For centuries, people were drew in by some leaders who claimed that they are the chosen ones … Most of the cults, organized by these people, and ended the same – a mass suicide or murder …
1. Charles Manson – “Family”
Born in 1934, with still quite a young mother, who later became a prostitute, Manson almost all 60th years spent in prisons and jails in San Francisco
Manson told four of his followers to go to 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles and kill the people inside. This house once belonged to Terry Melcher, the man who had not helped Manson with his music career. However, Melcher no longer lived there; actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski, had rented the house. On August 9, 1969, four of Manson’s followers brutally murdered Tate, her unborn baby, and four others who were visiting her (Polanski was in Europe for work). The following night, Manson’s followers brutally killed Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in their home.
2. Jim Jones – “Church People”
But that’s nothing compared to the 909 people, 276 of them children, who became enamored with the handsome charismatic founder of the Peoples Temple. James Warren Jones started out Methodist, and seemed to have fine intentions, endeavoring to bring about civil right for blacks and integrate American society. Somewhere along the line, he went patently insane. He was an aggressive narcissis. He never claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and the only reason he founded the Peoples Temple was for the money he could make via his congregation.
The strangest part is that his followers were not hopeless runaways or uneducated and uninformed. They were predominantly members of other Christian denominations, Methodism, Presbyterianism, Disciples of Christ, etc. They were taken in by his good looks and charm, and his ability to lead and convince.
n 1974, the Temple went to Guyana, with only 50 members. But Jones promised others back in the States a tropical paradise, and they flocked by the hundreds to “Jonestown.” Because he had always been an outspoken communist sympathizer, and intended Jonestown to be a socialist save haven, he drew the attention of the U. S. Government.
On November 17, 1978, investigating claims of abuse within the Temple, California congressman Leo Ryan went to Jonestown, and about 15 members wanted to leave with him. They attempted to depart via a nearby airstrip, and were fired upon by Temple security guards. Ryan was killed, along with four others, one a Temple member.
When the shooters returned to Jonestown, Jones and accomplices were preparing a mass suicide by poisoning: Flavor Aid loaded with cyanide, phenergan, Valium and chloral hydrate.
There are graphic pictures of the dead lying en masse outside the pavilion, 909 of them. The children were probably not told that the drink was poisoned.
Jones shot himself in the head.
3.David Koresh – “branch of David”
Vernon Wayne Howell was a handsome, charismatic Texan, considered so poor a student in elementary and middle school that he was enrolled in special ed classes. He memorized the New Testament by 11, and impregnated a 15 year old when he was 19. He must have forgotten a few verses.
By 1983, after being kicked out of a 7th Day Adventist Church for fooling around with the pastor’s daughter, he began calling himself a prophet. He was able to recruit followers because of his good looks and magnetic personality, eventually proclaiming himself Jesus Christ, “the Son of God, the Lamb who could open the seven seals.” He taught that monogamy was the only proper relationship, but that polygamy was perfectly fine for him, and him alone, and quickly had sex with Karen Doyle, called her his second wife, after his first died, and proceeded to have sex with as many as 140 different women
April 19, 1993: sect members set on fire a building in Waco, Texas.
Karen Doyle did not get pregnant, probably because she was 14 years old, so he slept with Michele Jones, 12 years old. By proclaiming this God’s will, he was able to have sex with any woman or girl whenever he liked. He tried to gun down George Roden, who was also a high ranking member of Koresh’s sect, and escaped conviction by mistrial.
By the time of the Waco Siege, he had, by his own admission, fathered at least 12 children, some by girls as young as 12. And the followers just kept coming. To be honest, the FBI seriously botched the siege, and used unnecessary force, but Koresh was the primary culprit of his followers’ deaths, 82 of them, by fire. Which side started the fire is hotly disputed and will never be known, but Koresh told his followers, “Don’t move until you see God.”
They didn’t see God before they burned alive, Koresh with them.
4.Luc Jouret – “Order of the Solar Temple”
Born in Congo In the 1980′s , a Belgian physician organized the Order of the Solar Temple “with Joseph Di Mambray – Franco-Canadian jeweler.They promoted the belief, borrowed from Roman Catholicism, the Templars, Rosicrucians and of astrology – and all this was supported by fears of ecological catastrophe. They positioned the death as a way to interplanetary flight.
