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On the night of 5 to 6 October 1994, 53 members of the Order of the Solar Temple died in a mass murder-suicide at two locations in Switzerland. The OTS was an esoteric and new age cult that operated out of many primarily French-speaking countries. This followed the 30 September murder of a family in Morin-Heights, Quebec; 53 people died in total, through either murder or suicide.

Previously an obscure group, the

While initially declared a mass suicide

Though the group's leaders died in the incident, two other mass suicides of remaining members followed in 1994 and 1997 in France and Canada.

Background
The Order of the Solar Temple was

Planning
In a tape likely dating to spring 1994, Jouret and Di Mambro discussed the Waco siege, saying that they had "beaten us to the punch", with Di Mambro saying "what we’ll do will be even more spectacular". Members of the group claimed a mass suicide had occurred in Sydney on 6 January 1994. According to the New South Wales Police, this did not occur. In another tape from spring 1994, Di Mambro stated: "We are rejected by the whole world. First by the people, the people can no longer withstand us. And our Earth, fortunately she rejects us. How would we leave [otherwise]? We also reject this planet. We wait for the day we can leave … life for me is intolerable, intolerable, I can’t go on. So think about the dynamic that will get us to go elsewhere." Given the scale of the issues facing the group leaders, it was decided they would to "transit" to Sirius. To prepare for the transit, specific missions were given to the most faithful members. Included among these was the specific kinds of deaths, which were divided into three categories: The OTS termed the acts a "transit", which they described as "in no way a suicide in the human sense of the term". In their view, traitors would be simply murdered, while "weaker" members would be "helped" to transit, and the remaining members considered strong enough would kill themselves. Members believed that, upon death, they would acquire "solar bodies" in a faraway location in space (typically given as the star Sirius, but alternatively Jupiter or Venus). The group's leaders wrote four letters expressing these views, known as Le testament, which contained messages of the order's beliefs. The four letters were titled "To All Those Who Can Still Understand the Voice of Wisdom … We Address This Last Message", "The Rose+Croix", "Transit to the Future", and finally "To Lovers of Justice".
 * the elimination of "traitors";
 * the execution of members who agreed with the principle of transit, but not necessarily by physical death ("Immortals");
 * the execution of members who agreed with the principle of transit and accept physical death ("Awakened")

In their belief, they would "transit" by the star Sirius. During the last meeting of the order, On 24 September 1994, the group was renamed as the Alliance Rose Croix (ARC), announced by Tabachnik. The group claimed the renaming was in order to reach "the irreversible stage of the return to the Father" and the "Vth Reign", which would lead to the abolition of hierarchies.

Dutoit family murders
On 30 September 1994, Dominique Bellaton lured the Dutoits to Di Mambro's chalet in Morin-Heights; Di Mambro had ordered two group members, Jerry Genoud and Joël Egger, to eliminate the infant. The baby was stabbed through the heart with a wooden stake, and the parents were then murdered. Each of the victims was stabbed multiple times; Tony was stabbed fifty times in the back.

Bellaton and Egger left for Switzerland at 10:10 p.m. the same day, while Genoud and his wife Colette cleaned up and set fire to the chalet, killing themselves.

The bodies of the Dutoits were later found hidden in a storage closet.

Cheiry and Salvan
On the night of October 4 to 5, 1994, two fires broke out in Switzerland: one at around 11:55 p.m. at the "La Rochette" farm in Cheiry, and another in three chalets at "Le Fond du Ban" in Salvan. When the fire department arrived, they found 23 people dead in Cheiry and 25 in Salvan. The victims were, in most cases, "dressed in a white, black or gold ritual cloak, depending on the degree of initiation reached". In Switzerland, many of the victims were found in a secret underground chapel lined with mirrors. Jouret was among the dead in Salvan. Many bodies were burned beyond recognition, and Jouret and Di Mambro's bodies had to be identified via dental records. Di Mambro's wife and child were also among the dead.

On the morning of 5 October, Di Mambro instructed member Patrick Vuarnet, Jean Vuarnet's son, to mail the Testament letters to roughly 300 people, including to the media, other followers, academics (one of whom was Jean-François Mayer) and a number of political and public figures, including Charles Pasqua. They were postmarked from "D.Part" and "Tran Sit Corp", mailed from "33 Golden Strasse, 8011 ZURICH".

