August 19, 1924 - Joseph Di Mambro
The founder of the Order of the Solar Temple spent decades moving through the margins of esoteric movements before building the organization that would end in mass death. Di Mambro combined a long history of fraud and manipulation with genuine fluency in occult traditions, giving him both the tools and the credibility to attract followers willing to subordinate their lives — and deaths — to his authority. The October 1994 mass murder-suicides that killed him along with dozens of members across Switzerland and Quebec remain among the most studied episodes of destructive cult violence in modern history.
From Wikipedia
Joseph Léonce Di Mambro (19 August 1924 – 5 October 1994) was a French esotericist who founded and led the Order of the Solar Temple alongside Luc Jouret. Di Mambro had been associated with a variety of esoteric groups before founding OTS. He was convicted of several counts of fraud, including impersonation of a psychiatrist. He founded the Solar Temple with Jouret in 1984. He committed suicide in the Swiss village of Salvan on 5 October 1994 as part of a mass murder–suicide.
Born in 1924 in France, the son of an Italian immigrant, Di Mambro was apprenticed as a watchmaker and jeweler in his teenage years. After World War II, Di Mambro joined the Rosicrucian organization AMORC. In the late 1960s, Di Mambro scammed a business partner and then fled France, before returning several years later. In 1972 he was sentenced to several months in prison on unrelated charges. Afterwards, he founded several New Age and spiritual groups, including the Golden Way Foundation, and met Luc Jouret in the 1980s.
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