The Story of the Doomsday Cult that Drank the Kool-Aid

The Doomsday Cult That Drank the Kool-Aid and Made These Nike’s Sell OutPhoto byNikki Young/Canva

This is the story of the Heaven’s Gate cult, which operated on America’s West Coast for around 22 years until the members took part in the largest mass suicide in American history. The infamous alien-obsessed spiritual group would somehow lead 39 members to commit mass suicide, with one aspect of the event leading to an interesting fashion trend.

People can quite easily be taken advantage of in the name of whatever religion they believe. This is exactly what happened with Heaven’s Gate. Unfortunately, many of its members were met with more than just a loss of time or finances — they lost their lives.

The Early Beginnings of Heaven's Gate

Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. was born on May 17, 1931, to a Presbyterian family in Spur, Texas. Actually, his father was a Presbyterian minister, so he grew up heavily around religion. He initially enrolled to study as a Minister but changed his mind and went into Music. He did a brief stint in the US army corps from 1954 to ’56. By 1959 he had obtained his Masters in Music from the University of Colorado. He would then go on to teach music at several different universities. However, in 1970 he was dismissed for ‘health reasons of an emotional nature’.

Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr.Photo byCOURTESY OF HBO MAX

Basically, he wasn’t doing so well mentally. His father’s death a year later brought on severe depression. So he checked himself into a mental institution. Even though he really tried and underwent some psychotherapy, he found no relief. His marriage began to fail and by 1972 he had divorced his wife and was estranged from his two children.

It was during this period in his life he met a woman by the name of Bonnie Lu Nettles. I’ve read a few different sources with different information — some sources say they met at the mental institutions, and some are unclear. Bonnie was a former nurse and mother of four who was actually married when she met Marshall.

In her early years, Bonnie was born and raised in Houston into a Baptist family. As an adult, she moved away from religion. After becoming a registered nurse, she married businessman Joseph Segal Nettles in December 1949 with whom she had four children. Their marriage remained mostly stable until 1972 when she met and fell in love with Marshall. But it wasn’t just her meeting Marshall that broke her marriage and family up. It was also this really strange belief system that she began to follow.

Basically, Bonnie believed that a 19th-century monk named Brother Francis frequently spoke with her and gave her instructions. She began conducting seances with mediums in order to contact other deceased spirits. A circle group was held every Wednesday at her house to contact the dead. Bonnie had a strong interest in astrology, theosophy, and the occult. And her husband wasn’t down with it.

In 1972, Bonnie went to see multiple fortune-tellers, who told her that she was soon to meet a mysterious man who was tall with light hair and a fair complexion. This description was fairly close to Marshall’s appearance ,  so when she saw him, she fell for him quickly and deeply, feeling like this was the man she was destined to meet.

Little did anyone know that this romance between Marshall and Bonnie would be the catalyst of a huge tragedy.

Marshall and Bonnie lived as common-law partners and moved to Las Vegas and Oregon looking for a spiritual awakening, but they couldn’t keep out of trouble. In 1974 Marshall was jailed in Texas for auto theft and credit card fraud.

The pair decided to change their names, calling themselves “Bo” and “Peep” with Marshall being Bo and Bonnie being Peep. Later they would change their names to “Do” and “Ti”, you know — like the musical notes.

Together, they started to study different religions and theories intensely. Eventually, they concluded that they had been chosen to fulfill biblical prophecies and that they had been given higher-level minds than other people.

They wrote a pamphlet that described Jesus’ reincarnation as a Texan. They started handing out flyers and pamphlets at other religious churches, and people actually listened to them. The pair started Heaven’s Gate in 1974 and recruited their first members the following year when they convinced 20 people to leave their families and lives behind to move to Colorado after telling them an alien spaceship would take them to heaven.

Marshall and Bonnie, or should I say Bo and Peep, promised that an extraterrestrial spacecraft would take their followers to the “Kingdom of Heaven.” They said that human bodies were merely containers that could be abandoned in favor of a higher physical existence. Basically, their souls would be transported into new bodies after being abducted by UFOs. The press initially dubbed them as a "UFO cult".

When they distributed flyers for meetings, they also recruited disciples, whom they called “the crew”. At the events, they basically told the group that they were beings from another planet, called the "Next Level", who sought participants for an experiment. They stated that those who agreed to take part in the experiment would be brought to a higher evolutionary level. And though it may be surprising, people listened. People showed up to these meetings time and time again. Marshall had not only convinced Heaven’s Gate’s members that the cult was their path to salvation but that he was the same alien spirit that had inhabited Jesus Christ.

