A group of former Heaven's Gate members has planned a public showing of a 70-minute tape in Berkeley, Calif., featuring the cult's late leader, Marshall Applewhite Jr., shown in this March 28, 1997 file photo. 

When 39 members of a California-based cult Heaven’s Gate died in a mass suicide 25 years ago, they believed they were freeing their minds and souls to rendezvous with a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. 

Their leader, a man who called himself “Do,” was a former Brackenridge High School student named Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr.

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Mixing apocalyptic rhetoric with science fiction, Applewhite Jr. and a former Houston nurse convinced followers that a “higher level” awaited them via an awaiting spacecraft that would transport them if they were willing to rid themselves of their earthly “containers.” 

Members of the Heaven’s Gate cult killed themselves with drugs and vodka in California in March 1997. Among those who committed suicide were a San Antonio massage therapist and four other Texans. 

San Diego and Los Angeles County Medical Examiner personnel place some of the 39 victims of a mass suicide onto a truck for transport to the morgue on March 27, 1997 in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.

There are a myriad of San Antonio and South Texas connections to Applewhite Jr., according to Express-News archives. 

In March 1997, Marshall Applewhite Jr., leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, convinced 38 followers to commit suicide so that their souls could board a UFO. 

Among them, Applewhite’s family can be traced to Bexar County slave owners in the 1850s. Applewhite Road on the South Side still carries the family name. His father, Rev. Marshall Herff Applewhite Sr., was born in the Alamo City and is buried in the family plot at Mission Park South Cemetery, just blocks from the San Antonio River. 

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Applewhite Jr., a former Houston choir and music director, and members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were in San Antonio for a short time before they moved to California, according to a 2020 HBO Max docu-series, “Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults.” 

Applewhite Jr. was born in Spur, a small city 60 miles east of Lubbock. He attended Brackenridge High School in San Antonio in the mid-1940s and graduated from Corpus Christi High School in 1948, where he was president of the school's National Society chapter.  

The youngest of four children, his father, a Presbyterian minister, traveled throughout Texas, moving his family every two or three years as he started churches. 

A patch made by the Heaven's Gate cult. The "away team" was a cheeky joke about how they would be leaving the planet.

Shortly after the mass suicide, Applewhite Jr.'s older sister, Louise Winant, told reporters that he would likely be buried at the family plot in San Antonio. However, subsequent stories indicate that some families took issue with it. After the autopsies and the victims were identified by authorities, all the bodies were ordered to be cremated.

The cult leader’s great-great-grandfather, Stephen Applewhite, was one of three brothers who settled on a South Bexar County ranch in 1853, bringing numerous slaves and establishing a cotton plantation. 

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The Applewhite ranch, once encompassing more than 4,500 acres, led to the naming of Applewhite Road, a largely rural road that runs south from Texas 16 and ends about halfway to Poteet. 

After the Civil War, during which the cult leader’s great-grandfather fought for the South, the Applewhites shifted to tenant farming. The ranch was more recently used as a cattle ranch and dairy farm. Only about 300 acres were owned by family members in the 1990s, and pieces of the ranch have recently gone up for sale. 

Marshall Applewhite Jr., right, leads a rehearsal of the Festival Chorus shortly before its initial concert appearance on Nov 21, 1969, at Jones Hall in Houston. 

After graduating from Austin College and studying briefly at a theological seminary in Virginia, Applewhite Jr. married Ann Francis Pearce of Corpus Christi. They had two children and divorced 16 years later. 

Those who knew Applewhite Jr. in the first 40 years of his life remembered him as a likable, roving minister’s son who was a talented choir director and energetic music professor in Houston. Most found it difficult to pinpoint what went wrong. 

Winant told the Express-News in 1997 that her brother had undergone a “near death” experience in the early 1970s, when he was hospitalized in Houston with a heart blockage. 

"One of the nurses there told him he had a purpose, that God kept him alive," Winant told the New York Times. “She sort of talked him into the fact that this was the purpose — to lead these people — and he took it from there.” 

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That nurse was Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles, and the pair would develop a mentor-student relationship that grew into a spiritual partnership. The pair were known as "Bo and Pee," and later "Do and Ti."

Heaven's Gate cult leader Marshall Applewhite Jr. is shown in this undated video image. 

In 1972, Applewhite Jr. was fired from St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Houston because of what he called his interest in “astrology and theology.” The formation of the cult’s core beliefs began shortly after. 

Applewhite Jr. broke from the family in the early 1970s with a phone call.

Applewood Jr. and Nettles primarily recruited on college campuses, exhorting their followers to abstain from sex, alcohol, and tobacco, as well as to abandon their families.

Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. is shown in this 1974 Harlingen police mug shot taken after he was arrested for auto theft in Harlingen, Texas. Applewhite was one of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult found dead on March 26, 1997, after they committed mass suicide in their home near San Diego. 

Applewhite Jr. and Nettles initially established headquarters in Oregon, but soon began wandering through national forests and settling in small towns.

In 1996, cult members moved into a Rancho Santa Fe, California mansion, where 39 people, including Applewhite Jr., would eventually commit suicide. 

Among the suicide victims was Jeffrey Howard Lewis, 41, of San Antonio. Lewis, a massage therapist, sold his possessions to join Heaven’s Gate. 

Among the other Texas victims were: Michael Howard Carrier, 48; Norma Jeane Nelson, 59; Susan Frances Strom, 44; and Denise June Thurman, 44. 

Express-News and Houston Chronicle archives were used in this report. Staff writer Nick Shepherd contributed to this report. 

Timothy Fanning is a digital reporter for the San Antonio Express-News.