THE MARKER WE'VE BEEN...WAITING FOR

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Most surviving families, however, felt differently, not quite able to see the new dimension their relatives had vanished into. "We are going through a tough time," said a relative of Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, a 39-year-old Cincinnati woman who left her five children (the youngest of whom were infant twins) to join the cult last August. "It's not the closure we wanted," said Alice Maeder, whose daughter Gail, 28, started following the cult in 1994 after her Santa Cruz, California, T-shirt shop failed, "but now we know where she is." Added Gail's father Robert: "She's finally coming home."

At least one woman who died in Rancho Santa Fe offers a hint in the farewell videotape that all these people may not have been quite as happy as they seemed: "I don't have any choice but to go for it, because I've been on this planet for 31 years, and there's nothing here for me."

"ALL OF US AT THIS TIME ARE FINDING OURSELVES ALIGNING WITH OTHERS OF COMMON MIND."

About the most exciting event in Rancho Santa Fe is when Victor Mature, 82, the movie actor famed for playing Samson decades ago, putt-putts in his golf cart to the post office each day. The area 30 miles north of San Diego is a historic landmark, California's oldest planned community and a place so beautiful a writer in the 1940s described it as "the pocket where the Creator keeps all his treasures. Anything will grow there." Live and let live, in fact. In the gated community of 2,500 million-dollar homes, the cult members rented the 9,200-sq.-ft. mansion at 18421 Colina Norte, complete with pool and tennis court, from Sam Koutchesfahani, paying him $7,000 a month in cash. And although many locals knew their new neighbors were involved in some sort of religious activity, no one was concerned enough to investigate any further.

The house was for sale, and prospective buyers, who were asked to remove their shoes and put on sterile surgical slippers before traipsing through, described seeing a lot of androgynous people hunched over computers. The tenants were odd but not dangerous. "They were very bright, unique certainly, but very nice. Standoffish but not rude," says Bill Grivas, who was considering buying the house with his girlfriend. "I had been told they were serious about their religion. You could only see the house at certain times because the monks were using it as a monastery. You knew right away: they were dressed in black pajamas like Viet Cong."

Their landlord may have been one of the last to see the victims alive. Koutchesfahani stopped by the house on Sunday, March 23, and was given a gift for one of his children--a computer. Only later did Koutchesfahani realize it was a farewell present. "They were polite people who shared Sam's problems and told him that things would be all right--that God would work things out," says Koutchesfahani's lawyer Milt Silverman. Koutchesfahani had a checkered past, having pleaded guilty to fraud and tax evasion. "There was nothing goofy about them. There was nothing wacky about a spaceship following a comet. They were Christians. I guess they kept their true beliefs hidden from the world." Well, not entirely. Silverman says one of them mentioned they had come to Earth "as angels in human cartons."