Bonnie Lu Nettles (Birth name Trousdale; August 29, 1927 – June 19, 1985), later known as Ti (; ), was an American religious leader and nurse who was co-founder and co-leader along with Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven's Gate new religious movement. Nettles died of melanoma metastatic to the liver in 1985 in Dallas, Texas, twelve years before the group's mass suicide in March 1997.
Early life
Bonnie Nettles was born on August 29, 1927, and raised in Houston, Texas, into a
Baptist family.
As an adult, she moved away from the religion. After becoming a
registered nurse, she married businessman Joseph Segal Nettles in December 1949, with whom she had four children. Their marriage remained mostly stable until 1972, at which time, according to
The New York Times, she began attempting to contact deceased spirits by conducting regular seances and came to believe that a 19th-century
monk named Brother Francis frequently spoke with her and gave her instructions. She also visited multiple
Fortune-telling who told her that she was soon to meet a mysterious man who was tall with light hair and a fair complexion, descriptions which were fairly close to Marshall Applewhite's appearance.
Nettles also studied
astrology,
Theosophy, and the
occult.
Introduction to Applewhite
Nettles met Marshall Applewhite in March 1972, though where they met is uncertain. In his writings, Applewhite claimed to have been "visiting a hospitalized friend when Mrs. Nettles entered the room and their eyes locked in a shared recognition of esoteric secrets." However, Applewhite's writings were prone to
hyperbole or relaying everything as some occurrence of
fate. Terrie Nettles, Bonnie's daughter, worked at a theater where Applewhite produced weekend children's shows and taught in an in-house
drama school. She has stated that "someone got hurt at the drama school in the theater that Herff Applewhite worked at. Herff accompanied the injured person to the hospital where he met Bonnie."
Joe Nettles, one of Bonnie's sons, was not entirely sure how they met or whether their first meeting was at the theater.
Nettles agreed to perform an Astrology for Applewhite. They had an almost instantaneous "spiritual" connection; Applewhite decided that Nettles was "to be the sage, he the speaker." They left together on New Year's Day of 1973. Nettles' three youngest children were left to remain with their father, while her oldest daughter, Terrie, then aged 20 and skeptical of her mother's ideas, fended for herself.
Death
Many events passed in creation of the Heaven's Gate group and the formation of its core members, with Nettles continuing to act as the interpreter of signs and the
Mysticism of the group. In 1983, she had to have an eye removed due to cancer, and her doctor informed her that the disease was already spreading through the rest of her body. Nettles stated that the doctor was ignorant and believed, along with Applewhite, that she could not die, as they had to ascend together. The cancer continued to worsen, moving to her
liver. Nettles died on June 19, 1985, at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas. While there as a patient, she used the pseudonym Shelly West.
[Zeller, Benjamin Heaven's Gate, America's UFO Religion, 2014, p. 113]
Applewhite convinced the rest of the group that Nettles' "broken-down vehicle was left behind". He had her body cremation and her ashes were then spread upon a lake somewhere in Texas.
Scholars have viewed the death of Nettles as a key turning point in the history of Heaven's Gate, as it caused the theology to shift from a belief that they would physically ascend to heaven while alive aboard a UFO to viewing the body as merely a "vehicle" for the soul which would be discarded upon entering heaven, which would culminate in the group's mass suicide in 1997.
Nicknames
Applewhite and Nettles went by the collective of "The Two", as well as the singular names
Little Bo-Peep respectively
and later
Solfege,
along with
Guinea pig at some points in time.
