Death Journey
Morin Heights is a popular ski resort near Montreal in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec. Not much happens there aside from winter sports, but on October 4, 1994, a condominium fire attracted the fire brigade. What at first appeared to be a routine incident yielded a few surprises. As investigators assessed the scene, they came across two charred bodies. Since a quick check indicated that the building was owned by Jo Di Mambro, 69, officials anticipated that he would be one of the victims and surmised that his friend, Luc Jouret, 47, could be the other. Di Mambro, it turned out, was the founder of a religious organization known as the Order of the Solar Temple, and Jouret was its reputed prophet and proselytizer.
However, the autopsy soon revealed that neither victim was a 69-year-old male, and that, in fact, one victim was an older female. Was this the couple who had been renting the condo? If so, where was their infant son?
No one realized then that this discovery was just the first of a series of strange and grisly events that would make many people even experts rethink what they believed about religious communal behavior.
Comes Violently
Upon closer inspection of the home after the fire was put out, three more bodies were found, stashed together in a closet a man, a woman and a child. As the victims were removed from the condo, it appeared that they had not been killed by the fire. Instead, it seemed that they had been dead for a few days. Blood covered them, which turned out to be from a series of stab wounds. This discovery, at least, solved one mystery: These three victims were the renters, according to Catherine Wessinger, in How the Millennium Comes Violently. They were Tony Dutoit, stabbed 50 times in the back; his wife, Nicki, also stabbed several times in the back, as well as twice in the chest and four times in the throat; and Christopher-Emmanuel, 3 months old, who was stabbed six times in the chest with a wooden stake.
An examination of the circumstances and the condition of the Dutoits bodies put their time of death around September 30, four days earlier. But now investigators had no idea who the other deceased victims were. They had two unidentified bodies and no clear idea what had happened in this place, or why the Dutoits had been killed. Had these two murdered the family and then killed themselves? Or were all five people killed by someone else, who had then set the place on fire? But why then were the Dutoits covered in wounds, while the other two victims were not? And who had been the principal target? Authorities were stumped, but it wasn’t long before their questions became part of an international inquiry.
It was discovered that the Dutoits were former members of Di Mambro’s Solar Temple sect, and a list found in the chalet indicated that the order had 600 members. A rumor developed that Di Mambro had sent one of his “knights” to assassinate the Dutoit infant, Christopher-Emmanuel, because he believed the boy to be the anti-Christ. Warrants were issued for the arrest of Di Mambro, as well as Luc Jouret.
The next day, fires broke out across the Atlantic Ocean in Switzerland. This time there were many more victims, and they had a statement to make to the world.
(AP)
In Cheiry, Switzerland, some local people were celebrating the grand re-opening of a restaurant in the small village, says Switzerland’s Ministry of Defense, Jean Francois Mayer, when they learned of a fire that had broken out in an outlying farmhouse owned by 73-year-old Albert Giacobino. It was around midnight on October 4. Firemen responded and soon found a victim. Inside the house, a man was lying on a bed with a plastic bag over his head. The fire appeared to be part of a suicide gesture.
Upon closer inspection, it appeared that this man (later identified as the retired farmer) had been murdered, shot in the head. The police came and soon found several incendiary devices installed around the house. They went into what appeared to be a garage, but once inside, they saw that it was actually a meeting hall. Several people had left their belongings there, but nobody was present.
Police inspected the rest of the area but failed to turn up anyone or anything that could shed some light on the puzzling incident. Then investigators noticed that the meeting hall appeared to be larger than just the one room, although no doors to another area were found. As they tested the walls, it appeared that one was movable, so they opened it up. To their astonishment, inside this apparently secret room, with crimson wall-to-wall carpeting, tall mirrors and red satin draperies, lay a number of corpses organized in a circle, like spokes radiating from the hub of a wheel. Their heads outward, they were arranged around a triangular alter. Investigators counted 18 people, many of them wearing what appeared to be white, gold, red and black ceremonial garments and capes. Champagne bottles lay scattered around them. Many of these people also had plastic bags over their heads. In an adjacent room, also lined with mirrors, they found three more corpses.
