Rampage (34 page)

Things got worse in April, when two of Hogue’s accomplices, Joseph Percival and James McDougall, were arrested in Edmonton for violent robbery and possessing $12,000 in stolen currency.
[56]
Percival had been a former Vancouver policeman. Rumours began circulating of an internal investigation into the force, and Hogue learned that he was under particular scrutiny. The pressure was unbearable. Bit by bit, he sensed his whole world closing in on him. Soon the truth would be revealed: his six children would learn that their policeman father was actually a criminal in disguise. They would abandon him, and he would be locked up. Maybe they’d send him to the federal correctional work camp in Agassiz where his brother Lawrence was serving four years for theft. Between the constant paranoia and intense feelings of guilt, Leonard Hogue’s mind began to slowly unravel.

A Family Affair

At 5:30 p.m. on Monday, April 19, Hogue rented a blue 1965 Meteor Montcalm station wagon from a Vancouver U-Drive. It has never been determined how the Coquitlam resident managed to arrive in the big city — that same morning he had totalled his Volkswagen on the Port Mann Freeway. What is known is that at some point during the evening he purchased a .357-calibre Magnum revolver from a CPR policeman before the two wound up drinking at a Vancouver hotel. Upon returning to his $25,000 home in Coquitlam’s sleepy Harbour Chines subdivision, Hogue shot his wife and six children. Once he was certain that they were dead, he turned the gun upon himself.

The following day, service station owner Ray Ellis found a blue station wagon on his lot at 1695 Como Lake Road in Coquitlam. Initially he assumed that somebody had left it for repairs, but when nobody contacted him by Wednesday, he telephoned the police. Meanwhile, Leonard Hogue’s absence from work had not gone unnoticed, and fearing that he had flown the coop, Chief Booth sent an officer to the Hogue residence to check things out. It was a dank, cloudy day, and the white suburban home with the green shutters was still wet with the morning rain. After knocking on the door and receiving no reply, the investigating officer stooped down to peer through the basement window and recoiled. At the foot of a blood-spattered chesterfield lay the body of a young girl. What they thought had been a simple case of truancy had suddenly become homicide.

Within no time, detectives entered the premises to discover a bloodbath. Leonard’s wife, Vera, lay murdered in her bed, shot through the head while sleeping. Likely, she was the first to die. Her spouse and executioner had opted to end his life beside her — Leonard’s partially clad body was sprawled across the bedroom floor with the revolver nearby. Roused by the shots, their thirteen-year-old son Larry had made an attempt to flee his top bunk, only to be gunned down by his father. Raymond, eight, and Clifford, six, had raced downstairs to the main floor with Leonard in hot pursuit. One boy ran for the bathroom as Leonard fired at him, missing, before a second bullet exploded through his head in a shower of blood. Possibly reasoning that he could not outrun his father, the other boy attempted to hide in a closet, and was killed in the doorway. The Hogue daughters, twelve-year-old Noreen and four-year-old Darlene, made it as far as the basement before their lives were similarly deleted with two callous clicks of the trigger. To quote Inspector Ian Macgregor,

I have seen death many times on this job. I have seen men dead, women dead, children dead, but I’ve never seen death like this. Nothing as tragic as this. It would have been one thing if they would have all been killed at once, like a machine gun. But here you had kids running away, trying to hide, with one trying to get into the closet. Further on top of all this, Hogue had to stop and reload. He must have been insane.
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Leonard’s final victim hadn’t even attempted to flee his bed. Like his mother and siblings, three-year-old Richard Hogue had died from a gunshot to the skull. Only the family dog had been spared. Amidst the blood splatters, brains, and bullet holes, investigators made a curious find: six Easter baskets on the kitchen counter, one for each of the children. How could a man spoil his sons and daughters on Sunday, only to cruelly stalk and execute them in their own home on Monday? Was this a father’s selfish attempt to ensure his family would never leave him, or a twisted and irrational act of mercy?

