Jonestown
Michael 'Mike' Gormez
San Francisco Examiner Launches Days of Darkness: November 1978; Three
Part Series is Prelude to City Hall Photo Exhibit
http://www.examiner.com./darkness/index.html
Mike
--
Why are these people dead Scientology?
http://www.enturbulate.nu/
Tilman Hausherr
about what was to come. I append her affdavit at the bottom.
20 Years Later, Jonestown Survivor Confronts Horrors
San Francisco Chronicle
2.11.1998
By Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
For a young woman of 17, flinging herself on the
world after the cloistered atmosphere of an English
boarding school, Peoples Temple seemed daring and
exciting.
With its bell-ringing calls for social justice --
this was in the fractious 1960s and early '70s --
the little-known church near Ukiah catered to the
closet revolutionary in Deborah Layton. Its leader,
the Rev. Jim Jones, with his omnipresent dark
glasses and his sweeping red robe, was the anchor of
her newfound life and, like many Temple members, she
was mesmerized by him.
Nearly 30 years later, her mother long dead in a
rotting jungle outpost in Guyana, her brother doing
life in a federal prison and her father so broken
that he weeps at the mention of anything connected
with Jonestown, Deborah Layton has, as she put it
the other day, "decided it was time to come out of
the cobwebbed attic."
Clearing away those cobwebs meant writing a book --
it's called "Seductive Poison: A Jonestown
Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples
Temple." It paints a convincing picture of what it
was like to spend seven years in the notorious cult,
only to escape a few months before the tragedy that
gave Jonestown its infamous place in history as the
site of the largest mass suicide in modern times. "I
was driving across the bridge," she says when asked
why, after all these years, she wanted to revisit
the horrors of Jonestown. "And I thought, if I get
hit by a truck, my epitaph will be, `Jonestown
survivor dies on Bay Bridge.' I wanted to leave my
daughter a legacy that wasn't that simple."
Jonestown was the agricultural compound Jones'
followers carved out of the Guyanese jungle, 150
miles northwest of the nation's capital, Georgetown.
It was the final stop for a group that for nearly 10
years had fascinated and, in the end, horrified the
Bay Area.
Twenty years ago this month, Jones and 912 of his
followers committed mass suicide at the jungle
compound. It was an implausible ending for the fiery
preacher, who had curried favor among the
fashionable elite of the Democratic Party.
Jones, who demanded that his flock call him Father,
was one of the most politically powerful people in
San Francisco, wined and dined by such luminaries as
Rosalynn Carter, Assemblyman Willie Brown, Mayor
George Moscone and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn
Dymally.
Deborah Layton is now 45, lives in an elegant house
in Piedmont and takes her 12-year-old daughter to
play in soccer games. Her life appears to be
light-years from Peoples Temple.
"When I joined Peoples Temple, I was 17 and it was
like joining the Peace Corps," she says. "I felt we
were doing something that had meaning. I wanted to
be part of something that was doing things for other
people, and besides, Peoples Temple offered a
community of friends." She blithely ignored the
warning signs -- the fake "cancer healings" and the
increasingly hostile confrontations, when Jones
would scream at members of his flock for faintly
perceived faults or have them paddled harshly with
the "board of education."
Layton became a senior insider in Jones' entourage.
She was entrusted with flights to Europe and Panama
to open Temple bank accounts, where Jones stashed
the millions he was taking from Temple members who
freely gave him their life savings, their homes and
just about everything else.
"The reason I did well," Layton says now, "is that
I'm a little soldier and I follow orders so well."
In the summer of 1977, after an expose of Peoples
Temple in New West magazine, Jones and his followers
fled to Guyana. Jones had become increasingly
paranoid, convinced that the CIA, the FBI and the
media were out to destroy him.
Layton and her mother arrived in Jonestown in
December 1977. Her startling introduction to life
there quickly allowed Layton to see the cracks in
the facade. The "Greeting Committee" promptly
confiscated all their clothes and belongings and,
most important, their passports. They were issued
four T-shirts, four pairs of socks, a toothbrush and
toothpaste, four pairs of underwear and a bar of
soap. Her mother's cancer pain medications were
taken away. Much later, Layton writes, she would
find them "on the bookshelf in Father's house with
the many other prescription drugs taken from Temple
members."
Life in Jonestown became a drab and exhausting
routine of dawn-to-dusk labor in the fields, replete
with swarms of voracious mosquitoes that even went
after the toughened soles of people's feet.
After a few weeks, Layton grew "accustomed to the
unusual smells in the food and drink. I was even
unaffected by the rice weevils and other strange
bugs we ingested daily." Ever on the alert for
malcontents, Jones would order recalcitrant Temple
members -- those who questioned his authority --
into "The Box," a stifling underground cubicle the
size of a coffin.
Children had their own special punishment, Layton
writes. "They would be taken to the Jonestown well
in the dark of night, hung upside down by a rope
around their ankles, and dunked into the water again
and again while someone hidden inside the well
grabbed at them to scare them."
Crimes for which children went to the well included
"stealing food from the kitchen, expressing
homesickness, failing a socialism exam, or even
natural childish rebelliousness."
Jones had a penchant for suddenly getting on the
compound loudspeaker long after everyone had gone to
bed and shouting, "White Night! White Night!" -- the
signal that meant an attack was imminent, an excuse
for conducting a suicide drill.
Hurrying out of bed, Layton would race toward Jones
"in my mud-caked boots, past the tin-roofed cabins,
past the wooden outdoor showers where we're allowed
our two-minute wash at the end of our 11-hour days
in the field." And it wasn't an isolated incident.
"Every week we're ordered to drink some liquid," she
writes, culling her memories of the "old tapes (of
Jonestown recollections that) are running in my
head."
"Every week we're promised death, a relief from this
miserable life. I hope tonight is the last one. I'm
so desperately tired. Perhaps death is better than
this."
In May 1978, she was sent by Jones to Georgetown to
chaperone some Temple children on a cultural
exchange. She managed to contact her sister in
Davis, who wired a ticket to Georgetown, where
Layton and other Temple members were staying in a
house the Temple owned. At the airport, Temple
members who found out she was fleeing implored her
not to leave. She got on the plane, leaving her
mother behind.
Five months later, on the night of November 18,
1978, Jones sent a gang of gunmen to an airstrip in
Port Kaituma, where Representative Leo Ryan of San
Mateo and a fact-finding party that had visited
Jonestown were preparing to leave. Within minutes,
Ryan and four others were shot dead.
Later that night, Jones had another suicide
exercise. This time, it was not a drill.
Jones died from a bullet to the brain. Layton's
mother, Lisa, had died of cancer 10 days before the
mass suicide. Her brother, Larry, later became the
only person ever charged in connection with the
airstrip massacre and, after two trials, was
convicted in 1986 of conspiring to murder Ryan. He
is serving a life sentence in the federal prison at
Lompoc. "If I hadn't been sent to Georgetown that
day (in May)," Deborah Layton says now, "I would
have died in Jonestown. I would never have left
Jonestown with Congressman Ryan. In fact, I would
have been on that truck, with a rifle."
Looking back on it 20 years later, she says, "I put
everything in denial and locked it down. Deep inside
me, I still have the demons of shame and guilt."
She looks away for a moment, then brightens and
starts to talk about a visit she made to Jonestown
only a few months ago, accompanied by a crew from
the Arts & Entertainment network, which is making a
documentary on Peoples Temple.
"I was ready to be overwhelmed by emotion," she
says, "but when we got into the area, it just wasn't
there. If there is such a thing as a spirit or
essence of people... well, it wasn't there."
"I thought, what a waste. What an evil thing that
Jim Jones did."
http://www.ieway.com/~csukbr/juslib/jimjones.html
AFFIDAVIT OF DEBORAH LAYTON BLAKEY
RE THE THREAT AND POSSIBILITY
OF MASS SUICIDE
BY MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE'S TEMPLE
I, DEBORAH LAYTON BLAKEY, declare the following under penalty of
perjury:
1. The purpose of this affidavit is to call to the attention of the
United States government the existence of a situation which threatens the
lives of United States citizens living in Jonestown, Guyana.
2. From August, 1971 until May 13, 1978, I was a member of the People's
Temple. For a substantial period of time prior to my departure for Guyana in
December, 1977, I held the position of Financial Secretary of the People's
Temple.
3. I was 18 years old when I joined the People's Temple. I had grown up
in affluent circumstances in the permissive atmosphere of Berkeley,
California. By joining the People's Temple, I hoped to help others and in
the process to bring structure and self-discipline to my own life.
4. During the years I was a member of the People's Temple, I watched the
organization depart with increasing frequency from its professed dedication
for social change and participatory democracy. The Rev. Jim Jones gradually
assumed a tyrannical hold over the lives of Temple members.
5. Any disagreement with his dictates came to be regarded as "treason".
The Rev. Jones labelled any person who left the organization a "traitor" and
"fair game". He steadfastly and convincingly maintained that the punishment
for defection was death. The fact that severe corporal punishment was
frequently administered to Temple members gave the threats a frightening air
of reality.
6. The Rev. Jones saw himself as the center of a conspiracy. The
identity of the conspirators changed from day to day along with his erratic
world vision. He induced the fear in others that, through their contact with
him, they had become targets of the conspiracy. He convinced black Temple
members that if they did not follow him to Guyana, they would be put into
concentration camps and killed. White members were instilled with the belief
that their names appeared on a secret list of enemies of the state that was
kept by the C.I.A. and that they would be tracked down, tortured,
imprisoned, and subsequently killed if they did not flee to Guyana.
7. Frequently, at Temple meetings, Rev. Jones would talk non-stop for
hours. At various times, he claimed that he was the reincarnation of either
Lenin, Jesus Christ, or one of a variety of other religious or political
figures. He claimed that he had divine powers and could heal the sick. He
stated that he had extrasensory perception and could tell what everyone was
thinking. He said that he had powerful connections the world over, including
the Mafia, Idi Amin, and the Soviet government.
8. When I first joined the Temple, Rev. Jones seemed to make clear
distinctions between fantasy and reality. I believed that most of the time
when he said irrational things, he was aware that they were irrational, but
that they served as a tool of his leadership. His theory was that the end
justified the means. At other times, he appeared to be deluded by a paranoid
vision of the world. He would not sleep for days at a time and talk
compulsively about the conspiracies against him. However, as time went on,
he appeared to become genuinely irrational.
9. Rev. Jones insisted that Temple members work long hours and
completely give up all semblance of a personal life. Proof of loyalty to
Jones was confirmed by actions showing that a member had given up
everything, even basic necessities. The most loyal were in the worst
physical condition. Dark circles under one's eyes or extreme loss of weight
were considered signs of loyalty.
10. The primary emotions I came to experience were exhaustion and fear.
I knew that Rev. Jones was in some sense "sick", but that did not make me
any less afraid of him.
11. Rev. Jones fled the United States in June, 1977 amidst growing
public criticism of the practices of the Temple. He informed members of the
Temple that he would be imprisoned for life if he did not leave immediately.
12. Between June, 1977 and December, 1977, when I was ordered to depart
from Guyana, I had access to coded radio broadcasts from Rev. Jones in
Guyana to the People's Temple headquarters in San Francisco.
13. In September, 1977, an event which Rev. Jones viewed as a major
crisis occurred. Through listening to coded radio broadcasts and
conversations with other members of the Temple staff, I learned that an
attorney for former Temple member Grace Stoen had arrived in Guyana, seeking
the return of her son, John Victor Stoen.
14. Rev. Jones has expressed particular bitterness toward Grace Stoen.
She had been Chief Counselor, a position of great responsibility within the
Temple. Her personal qualities of generosity and compassion made her very
popular with the membership. Her departure posed a threat to Rev. Jones
absolute control. Rev. Jones delivered a number of public tirades against
her. He said that her kindness was faked and that she was a C.I.A. agent. He
swore that he would never return her son to her.
15. I am informed that Rev. Jones believed that he would be able to stop
Timothy Stoen, husband of Grace Stoen and father of John Victor Stoen, from
speaking against the Temple as long as the child was being held in Guyana.
Timothy Stoen, a former Assistant District Attorney in Mendocino and San
Francisco counties, had been one of Rev. Jones' most trusted advisors. It
was rumoured that Stoen was critical of the use of physical force and other
forms of intimidation against Temple members. I am further informed that
Rev. Jones believed that a public statement by Timothy Stoen would increase
the tarnish on his public image.
16. When the Temple lost track of Timothy Stoen, I was assigned to track
him down and offer him a large sum of money in return for his silence.
