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What happened in Rancho Santa Fe, California, was by no means a tragedy. Thirty-nine people did what they felt was necessary to achieve eternal happiness. They died of their own free will. Who are we to question their motives? We should not mourn their death. They fulfilled their purpose in life and died content. Who could ask for more? ALEX STEWART Summerville, South Carolina...
...merely as "think-tank material," a next step that Do did not plan to impose on all male members. He was fearful, says Sawyer, that "someone would leave and tell people and he'd be blamed." Eventually, Sawyer and another cultist, Steven McCarter, who died in Rancho Santa Fe, pressed Do to begin the castrations. Says Sawyer: "I wanted to do it. I was very much in favor of it. It was me and Steve. We flipped a coin to decide who would go first. He won the toss." The surgery took place in Mexico. "It was very traumatic...
...brought prosperity to the group. Two members inherited about $300,000, allowing the cult to rent houses, called "crafts," in Denver and later the Dallas-Fort Worth region. (In the Rancho Santa Fe area, the group appears to have rented two different crafts.) Thus Applewhite had enough assets to initiate the cult's last great recruitment drive, on New Year's Day 1994. An estate sale was held at the Escondido mansion, raising money to buy four vans and gear to tour the country...
...would proceed from these crafted and layered texts of made-up events and people to the story about the mass suicide of the Rancho Santa Fe cultists who believed the Hale-Bopp comet summoned them to heaven, or the one about Martin Luther King Jr.'s son Dexter visiting James Earl Ray and saying he thought him innocent of his father's murder, or the account of George Bush parachuting out of a plane because his only other jump was during World War II, when Japanese gunners shot up his torpedo bomber and he was forced to bail out over...
...early days of the cult were a far cry from the well-organized, high-tech Rancho Santa Fe operation. Applewhite and Nettles, who did odd jobs to support themselves, were arrested in Harlingen, Texas, for stealing gasoline credit cards, a charge that was later dropped. Applewhite then spent months shuttling from state to state in a confusing legal tangle over a car. During this period, he wrote his first spiritual manifesto. Applewhite and Nettles also had a brush with a comet. Stranded with a broken-down car in St. Louis, Missouri, they comforted themselves with the thought that "God would...