HEAVEN'S GATE Mad About Memorabilia
Wherever they are now, those 39 Nike-clad members of the Heaven's Gate cult who committed the tidiest of suicides last March didn't leave behind much except for their bodily "vehicles," a few personal possessions and a handful of still living devotees who, in the cult's decidedly unsoaring ecclesiastical language, hadn't yet made it to the "level beyond human." Six weeks later, fellow "students" Chuck Humphrey and Wayne ("Nick") Cooke attempted to complete their course work in the approved manner--by swallowing a combination of alcohol and phenobarbital and tying plastic bags over their heads--in a Southern California motel room. Cooke made it to the next level; Humphrey didn't. Fortunately, he had work to do.
Today Humphrey--who prefers to be known by the name Rkkody--is running a Heaven's Gate Website where potential followers can buy videotapes of leader Do espousing his philosophy as well as gift items like Heaven's Gate mouse pads, NASA-style "Away Team" patches, "dishwasher-safe" mugs and T shirts emblazoned with the slogan WHAT IF THEY'RE RIGHT? In an E-mail interview with TIME, Rkkody claims that his site receives 1,000 hits a day but that he has sold "disgustingly few" of the merchandise items: "less than five mouse pads, no T shirts." He had been hoping to use the proceeds to supply the nation's libraries with free copies of Heaven's Gate videos and books.
Meanwhile, the owner of the mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., where the cultists died, has taken a first round of bids on the property, which includes a sauna, a fitness room and tennis courts; even though the owner paid $30,000 to "sanitize" the house, no bid has yet come close to the mansion's pre-suicide value--about $1.5 million. The real estate agent handling the sale, Randall Bell, is an expert at moving "distressed" properties, having previously consulted, he says, on the sales of homes where Nicole Simpson, JonBenet Ramsey and Sharon Tate passed away, as it were. Not afraid to confront his chief marketing obstacle head on, Bell has renamed the property the Heaven's Gate Mansion, or the Gate for short--which, he says, is at least preferable to its usual media label: "the death house." --Reported by Paul Krueger/San Diego and Margot Hornblower/Los Angeles
DONORGATE The Unforgiven Giver
John Huang answers the phone and quietly tells a caller no, he cannot talk. The central figure in the White House fund-raising scandal, a former Commerce Department official who drummed up millions of dollars in the questioned contributions to the Democratic National Committee, comes close to begging forgiveness in his polite refusal. He says he wishes he could talk, but then congressional investigators and the FBI would also want to chat him up. His wife Jane, interrupted in the midst of her house cleaning, sometimes responds to a doorbell ring at her front door, and always with the same message: "We're not giving any interviews at this time--to anyone." She gently but firmly shuts the door.