The Call of the Weird

by Louis Theroux

  Two other former cult members, Mark and Sarah, arrived soon afterward. Mark was friendly and animated. Sarah was low-key and seemed a little wary.

  It soon became clear that all three were against “showing their vehicles” on camera, so we spent what was left of the evening driving round Phoenix forlornly looking for a backdrop against which we could silhouette them—a view overlooking the city; a starry desert landscape. There were eight of us in the van, including crew. We made awkward chit-chat—me scrupulously using all their terminology about “graduating” and “class members” and “the next level” and worrying all the time that Debbie or Simon or one of the crew was going to make an off-color remark.

  At one point Mark said, “This whole idea about it being a cult is so off-base. I mean, these were brilliant people. The intelligence . . . We’re talking about doctors, lawyers. One of them was the person who did all the programming for ATM machines.”

  We ended up stumbling around a rutted track in the pitch dark in a park somewhere on the outskirts of Phoenix. Mark had thought we’d get a nice view of the city, but we hadn’t banked on the noise of about thirty teenagers drinking and playing eighties hits. “Mickey” by Toni Basil had just come on when we called it a night.

  My abiding memory of the whole encounter is how bare Oscody’s apartment was, with nothing in it but that computer and its flying toaster screen saver.

  Seven years later, in the Las Vegas university library, I browsed articles on the history of Heaven’s Gate. Marshall Herff Applewhite, or “Herff,” as people called him, had been a music teacher in Texas. Married with two children, he struggled with homosexual impulses. He divorced. In 1970, he lost his job at St. Thomas’s University amid a scandal over an affair with a student. He became depressed, heard voices.

  In one version of the story, Herff met Bonnie Lu Nettles in a psychiatric hospital in Houston, where he was attempting to “cure” himself of homosexuality. For a while, they ran a New Age center together. They hit the road in 1973, convinced that they were the two witnesses spoken of in the book of Revelation.

  Starting in 1975, they began recruiting. For years, they toured the country, giving presentations, answering questions, winning converts. The dropout rate was high; at no time did they number more than a hundred. They taught that Earth was a “garden” for growing souls, which would be picked up by a spaceship when they were ready. The worst mistake one could make was to identify one’s self with one’s body, or “vehicle.” All sensuality was shunned. They abstained from sex or even lustful thoughts, wore baggy clothing, cut their hair short.

  The kitchen was called the “nutrilab.” Cooking was “fuel preparation.” They could watch certain TV shows: Star Trek and The X Files were okay; news shows about natural disasters were encouraged, because they fed into the group’s apocalyptic thinking. Little House on the Prairie was not, because it was about a family and therefore it “vibrated on the human level.” Students had to close their eyes during scenes that were arousing.

  Posted on the Heaven’s Gate website was a list of offenses: “Trusting my own judgment—or using my own mind,” “Staying in my own head, having private thoughts,” “Having likes or dislikes.”

  In 1985, Ti died of liver cancer. She’d been expecting to be picked up by a spaceship, physically, and taken to Heaven. When that didn’t happen Do adapted the theology. Now, instead of needing an actual spaceship to land, their souls could migrate over a distance. Thus the groundwork for their suicidal exit eleven years later was laid.

  One academic article gave this account of their final years: “The group’s efforts to get its message out were hitting a dead end. Among the few who clicked on to the Heaven’s Gate website, the main response was ridicule . . . Hardly anyone joined . . . A dropout claimed that members ‘resented the fact that the world wrote them off as another kooky cult.’” I thought guiltily of my own contact with the group and their faith in my good intentions. In late 1996, speculation appeared on the Internet that there was a spaceship in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp. The comet would be closest to Earth on the first day of spring 1997. Do had predicted UFO landings many times in the group’s twenty-one-year history, but this time there would be no landing. They were going out to meet the craft a hundred million miles from Earth.

