For eight days in October 1994, the police of three countries looked for Luc Jouret. Swiss investigators had issued an international warrant naming him and his co-leader, Joseph Di Mambro, on suspicion of premeditated murder and arson, after 48 members of their Order of the Solar Temple were found dead in two Swiss villages and five more in a resort town north of Montreal. Jouret was a Belgian homeopathic physician who had spent a decade filling lecture halls in Quebec, France and Switzerland. On October 13 the Swiss police announced that he had been identified among the 25 dead in Granges-sur-Salvan, in the canton of Valais. The manhunt was over, and so was any chance that a court would hear the case.
That outcome governs everything that follows. Jouret was never tried, never convicted and never heard in his own defense on the deaths. In April 1996 the three Swiss judges who led the inquiry concluded that none of the people responsible had survived, and the Swiss cases closed without a trial. What can be said of his part rests on the warrant, on what investigators in Switzerland and Canada said publicly, on the history of the order he led, and on the one court case of his life that did reach a judgment, a weapons case in Quebec the year before.
Jouret was born in Kikwit, in the Belgian Congo, and was 46 at his death. In the 1970s he went to Brussels for medical training, then studied acupuncture and homeopathy and moved from country to country before settling into the work that made his name. He became a homeopathic doctor and a speaker, lecturing in Canada, France and Switzerland on nutrition and on child-rearing in the New Age manner.
The lectures drew a particular audience. In the 1980s he attracted people who wanted a more peaceful and ecological world. Some of his followers were his patients, but most first heard him from a lectern. He also gave personal-development seminars for business people, and it was at one of those conferences that a Quebec man who later became one of the best-known former members first met him.
Beneath the advice on health ran a darker theme. Jouret warned his audiences that converging environmental disasters were bringing the world to an end and that only a few would come through. Listeners who responded were invited further in, into an inner circle where the full scope of his teaching was laid out.
He had also found his way into the neo-Templar movements of France. He joined the Reformed Order of the Temple, a French-based group led by Julien Origas, a former Gestapo officer, and when Origas died in 1981 Jouret took over its leadership.
In 1983, in Geneva, Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro, a Frenchman more than twenty years his senior, founded a secret order that combined several earlier groups. In 1990 it took the name Order of the Solar Temple. Some members knew Di Mambro as "the Dictator" or "Napoleon." Jouret was the order's spiritual leader and its public face; Di Mambro, the co-leader, was the one who built and ran its structures. Around the order Jouret organized a network of clubs that promoted his lectures and served as recruiting centers. He adapted Catholic ritual for its ceremonies, including communion at masses where he acted as the priest, and he urged followers to stockpile arms against the end he foretold.
By 1989 the order had 442 members, most of them French, Swiss and Canadian. To the outside world it presented itself as a community devoted to nature. Inside, a circle of initiates was told that it was an elite that would survive the coming catastrophe in a chosen place.
Unlike the communal sects of the same era, the order did not gather its members onto a single compound. They kept their jobs and their own addresses, and many hid their membership even from close friends. The order itself bought property: farms and expensive residences in Geneva, in southern France and in Quebec. New members paid steep initiation fees and were expected to sign over their assets. A former follower later said that she and her husband had given Jouret nearly $500,000 and never got it back. After the deaths, investigators estimated that the order may have gathered as much as $93 million, part of which had paid for a comfortable life for its two leaders and for properties in western Europe and Canada.
Jouret moved to Quebec in 1986 and brought followers with him. He did well before business audiences there. In 1988 and 1989 he was paid to speak at the provincial utility Hydro-Québec on self-realization, and he recruited more than a dozen of its employees. At its height his following in Quebec may have reached 75 people, with some 200 more in Switzerland and France.
The order's standing in Quebec broke in 1993. On March 8 of that year two members were arrested while trying to buy arms that were illegal in the province, in a purchase arranged by a police informant. The case reached Jouret. He was charged in Canada with possession and conspiracy offenses under the arms laws, and he pleaded guilty to an illegal-arms charge. One of the two arrested members, who had first met Jouret at a personal-development conference and had by then left the order, also pleaded guilty, saying that a high-ranking member had asked him to make the purchase. Jouret left Canada for Switzerland the same year.
The case cost the order money and people. Quebec provincial police later said that between 40 and 80 members left after the 1993 investigation. Some of its backers withdrew their funds, and money became short. Inside the order there were quarrels over finances. Albert Giacobino, a Geneva resident who had bought a property in Cheiry in 1990 and who belonged to the order, complained to friends about Di Mambro's free spending and threatened to pull out his investment. Some of those who died in 1994 were former members who had asked for their money back.
The first deaths came in Morin Heights, Quebec, in the Laurentians north of Montreal. Three members of one Swiss family, a child among them, were killed there on September 30, 1994, in a property that belonged to Di Mambro. Four days later two more members of the order died there.
