DATE: Monday, March 31, 1997                TAG: 9703310100

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST 

DATELINE: ABINGDON, VA.                     LENGTH:   43 lines

SOUTHWEST VIRGINIA TOWN PUZZLED BY NATIVE'S SUICIDE

The beginning and the end of Michael B. Sandoe's life are clear. It's what happened to the young man in between that remains a mystery to his former friends and neighbors in this rural southern-Virginia community where he grew up.

For the first 18 years of his life, Michael Barr Sandoe had what former teachers and friends recall as a typical, if sometimes boisterous, childhood and adolescence. The end, though, came quietly, when officials say the 26-year-old Sandoe and 38 other people committed suicide by swallowing mixtures of crushed sleeping pills and vodka at a mansion in a wealthy suburb of San Diego.

Several who knew Sandoe before he graduated from high school in 1989 to join the military say they'd lost contact with him. Now they are trying to square the Michael they knew - a cheerful senior class president - with the one who joined a cult that mixed Christian religion and science fiction.

``I don't know what might have happened to him in the military or something else to change him,'' said Michael Lethcoe, 49, a teacher at Abingdon High School and faculty sponsor for the Key Club, a youth-service group that Sandoe belonged to.

In high school, the tall, slight young man was known as a prankster, friends say, always joking with people in a good-natured way. Besides membership in the Key Club, he was in the French Club in his junior year and was elected class president the next.

Shannon Markham, 25, one of Sandoe's friends in high school, called him a ``regular guy'' who loved his Ford Mustang and had a steady girlfriend.

Jackie Craft, another friend of Sandoe's in high school, said running for class president started off as a joke for Sandoe. But Craft said her friend took it seriously once he won. ``His senior year was really a different year for him,'' she said. ``He gained a lot of respect from people.''

After high school Sandoe enlisted in the Army. His mother, JoAnne Sandoe, said her son became an Army paratrooper and Ranger.

After serving in the Persian Gulf war, his mother said, he came back and ``worked and traveled.'' She said she had no indication her son was involved with the Heaven's Gate group.

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