  Having made money designing websites, the group splurged in its last few months on outings to the San Diego Wild Animal Park and Sea World and a UFO conference in Laughlin, Nevada. They kept itemized ledgers of all their expenditures. They traveled to Las Vegas, saw Cirque du Soleil ($2,661), gambled (winning $58.91), and ascended the Stratosphere, the second-tallest structure west of the Mississippi. Among their last acts, three days before the suicides began, was a group outing to see the Mike Leigh film Secrets and Lies.

  One night in May 2004, I climbed the Stratosphere. 1,149 feet high, it looks, from the outside, a little like a flying saucer on stilts, ungainly but beautiful. The observation deck has raked windows so you can look down as well as out, down onto the lights of Las Vegas and out onto the ring of dark mountains that holds the city in its arms. It feels the way being lifted slowly into space on a flying saucer might feel. Outside Las Vegas the landscape is lifeless. The city is like a moonbase; it is easy to imagine there is no other life on earth.

  At my motel, I watched the videotape in which the Heaven’s Gate members deliver their “exit statements.” On camera, they are shy and gentle, all of them aware of how they are likely to be perceived— as brainwashed dupes, weirdos, cultists—and doing what they can to forestall that impression.

  They sit outside, two women with a sunny garden stretching out behind them. “I’m so happy.” “We’re looking forward to being in our next-level bodies.” Modest, humble, nervous, with their hands folded, in baggy shirts with their top buttons all done up. “This vehicle isn’t much of a communicator and especially it’s not comfortable in front of a camera.” One starts crying.

  A middle-aged black man, Thomas Nichols, the brother of Nichelle Nichols who played Lieutenant Uhura in Star Trek, says: “I’m the happiest person in the world.” One younger member ends her statement by slapping her chest in the style of Captain Picard in Star Trek and saying: “Thirty-nine to beam up!” Laughter in the background.

  Two women, sitting erect, in their thirties and fifties respectively, say: “Hideousness has become the norm.”

  A young guy wearing glasses says: “When we leave, I know the media will treat this as a sort of weird bizarre cult, whatever you want to call it. But look deeper . . . look for what we’ve taught people and the message we’ve left behind. We know that it’s difficult to understand but the next level requires a commitment, a kind of final ingredient of leaving the body and giving it up until you can actually graduate.”

  A skinny woman with sticking-out ears says: “I know y’all can get the impression that there’s some kind of charismatic people that may have had a strong influence on a lot of weak-minded people. Well, there are a lot of people that we’ve worked with over the years that might be able to push through that impression.” She refers to Do as Jesus; starts weeping; talks about “demons.” Demons meaning—unwanted desires? Sexual urges? The impulse to quit the cult and reunite with her friends and family in the outside world?

  I’m struck watching it by how many of them there are. I start to think this must be the last, then another comes on, then two more . . .

  A man, fiftyish, short hair: “We know that the spin doctors, the people that make a profession of debunking everybody, putting down everybody, are going to attack what we’re doing, just like they attacked the Solar Temple, Waco, what have you. They’ll say these people are crazy. They were mesmerized, whatever. We know it isn’t true, but how can you know that?” Then a man in his forties: “We know the media will do a hatchet job on us.”

  In his video, Do looks a kindly man. He speaks slowly. He has the air of the music teacher he once was. I imagine myself among them, a fellow member of the cult. It wou
ld be very peaceful and gentle, and probably quite boring. Several newspaper accounts commented how tidy the house was, how neatly they all died.

  It is hard as a nonbeliever to know what value to attach to the suicides. What does it mean? Their awareness of how they are perceived makes it difficult to view them as brainwashed. Only when they speak about the hatefulness of the world am I brought up short. Only then do they seem disconnected. I find a lot to feel sad about in their deaths, and also a little to admire. Whatever else you say about the suicides, they were done out of a kind of love. They wanted to do it. Or thought they wanted to. If there’s a difference . . .

  I’d asked Rio when I met him if he knew what became of Oscody. “He’s in Phoenix,” he said. “So are Mark and Sarah.” But Rio was wrong. Oscody had “exited” back in July of 2001, without fanfare, unknown to the world at large, bringing the Heaven’s Gate suicides to a grand total of forty-two. I found this out when I spoke to Mark on the phone.