On October 5, 1994, 23 members of the order, Albert Giacobino among them, died at Cheiry, a village in the canton of Fribourg. Hours later, about 50 miles away in Granges-sur-Salvan, in the canton of Valais, 25 more died, at least five of them children, at chalets one of which belonged to Jouret.
Among those identified in the days that followed were four people from Quebec, named by the Quebec provincial police: Robert Ostiguy and Françoise Ostiguy of Richelieu, Jocelyne Grand'Maison of Quebec City, and Robert Falardeau. All four were linked to the order, and all four died in Switzerland. The dead of 1994 came from Switzerland, France and Canada. Of the 74 people who would die in the order's name by 1997, 30 were Swiss, 30 French and 10 Canadian.
Earlier on October 5, two men who gave their names as Jouret and Di Mambro had been let into a building in Granges-sur-Salvan, and an investigator later said both men had been seen at the chalets hours before the fires. Swiss police formed the view that Jouret, Di Mambro or both had directed what happened in Cheiry, traveled to Granges-sur-Salvan to oversee the second stage, and then either fled or died there. Swiss and Canadian officials came to believe that the deaths were a mass murder followed by a mass suicide, though some members appear to have gone to their deaths willingly. One woman left a letter saying that she had come to Switzerland to die.
On October 6, the examining magistrate leading the Fribourg inquiry held a news conference in Cheiry. He said that the theory of a collective suicide had not been abandoned, but that some of the evidence pointed toward killing. Police had already issued warrants; he would not say how many or for whom. Within days he declined to say what financial documents recovered by police showed about disputes between members and the order over money.
On Friday, October 7, the Swiss authorities issued arrest warrants for Jouret and Di Mambro on suspicion of arson and premeditated homicide, and an international manhunt began. A former member suggested that Jouret might have fled with the order's money. The cantonal police chief of Fribourg, the Swiss chief coroner and the investigating judge coordinated the Swiss side; three Canadian police officers arrived in Switzerland to help tie the inquiries together. A report that the order had served as a front for arms trafficking and money laundering went out in Canada, but neither Swiss nor Canadian officials could confirm it.
The inquiry widened. Australian federal police examined claims that the order had bought arms and military equipment in Australia for resale abroad and found nothing to support them, though they did establish that Jouret and Di Mambro had visited the country repeatedly from the mid-1980s. Canadian officials pursued specific information linking Di Mambro to money laundering. Investigators found at least five more properties belonging to the order. About 300 officials and organizations received packets mailed by a member of the order on Jouret's instructions; that member was held by the Swiss authorities.
The death of the order's treasurer, confirmed early that week, led investigators to think it more likely that Jouret was dead than in hiding. On Monday, October 10, Swiss police confirmed that Di Mambro was among the dead in Granges-sur-Salvan. On Thursday, October 13, they announced that Jouret had also been identified there, along with those of Di Mambro's son. With that, every presumed leader of the order was dead. Both men appeared to have died by suicide.
The Quebec inquiry ran in parallel. Quebec provincial police had said from the first days that the three family members in Morin Heights had been killed several days before the fire and that the two other adults found there had taken their own lives. Canadian police believed that those responsible for the three killings were among the people who died later in Switzerland.
On November 18, 1994, at a news conference in Quebec, the provincial police set out their conclusions. Members of the order had carried out the killings in Morin Heights, they said, and they traced the decision to target the family to Di Mambro himself. They also put a figure on the damage the 1993 arms case had done: between 40 and 80 members had left the order after it.
In June 1996 a Quebec coroner tabled his report on the 1994 deaths. He said there were limits to what the authorities could do to prevent such things. In March 1997, after police had monitored members of the order at the summer solstice of 1996 and concluded that it was no longer an active movement, five more people died in Saint-Casimir, Quebec. The provincial police sent their report to the Crown prosecutor, who would decide whether anyone could be held responsible and whether charges should be laid. With those deaths the toll linked to the order since September 1994 reached 74.
The deaths in Switzerland were investigated by the cantonal justice systems of Fribourg and Valais, each with its own examining magistrate. On April 3, 1996, the three Swiss judges handling the case announced their conclusion: none of the people responsible for the killings in Cheiry and Granges-sur-Salvan had survived. The Swiss authorities closed their investigations without bringing anyone to trial. They also found no link between the order and a Geneva conductor who had been close to Di Mambro.
That conclusion did not satisfy the families. In April 2001 the lawyer who led the association defending the relatives of the Solar Temple dead, and who represented relatives of the 48 who died in Switzerland, said that the Swiss inquiries had lacked rigor and had produced nothing. He held out one possibility. Because the Swiss measures were only provisional, he said, the cases could be reopened if new information came to light, and he called that not impossible. Thirty years after the deaths, many relatives remained bitter that no one had ever been convicted.
The order's deaths did not end in Switzerland or Quebec. On December 23, 1995, sixteen members, three of them children, were found dead in the Vercors region near Grenoble, France. A French investigating judge spent five years on that case, and on July 3, 2000, the conductor whom the Swiss had cleared was ordered to stand trial in Grenoble. The charge was participation in a criminal association with a view to committing murders, "association de malfaiteurs en vue de commettre des assassinats."