Initially, I was to offer him $5,000. I was authorized to pay him up to
$10,000. I was not able to locate him and did not see him again until on or
about October 6, 1977. On that date, the Temple received information that he
would be joining Grace in a San Francisco Superior Court action to determine
the custody of John. I was one of a group of Temple members assigned to meet
him outside the court and attempt to intimidate him to prevent him from
going inside.
17. The September, 1977 crisis concerning John Stoen reached major
proportions. The radio messages from Guyana were frenzied and hysterical.
One morning, Terry J. Buford, public relations advisor to Rev. Jones, and
myself were instructed to place a telephone call to a high-ranking Guyanese
official who was visiting the United States and deliver the following
threat: unless the government of Guyana took immediate steps to stall the
Guyanese court action regarding John Stoen's custody, the entire population
of Jonestown would extinguish itself in a mass suicide by 5:30 P.M. that
day. I was later informed that Temple members in Guyana placed similar calls
to other Guyanese officials.
18. We later received radio communication to the effect that the court
case had been stalled and that the suicide threat was called off.
19. I arrived in Guyana in December, 1977. I spent a week in Georgetown
and then, pursuant to orders, traveled to Jonestown.
20. Conditions at Jonestown were even worse than I had feared they would
be. The settlement was swarming with armed guards. No one was permitted to
leave unless on a special assignment and these assignments were given only
to the most trusted. We were allowed to associate with Guyanese people only
while on a "mission".
21. The vast majority of the Temple members were required to work in the
fields from 7 A.M. to 6 P.M. six days per week and on Sunday from 7 A.M. to
2 P.M. We were allowed one hour for lunch. Most of this hour was spent
walking back to lunch and standing in line for our food. Taking any other
breaks during the workday was severely frowned upon.
22. The food was woefully inadequate. There was rice for breakfast, rice
water soup for lunch, and rice and beans for dinner. On Sunday, we each
received an egg and a cookie. Two or three times a week we had vegetables.
Some very weak and elderly members received one egg per day. However, the
food did improve markedly on the few occasions when there were outside
visitors.
23. In contrast, Rev. Jones, claiming problems with his blood sugar,
dined separately and ate meat regularly. He had his own refrigerator which
was stocked with food. The two women with whom he resided, Maria Katsaris
and Carolyn Layton, and the two small boys who lived with him, Kimo Prokes
and John Stoen, dined with the membership. However, they were in much better
physical shape than everyone else since they were also allowed to eat the
food in Rev. Jones' refrigerator.
24. In Febuary, 1978, conditions had become so bad that half of
Jonestown was ill with severe diarrhea and high fevers. I was seriously ill
for two weeks. Like most of the other sick people, I was not given any
nourishing foods to help recover. I was given water and a tea drink until I
was well enough to return to the basic rice and beans diet.
25. As the former financial secretary, I was aware that the Temple
received over $65,000 in Social Security checks per month. It made me angry
to see that only a fraction of the income of the senior citizens in the care
of the Temple was being used for their benefit. Some of the money was being
used to build a settlement that would earn Rev. Jones the place in history
with which he was so obsessed. The balance was being held in "reserve".
Although I felt terrible about what was happening, I was afraid to say
anything because I knew that anyone with a differing opinion gained the
wrath of Jones and other members.
26. Rev. Jones' thoughts were made known to the population of Jonestown
by means of broadcasts over the loudspeaker system. He broadcast an average
of six hours per day. When the Reverend was particularly agitated, he would
broadcast for hours on end. He would talk on and on while we worked in the
fields or tried to sleep. In addition to the daily broadcasts, there were
marathon meetings six nights per week.
27. The tenor of the broadcasts revealed that Rev. Jones' paranoia had
reached an all-time high. He was irate at the light in which he had been
portrayed by the media. He felt that as a consequence of having been
ridiculed and maligned, he would be denied a place in history. His obsession
with his place in history was maniacal. When pondering the loss of what he
considered his rightful place in history, he would grow despondent and say
that all was lost.
28. Visitors were infrequently permitted access to Jonestown. The entire
community was required to put on a performance when a visitor arrived.
Before the visitor arrived, Rev. Jones would instruct us on the image we
were to project. The workday would be shortened. The food would be better.
Sometimes there would be music and dancing. Aside from these performances,
there was little joy or hope in any of our lives. An air of despondency
prevailed.
29. There was constant talk of death. In the early days of the People's
Temple, general rhetoric about dying for principles was sometimes heard. In
Jonestown, the concept of mass suicide for socialism arose. Because our
lives were so wretched anyway and because we were so afraid to contradict
Rev. Jones, the concept was not challenged.
30. An event which transpired shortly after I reached Jonestown
convinced me that Rev. Jones had sufficient control over the minds of the
residents that it would be possible for him to effect a mass suicide.
31. At least once a week, Rev. Jones would declare a "white night", or
state of emergency. The entire population of Jonestown would be awakened by
blaring sirens. Designated persons, approximately fifty in number, would arm
themselves with rifles, move from cabin to cabin, and make certain that all
members were responding. A mass meeting would ensue. Frequently during these
crises, we would be told that the jungle was swarming with mercenaries and
that death could be expected at any minute.
32. During one "white night", we were informed that our situation had
become hopeless and that the only course of action open to us was a mass
suicide for the glory of socialism. We were told that we would be tortured
by mercenaries if we were taken alive. Everyone, including the children, was
told to line up. As we passed through the line, we were given a small glass
of red liquid to drink. We were told that the liquid contained poison and
that we would die within 45 minutes. We all did as we were told. When the
time came when we should have dropped dead, Rev. Jones explained that the
poison was not real and that we had just been through a loyalty test. He
warned us that the time was not far off when it would become necessary for
us to die by our own hands.
33. Life at Jonestown was so miserable and the physical pain of
exhaustion was so great that this event was not traumatic for me. I had
become indifferent as to whether I lived or died.
34. During another "white night", I watched Carolyn Layton, my former
sister-in-law, give sleeping pills to two young children in her care, John
Victor Stoen and Kimo Prokes, her own son. Carolyn said to me that Rev.
Jones had told her that everyone was going to have to die that night. She
said that she would probably have to shoot John and Kimo and that it would
be easier for them if she did it while they were asleep.
35. In April, 1978, I was reassigned to Georgetown. I became determined
to escape or die trying. I surreptitiously contacted my sister, who wired me
a plane ticket. After I received the ticket, I sought the assistance of the
United States Embassy in arranging to leave Guyana. Rev. Jones had
instructed us that he had a spy working in the United States Embassy and
that he would know if anyone went to the embassy for help. For this reason,
I was very fearful.
36. I am most grateful to the United States government and Richard McCoy
and Daniel Weber; in particular, for the assistance they gave me. However,
the efforts made to investigate conditions in Jonestown are inadequate for
the following reasons. The infrequent visits are always announced and
arranged. Acting in fear for their lives, Temple members respond as they are
told. The members appear to speak freely to American representatives, but in
fact they are drilled thoroughly prior to each visit on what questions to
expect and how to respond. Members are afraid of retaliation if they speak
their true feelings in public.
37. On behalf of the population of Jonestown, I urge that the United
States Government take adequate steps to safeguard their rights. I believe
that their lives are in danger.
I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and
correct, except as to those matters stated on information and belief and as
to those I believe them to be true.
Executed this 15 day of June, 1978 at San Francisco, California.
(signed) Deborah Layton Blakey
Tilman Hausherr
Most Peoples Temple Documents Still Sealed
San Francisco Chronicle
13.11.1998
By Michael Taylor, Don Lattin, Chronicle Staff Writers
For nearly 20 years there have been rumors that the Rev. Jim Jones
was either under surveillance by the CIA and the FBI or that he
was working for the CIA.
There was even a rumor that he had taken his followers to
Jonestown as part of the MK-ULTRA mind control program -- a CIA
effort that tried, among other things, to duplicate Soviet and
Chinese brainwashing techniques to force recalcitrant spies to
reveal sensitive secrets. The government said MK-ULTRA was ended
in 1973.
Congressional investigations into Jones' Peoples Temple never
substantiated such rumors. But Congress has never declassified
some 5,000 pages of documents that scholars and conspiracy buffs
would love to go through.
J. Gordon Melton, founder and director of the Institute for the
Study of American Religion, said he does not know what the
documents might reveal. But he said they need to be made public
``so we can finally figure out what role the U.S. government had
down there.''
``Jonestown was closely monitored by the government,'' Melton
said. ``The CIA and the State Department were regularly checking
in on Jonestown.''
In 1980, the House Select Committee on Intelligence determined
that the CIA had no involvement with Peoples Temple and had no
advance warning of the mass murder-suicide.
A year earlier, the House Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that
Jones ``suffered extreme paranoia.'' The 782-page report also
recommended that more studies be done of cults, but the committee
kept more than 5,000 pages secret.
George Berdes, the chief consultant to the committee at the time,
said recently that the papers were classified because ``we had to
give assurances of confidentiality to sources.''
``This way, we were able to get better and more information,'' he
said.
But Berdes said that now, ``after 20 years, I think it should be
declassified.'' A committee staff aide said the question of
declassifying the papers is being studied.
Mary McCormick Maaga, author of a new book, ``Hearing the Voices
of Jonestown,'' said the government's refusal to release the
papers ``feeds this conspiracy theory mentality'' around
Jonestown.
``I don't need a conspiracy theory to understand all this, but
there are some loose ends,'' she said. ``The government has never
come clean about the ways they were harassing Peoples Temple.''
Trying to discover the truth about this and other Peoples
Temple-related rumors, Fielding McGehee, a North Dakota writer,
filed more than 200 Freedom of Information Act requests from 1978
to 1982 against six federal agencies, including the CIA and FBI.
McGehee's interest stems from the fact that two sisters of
McGehee's wife, Rebecca Moore, died at Jonestown.
Moore, a professor of religious studies at the University of North
Dakota, is the author of ``A Sympathetic History of Jonestown.''
``Lots of boxes of material went into the House committee files,''
McGehee said. ``It's like the supporting material on the Kenneth
Starr report, but it was never released. We asked Congress to
release it, but got no reply.''
There are, however, a few places where voluminous government
information about Peoples Temple is available.
In January, amateur historian Brian Csuk asked the State
Department what it had on Jonestown. To his surprise, the
department sent him nearly 6,100 pages of material. He has put a
lot of this information on a Web site at www.icehouse.net/zodiac.
The site contains copies of letters praising Jones from such
luminaries as former Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally and the
late San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk. It also has copies of
State Department cables about the mass murder-suicides sent from
the U.S. Embassy in Guyana, as well as a series of riveting
``situation reports'' describing the drama at Jonestown as U.S.
diplomats began to learn of the deaths.
Moore, the North Dakota professor, has created a Web site of
temple history and ``alternative considerations'' of the sect.
That site is at
www.und.nodak.edu/dept/philrel/jonestown/index.html.
Tilman Hausherr
The End To Innocent Acceptance Of Sects
Sharper scrutiny is Jonestown legacy
By Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer
13.11.1998
San Francisco Chronicle
When 50 members of a doomsday cult vanished last month in
Colorado, Hal Mansfield knew exactly how to get the world's
attention. ``This is Jonestown waiting to happen,'' said
Mansfield, director of the Religious Movement Resource Center in
Fort Collins, Colo.
Twenty years after the murder- suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, of
914 members of the Peoples Temple, the Rev. Jim Jones remains the
personification of cultic evil.
Two words are all it takes to demonize a new religious movement --
whether it deserves the label or not:
``Another Jonestown.''
Those who study cults, sects and new religious movements are
bitterly divided into two camps -- factions of experts branding
their adversaries as ``apologists'' or ``alarmists.''
J. Gordon Melton, founder of the Institute for the Study of
American Religion in Santa Barbara, said ``professional cult
hunters'' like Mansfield are too quick to see the potential for
mass suicide in the latest Christian sect or new religious
movement.
``They believe that all these groups are bad and brainwash their
members,'' he said.
In Melton's view, ``brainwashing doesn't exist.''
``Jonestown became the stereotype of a cult,'' Melton said. ``But
Jones was actually a member of a mainline Protestant denomination,
the Disciples of Christ, and was very involved in the ecumenical
movement in California. It's the story of a mainline church gone
bad, not a new religion.
``Around 2,500 people kill themselves every year in California,''
Melton added. ``It's not beyond reason to see that people in
religion can find something to die for. You don't need a
brainwashing model to explain that.
``Jim Jones and the members of Peoples Temple performed an act of
revolutionary suicide.''
Those in the Melton camp point out that most religions start off
in an intense ``cultic'' manner, clashing with the values of
mainstream culture.