There was blood as well, and it soon became clear that most of the people had been shot in the head and that 10 had been suffocated. A few bodies showed bruises, evidence of having been beaten. The investigation concluded that the victims had died on October 3, the day before. Was this a mass murder or a suicide pact? These investigators were as yet unaware of the discovery of the Canadian deaths from the afternoon before, and even so, there was no apparent reason yet to link them.
(AP)
Next to this building, other officers discovered a chapel that was rigged with small bags of petrol to go up in flames. Apparently the idea had been to burn the entire place down, but the devices designed to do so had failed. That failure left them with a crime scene of some magnitude, but one that could now be processed for evidence and for incident reconstruction.
They would be helped along, to everyone’s dismay, by yet another discovery in a Swiss skiing village about 100 miles away.
In Granges-sur-Salvan, a sleepless tourist looked out his window at 3 a.m. on October 5 to see flames coming from a house nearby. The fire department went right out and saw that not one but three adjacent housesactually, ski chaletswere burning. That was a good indication of potential arson and it was soon discovered that they had all been rigged with gasoline bombs. The police broke in and found numerous victims, including three teenagers and four children. Altogether in two of the three chalets, there were 25 badly charred corpses. Many had been shot in the head, some as much as eight times. Upon investigation after identification from dental records, they proved to be members of the Order of the Solar Temple, as did the 22 dead people from the other Swiss village. The order owned the damaged buildings.
In subsequent weeks, after the autopsies, a magistrate determined that of all these deaths, only fifteen had been willing suicides. Thirty more people were lured into a ceremony, where they were killed, and seven seemed to have been executed. Surprisingly, among those who died were successful professionals, such as a journalist, a high-ranking government official, several wealthy businessmen, and a mayor.
On October 19, the unknown white male victim in the Canadian fire, estimated to be about 35 years old, turned out to match the dental records of Gerry Genoud, and the other victim matched those records of 60-year-old Colette Genoud. They were from Switzerland and were members of the order. It wasn’t yet clear what they had been doing in the Dutoits’ rented condo, or why they were dead.
Clearly, it was time to find the leaders of this religious community.
young man (CORBIS)
Joseph Di Mambro was born in southern France in 1924. While he trained as a clock maker and jeweler, he became interested in esoteric religions. He studied the doctrines of the Rosicrucians and became a member of one order for 13 years. When he left, he had followers for his own brand of religion.
In 1973 he founded the Center for the Preparation of the New Age and developed a commune close to France’s Swiss border. He said that he was the reincarnation of various religious and political leaders, from Osiris to Moses, and persuaded people to give their money and possessions to him so he could take care of the community’s needs. He arranged “cosmic” marriages and identities to suit him, identifying those members who were the reincarnation of some famous person. He decided who would have children and who would not, hoping for the production of exceptional offspring who would play a part in shaping the fate of the world. His own son, Elie, was presented as one of them, while his daughter, Emmanuelle, was supposedly one of the nine “cosmic children” who would usher in a New Age. Emmanuelle herself was the new messiah. Wessinger says that toward this end, the girl wore a helmet and gloves, and was forbidden contact by anyone but the immediate family. That was to keep her pure.
medallion (AP)
To provide a sense of cohesion and group uniformity, Di Mambro developed some simple rituals, which Mayer, the defense minister, says became more elaborate over time, “with capes, crosses, swords, and so on.” Some of his followers came from affluent families, which enabled Di Mambro to purchase a mansion in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1978, he formed the core group, the Foundation of the Golden Way that by 1984 would eventually become known as the Order of the Solar Temple. His ideas drew many sympathizers who did not live in the community but who nevertheless gave donations and practiced the ceremonies. They were brought in through front organizations, known as clubs. The secret society apart from these clubs was reserved for the core elite.
