Inside lay 18 bodies–men, women and a boy about 10 years old–arrayed in a crude circle, feet toward the center. Many wore red and black or white and gold ceremonial robes, some with their hands tied behind their backs. Most had been shot in the head or neck; 10 had plastic bags over their heads. Empty champagne bottles littered the floor; on the wall hung a painting of a Christ-like figure with a rose above his head. Another corpse turned up in a room off to the side. In an adjoining circular chapel, police uncovered three more bodies and jarring clues: an altar with a rose and a cross and a golden chalice. The place had been booby-trapped with 100-gallon bottles of gasoline wired to clocks set to go off. Said a police spokesman: “If it had worked, the whole joint would have blown.”
Just hours later, a similar device apparently did work. Sometime after 3 in the morning, three ski chalets at Granges-sur-Salvan, an alpine village 100 miles south of Cheiry, went up in flames and took the lives of 25 people–including at least four children–10 charred beyond recognition. Upstairs in one building, police found the bodies of two teenage boys; downstairs, a little boy on a bed lay hugging an even younger gift in a red dress, who seemed “almost smiling.”
The nearly simultaneous tragedies began to look like a collective suicide pact among members of the Order of the Solar Temple, an obscure doomsday cult with roots in Switzerland and a branch in Canada. A day before the twin massacres in Switzerland, a similar fire had taken the lives of a man and a woman at a chalet in Morin Heights, Quebec, 50 miles northwest of Montreal. Both victims wore red and gold medallions inscribed with the letters TS, presumably for Temple Solaire, or Solar Temple.
But was it ritual suicide–or murder? By Thursday, police authorities suspected homicide. Combing the fire-gutted chalet, Quebec provincial police discovered three more bodies in an adjacent villa: a couple in their 30s and their 3-month-old son, who’d been suffocated. Back in Cheiry, autopsy results determined that one of the 23 dead had been drugged, “which makes us think of an execution,” said Piller. Police could find no murder weapon at the scene; three rifles near the corpses could not have fired any of the fatal shots. But there was a solid motive: greed. Piller has seized cult financial documents without revealing their contents. But relatives of several cult members reported squabbles between followers and their leaders over money. Among them was Giacobino, a victim of the Cheiry blaze, who had donated millions of Swiss francs and wanted to be reimbursed. The trail led to two men who, it turned out, owned the chalets in Canada and in Switzerland–Luc Jouret, a homeopathic doctor and founder of the cult, and his shadow associate, Joseph di Mambro. Swiss officials issued warrants for their arrest on suspicion of arson and premeditated homicide.
Who is Jouret? A charismatic and caring health practitioner to devotees, a demagogic swindler–and worse–to detractors. Born in the Belgian Congo, now Zaire, Jouret, 46, studied medicine at the Free University of Brussels, where he dabbled in Maoism. But after a trip to the Philippines in the 1970s, Jouret threw over politics for meditation and the healing arts, becoming a disciple of Krishna Macharia, an Indian guru. Lecturing on “the joy of living” through homeopathy, a method of treatment that relies on home remedies and natural herbs, Jouret hung out his shingle in Annemasse, France, on the Swiss border.
Jouret’s interests grew more esoteric–and ambitious. He became interested in the Rosicrucian sect, a society concerned with occult lore, and in the Knights Templars, whose last grand master was burned at the stake in 1314. When Jouret tried to take control of the New Templar Knights in the early 1980s, other members booted him out. “He was a smooth talker, and he drew people to him,” says Genevieve Ortigas, widow of the sect’s leader. “But he began to develop ideas we didn’t like. Plus, his main aim was to get money and girls.” So Jouret founded his own group, the International Order of the Knights of the Solar Tradition, and formed self-help, meditation clubs. In pamphlets and cassettes, he blasted the failure of traditional medicine and hawked his own home-brewed remedy: preparing for doomsday. Cult rituals were “brainwashing sessions,” says a former member. “It was almost like falling in love and then you can’t get out of it.” Jouret claimed that those who joined the order, the chosen few, would be saved from perdition. The signs of doom were everywhere–from the damaged ozone layer and the AIDS epidemic to global ethnic conflicts. “The present world chaos is not just by chance,” Jouret intoned on one tape. “We have arrived at the hour of Apocalypse.”
