On their Web site, the leaders of the Heaven's Gate cult involved in this week's mass suicide of 39 people in San Diego County are identified as Do and Ti.
They were known to some of the members of their movement, which apparently self-immolated in an attempt to reach a spaceship they believed is near Comet Hale-Bopp, as Bo and Peep.
Sometimes they just called themselves The Two.
And over their two decades-plus of wandering the United States in search of adherents, they were often named in press clippings and police blotters by their earthly names: Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles.
Press accounts say they met in the early '70s when Applewhite was a patient and Nettles was a nurse at a Texas mental hospital. He was a divorced college music professor. She was a married mother of four who left her home to follow her vision with Applewhite. One of their first adventures together was an arrest in 1974 in Herlingen, Texas: Applewhite was busted on car-theft charges, Nettles on a count of credit-card fraud. He spent six months in the local lockup before pleading guilty.
Soon after they teamed up - over the years they called their group the Next Level Crew, Total Overcomers, Human Individual Metamorphosis - they seemed to readily attract a wide following with their amalgam of Christianity, Gnosticism, Scientology, millenarianism, and utter faith in an extraterrestrial presence that was to deliver humanity to a higher plane of existence.
In the late summer of 1975, Applewhite and Nettles came to the San Francisco Bay Area and drew hundreds to presentations at Stanford University and other college campuses. That October, an announcement that The Two would appear at the main branch of the San Jose Public Library brought out 500 people to hear them. Applewhite and Nettles skipped the date because of mounting publicity.
Before coming to California, The Two had toured Colorado, Washington, and Oregon that won them scores of followers. Reports that as many as 20 people had vanished from the Newport, Ore., area with the "UFO cult" put the group in the pages of Newsweek, the New York Times magazine and on national TV news broadcasts. Despite Bo and Peep's sudden shyness, when Applewhite and Nettles left the Bay Area in 1975, they were leading more than 200 people who were willing to subject themselves to an "overcoming process" and give up their property for the promise of a spaceship journey to "that higher kingdom."
Their theology, boiled down:
They were not of this world. They had come from beyond, a level beyond human, higher than Earth, to inhabit their bodies here. (The Kingdom of God is a real place in the universe whose inhabitants have occasionally time-traveled to Earth. One such time traveler was Jesus.)
Soon, more spacecraft would show up to take a new cargo of souls to the higher level whence Bo and Peep came.
In 1985, Nettles died, leaving Do to teach alone.
In 1994, the group was on the road again. Its attraction wasn't as strong as before, but a July 1994 appearance in Chicago drew 40 people.
The session, recounted by Chicago Tribune religion writer Michael Hirsley, featured five of Applewhite's disciples, Evan, June, Matt, Oliver, and Sawyer, and described the cult's tenets. They met a skeptical reception.
One person asked what was "the next step" for anyone who decided to leave everything behind to follow the group. The response was that destinations differ for different people, so "we can't tell you exactly."
This report is based on research by Daryl Lindsey and Craig Bicknell and was compiled by Dan Brekke. Sources include the Chicago Tribune, the Madison (Wisconsin) Capitol Times, and The New York Times.