ATTACKING `CULT APOLOGISTS'
Anti-cult leaders such as Margaret Singer, adjunct professor
emerita of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley,
said ``cult apologists'' like Melton ``blindly defend'' dangerous
sect leaders like Jones.
``Anything that calls itself a religion is, by definition, good,''
she said. ``People like Melton are not really scholars of group
pressure or group process. We really study these groups and
analyze how influence is put upon people by clever and conniving
people who want power.''
According to Singer and others on her side of the cult wars, a
destructive sect is easily distinguished from a legitimate
religion.
They say cults are marked by charismatic leaders who claim special
powers, promote an ``us vs. them'' philosophy, practice
brainwashing and use deceptive recruitment and fund-raising
techniques. Followers undergo dramatic changes in diet, sleep
patterns and privacy; become alienated from friends and family;
and are exploited financially, physically and sexually.
``Venal people see how easy it is to pick up the lonely and the
depressed and sell them a bill of goods,'' Singer said. ``There
are so many people out there looking for easy answers to life's
complicated problems.''
Those who know Monte Kim Miller, the Colorado doomsday prophet,
say the Jonestown comparisons are no exaggeration.
COLORADO GROUP ON THE RUN
Last month, Miller and about 50 members of his Concerned
Christians sect disappeared from their homes in the Denver area,
leaving behind hundreds of worried relatives.
They vanished in the days leading up to October 10, when Miller
prophesied that an apocalyptic disaster would wipe Denver off the
map.
Those who have watched the group think it may eventually resurface
in Israel. Miller, the self- proclaimed last prophet on earth,
predicts he will die in the streets of Jerusalem in December 1999
and reappear three days later.
Bill Honsberger, a Colorado evangelical missionary who has
monitored the group, notes that both Miller and Jones began their
ministries as respected religious leaders.
Miller even began as a speaker on the anti-cult circuit. ``Twelve
or 13 years ago, he was appearing in some of the biggest churches
in Denver, speaking out against the New Age movement,'' Honsberger
said.
In recent years, however, Miller said he could channel the voice
of God and began comparing himself to the two witnesses in the
apocalyptic pages of the Book of Revelation, the last chapter of
the Bible.
``We sat at his house with him for two hours,'' Honsberger
recalled. ``We started out talking about how he became a
Christian, and pretty soon he showed how he could speak for God.
He'd shift his position, contort his face, and say things like,
`God will kill you for opposing his true prophet.' ''
According to Honsberger, Miller preaches that his followers ``must
take up the cross and be willing to die for God. But you stand up
for God by being loyal to him. It's the same mentality as Jones,
but the manipulation is even more glaring. He has incredible
control.''
Mansfield said some of Miller's followers have called their
families since they disappeared last month to say they are all
right. But they would not reveal their location.
Mansfield also concurs with Honsberger about the Jim Jones
similarities.
``What's going on inside this guy's head now is anybody's guess,''
he said, ``but I think some sort of suicide is possible.''
RASH OF APOCALYPTIC SECTS
Singer noted that there has been no shortage of violent religious
sects in the 1990s, many of them with apocalyptic overtones.
Seventy-two members of the Branch Davidian Christian sect died
when a hellish inferno engulfed their compound in Waco, Texas. In
Japan, the Aum Shrini Kyo cult unleashed a nerve-gas attack on
subway riders. In Canada and Europe, 75 members of the Order of
the Solar Temple killed themselves in search of new life in a
place called Sirius.
And in the spring of 1997, 39 members of Heaven's Gate, a Southern
California cult blending Bible prophesy, spiritualism and UFO
lore, killed themselves in the belief that they would rendezvous
with a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
Janja Lolich, who runs the Cult Recovery and Information Center in
Alameda, said Jonestown remains the landmark event of the
anti-cult movement.
Lolich said he hoped the 20th anniversary of Jonestown will serve
as a warning for ``young people who don't have Jonestown in their
memory bank.''
``Often the public comes away with the idea that only wacky people
get involved in these groups,'' she said. ``But they are often
wonderful people with a real sense of idealism.''
NEW LIGHT ON THE TEMPLE
Focusing on the members of Peoples Temple -- and not just on Jim
Jones -- is the central concern of Mary McCormick Maaga in her new
book, ``Hearing the Voices of Jonestown.''
``Passion for social justice blinded them to their own cause,''
Maaga said. ``They increasingly focused on their detractors and
defectors and concerned relatives. They were importing food and
losing the battle against jungle diseases. Jones was addicted to
drugs.
``Their Christian communal socialist experiment wasn't working,
and they were very concerned about proving their enemies wrong.''
Reducing the complexity of Jonestown to a madman brainwashing his
vulnerable flock, Maaga said, is too simple an explanation.
``There were other people in leadership, and if they hadn't agreed
to the suicide, it couldn't have gone off,'' she said. ``But we
like to just focus on Jim Jones because it's easier to pinpoint
evil in a single human being.''
Tilman Hausherr
REMEMBERING JONESTOWN AND THE LESSONS WE NEVER LEARN
The Sacramento Bee
11.11.1998
By Peter H. King
Twenty years ago I was working out of a rented house
in Daly City. It was a tiny box of a place, pastel
in color, with a dirty shag carpet and an odor of
old newspapers. The San Francisco Examiner paid the
rent and called the house its North Peninsula
Bureau. There were no editors around, and I was the
sole reporter.
In late November I set out to write a story about
one woman's campaign to save some trees in her Daly
City neighborhood. I took the notes, but could not
write the article. Instead, I found myself taking
long naps on the rug, depressed, a portrait of
misplaced self- pity.
The week before, the Jonestown story had broken. For
a few frantic days I had been assigned to the main
city room, thrown into the thick of things. Now I
was back in the 'burbs, supposedly scrounging
features to fill the Peninsula section. I took this
as a setback.
Back then, still in my early 20s, I had not yet made
the seemingly obvious discovery that people in news
stories were more than names to be spelled with
accuracy, quotes to be jotted down. I had not yet
had my eyes pried open by this cutting and -- to me
-- arresting remark from a character in a Thomas
McGuane novel:
"People just kind of live their lives, Deke," the
novel's hero tells the small-town editor. "Y'know,
they're not out there just as cannon fodder for boys
with newspapers."
In the time I am writing about now, in that awful
San Francisco November of 1978, I was the
quintessential boy with newspaper. And those poor
souls of Jonestown, they were the cannon fodder.
Even today, 20 years later, the confession does not
come easily, but there it is. Jonestown was a
"story," and I was just dying to cover it. Some
things only time can teach.
I am drawn back now to that time by a series of
Jonestown reflections running this week in the San
Francisco Examiner. Nov. 18 will mark the 20-year
anniversary of the beginning of what the Examiner
labeled, for headline purposes, the "Days of
Darkness," a reference not only to the Jonestown
mass killings but also the City Hall assassinations,
eight days later, of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.
It's newspaper canon to mark anniversaries of major
tragedy, and I suppose there is some value in the
practice. The importance of not forgetting, in fact,
became a favorite theme of those who would look for
lessons in the murder and suicide of more than 900
cult members in a faraway jungle commune. Jim Jones
himself had struck the note, with the infamous
quotation, irresistible to newspaper ironists,
painted on a sign that hung in the center of his
compound: "THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE
CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT."
So what do I remember?
I remember the strange smell that rushed out of the
cargo planes as the coffins were unloaded at an air
base in Dover, Del. I had finagled my way back onto
the story, volunteering to forgo Thanksgiving for a
chance to escape Daly City. I remember encountering
the same, lingering odor again in Jonestown itself,
where I had been sent to cover a coroner's inquest
into the deaths.
I remember a night spent at a government house,
where a few Jonestown survivors and others were
lodged for the inquest. After everybody went to bed,
I slipped outside with another reporter. As jungle
fireflies swirled about us, we reviewed in whispers
the emerging evidence and all but convinced
ourselves that Jones had not shot himself, which was
the official version. Our theory was that he had
been shot by a survivor, quite possibly one of the
men now sleeping in the little house. We never did
go back inside.
I remember, too, the smile of Greg Robinson, the
young Examiner photographer who was killed in the
airstrip ambush that preceded the mass suicide. And
finally, I remember the faith I had, back then, that
it all meant something, that in this and all big
stories there were morals to be extracted, higher
purposes to be gleaned.
I am no longer so sure of this anymore.
The lessons, no matter how eloquently preached,
never do seem to take. Jonestown changed nothing for
the children of Waco, for the poor souls of Heaven's
Gate. Awful things happen and yes, they need to be
covered. From a distance of 20 years, however,
rarely do they seem as consequential as they did in
the heat of the moment. They just seem sad, and
utterly wasteful.
PETER H. KING's column appears Wednesdays and
Sundays in The Bee. Write him at P.O. Box 15779,
Sacramento, 95852, or call (916) 321- 1892; e-mail:
pking (at) mcclatchy.com
Tilman Hausherr
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/1998/11/12/MN82643.DTL&type=printable
_
Jones Captivated S.F.'s Liberal Elite
They were late to discover how cunningly he curried favor
San Francisco Chronicle
12.11.1998
By Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
------------------------------------------------------------------
On November 18, 1978, gunmen from the Peoples Temple opened fire
at a jungle airstrip in Guyana. Five people, including Rep. Leo
Ryan, were killed. Within hours, another 914 people had been
murdered or committed suicide at Jonestown, including temple
founder Jim Jones.
Jones had built his ministry into a force in San Francisco with a
program of helping the young, elderly and destitute. Supporters,
including powerful officials, defended him against allegations
that he was abusing followers.
The probes drove Jones to Guyana. When a visiting delegation led
by Ryan tried to leave with defectors, Jones turned to murder and
``revolutionary suicide.''
------------------------------------------------------------------
Before he became infamous for leading 913 people to their deaths
in the Guyanese jungle, the Rev. Jim Jones was the darling of San
Francisco's liberal establishment -- a man who could spread the
wealth to all the fashionable charities and, at a moment's notice,
marshal thousands of followers for a good cause.
Jones was a minister of the Disciples of Christ, but in San
Francisco he was best known as the suave if slightly sinister
leader of Peoples Temple, a flock of perhaps 8,000 people, mostly
poor and mostly black, who appeared to do everything Jones told
them to do.
With these willing workers, Jones made himself the perfect gift
for the liberal machine of U.S. Representatives Phillip and John
Burton, Assemblyman Willie Brown and Mayor George Moscone, which
was trying to consolidate its hold on San Francisco politics.
After Jonestown, the politicians were left to explain how they had
become so taken by Jones -- some of them pedaling away from their
close relationship to the sect leader, while others simply
admitted that they had been led astray.
``There wasn't anything magical about Jim's power,'' Timothy
Stoen, who spent nearly seven years in Peoples Temple as Jones'
attorney, said the other day.
``It was raw politics. He was able to deliver what politicians
want, which is power. And how do you get power? By votes. And how
do you get votes? With people. Jim Jones could produce 3,000
people at a political event.''
Jones first came to notice in San Francisco in September 1970,
when he started a fund to help the families of slain police
officers. It was the kind of generous and, at the same time,
politically astute gesture Jones would make. In the beginning, he
seemed almost to abjure any attention -- he would make a
contribution, then melt into the background.
But Stoen and other Peoples Temple observers said spreading the
money around was part of a plan Jones had to curry favor.
``They worked at it day and night,'' said the Rev. Cecil Williams,
pastor of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church and, at the time,
a friend of Jones'. ``They sat around talking about ways to get
things done. They had all kinds of schemes that they had worked
out.''
In 1972, the first warning signals about Jones went up when the
San Francisco Examiner profiled him in unflattering terms as an
influential rural preacher who called himself the Prophet and
claimed to be raising the dead. But ensuing official
investigations of Jones went nowhere.
A year later, Jones handed out grants to 12 newspapers, saying,
``We feel a responsibility to defend the free speech clause of the
First Amendment.'' He also bused members of his church to Fresno
to demonstrate on behalf of four Fresno Bee reporters who had been
jailed for refusing to reveal the names of their confidential
sources. It was about the last time Jones would be so friendly
with the press.
The turning point in Jones' drive for power came in 1975,
according to Tim Reiterman's and John Jacobs' exhaustive study,
``Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and his People.''
Jones' army of volunteers saturated San Francisco neighborhoods,
distributing slate cards for Moscone (running for mayor), Joseph
Freitas (district attorney) and Richard Hongisto (sheriff). All
three won.
``What you had here was a ready-made volunteer workforce,'' said
Agar Jaicks, who was chairman of the county Democratic Central
Committee, the governing body of the Democratic Party in San
Francisco. ``And you also had in Jones a man who touched a
component of the consensus power forces in the city, such as labor
and ethnicity groups, and he was very strong in the Western
Addition. So here was a guy who could provide workers for causes
progressives cared about.''
