List of Mass Suicides of the 20th and 21st Centuries
If you are experiencing a crisis or would like to speak with someone about harmful thoughts, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741 in the United States.
Among the many unfortunate events that fill the pages of history, there have been numerous shocking examples of mass suicide. Some of these mass suicides have been motivated by religious fervor and conviction, whereas others have been based on social codes of honor. In the ancient world the story of a mass suicide of the Zealots at the siege of Masada was told by Josephus, although it might be more legend than truth. In Japan the story of the 47 rōnin is a stark example of ritual seppuku (“self-disembowelment”) required by samurai honor codes. In India there are recorded incidents of Rajput women, prior to impending battles, committing jauhar (collective self-immolation) in large groups to preserve their honor.
From the late 20th to the early 21st century certain new religious movements, some with eschatological beliefs about the imminent end of the world, enacted headline-grabbing incidents of mass suicide. In some cases, though, it is unclear whether these movements’ followers died voluntarily—or it is clear that many did not—thus blurring the line between suicide and homicide. This list surveys examples of mass murder-suicides that have taken place among some of these modern doomsday cults.
Jonestown: The Peoples Temple
The Jonestown massacre in 1978 was one of the largest mass deaths in American history and was prominently featured in news reports. Jim Jones began the Peoples Temple in the 1950s as a racially integrated movement that also included faith healing and eschatological beliefs of a coming nuclear holocaust. In 1974 he founded an agricultural settlement in Jonestown, Guyana, and led hundreds of members there in 1977. In 1978 a delegation that included U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan from California and several journalists visited the commune at the behest of Concerned Relatives, a community of former Peoples Temple members and current members’ families who submitted disturbing reports that congregants were being held at Jonestown against their will.
After the delegation left the settlement and waited at a nearby airstrip, Peoples Temple members murdered Ryan, three journalists, and a defector from the commune. At the direction of Jones, members of the Jonestown settlement then staged a mass suicide, called the “White Night,” in which more than 900 people died (largely, but not in all cases, voluntarily), most of them by drinking or being injected with a cyanide-laced grape-flavored drink. Among the dead were some 300 children under the age of 17. In addition to the people who died by murder or suicide in the Jonestown massacre, the deceased also included pets, farm animals, and even fish in ponds that were poisoned.
Branch Davidians
The Branch Davidian sect led by David Koresh in the 1990s was an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Like the Adventists, the Branch Davidians believe that they lived in end-times and that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent. The Davidian movement began in the 1930s, the offshoot Branch Davidians formed in the 1950s, and David Koresh had assumed control of the group by the late 1980s. He and his followers amassed a considerable arsenal of weaponry that they kept at their Mount Carmel compound, located just outside of Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians earned money through arms dealing, which gave government authorities reason to be concerned about the compound’s potential threat to its neighbors. Local media and the government were also aware of and investigated allegations of child abuse in the compound, including Koresh’s keeping of teenaged “spiritual” wives.
After obtaining a search warrant, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) launched a raid on the compound on February 28, 1993, with the purpose of searching for weapons and, potentially, making arrests. The Davidians were prepared, since Koresh was tipped off in advance, and the raid devolved into a shoot-out in which four federal agents and six Davidians were killed. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) took over from the ATF, and the raid turned into a siege that continued for 51 days.
The siege culminated on the morning of April 19 as federal agents attacked the Waco compound to no avail. About noon that day fires erupted at multiple points in the compound, but only nine members emerged. The government’s later investigations concluded that the fires were suicidal arsons, however some antigovernment groups have concluded that the actions of federal authorities started the fires. The assertion that the government attacked the Branch Davidians became a rallying cry for various right-wing groups and influenced Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing, and Infowars founder Alex Jones.
In any event, the fires brought the siege to a deadly end. Including Koresh, more than 80 members of the Branch Davidian sect, including more than 20 children, died in the fire—some from asphyxiation, some from falling debris, and others from gunfire within the compound. While the cause of the fire remains a matter of dispute, both surveillance recordings and the testimonies of survivors indicate that the fire was initiated purposefully by Branch Davidians who perceived the violent confrontation with federal agents as a fulfillment of Koresh’s apocalyptic prophecies.
Order of the Solar Temple
The Order of the Solar Temple was a new religious movement established by Joseph De Mambro and Luc Jouret in the early 1980s. Primarily based in French-speaking countries in Europe, as well as in Quebec and francophone parts of the Caribbean, the group, whose members were called Templars, held as one of its central tenets that a world-ending catastrophe was imminent. By the early 1990s, facing both internal dissent and the external threat of a government investigation, the group’s leaders had decided that departure from Earth was called for, in what they termed a “transit” to another planet. In October 1994 successive episodes of mass suicide or murder of 53 Templars occurred in Canada and Switzerland. In December 1995, 16 more Templars were found dead in France. Finally, 5 Templars in Canada completed suicide in 1997, in what appeared to be an attempt to reunite with the Templars who already undertook their supposed transit.
