On the morning of 16 December 1995, 16 members of the Order of the Solar Temple died in a mass murder-suicide in a clearing in the Vercors, near the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Chérennes in Isère, France.

Following this initial transit, the OTS was believed to be defunct, but was actually secretly continued by Christiane Bonet, a devoted member of the group.

Bonet claimed that she could communicate with Jouret and Di Mambro in the afterlife as a medium, and gathered together the remaining OTS members, who would regularly meet together.

The Order of the Solar Temple was a religious group active in several French-speaking countries, led by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret.

According to journalist Arnaud Bédat, it functioned to comfort the remaining members, showing them that their dead friends had not abandoned them, which served to convince them of the validity of their faith in the OTS: they were just being waited for "on the other side".

[6][8] Even a month after the initial deaths, the remaining members of the Solar Temple began to meet up, centered around Christiane Bonet.

[11] Bonet was involved in the first deaths, as the day prior to the "transit" she had called the employers of two members – Elie Di Mambro and Daniel Jaton, the former being her "cosmic" partner in the group – saying they were delayed, when in actuality both had already died in Switzerland.

[9][10] When interviewed by the Swiss police the day after the transits, she acted "cold, distant, and contemptuous", denying she had known anything beforehand, saying the phone calls had been to "not dramatize the situation".

[15] Both men had been in Switzerland during the first transits, likely the people inside the car that had escaped from the Cheiry farm the day prior; Lardanchet was afraid that he was going to be prosecuted as the perpetrator of the Swiss killings.

[23][24] Patrick Vuarnet had been the person to distribute the original Testament letters for the 1994 suicides, after which he was questioned but not charged with any crime; he expressed to his brother that he felt guilty that he had not been in the first "transit".

When she was interrogated by the French police, she claimed that she had actually left the OTS two years before the deaths, but she was evasive in answering the questions and not believed by investigators.

She convinced them that she had established contact with Jouret and Di Mambro in the afterlife, acting as a medium, which she said she had developed the abilities for following the 1994 transit.

The group around Bonet became more distinct, and members began to communicate to each other in a coded system through their pagers, avoiding phones except for basic things.

[33] Huguenin took the letter as a sign that another transit was being plotted; he had promised that he would not say anything about being shown the leader, but immediately told the Fribourg police investigators who had interrogated him several months before.

[38] Thierry Huguenin's personal theory was that only four of the members knew of the plans for death, and that the others thought the Vercors trip was instead to encounter supernatural phenomena in which they would see Di Mambro materialize, which he viewed as the only thing that would have attracted them all to one place.

[41][25] The couple that survived was told that due to a setback the evening meeting was cancelled; they were possibly viewed by Bonet as not ready for the transit.

[42] By shortly after 10 p.m. most had left Geneva and all arrived at the French village of Saint-Pierre-de-Chérennes in the Vercors mountains, before driving up narrow roads to the Faz plateau.

[25][5] According to the hypothesis of the Grenoble Gendarmerie, following this, the members then exited their cars and enter the nearby Coulmes forest, where they walked to their final destination.

[38][13] This required a walk of over a 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mi) over very steep terrain, in very cold weather; with them were three children, aged 6, 4, and 2, alongside the thirteen adults.

[44][47][48] Each child had been shot once in the forehead, while the adults were killed by a point blank .22 Long Rifle blast to the head and also a bullet to the heart.

Following the deaths, Lardanchet and Friedli then poured gas over the bodies, setting them alight, before each shot themselves in the head with a Manurhin .357 Magnum,[15][49][45] both police service weapons.

Near the bodies were amassed several objects, including medicine and flashlights but also guns (two .22 LR rifles and two 9mm pistols, one of which had a silencer, police service weapons).

[45] The circumstances leading to the deaths were very similar to the initial 1994 transit; all of the dead were Solar Temple members or their relatives, most of them had been drugged with sedatives, and they had gunshot wounds.

[51] After this leak, on the 22nd, while watching television reports a French hunter recalled that he had seen on the 16th of December several cars registered from other places parked in Saint-Pierre-de-Chérennes, along with many footprints going into the forest.

[45] Shortly after the bodies were discovered, Grenoble's public prosecutor Jean-François Lorans opened a judicial investigation into "murder and criminal association".

He stated that "We consider that the circumstances in which these murders were committed imply a degree of preparation, deliberation and premeditation that fall within the notion of organized crime.

France formed a government watchdog designed to fight cults; a child was removed from her mother's custody, temporarily, due to her past affiliation with the OTS.

[57] A spokesman for the Quebec cult-watching organization Info-Secte warned that the group continued to secretly operate, while former member Hermann Delorme said another transit might occur on the summer solstice of 1996.

[17][61] Former member Hermann Delorme had his own theory; interviewed by cult researcher Susan J. Palmer in 1995, he claimed that the second transit was actually murder by a secret "rear guard" left by the OTS to kill those who continued to practice.

[13] According to him, there had been two "intellectually plausible" theories, either that "the group set up and executed its project based on its esoteric ideology", or that the esotericism was a front for some other reason for the murders, but that there had been no evidence for the latter.