The cult grew to a few hundred members. Many came from ordinary walks of middle-class life in Switzerland, France and Canada, where Jouret moved in 1987 and founded the Order of the Solar Temple. Hydra-Quebec, the $5.2 billion electric company, paid Jouret to give motivational speeches to employees. Along the way he made approximately 20 converts in the company. “Dr. Jouret was a very well-known lecturer on self-realization and how to be happy at work,” says Bertrand Ouellet, director general of the Center for Information for New Religions in Montreal. But others saw his dark side. “A year ago a few [cult] members told me they were discussing selective killing of some politicians,” says Pierre Tourangeau, who covers the Quebec economy for Radio Canada. “I’m not saying they were preparing selective killings, just that the thing had been discussed informally. They hoped to put a crisis scenario in place.”
A crisis of sorts erupted in March 1993. Two members of the cult, one of them a project manager at Hydro-Quebec, were arrested and charged with attempting to buy guns and silencers. But Jouret and his accomplices avoided the slammer by pleading guilty to trafficking in firearms and agreeing to pay $750 in fines to the Red Cross. Jouret then fled to Switzerland. The cult became the subject of several police investigations: possible links to death threats against four members of the Quebec National Assembly, a series of explosions at the site of Hydro-Quebec transmission towers–even a conspiracy to bomb Indian reservations.
Jouret last resurfaced on Tuesday ill Granges-sur-Salvan, reportedly buying plastic bags at a grocery store. A locksmith claimed to have let him into one of the chalets about 12 hours before the fire–and recalled a strong scent of gasoline.
The cult leader wasn’t alone in Granges. With him was di Mambro, a 70-year-old French-Canadian, who spent six months in a French jail in 1972 for posing as a psychologist. Di Mambro has been variously characterized as the cult’ s financial director and its mastermind. “Jouret was an instrument. He had this prophetic quality and so was useful,” a former cult member told TSR, Swiss TV news. “But the real power was di Mambro.” He may also have been the focus of growing dissension within the order. According to TSR, several cult members recently confronted di Mambro and demanded an accounting of how he had spent their cash and assets. A search of his luxury mansion in Geneva turned up four red Ferraris and a Lamborghini.
But at the weekend the story took an even eerier twist. A report by Radio Canada alleged that di Mambro had used the cult as a from for international trafficking in small arms, funneling bullets, mines and shells through developing countries, as well as Australia, and using real-estate transactions to launder $95 million. Canadian police confirmed the investigation. Then Swiss radio reported that acquaintances had positively identified the body of Joseph di Mambro, along with that of his wife, among the Granges victims. Authorities refused to confirm Joseph’s death.
What really happened to the cult followers? Was there a fatal confrontation between their leaders? With Jouret still at large, the answers lay buried in the ashes. The grisly deaths of 53 people bore some resemblance to the fate of the followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh, prophets of Armageddon. But the victims in Canada and Switzerland may have suffered for no reason–at the hands of someone who turned doomsday into profits.
Was it a ritual suicide–or murder? Last week at least 53 members of a bizarre doomsday sect, the Order of the Solar Temple, lost their lives when incendiary devices went off at a ski resort near Montreal, Canada, and at two locations, 100 miles apart, in Switzerland. Evidence on both sides of the Atlantic suggested a possible money-laundering operation–and a power struggle between cult leaders.
Beneath the farmhouse, behind a secret door, lay the chapel and chamber–the final resting place of cultists.
Cult member and victim Albert Giacobino bought the place four years ago to raise and sell macrobiotic vegetables.
Police have identified four causes of death: gunshot wounds, asphyxiation, fire and, possibly, lethal injection.
Cheiry total 23 Men 10 Women 12 Child 1 Granges-sur-Salvan 25 Men 2 Women 2 Child 1
