INVESTIGATORS IDENTIFY FINAL 2 CULT MEMBERS.

Byline: The New York Times

The authorities Monday released the last two names of the Heaven's Gate cult members found dead in the mass suicide and said they were moving to wrap up their investigation because they had no evidence that any crime had been committed and no indication that other people had been involved in the 39 deaths.

After repeated unsuccessful efforts over the weekend to reach the families of the last members to be publicly identified, the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office announced their names at a news conference Monday afternoon. They were identified as Alphonzo Ricardo Foster, a 44-year-old man with a Minnesota driver's license, and Lindley Ayerhart Pease, 41, a man who was born in Exeter, N.H.

``We're in the process of concluding our investigation, pending any additional information,'' said Lt. Gerald L. Lipscomb, head of the homicide unit of the San Diego County sheriff's office. He said ``The rumors are going rampant, and some of them are very bizarre,'' Lipscomb said. But he added that ``we have absolutely nothing'' to shake the conviction that it had been a group suicide ``and no indication that they're affiliated with anyone in the world'' besides the 39 members who died.

The county medical examiner, Dr. Brian Blackbourne, said all the autopsies had been completed by late Saturday and had done nothing to change his view that most members had died of lethal doses of phenobarbitol combined with vodka, or of suffocation from plastic bags found in the garbage outside the house.

Lipscomb said the authorities were still trying to determine how the cult had obtained the controlled drugs, but he speculated that members who had prescriptions for legitimate conditions could have stockpiled the drugs. And he said many prescription drugs were easy to buy just across the border in Tijuana, Mexico.

Updating his earlier estimate that perhaps a half-dozen of the 18 men found dead had been castrated, Blackbourne said Monday that a final tally showed that eight had been castrated. Their testicles had been surgically removed some time ago without excessive scarring, he said.

Last week, Blackbourne confirmed that the group's leader, Marshall Herff Applewhite, was among those castrated, but Monday he said that his office would not elaborate on the condition of any individual body or say which bodies had been claimed by family members.

``This is not something they did themselves,'' Blackbourne said of the castrations. But he added, ``It's not something a normal, legitimate physician would do on an individual on request.'' Two of the dead women were nurses, he said, but he had no idea whether they might have performed the procedures.