Along the way, Di Mambro, the Cosmic Master, met a charismatic medical doctor and obstetrician from Belgium named Luc Journet. Born in 1947 in the Belgian Congo, he became a tireless worker on behalf of the order, multiplying its membership and taking on the job of guide and prophet. With charm, eloquence, and persuasion, he impressed people to get involved. He’d been to India, where he’d been impressed by spiritual ideas, and he practiced homeopathic medicine.
By the late 1980s, membership reached as high as 422 in 1989 (some reports say 600), from Switzerland to France to French-speaking Canada, as well as the French Caribbean. There were a handful of devotees, respectively, in the U. S. and Spain. Time reporter Michael Seville wrote that Jouret and Di Mambro had collected as much as 93 million dollars from their followers’ assets, selling them and profiting from the proceeds.
The religion operated along a strict paternalistic hierarchy, as most secretive cults do, with its top 33 members known as the Elder Brothers of the Rosy Cross, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. Beyond them was the core community, which operated as an elite fraternity, and then the clubs, or initiating outlets through which the new members entered and were evaluated.
According to an organization called Religious Tolerance, Luc Jouret had convinced followers that in a previous life he had been a member of the 14th-century Christian order known as the Knights Templar, and that he was now the third incarnation of Christ. Thus, he had higher spiritual knowledge and access to esoteric secrets. According to him, after members left their physical bodies on earth, they would meet together again via “death voyages” that took them to another planet, or the star Sirius. In Jouret’s doctrine, death was an illusion and life would continue in a higher form in these other places. While he taught homeopathic remedies and New Age philosophies, he preached that the world would end with an environmental catastrophe, due to human neglect and outright damage, and some members would be chosen to make the transition from Earth to Sirius before this incendiary final collapse. In fact, they would have to leave through fire. There was no other way.
Little did they know, as they listened to Jouret, that this parting from their bodies was in the not-too-distant future. As membership declined and rumors of fraud and financial mismanagement plagued the order, preparations were made to finalize the plan.
In The Secret World of Cults, Sarah Moran reports that Luc Jouret was obsessed with fire, based on the manner in which the original members of Order of the Knights Templar were burned to death at the stake. To him, fire was the signal for the world’s demise. Fire, while destructive, also had the power to transform, as in the alchemical rituals that were endowed with the mystical power to turn base substance into more refined and valuable forms.
As part of Jouret’s plan to end in fire, he had rigged gasoline bombs at the various suicide sites to go off at the simple ringing of a phone. Whoever was near the bombs, whether dead, dying or just captive, would be incinerated. He was a long way from the original ideals of the knightly order.
Societies
In 1118 A. D., says Arkon Daraul in A History of Secret Societies, nine knights from the First Crusade formed a bond to protect pilgrims who were journeying to the Holy Lands. They took monastic vows and created a sacred order, which over the course of 200 years, grew into one of the most powerful and secretive organizations in Europeso much so that it eventually drew the wrath of rulers. For a while, they had the support of European monarchies and the Holy See Pope Innocent II exempted them from all but Papal authority and they moved from poverty to great wealth, but finally they were persecuted and dissolved.
In 1307, the King of France, Philip the Fair, took exception to the order’s secret meetings and rituals, and moved against them. On October 13, on the grounds of heresy and homosexual acts, he seized their considerable assets and forced tortured confessions. In 1310, he burned 54 members at the stake and Pope Clement V dissolved the order. By 1314, the last of the Grand Masters, Jacques de Molay, was burned. One legend has it that Molay cursed both the king and the pope, announcing that within a year they would join him. Pope Clement died a month later, according to the Templar History Web site, and Philip, seven months after.
Over the years since, neo-Templar societies have sprung up, including the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple, founded by Jacques Breyers in 1952. He’d had mystical experiences at a castle in France and had decided to re-energize the ideals of the order. His work influenced Di Mambro and Jouret.
