Word: jouret
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...were charged steep initiation fees and required to sign away their assets. The sect / acquired farms and lavish houses in Geneva, southern France and Quebec. A disaffected former follower, Rose Marie Klaus, told a Quebec newspaper last year that she and her husband had given nearly $500,000 to Jouret and never saw it again. Giacobino, the owner of the farm in Cheiry, was heard complaining to friends about Di Mambro's free-spending ways and threatening to pull out his investment...
Whatever the mixture of cold-blooded calculation and religious fanaticism that lay behind the deaths, all signs of both method and madness pointed to Jouret as the prime culprit. Born in Kitwit in the Belgian Congo, now Zaire, he went to Brussels in the 1970s for medical training, then moved around the world studying acupuncture and homeopathy, a system of treatment based on minimum doses of medication. Along the way he found himself drawn to the spiritual arcana of the Knights Templar, a mystical brotherhood banned in France in the 14th century. Eventually he joined a French-based group called...
...Jouret is believed to have attracted up to 75 followers around Quebec and 200 more in Switzerland and France. Though some were recruited from among his patients, most learned of him through the lectures he gave on two continents. In 1988 and 1989 he was paid to speak at a public utility, Hydro-Quebec, where he talked of "self-realization" and recruited more than a dozen employees. Listeners who seemed receptive to his initial message might find themselves invited to join an inner circle where his full apocalyptic vision was unveiled...
Unlike the followers of Jim Jones and Koresh, Jouret's faithful did not live in tightly organized communes. For the most part they kept their day jobs and lived at their own addresses, often hiding their membership even from close ! friends. "We went about our daily lives, but we didn't belong to this world," said a former member who spoke anonymously on Swiss television. "Jouret made us feel we were a chosen and privileged congregation." But he still had the power to make them assemble when he called, though they may not have suspected the fate they were chosen...
...away, in Granges-sur-Salvan, investigators found 25 additional bodies in three burned-out chalets. Many had bullet wounds indicative of point-blank execution. Almost simultaneously, Canadian authorities reported the death of five more suspected cult members near Montreal. Police are searching for the cult's two leaders, Luc Jouret, a Belgian homeopath who emigrated to Switzerland via Canada, and Joseph di Mambro, a French Canadian...