GENEVA WAS BRIMMING WITH HOLIDAY cheer as a small convoy of cars set out for France. The travelers looked more respectable than any ordinary party of vacationers. In their four cars, the 16 French and Swiss nationals included three little girls, two policemen, a Geneva psychotherapist and the son of a famed European former skiing champion.
But as they arrived in the vicinity of Grenoble in southeastern France, a furtive air crept in to the seasonal image. Near the village of St. Pierre-de-Cherennes, the party halted in the thick of an Alpine forest and walked about half a mile to a clearing. There, 14 members were dosed with sedatives and lay down in a sunburst pattern, most of them with plastic bags over their head. The remaining two then shot the others dead, set the bodies ablaze and killed themselves with pistol shots under the chin. One of the executioners was a policeman, Jean-Pierre Lardanchet. Two of the three girls shot through the forehead with a .357 magnum were his own daughters, ages 2 and 4, investigators disclosed last week.
When the ghastly scene was discovered, the day before Christmas Eve, much of appalled Western Europe was compelled to ask--again--Why? The winter solstice ritual enacted about an hour's drive from the site of the glittering 1992 Winter Olympics reprised similar cult sacrifices that took place 14 months earlier. And among the victims were some of the most privileged, responsible members of society. Besides the police officers, the woman psychotherapist and an architect, the dead included Patrick Vuarnet, the 27-year-old son of 1960 Winter Olympics gold medalist Jean Vuarnet, best known today for his line of chic sunglasses. For Vuarnet fils--whose mother Edith, his woman companion Ute Verona and their daughter Tania, 6, accompanied him in death--the prerogatives of status had melted under the mystical thrall of a sect known as the Order of the Solar Temple.
Founded by a Belgian homeopath named Luc Jouret, the cult at first seemed to be a harmless New Age mishmash of astrology and health regimens professing to trace some of its ideas back to the Knights Templar, an order of Crusaders. By late 1994, the directions his sect was taking became horribly clear when Jouret and 52 fellow Templars were found dead as part of mass immolations in Switzerland and Quebec.
Police pursued complaints of manipulation of wealthy cultists for their money by shadowy Solar Temple survivors. With the guru's demise, though, the decapitated order seemed likely to wither away. Vuarnet's family knew better. Recalling his brother's guilt at not having been "called" in 1994, Alain Vuarnet says Patrick "looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Alain, you are the one deluding yourself. You just don't understand.' " In view of the cult's still extensive assets and international following, authorities are trying harder than ever now to understand.
--By James Walsh. Reported by Bruce Crumley/Paris