Heaven's Gate: The Sequel

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{LAW_PAGE_BREAK} We have come out of the wilderness and know what our mission is. It is definitely a “Big One.” I am not kidding, baby, this is for real.

—Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles (a.k.a. TI), 1973

{mosimage}By the time I finished Beyond Human Mind,it was clear that Rio’s book is a gospel, a testimonial about his time with DO and the call to transmit his wisdom — along with the “updates” he’s now receiving. If DO and TI had ushered in a new, alien apostolic age, then it is Rio who hopes to emerge as Heaven’s Gate’s John the Baptist, taking the word to the people. This was the reason he felt the urge to leave the mansion in March 1997. He was meant to tell the story. He now realizes that’s been his job since DO came up with the idea of writing a screenplay in 1996.

The script incorporates the Heaven’s Gate cosmogony. Humans are bit players in a vast galactic drama, including at least one alien summit on Mars. The protagonist is a telepathic man-dog descended from the Atlanteans who has a crystal embedded in his forehead and journeys to Earth to grow a soul. Rio and OLLODY started the first version when the group lived in Pleasant Valley, Arizona, and DO decided that a screenplay would be a ticket to the masses. The first draft was several hundred pages long, and featured concept art for all the different alien races and ships. NBC, Rio said, was interested.

All of this checked out when I tracked down Alex Pappas and Rick Singer, the producers who shopped the script around in 1996 and 1997. They ran a company called Way Out Pictures with Mark Bakshi, son of animator Ralph Bakshi and current president of Paramount Production. They were introduced to Heaven’s Gate when the group rented a house from Pappas. DO found out about Pappas’ ties to Hollywood and set up a meeting. “It was pretty wild shit,” Pappas said. “Good, but unwieldy. Needed rhythm.” When Pappas suggested cutting half of the story, especially the elaborate extraneous alien races and planets that only added confusion, DO and Rio were reluctant. “I asked, ‘Why?’ ” Pappas recalled. “And they said, ‘You don’t understand. This is all true.’ ” Pappas and Singer brought in writer Alan Haft to help pitch a take on the project around town. “NBC had Dark Skies then,” Singer said. “So they were getting into sci-fi, and there was some traction there.”

This whetted Heaven’s Gate’s appetite for the wider proselytizing possibilities offered by Hollywood. They were tremendous fans of X-Files, Star Trek and E.T., which they viewed as a religious metaphor — visitor with healing powers and message of peace comes to Earth, dies at the hands of persecutors, is resurrected, and ascends back to heaven in a cloud of light — one that had been seen by nearly half the planet. (When the group came out of 20 years of hiding, their recruitment message was “’95 Statement by an E.T. Presently Incarnate.”)

Since Rio was from Los Angeles and had done some effects work, he became the point man for Heaven’s Gate’s industry efforts. When they found out the networks were looking for a series along the lines of “X-Files meets Touched by an Angel,” the group developed a treatment about their monastic wanderings and called it Angels in Training. They also spent a lot of time filming a documentary about their “second wave” membership drive.

But none of it had panned out by the time Hale-Bopp passed Earth and DO used his key to unlock Heaven’s Gate for his disciples. In the immediate aftermath of the suicides, Rio used his newfound infamy to try to jump-start their Hollywood efforts. In their farewell letter to Rio, the group signed off with “Thanks for your help. Maybe the script will sell now.”

Nick Matzorkis, Rio’s boss, with whom he drove to San Diego and discovered the bodies, had similar thoughts. A successful, press-savvy entrepreneur, he counseled Rio to go into hiding and started acting as Rio’s agent, making the arrangements for Rio to appear on Prime Time Live and the cover of Newsweek, and simultaneously sell a TV movie about his life to ABC. It was a heady time: Rio sold his footage of the bodies to the BBC and got enough money to give his ex-wife $10,000 for child support. Part of Matzorkis’ ABC deal secured Rio a spot in the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills for several weeks. There, Rio was dodging the press, many of whom were staying in the hotel. At night, Rio would retreat alone to his room and consult DO in the Next Level, looking for guidance on terms with ABC and whoever else came knocking. During the day, Rio and Matzorkis would take meetings at the restaurant on the roof.