By March 1976, Herb Caen was writing items about tete-a-tetes
between Jones and then-Assemblyman Brown in political watering
holes like the old Bardelli's.
``Many a San Franciscan and many a project have received sizable
checks from Peoples Temple, accompanied by only a short note from
Jim Jones, saying, `We appreciate what you are doing,' '' Caen
wrote.
Jones spread his largesse widely. He gave money to the NAACP, the
Ecumenical Peace Institute and a senior citizens escort service.
Willie Brown and then-Governor Jerry Brown were seen at temple
services.
In September 1976, the Burtons, Willie Brown, Williams, Moscone,
radical academic Angela Davis, lawyer Vincent Hallinan, Lieutenant
Governor Mervyn Dymally and publisher Carlton Goodlett toasted
Jones at a big testimonial dinner. A month later, Moscone named
him to a seat on the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission.
``And it wasn't just the politicians,'' said Corey Busch, who was
Moscone's press secretary in 1975 and 1976. ``It was also the
media. He had books of positive press clippings.''
In fact, the San Francisco media appeared cowed. Aside from a
short, innocuous profile that ran in The Chronicle in April 1976,
little had been written about Jones' operation.
In late 1976, things began to change. Chronicle reporter Marshall
Kilduff (now a Chronicle editorial writer) decided to do his own
profile of Jones -- more a profile of a colorful San Francisco
character than anything else.
When he visited the temple during a service in January 1977,
Kilduff said in an interview the other day, he found his boss,
then- city editor Steve Gavin, sitting in the row reserved for
visitors.
Kilduff said that when he later proposed a story on Jones, Gavin
``said we had done a profile and that was sufficient. I went at
him several times, and said I thought we should do more. He didn't
see it that way.''
Kilduff, however, persevered and soon won the confidence of 10
temple defectors, who poured out their story to him. He eventually
collaborated with writer Phil Tracy, and they sold their story to
New West magazine, which published the piece in August 1977.
The article detailed beatings and fake ``cancer healings'' and
reported that the temple had forced members to turn over millions
from savings accounts and the sale of their homes. The piece
became the catalyst for Jones' flight to Guyana.
Other publications began to join the fray, notably the San
Francisco Examiner, which assigned Reiterman, Jacobs, Nancy Dooley
and other reporters to investigate Jones' operations.
Tough-minded reporting dogged Jones during the winter. In June
1978, one month after escaping from Jonestown, temple defector
Deborah Layton went public in a Chronicle interview with Kilduff
and gave a stark description of life at the temple's Guyana
stronghold.
After the mass murder-suicide, Gavin, who by then had left The
Chronicle, said in an interview, ``I was always wary of being
manipulated by them and conscious of the possibility, but I don't
think I was. I think all my decisions about Peoples Temple stories
were made on a professional basis.''
Reached earlier this week, Gavin said, ``That was a long time
ago,'' and declined to talk about it.
In the wake of Jonestown, Willie Brown said, ``If we knew then he
was mad, clearly we wouldn't have appeared with him. But it's not
fair to say what you would have done if you knew the kind of
madness that would take place years later.''
The mayor released a statement two weeks ago through his press
spokeswoman, Kandace Bender, that said, ``Jonestown was a tragedy
of the first order, and it remains a painful and sorrowful event
in our history. Not a year has gone by that I have not stopped to
remember San Francisco's terrible loss.''
Moscone was assassinated nine days after the Jonestown deaths.
After the deaths were revealed, he said, ``It's clear that if
there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I'm not
taking any responsibility. It's not mine to shoulder.''
------------------------------------------------------------------
CHRONOLOGY OF PEOPLES TEMPLE
1953: Jim Jones, a minister who had not been ordained by any
church, opens a small church of his own in Indianapolis.
1964: Jones is finally ordained a minister in the Disciples of
Christ.
1965-71: Jones, convinced a nuclear holocaust is imminent, moves
his congregation to town of Redwood Valley, just north of Ukiah.
His church prospers and he is named foreman of the Mendocino
County grand jury.
1971: Peoples Temple buys a building at Geary Boulevard and
Fillmore Street in San Francisco and a second church in Los
Angeles. Headquarters of the sect moves to San Francisco.
1971-73: Temple congregation grows, and the church offers social
programs, jobs and health care.
1974: The temple negotiates a lease with the government of Guyana
for a remote parcel of land near the Venezuelan border.
1975: The temple supplies crowds for rallies and turns out
platoons of disciplined campaign workers for liberal political
candidates in San Francisco.
1976: Mayor George Moscone appoints Jones to the city's Housing
Authority Commission. Jones attracts favorable media attention and
is wooed by national politicians. But he also displays signs of
megalomania and paranoia, never leaving the temple without
bodyguards and packing public meetings with temple members, who
applaud his every word.
Summer 1977: New West magazine prints charges of temple defectors
who tell of beatings, fake healings and secret piles of cash and
property holdings.
August 1977: Jones moves to his temple outpost in Guyana, now
called Jonestown.
1977-78: Many temple members emigrate to Jonestown for a new life
Jones has promised them. Eventually, the settlement's population
exceeds 1,000.
June 1978: Temple defector Deborah Layton, in interview with The
Chronicle, describes Jonestown as a place with armed guards,
public beatings and mass suicide drills.
Fall 1978: Relatives of Jonestown residents ask for an
investigation.
November 7, 1978: Representative Leo Ryan of San Mateo announces
he will visit Jonestown to see what is going on.
November 17: Ryan and his group arrive in Jonestown and are
treated to a cultural festival.
November 18: Some residents pass notes to Ryan's party, asking to
be taken out of Jonestown. Ryan decides to leave, but as he and
his party wait at the airstrip, they are shot by temple gunmen.
Dead are Ryan, NBC staffers Robert Brown and Don Harris, San
Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and Patricia Parks,
a temple member who was trying to leave. The rest of the
delegation hides in the jungle.
November 18: Jones orders his flock to kill themselves by taking
cyanide. Those who refuse are forced to take the poison. Children
are killed with injections. Eventually, 914 bodies are found in
Jonestown, including that of Jones himself.
Haunted by Memories of Hell
San Francisco Chronicle
12.12.1998
By Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
------------------------------------------------------------------
On November 18, 1978, gunmen from the Peoples Temple opened fire
at a jungle airstrip in Guyana. Five people, including Rep. Leo
Ryan, were killed. Within hours, another 914 people had been
murdered or committed suicide at Jonestown, including temple
founder Jim Jones.
Jones had built his ministry into a force in San Francisco with a
program of helping the young, elderly and destitute. Supporters,
including powerful officials, defended him against allegations
that he was abusing followers.
The probes drove Jones to Guyana. When a visiting delegation led
by Ryan tried to leave with defectors, Jones turned to murder and
``revolutionary suicide.''
------------------------------------------------------------------
There are no pictures of Fred Lewis' wife or seven children on the
walls of his tidy San Francisco duplex. He wants no such reminders
of the horror.
Twenty years ago next Wednesday, Lewis' entire immediate family
and 19 other relatives died in the mass murder-suicide at the Rev.
Jim Jones' cult compound in Guyana. He lost more family than
anyone else in Jonestown that day.
The bitterness and grief, the memories of the poisonings and
shootings that left him so totally alone, are never more than the
blink of an eye away.
``It is always with me, always,'' said Lewis, 69, sitting at his
kitchen table and leafing through clippings he usually pulls out
only on the Jonestown anniversary day.
``That . . .'' he struggled with his words, ``that . . . man Jones
took my family.''
Lewis does have photos -- hundreds of them in two white vinyl
albums, showing smiling sons, daughters, cousins and more, at
birthdays, in school group shots or playing around the house. The
albums stay in a cupboard downstairs with the news clippings.
He got the entire pile out recently and began to smile through the
sadness writ deep in his eyes.
``These are my two oldest sons. They could kick a football almost
goal to goal,'' he said, jabbing a finger on an album page at two
strapping teenagers grinning widely. He flipped to a portrait of a
little girl, around 10, beaming under billowing black curls tied
back with a pink ribbon.
``This was Lisia, as cute as anything in this world, so full of
fun,'' Lewis said. Others flicked by as the pages turned: ``This
was a birthday cake I made for them one year. . . . This is the
whole bunch at Halloween -- look at them laughing. . . . This was
us hanging around.''
The memories of the cousins and uncles and nieces come slower,
layered over by pain and decades. ``The names are hard to bring to
mind after all these years, and there were so many,'' Lewis said,
the smile leaving his lips. He snapped the album shut.
``Anyway, most everyone in these albums is gone, all gone,'' he
said, voice dropping to a whisper.
There is a separate stone marker for Lewis' family at the mass
grave at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, where 406 of the 913
Jonestown victims are buried. The names of the secondary relatives
may be fuzzy for Lewis, but he can call off the eight in his
immediate circle: wife, Doris, 46 when she died; and children
Lisia, 16; Karen, 15; Freddie Jr., 13; Barry, 11; Adrian, 9;
Cassandra, 8; and Alisa, 7.
``I miss them,'' he said quietly. ``I have a fine life now. But I
miss them.''
A big man with smile crinkles on his cheeks, Lewis does not come
off as a sad fellow. He is quiet, polite, and the house he keeps
with his girlfriend is pin-neat down to the shiny plastic on the
living room furniture.
If the subject of Jonestown does not come up, he is fine. That's
why he usually doesn't mention it.
Except at anniversary times.
The long nightmare began one Saturday night in August 1978, when
Lewis came home from his job as a butcher at Petrini's grocery to
find the family apartment in the Fillmore District cleaned out and
everyone gone.
Lewis learned much later that Doris had taken the kids and, with
the help of Peoples Temple members, carried off all the furniture,
bound for Guyana. But at the time, all he knew was they had
vanished. ``She left me one mattress and no note,'' he said. ``I
thought they'd been kidnapped.''
The family had been doing just fine until then, Lewis said --
except for Doris' two-year association with Jones' temple.
The two had been married 17 years and were devout Baptists when
Doris learned of the temple from friends. Once Jones' siren call
took hold of her, she ditched mainstream religion for good.
The temple had taken their kids on swimming and horse-riding field
trips, a rare treat for the inner-city youngsters. The temple made
Doris feel strong and welcome. It promised her a racism-free
spiritual Utopia.
To this day, Lewis said, ``I don't know why she got so involved,''
but it became quickly clear that ``she thought it was better than
what we already had.''
She initially tried to get him to join, too. `But I never did
believe in this man (Jones),'' said Lewis. ``Any time a man starts
talking about where he is God, and where you should throw away the
Bible . . . I don't want anything to do with him.''
Still, the cult didn't spring straight to mind as an explanation
for the family's disappearance. ``Our marriage was good and that
temple stuff didn't really get in our way,'' he said. ``Doris was
working at the post office, I had a good job and the kids were
going to school. What more could you ask for?''
The police sent him to the district attorney's office, which sent
him a letter saying it would keep a report file open. He checked
at the Peoples Temple on Geary Boulevard, but nobody would let him
in the door or answer his questions.
``I went to work and told them my family was gone and they all
said, `Fred, you're kidding,' '' Lewis said. ``I was crying, but
everybody told me it's not true, they'll be back.''
Lewis opened the photo album and stared at a photo of Doris, lying
on their bed just before that summer and grinning under her huge
Afro. ``But it was true,'' he said, chuckling ruefully.
Months went by before rumors filtered in that the family had gone
somewhere with temple members. Then he got the first of six
letters from Lisia.
``She said she missed me, and then she talked about what they were
doing there,'' Lewis said. ``The other kids would put little notes
on the letters, but they didn't really say much. I tried to call
Jonestown, but they wouldn't let any of my family come to the
phone.''
He remembers only fragmented details of what they wrote, and has
not read the letters since the massacre. He said he still can't.
Then on November 18 came the hammer blow.
``I was at work when a man came running in and said Congressman
Leo Ryan was killed,'' Lewis remembered. ``I dropped my tools, ran
home, and there on the TV they were showing those awful pictures
of the people lying on the ground, and rolling those names of the
dead. My family was on it. I knew that was it then.''
The next few years are a blur of memory: fury, court dates as
survivors sought reparations and return of the bodies of loved
ones. Sorrow. Interviews with police.
``I had too many times with the bottle, and it was like that off
and on for years until my girlfriend made me give up smoking and
drinking,'' Lewis said. ``I went to their grave every day for
eight years, but she made me stop that, too.
``She told me I was going to wreck myself, and she was right. So
now I just go once a year and sometimes on one of the kids'
birthdays,'' Lewis said. ``I take them flowers.''
