that room. So how did he get there? What did his followers believe, and what did he ask of them? And when scholars later looked back, how did they explain why so many people stayed with him to the end?

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• 2. From Choir Loft to Classroom

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  Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. was born in Spur, Texas, on the 17th of May 1931. His father, Marshall Herff Applewhite Sr., was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother was Louise, born Winfield. He had three siblings, and as a child he became very religious. He attended Corpus Christi High School and then Austin College, where he joined several student organizations and was only moderately devout. In 1952 he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy. He then enrolled at Union Presbyterian Seminary, hoping to become a minister.

  Around that time he married Anne Pearce, and the couple later had two children, Mark and Lane. Early in his seminary studies, he left to pursue music instead. He became music director of a Presbyterian church in North Carolina. He sang as a baritone and loved spirituals and the music of Handel. In 1954 the United States Army drafted him, and he served in the Army Signal Corps in Austria and New Mexico. He left the military in 1956 and studied at the University of Colorado Boulder, earning a master's degree in music with a focus on musical theater.

  After Colorado he moved to New York City and tried to start a professional singing career. It did not work out. He went on to teach at the University of Alabama, where he began a sexual relationship with a male student and lost his position. Society at the time was not supportive of same-sex relationships, and he was left frustrated by his desires. His wife learned of the affair in 1965, and they separated. They divorced three years later. When he told his parents he was homosexual, his father rejected him.

  Still in 1965, he moved to Houston to chair the music department at the University of St. Thomas. Students found him an engaging speaker and a stylish dresser. He became a locally popular singer, directing the choir at an Episcopal church and performing with the Houston Grand Opera. For a time he was openly gay, yet he also pursued a young woman, who left him under pressure from her family. He was greatly upset by the outcome. In 1970 he resigned, citing depression and other emotional problems. The sociologists Robert Balch and David Taylor, who studied his group, speculate that another affair with a student prompted the departure. The university's president later recalled him as often mentally jumbled and disorganized near the end.

  In 1971 he briefly ran a delicatessen in New Mexico, where customers liked him. He returned to Texas later that year, and his father died around the same time. The loss brought severe depression. By then his debts were mounting, and he was borrowing money from friends.

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• 3. The Two

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  In 1972, Applewhite met Bonnie Nettles, a nurse with an interest in Theosophy and Biblical prophecy. He later said it felt as though he had known her for a long time, and he concluded they had met in a past life. Nettles told him that extraterrestrials had foretold their meeting. That persuaded him he had a divine assignment. By then he was already exploring alternatives to traditional Christian doctrine, including astrology.

  Soon he was living with her full-time, though their relationship was not sexual. It fulfilled his longtime wish for a deep and loving, yet platonic, bond. Nettles was married with four children. After she grew close to Applewhite, her husband divorced her and she lost custody of the children. Applewhite permanently cut off contact with his own family. He saw Nettles as his soulmate, and acquaintances later recalled her strong influence over him. A writer named Raine says she "was responsible for reinforcing his emerging delusional beliefs". The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton suggests the opposite, that her influence helped him avoid further psychological deterioration.

  Together they opened a bookstore called the Christian Arts Center, which stocked books from many spiritual backgrounds. They also launched a venture called Know Place, teaching classes on theosophy and mysticism. Both businesses closed within a short time. In February 1973 the pair resolved to travel and teach others about their beliefs, and they drove through the Western United States. Lifton describes the trip as a "restless, intense, often confused, peripatetic spiritual journey". Money was scarce. They sold their blood, took odd jobs, camped out, and sometimes lived on bread rolls alone. Sometimes they did not pay their lodging bills.

  One friend from Houston wrote to them and accepted their teachings. They visited her in May 1974, and she became their first convert. On the road they thought about the life of Francis of Assisi and read Helena Blavatsky, R. D. Laing and Richard Bach. They carried a King James Version of the Bible and studied New Testament passages on Christology, asceticism and eschatology. Applewhite also read science fiction by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.

