Word: cult
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...presence among the dead of the brother of a Trekkie demigoddess was only the most startling intersection of reality and science fiction. The cult's work space in Rancho Santa Fe was decorated with posters of alien beings from The X-Files and E.T. On the farewell tape, a cultist even brings up Nichols' oeuvre in explaining his decision to leave behind his human "container": "We watch a lot of Star Trek, a lot of Star Wars, it's just, to us, it's just like going on a holodeck. We've been training on a holodeck...
...confusing things about this tape was actually telling the victims apart: all with close-cropped hair and unlined skin, it was easy to see why sheriffs originally thought all the dead were young men. But shedding any signs of sexuality was integral to the cult, and six of the men, including Applewhite, went so far as to get castrated years ago, which may help explain the odd passivity or gentleness the victims exhibited. "In order to be a member of that Kingdom, one had to overcome his humanness, which included his sexuality," said a former cult member, Michael...
...victims' kin, though, had little trouble recognizing their long-lost, but suddenly gone, relatives. Mary Ann Craig, whose husband John, 62, left her and their six children in Durango, Colorado, in 1975 to join the cult, says she had been waiting for the news of his death for 22 years. "How can you explain something like this?" she asks. On Friday, Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek, went on CNN's Larry King Live to discuss the death of her brother Thomas Nichols. Nichelle said that her brother "made his choices, and we respect those...
...differently, not quite able to see the new dimension their relatives had vanished into. "We are going through a tough time," said a relative of Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, a 39-year-old Cincinnati woman who left her five children (the youngest of whom were infant twins) to join the cult last August. "It's not the closure we wanted," said Alice Maeder, whose daughter Gail, 28, started following the cult in 1994 after her Santa Cruz, California, T-shirt shop failed, "but now we know where she is." Added Gail's father Robert: "She's finally coming home...
...landmark, California's oldest planned community and a place so beautiful a writer in the 1940s described it as "the pocket where the Creator keeps all his treasures. Anything will grow there." Live and let live, in fact. In the gated community of 2,500 million-dollar homes, the cult members rented the 9,200-sq.-ft. mansion at 18421 Colina Norte, complete with pool and tennis court, from Sam Koutchesfahani, paying him $7,000 a month in cash. And although many locals knew their new neighbors were involved in some sort of religious activity, no one was concerned enough...