Rio spent nearly a week with screenwriter Phil Penningroth, who had previously scripted a TV movie about Waco. Penningroth turned in a draft in about a month, but when the network executives’ notes came back asking for “more maniac,” he balked. Penningroth had produced a sensationalized version of David Koresh that he wasn’t proud of, and he didn’t want to do it again. He quit the project, and it died not long after.

When the limelight faded, Rio slowly reactivated his life. He opened a bank account and found a permanent apartment with a roommate. A friend who was good with accounting and taxes helped Rio fix his credit. He transitioned from Web work with Matzorkis to freelance art jobs: packaging, trade-show booths, sculpting dolphins from wax. Rio stopped hearing from DO and TI. He lived quietly.

In 2000, DO and TI’s silence ended. Rio started hearing from them and getting ideas again. He picked up the screenplay. Two years later, he started the book. Whereas he had once been confused about his survival, it had all come into focus. He was meant to bear witness.

Part 6: The End is Nigh

{LAW_PAGE_BREAK} Look for chaos — fires, shortages, excesses, earthquakes, destruction of all kinds.

—Marshall Herff Applewhite (a.k.a. DO), 1974

{mosimage}We were at a Coffee Bean & Tea Leafon Beverly Glen when Rio told me that some time soon, the Earth will shift its axis and many people will die. I had just sat down with a chocolate-covered graham cracker, and the sun was setting. Information of this kind, he said, arrives in his mind like a ticker tape, providing constant updates in thought form. “I can’t yet say when the axis will shift,” he added with his usual conviction. “But hopefully that will come soon.” When I asked if this ticker tape is coming straight from DO, he said, “I think so.”

I should point out that Rio is not technically the sole survivor of Heaven’s Gate. There have been other apostles, like RKKODY, a.k.a. Chuck Humphrey, who believed he had to actively gather souls for DO, until he killed himself in a tent in the Arizona desert in 1998. SWYODY, a.k.a. Steve Havel, recently decided that he too will write a definitive memoir “that proves DO and TI were the Second Coming.” Rio bills himself as the sole (or “soul”) survivor by making the distinction that although many “dropouts” came and went, he was the only student who learned all the lessons DO’s classroom had to offer.

There’s an element of hucksterism in all religion, so I suppose it’s not surprising that every single person I talked to who knew Rio asked, “What’s his angle?” Nancie Brown, Alex Pappas, Rio’s ex-wife — they all wanted to know what Rio’s selling these days. Besides a book and a screenplay, that’s a good question.

Rio’s ex-wife, who is bitter about his lack of child support over the years (she says she calls once a year to remind him that he owes her $100,000), said that Rio “never has a penny but is always looking to get rich.” Rio did once mention to me that one of his three life goals is to make a lot of money, although he claimed that the purpose would be to help clean the oceans.

It does seem strange to turn any kind of profit off the deaths of 39 of your friends, but Rio’s not just a charlatan. He definitely believes in something, although it’s hard to tell what exactly that something is. In a nutshell, the message is “Buy the book.” Beyond that, I’m not exactly sure. The Next Level seems to have chosen some elliptical emissaries. Following in DO’s footsteps, Rio speaks very precisely about impossibly vague things. What is a soul again? “Let’s get it straight: Spirit and soul are different. Spirit reincarnates here, learning Earth’s lessons, while the soul is ‘you’ choosing to evolve a new creature that has the nonhuman requirements for the Next Level.” How does that happen? “The Representative becomes your teacher.” Then what? “You will not be reincarnated again!” None of the language of Heaven’s Gate has any external foundation; the more I tried to understand it, the more it became a wash of intangible words — words Rio’s asking us to believe just because he had some dreams that he was in a giant dark room that felt like an oil tanker.

I asked Rio to boil it all down to three sentences. This proved impossible. After a long pause, I got more “finishing school for Earth lessons” and “the Exit was a time of passage and is over” and “the Flood was the beginning of the cycle.” Then his girlfriend called.

