Cult members speak out 25 years after mass suicide of Heaven’s Gate acolytes

Largest mass suicide on US soil took place in March 1997 when 39 Heaven’s Gate members took their own lives

The images went worldwide after March 26, 1997. Not only were 39 bodies found in a suburban California home, bodies of cult members buried under blankets and wearing Nike sneakers; a creepy video of a wide-eyed man explaining their Heaven’s Gate philosophy also appeared everywhere.

This was before social media and before viral videos. But the clips of cult leader Marshall Applewhite were so jarring that they aired on TV news around the globe.

Now new Heaven’s Gate footage will be appearing on screens, 25 years after the shocking mass suicide - as former members of the cult speak out.

“Once you’ve already alienated yourself from everyone, it becomes very hard to go back to your old community,” Vidhya Ramalingam, founder and CEO of Moonshot, says in 20/20’s The Cult Next Door: The Mystery and Madness of Heaven’s Gate, airing on ABC on Friday night and soon available on Hulu.

The show investigates the cult and features never-before-seen footage and audio recordings, in addition to glimpses of the Southern California home where the Heaven’s Gate acolytes were found dead.

Marshall Applewhite (HBO Max)

“My guess is three-quarters of the people never stepped foot out the door, and I was one of them,” Jana Gibbons, a former Heaven’s Gate member, tells reporter Diane Sawyer, who scored a major interview with another ex-acolyte in the immediate wake of the mass suicide by poisoning.

That former member, Rio DiAngelo, sits down again with Ms Sawyer, other ex-members and relatives of the dead in the new programme.

Ms Gibbons, who was just 16 when she joined Heaven’s Gate, says in the show that “there probably wasn’t even any open windows, in the home where 39 people would die.”

Heaven’s Gate was founded by Mr Applewhite, the unblinking star of the cult’s videos, in the 1970s. A divorced father who’d been raised in a religious household, he had theological interests and met Bonnie Nettles in the early part of the decade, weaving together their own belief system in which they were prophets, the real God was an extraterrestrial, and they should preach their revelations to others.

That’s exactly what they did, picking up hundreds of nomadic followers as they crafted nicknames for themselves, the most famous being Do and Ti.

Do and Ti dictated not only belief systems but behavioural rules to those followers, who had to give away everything, cut ties with everyone and submit to requirements varying from bath times to castration.

In 1996, Applewhite decided that a shadowy picture of the Hale-Bopp comet showed a spaceship in its wake, preaching that the ship was meant to pick him up with his Heaven’s Gate followers. He and 38 others poisoned themselves with vodka and phenobarbital in pudding or apple sauce, dressed themselves the same and put plastic bags over their heads – leading to the gruesome discovery in a neatly preserved scene.

The website for Heaven’s Gate remains active, outlining the group’s beliefs – though it’s unclear how many people still subscribe to the ideas. According to the site, the Hale-Bopp Comet is “the ‘marker’ we’ve been waiting for – the time for the arrival of the spacecraft from the Level Above Human to take us home to ‘Their World’ – in the literal Heavens. Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion – ‘graduation’ from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave ‘this world’ and go with Ti’s crew.”

Interestingly, the site contains a statement “against suicide”.

“The true meaning of ‘suicide’ is to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered,” the statement reads. “In these last days, we are focused on two primary tasks: one – of making a last attempt at telling the truth about how the Next Level may be entered (our last effort at offering to individuals of this civilization the way to avoid ‘suicide’); and two – taking advantage of the rare opportunity we have each day – to work individually on our personal overcoming and change, in preparation for entering the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The followers left behind, who maintain the site, responded to requests for comment as recently as 2017, telling DailyMail.com in an emailed statement that they were still in some type of contact with the 39 dead.

“We are still connected to the Next Level, when they are,” they said, also expressing hopes they’d be reunited with the suicide victims.

“We hope to have the opportunity sometimes in the future but we do not know when that will happen,’ they said. “Probably in our next reincarnation on this planet.”

The email continued: “The simple understanding is that there is a real, physical level above the humans one here on earth. It is not a spiritual existence. It is real individuals, in real bodies, in real crafts taking care of the issues of their planet. The Next Level, as it is called, created this planet and all the life on it. The Next Level are the care takers of not only this planet but all the systems of the universe.

“From that, all the other understandings follow. They periodically come down to this planet to check in on this civilization’s development. The last time they took a very close up observation, in human form, was from about 1972 to 1997. The time before that was 2000 years ago. At those times they talk to those interested about the opportunity of the Next Level and how a very select few can enter into it only after a long period of transition and instruction.”