Rampage (35 page)

The following day, the Dutoit family arrived at the residence to visit their old friend Dominique. Egger lured Tony into the basement, where he struck the unsuspecting man on the back of the skull with a baseball bat. When Tony toppled to the floor, Egger flew into a savage frenzy, slashing the poor man’s throat and plunging the knife fifty times into his back. Carrying the dripping blade upstairs, he then turned his vengeance on Nicky, stabbing her repeatedly in the neck and torso. Once they were dead, Egger drove a wooden stake through Christopher-Emmanuel’s heart as the infant sat strapped in his car seat. With their grisly task complete, Dominique relayed instructions to the Genouds before she and Egger departed for Zurich. Convinced that they were heading for a heavenly planet orbiting Sirius, on October 4 the Genouds torched the building, burning themselves alive in a drug-induced haze. Sadly, this was not the last or the worst murder/suicide to be attributed to the Order of the Solar Temple. As the following section will reveal, Egger and Bellaton would eventually follow the Genouds’ fiery ascent to Sirius.

Kay Feely

Kay Feely      

Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret

Order of the Solar Temple

“Do you realize that we are the only people on the planet to see these things? Even great saints never saw such signs!” — Joseph Di Mambro

“Liberation is not where people think it is. Death can represent an essential stage of life.” — Luc Jouret

Victims:
Approximately 75 people have died as a result of the OTS/committed suicide

Duration of rampage:
October 4 to 5, 1994 (multiple mass murders)

Locations:
Morin-Heights, Quebec/Cheiry, Switzerland, Grange-sur-Salvan, Switzerland

Weapons:
Guns, fire

Twin Torches

Six thousand kilometres across the Atlantic, a second mysterious fire broke out in the mountains of Cheiry, Switzerland. Smoke was spotted around 1:00 a.m. on October 5, 1994, billowing from Albert Giacobino’s farmhouse on the outskirts of the village. Firemen rushing to combat the blaze soon happened upon the seventy-three-year-old Giacobino lying on his bed with a plastic bag covering his head. Their initial theories of suicide soon dissipated with the discovery of a bullet hole in his skull. When the flames were finally extinguished, investigators descended onto the Giacobino property to try and make sense of what had happened. Inside, they discovered a number of incendiary devices which had failed to ignite, leaving several of the outbuildings still intact. One of these contained what appeared to be a ceremonial meeting hall — reminiscent of something you would expect to find at a Masonic lodge. Personal items, obviously belonging to various people, were scattered about the room. It was as if their owners had disappeared into the smoke.

Viewing the exterior of the building, it became apparent to investigators that it was significantly larger inside than accounted for by the meeting room. Suspecting the presence of a secret chamber, they began searching inside, soon discovering a sliding wall that led to a narrow corridor filled with more undetonated incendiary devices. Heading cautiously down the hallway, they entered another room. What they found within was so absurd that it was terrifying, and so harrowing that it bordered on ridiculous. Eighteen lifeless bodies, each clad in a black, white, or gold ceremonial cape, lay in a circular formation around a triangular altar, their feet pointing inward, like rays emanating from the sun. Plastic garbage bags obscured their grim visages. The chamber itself was completely red. Though the ritualism and organization of the scene suggested a group suicide, the abundance of blood seemed to indicate that many had been murdered. To the investigators’ amazement, they uncovered a second secret chamber, containing three additional bodies. The room was octagonal and lined wall to wall with mirrors, reflecting the bizarre tableau from eight different angles. All in all, there were twenty-two dead. Subsequent autopsies would later reveal traces of tranquilizers and hypnotic drugs in each of the bodies. Twenty of the deceased had been shot multiple times in the face at close range with hollow-point bullets, literally obliterating their features. Fifty-two shots had been fired in total. One of the residents of the Giacobino farm had been Joel Egger, though at that time his connection to the Morin-Heights massacre was unknown.

Before the secret chambers were even discovered, at 3:00 a.m. that same morning fire engulfed neighbouring chalets in the ski resort town of Granges-sur-Salvan, 160 kilometres south of Cheiry. Fire crews raced to the inferno to find the doors had been nailed shut from the outside, and were forced to break them down. The same peculiar scene awaited them: a total of twenty-five corpses dressed in ceremonial garb, many shot in the head, with the remnants of incendiary devices scattered among the buildings. The fire had been much more effective this time, blackening the bodies beyond recognition, even reducing some of the dead to one-metre cinders. Three of the victims had been teenagers and another four were children. They ranged in age from four to fifteen years old, and unlike their elders, were not dressed in silk capes. When Joel Egger’s car was found parked outside the chalets, the deaths were immediately connected to those in Cheiry. Although the majority of those killed had been French and Swiss, a number of the victims were Canadian citizens.

Later, dental records would confirm that Joseph Di Mambro, Luc Jouret, Joel Egger, and Dominique Bellaton were among the dead at Granges-sur-Salvan. It is believed that after returning from Canada, Egger and Bellaton proceeded immediately to the Giacobino home to perpetrate the murders and facilitate the suicides there, before carrying on to Granges-sur-Salvan, where they “ascended to Sirius” with their ideological leaders Di Mambro and Jouret. It is fascinating to think that even though Di Mambro and Jouret intentionally swindled their flock, using technology to deceive them into believing that they were witnessing miracles, they too had committed ritual suicide. Who were these megalomaniacs who repeatedly orchestrated religious deception, but, bafflingly, bought into their own bogus belief system?