At any rate, Jouret saw within the play of past power and persecution a precedent for the Solar Temple. What had happened to the Knights Templar was filled with spiritual symbolism that grounded his proselytizing with ancient roots. The persecution had killed their bodies, he believed, but not their inherent spirituality. That lived on in the elite members of the Solar Temple.
However, it seemed that the ideals were getting tarnished, people were having doubts, and something drastic had to be done.
During the investigation that tied together the three mass death sites, it was found that some of the deceased members had written letters, or “testaments,” while still alive to relatives, officials, scholars, and newspapers to explain what they had done. They admitted to murder, saying that they had executed traitors, but that most of the shootings had been merely a way to help weaker members to make the transition. Only the “awakened” had been able to take their own lives, because they were more spiritually advanced. They all sought a higher realm of spiritual consciousness, and that was no longer possible to achieve on earth. In fact, earth was devolving and would soon meet with a catastrophic end. Following the Masters, who had left the planet on March 31, 1993 and on January 6, 1994, taking with them the spiritual energy of the seven planets, the Solar Temple community was withdrawing. They had gone to another planet, burning their residences behind them to avoid contamination by the uninitiated. They wanted all the faithful to join them.
In other words, for those members who had not participated in the suicides, it was still possible to imitate the act and join the others.
“With a clear mind,” said one of the “Testament” notes, “we leave this Earth for a Dimension of Truth and Perfection. There, away from obstruction, hypocrisy and hostility, we will give birth to the seed of our future Creation.”
Wessinger points out that they had apparently fulfilled the prediction of Jacques Breyer, who had concluded that the Grand Monarchy would leave earth around 1995 (although he had offered other possible dates as well).
Cars belonging to cult members were found at the Chiery train station, abandoned, and a .22 that was linked to the Chiery ritual deaths was found in Granges-sur-Salvan. Someone who had done the shooting in one place had driven that same night to the other to carry out more killings. Also, the suicide notes, supposedly written before the deaths, had post dates that indicated they’d been mailed afterward. Someone who’d been involved in all this death was apparently still at large.
It turned out that one member who was spared, Patrick Vuarnet, son of a French ski champion, had mailed the letters.
Although it was first believed that Di Mambro and Jouret had orchestrated the suicide/slaughter and then gone to hide out until they could emerge and spend the money they had fleeced from their members, their bodies were soon identified as being among the Swiss dead. In other words, they’d bought into their spiritual philosophies.
Even so, there had been problems between them. Despite Jouret’s charismatic motivational style, people in the commune resented his leadership style. His controlling manner got him voted out as Grand Master, which caused a rift in the European community and angered Di Mambro. He began to think less of his chosen protégé. Di Mambro, who died at Salvan, had left a letter deploring the manner of the deaths at Chiery, Wessinger said, saying they were nothing but carnage perpetrated by the incompetent Jouret. There should have been a more glorious exit, Di Mambro wrote.
As reporters uncovered Jouret’s past, they learned that prior to his involvement with the Solar Temple, he had been part of a racist, neo-Nazi magical society, co-founded by former Gestapo officer Julien Origas. He’d tried to grab for power and lost, so he left. In the Solar Temple, he’d made the same lunge for power, and here, too, he had failed.
It wasn’t long before the reasons for the order’s grisly exit appeared to be a bit worldlier. Apparently during the elaborate rituals for communal enlightenment, Di Mambro liked to make the Holy Grail and the spiritual “Masters” appear to groups of believers, using laser tricks. One of his close associates who helped with this eventually grew disgusted. He let others in on the secret and tried to defect, demanding some of his investment back. That man was Tony Dutoit, one of the murder victims in Canada, who was stabbed 50 times.
Apparently, Di Mambro did not relish being exposed for a fraud.
