The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (17 page)

The only way out of this seemingly messy state of affairs, or so it seemed to Di Mambro and Jouret, was to declare that the time had come for both them and their followers to leave this Earth and proceed to a higher level of spirituality. Fire was required for the transition to be successful, so on October 4, 1994, following the murder of Tony Dutoit and his family, their building was set alight. Their murderers (later identified as thirty-five-year-old Gerry Genoud and sixty-year-old Colette Genoud) then committed suicide, believing they were on the path to Sirius. At almost the same moment, on the other side of the world, leaders Di Mambro and Jouret were putting the finishing touches to their own (and several others') suicides in the Swiss farmhouse owned by Albert Giacobino. After the deaths at Chiery and those of October 5 at Granges-sur-Salvan, there was a temporary cessation of activity among the surviving members of the Solar Temple. To what this was due has never been established, but one can surmise that with Di Mambro's and Jouret's deaths, the Solar Temple was finding it difficult to function. Nevertheless, a little over a year after the first three mass suicides, even more blood was to be shed.

In December 1995, in a sparsely wooded area better known as the Well (or Pit) of Hell located just outside Grenoble in France, sixteen people (including three children, six-year-old Tania Verona, nineteen-month-old Curval Lardanchet and four-year-old Aldwin Lardanchet) were found dead. Some of their number had suffered terrible burns while fourteen of them were discovered spread out in the telltale, wheel-like pattern later identified as a star. That day had been the apex of the winter solstice and all the corpses were later identified as having been members of the Solar Temple. Although some of the dead had obviously committed suicide, others showed signs that they had been brutally murdered. One woman's jaw was badly fractured, other people had gunshot wounds and nearly everyone in the circle was shown to have taken a combination of the drugs Myolastan and Digoxine. A few had left suicide notes stating that the purpose of their actions was to leave this life and travel to a higher spiritual plane. Chillingly, the notes also indicated that another mass suicide was going to take place.

A year passed with no further incidents, but police were still keeping a close eye on remaining Solar Temple members, paying particular attention to the winter and summer solstice and equinox dates. Perhaps, because nothing occurred on either occasion, they were lulled into a false sense of security, or perhaps they simply didn't have the resources to keep a constant watch over everyone. Whatever the case, the surveillance was relaxed only for tragedy to strike yet again.

On March 22, 1997 in the small village of St. Casimir in Quebec, yet another mass suicide took place, bringing the total number of Solar Temple deaths to seventy-four. Gathering at the spring equinox on 20 March, five adult members of the group along with three teenagers tried to set off an incendiary device intended to burn both them and the building to the ground. Luckily, the device failed, allowing the teenagers enough time to persuade their parents that they didn't want to die. Once released, the youngsters fled to a nearby house, but the adults continued with their plan, and this time they succeeded. Having taken tranquillizers, they arranged themselves on the floor in the sign of the cross, then set light to themselves. Later a note was discovered explaining that the victims believed this the only way to transport themselves to another planet.

The authorities may have failed to prevent this tragedy but they were much luckier the following year, for in 1998 they discovered that a German psychologist had gathered together twenty-nine members of the Solar Temple in the Canary Islands with the express purpose of staging yet another mass suicide. Meanwhile, back in France, relatives of the Grenoble victims were pressing the authorities to arrest any surviving members of the cult, especially any surviving leader, with a view to prosecuting them.

One such leader was Michel Tabachnik, a world-renowned musician and conductor, who lived in Paris but had worked for both the Canadian Opera Company and the University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He was indicted for ‘participation in a criminal organization' involving ritual killings, and was brought to trial in Grenoble on April 16, 2001. Although previously not thought to be a main player in the organization, further investigation concluded that he had been a facilitator in the 1994 suicides and all those that followed. In fact, Tabachnik had written a great deal of the group's literature (which was sold to believers for huge sums of money), and therefore had played a vital role in the priming of members to believe self-annihilation was necessary to achieve the Temple's goals.

At the trial, the French magistrate, Luc Fontaine, forwarded the opinion that two of the deceased members of the cult – a police officer named Jean-Pierre Lardanchet (whose two sons also died in the 1995 tragedy) and an architect by the name of Andre Friedli – had been the men who, at the Grenoble mass suicide, shot and murdered several cult members who weren't willing to take their own lives. It was a pattern that had been repeated at all the other incidents – two chosen members of the Temple shooting all those who weren't on a high enough spiritual level to achieve suicide. Afterwards, the crime-scene reconstruction demonstrated how Lardanchet and Friedli then poured gasoline over the bodies before setting them alight and afterwards killing themselves. It was all extremely grisly and unsurprisingly, given that prosecutors were pressing for a jail term of between five and ten years, Tabachnik denied all charges. After all, there was very little concrete evidence, apart from the writings, to link him directly to the deaths. Yet two former Solar Temple members testified that the order to commit suicide came only from the higher echelons of the group, which included Tabachnik. They also testified that it had been Di Mambro and Tabachnik who had set up the Solar Temple, having traveled together to Egypt where they had been inspired by the ancient pharaohs and where Di Mambro had interpreted ancient carvings for his acolyte, informing him that the god Sothis (later known as Sirius) represented knowledge. In addition to this evidence, during the course of the trial,
The Times
newspaper in London printed an interview it had conducted with the son of a former member.

Edith Vuarnet, the wife of an Olympic ski champion, could not resist the lure of the cult, despite the fact that fifty-three members of the order had already died.

