Horrifying cult 'massacre video' shows final moments of brainwashed disciples sharing last drink with their mass-murdering leader before they were killed with lethal injections

On October 5, 1994, in two sleepy villages in the Swiss mountains, a series of horrific discoveries were made.

What at first appeared to be unconnected fires at a farm house in the hamlet of Cheiry and at ski chalets over an hour away in Salvan was soon revealed to be something far more sinister.

Dozens of bodies belonging to men, women and children were uncovered by first responders - rows of charred remains laid out neatly in a scene one medic described as 'apocalyptic'.

Almost 4,000 miles away in Canada, a similarly gruesome fate had befallen a family-of-three, whose mutilated remains were uncovered the day before in a burned out house in rural Quebec. 

The thread tying these mysterious deaths together, investigators soon learned, was a shadowy international sect known as the Order of the Solar Temple.

All of the dead belonged to the Knights Templar-inspired cult, which instilled its followers with the belief that by taking their own lives they would 'transit' to the star Sirius and be welcomed into a glorious afterlife. 

The cult leaders and their most loyal followers followed through on this twisted doctrine, enjoying a final dinner together before injecting their children and themselves with a lethal poison.

Horrifying footage, referred to as 'the massacre video', captures the final moments of the cult's inner sanctum - with leaders and their brainwashed disciples merrily toasting wine and singing before being administered a deadly concoction and 'falling asleep'.

The cult's last moments were filmed by Joseph Di Mambro, the Order's 70-year-old founder, who swindled fortunes out of hundreds of followers and was ultimately responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocent people.

Now, a BBC documentary has shared testimony from journalists and investigators who worked on the case, as well as former members who escaped the warped cult, shedding new light on the dark world of the 'Apocalyptic Order'.

Founded by Joseph Di Mambro, a former jeweller, spiritual speaker and serial fraudster in 1984, OST drew influence from Christianity, as well ideas about Armageddon and UFOs, and claimed to be a continuation of the Knight's Templar.

Di Mambro's second in command was Luc Jouret, a charismatic homeopathic doctor who became the face of the group and recruited unsuspecting followers into its ranks.

The cult drew people in with slick propaganda videos showing families enjoying simple lives on an idyllic farm in Canada, while other videos featured Jouret, who regularly did speaking tours, pontificating on the benefits of 'dying to be reborn'.

OST convinced many of its more than 600 followers that they could live in a utopian community and when the time was right shed their Earthly bodies to be reincarnated on an unnamed planet orbiting the Dog Star, Sirius.

But in reality, many handed over their life savings to Di Mambro and Jouret, with the sect's conniving leaders living off their followers' wealth as they lived frugal lives.

'While the followers were breaking rocks and growing lettuce, the leaders were really enjoying themselves,' Swiss journalist Arnaud Bedat, who worked extensively on the case, told the BBC documentary.

'They travelled first class, they went to beautiful hotels, famous restaurants. For more than ten years the cult leaders lived in opulence, accumulating villas all over the world, collecting Ferraris and Lamborghinis with the followers' money,' he said.

But the early 1990s, the mask began to slip. Cult members began to leave, and many wanted the money they had invested back.

One of the key members to turn his back on the cult was Tony Dutoit. He had been loyal to Di Mambro for some 15 years and served him as a special effects technician, turning ceremonies into mystical experiences to trick the cult's followers into believing their 'masters'' powers.

Before he left, he revealed the truth to Di Mambro's son Elie, who went on to confide in other cult members and was branded a traitor by his father.

Di Mambro went into a 'paranoid spiral', insiders said, and started monitoring everyone, even wire tapping their phone calls.

'Those who were living their lives with the followers' money knew that they had to be held accountable and that they couldn't do it anymore,' Swiss police chief Pierre Nidegger said.

'All of this finally got them to say: 'We're going to leave and do the transit to Sirius.''

A tape recording of Mambro and Jouret speaking, made shortly before the tragedies, referenced the deaths of cult members in the US that year, and showed their determination for OST to go down in history.

'People have beaten us to the punch, you know,' Mambro reportedly said.

'Well, yeah. Waco beat us to the punch,' Jouret responded.

'In my opinion, we should have gone six months before them,' Mambro hit back, before vowing: 'What we'll do will be even more spectacular.'

Morin Heights murders 

The first killings were executed at the command of Di Mambro at his residence in the village of Morin Heights, Canada.

On September 30 1994, Dutoit and his wife Nicky were lured by Di Mambro's young lover Dominique Bellaton. 

A loyal cult member, Bellaton became pregnant in 1982 with Di Mambro's child, who he declared to be 'the Christ of the New Generation'. 

Disappointed when she was born a girl, he treated his daughter Emmanuelle like a boy, and pronounced her as the 'Avatar-Messiah' who would lead the cult to a new planet in the afterlife.

'This child had a martyr's life. It's mind-boggling,' one former member reflected. 'She had been removed from the eyes of the world. She wasn't allowed to see anyone, she was Christ reincarnated.' 

While he and Jouret picked women to have sex with, Di Mambro had strict control over his disciples' lives and relationships, Di Mambro forbade Nicky and Tony Dutoit from having children.