Also, he had many other pressures closing in. First, according to Susan Palmer in “Purity and Danger in the Solar Temple,” he was ill. He had diabetes, kidney failure and incontinence, and believed he had cancer. He was also about to be investigated for money-laundering, initiated by banks suspicious of the large amounts of money he’d been stashing into his accounts.
Worse were the spiritual affronts. Di Mambro had wanted to create an order of cosmic children, which included his daughter. But at the age of 12, Emmanuelle was rebelling. She no longer wanted the “purity” of forbidden contact; she wanted to be among kids her own age, doing what they were doing. In addition, Di Mambro’s son, Elie, had discovered Di Mambro’s trickery with the Cosmic Masters and had denounced his father to many members. Some of them demanded the return of their funds. In 1990, Elie went off on his own.
Thus, DiMambro’s family was falling apart, along with his health and his organization. His power was diminishing on all fronts, and members were accusing him of mismanagement of finances and problems with women. One member’s defiance even threatened his spiritual set-up.
Tony Dutoit’s wife, Nicki, had been ordered not to have any children, and she got pregnant anyway. Tony and Nicki went to Quebec to get away, and they had their son, Christopher-Emmanuel. Di Mambro reportedly viewed this child as the anti-Christ, who threatened his daughter’s status as the messiah. Along with Tony’s determination to expose Di Mambro’s deceptions, he was now in open defiance. He and Nicki were considered traitors who would continue to disrupt the spiritual progress of the other memberswhat was left of them. All of them had to be eliminated.
In addition to these significant internal rifts, the order was having problems with the culture at large. In 1991, a defecting member began to spread word in Quebec that the Solar Temple was dangerous. She demanded her money back and urged others to do the same, which sparked a number of angry demands and threats of lawsuits against the order.
Two years later, the Solar Temple came under police surveillance for possible connections with a political assassin organization, and then Jouret was pulled into a scandal involving illegal arms. Two Quebec members were arrested for purchasing handguns with silencers, and Jouret was charged as well. They were all sentenced to a year of probation and a fine, but Jouret’s career as a lecturer was finished.
(AP)
At the same time, the 54-day FBI siege had begun at Waco, Texas, which ended when David Koresh and the Branch Davidians committed mass suicide. Eighty-four people, including children of the cult members, died in a fiery blaze at their compound.
With all this negative press against cults, there were more defections and membership was quickly dwindling.
The only way to interpret all of this within the Solar Temple doctrines was to say that the stage of consciousness that had evolved on the planet Earth was at its end, and it was time to move on. They could use all the intense negative energy directed on them to assist in their exit. Preparations were made to do so. Members were urged to go to “arks of safety,” from which they could move on together.
Over a year after the first series of mass suicides, in a forested area near Grenoble, France, known as the Well of Hell, 16 people were found dead and burned on December 15, 1995. Fourteen of them were arranged in a wheel-like pattern, heads outward, which came to be regarded as a star. This night was chosen for its association with the winter solstice, and all of the dead were members of the Solar Temple. Three were children, and there was evidence that not all of the victims had willingly gone to their deaths. One woman’s jaw was fractured, as if she had struggled. Most had drugs in their system that had induced lethargy and sleep, and four people had left behind suicide notes in their homes. They hoped to “see another world” and hinted at another mass suicide to follow. Two bodies lying not far away were a police officer and an immigration inspector (some reports say an architect). Reconstruction of the incident indicated that they were the shooters. They had also started the fire.
This incident was chalked off to the influence of the earlier deaths, although families of the victims wanted justice. They believed that others had been involved who were still alive and that those people should be held responsible for their part.
Another year passed. The police monitored known members of the order throughout 1996, during the solstice and equinox seasons, since most of the prior incidents seemed associated with these dates, but when nothing happened, they eased their vigilance.
