Marshall Applewhite

Marshall Applewhite (born May 17, 1931, Spur, Texas, U.S.—found dead March 26, 1997, Rancho Santa Fe, California) was an American cofounder and leader of Heaven’s Gate, a new religious movement that ended with the group’s mass suicide. Applewhite founded the group with Bonnie Nettles in the 1970s, and their theology combined Christian eschatology with belief in unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and extraterrestrial beings. In the 1990s they were one of the first new religious movements to use the World Wide Web for proselytizing. In March 1997, believing that they would reunite with Nettles, who had passed away in 1985, Applewhite and 38 members of the group died in a mass suicide, a shocking event that received widespread media attention.

Early life, education, and career

One of four children of a Presbyterian minister, Applewhite moved frequently throughout his childhood while his father founded and built churches throughout Texas. Applewhite attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he was a philosophy major and was involved in choral and religious groups on campus. He graduated in 1952, and soon after he married Ann Pearce. He and his wife later went to New York City, where he tried to launch a career as a professional singer.

Applewhite briefly attended Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. But he left the program without a degree to take a job as the director of music at a Presbyterian church in Gastonia, North Carolina. He was drafted in 1954 and worked in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. With the army he and his wife moved abroad to Austria and then, back in the United States, to New Mexico. After an honorable discharge in 1956, he continued to pursue music, earning a master’s degree in the subject from the University of Colorado. While in graduate school he was active in the musical theater community and appeared in productions such as Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun.

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In the early 1960s Applewhite taught music at the University of Alabama and was reportedly dismissed in 1964. About the same time, in the mid-1960s, he and his wife separated; they divorced in 1968, and he eventually lost contact with her and his two children. In 1966 Applewhite joined the music faculty at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. While in Houston he was active in the local professional opera community. However, he left that university position in the early 1970s; some reports attribute his departure to an affair with a male student (contemporary media reports of Applewhite often describe him as bisexual, but he never made any public statements about his sexual orientation.) Interviews with friends and associates of his suggest that in the late 1960s and early ’70s Applewhite became increasingly interested in astrology, mysticism, and UFOs, seeking new religious understandings.

Formation of Heaven’s Gate

Applewhite met the cofounder of Heaven’s Gate, nurse Bonnie Lu Nettles, in 1972 while he was at the hospital in Houston where she worked. Accounts differ on whether he was at the hospital for a heart blockage or to visit a friend. The pair called themselves “the Two,” referring to the notion in Revelation 11 of two end-time witnesses. One of the core beliefs of Heaven’s Gate was that Applewhite and Nettles had minds capable of channeling extraterrestrials, and they preached that the subsequent stage of human evolution—called the Next Level, to which humans would soon transition—would be on an alien spacecraft.

In the early years the Two had few followers. The first was a woman named Sharon Morgan (later Sharon Walsh), with whom they crossed the country in Morgan’s car proselytizing. However, Morgan’s husband had them arrested for credit card fraud after he discovered they were using his gas card to pay for gasoline. Those charges were eventually dropped, but in the process police found that Applewhite had a warrant for arrest for stealing a rental car. On those charges he was jailed for six months in Missouri.

During his time in jail, Applewhite further refined the group’s theology and came to believe that he and Nettles were in fact extraterrestrials. Nettles joined him upon his release, and the pair began referring to themselves as Guinea and Pig, a reflection of their self-perception of being part of an extraterrestrial experiment. They later called themselves Bo and Peep—herders of a flock—before eventually settling on Ti (Nettles) and Do (Applewhite), names inspired by the seventh and first (also eighth) notes of the Western solfège. The group also operated under different names over the years, including Human Individual Metamorphosis and Total Overcomers Anonymous. In 1975 they held gatherings in California and Oregon that attracted their initial bands of followers. Those who attached themselves to the Two dropped out of society and prepared for the transition to a new life on a spaceship. At their highest point, in 1975, they had recruited about 200 followers.

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Challenges and changes

Yet by the end of 1975 the movement had begun to splinter. Applewhite and Nettles prophesied, following Revelation 11, that they would be martyred and resurrected, an event they called the Demonstration. When that did not occur, the group became more insular and disjointed, and the core group eventually relocated to Texas as followers dwindled sharply. In 1976 Nettles announced that the group would not accept any new members. Following the concept of a classroom but operating more like a boot camp, under the leadership of Applewhite and Nettles, the group pursued stringent practices of discipline. Celibacy was a key element of the doctrine. Adherents believed they were undergoing grueling preparation for life aboard a spaceship on the Next Level.

A major shift in the community and their perspective occurred in 1985 when Nettles died from liver cancer and Applewhite took over as the sole leader. Until that point the group had believed that reaching the Next Level would occur in one’s physical body. Nettles’s death prompted a reconfiguration of some aspects of the theology. Applewhite slowly turned the group’s thinking toward a stronger focus on satanic forces working against them and the concept that human civilization was imminently going to be recycled. Members increasingly discussed denial of sexuality to the point of castration, which some members undertook. A small group remained committed, and even attempted to revive outreach efforts in 1988, but the group was largely isolated from the outside world, and its numbers slowly dwindled, reaching 26 followers by 1993.

Beginning in 1994, however, the group made another venture outward, taking to the road in a series of lectures across the United States. Some members of Heaven’s Gate in the 1990s formed a website-design business, called Higher Source, by which they supported themselves and the group. They also tried to capitalize on the burgeoning World Wide Web to spread their message by posting on message boards and creating a website.

Mass suicide

Applewhite and his followers eventually settled in Rancho Santa Fe, California, an affluent suburb of San Diego, in 1996. In 1997 rumors circulated in the UFO community that an alien spacecraft was hiding in the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp, which had been discovered in 1995 and would reach its closest point to Earth on March 22, 1997—a week prior to Easter. Applewhite believed that Hale-Bopp was a sign that a UFO was coming to finally take Heaven’s Gate members to the Next Level, as explained by a post on the Heaven’s Gate website:

Whether Hale-Bopp has a “companion” or not is irrelevant from our perspective. However, its arrival is joyously very significant to us at “Heaven’s Gate.” The joy is that our Older Member in the Evolutionary Level Above Human (the “Kingdom of Heaven”) has made it clear to us that Hale-Bopp’s approach 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.

Discussions of suicide had circulated in the group for some years, but on March 22, with the start of Holy Week and the comet’s approach, the group’s death by suicide commenced. On March 26 authorities found the bodies of Applewhite and 38 of his followers. In the previous days they had consumed a concoction of phenobarbital, vodka, and applesauce, after which they placed bags over their heads that caused them to die by asphyxiation. The 39 members of the group were discovered lying on their backs and covered by purple shrouds. They wore black trousers and sneakers and had packed suitcases by their sides, as if ready for a trip. In the years following, three more members of Heaven’s Gate died by suicide. These deaths effectively ended the group; however, Heaven’s Gate’s website, explaining the group’s beliefs, still remains accessible.