  “It’s kind of difficult, an awkward thing to talk to people about,” Mark said. “Rio didn’t know about it, because we hadn’t really talked much in the last year or so.”

  I met up with Mark and Sarah in the suburbs of Phoenix at a New Orleans theme restaurant called Lafitte’s, inside an Embassy Suites hotel. We were the only customers. Instead of rings, the napkins were bound with strings of shiny beads of the kind they wear in New Orleans at Mardi Gras. Dixieland jazz played incongruously.

  Sarah had long dark hair, earrings, and a pendant; she looked vaguely Persian. Mark was red-haired, geeky, in black trousers and gray polo shirt. They were intelligent and friendly. Sarah was, once again, a little wary.

  I bought them lunch, and they seemed pleased to have a chance to relive their days in the community, as the waiter eavesdropped on our conversation. They were in the group for twelve years, from 1975 to 1987. Like Rio, they regarded their time in Heaven’s Gate as the greatest of their lives. “If you could find an apostle who would say what it was like being in the presence of Jesus,” Sarah said, “it was just fabulous.”

  “It was hard,” Mark said. “But there’s nothing in the human experience that matches it. Nothing.” It was like “unconditional love” between all the members, Mark said.

  “So why did you leave?” I asked.

  “Good question,” Sarah said.

  “Yeah, good question,” Mark said.

  “Still wrestle with that today,” Sarah said.

  The answer, I suspected, was because they loved each other. Their love trumped the love of the group. Now, in addition to their workaday jobs, they run the Heaven’s Gate website and distribute videos and books to anyone who’s curious. Mark answers emails. Once a week, he’ll get an inquiry about whether it’s too late to join the rest of the class in space by committing suicide. “We tell them! We say the class is over . . . The best thing to be is good for the rest of your life and always strive to be closer to God.”

  I was impressed with how thoughtful and considerate Mark and Sarah were. Mark spoke eloquently about how hard it was to weather the onslaught of media coverage: “That very rough oneto- two-week period when the public was saying ‘Please! Explain this to us! Make them less so that we can go on with our lives!’ You know? ‘Ridicule them! Do something with them!’”

  Later, reading over a transcript of my conversation with them, I was struck by a passage where Mark talked about Oscody’s “exit” and how it was to break the news to Rio:

  M: Rio and I for some reason hadn’t talked for a long time and it never came up, and he went kind of like real sad: “Really?” I said, “I thought I told you.” . . . And he understood the context. He understood what it meant.

  L: Why was he sad?

  M: No, he wasn’t sad.

  L: Oh, I thought you just said he was sad.

  M: No, he wasn’t sad.

  L: What did you say?

  M: He was like surprised. Like: [brightly] “Really? I didn’t know that.” And so I explained the context and the circumstances. And he said, it was a very noble thing [voice breaking].

  9

  MARSHALL SYLVER

  Looking around the crowd that was gathering outside the conference room at the Golden Nugget hotel casino, it was hard to believe they were all there to see Marshall Sylver.

  He’d endured a high-profile trial for fraud, numerous lawsuits, a scalding magazine exposé—enough disgrace, you would think, to derail the career of a supposed success coach. But still they came: young, old, all races, maybe two hundred or more, hoping to learn the secrets of Passion, Profit, and Power, at the knee of the master.

  I’d made a documentary about him five years earlier. Now I was back, intending to catch him unawares at his seminar, the guest of one Gene Puffer. As a repeat student, in theory Gene could get himself and a friend in for free. It had crossed my mind to pay for the seminar, but Dena, the friendly woman on the phone at Sylver HQ, had told me it cost $1,495.

  Right now, Gene was downstairs getting a coffee. He said he might get thrown out if he were spotted by anyone on Marshall’s staff. Gene had been among several ex-Sylverites who had testified against Marshall and there was bad blood. Dena had asked me to confirm his name when I’d called, to make sure he qualified as a “reattend.” “I’ll call back,” I said. There was a chance that if his name were entered into Dena’s computer, sirens would sound and flashing red lights would go off throughout the building.

