W W Higher Source

Investigators probing the mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe are convinced that the 39 dead constituted the entire Heaven's Gate cult and that the organization had no splinter groups or links to other cults, authorities said Monday. San Diego County Sheriff's Department homicide investigator Lt.

The bodies came Thursday in industrial-strength doses, brought to the San Diego County medical examiner's office by the truckload, then carried two by two on a forklift to a waiting semi-truck-turned-cooler, its walls sweating under a warm sun.

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.

A former Heaven's Gate member and San Diego County are disputing ownership of the suicide cult's World Wide Web design business, which may be worth $1 million despite all its employees being dead. The county plans to auction off the cult's belongings and give the proceeds to surviving family members, said Susan Jamme, the county's deputy public administrator in charge of the case.

The company that insured the 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult against abduction by aliens said it stopped writing alien-related policies after the group's mass suicide. The cult members paid $1,000 on Oct. 10 for a policy that covered up to 50 members and would pay out $1 million a person for abduction, impregnation or death caused by aliens.

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?

In those now-familiar sun-washed video farewells, the members of Heaven's Gate said they had made up their own minds. Even the parents of one young man found among the purple-shrouded dead tried to reassure us about what happened in Rancho Santa Fe, issuing a statement saying "he was happy, healthy and acting under his own volition."