29 Years Ago, 39 Heaven’s Gate Cult Members Died in Largest Mass Suicide in U.S. History. Here’s What an Escapee Told PEOPLE in 1997
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It’s been 29 years since 39 cult members killed themselves in the largest mass suicide ever in the United States. The Heaven’s Gate cult suicide came as a result of years of systemic brainwashing and remains shrouded in mystery, all these years later.
An April 1997 PEOPLE cover story detailed how the group first came together in the spring of 1975 in Los Angeles, where Marshall Applewhite, “a onetime choirmaster from Texas, and Bonnie Lu Nettles, a former nurse, regaled a group of meditation enthusiasts with their belief that spaceships would someday arrive to carry away their spirits.”
Applewhite and Nettles went by the nicknames Bo and Peep, urging their members to abstain from sex, alcohol and tobacco and leave their families behind.
Over the years, the group moved around — first putting down short roots in Oregon, with some 20 to 30 followers and later moving to Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyo., and then Bonny Reservoir, Colo. They also changed names — at one point going by “Human Individual Metamorphosis” and “Total Overcomers Anonymous” — before settling on Heaven’s Gate.
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Read more https://people.com/heavens-gate-cult-suicide-anniversary-11914222
Content retrieved from: https://people.com/heavens-gate-cult-suicide-anniversary-11914222.
