The day before the suicides were discovered, Holly Craig in Fayetteville, Tennessee, received the floppy discs--and a letter of instruction. "Well, it's difficult to know where to start since you know quite a bit about us," it began. Indeed she did. Having done business with Heaven's Gate Web-design team, Craig had met 15 members and considered herself a "good friend" of seven of them, eventually becoming manager of their home page. The letter asked her to contact eight disciples who had left the group, as well as another who was still actively involved. She managed to reach all save one, who now lives in Romania. The disciples, she says, were "receiving messages from the 'Level Above' and Do for further instructions concerning the Website." Last week the disciples got back to her, saying "it was time to upload" the discs.
"By the time you receive this, we'll be gone," read the first of six new pages Craig posted on the Web on Thursday. Above that message blared the headline HEAVEN'S GATE 'AWAY TEAM' RETURNS TO LEVEL ABOVE HUMAN IN DISTANT SPACE, preceding three "exit statements" from team members. Meanwhile, several of the disciples contacted by Craig began holding conference calls to plan strategy, exchanging messages from the "Level Above" and guidance from the deceased founders of Heaven's Gate, Do and Ti (Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles). They said the Website established last week would be updated with documents and illustrations. Said Craig: "This will be an ongoing site for years to come."
Even as the pages were being set up, the surviving disciples were distancing themselves from the man who goes by the names Rio D'Angelo and Richard Ford, the cult member who discovered the bodies and alerted the police. They claim that Rio has taken over the cult's original Website and is out for profit, having signed a movie deal with ABC; he has ceased communicating with them. The dissension is likely to reverberate. While Applewhite led 38 followers into apparently blissful self-annihilation, his 20-year odyssey may have drawn a total of 200 to 500 adherents, many of whom remain alive, still believe to various degrees and are beginning to argue about the meaning of the adventure and the stewardship of its legacy. One early disciple, Sharon Walsh of Colorado, believes the "Away Team" was limited to 39 for numerological reasons: 3 + 9 = 12, the number of Jesus' disciples (also, 1 + 2 = 3, or the Trinity). Walsh's sister was a suicide; she says her mother and stepfather--and she assumes others--remain fervent believers and would have joined the 39 were it not for numerology.