Less than two months after telling a national television audience he wished he had died among Heaven's Gate cultists in San Diego County, Wayne "Nick" Cooke committed suicide Tuesday at a Holiday Inn.

Like the 39 suicides before him, including that of his wife Suzanne Sylvia Cooke, Mr. Cooke suffocated himself in a plastic bag after washing down barbiturates with vodka.

The former Point Reyes Station man's suicide occurred in Encinitas, San Diego County.

Like other Heaven's Gate members, who took place in the earlier mass suicide, Mr. Cooke was dressed in black pants and black Nike shoes, with nothing but a $5 bill and three quarters in his pocket.

Days after the original suicides were discovered, Mr. Cooke appeared on the TV program 60 Minutes with his daughter Kelly. On the program, he said his wife, a former Point Reyes Station librarian, chose suicide to shed her bodily "container" and elevate herself to the next level of existence aboard an alien spaceship traveling behind the comet Hale-Bopp.

"I wish I had the strength to have stuck it out and continued to be part of that crew," he told 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl at the time.

Surprisingly, it was Stahl who informed police of Mr. Cooke's suicide after she was contacted by Kelly Cooke, who had received a letter and audio tape from her father, informing her of his decision to kill himself.

Lawmen said the daughter was "uncooperative" with them, but they, nonetheless, were able to trace the package to Encinitas, 20 miles north of San Diego.

At the Encinitas Holiday Inn, officers found Mr. Cooke lying face down on the floor, alongside another cultist, Charles Humphrey of Denver, who was alive but unconscious. He later revived in a San Diego hospital.

Kelly Cooke, now 30 and living in New York City, had been left behind at age 10 with neighbors in the Point Reyes Station-Inverness area when her parents left West Marin to join the cult in 1976.

Both Nick and Suzanne Cooke were 54 years old at the time of their deaths.