At seven o'clock on the morning of August 3, 1978, people on the street below the International Dunes Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City looked up and saw a woman and seven children on an eleventh-floor balcony. Morning commuters, pedestrians and construction workers stopped to watch. The three oldest children climbed a stack of folded chairs and went over the railing. The woman then began lifting the younger ones and throwing them over, one at a time, while the crowd shouted for her to stop. "People were shouting, 'No! Stop!'" one witness recalled. A bystander, Pat Eyre, told reporters that one child grabbed the railing and fought, and the mother pulled him loose and threw him off. Then she put a foot on the rail, balanced for a moment and jumped.
The dead were Elizabeth, fifteen; Joshua, ten; Deborah, nine; Joseph, eight; David, six; and Rebecca, five. Their sister Rachel, reported as fourteen at the time and as fifteen in later accounts, survived the fall of about a hundred feet with multiple fractures, internal injuries and brain damage, and spent about a year in the hospital. The children had never gone to school. The state of Utah spent more than a hundred thousand dollars on her care before releasing her to a foster home.
She was born Margit Birgitta Ericsson in Sweden and came to Utah as a young immigrant, a student at Brigham Young University, where she met and married a convert from Yonkers, New York, named Charles Bruce Longo. They had three children before he graduated in 1965. By 1978 she was thirty-eight and went by Rachel, the name her husband's movement had given her; the name is also recorded as Rachal, and several later reports called her Rebecca, which was the name of her youngest daughter.
Longo was born on November 9, 1938, in Yonkers, the son of a doctor. He joined the Marines after high school, converted to the Mormon faith in 1958, and in 1960 went on a mission to Uruguay, where his companion remembered him as an excited missionary who learned Spanish quickly and could quote the Book of Mormon from memory. He was released early after he said he had begun hearing voices. At BYU he gathered a circle of young Mormon friends, among them Sterling Peacock, Gil Hibben and Paul Chipman, and told them of a vision that he would rise high in the church. The church excommunicated him in June 1969. His friends followed him out.
He became Immanuel David, and his followers took the surname David and new first names. He told them he was God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in one, and in 1973 wrote to the Israeli prime minister and the Knesset to say so. The group, the Family of David, lived communally at Manti, Utah, then moved through Nebraska, Washington and Montana. Former members said he often separated men from their wives and children, and that he lived in hotel suites while they worked to support him. A woman raised in the group later described in a court affidavit being beaten as a child.
For more than a year before the deaths the family had lived in a three-room suite at the Dunes at ninety-five dollars a day, eating meals sent up from an expensive French restaurant and paying in cash. By August the money had apparently run out. The FBI had been investigating the group's fund-raising since 1977; Peacock, by then called Matthias David, had just been convicted of federal wire fraud for raising money through invented hard-luck stories, and Hibben had been charged as well. Investigators said they were close to indicting Immanuel David on wire fraud or tax evasion.
On July 31 he borrowed a pickup truck from his old mission companion, drove it into Emigration Canyon east of the city, and piped the exhaust into the cab. He had five dollars in his pocket and left no note. A detective said afterward that he must have known how close he was to prison and that his ego would not let him face it. Rachel took the news calmly, telling officers that her husband was ready for the next world, and went back to the suite with the children.
The children left handwritten notes in the suite expressing their faith in their father's powers. Police Lieutenant Roger Kinnersley said the father had been the absolute authority in the family, and that without him they believed the family would cease to function, so it was very likely they thought they were following him where he had gone. Three days after his death she took the seven children out onto the balcony.
Rachel, the second-oldest child, was released from the hospital to a foster family and dropped from view. In 1993 Dan Noyes, a correspondent for Inside Edition, found her in a wheelchair, living with an uncle the program identified as Lennart Eriksson. "I remember my father said he will be back. I know he will," she told him. "My father never lied." She said she had jumped willingly and believed that the deaths of her family had been ordained, and the program reported that she had gone on trying to follow what it called the suicide order, attempting several times to kill herself. By 2000 she was living with an uncle who was a member of the group, had taken the name Jacob David and had become her legal guardian. The Spokesman-Review reported that year that it was not clear whether Utah's Division of Family Services had known she had gone back to the sect.
When a Spokane reporter visited the house in Aurora, Colorado, that year, she used a wheelchair, could stand only with a walker, painted by numbers and liked listening to Neil Diamond. She could not remember the morning at the hotel. "It's all hazy," she said. "It's something I want to shove out. I want my family back." The group had told her she was Eve. In 2008 Matthias David said she had moved to a care center in Sandpoint, Idaho.
There was no prosecution, because the only person who could have been charged died in the fall. The deaths were a single act of familicide inside a religious family, not a series. Immanuel David, his wife and their six children were buried side by side in paupers' graves, without headstones, in a small cemetery in Taylorsville. His brother Dean Longo, a Florida police officer, flew in with their mother for the funerals. "I don't recall seeing anything God-like about my brother," he said years later.
About a dozen members of the Family of David kept the faith for decades, in Spokane and near Denver, waiting for his return and holding that they were reincarnated biblical figures. Matthias David, who had been in federal prison in August 1978, said the remaining members would never repeat what happened at the hotel and that he did not consider the deaths crimes. "They could not be apart," he said of Immanuel David and his family. "When David left, they left with him."
November 9, 1938: Charles Bruce Longo, later Immanuel David, is born in Yonkers, New York.
1965: Longo graduates from Brigham Young University; he and Margit Birgitta Ericsson have three children by then.
June 1969: the church excommunicates Longo, and his friends follow him out.
1973: as Immanuel David, he writes to the Israeli prime minister and the Knesset to say he is God.
1977: the FBI begins investigating the group's fund-raising.
July 31, 1978: Immanuel David pipes exhaust into the cab of a borrowed pickup truck in Emigration Canyon and dies.
August 3, 1978: on an eleventh-floor balcony of the International Dunes Hotel, three children go over the railing and she throws the younger ones off, then jumps; six children die and Rachel survives.
1993: Inside Edition correspondent Dan Noyes finds the surviving daughter, Rachel, in a wheelchair, living with an uncle.
2000: she is living with an uncle who is a member of the group and her legal guardian.
2008: Matthias David says she has moved to a care center in Sandpoint, Idaho.