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 …