By now, the internal contradictions were somewhat maddening. Rio insists that the rigorous monastic control was necessary to achieve spiritual perfection, but he now does what he wants, watches movies, is romantically engaged and offers a spiritual “shortcut” to anyone who wants to preorder Beyond Human Mind on Amazon.com. It sounds like a suspiciously convenient adaptation of the original philosophy, but then again, Rio’s divine ticker tape also told him to not commit suicide, write a book and dust off that old screenplay. In his interview with Diane Sawyer, Rio talked about how the Procedure was supposed to erase one’s confidence. Every statement was tentative, including household requests from the “Individual Needs Department,” which would have been phrased, “I may be mistaken, but I think my deodorant is empty and I need more.” And yet Rio is 100 percent confident that DO was an extraterrestrial messiah who still communicates with Rio from the stars. Recent memoranda received by Rio exhort us to “embrace love, creativity and goodness,” but he also assures me that we’re in the Tribulation period and there will soon be widespread disaster. I’m always skeptical of someone who believes that death is a trifle and nonchalantly predicts vast human suffering while indulging in a mint Coco Jo and Iced Blended. Even the apocalyptic math is off: Rio’s cycle has Noah’s Flood, Moses, Jesus, and DO and TI in 2,000-year intervals, completing a 6,000-year recycling process that’s about to cataclysmically reset the counter, but when I pointed out that biblical archaeologists date Moses’ time to 1250 B.C., he said, “Really? Hmmm. Well, you know.”

The next time we met was on the Santa Monica Pier. That was where, in 1994, Nancie Brown’s son David and his fellow Overcomers asked to have their picture taken for the L.A. Weekly article. At the time, the group had thoughts of a UFO rendezvous on the water. This was when DO still thought the Next Level would come to the surface and pick them up, before he decided that the Exit would entail leaving the vehicle.

I asked Rio again about the axis shift. “It might be six to 10 years,” he offered. “And it will be due to some kind of jolt.”

“What will you do then?” I ask.

“Try to help with the information that I have. I’m altruistic, a caregiver.”

“I mean, what will you actually do when the shit hits the fan? I mean, you’re talking famines, wars, Road Warrior stuff. You’re not going to be sitting at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf talking about being a caregiver.”

“I see what you mean,” he said with a strange, knowing smile. “I’ll be moving inland,” he said, making his usual direct eye contact. “But the key thing is that I will have no fear.”

His matter-of-factness reminded me of the Exit Videos, and their unflinching embrace of death. I couldn’t figure out if that preternatural calm was admirable or dangerous or simply sad — the disastrous result of anguished lives searching for meaning. These were emotionally vulnerable people looking for answers. I know the feeling. I want answers too. I wish I could be cheerful about death and certain about my cosmic purpose. I’d love to have the serenity I saw in those videos. I just couldn’t bear for that serenity to stem from believing that The X-Files might be nonfiction. These people were so alienated they literally believed there are aliens. If that’s what absolute tranquillity requires, it’s a psychological Rubicon I’m not willing to cross. For those who did, I don’t want to judge them other than to say that there was likely another answer for them, one that didn’t entail 39 grieving families.

Later, I called Nancie Brown. She wanted to know Rio’s phone number so she could ask him some questions about David. Nancie is a Quaker, forgiving and loving, and seems like an all-around delightful woman. I can’t begin to understand what DO provided that Nancie couldn’t. I gave her the number. I asked her what David was like, and she said it was sometimes hard to remember, but he gave the greatest hugs. Then she told me about the call she received from the San Diego County coroner. It was the worst day of her life. The coroner was tactful. He said David had a peaceful look on his face. She wasn’t sure if it was true, but it left her with a nice image. When she hung up the phone, she was startled by a loud, shuddering scream. Then she realized it was coming from her.


O.K., brace yourself...Our Father... requires of us what any “sane” earthly person would deem impossible.