Though Hogue’s suicide ensures we will never know the answers to these questions, one mystery could be solved: his involvement in the CPR warehouse robbery. Alerted to the presence of the abandoned station wagon at Ray Ellis’s gas station, detectives quickly traced it to Hogue, and began searching its contents. In the rear deck they discovered traces of clay and hemp fibres, probably from a rope used to bind the containers of junk cash. There were markings where something heavy had been dragged from the vehicle. A crowbar sat in the front seat, near a box of .357-calibre ammo.

It wasn’t until mid-June that the marked money was finally recovered: $1,185,165 of worthless paper in a rented Victoria garage that had been sealed with a custom padlock. The custodians remembered speaking to a “rough-looking” man in his mid-forties who had wanted to rent a unit. A day later, they remembered a second “fair-haired man,” and witnessed two different individuals unloading crates from a rental truck into the garage.

On Wednesday, April 28, 250 mourners attended a funeral service for all eight members of the Hogue family, including Leonard. Neighbours had viewed the Hogues as a tight-knit church-going brood. Many of Leonard’s fellow policemen expressed shock that he could be capable of such an atrocity. “He was the last guy to worry about anything,” one officer stated. “If anything happened he laughed it off.”

Chapter 9

The Disciple and the Ideological Killer

As it is impossible to comprehend Disciple mass murderers without examining their Ideological counterparts, this chapter will explore both types of slayers. Generally, they fulfill complementary roles in a homicidal cult, with the Ideological mass murderer indoctrinating and gaining psychological control over the Disciple. The Ideological murderer frequently orders the murders of dissident cult members, convincing the Disciple to do the dirty work, though this is not always the case.

Arguably the deadliest of these cults was the People’s Temple, founded in 1955 by American preacher Jim Jones (Ideological). Between 1974 and 1978, Jones convinced nine hundred of his flock to uproot to Guyana to inhabit a utopian religious commune dubbed Jonestown. Hearing rumours that several members of the organization had been physically prevented from leaving the commune, California congressman Leo Ryan flew out personally to investigate. When Ryan learned that Jones was indeed holding defectors captive, Jones commanded his Disciples to gun down the congressman and his entourage on the Port Kaituma airstrip. Knowing that these murders ensured the American government’s retaliation, Jones declared that the end was nigh. On November 18, 1978, he convinced hundreds of his followers to commit “revolutionary” suicide by drinking grape Flavor-Aid laced with cyanide. Those who resisted were either physically forced to, or were shot. Many among his congregation were so brainwashed that they actually administered the poison to their own children. In total, over nine hundred people perished in the jungle that day, including Jim Jones, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

On rare occasions, the Ideological mass murderer opts to shed blood himself. When self-proclaimed prophet Jeffrey Lundgren discovered that devoted follower Dennis Avery had squirrelled some money away in a bank account rather than donate it to their Mormon splinter cult, Lundgren informed his flock that it was time to “prune the grapevine.” He convinced Disciple Ron Luff to individually lure the five members of the Avery family into a barn, where Lundgren shot them to death one after another.

Canada is no stranger to cult activity, though the only example to perpetrate a massacre is the Swiss-based Order of the Solar Temple. Led by Ideological mass killers
Joseph Di Mambro
and
Luc Jouret
, in 1994 they successfully commanded Disciple
Joel Egger
to butcher a family of three in the tourist community of Morin-Heights, Quebec, and later, an untold number of others in Switzerland.

   
      
Joel Egger

Order of the Solar Temple

Victims:
3 murdered in Canada, more overseas/committed suicide

Duration of rampage:
October 4, 1994 (mass murder)