(AP)
Yet it wasn’t over. On March 22, 1997, another mass suicide in St. Casimir, Quebec, brought the total deaths for this religious cult to 74. This one had nearly been averted. Five adult members and three teenagers (two sons and a daughter) had gathered during the spring equinox on March 20. When their incendiary equipment failed, the teenagers persuaded their parents that they did not wish to die. They were allowed to leave, while the adults, including an elderly woman, made a second attempt at burning down the house. This time they succeeded and were killed. Four of them had arranged their bodies in the shape of a cross. All had taken tranquilizers. The teenagers, drugged, were found next door and were taken to safety. A note was found which indicated that the victims believed they were transitioning to another planet.
In 1998, the police prevented a German psychologist from carrying out yet another mass suicide. She had gathered 29 people believed to be members of the Solar Temple in the Canary Islands. None of them died.
Piecing the tale together, experts believe that Jouret and Di Mambro had decided that several governments were persecuting the order. Prior to the night of the mass slaughter/suicide in Switzerland, Di Mambro and 12 of his followers had engaged in a “Last Supper” to affirm their spiritual ideals. Then the violence began. In Switzerland, the “awakened” 15 had killed themselves by poison, while 38 others were shot. Eight of those were considered traitors to the order, and were thus executed, rather than “transitioned.”
The families of the victims in Grenoble were not about to let the situation fade away. Police identified several prominent members who were still alive and went into action.
profile (CORBIS)
Michael Tabachnik, 58, an internationally renowned Swiss musician and conductor, was arrested as a leader in the Solar Temple, and was indicted for “participation in a criminal organization,” which included murder. He came to trial in Grenoble during the spring of 2001.
French magistrate Luc Fontaine theorized that two deceased members of the cultpolice officer Jean-Pierre Lanchet and architect Andre Friedlihad been the shooters at the mass suicide near Grenoble, and were therefore guilty of killing unwilling victims. One of the children found in a plastic bag there had been only 18 months old. The crime reconstruction had the two suspects shooting the others, dowsing them with gasoline, and before killing themselves, setting the bodies on fire.
Tabachnik was believed to have been among the group of leaders who had facilitated the suicides, and in 1994 to have announced the conclusion of their mission just eleven days before the first deaths. That indicated knowledge about what was to happen. Allegedly he had written much of the group’s literature, and had thus had conditioned people toward annihilation by creating a “dynamic toward murder.” He was said to have been Di Mambro’s expected successor. Prosecutors wanted a jail term of five-to-10 years.
He denied all the charges, claiming that he had severed connections with the sect in 1992. He said he’d known nothing about the plan for a mass suicide. “I have done absolutely nothing wrong,” he stated to reporters.
(AP/Wide World)
At the trial, two former Solar Temple members testified about what they knew. They insisted that senior cultists had ordered the mass suicides and execution of traitors. One stated that that some senior members who were above even Jo Di Mambro had survived and would exact retribution against anyone who spoke out. She said she had overheard another member tell Di Mambro that if members did not willingly cooperate with the suicide plan, they would be forced to do so.
Information also came out that Di Mambro and Tabachnik had co-founded the order after traveling together to Egypt to visit the temples of the pharaohs. Together they had set up the Golden Way in 1978, whose members were taught that they would find peace in death and would merge with a cosmic energy force. That group, with Luc Jouret onboard, eventually became the Solar Temple.
However, with no concrete evidence against Tabachnik for any part he might have played in the Grenoble incident, the court acquitted him of involvement in the 16 deaths. The victims’ families were disappointed.
The Order of the Solar Temple is now believed to be dormant, if not disbanded altogether. While some reports claim that members still practice the rituals, there seems to be little concern from authorities that any more ritual deathsforced or otherwisewill take place.
A documentary about Princess Grace of Monaco, which aired in Britain in 1997, alleged that she had been a member of this cult and that her death in 1982 was linked to Di Mambro, but those close to her have vehemently denied these reports.
In January 2002, Switzerland opened a center for public information about religious cults, to inform people about the potential dangers and to assist cult victims.
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