Bonnie Nettles

Bonnie Nettles (1928 - 1985) was co-leader of a group with Marshall Applewhite who became the leader of what turned into the Heaven's Gate group after Nettles's death.

Nettles, a nurse, met Applewhite while visiting a patient at a Houston, Texas hospital (in the psychiatric ward) in the early 1970s. She met him again at a theatre where her daughter worked and her son took drama classes. Nettles prepared astrological charts for some of the mothers there when she ran into Applewhite again. It was at this time that he requested that she prepare his chart and they discovered together that they had some sort of spiritual link. Applewhite had difficulty dealing with Nettles' death in 1985. It appeared that this led him on a quest to find Nettles at a higher spiritual level, which eventually led to the suicides in the hope that all the members would leave this realm and go to the next level and meet up with Nettles again. The group went by many names before settling on the name Heaven's Gate in 1994.

Nettles died of liver cancer in 1985, 12 years before the cult's mass suicide in 1997.

Applewhite and Nettles went by the names "Bo" and "Peep" respectively and later "Ti" and "Do".