  By June 1974 their beliefs had hardened into an outline. They concluded that they had been chosen to fulfill biblical prophecies and had been given higher-level minds than other people. They wrote a pamphlet describing the reincarnation of Jesus as a Texan, a thinly veiled reference to Applewhite. They also decided they were the two witnesses of the Book of Revelation. They sometimes visited churches and spiritual groups to announce this, calling themselves "The Two" or "The UFO Two". They expected to be killed, restored to life, and carried onto a spaceship in full view of others. They called this event "the Demonstration", and it was meant to prove their claims. To their dismay, audiences received these ideas poorly.

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• 4. Jail and Recruits

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  In August 1974, police in Harlingen, Texas, arrested Applewhite for failing to return a car he had rented in Missouri. He was extradited to St. Louis and jailed for six months. He maintained that he had been "divinely authorized" to keep the car. In his cell he thought through his theology. He dropped talk of the occult and turned instead to extraterrestrials and evolution.

  After his release, he and Nettles set out to contact extraterrestrials and to find like-minded followers. They advertised meetings and recruited disciples they called "crew". At these gatherings they claimed to represent beings from another planet, the Next Level, who wanted volunteers for an experiment. Those who joined would be raised to a higher evolutionary level. The two called themselves "Guinea" and "Pig". Applewhite described himself as a "lab instructor" and did most of the speaking, while Nettles added clarifications or corrections. They seldom spoke with attendees personally and simply collected phone numbers. Their organization was first named the Anonymous Sexaholics Celibate Church, and it soon became the Human Individual Metamorphosis.

  Applewhite believed in the ancient astronaut hypothesis. In this view, extraterrestrials had visited humanity long ago, placed humans on Earth, and would return to collect a select few. Parts of the idea resemble the Reformed Christian concept of election, probably a trace of his Presbyterian upbringing.

  In April 1975, New Age devotees in California invited the pair to speak. About half of the 50 attendees agreed to follow them. They also spoke on college campuses, including Cañada College in August. At a meeting in Waldport, Oregon, in September 1975, about 30 people left their homes to join them. That drew interest from media outlets. The coverage was negative, and commentators and some former members mocked the group and accused the leaders of brainwashing. Balch and Taylor state that the pair avoided pressure tactics and wanted only devoted followers.

  The scholar Benjamin E. Zeller notes that their message of salvation through individual growth echoed currents in the New Age movement of the day. The leaders themselves denied any connection, since they saw that movement as a human creation. The sociologist Janja Lalich credits their success to an eclectic mix of beliefs. They talked about literal spaceships while keeping familiar spiritual language. Most recruits were young and drawn to occultism or lived outside mainstream society. They came from many backgrounds, including Eastern religions and Scientology.

  Applewhite told followers they would change the way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and this image appeared in almost all early literature. He stressed that he was not speaking metaphorically, often using the words "biology" and "chemistry". By the mid-1970s he tried to avoid the word "religion" altogether, seeing it as inferior to science.

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• 5. Rules of the Flock

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  By 1975, Applewhite and Nettles were calling themselves Bo and Peep, shepherds tending a flock of about 70 followers. Applewhite taught that cutting every earthly tie was required before anyone could reach the Next Level. He leaned on New Testament passages in which Jesus speaks of forsaking worldly attachments. Members had to renounce friends, family, media, drugs, alcohol, jewelry, facial hair and sexuality. At first they also took biblical names. Soon they were told to adopt two-syllable names ending in "ody", with three consonants in the first syllable, such as Rkkody, Jmmody and Lvvody. Applewhite said the names marked followers as spiritual children and set them apart from their "human vehicles".

  The religious scholar James Lewis calls their way of life "quasi-nomadic". They stayed mostly at remote campgrounds and kept quiet about their beliefs. The leaders stopped holding public meetings and spent little time teaching doctrine. Contact with scattered followers was slight, and many walked away.