The first that [Alain] Vuarnet or his father knew of the sect's existence and their family's connection with it was in October 1994, when fifty-three of its followers perished in three fires in villas in Switzerland and Canada. The names of Mme Vuarnet and Patrick, her youngest son, were mentioned in a police report.

‘It was as though our world had fallen in,' says the tall, athletic Vuarnet, who now heads the family business. ‘But in a sense we were relieved – the two gurus had killed themselves. A few months later, I asked my mother whether she still saw other members of the Order of the Solar Temple. She went pale and replied, “Alain, after all that those people have done, do you really think I could have anything to do with them?”' A year later, in the early hours of December 16, 1995, Edith and Patrick were among sixteen Solar Temple members who climbed through the forests of the Vercors mountains in southwest France to a clearing known locally as the Pit of Hell.
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Alain Vuarnet then proceeded to describe how, back in 1990, his mother had been suffering from a mild bout of depression when she met Luc Jouret. She wanted to find something she could believe in, some type of faith, and Jouret's cult obviously fitted the bill.

Meanwhile at the trial, Tabachnik, although admitting he had become involved with the group, stated categorically that he was not one of its leaders, but simply someone who had been duped by Di Mambro. ‘My great difficulty, your honor,' he said during one particularly grueling eight-hour court session, ‘is to explain my role in what happened, because I was completely naïve.'
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But the lawyer acting on behalf of the families of some of the Grenoble victims dismissed this defence. ‘ Tabachnik,' said Francis Vuillemin,‘is trying to pass himself off as an imbecile, when in fact he is trying to treat others as imbeciles. In truth he was the doctrinarian behind the deaths.'
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Respected international conductor and composer Michel Tabachnik was suspected of involvement in the deaths of the members of the Solar Temple sect but was acquitted of all charges. He went on to win many accolades for his music and was recently appointed chief conductor of the Noord-Nederlands Orkest.

The prosecution then went on to try to prove, through witness statements, that Tabachnik had been one of the leaders who had announced the end of the cult shortly before the first series of three massacres and that he, therefore, knew precisely the nature of the coming events. Yet no matter how much mud the prosecution flung at Tabachnik, no matter how much they tried to link him to the Solar Temple's leaders, on June 25 he was acquitted of all the charges.

Naturally, Tabachnik's own lawyer, Francis Szpiner, was delighted with the result, declaring that the trial judges had rightfully resisted media pressure to convict his client. However, contrary to this opinion, the Association de defence de la famille et de l'individu – an anti-cult organization – declared the result disappointing and called for the government pass a law banning the existence of cults. ‘With this law on the books,' stated the association's lawyer, Francis Buillemin, ‘Michel Tabachnik wouldn't have been able to escape punishment.'
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Tabachnik walked from court a free man and has remained so, despite prosecutors appealing against his aquittal. Today he continues to enjoy a successful career as a highly respected conductor.

Police authorities in France, Switzerland and Canada all decided that there was a very real possibility the millennium might prove the spark to ignite another series of mass suicides. In Quebec, approximately seventy-five investigators focused on sects operating in the province and officer Pierre Robichaud of the Sureté du Quebec was quoted as saying:

They [the Order of the Solar Temple] say they are inactive, but unfortunately, we cannot say without doubt that, yes, they are inactive.We are not worried but, unfortunately there are things we cannot predict. Tomorrow, another massacre like the one in St. Casimir can blow up in our face. It is a very touchy matter.
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In Switzerland, too, moves were afoot to prevent another tragedy, this time by opening a public information center on religious cults so that, while not infringing upon people's beliefs, the public could at least become aware of the danger involved in joining certain groups. François Bellanger, president of the information center said:

We are not fighting these groups. We live in a country where the freedom of religion is sacred. We want to provide neutral and relevant information. In collecting, analysing and providing this data, we are going to act very carefully.
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And this softly, softly approach does seem to have worked for, since the Grenoble suicides and the trial of Michel Tabachnik, there have been no further mass suicides. This does not, of course, necessarily mean that such a thing will not reoccur in the future. Interestingly, in his final report after the Tabachnik trial, Judge Fontaine recorded the following: ‘Structured like a multinational, the Order was truly a giant commercial operation with financial interests on three continents.' Whether this statement pointed to the fact that many people believed (and still believe) the cult to be a front for organized crime has, however, never been proved. What is certain is that millions of dollars moved through the Solar Temple's accounts, and that it included amongst its members many highly influential people such as police officers, politicians, civil servants and, allegedly (according to a Channel Four TV documentary), Princess Grace of Monaco. It may also be true that Di Mambro and Jouret were being manipulated by someone even higher up in the organization than themselves – someone whose name, in the true nature of a secret society, has never been revealed.

With the jugglery of deceit and the trickery of untruth, with guileful preparations and specious obfuscations, he laid the foundations of the fida'is, and he said: ‘Who of you will rid this state of the evil of Nizam al-Mulk Tusi?' A man called Bu Tahir Arrani laid the hand of acceptance on his breast, and, following the path of error by which he hoped to attain the bliss of the world-to-come, on the night of Friday, the 12th of Ramadan of the year 485 [ …] he came in the guise of a Sufi to the litter of Nizam al-Mulk, who was being borne from the audience to the tent of his women, and struck him with a knife, and by that blow he suffered martyrdom.

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