  The idea of seeing Marshall again had been making me anxious for a month, even infiltrating my subconscious. A few weeks earlier, having arrived back in Vegas, and realizing a surprise visit to his seminar was my only hope of contact, I’d had a dream in which he physically threw me out of his class, dragging me along by the arm as I fired questions. He looked different in my imagination. Instead of slicked-back hair and suit, he had a blazer-cut leather jacket and his hair was fashionably tousled.

  I was surprised by the strength of my animus against Marshall, but the truth is I’d never really warmed to him. In 2000, I’d attended a couple of his events, and even then I’d been troubled by the high-pressure sales practices. In the years since, the Millionaire Mentorship Program had attracted so many complaints that the State of Nevada ended up prosecuting him for fraud. Among the details that came out: The so-called “elite course” available only to “qualified pre-interviewed students” had signed up a mentally handicapped man, offered money-back guarantees that it refused to honor under any circumstances, and employed a near-destitute “millionaire mentor” who moved in with one of his “students,” then made off with his car and $10,000.

  Two months before the seminar, in July, I’d spent several days at the county clerk’s office in downtown Las Vegas, reading the transcripts of case C19/451, the State of Nevada v. M. Sylwestrzak. Among the details were the names of two witnesses who testified against Marshall: Art Eagle and Gene Puffer. Both were graduates of the Millionaire Mentorship Program, a ten-week get-rich-quick scheme. Three and a half days learning “wealth creation,” followed by ten weeks of daily calls from one of Marshall’s elite cadre of “millionaire mentors.” If you didn’t double your money, you got a full refund. It sounded too good to be true, and it was.

  I met up with Gene and Art at a gourmet coffee chain. Gene was tall, with a moustache, and a chunky technical watch. An outof- work airline pilot, he was doing substitute teaching to pay the bills. Art was a struggling entrepreneur, paunchy, with thinning hair. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and tie and a dainty, thin watch. He was the picture of a downtrodden salesman. He told me his story.

  He’d been an actual millionaire at one time, he said, with $5,000,000 in his bank account. He was vague about where the money had come from. For a while, he’d had it in a bank account in Grenada, where he was getting insane rates of return—40, 50 percent. He convinced his mother and his sister to put their money in the same bank. But there were problems with the withdrawals. Then the head of the bank fled to Uganda. Art and his family lost everythi
ng.

  He heard Marshall’s commercial on Christian radio. Learn the skills necessary to become a millionaire. It mentioned a “mixer,” a social event where you could learn more, taking place at Marshall’s “mansion.” Art was intrigued.

  The mansion turned out be a conference room at a hotel, but Art liked what he heard. His only concern was that he might not have what it took to make it in the Program. “I need to believe that I can help you,” Marshall said in his leaflet. Art was a slow reader and writer since suffering a brain injury as a teenager.

  He approached Marshall. “I told him a little about my personal situation. I have a couple of hindrances that sometimes put me behind other people a little bit. He said don’t worry about it, you’re going to do fine, and that’s why we have this guarantee.” Reassured, he signed up. He put the course on his credit card. A total of $6,600.

  The classes in “wealth creation” came first. They role-played, pretending to speak and act like millionaires. They were told to pick an “income vehicle.” They could sign up under Marshall as part of a “network marketing company”—something like a pyramid scheme—or they could come up with their own idea. Art was so impressed he decided he wanted to work for Marshall himself.

  Marshall told Art he’d need to sign up for another course. Art plunked down another $5,000 for a place at “Mentorship University.” Marshall told Art he’d need to see a résumé, too. Art took him at his word. If he wanted a résumé, he’d get one, but not any old résumé. He’d get the à la recherche du temps perdu of résumés, an obsessive, painstaking work of art, a love letter of sorts. He began spending up to six hours a day on his computer polishing it, adding subsections, logos, fonts. When finished, it ran to 133 pages, complete with a table of contents, an introduction, and a conclusion. Meanwhile, he was volunteering his time to Marshall’s company, doing odd jobs like helping to clear away chairs after seminars.