When they left the cult, Nicky gave birth to a son, who they named Christopher Emmanuel. 

Incensed by the choice of name and furious at their defection from the group, Di Mambro considered the Dutoits had committed a double betrayal.

He labelled their son the 'Anti-Christ' and ordered cult members Joel Egger and Jerry Genoud to travel to Canada to murder the couple and their three-month-old baby.

The killings were carried out in a ritualistic fashion, with the infant and his parents brutally stabbed and beaten. 

Genoud and his wife stayed behind to clean up and prepare for their own deaths.

On October 4, they set incendiary timers to go off and burn the house down, killing themselves in the blaze.

Swiss massacre

The next day in Switzerland, firefighters were called out to a house in Cheiry, near Lake Geneva.

Searching the farmhouse for survivors, they came across a secret door in the garage. Inside they found an Church-like meeting room with an altar, seats and the belongings of what seemed like worshippers strewn around.

Then they found the bodies - 22 people arranged side by side in a star formation.

Investigators said 21 out of the 23 victims were put to sleep before being killed, with a total of 65 shots fired from a single weapon - used by Egger, who had flown back from Canada to carry out the massacre.

While it at first appeared to be a mass suicide, Sylvain Ostiguy, whose parents were among those murdered, said they would not have taken their own lives. 

'My father was there to get his money [from the cult]. He had no desire to commit suicide. It was murder,' he said.

'Cheiry was the traitors,' Bedat explained. 'All the traitors of the Solar Temple were executed one after the other by Joel Egger, who held the weapon. We are sure of it. By Luc Jouret, who probably held it too,' he added.

'But the man who gave the orders, the great orchestrator, was Jo Di Mambro, who was taking care of all of this from Salvan, managing the murders in Cheiry.'

When their task was complete in Cheiry, Jouret and Egger fled to Salvan, where the leading sect members were waiting.

The 'massacre video' 

'Salvan was the grand finale, the highlight,' explained Bedat. 'It was the hardcore, the headliners, the die-hards, the extremists, the fundamentalists, who all voluntarily decided to end it and go towards their deaths.'

The zealots' final moments were recorded by Di Mambro. Eerie footage shows them singing 'Chevaliers de la Table ronde' - a traditional French drinking song regaling the medieval Knights of the Round Table, who the cult believed it was linked to.

Jouret is sat in the middle of the table cheerfully toasting his fellow cultists, with Egger next to him doing the same just hours after they had committed mass murder.

Di Mambro's hand is also occasionally seen in the shot as people chat away, most happily aware that they are moments from death.

'All these people, I see them living, moving and smiling, and then, taking the poison and falling asleep,' Bedat said, with the footage showing several of the members closing their eyes and becoming drowsy.

'What's completely crazy about this is that we see Joel Egger. He just came back from Canada. He has already killed, with unprecedented barbarism, the Dutoit couple with baseball bats and stabbing. 

'And here he is, singing and laughing with all the other followers, before killing a large number of them. That's what's so crazy about this video.'

They were injected with a poison concocted by Jouret, while their children were also killed with the drugs and laid to rest.

A firefighter who responded to the blaze described discovering rigid bodies laid out like 'tailor's dummies'. 'As soon as I touched it I knew it was a dead body,' he said.

Medical examiner Thomas Krompechwer said the scene was 'apocalyptic', with each of the bodies yellow and in identical positions, calm and undisturbed.

Each had signs of an injection in the arm, he said, and appeared to have been put to sleep and died there peacefully before fire ravaged the buildings.

Even more disturbingly, he disclosed, above the heads of each of the children was a sheet of A4 sized paper which read: 'For our master, who guides us step by step along the highway to the eternal light.'

'That's when I realised the wicked nature of what I was looking at,' he said. 'I held out the small hope that those poor children might indeed have seen the eternal light.'

While the core members 'transited' at Salvan, the Order did not die with them. 

The cult continues

These were not to be the last mass killings connected to the Order, with its influence long outlasting the deaths of its founders.

Just over a year after the first massacres, 16 people, including three young children, were reported missing. They were quickly identified as members of the Order.

Eight days after their disappearance, a fire was reported in the French village of Saint-Pierre-de-Chérennes. 

At a remote mountain close dubbed 'The Hell Hole' incinerated bodies of 16 men, women and children were found laid out in a star formation.

Three children aged 6, four and almost two, all killed by a bullet in the head, along with their families.

Investigators determined that two cult members - French architect Andre Friedli and police detective Jean-Pierre Lardanchet - had drugged the others before shooting themselves.

'When the first tragedy happened, she regretted not being part of the trip,' a neighbour of psychotherapist Christiane Bonet, thought to have been a leading figure in the group, testified.

Surviving members had decided it was time to join their brethren, and they were not the last.

In March 1997, more remaining cult members in Canada decided to 'transit' to Sirius, and planned to take their children with them.

Five bodies were found after an apparent house fire, but miraculously, three children managed to escape.

One of the youngsters recounted in chilling detail how they noticed strange goings on in their home in the days leading up to the deaths - including coming across their grandmother with a plastic bag over her head.

Suspecting they could soon meet their ends, the brave youngsters managed to negotiate with their parents and flee - the only intended victims of the Order to make it out with their lives.