Rancho Santa Fe Ca

Caught between the media's deafening clamor for information and the families' impassioned pleas for privacy, authorities investigating the mass suicide here sought a middle course: providing frequent briefings but withholding some key details. It was a policy that won praise from many in the media horde that descended on this ritzy community, many of them veterans of breaking stories that have deteriorated into rancorous confrontations between police and media.

Bob Page's journalistic career has taken him to Saigon, when helicopters were lifting off from the U.S. Embassy in 1975. He's also worked in Hong Kong and London, New York and Boston. Page thought his glory days on journalism's fast track were behind him when he moved to Rancho Santa Fe in 1992 to become chairman of the Rancho Santa Fe Review. Boy, did he have it wrong.

"Beam Us Up," read the banner headline in the Mirror. "They guzzled vodka, applesauce and lethal pills, then went gladly to their doom," said the London tabloid. Do the dead of Heaven's Gate deserve a better requiem? Or, in a world ever more hardened to unspeakable outrage, none at all? And was the mass suicide that left 39 dead in Rancho Santa Fe just California fruitcake, or did it contain the germ of something more sinister and universal?

The 39 Heaven's Gate cult members who committed suicide last week had insured themselves against being abducted, impregnated or killed by aliens, an insurance agent who specializes in unusual policies said Sunday. The cult bought a policy Oct. 10 that would pay out $1 million to each member's beneficiaries, said Simon Burgess, managing director of Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson, an insurance brokerage.

As coroners completed the grim task of examining the bodies of 39 cult members who died in a mass suicide here, a real estate agent said Sunday that two wealthy businessmen have offered to buy and raze the mansion where the deaths took place. The two men want to protect local property values and "spare Rancho Santa Fe the stigma of what happened" at the 9,200-square-foot house atop Colina Norte, real estate agent Steve Leggitt said.

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.

Befitting the space alien he claimed to be, Marshall Applewhite never really succeeded here on Earth, never made the desired inroads in human society. His message was aimed at the fringe, but it seemed a bit too far out for most, almost a caricature of wacky California thought. A redeemer descended from the "Next Level," he was locked in decades of spiritual war with rival space aliens.

When a mysterious man and woman known as "The Two" began seeking fellow travelers for a space trip to a higher world, they came to Los Angeles, to a tract home in Studio City, to the living room of a spiritualist and onetime advertising executive named Joan Culpepper.

San Diego County medical examiners Saturday worked through their grim backlog of 39 autopsies, using forklifts to haul bodies two at a time into a refrigerated tractor-trailer as camera crews recorded the macabre scene. As the row of corpses grew and grew, the son of Heaven's Gate cult leader Marshall Applewhite apologized to the families who had lost loved ones to the mass suicide.