Lewis has managed, in the past two decades, to carry on with a
second life after so many deaths.
He got an undisclosed settlement as part of a class-action claim
against the temple of more than $8 million, and retired from his
butcher job in 1982.
``We are just fine now and try not to think of those days,'' said
Francis Revere, his loving partner for the past 15 years. She
doesn't talk about Jonestown much, anytime, anywhere.
As the years wore by, Lewis learned to channel his displaced love
and became a sort of grandfather figure to those around him -- his
Bayview district house is the one the neighborhood kids all come
to after school to play with the bicycles, skates and games he
keeps for them in the garage.
``He's a real nice man, lets the kids all play with his stuff,''
said Marquise Bishop, 8, bouncing a ball on the sidewalk outside
one day. ``He smiles a lot.''
The ugly memories only really crop up once a year. Lewis organizes
an anniversary service at Evergreen, and he and his niece Jynona
Norwood talk each time of wanting a memorial erected to all the
victims. But it's hard to push the idea when what you really want
to do is leave the past behind.
Lewis does not keep in touch with other survivors or family.
``Everyone from this city is dead, and the other survivors don't
want to be reminded,'' he said. ``I don't either.''
The only picture he displays from those happy days before the end
is a shot of himself at Petrini's, trim and jaunty in his white
apron and a red carnation.
``Those were the days before everything happened,'' he said,
holding the frame for a moment and smiling distantly. He put it
back on the dresser carefully. ``That's all I need to see,'' he
said.
Tilman Hausherr
20 years later, Jonestown remains an enigma
The Fresno Bee
14.11.1998 ?
By MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Twenty years ago this month, Tim
Stoen was holed up in hell.
He and his wife had gone to Guyana with U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan
in one last attempt to retrieve their son, who had been
claimed by cult leader Jim Jones as his own.
Their hope died as they heard that Ryan and four others had
been shot to death in an ambush at the Jonestown airstrip.
They knew it was only a matter of time before Jones followed
through his long-threatened mass murder-suicide.
"It was really a horrific night ... knowing at any moment that our
son was going to be dead. It was utterly hopeless. If anything
could remind you of hell, it would be that moment, that feeling,"
Stoen says.
More than 900 people died after Jones ordered his followers
to drink cyanide-poisoned punch. Nearly one-third were
children. Among them -- John Victor Stoen, aged 6.
"The lesson for me is that every group ... has to make sure
that they hold their leader to a set of standards, constantly
hold that leader accountable," Stoen says.
Stoen, a former San Francisco prosecutor, had represented
Jones in California and became a trusted member of the
Peoples Temple.
Now in private practice in Colorado, Stoen remembers letting
his enthusiasm over the good things, like seeing hard-core
heroin addicts go straight, overwhelm his misgivings about
the bad -- corporal punishment and thought control.
"I said, 'Look how altruistic, how socialistic the people are
becoming. Yes, Jones is heavy handed and he's
idiosyncratic, but it's working.' "
* * *
Jynona Norwood was hiding out in a San Francisco suburb
20 years ago. She had gone there with her young son, Ed,
afraid that Jones would sweep him off to Jonestown.
Her lesson from Jonestown: Beware of false prophets.
"I never believed that Jim ... was a minister from his heart,"
says Norwood. She was one of the few in her family to resist
Jones' charm. Twenty-seven of her relatives, including her
mother, died in Jonestown.
She believes that Jones, son of a Klansman but adopted
father of a rainbow family, used interracial tolerance as a
powerful recruiting tool for the poor blacks and privileged
whites who flocked to his services.
"He knew that was the door in to black folks' hearts and
idealistic, altruistic white people who wanted to see the end of
racism."
Norwood, now a Los Angeles pastor, helps organize yearly
memorial services at the mass grave in Oakland where about
400 Jonestown victims are buried.
She is trying to raise funds for a wall to memorialize the dead
and warn the living.
"They deserve to be remembered," she says. "They were our
neighbors. They were our loved ones. They were our friends."
* * *
Twenty years ago, Jackie Speier was lying on a Guyana
airstrip with five bullet wounds. An aide to U.S. Rep. Leo
Ryan, she had gone with him to investigate Jonestown.
She would go on to become a state assemblywoman and this
month was elected to the state senate.
If there is a lesson in Jonestown, it's that "the menace of cults
still lingers; it's as real today as it was 20 years ago," Speier
recently told the San Francisco Examiner. "No one should
ever be so arrogant as to believe it couldn't happen again."
pastor...@my-dejanews.com
til...@berlin.snafu.de (Tilman Hausherr) wrote:
> Here an earlier article, about the girl who warned
> about what was to come. I append her affdavit at the bottom.
>> 20 Years Later, Jonestown Survivor Confronts Horrors
>>
>> San Francisco Chronicle
>> 2.11.1998
>>
>> By Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
>>
>> For a young woman of 17, flinging herself on the
>> world after the cloistered atmosphere of an English
>> boarding school, Peoples Temple seemed daring and
>> exciting.
-snip-
>> Jones died from a bullet to the brain. Layton's
>> mother, Lisa, had died of cancer 10 days before the
>> mass suicide. Her brother, Larry, later became the
>> only person ever charged in connection with the
>> airstrip massacre and, after two trials, was
>> convicted in 1986 of conspiring to murder Ryan. He
>> is serving a life sentence in the federal prison at
>> Lompoc. "If I hadn't been sent to Georgetown that
>> day (in May)," Deborah Layton says now, "I would
>> have died in Jonestown. I would never have left
>> Jonestown with Congressman Ryan. In fact, I would
>> have been on that truck, with a rifle."
>>
-snip-
>> AFFIDAVIT OF DEBORAH LAYTON BLAKEY
-snip-
>> (signed) Deborah Layton Blakey
>>
Yes, let's remember that it's Deborah Layton *Blakey* we're talking
about, whose husband, George Philip Blakey, was was a CIA affiliate who
trained UNITA rebels in Angola, and who made the $650,000 down payment on the
jonestown property, *and* whose father Lawrence Layton who was "Chief of
Chemical and Ecological Warfare Research" at Utah's Dugway Proving
Grounds...He donated large dollars to jones. Good she just "happened to get
out in time"...Now she's apparently being groomed to be the new poster-lady
for the anti-cult cult
Jonestown didn't just "happen." If you're curious about how those in power
create and use cults like jonestown, check out URL:
http://www.io.com/~patrik/jimjones.htm
--pastor flash
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by
public incredulity." --Marshall McLuhan"
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
Tilman Hausherr
12.11.1998
By Andrew Quinn
OAKLAND, Calif., Nov 13 (Reuters) - They called it ``the Promised
Land,'' but 20 years later its real name, Jonestown, still sends an icy
knife stabbing through the heart.
Deep in the tropical jungles of Guyana, more than 900 hopeful Americans
followed their charismatic leader on a mission to build a utopian
paradise. Instead, Jonestown became the site of the largest mass suicide
in modern history.
Deborah Layton lived in Jonestown but did not die there.
Among the few members of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple to leave Guyana
alive, Layton was a defector who raised an alarm over what was brewing
in the cult's armed jungle camp.
Now living in a cheerful house outside San Francisco, she ventured back
into the darkness of the Peoples Temple in an attempt to pull meaning
out of the abyss where, on Nov. 18, 1978, hundreds of men, women and
children choked down the cyanide-laced punch that snuffed out their
lives.
``I am doing this for the sake of my daughter,'' Layton said, sitting in
a sunny living room adorned with photographs of a smiling 12-year-old
girl. ``I don't want her to grow up fearful.
I want her to understand her mother's life.''
Layton's effort to exhume memories of Jonestown has resulted in a book,
``Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in
the Peoples Temple.''
It also took her back to Jonestown, a trip riddled with shame and guilt.
Her mother, who joined the cult in part to be closer to her, lies buried
deep in the jungle after dying of cancer just 10 days before the cult's
horrific final act.
A LIFE SENTENCE
Her brother Larry, who introduced his sister to the idealistic,
multiethnic Peoples Temple, is serving a life sentence in prison, the
only person ever charged in connection with the group's deadly attack on
U.S. Representative Leo Ryan of California at a Guyanese airstrip -- the
bloody prelude to the cult's last night of terror and despair.
Deborah Layton got out of Jonestown in May, 1978. Once one of Jones'
trusted lieutenants, she had grown increasingly worried that the
temple's adored ``Father'' was leading his flock in a dangerous
direction. She says her escape was a simple matter of listening to a
voice inside her soul -- a voice Jones had struggled to drown out with
hysterical rantings and midnight suicide drills.
``They tell you that it is wrong, that the voice is you trying to be
selfish, trying to shut out the group,'' Layton said. ``It is what saved
me.''
Her ``inner voice'' had once ruled her life. A rebellious 17-year-old
from Berkeley, she drifted to the Peoples Temple in 1970 because its
progressive programme of social action reminded her of the Peace Corps.
``These were good people, they weren't evil,'' she said. ``I was young
and I needed structure. The people who joined the Peoples Temple wanted
to be part of something bigger, feeding the poor or helping the homeless
or whatever. The organisation did not start out bad, it was Jim Jones
who was deceitful.''
While Jones recruited new members with shows of religious devotion,
those in the group soon found themselves working for what amounted to a
rigid political cell devoted to advancing their leader.
By 1974, as Jones was establishing his headquarters in San Francisco,
Layton had risen high in the hierarchy. Although she herself had been
sexually abused by Jones, she steeled herself into rigid obedience to
``Father,'' who was ratcheting up the level of paranoia and fear.
NO HINTS OF VIOLENCE TO COME
Little of this was visible on the outside. With his progressive
credentials and photogenic, multiracial flock, Jones quickly became a
San Francisco powerbroker, feted by the likes of then First Lady
Rosalynn Carter and then State Assemblyman Willie Brown, now the city's
mayor.
Sent reeling by a 1977 press expose and several defections, Jones told
Temple members they were moving out of range of ``the racists and the
enemies'' to Guyana -- ``the Promised Land.''
``It was like a dark, hot desert. There was nothing there,'' Layton said
of Jonestown, where Peoples Temple agents had already set up a
bare-bones ``agricultural project'' in the jungle. ``When you saw it,
you knew it was an evil place.''
The exodus to Guyana began in the summer of 1977. Early arrivals radioed
back to San Francisco that Jones' promises had come true and that it was
indeed a paradise. Those left behind to wrap up the Temple's affairs,
including Layton and her mother, were eager to join the main group.
They did so in December. After a lengthy flight, followed by a 30-hour
boat trip up the Kaituma River and an agonizing trek by flatbed truck,
they arrived at Jonestown. The moment she arrived and looked into the
eyes of Jonestown veterans, Layton knew it had gone wrong.
``When I saw their faces ... they were so lost,'' she said of the
frightened, subdued crowd that silently watched her group arrive at the
makeshift camp of tents and cabins. ``I could feel them watching me,
that I came from that other world that they would never get back to. And
they never did.''
In the suffocating heat of Guyana, fed by alcohol and drugs, Jones'
megalomania burst into evil flower. Jonestown, far from a happy commune,
was a work camp where Temple members, who toiled dawn-to-dusk under
armed guard, were subjected to nightly harangues from a leader obsessed
with imaginary threats from ``traitors'' and ``mercenaries.''
PUNISHMENT IN 'THE BOX'
Disobedience could bring punishment in ``the Box,'' a stifling,
underground cubicle no bigger than a coffin, and any night could
suddenly become a ``White Night'' -- Jones' code for a mass suicide
drill.
The exhaustion, and the fear, left most Temple members incapable of
resisting, Layton said. ``In insanity, there is no way to have clarity.
You can't think. You don't know what to do. That's the real terror of
it.''
Layton believes she, too, would have perished at Jonestown if she had
not been sent on a mission to the Guyanese capital of Georgetown in May,
1978. There, her ``inner voice'' now coming in loud and clear, she
slipped away from the group and out of the country, leaving her
cancer-stricken mother behind.
``I felt I had to get out in order to go back and save her,'' Layton
said. ``I didn't know I would never see her again.''
Largely thanks to Layton's testimony upon her return to the United
States, Congressman Ryan launched a fact-finding trip to Jonestown in
November, 1978. It cost him his life and set in motion the dreadful
final act for the Peoples Temple.
Along with four others in his group, Ryan was gunned down on an airstrip
by Temple guards including Layton's brother Larry, acting on orders from
Jones.
Back at Jonestown, convinced that Ryan's arrival heralded an apocalyptic
attack by his enemies, ``Father'' shepherded his frightened children
through a final White Night. A total of 912 people died by cyanide.
Jones was shot through the head.
