Word: swiss
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...suicides, part of one more episode in cult pathology to put beside the weird tragedies at Jonestown, Guyana, and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. A victim was found with a letter to her family explaining that she had come to Switzerland to die. Jean-Francois Mayer, a Swiss authority on cults, made public three letters he said were posted to him by cult members before the fire. "We are leaving this earth," read one, "to rediscover, lucidly and freely, a dimension of truth and absoluteness...
Many other signs pointed to murder. The gun that fired the fatal shots in Cheiry was gone. One of the victims had been given a powerful drug. Swiss police speculated that Jouret, Di Mambro or both oversaw the death ritual in Cheiry, drove to Salvan to direct the second stage and then fled. "If this is suicide," said Andre Thierrien, a fireman in Cheiry, "then someone must have given them a helping hand." In Salvan, fully packed bags were found in apartments that had been rented by victims, suggesting that some had expected to make conventional departures from town...
...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...
...point. Frank is the genius of the marginal and the unofficial. The nondescript corner of some ratty diner in South Carolina, the smudged window that opens onto the dreariest rooftops in Butte, Montana, the vacant stare of an elevator operator in Miami Beach -- these are things the Swiss-born Frank decided were central to comprehending his adopted nation. Important is a funny word to attach to a man so suspicious of whatever is well regarded and so indifferent to success...
...charred bodies of 48 men, women and children -- members of a secretive religious sect known as the Order of the Solar Temple -- were discovered in two Swiss villages, a tragedy that included apparent suicides and what local authorities described as "collective murder" made to appear as mass suicide. In a fire-damaged farmhouse in Cheiry, a village north of Geneva, police discovered 23 dead men and women wearing ceremonial vestments. Fifty miles 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...