  Both leaders feared assassination. They taught that their own deaths would resemble those of the two witnesses in the Book of Revelation. Balch and Taylor believe that Applewhite's jail time and early rejection by audiences fed that fear. Later the pair told followers that the press's treatment of Applewhite had been a kind of assassination, and had fulfilled the prophecy. Applewhite read the Bible as a record of extraterrestrial contact with humanity. He relied heavily on Revelation and took a somewhat negative tone toward Christianity. He lectured on only a small number of verses and never tried to build a full theology.

  By early 1976 the leaders had settled on the names Do and Ti, which Applewhite said were meaningless. In June 1976 they gathered their remaining followers in Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest in southeastern Wyoming, promising a UFO visit. Nettles later announced that the visit had been cancelled. The leaders then divided the followers into small groups called "Star Clusters".

  From 1976 to 1979 the group lived in campgrounds, usually in the Rocky Mountains or Texas. The leaders placed greater demands on lives that had been loosely structured, and membership retention improved. They communicated mostly in writing or through assistants. They insisted they were the only source of truth and rejected individual revelations, hoping to prevent splits. Applewhite discouraged close friendships, fearing insubordination. Followers practiced what the leaders called "flexibility", meaning strict obedience to often shifting requests. Applewhite told them to be like children or pets in their submission.

  Yet many found him laid back and fatherly. In his 2000 study, Winston Davis says Applewhite mastered the "fine art of religious entertainment". Applewhite organized seemingly arbitrary rituals he called "games" to instill discipline, and he watched science fiction television with the group. He voiced preferences rather than giving commands and stressed that students were free to disobey. Lalich dubs this the "illusion of choice".

  In the late 1970s the group received a large sum of money, possibly an inheritance from a member or donations from followers' income. It rented houses, first in Denver and later in Dallas. With about 40 followers living in two or three houses, the leaders usually kept a house of their own. The windows were covered. They ran the household like a boot camp preparing members for the Next Level, calling the house a "craft" and regimenting lives down to the minute. Students who were not committed were encouraged to leave, and departing members received financial help. Lifton says Applewhite wanted "quality over quantity".

  Sometimes the leaders made sudden, drastic changes. Once in Texas, they announced a coming visit from extraterrestrials and told everyone to wait outside all night. Afterward they said it had only been a test. Lalich sees this as a way of deepening devotion, so that commitment no longer depended on what followers saw. Members grew desperate for Applewhite's approval, and he used that to control them.

  By 1980 the group had about 80 followers, many with jobs working with computers or as car mechanics. In 1982 the leaders let members call their families. In 1983 they allowed visits home on Mother's Day, for short stays only. Members were told to say they were studying computers at a monastery.

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• 6. After Nettles

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  In 1983, doctors surgically removed one of Nettles' eyes because of a cancer diagnosed several years earlier. She lived two more years and died in 1985. Applewhite told followers that she had "traveled to the Next Level" because she had "too much energy to remain on Earth". Her body, he said, had been abandoned for the journey. The explanation worked, and only one member left. Even so, Applewhite sank into depression. He claimed Nettles still communicated with him, but he suffered a crisis of faith.

  His students supported him greatly. He then held a ceremony in which he symbolically married his followers, which Lalich views as an effort to ensure unity. He said Nettles had left him behind because he still had more to learn. He felt she held "a higher spiritual role" than he did. He began calling her "the Father" and often used male pronouns for her. He also taught a strict hierarchy, in which students needed his guidance as he needed the guidance of the Next Level. Zeller notes that this made it impossible for the group to continue after Applewhite's death. Followers were encouraged to see him as Christ. The earlier stress on individual choice gave way to his role as mediator, and the group began to look more like a religion, built on faith and submission.

