Heaven’s Gate Pair Attempt Suicide; 1 Dies

ENCINITAS, Calif. — One former member of the Heaven’s Gate cult was found dead Tuesday and another was near death in an apparent double suicide attempt in a motel just miles from the Rancho Santa Fe mansion where 39 members of the cult ended their lives in March.

Like the cultists who died in the mass suicide, the two men found in the room at the Holiday Inn Express had sent upbeat tapes to friends and family members happily expressing their wish to join the other cultists in the “next level,” officials said.

The two had been devoted members of the cult for two decades and, while they drifted away from the cult, they remained firm in their beliefs that by committing suicide they would ascend to a higher and better world.

After receiving a call from a CBS-TV reporter, San Diego County Sheriff’s Department deputies found Wayne Marshall Cooke, 54, of Las Vegas dead on the floor, and Charles Humphrey, 56, of Denver, unconscious nearby, said Sgt. Don Crist.

Cooke’s wife, Suzanne Sylvia Cooke, 54, was among the 39 found dead March 26. Humphrey, who had been one of the cult’s computer specialists, was listed in critical but stable condition at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas, a suburb 25 miles north of San Diego. He was being sedated and his breathing was being aided by a ventilator, hospital officials said.

The scene inside Room 222 had several grisly similarities to the suicide mansion on Colina Norte in Rancho Santa Fe: Purple shrouds lay near the bodies; the men were dressed in black jumpsuits and Nike running shoes; tote bags with belongings were beside the bodies; each man had a $5 bill and quarters in his pockets, just like the other cult members; and both men had apparently ingested phenobarbital and placed plastic bags over their heads.

Deputies came to the motel after being notified by CBS reporter Lesley Stahl that Cooke’s daughter, Kelly, had received a tape from her father saying that he planned to join his former cultists by committing suicide.

In that tape, Cooke told his daughter: “I’m saying I’m very happy and I want very much to follow my classmates and my teachers Do and Ti. . . . So goodbye.” Do and Ti were the names taken by Marshall Applewhite, who led the mass suicide, and co-leader Bonnie Lu Nettles, who died a decade ago of cancer.

Cooke was found with a plastic bag over his head held by a rubber band around his neck. A plastic bag with a hole in it was found near Humphrey, suggesting that he may have changed his mind about dying and ripped the bag off, Crist said.

Former cult member Dick Joslyn said Cooke and Humphrey had talked longingly about rejoining their former colleagues.

“They certainly felt left behind,” Joslyn said in a telephone interview from his home in Tampa, Fla. “Chuck often said to me that as soon as his [computer] work was done, he’d be out of here too.”

Joslyn said Humphrey had been updating the group’s computer Web site and also trying to sell some of its videotapes, in which cult members explained their offbeat philosophy.

Both Cooke and Humphrey had given interviews in the weeks after the shocking discovery in Rancho Santa Fe but had grown tired of media sensationalism, Joslyn said.

“The media coverage was so poor and so sensationalized, showing all of them as brainwashed kooks . . . that they thought, ‘What’s the point of trying to share our information if no one wants to hear it?’ ” said Joslyn, who left the cult in 1990. “In a sense the media is responsible” for the suicide attempts, he said.

Cooke and his wife had given up custody of their daughter, who is now 30 and living in New York City, when they joined Applewhite’s cult two decades ago as it traveled through Northern California looking for converts.

In his tape, Cooke said he decided to commit suicide because “emotion and joy welled up inside me” when he considered the prospect of rejoining Applewhite and the others. “I’m happy to say goodbye to the world,” he said.

In an interview in late March with Stahl, a correspondent with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Kelly Cooke had expressed no anger at her parents for having given up custody of her when she was 10 or for her mother’s decision to kill herself.

On Tuesday, Kelly Cooke told CBS of her father’s suicide, “I won’t say I’m surprised. I had a sense that I couldn’t count on this not happening to him. . . . For him, his real suicide would be to remain here.”

