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

[6][7] Jouret, Di Mambro, and Camille Pilet (a retired sales direct of the Piaget SA watch company) owned 3 villas in Granges-sur-Salvan, as well as a luxury condominium complex in Morin-heights.

[14] Jouret had asked members Hermann Delorme and Jean-Pierre Vinet to buy three semi-automatic guns with silencers, illegal in Canada, resulting in the three being arrested.

[17] Jouret and the other two men were given only light sentences after the crime (one year of unsupervised probation and a $1000 fine intended to be paid to the Red Cross), but in the aftermath the media took interest in the group.

The Canadian press began to report, using information gained from police wiretaps, conversations between members of the OTS, which they described as a "doomsday cult".

[24] Di Mambro had previously forbidden Nicky from having children following a miscarriage, but after she left the group, she and Antonio had a son, who they named Christopher Emmanuel.

[26] This original transit was intended to take place at a luxury house in the village of Saint-Sauveur in the Laurentians in Canada, where the OTS had an underground ceremonial crypt.

After the police raid Di Mambro ordered OTS members to destroy the crypt and empty the house, viewing it as having been ruined by the intrusion; the transit plans were then postponed and moved to Switzerland.

The group claimed the renaming was in order to reach "the irreversible stage of the return to the Father" and the "Vth Reign", which would lead to the abolition of hierarchies.

[42] Upon arriving in Canada, he met with Dominique Bellaton and Collette and Jerry Genoud in a chalet owned by Di Mambro in Morin-Heights.

[47] At this time, Robert Falardeau (later to be killed as a "Traitor"), who Jouret despised, was in Switzerland, having been called to sign papers with Di Mambro and get his money back, intending to return to Canada as soon as he could.

[52] They declared that, upon death, they would acquire "solar bodies" on the star Sirius (though members also gave Jupiter or Venus as an alternative destination).

[53][50] One letter declared "We leave this Earth to rediscover, in complete lucidity and freedom, a Dimension of Truth and the Absolute, far from the hypocrisies and oppression of this world, with the end of producing the embryo of our future Generation.

[57] In one letter, they harshly criticize the allegations the OTS had received in several countries (Australia, Switzerland, Martinique, Canada, and France) as "deceitful", but especially complain about the SQ and the Q-37 investigation.

[30] This was also found in a search of Di Mambro's apartment, and read:[63] Following the tragic Cheiry Transit, we wish to make it clear, on behalf of the Rosy Cross, that we deplore and totally disassociate ourselves from the barbaric, incompetent and aberrant behavior of Doctor Luc Jouret.

[69][72] Following the deaths in Cheiry, Jouret was recorded as calling Di Mambro, possibly to inform him that it had been a success, and shortly after so did Egger.

[73] At about 8 a.m., the Cheiry mailman witnessed a red Ford Fiesta, containing 3 or 4 young men,[b] coming from the farm and heading down to the village.

[74][75] According to Thierry Huguenin, Jouret and Di Mambro had planned for there to be exactly 54 dead, in connection with 54 Templars who had been burned at the stake in the fourteenth century.

[74][78] From 11:42 p.m. to 12:12 a.m. he called the Cheiry farm three times, triggering the ignition system, before doing the same to the group's hideout in Aubignan and one of Di Mambro's apartments in Territet.

[65] The "Immortals" all died at Salvan; according to academics Shannon Clusel and Susan J. Palmer it is not known how many of them consented to death prior, and how many were simply murdered,[57] but according to journalist Arnaud Bédat all of them likely agreed except Elie.

[26] On 1 a.m. on 5 October, Swiss examining magistrate André Piller was called by the police to respond to a fire at Cheiry, arriving half an hour later.

[4] At the scene, firefighters attempted to save the house, while Piller and the responding police entered the nearby farmhouse; there, they found the body of Albert Giacobino with a plastic bag over his head, alongside an ignition system that had not gone off.

[4] These two fires were connected when a car belonging to Egger, who lived in the Cheiry house, was found parked outside the Salvan commune.

[38] Several months after the deaths, two journalists from France 2 visited the ruins of the Salvan chalet and found, in the kitchen garbage can, audio cassettes in excellent condition, recording telephone conversations between followers who had been spied on by Di Mambro.

[89] The leadership of the OTS cared deeply about the group's legacy, and spent a large amount of time preemptively creating a "legend" through both the manifestos they mailed to various media and scholarly sources, and by destroying all evidence that would have conflicted with their own story.

This failure left behind a large number of the Temple's written documents, some of which were found on the group's surviving computers, as well as audio and video cassettes, able to be looked through by investigators.

[90] Thanks to the documents found, the police were able to understand the workings of the community and recognize some of its members, including Michel Tabachnik (in concert in Denmark at the time of the deaths).

[91] As the bodies were so badly burned, it was not immediately realized that several members, including several of the main people involved like Jouret, Di Mambro, Pilet, Egger, and Bellaton were among the dead, resulting in an international manhunt as the Swiss police suspected they had escaped.

[35] According to sociologists John Hall and Philip Schuyler, the SQ's account of this should be taken with a grain of salt as, due to their personal involvement in the investigation and the complaints the OTS had lodged against them in their "transit" note, they would naturally prefer a theological interpretation of motive.

[93] As described by Susan J. Palmer in 1996, "false or unverifiable trails have been laid: secondhand testimonies are traded by journalists, ghost-written apostate memoirs are in progress and conspiracy theories abound.