  Nettles' death forced a change in doctrine as well. Her body remained behind, unchanged, so Applewhite had to say that ascension could be spiritual. He had once taught that the group would physically rise from Earth. Now he concluded that her spirit had gone to a spaceship and received a new body, and that his followers would follow. In his view, the Biblical heaven was a planet where highly evolved beings lived, and bodies were needed to reach it. Jesus, he believed, was an extraterrestrial who came to Earth, was killed, rose bodily and was carried onto a spaceship. Humanity had not been ready to ascend then. Applewhite decided that a chance to reach the Next Level came "every two millennia", so the early 1990s offered the first since Jesus.

  He also taught that he was a walk-in, a New Age idea popular in the late 1970s. Walk-ins were higher beings who took over adult bodies in order to teach humanity. The butterfly metaphor gave way to the body as a mere container, a vehicle that souls could enter and leave. Lewis writes that the group's teaching had "Christian elements that were basically grafted on to a New Age matrix". Kenneth Woodward, writing in Newsweek, compared the dualism to ancient Christian Gnosticism, though Peters notes that Applewhite's theology differs by privileging the physical world.

  Applewhite grew increasingly paranoid and feared a conspiracy against the group. One member who joined in the mid-1980s recalled that he avoided new converts, suspecting infiltrators. He feared a government raid and praised the Jewish defenders of Masada in ancient Israel, who resisted the Roman Empire totally. He spoke more and more of the Apocalypse, likening Earth to an overgrown garden to be recycled, and humanity to a failed experiment. Earth, he said, would be "spaded under". Unlike most in the New Age movement, he predicted apocalyptic change rather than utopian change. He taught that Lucifer had brainwashed most humans and named sexual urges as his work. In 1988 he introduced evil extraterrestrials called "Luciferians", who he said sought to thwart his mission.

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• 7. Countdown to 1997

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  In 1988, Applewhite's group mailed a document describing its beliefs to a range of New Age organizations. It covered the group's history and urged readers to study several books, mostly about Christian history and UFOs. Apart from that mailing, the group stayed out of sight until 1992. That year it recorded a 12-part video series and broadcast it by satellite. The series added a "universal mind" that listeners could share in.

  Over the group's life, several hundred people joined and left. In the early 1990s, membership fell to as few as 26, and the defections gave Applewhite a sense of urgency. In May 1993 the group took the name Total Overcomers Anonymous. It spent $30,000 on a full-page advertisement in USA Today warning of catastrophic judgment coming to Earth. About 20 former members rejoined. Public lectures in 1994 helped double membership from its low point. By then Applewhite regimented his followers less strictly and spent less time with them.

  He also posted some teachings on the Internet in the early 1990s, but the criticism stung him. Around then, he first spoke of suicide as a way to reach the Next Level. Everything "human", he explained, including the body, had to be forsaken before ascending. The organization was renamed Heaven's Gate. Davis speculates that the rejection may have encouraged Applewhite to try to leave Earth.

  From June to October 1995 the group lived in rural New Mexico. It bought 40 acres and built a compound from tires and lumber, which it called the "Earth ship". Applewhite hoped to establish a monastery. The work proved hard, especially for him. He was in poor health and at one point feared he had cancer. Lifton notes that leading the group actively probably left him severely fatigued in his last years. The winter was very cold, and they abandoned the plan. Afterward they lived in several houses around San Diego.

  The group increasingly focused on suppressing sexual desire. Applewhite and seven others chose surgical castration, and after some difficulty they found a willing surgeon in Mexico. Applewhite saw sexuality as one of the strongest forces binding humans to their bodies. He taught that Next Level beings had no reproductive organs, while Luciferian beings had genders. He also cited a New Testament verse saying there would be no marriage in heaven. He required members to dress alike and wear similar haircuts, possibly to reinforce the idea of a nonsexual family.