Location:
Morin-Heights, Quebec

Weapons:
Knife, wooden stake

A Fiery Ascent

Morin-Heights, Quebec: a quaint tourist community nestled in the Laurentian Mountains. Until 1994, this town of 3,500 was known primarily for its picturesque ski slopes. A nearby recording studio boasted world-class clientele, including the Bee Gees, David Bowie, Rush, and The Police. On the morning of October 4, flashing lights and blaring horns broke the frosty silence, as fire engines rushed to battle an inferno raging at a local condominium. The owner of the building was sixty-nine-year-old Frenchman Joseph Di Mambro — the spiritual leader of an international religious sect known as the Order of the Solar Temple. Inside the dank ash and dripping beams of the burnt structure, respondents happened upon the blackened remains of two figures in the upstairs bedroom. Immediately, they suspected the bodies belonged to Di Mambro and his business partner and “prophet,” forty-seven-year-old Luc Jouret. Downstairs, the bloody corpses of a man and woman were discovered in a closet. Rather than perishing in the fire, the male had been knifed fifty times in the back, while the female had suffered similar mortal wounds to her breasts and throat. The body of a murdered infant was found crammed behind a water heater, a plastic bag covering his head. In a truly bizarre, almost ritualistic, act, a wooden stake had been driven through him six times, as if he were a supernatural entity whose life force was impervious to conventional weapons. The child had been literally bled white.

Between the autopsies and investigation, the identities of the Morin-Heights victims were soon determined, though the results were entirely unexpected. The bodies found upstairs did not belong to either Luc Jouret or Joseph Di Mambro; they were those of Swiss couple Gerry and Collette Genoud — both devoted members of the Solar Temple. Unlike the stabbing victims, the Genouds appeared to have committed suicide by fire, placing time bombs about the room and hanging gasoline-filled garbage bags from doorknobs before drugging themselves. The murdered were identified as thirty-five-year-old Swiss Tony Dutoit; his English wife Nicky Robinson-Dutoit, thirty; and their eighteen-month-old son Christopher-Emmanuel. Autopsy results indicated they had been dead for a period of three days before the fire. Despite these revelations, many questions still remained unresolved. Who had killed the Dutoits, and why? What had prompted the Genouds to end their own lives in such an excruciating fashion? The answers were encrypted in the Order of the Solar Temple, and to decipher them, the investigators would have to stare into its blinding sun and, somehow, see clearly.

Antichrist

Once upon a time, Tony and Nicky Dutoit had been committed members of the Order of the Solar Temple, with ties to the organizational leadership. An adept seamstress, Nicky had tailored many of the robes worn during the religious ceremonies, and held a special place as governess to Di Mambro’s daughter Emmanuelle. Revered as a “cosmic child” and “avatar,” Emmanuelle was referred to as “he,” and disallowed physical contact with anyone outside “his” immediate family. Tony Dutoit’s role was even more crucial than Nicky’s: he engineered the elaborate holograms, laser projections, and sound effects which mystified onlookers took for apparitions in Di Mambro’s subterranean chamber in Cheiry, Switzerland. Amazingly, though Tony was a knowing accomplice in this elaborate magical fraud, in 1991 he had a sudden crisis of conscience when rumours surfaced regarding the origin of the Order’s financial resources: money laundering, gun smuggling, and confidence scams. Jaded, the Dutoits left the cult, demanded a refund of money they had invested in it, and began to confess the illusory nature of the “miracles” to other members of the group.

The Dutoits were already treading on dangerous ground, but they would soon make a decision that would seal their fate once and for all. After Nicky miscarried a baby, Joseph Di Mambro had forbidden her to ever have a child. But spurious religious declarations were no match for natural instincts, and in defiance of his orders, the Dutoits relocated to Quebec in 1993, where Nicky gave birth to a son, Christopher-Emmanuel. Di Mambro was furious; not only had they exposed his trickery and rebuked his commands, now they had even gone so far as to steal his daughter’s name. Unable to tolerate this flagrant undermining of his authority, Di Mambro decided that the Dutoits should be “symbolically executed.” There was no better man for the job than Joel Egger — a muscular thirty-four-year-old fanatic devoted to the Order of the Solar Temple. On September 29, 1994, Egger left Zurich on Swissair flight 138 and arrived at Mirabel airport in Montreal. From there, he drove forty-five minutes north to the condominium in Morin-Heights, where he was met by Emmanuelle’s mother, Dominique Bellaton, along with fellow cultists Gerry and Collette Genoud.