Recipe for Death

RANCHO SANTA FE, California: Perfection, as any website designer will tell you, is absolutely essential in HTML coding. Misplace a bracket, spell a command wrong, and the whole page could come crashing down. So when it came time to die, the 39 members of a mysterious San Diego cult went about it in the same precise manner they had conducted Higher Source, their web design business. The suicide plan was meticulously organized. Each member received a hand-written recipe with suicide instructions: take the package of pudding or apple sauce, stir in the drug phenobarbital and eat it, quickly drink the vodka mixture, and then lay back and relax. Unlike many cult-related mass suicides in history, such as the People's Temple in Guyana, police say every member of the Heaven's Gate cult willingly died. The deaths proceeded in an orderly, methodical fashion. Each member was assigned to one of three groups; the first group of 15 took their lives and the second group of 15 members cleaned up after them. Then the second committed suicide with the help of the remaining nine, until only two were left to finish the job on themselves. They packed suitcases that sat near the ends of each bed, and all were wearing black Nike's that looked brand new. Members were clearly concerned about their legacy: They each stashed identification such as passports and birth certificates in the top pockets of their shirts, making identifying the bodies easy. While the how seems clear, the why is not so easy. It appears that members may have simply believed that their time was up. They described on video their obsession with the arrival of the comet Hale-Bopp - to them, the signal to them that it was time to leave this world to head to what they called the Next Level. They believed that the way to get there was by shedding their physical selves in order to board a UFO trailing the comet.