  In October 1996, the group rented the mansion in Rancho Santa Fe. That year it recorded two video messages offering viewers a "last chance to evacuate Earth". Around then the members learned of the approach of Comet Hale-Bopp. Applewhite came to believe that Nettles was aboard a spaceship trailing the comet and planned to meet them. He told followers that the vessel would carry them to a heavenly destination, and that a government conspiracy was trying to suppress word of it. He added that deceased followers would be taken aboard too, a belief resembling the Protestant pretribulation rapture doctrine. How he learned of the comet is not known. Nor is it known why he believed the comet carried extraterrestrials, or that the dead Nettles would be with them.

  In late March 1997 the group isolated itself and recorded farewell statements. Many members praised Applewhite, and Davis describes their remarks as "regurgitations of Do's gospel". Applewhite recorded his own video shortly before his death. He called the suicides the group's "final exit" and said, "We do in all honesty hate this world". Lewis speculates that Applewhite settled on suicide because he had promised the group would ascend in his lifetime, which made naming a successor unworkable.

  The religious scholar Catherine Wessinger posits that the suicides began on the 22nd of March. They continued over three days, and Applewhite was one of the last four to die. Three assistants helped him, then ended their own lives. Everyone wore the same outfit: Nike shoes and black uniforms with patches reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team". Each had about six dollars in a shirt pocket. Beside most bodies lay a bag holding clothes, daily items and a form of identification. The deaths were the largest group suicide involving U.S. citizens since the 1978 mass murder-suicide of 918 Americans in Jonestown, Guyana. Medical examiners later determined that Applewhite's fear of cancer had been unfounded, though he did have coronary atherosclerosis.

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• 8. Why They Followed

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  On the 7th of April 1997, Applewhite's face appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. The deaths set off a media circus, and his final message was broadcast widely. Hugh Urban of Ohio State University described Applewhite in that video as "wild-eyed and rather alarming". Some outlets focused on Applewhite's sexuality, and the New York Post dubbed him "the Gay Guru". The gay rights activist Troy Perry argued that Applewhite's own repression, and society's rejection of same-sex relationships, ultimately led to his suicide. Academics have not supported that idea. Zeller argues that sexuality was not the main driver of Applewhite's asceticism, which he traces to several factors, though he grants it a role.

  The larger question was how Applewhite persuaded people to obey him, even to the point of suicide. Many popular commentators, including the psychologist Margaret Singer, speculate that he brainwashed his followers. Many academics reject that label as an oversimplification that misses how his influence actually worked. Lalich speculates that followers were willing to die with him because they had become totally dependent on him and were poorly suited to life without him. Davis points to two factors: Applewhite isolated his followers socially and cultivated total religious obedience in them. Balch and Taylor note that students had made a long-term commitment, so his interpretations of events seemed coherent to them. Most of the dead had been members for about 20 years, though a few were recent converts.

  Other scholars stress belief over control. Lewis argues that Applewhite controlled his followers by packaging his teachings in familiar terms. Richard Hecht of the University of California, Santa Barbara, argues that members died because they believed the narrative Applewhite built, not because he psychologically controlled them. In his 2000 study of apocalyptic movements, John R. Hall posits that members saw suicide as a way to show they had conquered the fear of death and truly believed Applewhite.

  Urban reads Applewhite's life as a sign of the "intense ambivalence and alienation shared by many individuals lost in late 20th-century capitalist society". He says Applewhite's attacks on contemporary culture at times resemble those of Jean Baudrillard. In Urban's view, Applewhite found no way out of the society around him except suicide, which offered an escape from its "endless circle of seduction and consumption".

  Comparisons to other leaders abound. Lalich says Applewhite fit "the traditional view of a charismatic leader", and Evan Thomas deems him a "master manipulator". Lifton likens him to Shoko Asahara, the founder of Aum Shinrikyo, as equally controlling, with a paranoia and megalomania that were gentler but ever present. Christopher Partridge of Lancaster University sees a likeness between Applewhite and Nettles and John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton, who founded the millennialist movement Muggletonianism in 17th century England.

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