The Snake and the Spider

Attempting to decipher the esoteric and infinitely complex doctrine of the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS) would not only consume the rest of this book, it would still ultimately make very little sense. Those who wish to delve deeper into this theological cesspit are advised to consult
The Order of the Solar Temple: Order of Death
, a well-written and detailed examination of the group’s beliefs organized in several essays and edited by James R. Lewis. Suffice it to say, the OTS’s core beliefs were rooted in ancient Egyptian mysticism, Rosicrucianism, and legends involving the Knights Templar, but also incorporated elements of New Age spirituality, white supremacy, Christianity, and that ever-productive and stabilizing religious obsession with imminent Armageddon. Though the OTS’s elaborate mythology and rituals were drawn and bastardized from numerous sources, the man responsible for rendering these disparate ingredients into a single digestible hot dog was Joseph Di Mambro.

Born on August 19, 1924, in southern France, Di Mambro grew to become a watchmaker and jeweller, like fellow mass murderers Généreux Ruest and
Albert Guay.
Always fascinated with fringe religious movements, he joined a group calling itself the Rosicrucians, which he remained a member of for thirteen years. Upon leaving, he drew several followers away from the order and into the Centre for the Preparation of the New Age, a faith he had invented in 1973 and built a temple for on the French-Swiss border. He wielded absolute spiritual authority over his followers by claiming to be the reincarnation of political and religious figures from the Egyptian god Osiris to Moses. Similarly, he imbued the lives of his followers with meaning by telling them that they were the reincarnation of various historical figures. Unsurprisingly, none of his flock had ever been a mundane peasant — Di Mambro actually informed one member that they had been a Roman soldier who was present at Christ’s execution. Like many religious leaders, Di Mambro used his status to con his disciples out of vast sums of money, under the auspices of using it to help their community. As most were wealthy upper-middle-class citizens, Di Mambro eventually netted a small fortune, and in 1984, was able to purchase a mansion in Geneva. He also enjoyed wielding control over their sex lives, deciding who was permitted to have children and who was forbidden. Over time, his group rituals evolved from simplistic to elaborate ceremonies involving symbolic objects such as capes, crosses, and swords, all orchestrated to maintain cohesion. In 1978, the “Cosmic Master” Di Mambro identified an elite core of followers whom he called the Foundation of the Golden Way, eventually transforming into the Order of the Solar Temple in 1984. Though disallowed from this exclusive inner circle, members of associated fringe movements willingly gave financial contributions and carried out the OTS’s ceremonies.

In the early eighties, Di Mambro invited a charismatic young Belgian homeopath named Luc Jouret to deliver a lecture to his congregation. Like Di Mambro, Jouret was heavily involved in esoteric religious orders, particularly the International Order of Chivalry Solar Tradition, headed by neo-Nazi Julien Origas. Born on October 18, 1947, in the Belgian Congo, Luc Jouret moved to Belgium with his parents to escape the violence and instability ushered in by African nationalist movements seeking to throw off the colonial yoke. He studied at the Free University of Brussels in the Department of Medicine, graduating with an MD in 1974. During this period, he had become interested in communism, and unknown to him, came under close scrutiny by the Belgian government. Confiding in a friend that he wanted to “infiltrate the army with communist ideas,” Jouret joined the paratroopers in 1976 and participated in a rescue mission of Belgian citizens who were being held hostage in the Belgian Congo. Dissatisfied with his classic medical education, Jouret turned to homeopathy, and studied informally in France. Over the next few years he would journey to the Philippines and allegedly China, India, and Peru to learn the secrets of non-traditional healers. By the early eighties, he had set up a homeopathic practice in Annemasse, France, and eventually garnered so much acclaim that he was also servicing clients from Switzerland and Canada, two countries where he would set up practice. He also began to lecture and give conferences on ecology and naturopathy, starting a business called Atlanta to manage his talks.

Di Mambro and Jouret quickly recognized their common ground, and began to collaborate in a number of contexts, joining forces in 1984 to forge the Order of the Solar Temple. With his good looks and deft manipulative abilities, Jouret took on the role of recruiter and prophet — the face of the organization. Di Mambro preferred to stay behind the scenes, secretly coordinating projects and weaving international webs of intrigue. By 1989, the group had reached between 420 and 600 members, mostly in Francophone areas such as Quebec, France, Switzerland, and the former French colonies of the Caribbean. Di Mambro and Jouret had amassed $93 million through selling their disciples’ assets and dabbling in organized crime.

Of course, all good things must to come to an end. As they grew older, Di Mambro’s children began to rebel against their role as cosmic children, either refusing to perpetuate the charade any longer, or in the case of his son Elie, denouncing his father as a fraud to members of the Order. Tony Dutoit’s admissions that he had fabricated miracles through the use of technology only exacerbated their doubts, and many of Di Mambro’s own congregation began demanding refunds on the money they had invested. Though immediately charming, Jouret had soon irritated OTS members with his controlling demeanour. As a result, he was replaced as Grand Master of the Quebec chapter, causing Di Mambro to lose faith in his golden boy. Furthermore, Di Mambro was plagued by health problems: kidney failure, diabetes, and incontinence, not to mention the fact that he was under investigation for money laundering. The final straw came when the Dutoits not only defied his orders never to conceive a child, but named it Christopher-Emmanuel — the antichrist to Di Mambro’s own cosmic child Emmanuelle.