Layton says there is little sense to make of the Peoples Temple tragedy.
Cults, she said, will be around as long as there are people whose hopes
get the better of their fears and who stop questioning.
She closed her own book on Jonestown this year when she revisited the
overgrown site of the cult's jungle camp with a documentary crew.
``I went looking for something, some part of the people who had died,''
Layton said. ``But if there is such as thing as essence of people or
spirit they were not there. They had fled.
And that is good.''
Tilman Hausherr
Modesto death added to toll of massacre
The Modesto Bee
15.11.1998
By Lisa Millegan, Bee staff writer
Modesto residents rejoiced when they learned that native son Michael
Prokes, a publicist for Jim Jones, had survived the 1978 mass suicide of
more than 900 people in Guyana.
Four months later, their elation turned to tears when Prokes shot
himself in the head after a news conference in a Modesto motel.
Seconds earlier, Prokes had read a lengthy statement discussing the
reasons so many of his friends died in South America. "They died for all
those who suffer oppression," he said. "I refuse to let my black
brothers and sisters and others in Jonestown die in vain."
Prokes, 31, was pronounced dead three hours later in a Modesto
hospital.
Prokes was born in Modesto in 1947 and graduated in 1965 from Davis
High School, where he was a four-year honor student and member of the
football team. He attended Modesto Junior College, then earned a
bachelor of science degree in communications from California State
University, Fullerton, in 1969. Friends said he was a member of the
Second Church of Christ, Scientist, in Modesto.
He worked as a television reporter in the early 1970s, serving as
Stockton bureau chief for KXTV Channel 10.
It was through his work that he met Jim Jones, the charismatic
preacher of San Francisco's Peoples Temple. Shortly after a television
interview with Jones, Prokes gave his resignation and decided to join
the church.
Prokes told reporters at his final news conference that he was an
"informant" when he first joined the temple. But he said he didn't
remain one long.
"I came to realize that the temple was probably the only hope for the
many people it was helping off the streets, off of drugs, out of crime
and out of mental institutions, jails and prisons," he told the media.
In Guyana, Prokes had assisted Jones with building a new community,
free of the perceived harassment the church was facing in California. He
remained in contact with his family and had invited his mother to join
him in South America.
After the mass suicide, Prokes' family was in agony wondering what
had become of Michael. With the family's blessings and with the help of
the U.S. State Department, Modesto Bee reporter J. Robert Bazemore
boarded a commercial jet four days after the tragedy to find Prokes in
Guyana.
Within a few days, Bazemore found Prokes and interviewed him
extensively about the Jonestown community. Prokes told Bazemore that he
knew about prior suicide drills but claimed he was not present when they
took place.
Prokes was detained briefly in Guyana, where he was questioned by
Guyana officials. Eventually, he was allowed to return home to spend
Christmas with his mother in Modesto.
Friends described Prokes as a quiet, conservative student who was not
overly religious. A teacher said Prokes was a "sensitive kid with some
social conscience."
Four months after Prokes returned to Modesto, he told The Bee he had
a statement to make and asked editors if he could hold a news conference
in the newsroom. Editors denied the request after Prokes told them he
intended to bring television reporters. He then decided to hold the news
conference in a motel.
Prokes walked to the bathroom immediately after reading a five-page
statement praising Jim Jones. As he walked out, he pulled the plug on
one of the television lights. Seconds later, reporters heard a gunshot.
Two television cameramen pushed the door open and found Prokes
crumpled on the floor inside. Bazemore, trained in advanced first aid as
a ski patrolman, knelt to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
The Bee published this photograph of the scene captured by Bee
photographer Debbie Noda.
http://www.modbee.com/special/jonestown/
Bazemore took an early retirement in 1992 and now lives in Colorado.
Tilman Hausherr
Newsday
15.11.1998
SEDUCTIVE POISON: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of
Life and Death in the People's Temple, by Deborah
Layton. Anchor, 309 pp., $23.95.
IT'S HARDLY the JFK assassination, but many of us
Americans over 35 can remember where we were, what
we were doing and what we thought when we heard, on
Nov. 18, 1978, that 918 members of the People's
Temple had committed suicide by drinking
cyanide-laced punch in a jungle outpost in Guyana.
Not yet accustomed - or maybe inured - to the
disasters of group-think that would lead to the mass
murders/suicides of the Branch Davidian and Heaven's
Gate cults, Americans were stunned: Why had so many
men, women and children so blindly followed their
leader, the Rev. Jim Jones, to destruction?
Deborah Layton, then 25 years old, was less
surprised. Six months before the debacle, Layton had
escaped the cult and tried to warn the U.S.
government about the dangers in Guyana. It was her
revelations, in fact, that were partly responsible
for the investigation initiated by California
congressman Leo Ryan, an investigation that ended
with Ryan's murder at the Georgetown, Guyana,
airport and the subsequent mass suicide. Apparently,
the U.S. government was having a hard time believing
such a thing would happen, even though Layton
described several "White Nights" during which Jones
would awaken his parishioners, line them up and feed
them a placebo poison, all to test their loyalty.
Layton clearly carries some guilt about the deaths
(her brother Larry is still in jail for conspiring
to kill Ryan, and her mother, a church member, would
likely have been one of the suicides had she not
died of cancer a few days earlier). In her memoir,
"Seductive Poison," she tries to explain her
seven-year association with "Father" Jones. A wild,
upper-middle-class Berkeley daughter of a German
Jewish mother and a strict southern father, Layton
saw herself as "an outcast," a "misunderstood
underdog"; when introduced to the charismatic Jones
by her much older brother Larry, she felt whole. "At
last," she writes, "what I had yearned for all my
life happened, an important adult found me smart,
worthwhile and interesting."
During her stint as a financial adviser (sending
millions of members' dollars to foreign banks in
Jones' name) and PR "executive" (organizing public
events to convince local politicians of the validity
of the church) at the temple headquarters in San
Francisco, Layton continued to believe she was
becoming enlightened. When Jones summoned her to
have sex with him in the back of his traveling bus,
she trusted he was operating for her good; even when
he later publicly humiliated her as the sexual
aggressor, she stayed firm. Like a classic battered
wife, she blamed herself for having appetites. It
was not until she was sent to the "Promised Land" in
Guyana that the bright, rebellious and questioning
Layton began to re-emerge.
Even she couldn't help but wonder why the church
members were living in mosquito-infested barracks,
sharing communal makeshift toilets and suffering
brutal beatings for which they were then denied
basic medical treatments while Jones had
electricity, all manner of culinary delicacies and
sexual partners - and complete freedom.
In Layton's copiously detailed retelling, it was
these specific inequities that eventually convinced
her to flee, but 20-year hindsight is a funny thing:
Throughout this long story, she hints that she'd
always had doubts about the temple's so-called
socialist agenda, particularly the Jonesian dictum
that all white men were homosexual and the
reverend's insistence that members have no contact
with those on the outside. She knew she was being
manipulated, and yet for seven long years she was
unable to leave. A reader - who, of course, also has
the benefit of that hindsight - might become
frustrated.
Reading Layton's story is a lot like sitting through
a bad horror film: Just get out! you want to scream,
as the hero stumbles into yet another obvious trap.
But Layton did eventually break free, and the scenes
of her trying to convince first the Guyanese
consulate and later the U.S. government that there
was something very, very rotten in the camp at
Jonestown are among the most riveting and painful in
the book. Had she devoted more space to Jones' very
close relationships with the liberal luminaries of
the time - he was appointed by then-San Francisco
Mayor George Moscone to, among other things, a
position on the Human Rights Commission! - her
paralysis might be more understandable. (Though
former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter
Charles Krause says, in his introduction, that Jim
Jones was "always a charlatan," it was not until
1977, just a year before the suicides, that the
intrepid San Francisco press - in this case, New
West magazine - finally published a critical article
about him.) Deborah Layton was just one scared,
lonely college dropout in a love/hate relationship
with authority and, like so many others, in search
of "meaning." The tragedy here is that it took her
so long to find it and that when she did, the
authorities were fatally slow to listen.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385489838/denniserlichdefe/
Sales stat is at 102 - i.e. it is close to the top100. Rebecca Moore's
book is at 1,247,665. Maybe Rebecca shouldn't ask over $100 for her
jonestown apologist book ("a sympathetic history of jonestown") !!!
Catherine Wessinger was smarter - her apologist book is priced at $20.
Of course this doesn't change that people don't buy it, and her sales
stat is at 91,347.
Tilman
Tilman Hausherr
FINDING MEANING FROM JONESTOWN 20 YEARS LATER
Sacramento Bee
15.11.1998
By John Jacobs Mcclatchy Newspapers Political Editor
The mind of man is capable of anything -- because
everything is in it, all the past as well as all the
future.
-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given
you because you would not be able to live them. And
the point is, to live everything. Live the questions
now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without
noticing it, live along some distant day into the
answer.
-- Rainier Maria Rilke
THE PHONE call is permanently etched in my memory. I
was puttering around my Telegraph Hill apartment on
a late Saturday afternoon 20 years ago next
Wednesday when one of my editors at the San
Francisco Examiner rang up.
There's been a shooting at the airport near
Jonestown, she said. Greg Robinson was dead,
Congressman Ryan was dead, others were dead or
wounded. The city desk had not yet heard from Tim.
Could I come in? I said I was nursing a cold and my
car had a dead battery. She said she'd try other
reporters.
Before I had even put down the phone, the shocking
news suddenly sank in. Greg Robinson was an Examiner
photographer, a friend and colleague. Leo Ryan was
leading a fact-finding tour of journalists and
"Concerned Relatives" to Jonestown, Guyana, a tiny
country on the northeastern shoulder of South
America. He was investigating whether the Rev. Jim
Jones was holding nearly 1,000 members of his
Peoples Temple against their will in concentration
camp conditions in the rain forest, hours from
civilization.
And Tim was Tim Reiterman, an Examiner investigative
reporter whose explosive stories on Jones and
Peoples Temple in August 1977 had helped prompt
Jones into moving some 900 people from San Francisco
to Jonestown -- his escape pod -- to avoid more
scrutiny. Tim was also a friend and colleague,
traveling with the Ryan party.
I called back immediately. "I'll take a cab," I
said. "I'll be there in 10 minutes."
I was 28 years old. I couldn't possibly know as I
headed into the newsroom that day that I was about
to embark on the most important, tragic, sensational
and compulsively gripping story of my journalism
career. I would learn in ways I never before
comprehended that true evil exists. The world press
soon descended on Guyana, as indeed I did,
transmitting horrendous images to a shocked world of
bloated bodies lying face down in the jungle heat,
their dead children buried under them.
The story would consume me for the next four years
and take me to Guyana four times, twice to Jonestown
itself. I first went to Jonestown a week after more
than 900 bodies, most of them African American, were
removed by U.S. soldiers and shipped home for
burial. I returned near the first anniversary of the
day Ryan, Robinson and the others were murdered at
the Port Kaituma airstrip as they attempted to board
planes home. Seven miles away, in his jungle
encampment, the paranoid and delusional Jim Jones
ordered his followers to commit an act of
"revolutionary suicide," to take their lives by
drinking fruit punch laced with cyanide.
They started with the babies. For them, as with most
of the others, it wasn't suicide. It was murder.
In early 1979, Reiterman, his own wounds healed,
approached me. He had a book contract and wanted my
help. I agreed almost instantaneously. This would be
no quickie. We would take the time and space we
needed to tell what happened as best we could. The
result, Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim
Jones and His People, published in 1982 (and long
since out of print), was our effort to show in 600
pages who Jones was and where he came from, who
joined his movement and what possessed them to leave
their homes and families and follow a mad preacher
9,000 miles to their doom.
Essential to this task was not merely unmasking the
charismatic leader in all his complexities. To make
comprehensible the behavior of his followers, we had
to restore humanity to all the Temple members
dehumanized by the initial mass media reports,
adding flesh and bones and dreams and aspirations to
those who had been demonized as crazed,
one-dimensional cultists.
What we found was disturbing beyond measure. They
were, in a word, like us -- and like many people we
knew.
They joined Jones because they wanted to make the
world a better place, or achieve the kind of racial
justice and brotherhood Jones promised, or because
they found Peoples Temple to be warm and embracing
-- for some the first such environment they ever
experienced. For the many black members, the Temple
offered acceptance and haven from an often hostile
and racist world. For the older ones, Jones' phony
"faith healings" cemented the bond.
Once there, through Jones's sophisticated mind
control techniques, Temple members began to be
compromised, bit by bit, year by year. Voluntarily
or through coercion and peer pressure they renounced
their previous lives, their families, their
fortunes, their independent identity, their sexual
integrity and, ultimately, their free will. And
then, for most, it was too late to get out. They had
invested too much in Jones to turn back now. He was
God. They believed in him.
