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20/33/097

Friends, sister say cult leader once loved life

By PAULINE ARRILLAGA

Associated Press Writer

ARANSAS PASS, Texas (AP) - To the world, he is a man on a videotape speaking wide-eyed of outerspace and of joining a higher power; a man who killed himself and led 38 others to the same fate to accomplish that goal.

To friends and his sister, he is simply Herff - a gifted musician who was raised in the church, the son of a Presbyterian minister.

He was a man who loved life and lived it to the fullest until the day he joined the Heaven's Gate cult, eventually becoming its leader.

It is the previous life Louise Winant wants people to remember about her brother, Marshall Herff Applewhite. But even Mrs. Winant knows, his death has become his legacy.

On Wednesday, the 66-year-old was among 18 men and 21 women whose bodies were found in a California mansion. Authorities say they committed mass suicide in the belief that they would take a spaceship ride in a UFO trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.

"I'm sorry it had to end the way it did," said Mrs. Winant, 69. "But I want people to realize he didn't mean them any harm.

"I don't want to remember him, and I don't want anyone else to remember him, as a kook."

Applewhite's son hardly remembers him at all. In a letter sent to Corpus Christi television station KZTV, Mark Applewhite said he was 5 when his father left the family.

Applewhite, a born-again Christian who lives in Corpus Christi, said he was "appalled by the things that have resulted from the actions of my father and others in that cult."

"I am deeply hurt by the knowledge that people have now lost their lives in connection with my father," he wrote.

Until joining Heaven's Gate, Applewhite seemed anything but a "kook."

He was born in Spur, east of Lubbock, and grew up as one of four siblings. Besides Mrs. Winant, he had another sister and a brother who suffered from mental retardation.

The family moved around every three years or so because of his father's career. They lived throughout Texas, including San Antonio and Corpus Christi, where Applewhite graduated from high school in 1948.

Throughout his schooling, at Julliard, Austin College, the University of Colorado, Applewhite focused on music. And he was good, his sister said.

"He could play almost any instrument, and he sang beautifully," she said.

Karl Hickfang, president of the Texas Choral Directors Association in the late 1960s, said Applewhite directed a regional choral clinic for the association.

Hickfang remembered him as a fine baritone and said "he was a very talented, personable fellow."

Applewhite lived in Houston between the late 1950s and early 1970s, during which time he sang for the Houston Grand Opera. In a 1967 production of "Carmen," he was part of a cast that included Opera great Placido Domingo.

He also worked as a music teacher at the University of St. Thomas in 1966-70 and was promoted to first chairman of the music department.

But Applewhite eventually was fired from the private Roman Catholic college for "health problems of an emotional nature," according to a 1975 newspaper article.

Mrs. Winant said her brother came about his beliefs sometime in the early 1970s. He was hospitalized in Houston with a heart blockage and had a "near death" experience.

His nurse, Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles, told him "he was saved so that he could help her lead this group," Mrs. Winant said.

Mrs. Winant last saw her brother more than 20 years ago, when Applewhite went to her home in Dallas to tell her he had joined a group "that was so much closer to God than any group he had ever been in."

He told her his family would never see him again.

"At first, I thought he was kidding because he was always joking," Mrs. Winant said. When she questioned Applewhite, he replied: "You just don't really know me."

Mrs. Winant said she tried unsuccessfully for years to contact her brother. The best she could do was to follow his travels through a California woman who had set up a support group for families of Applewhite's followers.

She also kept track of him through news reports, and compiled a scrapbook filled with press clippings, stories generated as he shared his unusual theories with reporters around the country.

Mrs. Winant learned of her brother's death along with the rest of the world. When news of the mass suicide hit the national airwaves, she knew her brother, who for years had gone by the name "Do," must be involved.

"As soon as I heard something about 'Do' and 'spacecraft,' I thought 'Oh no,' " Mrs. Winant said.

Although she was familiar with Applewhite's beliefs, she wasn't prepared for what she heard.

"Not the suicide part, but I knew that someday he would surface with this group," she said. "I had no idea it would be in the way that it was. He had never seemed suicidal. And I'm sure that to him it was not suicide."

But that's not what she preferred to talk about Friday. As she graciously answered questions in dozens of interviews at her home, the sweet, soft-spoken woman sought to talk instead about the man she used to know.

As if trying to introduce the world to the old Applewhite, Mrs. Winant pulled out a record album, titled "Light and Blue," recorded when Applewhite was part of a singing group at the University of Alabama. She tried to play it, but her phonograph was broken.

In a sense, Mrs. Winant said, her brother's death is less painful than his departure in the 1970s. The thought brings her to tears.

"This time there's more of a closure because always before I was looking for him and I never could find him," she said. "Now I know where he is. It is a relief in a way because now I don't have to worry."

Mrs. Winant said she wants to bury her brother in San Antonio, where she believes their mother purchased a lot for him years ago, because "she always knew something was going to happen."

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