Marshall Applewhite Essay

Marshall Applewhite, was a music professor at first known for his musical and dramatic talents, he sang opera, and was a very good public speaker.
Applewhite had a wife and two kids, but in 1972 he left his family.
He lived Houston, Texas, when he had to go to the hospital because he had heart problems and reportedly had a near-death experience.
One of his nurses, Bonnie Lu Nettles, told him that he was put on this planet for a reason, she recruited Applewhite into the Heaven’s Gate cult.
It seems as though Nettles took advantage of Applewhite’s mental state having just recovered from, well, almost dying.
Applewhite faced prison time, had a huge influence on ordinary people, shared his beliefs on spiritual beings and the human body, and was an overall leader to the followers he had. In 1974 they were arrested for credit card fraud, the charges were dropped, but Applewhite was charged for the theft of a rental car, he was sentenced to six months in prison. When Marshall got out of
In 1985, Nettles died of cancer, along with the cult losing followers because the UFO never showed, because of all this, the cult disappeared completely. In the early 1990’s the cult resurfaced, Applewhite recruited a total of 39 people, 21 women and 18 men. In 1995 the discovery of the Hale-Bopp comet convinced the members that the UFO was coming for them and was hidden from human detection. Applewhite also made a series of videos titled Beyond Human and a video titled The Last Call which had information about the cult. Applewhite rented a mansion in Santa Fe in late March of 1997, the groups last meal was at a restaurant, they all ordered the same meal which was turkey pot pie, blueberry cheesecake, and ice tea. Two days later the group drank a lethal mixture of phenobarbital and vodka, all wearing the same dark clothing and Nike sneakers. This inevitably led to the death of 39 individuals who followed Applewhite’s beliefs and hoped to reach their “higher