Word: rio
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Even as the pages were being set up, the surviving disciples were distancing themselves from the man who goes by the names Rio D'Angelo and Richard Ford, the cult member who discovered the bodies and alerted the police. They claim that Rio has taken over the cult's original Website and is out for profit, having signed a movie deal with ABC; he has ceased communicating with them. The dissension is likely to reverberate. While Applewhite led 38 followers into apparently blissful self-annihilation, his 20-year odyssey may have drawn a total of 200 to 500 adherents, many...
...Heaven's Gate victims did more than leave suicide notes; they left suicide press kits. One of the first to receive the materials was a former cult member using the name Rio D'Angelo (police say he is really Richard Ford), who got a Federal Express package containing two videotapes, a letter and two computer discs. He took the tape home last Tuesday night and watched it. On Wednesday he came to work at the Interact Entertainment Group in Beverly Hills, California, which had employed Higher Source, the cult's Web-page design service. Rio told his boss, Nick Matzorkis...
When Matzorkis and Rio finally watched the video together with the sheriff's deputies in the middle of the night, they were stunned by what they saw. The cult members were not just unthreatening in life, they were mild in death. Says Matzorkis: "They were sharing their joy and glee. The excitement really showed." When Matzorkis scanned the computer discs on Saturday evening, TIME learned, he found that they contained messages from cult members intended to be posted on the group's Website-in effect, suicide notes. One, from a woman who signed herself "Goldenody," seemed to support the notion...
...them. They contain an update for the Heaven's Gate site, with personal suicide messages explaining the members' beliefs and reasons for going to the next "level" with their leader Do (Applewhite). TIME and CNN also obtained a two-minute color video shot by Richard Ford, aka Rio, when he discovered the bodies of his fellow cult members last week. Ford recorded the death scene of Applewhite, who lay on a large bed unlike the cots where his followers died. An illustration of an extraterrestrial stood nearby. The video is somewhat more gruesome than the portions of the sheriff...
...with Ti's crew." That craft was to be lurking in the wake of the Hale-Bopp Comet, apparently ready to take willing members along on a passage to bliss. But as with all religions, the site acknowledged, "what happens between now and then is the big question." "Rio," the ex-member who discovered the bodies, said members spoke of leaving their bodies, their "shells," behind for the journey. Yet the thirty-nine seemed determined, if only symbolically, to take it with them. Each, according to police, carried identification, along with some money, in the front pockets of their nearly...