The Death of a Family

Tragedy in Salt Lake City

Bruce David Longo, 39, stood 6 ft. 4 in., weighed an intimidating 300 lbs., wore his dark hair in a long pigtail and maintained that he was in fact the Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ and God. Excommunicated by the Mormon Church, he began calling himself Immanuel David and became the leader of a religious cult consisting of about 20 friends, his Swedish-born wife Rachel and their seven children. Eighteen months ago, the family moved from Duchesne, Utah, to Salt Lake City, where they eventually settled in a $95-a-day, three-room suite at the International Dunes Hotel. They kept to themselves, eating their meals--sometimes ordered from an expensive French restaurant--in their suite and paying their bills in cash. The source of the money was a mystery. The father once spoke vaguely to a hotel clerk of owning silver mines in Sweden. But a disciple had recently been convicted of wire fraud, and the FBI was investigating Longo on similar charges.

Last week police found him dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in the cab of a pickup truck in Emigration Canyon, a few miles east of the city. Rachel took the news of his suicide calmly, telling officers that her husband was ready for life in the next world, and returned to the suite.

Two days later, at 7 a.m., she appeared on an eleventh-floor balcony of the hotel with the children: Elizabeth, 15, Rachel, 14, Joshua, 10, Deborah, 9, Joseph, 8, David, 6, and Rebecca, 5. The three older children clambered up a pile of folded chairs and leaped over the railing. Then Rachel began throwing the younger children over the rail, one by one. "No, stop!" shouted onlookers on the ground. But there was no response from the balcony. Said bystander Pat Eyre: "One child grabbed on to the railing and fought a little bit, but she pulled him loose and threw him off. Then she put her foot on the rail, balanced for a moment and jumped." There was only one survivor: a daughter, not yet identified by authorities at week's end, who was hospitalized in critical condition with multiple fractures, internal injuries and probable brain damage.

The children, who a friend of the family described as "very polite, well dressed and bright," left handwritten notes in their hotel suite expressing their faith in their father's powers and his intention--not further explained--to destroy California. Said Police Lieut. Roger Kinnersley: "The father was the absolute authority in the family. They believed that without his being present, the family would cease to function. So it's very likely that they thought they were merely following him where he had gone." -

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