Cult leaders have died in various places and various circumstances,
whether in prison or in a mansion; alone or surrounded by followers; hated or revered.
Keep watching to discover what happened to the remains of the following cult leaders.
In the late 1960s, Charles Manson formed a cult that came to be called the Manson Family,
to which he preached racist and misogynistic ideologies. It's suspected that members of
the Family committed several murders both before and after their most infamous ones,
which started on August 9, 1969. That was when Manson sent four of his followers to
a Beverly Hills house where actress Sharon Tate was staying. They brutally killed the
heavily pregnant Tate and four others. The following night, Manson and three other
Family members killed wealthy couple Rosemary and Leno LaBianca in their home in Los Feliz.
Manson and four other Family members were ultimately sentenced to life in prison. After four
decades in prison and 12 denied parole requests, Manson died of natural causes on November 19,
2017, a week after turning 83. A multi-party legal dispute over his body then broke out,
with a judge eventually granting his grandson Jason Freeman the right to claim it.
According to Freeman's lawyer, he planned to cremate his grandfather and scatter
his ashes over a body of water, presumably to prevent anyone from building a shrine.
"I've approached it as doing the right thing for a family member."
When Jim Jones started the Peoples Temple in 1956,
its integrationist politics were considered progressive. But by 1977, Jones' motivations had
become increasingly self-serving. Paranoid about outside interference, he relocated with about
1,000 of his followers in a remote settlement in Guyana that they named Jonestown. On November 18,
1978, after members of the Temple shot and killed several visiting investigators,
Jones ordered his followers to poison themselves, starting with the children.
Anyone who ran or refused was shot, or possibly injected with poison. In total, 918 people died.
Guyana refused to bury the bodies on the site, so the American military undertook a massive
operation to transport them to Delaware's Dover Air Force Base. For various reasons,
410 of the bodies were never claimed. Ultimately, the owner of Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland,
California offered to bury the unclaimed dead in his cemetery. Five more victims were
buried there in 2014, after their remains were discovered in an abandoned Delaware mortuary.
But Jones didn't share the same fate as his followers. He died at Jonestown from a bullet
wound, and he was cremated in New Jersey. His ashes were then scattered over the Atlantic Ocean.
When Evergreen dedicated several plaques listing all the names of
the Jonestown victims in 2011, they controversially included Jones.
One half of the duo that founded astrology apocalypse suicide cult Heaven's Gate,
Bonnie Nettles didn't live to see the tragic event the group is now most famous for.
Born in Houston, Texas, in 1927, Nettles was raised as a Baptist
but developed an interest in Tarot cards, astrology, fortune telling, reincarnation,
and karma. She also believed that she could talk to the dead through seances,
in particular, that she could communicate with a 19th-century monk she called Brother Francis.
Dissatisfied with her marriage and at odds with the people around her,
in 1972 Nettles found a platonic spiritual connection with her son's drama teacher,
Marshall Applewhite. The following year, they began traveling the country,
gradually recruiting new members to their nascent religion. They connected themselves to prophecies
in the Book of Revelation, mixing in references to other spiritual beliefs. Their followers were
told that they must mentally and physically prepare to abandon their Earthly existence
so that they could be ready and worthy of the time when a U.F.O. would beam them up to heaven.
Nettles didn't live to see that climactic moment. Having lost an eye to cancer in 1983,
she died from liver cancer in 1985. Her ashes were scattered over White Rock Lake in Dallas, Texas.
Like most cult leaders, Heaven's Gate's Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles controlled their
followers through restrictions. They were told to surrender Earthly desires: no sex
or drugs, only certain foods, and no belongings not shared by the group. Everyone was given six
minutes and a gallon of water to wash. Even the diameters of pancakes were standardized.
Despite this control, after Nettles' death in 1985, Applewhite struggled to lead Heaven's Gate
alone, as he felt pressure to come up with the promised ascension to the Next Level.
In 1995, astronomers announced the discovery of the comet Hale-Bopp.
The Heaven's Gate members decided that the U.F.O. that would collect them was following the comet,
and they planned to send themselves to meet it. Over three days in March 1997,
when the comet passed closest to Earth, the cult members filmed goodbye messages, dressed in black
with black-and-white Nike Decades sneakers, and took their own lives. Applewhite died in the third
group. On March 29, three days after the bodies were discovered, his sister reportedly planned to
bury him next to their father in San Antonio. However, his ashes were ultimately scattered.
"Your only chance to evacuate is to leave with us."
Around 1990, David Koresh took over a Christian sect called the Branch Davidians. He preached
of an imminent apocalypse, and the cult started stockpiling weapons and running military drills,
aiming to become a so-called Army of God. At the same time, Koresh ordered that all
other men be celibate, while he chose wives for himself among the women, including very young
girls. He also controlled where and when everyone slept and limited access to food.
On February 28, 1993, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms conducted a
disastrous raid on the Davidians' compound outside of Waco, Texas. Six cult members and four officers
were killed. On April 19, a fire that apparently started from the inside destroyed the compound.
Fifty bodies were recovered. On May 2, authorities confirmed that Koresh's
was among them. They reported that he had likely died from a gunshot wound,
not from the fire, although it's not clear who inflicted it. A month later,
Koresh was buried in Memorial Park Cemetery in Tyler, Texas, at a private funeral. The
grave was originally unmarked, but at some point a small marker was added.
Scientology was founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in 1954,
based on a pseudopsychology book he'd written four years earlier.
