Marshall Applewhite

Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. (May 17, 1931 - March 26, 1997) was the leader of Heaven's Gate group. He died in the group's mass suicide of 1997.

Marshall Applewhite, the son of Louise Haecker Winfield and Marshall Herff Applewhite Sr., and was born in 1931 in Spur, Texas. He had an older sister named Louise Applewhite Linant. Applewhite's father was a Presbyterian minister who started new churches and moved from place to place in Texas about every three years. Applewhite hoped to follow in his father's footsteps and become a preacher as well, but his sister and father encouraged him to develop his musical talents. In high school, Applewhite proved more dedicated to music than religion, and joined the school choir. In 1950, at age 19, Applewhite enrolled at Austin College, where he pursued a degree in Music and Pre-Theology at his father's urging.

By age 28 in 1959, Applewhite was a music teacher in college. Applewhite had written about outer space, aliens, and the galaxy which he shared with his college students. He believed that there was another species on another planet in the solar system.

In 1972, Applewhite met a 44-year-old nurse named Bonnie Nettles at a Houston psychiatric hospital, where he was in the process of recovering from a heart attack. He saw her again in a theatre and they started courting each other. Two years after he met Nettles on August 28, 1974, the 43 year old Applewhite was arrested in Harlingen, Texas and charged with stealing credit cards.

After Nettles told him that he possesed special astological attributes, Marshall Applewhite declared himself the individual in whose mind was held that of Christ, the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. By 1975 they had begun Total Overcomers Anonymous together, which was eventually to become Heaven's Gate.

In 1975, Applewhite and Nettles convinced 20 people from Waldport, Oregon to join their group. Applewhite told them there would be an alien appearance by means of a UFO, but when the encounter never happened they left the group. However, more people joined and had 93 people total in their group. The cult meetings were held in various locations initially in the Waldport area, but soon spread to multiple meetups at churches, halls, lecture theatres, and new age awareness centres. As the group became more structured, over a 9-month period in 1975 Applewhite, Nettles, and small groups of their followers travelled to nearly all 50 states and even parts of Canada. The mansion at Rancho Santa Fe, California, was the eventual site of the group's mass suicide, however the group moved periodically over the years, preferring to reside in California, Colorado, and New Mexico.

Nettles and Applewhite were nicknamed 'Ti and Do' or the 'UFO two'. Nettles died in 1985 of cancer and Applewhite led Heaven's Gate alone from her death to his suicide in 1997. At some point, Applewhite had himself surgically castrated.

On March 19, 1997, Marshall Applewhite taped himself speaking of mass suicide and believed "it was the only way to evacuate this Earth." The Heaven's Gate cult was against suicide but they believed they had no choice and had to leave Earth as quickly as possible. After claiming that a space craft was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp, Applewhite convinced thirty-eight followers to commit suicide so that their souls could board the supposed craft. Applewhite believed that after their deaths, a UFO would take their souls to another "level of existence above human", comparable to what mainstream Christians would equate to Heaven. This and other UFO-related beliefs held by the group have led some observers to characterize the group as a type of UFO religion.



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