Former Heaven’s Gate Member Found Dead In A Copycat Suicide

A former member of the Heaven’s Gate cult was found dead Tuesday in a copycat suicide in a motel room near the scene of the group’s mass suicide in San Diego County, and another former member was found unconscious in the same room, authorities said.

San Diego County sheriff’s officials said the men were discovered, with trademark black Nikes and purple shrouds, in a $59 room at a Holiday Inn Express in Encinitas, Calif. They said the scene was reminiscent of the discovery of 39 bodies of cult members on March 26, in a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, about four miles away and just north of San Diego.

“It was very similar in every way, only on a much smaller scale,” said Lt. Gerald L. Lipscomb, chief of the homicide unit in the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

The dead man was identified as Wayne Cooke, a sculptor and handyman whose wife, Suzanne Sylvia Cooke, 54, was one of the 39 cult members who swallowed barbiturates and vodka, dying in the belief they would then join a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. The other man, who has been hospitalized in critical condition, was Charles Humphreys, also known as Rick Edwards.

In an interview with The New York Times after the first suicides, Cooke, who was about 56, had only spent four years in the group, most recently in 1994. He was morose at having missed out on his former colleagues’ supposed ascension and said he would probably join them. “I am going to drop my shell one of these days,” said Cooke, who was known within the group as “Justin” and had lived most recently in Las Vegas, Nev. “Hopefully, I will have another chance.”

CNN, which said it received a letter and videotaped statements from the two men this morning, played a tape of the dead man saying: “I am not dying, I’m not going to be dead. I’m simply leaving this vehicle,” the cult members’ term for their bodies.

Lipscomb said San Diego officials had been alerted Tuesday morning by CNN, and by Lesley Stahl of the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” that they had received farewell messages made by the two men. Investigators then spoke with Kelly Cooke, who told them that she believed that her father and a friend were planning to commit suicide in the San Diego area. Kelly Cooke had received a package from her father alerting her to his plans, and then called Stahl, the authorities said.

The authorities checked area hotels and found the men registered in Room 222 at the Holiday Inn Express on Leucadia Boulevard in Encinitas, a suburban community that adjoins Rancho Santa Fe.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the motel to find one man dead and the other unconscious and “in pretty bad shape,” according to a spokesman, Ron Reina. The unconscious man was taken to Scripps Hospital in Encinitas, where he was listed in critical condition Tuesday afternoon.