—Marshall Herff Applewhite (a.k.a. DO) and Bonnie Lu Truesdale (a.k.a. TI), 1975

David and the others were first seen by the outside world in the police video shown by the media. It was composed as a clinical document of a suspected crime scene, whereas Rio says the video he shot before the police arrived was an attempt to tell “the real story.” I was surprised to discover how short it is, around two minutes long, making it the most unfamiliar two minutes of home video I’ve ever seen. The sound is off — Rio said he was calling out to make sure there were no survivors who needed help — and editing makes the camera jump from room to room. We fade in on the Compulab, or office, where there’s a bulletin board, a map of the world, some flowers on the table. In the adjoining hall are the first bodies, resting on a fold-up table and mattress on the floor. The black Nikes are there, along with the purple shrouds diagonally stretched over the head and torso. Seven more rooms reveal the rest of the departed crew. Rio lingers at times on details — a pair of glasses neatly folded next to a hand, a thick trail of coughed-up blood soaking through one of the purple shrouds. Finally, we enter the master bedroom, where DO is alone, face-up on a queen-size bed with his shroud fully extended like a purple manta ray. Rio pans to the fireplace, revealing a drawing of an alien on the mantel. “It just kind of happened, that artist’s rendering of the Next Level sitting there,” Rio had told me. “I thought it was a nice touch.” Then the camera zooms in on the figure. There’s a pause, just long enough to see the expressionless alien gazing into a field of stars. And the screen goes black.

Post-script : Comets (and reactions to them) through the ages
{LAW_PAGE_BREAK}
Swoosh {mosimage}Comets (and reactions to them) through the ages

The first recorded cometapparition was in 240 B.C., when Chinese astronomers reported a “broom star” that “appeared in the east and then was seen in the north” in a text called Shih chi. Since then, the historical record is full of people appealing to the heavens for signs and finding them in roving balls of ice. And can you blame them? Go back and look at pictures of Hale-Bopp. It’s awe-inspiring, this unexpected dazzling thing rising and setting with the night sky, burning brightly and then fading away. If there were supernatural guardian angels, that’s where I’d look for them.

Halley’s visit in 12 B.C., for example, is thought by some astronomers to be the celestial phenomenon behind the Star of Bethlehem. But since there have been so many arbitrary miseries befalling people through the ages, the meaning of comet sightings was often divined as an ill omen. Comets have been blamed for the fall of Jerusalem (66; advance warning); Vesuvius’ eruption and subsequent burial of Pompeii and Herculaneum (79); the Turks’ success in conquering Constantinople (1453); and, of course, the “Great Dying,” or plague outbreak in London (1665). The Middle Ages took a characteristically fearful and pessimistic view of comets, interpreting them mostly as angry salvos aimed at sinners by a vengeful God. The Great Comet of 1680 inspired a handbill bearing a warning that “Herewith is represented the fearful celestial phenomenon and other events... by which Almighty God terrified dear Hungary, and at the same time admonished Christendom to penance...”

As late as the 19th century, comets were blamed for the fall of the Alamo, a fire in New York City and a series of very terrestrially inspired wars in Latin America. Halley’s comet’s roundabout through the solar system in 1910 sparked mass hysteria and a fertile market for “comet pills,” sold to counter the widely dreaded effects of the tail’s poisonous gas.

Then there is the most natural reading: Apocalypse. Almost all comet sightings since antiquity have spelled the end of the world in someone’s eyes. Popularizing the idea in America was an Adventist millenarian offshoot called the Millerites, who had decided that the Second Coming would be heralded by a comet arriving no later than March 22, 1844, exactly 153 years before Hale-Bopp’s visit. One night in October, Millerites all over the country famously awaited their comet on hills and rooftops, only to discover their calculations were off. They called it the “Great Disappointment.” After a dry spell, a modern revival of doomsday comets began when Kohoutek’s 75,000-year orbit made a close approach in 1973. Since then, West, Hyakatuke, Hale-Bopp and, just last January, McNaught, the brightest in 40 years, all inspired eschatological predictions by various religious groups and readers of Nostradamus worldwide. If only the Millerites were around today.

–J.B.


More on the Heaven's Gate
Heaven's Gate Exit Videos: Videos made by DO and his followers in the days leading up to the group's suicide
Rio's Statement: The sole survivor of Heaven's Gate in his own words.
They Walk Among Us The 1994 LA Weekly article that led Rio to join TI & DO's group. By Dave Gardetta