Heaven’s Gate
The popularity of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in the 20th century led to a number of new religious movements featuring beliefs in flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitation. Among those movements was the doomsday cult Heaven’s Gate, whose members’ mass suicide in 1997 made global headlines. The group was led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, who referred to themselves by the monikers “Do” and “Ti,” respectively. The two, who referred to themselves as “The Two,” believed that they had “next level” minds that channeled extraterrestrials, and they preached that the subsequent stage of human evolution would be on alien spacecraft to which humans would soon transition. Nettles died of cancer in 1985, leaving Applewhite to lead the small community. He and his followers eventually settled in Rancho Santa Fe, California, an affluent suburb of San Diego, in 1996.
In 1997 rumors circulated in the UFO community that an alien spacecraft was hiding in the tail of Comet Hale-Bopp, which had been discovered in 1995 and would reach its closest point to the Sun in April 1997. The Heaven’s Gate group, which by that time had dwindled to 39 members from a height of about 200, believed that the clandestine spacecraft would transit them to the next level, where they would join their deceased coleader, Nettles. In order to expedite their passage, in March 1997 the group committed mass suicide by taking phenobarbital with vodka and applesauce. Found by authorities, all 39 members were lying on their backs and covered by purple shrouds, with bags over their heads. They wore black trousers and sneakers and had packed suitcases by their sides, as if ready for a trip.
The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God
In the late 20th century numerous Christian-based new religious movements developed in Africa, many of which were forms of Pentecostal, Evangelical, or Charismatic groups, as well as local offshoots from Roman Catholicism. In the 1980s in Uganda there was a particular spate of visions of the Virgin Mary among Catholic groups. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTCG), led by Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibwetere, was one such Catholic splinter group founded upon leaders’ visions of Mary and Jesus, and it promulgated a fundamentalist message regarding the revival of the Ten Commandments as well as views of an impending apocalypse.
In March 2000 the MRTCG’s followers sold possessions or settled debts and traveled to the movement’s headquarters in the town of Kanungu, in southwest Uganda, where leaders claimed that Mary would appear in mid-March to offer a message. On March 17 hundreds died when the headquarters building, in which they had gathered for feasting and the promised vision of Mary, was first barricaded and then, following an explosion, engulfed in flames. More than 500 members died in the building and at least 200 more dead were found in subsequent weeks on nearby properties owned by the movement. Although the initial response to the event was to read it as a cult mass suicide, further evidence uncovered during the investigations suggested that not all members died voluntarily and that the massacre was perhaps more precisely a mass homicide directed by the movement’s leaders. As of 2025 the leaders have been neither found nor prosecuted, although warrants have been issued for their arrest.
Shakahola massacre
Another shocking instance of mass suicide combined with mass homicide came to light in 2023 in Kenya among followers of another doomsday Christian movement. Paul Nthenge Mackenzie started the Pentecostal millenarian Good News International Ministries in 2003. In addition to standard apocalyptic fare, Mackenzie preached against formal education and Western medicine. In 2015 he began broadcasting his sermons and later obtained a local television station for that purpose. Despite the Kenyan government’s official support for various Evangelical religious groups, it began investigating Mackenzie for various offenses. He was charged in 2017 with radicalization and with not sending his children to school (and was acquitted), and he was arrested in 2019 for running an unlicensed TV station. Also in 2019 the Kenyan government launched a digital ID program, which Mackenzie likened to the “mark of the beast” in the Book of Revelation. To escape government oversight, in 2019 he began shifting his operations from the southern coastal town of Malindi to the nearby 800-acre (324-hectare) Shakahola Forest (near Tsavo National Park). There he sold members small plots of land, where they lived in huts while praying and fasting.
About 2020 Mackenzie began preaching that the end of the world was quickly approaching. Reports that he had predicted a virus as a final sign were interpreted by followers as having come to fruition with the COVID-19 pandemic. Reports indicate that by 2022 Mackenzie had urged more extreme fasting and that by early 2023 he had directed his followers to starve themselves and their children to death so that they could ascend to heaven before the apocalypse and to meet Jesus. In early 2023 shopkeepers near Shakahola Forest noticed that women and children from the movement were no longer coming around, and local herders found severely emaciated women and young boys, some of whom claimed they had been forced to starve.
By April authorities had arrived, and hundreds of bodies were uncovered in mass graves in the Shakahola Forest. As the corpses were investigated, it became apparent that starvation was not the only cause of death and that many followers had been violently beaten and mutilated. Mackenzie and more than 90 of his alleged coconspirators have been charged by Kenyan authorities in multiple cases for murder, kidnapping, terrorism, and child torture, including a charge for the murder of 191 children and for the murder of more than 400 people. It is one of the rare cases wherein a leader of a modern doomsday movement has been arrested and faced legal prosecution after their followers’ mass murder-suicides.