THE MARKER WE'VE BEEN...WAITING FOR

(3 of 7)

When Matzorkis and Rio finally watched the video together with the sheriff's deputies in the middle of the night, they were stunned by what they saw. The cult members were not just unthreatening in life, they were mild in death. Says Matzorkis: "They were sharing their joy and glee. The excitement really showed." When Matzorkis scanned the computer discs on Saturday evening, TIME learned, he found that they contained messages from cult members intended to be posted on the group's Website-in effect, suicide notes. One, from a woman who signed herself "Goldenody," seemed to support the notion that their leader was terminally ill. "Once He is gone," she wrote, "there is nothing left here on the face of the earth for me." (In the meantime, Matzorkis has tied up the rights to a TV movie of the week.)

The farewell tape looks like a garden party of the apocalypse, with the California sun shining and the trees in the mansion's backyard blowing in a gentle breeze. The speakers talked as if they were looking forward to a holiday, not a vodka-phenobarb cocktail. Said one woman: "We couldn't be happier about what we're about to do." Said a man in his 40s: "I've been looking forward to this for so long." Said a woman, laughing slightly: "People in the world who thought I'd completely lost my marbles--they're not right. I couldn't have made a better choice."

One of the confusing things about this tape was actually telling the victims apart: all with close-cropped hair and unlined skin, it was easy to see why sheriffs originally thought all the dead were young men. But shedding any signs of sexuality was integral to the cult, and six of the men, including Applewhite, went so far as to get castrated years ago, which may help explain the odd passivity or gentleness the victims exhibited. "In order to be a member of that Kingdom, one had to overcome his humanness, which included his sexuality," said a former cult member, Michael.

The victims' kin, though, had little trouble recognizing their long-lost, but suddenly gone, relatives. Mary Ann Craig, whose husband John, 62, left her and their six children in Durango, Colorado, in 1975 to join the cult, says she had been waiting for the news of his death for 22 years. "How can you explain something like this?" she asks. On Friday, Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star Trek, went on CNN's Larry King Live to discuss the death of her brother Thomas Nichols. Nichelle said that her brother "made his choices, and we respect those choices."

The presence among the dead of the brother of a Trekkie demigoddess was only the most startling intersection of reality and science fiction. The cult's work space in Rancho Santa Fe was decorated with posters of alien beings from The X-Files and E.T. On the farewell tape, a cultist even brings up Nichols' oeuvre in explaining his decision to leave behind his human "container": "We watch a lot of Star Trek, a lot of Star Wars, it's just, to us, it's just like going on a holodeck. We've been training on a holodeck...[and] now it's time to stop. The game's over. It's time to put into practice what we've learned. We take off the virtual-reality helmet...go back out of the holodeck to reality to be with, you know, the other members on the craft in the heavens."