TWENTY YEARS later, the images still haunt me.
* Walking through Jonestown, I see small syringes
half buried in the red clay mud. These were used to
squirt poison down the throats of infants and
toddlers. Nearby, in the hushed quiet of a newly
created ghost town, stands the preschool nursery.
The day's lesson plan is still chalked on a
blackboard: "1) perceptual motor skills; 2) water
colors; 3) play dough; 4) paper cutting; 5) sandbox,
manipulative toys."
* In the open air, colonial-style lobby of the Park
Hotel in Georgetown, the capital city, I debrief
Temple defectors and other survivors who escaped
Jonestown that day. I interview two young men, who,
a week earlier, would not have hesitated to kill me
if Jones had given the order. Now, they ask me how
the 49ers are doing and if the Northern California
drought has ended. This is Eichmann's "banality of
evil."
A defector explains how Jones ordered Gideon Bibles
in bulk for his followers to use as toilet paper. A
New York Times reporter looks on amazed. "I've seen
some strange things in Times Square over the years,"
he says. "But this takes the cake."
A young reporter for a socialist weekly is
disconsolate. "I never imagined that anyone on the
left could do such a thing," he mutters. "My God," I
reply, staring at him. "Have you never heard of
Stalin?"
* I'm finally allowed into 41 Lamaha Gardens, the
Temple's public relations home in Georgetown, where
more than 40 Temple members have been held under
house arrest. Prominently framed on the living room
wall are official proclamations from various
California politicians attesting to Jones' good
works. I stand in the white-tiled bathroom where
Temple public relations official Sharon Amos, two
weeks before, after hearing over the ham radio from
Jones that the "White Night" suicides had begun in
Jonestown, slit the throats of her three young
children and then took her own life.
It is here where I meet and interview Stephan Jones,
the imposing 19-year-old son of Jim Jones. He and
his adopted brothers and other members of the
Temple's basketball team are alive because Stephan
disobeyed a direct order from his father to return
to Jonestown. He was born into Peoples Temple. The
world he knew, including both his parents, has just
been obliterated. I visit him again six weeks later,
this time in a Guyanese prison, and bring him news
of the outside world. On his return to San Francisco
months later, Stephan decides to tell his story
through us.
THERE ARE no cheap answers in this tale; certainly
none will be offered here. And it's historically
inaccurate to assert -- as some have done, with no
proof, on recent cable television shows and on the
Internet -- that Jones was part of a CIA or other
government plot. Such simplistic conspiracy
mongering blocks thinking and analysis and again
dehumanizes the dead by making their own needs and
motivations irrelevant. If it was all just some kind
of plot, then we don't have to dig into deeper --
and scarier -- questions about the human condition.
But of course, we must.
Perhaps one way to take some meaning from the events
of Jonestown 20 years later, is to see how four
people, whose lives were permanently scarred by
their associations with Jonestown and Peoples
Temple, have not merely coped with the aftermath of
the tragedy but found the strength and optimism and
will to prosper: newly elected state Sen. Jackie
Speier, severely wounded on the airstrip with Ryan
that day; the Rev. John Moore and his wife Barbara,
who lost two daughters in Jonestown; and Stephan
Jones, who has now, finally, lived more of his life
outside the Temple than inside it, but who is still
haunted by his father and by the extended family he
lost.
Speier was on the trip as a 28-year-old aide to
Ryan. In Raven, Reiterman describes her condition:
"The magnitude of Jackie Speier's wounds left me
feeling helpless and nauseated. A slab the size of a
frying pan had been gouged out of her thigh, and the
flesh above and below the vicious gunshot wound was
bridged only by an inch-wide strand of skin. The
torn muscles quivered loosely. There were other
wounds . . . Her life seemed to be hanging by little
more than that strand of skin."
Until then, Speier had had a good life, an easy
life, she said in a recent interview. She went home
from the hospital in January 1979 to a warm
homecoming. But once the friends and family melted
away and she was lying alone on the couch, "the
wounds in my arm were still open, and the knife-like
pains returned. I realized I had been on such an
adrenalin high that I hadn't felt the pain until
then. Then I had to make a decision. I could spend
the rest of my life as a Guyana victim or move
forward. That day I decided to run for Leo Ryan's
seat."
Speier lost that race but eventually was elected to
the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. In 1986
she was elected to the Assembly, and on Nov. 3 to
the Senate. But in January 1994, tragedy struck
again. While she was pregnant with a second child,
her husband, Steve Sierra, an emergency room
physician, was struck and killed by a motorist
jumping a red light. She is now a single mother with
two children.
"If anything, the Jonestown experience on an
intimate and personal level gave me survival
skills," Speier said, "to go through the trauma of
the airstrip, seven months of hospitalization and 10
surgeries and wondering if I would ever walk again.
The good news is for anyone who goes through tough
times, there is a silver lining. But you've got to
make the choice to do it."
Asked how she processed the horror of Jonestown, she
said, "I'm results oriented. If I spend a lot of
time thinking about it, I sleep worse at night. I
can't return those people to life or bring back
Congressman Ryan. The best I can do is follow in his
footsteps. For me, the legacy of Jonestown is public
service."
BARBARA AND John Moore, who recently retired as
pastor at the First United Methodist Church in
Sacramento, have lived a life of social activism.
They marched for civil rights and with Cesar Chavez.
They demonstrated at peace vigils against the
Vietnam War and counseled draft resisters. They
taught their daughters to be questioners and to live
their social action ideals.
But they never dreamed that Carolyn Moore Layton and
her younger sister Annie would drift into what
appeared to be a cult-like group or would come to
parrot back what Jim Jones said, rather than express
their own views. Carolyn was no ordinary Temple
member. She became Jones's longtime mistress, bore
him a child, Kimo, who also died at Jonestown, and
was his most trusted aide. Annie became Jones's
nurse. She died in his house, a single bullet wound
in her head. "We died," she wrote in her own suicide
note, "because you would not let us live."
Eight days later, John Moore preached a sermon that
was published around the world, his effort to
understand. "The forces of life and death, building
and destroying, were present in Peoples Temple," he
said. "Death reigned when there was no one free
enough, nor strong enough, nor filled with rage
enough to run and throw his body against a vat of
cyanide, spilling it to the ground."
Today, John and Barbara Moore live in quiet
retirement in Davis. Barbara once said, "Jim Jones
murdered our children and grandchildren. I will not
let him destroy me." Citing the German poet Rainier
Maria Rilke, John Moore said, "The way we respond to
Jonestown is we live the question." He is comforted
by the Apostle Paul. "In the midst of tragedy," he
said, paraphrasing, "our faith in God is working to
bring about good." The real question "is what do you
do about it? You are free to make choices. I choose
to bring healing and reconciliation."
Said Barbara: "If you let (Jonestown) get to you,
you become a soggy mop. You build up a protective
shell. But every time I dust or move their pictures
around, I think about my children."
STEPHAN JONES is 39 years old now, with a tall,
tapered, athlete's body, hair closely cropped. He
lives in the Bay Area, has a business and a young
daughter. He gets on with his life. Still, Jonestown
and what might have been are never far from his
thoughts. Stephan turned away from his father as a
young boy. He heard his father having sex with
another woman and knew how hurtful it was to his
mother. And yet, until the end, he could never make
a complete break.
Stephan felt most free clearing bush to build
Jonestown, a year before his father ever arrived.
When there were just 50 settlers, he and his friends
built dormitories and cottages, milled lumber,
played pioneer. Several months ago, Stephan returned
to Jonestown for the first time in 20 years with a
film crew from ABC News. They landed at Port Kaituma
and trucked the seven miles in. When they arrived
and saw that nothing remained but the beginnings of
reclaimed jungle, Stephan fell to the ground
sobbing.
"I had made that trip so many times," Stephan told
me recently over breakfast. "Hundreds of times. On
foot, on tractor, on the truck. As you come up over
the rise, you always saw Jonestown. There were
people, the illusion of what we all believed we were
working for. It was my only world. To come up over
that rise and see -- nothing -- the closest thing to
desert the rain forest has to offer - - it just
brought home the loss." One thing Stephan Jones has
crystalized about his life and experience after 20
years: "How important it is to find and nurture that
voice in all of us, whether you want to call it God
or intuition or soul.
I call it spirit, your essence ... If Jonestown is
to offer us anything, it is to say to thine own self
be true. Find what you feel to be true and live it."
Tilman Hausherr
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/1998/11/17/EDITORIAL11322.dtl
Recognizing the humanity of Jonestown's victims
The San Francisco Examiner
17.11.1998
By STEPHANIE SALTER, Examiner columnist.
SEVEN DAYS after he learned that two of his daughters and his grandson
had died in the mass murder-suicide of Jonestown, the Rev. John V. Moore
delivered his Sunday sermon to his United Methodist congregation in
Reno. He had not planned to speak, but his wife Barbara convinced him
the effort was crucial.
Twenty years later, she says: "It was a testimony of love for our family
and the frailty of the human spirit."
The Moores, who now live in Davis, have been married and joined in
Christian ministry for 55 years. With their living child, Rebecca, a
professor of religion and philosophy at the University of North Dakota,
they have labored for two decades to keep their daughters - and all
those who died at Jonestown on Nov. 18, 1978 - from being
one-dimensionalized as poor, stupid sheep.
"Our family refused to be imprisoned by shame," said Barbara Moore.
"Now, for the first time in 20 years, there is a sense (among the
public) of the humanity of the people who died in Jonestown."
The Moores' dead girls, Carolyn and Annie, shatter all the lonely loser
stereotypes that experts tend to slap on people who join cults like Jim
Jones' Peoples Temple. They came from a close and loving home that
thrived on a solid commitment to classic Christian service and social
justice.
The biblical quotation that adorned the Peoples Temple stationery - the
one from Matthew 25:35-40 about serving Jesus by helping the poor, sick
and imprisoned - was practically the Moore family credo.
In the years the Moore children were growing up, they shared their home
with some 15 kids who needed a safe, loving place to heal. They marched
with their parents in rallies for civil rights and against the Vietnam
War.
While serving as pastor at San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church in
1965, John Moore preached about the open inclusion of homosexuals in the
Methodist Church. He picketed vineyard owners with Cesar Chavez's United
Farm Workers. He and Barbara counseled college students about everything
from unplanned pregnancies to accepting or resisting the military draft.
Carolyn's husband, Larry Layton, discovered Jim Jones and the Peoples
Temple in Mendocino County when Layton was serving alternate duty as a
conscientious objector at a state hospital. (The only person convicted
after the massacre at Jonestown, Layton is serving a life sentence.)
Even before the Moores' easy-going dog, Willy, broke character and
growled at meeting Jim Jones, John and Barbara had misgivings about the
charismatic pastor. There was too much "Jim says" in Carolyn's letters.
"That adulation of Jim Jones, that idolotry and the secrecy and paranoia
were there from the beginning," said John. "When I first met him (then
realized Carolyn was intimately involved with him), I thought, "Oh, my
God. Here's another Elmer Gantry.' "
But the Moores also saw their daughter "living out the guiding spiritual
principles" that their whole family had shared. And they knew that
drawing a line in the sand and alienating Carolyn was the quickest way
to lose her.
When Annie, too, joined Peoples Temple after nursing school, John and
Barbara tried to combat their mistrust of Jones by focussing on the
multitude of Christian positives in the church, from its diverse and
multi-ethnic population to its work with the poor, uneducated and
mentally retarded. As Barbara writes in an essay on a comprehensive
Jonestown web site
(www.und.nodak.edu/dept/philrel/jonestown/witness.html):
"I told myself that some good things were happening in Peoples Temple
and that it would probably phase out in time as many movements do."
But, of course, Jonestown ended in unthinkable horror, with the murder
and suicide of more than 900 members in the jungles of Guyana. Among the
409 children was Carolyn's 4-year-old son Jim Jon or "Kimo." His father
was not Layton but Jim Jones.
For most of the last 20 years, the media, academic and religious
attention have centered on Jones. The hundreds of others who died in
Guyana became only a nameless, faceless mass, posthumously represented
by grotesque photographs of poisoned, bloated bodies.
Such dehumanization, the Moores contend, not only profanes the inherent
sancity of each Peoples Temple member's life but dangerously deludes the
rest of us. If we believe that Jones was simply a whacko and that
everyone who followed him was too, we'll miss any chance we have to
learn from Jonestown, to acquire tools that can help us discern the
false prophet from the true servant of God.