October 5, 1994: at a mass suicide in a Swiss cooperative.
The Order had about 500 members who are mired in internal disputes and accusations of fraud. Jouret and Di Mambray quarreled. In October 1994 a series of suicides, murders and fires swept away almost the entire Order. (Di Mambray left a note, ridiculing Jouret and his actions). A year later, the surviving members of the Order carried out another mass suicide. In total 74 people were killed.
5. Shoko Asahara – Aum Shinrikyo (“Supreme Truth”)
Born partially blind, Japanese acupuncturist teacher of yoga Tidzuo Matsumoto formed in 1987 by a new religion called the “ultimate truth”. His followers (about 10 000 people) believed that their leader has the ability to levitate, and that he disclosed U.S. plans anti-Semitic and that the end of the world until 2000.
March 20, 1995: on-site attack in Tokyo subway.
Apparently, in an attempt to implement their own prophecy (the end of the world with the arrival of the clouds of poisonous gas), the followers of Asahara released in the Tokyo subway sarin, a deadly gas. As a result 12 people were killed and another 1,000 were seriously poisoned. Denying responsibility, Asahara ran, but he was caught and sentenced to death.
6.Marshall Eppluayt – “Cloud Gate”
And if you thought the last several entries were weirdos, Applewhite has gone down in history as a true psychopath. Born May 17, 1931, he proclaimed himself a prophet in 1972, and then, as they all seem to do, proclaimed himself Jesus Christ reincarnated. He was not as handsome as #9, but he wasn’t exactly ugly, either, was married, and seemed for all the world to be “blameless and upright before God.”
Followers flocked to his forceful charisma, when he told them that UFOs were coming to take them away to Heaven. When the UFOs didn’t show, the followers left, but he kept preaching to various friends and their acquaintances, and by 1975 acquired a following of 93 men, women and children.
March 26, 1997: suicide in Rancho Santa Fe.
He eventually recruited people from all 50 states, and settled in Rancho Santa Fe, California. His wife died of cancer in 1985, and sometime between then and 1997, he had a nurse surgically castrate him, for purification. He called his church “Heaven’s Gate.” His congregation worshiped him fervently.
On March 19, 1997, as the comet Hale-Bopp was passing Earth, Applewhite recorded himself preaching to his congregation that suicide “was the only way to evacuate this earth.” His congregation did not believe in suicide, but was so enamored with him, that 39 members took his word for it, and on March 24, 25, and 26, they killed themselves with mixtures of phenobarbitol and applesauce, followed by vodka. They also put plastic bags over their heads to be sure of asphyxiating, in case the poison didn’t work.
Applewhite’s idea was to die so his spirit would ascend to the UFO following Hale-Bopp, which would then take him and his followers to another plane, both physical and spiritual.
7. Joseph Kibvetere – “Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God”
Preaching the end of the world and the need to follow the ten commandments, Kibvetere and his main accomplice Credon Mverinde (former prostitute) said that they see images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and told his followers to follow the fast and sexual abstinence. However, the long-awaited end of the world never came.
March 17, 2000: Members of the cult burned themselves in a church in Uganda.
Close to midnight on March 17, 2000 in several buildings movement started fires. Around 1000 people were burnt to death – this number has exceeded even the number of deaths of mass suicide in Johnstown. Kibvetere allegedly burned down, but many say that his accomplice staged his own death and escaped.
8.Pyotr Kuznetsov – Russian True-Orthodox Church “
In the Penza region’s father Peter said that the apocalypse will happen in May 2008, and that God will show him and his followers, as his experience. Members of the sect were ordered to burn their passports because of fear of government control, and because these documents was the number 666. And then, Kuznetsov said that sect members had dug an underground shelter in which they’ll be for six weeks.
April 2, 2008: Members of the sect, finally emerged from his hiding place, where about 30 people waited for the end of the world.
Kuznetsov said that this act of “martyrdom” rather than suicide. He was stopped before he joined his followers underground. After most of the sect emerged from the shelter, Kuznetsov committed suicide.
