Deaths Seem to Fit Cult Pattern, Experts Say

Mystery shrouded the deaths, but there were also telling signs. The dozens of young men were dressed in black slacks, lying on their backs throughout the hillside mansion, neither trauma nor blood nor struggle in evidence.

Whether the 39 people found in a Rancho Santa Fe house died in an orchestrated suicide or fell prey to mass murder wasn’t clear late Wednesday. But the victims, said by the homeowner’s attorney to belong to an extreme religious group calling itself the W.W. Higher Source, would appear to have participated in a mass suicide, cult authorities and suicide experts said.

Carl Raschke, a well-known University of Denver cult watcher and author of a book on the links between the occult, violence and terrorism, speculated that W.W. Higher Source is a neo-Gnostic cult, based on its name and the fact that the victims were all male and wore black.

Gnostics going back to biblical times believed in a secret, revealed wisdom which is accessible only to those in the sect. Since the complete translation into English in the late 1970s of the Nag Hammadi Library, first discovered in late 1945 on the west bank of the Nile River near Cairo, the number of groups claiming Gnostic roots has proliferated.

But if the group in Rancho Santa Fe is a neo-Gnostic group, as Raschke believes, there is no indication it is connected with any of the other groups, many of which can be found on the Internet.

“Everybody dressed in black starts to sound cult-like,” Raschke said of the victims. “All-black attire is a sign of people who take their religion seriously.” But he cautioned that it “could have been a mass murder as well.”

Raschke noted that in the case of the deaths of members of the Solar Temple doomsday cult in France in 1994, some victims were later found to have been murdered, as were followers of Jim Jones in Guyana.

Raschke, who keeps close tabs on cults, said that he was told Wednesday morning by a cult insider that deaths--described as a “major series of transformations”--would occur “within the next few weeks.”

The deaths would begin around Easter Sunday and accelerate with Buddha’s birthday May 22, leading to “culminations” around the summer solstice, he was told.

Stephen O’Leary, a USC professor and author of “Arguing the Apocalypse,” agreed that the Rancho Santa Fe deaths appeared to have cult overtones. “My guess is this has got to be some kind of religious manifestation. . . . In a mass suicide of any kind you have a high relationship . . . to religious belief of some form or the other.”

Robert Ellwood, professor of religion at USC and specialist on Eastern religions and unconventional religious groups, said he was “astounded” both by the deaths and the fact that they took place in Southern California.

Like others attempting to piece together what happened and why based on a paucity of facts, Ellwood was cautious.

But the deaths, if they are the result of a mass suicide, can show the dark side of what he called a “private religious reality” that distorts the outside world.

“They’re so bound up in . . . their own religion that they don’t see their own life. That can explain how a group can commit mass suicide because they have these paranoid ideas of the world that is about to be destroyed or destroy them,” Ellwood said.

“They are so wrapped up in the group they can’t think of themselves apart from the group life,” he added.

While there has been so far no mention of leadership, a strong leader can sway vulnerable people under such circumstances, according to Debbie Pine, director of the Maynard Bernstein Resource Center on Cults, which has ties to the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles.

“Every cult is unique in its own way,” she said. But a common characteristic is emotional or psychological manipulation of recruits. “But it could be another example of how vulnerable people are at risk when they subject themselves to leadership of someone who makes a promise of a better life, a better world when in most cases it’s an illusion.”

Psychologists pointed to other factors that are believed to incite a mass suicide. “When something like this happens, typically the individuals involved have very passive personalities,” said psychologist Jay Nagdimon of the Didi Hirsch Suicide Prevention Center in West Los Angeles. “Because their psychology is structured this way, it leaves them more vulnerable to be influenced by a charismatic leader.”

Followers of such extremist cults “take on the wants of the leader or of the group, and that supersedes in some cases their own wish to live.”

Experts took pains to distinguish between individual and mass or group suicide. “I would say that most [individual] suicide is a desire to escape intense psychological pain,” Nagdimon said. “Mass suicide has more to do with external forces and the ability of a person’s own individuality to decide for himself what he wants to do.”

What the participant in a mass suicide and an individual suicide have in common is a state of what psychologist Edwin Shneidman called “perturbation.”

Often the source of that agitation is a concept that Shneidman terms “psychache,” which is a combination of emotions such as shame, guilt, loneliness, and hopelessness. Compounding that is a feeling that death is the only way out.

He did not think there was such a thing as a suicide pact among equals. “It’s obvious that on occasion, rather infrequently, there are suicide pacts, but my view is they are never coequal. There is always coercion in it.”

Sam Heilig, a psychiatric social worker in private practice in West Los Angeles who specializes in suicide, said that mass suicides and so-called copycat suicides occasionally have one thing in common: fear. “There’s a perceived threat from the outside world,” he said. That was true of the Branch Davidian deaths in Waco, Texas, he said, where the threat was a menacing new world order. And it was true of a string of nine suicides over some weeks among youngsters a decade ago--an event he studied.

“They all had a belief that there was a spirit driving around in a big black car and they were all going to die,” he said.

Rosemarie White, clinical director of the Institute for Suicide Prevention in Los Angeles, also suggested that the key to cult behavior was the complex interaction between leader and follower in an extremist cult. “The seducing aspects of the leader’s teaching can lull members into a very distorted emotional space where they lose the ability to determine what is appropriate or not appropriate,” she said. “So death becomes something to be welcomed for reasons that the leader explains.”

Like many people struggling to understand the shocking incident in Rancho Santa Fe, Herbert Rosedale, a cult expert from the American Family Foundation, compared it to Jonestown and Waco. “It is not different than we have seen in other places. . . . We just seem to forget about them between these times.

“From my experience,” he added, “people who get involved in destructive cults had a weak moment at which time they were susceptible to recruitment. . . . They are not dysfunctional people. They may be among the most idealistic, brightest people in the world.”

Psychologists stressed that anyone considering committing suicide, or who knows of a loved one who is, should seek counseling. The suicide prevention center in West Los Angeles 24-hour counseling hotline number is (310) 391-1253.

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Deadly Cults

The beliefs and rituals of some cults have taken deadly turns, resulting in murder, suicide and confrontations with law enforcement and government authorities. Some notable incidents:

* Nov. 18, 1978: More than 900 followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, including many children, died in Jonestown, Guyana, in a mass murder-suicide that shocked the world.

* May 13, 1985: Eleven people were killed, including four children, and 250 were left homeless after a fire following an armed confrontation between members of a cult group called MOVE and police in Philadelphia.

* Aug. 29, 1987: The bodies of 33 people linked to a religious cult in South Korea were found in a factory attic in an apparent suicide-murder pact in the town of Yongin, about 50 miles south of Seoul.

* April 19, 1993: David Koresh and about 80 members of the Branch Davidian cult perished in an inferno at their Waco, Texas, compound.

* October 1994: In separate incidents in France and Canada, 53 members of an extremist sect known as the Order of the Solar Temple died in grisly murder-suicide rituals.

* March 20, 1995: Deadly poison gas in Tokyo’s subway killed 12 people and sickened about 5,500 commuters in an attack linked to a cult known as the Aum Supreme Truth.

* Dec. 23, 1995: The charred bodies of 16 cult members linked to the Order of the Solar Temple were found in a forest in southeastern France in a murder-suicide.

* March 23, 1997: Five followers of the Order of the Solar Temple died in a group suicide in a small town near Quebec, Canada.

Researched by NONA YATES and VICKY McCARGAR / Los Angeles Times