In Cheiry, twenty victims died from one or more bullets to the head, two suffocated with plastic bags around their heads, and another probably in the same way on 3 October. Twenty-two people had flunitrazepam in their blood, and one had theobromine. The building, closed from the inside, was then set on fire the following day by an automatic ignition system. The bodies were dressed in the order's ceremonial robes and were in a circle, feet together, heads outward, most with plastic bags tied over their heads; they had each been shot in the head. The dead were divided into three categories. The inner circle members who were close to Jouret and Di Mambro, called the "Awakened", ingested poison. An additional 30, "Immortals", were shot or smothered; 8 others, declared as "traitors", were murdered.

The plastic bags may have been a symbol of the ecological disaster that would befall the human race after the OTS members moved on to Sirius; it is also possible that these bags were used as part of the OTS rituals, and that members would have voluntarily worn them without being placed under duress. There was also evidence that many of the victims in Switzerland were drugged before they were shot. Other victims were found in three ski chalets; several dead children were lying together. The bodies was discovered when officers rushed to the sites to fight the fires that had been ignited by remote-control devices. Farewell letters left by the believers stated that they believed they were leaving to escape the "hypocrisies and oppression of this world." At least five of the dead were children.

In Salvan, it transpired that the victims had been injected (or had injected themselves) with a curare, opioid and benzodiazepine-based poison. The cottages were then locked from the inside and set on fire using an automatic ignition system. Bodies were found in only two of the three cottages. A mayor, a journalist, a civil servant, and a sales manager were found among the dead in Switzerland. Records seized by the Quebec police showed that some members had personally donated over C$1 million to Di Mambro. It was concluded by police investigators that most of the dead had died on the 3rd.

thierry huguenin

Investigation
The leadership of the OTS cared deeply about the group's legacy, and spent a large amount of time preemptively creating a "legend" through both the manifestos they mailed to various media and scholarly sources, and by destroying all evidence that would have conflicted with their own story. This plan was disrupted, as some of the ignition devices had failed. This failure left behind a large number of the Temple's written documents, some of which were found on the group's surviving computers, as well as audio and video cassettes, able to be looked through by investigators. Several months after the deaths, two journalists from France 2 visited the ruins of the Salvan chalet and found, in the kitchen garbage can, audio cassettes in excellent condition, recording telephone conversations between followers who had been spied on by Di Mambro. Extracts from the tapes were broadcast and deemed to be in line with the order's beliefs and theses.

During the search of Joseph Di Mambro's apartment, a note (in French) was found which read:"Following the tragic Cheiry Transit, we wish to make it clear, on behalf of the Rosy Cross, that we deplore and totally disassociate ourselves from the barbaric, incompetent and aberrant behavior of Doctor Luc Jouret. Taking the decision to act on his own authority, against all our rules, he has transgressed our code of honor and is the cause of a veritable carnage that should have been a Transit carried out in Honor, Peace and Light. His departure does not correspond to the Ethics we represent and defend to posterity."

Thanks to the documents found, the police were able to understand the workings of the community and recognize some of its members, including Michel Tabachnik (in concert in Denmark at the time of the massacres). He was questioned for three days by the investigating judge André Piller, and was cleared of having been the perpetrator of the massacre. Other former OTS members were also questioned, such as Thierry Huguenin, who testified that he had been called to Salvan on 4 October on the promise that money owed to him would be returned that day. However, sensing danger, he left the scene. He went on to explain that he believed the plan was to assassinate him and the others in order to reach the number of 54 victims, in connection with the 54 knights of the Order of the Temple executed at the stake on 18 March during the reign of Philip IV of France. After the event, some other members declared their continued support for the group's ideas, and even regretted not having been chosen for the "transit". A Swiss magistrate concluded that of the fifty two deaths, only fifteen were suicides.

Aftermath
legislation

1995 deaths

1997 deaths

After the deaths, Swiss cantonal authorities founded the Centre intercantonal d'information sur les croyances, an organization meant to provide information on cults.