Rancho Santa Fe Ca

With the lighting of paschal candles and the ancient proclamation "He is risen!" Christians throughout the world today celebrate the central tenet of their faith--the resurrection of a Jewish holy man they call the Son of God. But as millions of the faithful observe the holiest day of their liturgical year, the Easter stories come against a backdrop of hopelessness--or misplaced hope--made grotesquely real by the mass suicide of 39 members of a cult in Rancho Santa Fe.

Employees of a local computer company were stunned to learn that at least two people who once worked beside them were Heaven's Gate cult members who perished in last week's mass suicide. The cult members had car-pooled daily to Subscriber Computing Inc., garbed in baggy pants and shirts buttoned to the neck, former employee Charles Gardner, 42, said Monday. He said that when he saw the names of Susan Elizabeth Nora Paup, 54, and Margaret Ella Richter, 46, in the newspaper, "my jaw just dropped."

The quiet, tragic end of 39 lives inside a palatial home in Rancho Santa Fe this week may have had its roots in a chance meeting more than 20 years ago of two disaffected people--one a nurse and the other her patient in a Texas hospital. The two were Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles and Marshall Herff Applewhite, who, according to experts and a videotaped history produced by the Heaven's Gate cult, has more recently been known as "Do" (pronounced Doe), the cult's charismatic leader.

Of course it happened in California. Where else would 39 keyboard-tapping monks, holed up in a $10,000-a-month adobe mansion in what the real estate agents here tout as "the Beverly Hills of San Diego," choose to "shed their containers" and hitch a ride to the Next Level on a spacecraft said to be trailing the Comet Hale-Bopp? Iowa? Kansas?

Grieving families around the nation began Friday to plan funerals for relatives they had long ago lost to the Heaven's Gate cult, which promised disciples they could evolve into extraterrestrials by severing all links to modern society and human desires.

Following a charismatic leader known as "the Representative" and taking their cue from the heavens--Comet Hale-Bopp--the men and women of the Heaven's Gate cult apparently believed they were leaving this week for a spaceship that would take them to a utopian "Next Kingdom." The complex theology and strident beliefs of 39 cult members, who died in an apparent mass suicide in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, apparently are spelled out in a voluminous tract they left behind.

Although the apparent mass suicide discovered Wednesday in Rancho Santa Fe sounds like prime material for a TV movie, networks and producers are proceeding cautiously in seeking to exploit the story. Several producers and network representatives contacted Thursday said they were not actively pursuing broadcast rights, although most stopped short of ruling out the possibility.

It was only last July that Heather Chronert answered the door of the San Diego Polo Club to find a pair of unexpected visitors: "Gentle, pale people,"--middle-aged men, she recalls, who proposed designing the club's World Wide Web site. At first skeptical, Chronert, the club's office manager, was soon won over by her visitors' "lavish, impeccable portfolio," which included among its offerings a "beautiful" site that paid homage to a famous rock star and actress: Madonna.

Ed Mayers strode across the luscious green grass at the Rancho Santa Fe Country Club and explained how 39 mass suicides could chip holes in the veneer of privacy built by residents of this exclusive enclave known simply as "the Ranch." "This is a place where people live in denial of the rest of the world," said the retired manufacturer, lining up a three-foot putt on a glorious morning. "The Ranch is a place where people practice civility in an uncivil world.