There was no return address on the tape, but sheriff’s deputies tracked the package back to the motel by checking with Federal Express, Crist said. Joslyn said Humphrey was unmarried but had sent a tape to a former girlfriend.

The two men apparently had checked into the hotel Monday and paid $59 to stay one night. Humphrey had come to San Diego last month to explain the cult’s beliefs to a nonbelieving public. Officials said the time of death had not yet been determined.

Asked why he had left the cult, Humphrey had said that he had grown impatient for Applewhite’s prophecies about the group ascending to heaven to come true: “I left the group because it had been 15 years, because many of the things we were told were going to happen didn’t. I got tired of waiting.”

CNN also reported getting a suicide tape from the pair, including an “exit statement” in which Cooke said, “I would like everyone to understand that I simply cannot stay here any longer and I am leaving because it is time for me to leave.”

The motel is four miles west of the mansion where the bodies of 39 cultists were discovered March 26 after former cult member Richard Ford made an anonymous phone call to authorities. Ford, armed with a video camera, had ventured to the mansion with his Beverly Hills employer after receiving one of the cult’s farewell tapes.

In an interview Tuesday, Ford, who prefers to be called Rio DiAngelo, said of Humphrey’s apparent failed attempt at suicide, “I think he knows what he’s doing. I feel badly for him that he was not successful because I’m sure physically it’s tough on the body.”

He said Humphrey had been worried about money. He said Cooke and Humphrey had the same belief as other Heaven’s Gate members about the inconsequential nature of the physical being. Applewhite’s belief system was a mishmash of Christianity, New Age philosophy, and bits and pieces of “Star Trek” lore.

“One of the first things we learn in the class is how to separate our soul from the body,” Ford said. “When you don’t identify with the body, it doesn’t mean much to you.”

He said he has no plans to commit suicide. “It does not interest me,” he said. “I have things to do.” Among those things is working on a movie about Heaven’s Gate.

The cultists believed that by killing themselves they could ascend to “the next level” aboard a spaceship that was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. They had persisted in this belief despite buying a high-power telescope and being unable to find the spaceship in the sky.

Humphrey and Cooke believed that it was still possible to rejoin Applewhite and the others, Joslyn said. “The comet was like a marker,” Joslyn said. “But they felt like the window in space-time was still open.”

In the days after the mass suicide, Cooke told reporters that he understood and supported his wife’s actions, even though it would leave their daughter without a mother. He said he was confident that his wife was indeed on a spaceship “somewhere.”

Far from being angry at Applewhite for leading his disciples to death, Cooke said he felt badly for not being with the cult when the suicide decision was made.

“I think if there was one word,” Cooke told CBS to explain his reason for leaving the cult, “it would be selfishness on my part or an inability to get a handle on my self-reliance, my independent kind of nature.”

Of the mass suicide, Cooke said: “If it came down that this is the way that the class was to exit, I would have no problems with that.”

Cooke explained that he and his wife had felt called by God to join Heaven’s Gate and that Applewhite had come “from the heavens.”

Cooke gave a series of interviews, providing reporters with an inside glimpse of the cult that had traveled extensively for two decades before settling in the hilltop mansion in ritzy Rancho Santa Fe.

Cooke and his wife had lived aboard a houseboat off Sausalito in the San Francisco Bay in the 1980s and gained a measure of notoriety and media attention by championing issues particular to boaters. He said he and his wife had been members of Applewhite’s group, which went by several names, “on and off” for 23 years.

In one interview, he had admired the care taken by Heaven’s Gate cultists in committing suicide. He said it reflected their views about tidiness being a virtue.

Cooke told reporters that if he had stayed with the group he would have submitted to castration, as had six of the 18 male cultists, including Applewhite, who committed suicide.

“Having had problems with sexuality,” Cooke said, “I would have jumped on it. I can’t say as I’ve ever been comfortable with my sexuality.”

Times correspondent Paul Levikow contributed to this story.