Scientologists believe that it's only through an expensive and extensive process called auditing
that we can address emotional scars and become "clear," which basically means enlightenment.
Medical professionals, trained psychologists, and anti-cult activists have been speaking
against Hubbard and Scientology for years. In the 60s, Scientology was banned in Australia
after an investigation deemed it a threat to the community. Former members have since accused the
organization of forced labor, child abuse, and human trafficking, among other things.
In 1966, to avoid these legal threats, Hubbard moved his operations to a boat. After 1980,
he disappeared from the public eye. On January 24, 1986, representatives of the organization
reported his death to authorities in San Luis Obispo County, California. According to his
Scientologist doctor, he'd died from a stroke. He had left a request that his body not be autopsied,
so despite the mysterious circumstances, the coroner wasn't able to do a thorough assessment
of the body. A spokesman for Scientology claimed that Hubbard's ashes were scattered at sea.
The story of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his meditation cult spans the globe. But for Rajneesh,
it started and ended in the commune in Pune, India where he first built a following. He founded
his religion in 1970, attracting followers with meditations that involved screaming,
laughing hysterically, dancing, fighting, and orgies. The Indian authorities weren't overjoyed
about the sudden influx of promiscuous, red-robed foreigners that Rajneesh attracted. In 1981,
looking to expand but blocked from doing so in India, Rajneesh and 2,000 of his
followers moved to Antelope, Oregon, which had a population of just 40.
Antelope locals were even less keen on the Rajneeshees than the Indian authorities,
especially once they'd built an enormous compound and started carrying out military
drills. There was also evidence that Rajneesh's second-in-command,
Ma Anand Sheela , organized a mass poisoning,
and lured hundreds of homeless people to the town to help the cult win an election.
In 1985, the United States government deported Rajneesh over an immigration fraud scheme.
"But I'm absolutely innocent. I have not done any crime."
Rajneesh returned to Pune, where he revived the original commune.
He died in 1990 at the age of 58, and he was cremated by his followers on a funeral pyre.
His ashes are kept at the commune underneath a marble plaque that reads:
"Never Born, Never Died, Only Visited This Planet Earth."
The Unification Church sees itself as a Christian sect, but it rejects a pretty important aspect of
Christianity. The cult celebrates its founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon as the true messiah,
instead of Jesus Christ. Moon founded the cult in 1954 in Korea after claiming that
Jesus had visited him in a vision in the 1930s and told him to continue his work. Moon claimed
that his mission was to unite every religion, hence the name "Unification." The followers
who joined became known as the Moonies, after the man they referred to as "Father."
The cult is most famous for its mass weddings, in which all the couples were
set up by Moon. Members were told that anyone who wouldn't join was a force for
evil who was trying to attack Moon. Followers lured prospective members to remote houses,
where they were forced through a process of indoctrination. Moon also preached right-wing
teachings, including anti-Semitism, and he was supported by self-declared fascists.
The Moonies were most popular in the 70s and 80s, but Moon continued to rake in cash through
various business interests after that. He was a billionaire when he died in 2012 at the age
of 92 of pneumonia. 35,000 people reportedly attended his lavish funeral in South Korea,
after which he was buried on Mount Cheonseong, the Moonies' holy site.
One of the most dangerous attacks ever committed by a cult took place in Japan in 1995,
when members of Aum Shinrikyo used a nerve agent to poison thousands of subway commuters. Founded
in the 1980s by Shoko Asahara , Aum combined cherry-picked teachings about meditation and
yoga from Buddhism and Hinduism. Asahara later threw in some Christian doomsday prophecies
and occult references as well. Specifically, he taught the apocalypse was imminent in the form of
a nuclear attack by the United States, and only his followers would survive. By the late 80s,
Aum had gained a significant following in Japan and Russia, especially among university students.
On March 20, 1995, Aum members left open bags of a powerful nerve agent called sarin,
which can be transmitted through the air, at five different stations on Japan's subway system. The
poison killed 13 people and injured at least 5,800. Asahara and six other Aum members were
soon arrested, sentenced to death, and executed by hanging on July 6, 2018, in a Tokyo detention
center. Asahara's ashes were held at a prison while various family members fought over who got
to take ownership of them. In September 2020, a court awarded them to his second-oldest daughter.
In 1987, at least one survivor of a dangerous cult alerted Australian police to its secret
location in the remote countryside near Melbourne. Raiding the complex, police found
28 children dressed identically, all with bleached blonde hair. The woman in charge of the compound
was Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who looked more like a 50s housewife than a cult leader. She'd been
accumulating followers and kidnapping children through fake adoption schemes since the 60s.
She also persuaded single mothers to hand over their children to her as "gifts"
to the cult, which she called The Family. Her teachings included bits of Eastern mythology,
doomsday prophecies, racist ideologies, and herself as the female reincarnation of Jesus.
Hamilton-Byrne reportedly maintained control over the adults and children through an unpredictable
blend of emotional manipulation and furious discipline. The children were beaten, starved,
and drugged with hallucinogens. Hamilton-Byrne and her husband were eventually tracked down and
arrested in New York. They were never charged with child abuse. She was only ever convicted
of minor fraud charges, and fined rather than sentenced to prison. She died at the age of 98
in a nursing home in 2019. She was buried in St Paul's Catholic Church in the town of Monbulk,
located on the outskirts of Melbourne, not far from where the cult had lived.
"You were a monster at times."
"I have nothing to say because I don't feel like one."
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