In 1975 they held gatherings in California and Oregon. Their followers basically dropped out of society and prepared for the “transition” to a new life on a spaceship. This meant that they had to sell all of their worldly possessions and give the money to the church.

Aside from abandoning their family and turning over all their money, cult members were asked to cleanse their bodies of the impure influence of things like fast food and impure sexual thoughts. That often involved things like the "Master Cleanse"  — when they drank nothing but the mix of lemonade, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup for three entire months.

When the expected transition did not occur, the group settled in Texas. The church bought a ton of housing and covered the windows so that they would have more privacy to prepare for the eventual move to a “higher level” of existence. All members were renamed and had to abstain from all forms of sex, one of the many strict rules.

The group actually began to lose members in the years following after no such spacecraft arrived.

Plan Diverted When Bonnie Dies

In 1985, Bonnie Nettles passed away from cancer. Just two years earlier, she had to have an eye removed due to cancer, and her doctor informed her that the disease was already spreading through the rest of her body. She stated that the doctor was ignorant and she believed that she could not die, as she had to ascend to heaven with Marshall.

But when Bonnie went ahead and passed away without him, Marshall didn’t miss a beat. He said that she had been collected by the ‘mother ship’ and only her container (her body) was left behind. He explained to the group that Bonnie had left because her work was done on this level but that he still had more that he had to do. Still, membership continued to dwindle.

By the 1990s, however, Marshall Applewhite rekindled the flames of Heaven’s Gate with the upcoming passing of the Hale-Bopp comet and began recruiting members with the promise of a pass to the afterlife. If you don’t remember what the Hale-Bopp comet was, because I certainly did not, let me give you a little refresher. Hale-Bopp was an unusually bright comet that flew by Earth. Marshall was able to convince the remaining members of Heaven’s Gate that there was an alien spacecraft following the Hale-Bopp comet.

People really believed it, and they were ready to commit, follow and do whatever needed to be done.

In October 1996, Marshall Applewhite rented a large home in Rancho Santa Fe, explaining to the owner that his group was made up of Christian-based angels. Then, in late March 1997, as Hale-Bopp reached its closest distance to Earth, Marshall Applewhite and 38 of his followers drank a lethal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka and then lay down to die, hoping to leave their bodily containers, enter the alien spacecraft, and pass through Heaven’s Gate into a higher existence. There were 21 women and 18 men between the ages of 26 and 72 who participated in the mass suicide.

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department received what first was thought to be a prank call regarding the mass suicide. But upon entering the massive estate, they discovered the bodies of 39 Heaven’s Gate members, all dead on beds, mattresses, or cots. It would later be learned that the suicides began in the days leading up to the call, with 15 ingesting a cocktail of barbiturates (which were dissolved into apple juice) and vodka before placing plastic bags around their heads. Several more groups did the same in the following days before everyone, including Marshall Applewhite, had deceased.

Each member was dressed exactly the same, wearing all-black and black Nike tennis shoes with a white swoosh. Nike actually discontinued the style, but since then the shoes have become a collector’s item. An unworn pair apparently discovered in a storage unit in Arizona went up for auction on eBay for the asking price of $6,660.

The Nike shoePhoto byNews.com

But guess what? The shoes were originally purchased by the cult in bulk because of their cost, not because of their style.

If the outfits weren’t odd enough, each member’s shirts featured a patch reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team,” and their pockets were each filled with a $5 bill and three quarters.

Their final meal together was a big group dinner that took place at a chain restaurant that they frequented near their compound. A week before the suicide, the cult went out for the last supper together at Marie Callender’s restaurant in Carlsbad,

“They all ordered the exact same thing,” a waiter recalled “It was set up before they came in. They all had iced teas to drink. Dinner salads beforehand with tomato vinegar dressing. Turkey potpie for the entree. Cheesecake with blueberries on top for dessert. They seemed very nice, very friendly, very polite. No one seemed depressed at all, or anything like that.”  | Source: Rollingstone.com

They believed Marshall Applewhite when he said that an alien spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet would pick up their souls and take them to the afterlife. And they risked it all on that belief.

A screenshot from their websitePhoto byHeaven's Gate website

Oddly enough, the cult’s website remains active today, 24 years after most of its members killed themselves. It’s really creepy to look at. You can tell it's a website from 1997. Almost like a time capsule.

Sources:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/heavens-gate-the-cult-of-cults-tv-review-4098414/

https://sneakernews.com/2015/09/17/the-story-of-the-nike-employee-that-sold-shoes-to-heavens-gate-cult-the-day-before-its-mass-suicide/

https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/heavens-gate-20-years-later-10-things-you-didnt-know-114563/