American Decades
Applewhite, Marshall Herff 1931-1997
CULT LEADER
Do and Ti.
Marshall Herff Applewhite was the son of a Presbyterian minister in Texas and was interested in becoming a preacher when he was young. He excelled in music: he sang in local choirs in Colorado and Texas, and even captured stage and operatic roles. He married and had two children. In the early 1970s, after divorcing his wife and losing his job teaching music, he spent some time in a mental hospital in Texas. There he met a nurse, Bonnie Lu Trusdale Nettles; she took the name "Ti" and left her family to travel with him after he left the hospital Applewhite considered her his teacher, and he took the name "Do." By 1974 they had both cut ties with all their kin. For the next twenty years they created and led a series of groups around the country that combined gnosticism, Christian millenarianism, and belief in benign space aliens. In 1975 they began to claim that they themselves were aliens incarnated...
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1990's Religion