The trial opened on April 17, 2001. The conductor admitted that he had belonged to the order but denied that he had indoctrinated anyone, and he called himself a scapegoat. The prosecution asked for five years in prison. On June 25, 2001, the Grenoble criminal court acquitted him, citing a lack of evidence. In its reasoning the court addressed the meetings in France in July and September 1994 at which he had announced that the order was winding up. He might have made that announcement, the judges said, to help Jouret and Di Mambro present the coming killings as a spiritual ritual; or he might have made it because his own thinking had changed, as tracts he wrote at the time suggested. The court did not find the first explanation proved.
Prosecutors appealed. The appeal was delayed repeatedly after the principal psychiatric expert in the case was himself indicted in Paris. The second trial finally opened in Grenoble on October 24, 2006, this time limited to the sixteen deaths in the Vercors. On October 31 the prosecutor general's office in effect abandoned the accusation, telling the court that the conductor had not been an important member of the order. On December 20, 2006, the Grenoble court of appeal upheld the acquittal. Its judgment found no proof that he had knowingly taken part in organizing the crime. It remained the only prosecution ever brought over any of the order's deaths.
The Swiss cases were handled under cantonal criminal procedure, in which an examining magistrate in each canton directs the police inquiry and decides whether a case goes to trial. With the suspects named in the warrant both dead, there was no one left to charge. The political response came from the cantons and the federal parliament. In January 1996, after the deaths in France, a member of Geneva's Grand Council lodged an urgent question on sects, citing French press criticism that had accused Swiss justice of laxity and the Geneva police of secrecy, and asking what the canton knew of such groups and whether it could trace their money. That year Geneva appointed a group of experts to examine the law on illegal sectarian activity, and in June 1997 it led the creation of an intercantonal working group of the French-speaking cantons, Ticino and Bern to set up an information office on sects. A working paper prepared in February 1998 for the management committee of the National Council recorded that Geneva's activity followed directly from the Solar Temple deaths of 1994 and 1995.
Jouret was never tried, so every statement about his part in the deaths in Morin Heights, Cheiry and Granges-sur-Salvan remains an attribution by investigators. The warrant that named him on suspicion of premeditated murder and arson was never tested in court. The Swiss police theory that he, Di Mambro or both directed the events in Cheiry and then went on to Granges-sur-Salvan was a working theory of the inquiry, not a finding by any court.
The line between killing and suicide was never drawn by a judge. The Fribourg magistrate said in October 1994 that the suicide theory had not been abandoned, and investigators accepted that some members went willingly. The Quebec police traced the Morin Heights killings to Di Mambro, not to Jouret. How the two leaders divided responsibility, and which of them decided what, is not settled. The only court to speak to it, in Grenoble in 2001, raised the possibility that both men sought to present the killings as a spiritual ritual, but it did so in acquitting another man, not in judging either of them.
Jouret's own record before the courts consists of the 1993 Quebec arms case, in which he pleaded guilty to an illegal-arms charge. He was never charged anywhere with any death.
1970s: Jouret trains in medicine in Brussels, then in acupuncture and homeopathy.
1981: Julien Origas dies; Jouret becomes leader of the Reformed Order of the Temple.
1983: Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro found a secret order in Geneva.
1986: Jouret moves to Quebec.
1988 to 1989: He lectures at Hydro-Québec and recruits employees.
1989: The order has 442 members.
1990: The order takes the name Order of the Solar Temple.
March 8, 1993: Two members are arrested in an attempted illegal arms purchase in Quebec; Jouret is charged and later pleads guilty to an illegal-arms charge.
September 30, 1994: Three members of a Swiss family are killed in Morin Heights, Quebec.
October 4, 1994: Two more members die in Morin Heights.
October 5, 1994: 23 dead are found in Cheiry and 25 in Granges-sur-Salvan, Switzerland.
October 6, 1994: The Fribourg examining magistrate says some evidence points toward killing.
October 7, 1994: Swiss warrants are issued for Jouret and Di Mambro on suspicion of arson and premeditated homicide.
October 10, 1994: Swiss police confirm Di Mambro among the dead.
October 13, 1994: Swiss police announce that Jouret has been identified among the dead in Granges-sur-Salvan.
November 18, 1994: Quebec provincial police announce their findings on Morin Heights.
December 23, 1995: Sixteen members of the order are found dead in the Vercors region, France.
April 3, 1996: The three Swiss judges conclude that none of those responsible survived.
June 1996: A Quebec coroner tables his report on the 1994 deaths.
March 22, 1997: Five people die in Saint-Casimir, Quebec; the toll since 1994 reaches 74.
July 3, 2000: A conductor is ordered to stand trial in Grenoble.
June 25, 2001: The Grenoble criminal court acquits him.
December 20, 2006: The Grenoble court of appeal upholds the acquittal.