Joseph Di Mambro

Joseph Léonce Di Mambro (19 August 1924 – 5 October 1994) was a French esotericist who founded and led the Order of the Solar Temple alongside Luc Jouret. Di Mambro had been associated with a variety of esoteric groups before founding OTS. He was convicted of several counts of fraud, including impersonation of a psychiatrist. He founded the Solar Temple with Jouret in 1984. He committed suicide in the Swiss village of Salvan on 5 October 1994 as part of a mass murder–suicide.

Born in 1924 in France, the son of an Italian immigrant, Di Mambro was apprenticed as a watchmaker and jeweler in his teenage years. After World War II, Di Mambro joined the Rosicrucian organization AMORC. In the late 1960s, Di Mambro scammed a business partner and then fled France, before returning several years later. He in 1972 was sentenced to several months in prison on unrelated charges. Afterwards, he founded several New Age and spiritual groups, including the Golden Way Foundation, and met Luc Jouret in the 1980s. Under Di Mambro's direction Jouret took control of the neo-Templar Renewed Order of the Temple group; he was ousted shortly after, but Di Mambro and Jouret then formed a schismatic group, the Order of the Solar Temple.

While Jouret was considered by the public to be the figurehead of the group, Di Mambro was the true head of the organization. Following stressors within the group, Di Mambro and Jouret became increasingly paranoid, and the group's ideological concept of "transiting" to another dimension would grow more prominent. They began to plot a mass murder–suicide which they called a "transit". In October 1994, many members were murdered in Cheiry under his direction. Di Mambro himself died of suicide by poisoning, alongside 24 other members of the Solar Temple in Salvan, Switzerland.