"It wasn't simply that something went wrong along the way with Peoples
Temple," said John. "The seeds of destruction were always there amid all
the positive stuff. It was more like an escalation of compromise. They
kept cutting corners until they were so compromised, they really were
different. By the time they got to Guyana, they thought the end
justified even the most extreme means."
For the past 20 years John, Barbara and Rebecca have viewed their role
in the Jonestown tragedy as a calling. At first, it was a hard and
bitter one. Over time, it's become a calling to experienced counseling,
consolation and - when asked - warning. As John writes on the web site:
"When we are in the midst of pain and suffering, we hear a voice within
asking, "Why?' But there is another voice asking a different question:
"What will you do?' The "Why?' question was not answered, but I knew
that I had the power to make choices . . . We chose to work with God to
bring whatever good we could out of the tragedy of Jonestown."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/1998/11/17/EDITORIAL11280.dtl
Messiahs and skeptics (EDITORIAL)
The 20th anniversary of the Jonestown mass murder reminds us that the
ability to avert evil isn't "out there' but "in her (rest garbled)
San Francisco Examiner
17.11.1998
THE POWER of remembrance is strong, especially in this city, which was
the home of Peoples Temple. Wednesday marks the 20th anniversary of the
event burned into our collective memory as "Jonestown," the mass murder
of 918 souls in the jungle of South America.
The facts are well known.
Jim Jones, a self-styled messiah, ingratiated himself with the political
powers in San Francisco and gained a large following. Then, abruptly he
left, taking his mostly poor, mostly black flock to a remote forest
outpost in Guyana. There, Jones' paranoia escalated, especially when a
delegation led by U.S. Rep. Leo J. Ryan visited in November 1978. As
Ryan's group prepared to leave, trouble broke out. Ultimately, five
people - including Examiner photographer Greg Robinson - would be shot
to death at an airstrip nearby, and 913 others would perish at Jonestown
in a mass suicide presided over by Jones.
One unforgettable image is of clumps of bodies, face down and poisoned
with potassium cyanide, bloating in the tropical sun. Another is the
portrait of a madman - the famous picture of Jones glaring behind his
aviator sunglasses. A third is the crude wooden sign that hung in the
pavilion at Jonestown. "Those who do not remember the past are condemned
to repeat it," it said.
That is usually taken as a warning against other evil Jim Joneses who
may be lurking out there. It is a fair warning, and should be heeded.
But it is not a latter-day Jones that we need to fear so much as our own
gullibility, rooted in our very human desires to trust other people, to
have faith in them, to create heroes, to want more from life than seems
to exist and to find an exit from the pain of suffering.
Jones offered those expediencies, but he could not have succeeded had
his pupils - and his mentors - exercised another important human
quality: skepticism.
True believers don't want to buy doubt. They ride on a wave of pure
positive emotion. But it is a fool's feeling.
David Koresh lured families to his own messianic household near Waco,
Texas, with a brand of evangelism even more blatantly screwy than
Jones'. Koresh followers surrendered their independence, and later their
lives. Heaven's Gate cultists near San Diego last year suspended
disbelief to, uh-huh, catch a comet.
But it is in less dramatic ways, too, that skepticism is healthy.
Against zealots in politics, single-minded social reformers and
blindered ideologues of all types.
It's a good thing that we turn governments out of power every few years
before they are corrupted, and before they in turn corrupt us. The clash
of wills represented in partisan politics isn't such a bad thing
considering the alternative.
In the '70s, virtually everyone was eager to buy into Jim Jones. He
could deliver votes. He championed the poor and mouthed allegiance to
the First Amendment. He gave hope to abandoned souls, provided a family
to the lonely.
Some people said he could perform miracles.
His only miracle was the power to mesmerize, made possible by too many
people's willingness to be mesmerized.
In hindsight, Jones was as phony as the cancer "cures" he used to create
adoration for himself. His audacity was mistaken for courage. Any doubts
were put down as persecution.
The best antidote for the next Jim Jones to come along is adversity of
viewpoints, influences, sources and references. We need to be ready for
him, with our skeptical armaments in place.
The final lesson of Jonestown isn't about the evil out there. It's about
building our inner strength to spot evil, fight it and dominate it.
Everything depends on us.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1998/11/17/MN27873.DTL
MEMORIAL SERVICES
San Francisco Chronicle
17.11.1998
There will be two public memorials this week to mark the 20th
anniversary of the Jonestown massacre.
The first, called a ``Help and Healing Service,'' will be held tonight
at 7 p.m. at St. Mary's Cathedral, 1111 Gough St., San Francisco.
The second will be held tomorrow, when relatives of some of those who
died conduct their annual service at Evergreen Cemetery, 6450 Camden St.
in Oakland. Of the 914 people who died at Jonestown, 406 are buried at
the cemetery in a mass grave.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/1998/11/17/MN102279.DTL&type=printable
A Trip Into The Heart Of Darkness
Always larger than life, Leo Ryan courted danger
San Francisco Chronicle
17.11.1998
By MARK SIMON
By the time Leo Ryan went to Jonestown, Guyana -- 20 years ago today --
most officials in the Bay Area had come to realize that the Reverend Jim
Jones was a dangerous man and that the Peoples Temple was nothing like
it seemed to be.
But it was Leo Ryan -- and no other public figure -- who went to
Jonestown to confront Jones.
It cost him his life, but it was an act that was quintessentially Ryan
-- quixotic skeptic, scholar, maverick and sometimes brooding loner who
reveled in being a catalyst for the events around him.
``The focus on the tragedy is always on Jim Jones and the despicable
activities he engaged in, and the fact that so many people lost their
lives,'' said state Senator- elect Jackie Speier, who accompanied Ryan
to Jonestown 20 years ago as his legal counsel and was wounded in the
ambush in which Ryan was killed. ``What is lost is the fact that there
was one courageous legislator who did the uncommon thing, and lost his
life in the process.''
The path Ryan took to elective office led directly to Jonestown.
In 1961, as a history teacher at Capuchino High School in Millbrae, Ryan
was a chaperone accompanying the high school's renowned marching band to
Washington, where it participated in President Kennedy's inaugural
parade.
Inspired by Kennedy's call to public service, Ryan returned to San Mateo
County determined to run for public office.
In 1962, he ran for the state Assembly from San Mateo County. A
Democrat, he won a Democratic seat by a comfortable margin of 20,000
votes.
He quickly became known as a politician who was hard to categorize, a
liberal who sometimes cast unexpected votes in support of education
reform, school vouchers and other issues.
``His attitude toward liberals was to keep us sullen, but not
mutinous,'' said Robert Caughlan, Ryan's Assembly district field
representative from 1968-72.
During his Assembly tenure, Ryan established a pattern that Speier calls
``experiential legislating.''
After the 1968 riots in Los Angeles, he posed as a substitute
schoolteacher at a Watts school, to see for himself what conditions were
like.
His most celebrated excursion was a 10-day stay in Folsom Prison as an
inmate, while he was chairing the Assembly committee overseeing prison
reform.
Critics dismissed the highly publicized adventures as headline-
grabbing.
``Leo had a taste for headlines. What politician doesn't?'' said
Caughlan, now a Menlo Park public relations consultant. ``Leo understood
the importance of advancing social agendas through public education.''
He won re-election to the Assembly five times before winning a
tailor-made congressional seat in 1972. He was re-elected three times.
In Congress, Ryan continued his ways, going to Prince Edward Island in
Newfoundland to confront fur hunters who were killing baby harp seals
with hooked clubs.
Ryan's daughter, Pat, now a policy analyst for the California Health
Care Association, has a poster-sized photo in her Sacramento office of
her father, sprawled out on the Arctic ice, laying his body between a
hunter and a seal pup.
Divorced from his wife, Peg, and living largely apart from his five
children, Ryan was even more of a loner in Congress.
Speier said you could name his close friends on the fingers of both
hands, and have some fingers left over.
A scholar with a master's in Elizabethan literature, Ryan was not a
back-slapping member of the House fraternity.
``He was a difficult man to understand,'' Pat Ryan said. ``He wanted to
be loved and he wanted to be respected and he wanted to be different and
he wanted to make a difference. He probably had a hard time letting
people really get to know him as a person.''
Then, in 1977, he heard from Sammy Houston, who had roomed with him on
the Capuchino band trip to Washington in 1961. Houston's son, Robert,
had quit the Peoples Temple and had been found dead in the East Bay
under mysterious circumstances.
Sammy Houston's attempts to contact his daughter-in-law and
grandchildren in Guyana had been thwarted.
Ryan began looking into the matter. He heard from constituents, family
members who were worried sick that something was wrong in Jonestown.
``We had heard from defectors and from concerned relatives that there
was mind control, people being held against their will, physical abuse,
sexual abuse. And there were guns,'' Speier said.
The State Department repeatedly stonewalled Ryan's attempts to find out
what was going on in Jonestown, telling him everything was fine.
Ryan decided to go to Jonestown, ostensibly in his role as chairman of a
congressional subcommittee that had jurisdiction over Americans abroad.
He asked the other members of the Bay Area congressional delegation to
accompany him. They all declined.
``He took on this issue when all the state and congressional legislators
around him wouldn't touch it,'' said Speier.
``I think he was afraid,'' said Pat Ryan. ``But he also believed that,
goddammit, somebody's got to do something.''
The last time Pat Ryan saw her father, she was walking him to the car
outside the family's Burlingame home. He was going to Jonestown.
Pat Ryan hugged her father, and, joking nervously, said, ``Don't let
anybody shoot you.''
``Don't worry,'' her father said. ``I'll be fine.''
``I think he believed the power of his office would protect him, and
that was the case in Guyana. He also believed the press covering his
trip would protect him,'' Pat Ryan said.
To the end, Ryan believed that it was going to turn out all right
--even after he had been attacked by a knife-wielding Peoples Temple
member, Speier said.
``There was a bravado to him, no question. It was one of his strengths
and one of his flaws,'' she said.
It may have been headline- grabbing, but it was more.
``You can take trips and go to Europe,'' Speier said. ``You don't have
to go to the jungles of Guyana.''
But that was what Leo Ryan did.
``He did what he did better than anybody else,'' said George Corey, a
Millbrae attorney and friend and political protege of Ryan's.
``He would march into the heart of hell to see it firsthand.''
Twenty years later, questions linger
MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, November 17, 1998
AP 17.11.1998
Twenty years after the mass murder-suicide in Jonestown ripped open a
new dimension of horror, questions linger: How did it happen? Why did it
happen?
Some believe the answers to those questions may lie in more than 5,000
pages of information the government has kept secret for two decades.
``Twenty years later, it would be nice to know what went down,'' said J.
Gordon Melton, founder and director of the Institute for the Study of
American Religion.
Over the years, there have been rumors of CIA involvement. Some believe
CIA agents were posing as members to gather information; others suggest
the agency was conducting a mind control experiment.
In 1980, the House Select Committee on Intelligence determined that the
CIA was not involved with Peoples Temple and had no advance knowledge of
the mass murder-suicide.
The year before, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had concluded that
Jones ``suffered extreme paranoia.'' The committee released a 782-page
report, but kept more than 5,000 other pages secret.
Without those documents, it's hard to confirm or refute the speculations
that have sprung up around Jonestown, said Melton, who planned to be in
Washington Wednesday to ask for the documents' release.
``The process of what went on in Jonestown is one of great concern to
all of us. First of all, we'd like to not see it happen again,'' he
said.
Calls by The Associated Press to a spokesman for the committee, now
known as international relations, were not returned. George Berdes,
chief consultant to the committee at the time of the investigation, told
the San Francisco Chronicle the papers were classified to assure
sources' confidentiality, but he thinks it is time to declassify them.
What is known about the end of Jonestown is that on Nov. 18, 1978, cult
leader Jim Jones ordered more than 900 of his followers to drink
cyanide-poisoned punch.
Among the dead: more than 270 children.
Only two years before, Jones had been the toast of San Francisco
political circles. As the charismatic leader of the Peoples Temple, an
interracial organization helped the desperate -- and voted by the
thousands -- he was courted by the likes of Mayor George Moscone and
Willie Brown, an assemblyman at the time. But after an August 1977
magazine article detailed ex-members' stories of beatings and forced
donations, Jones had abruptly moved his flock to Jonestown, a settlement
in the Guyana jungle.
In May 1978, Peoples Temple member Deborah Layton slipped out of Guyana.
She went to the U.S. consulate and later the newspapers with a warning:
Jones was conducting drills for a mass murder-suicide.
But there was little official government action until November 1978 when
U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, who had been contacted by a number of people worried
about their relatives in the Peoples Temple, decided to lead a
delegation of reporters and relatives to Jonestown.
Their visit began happily enough, but the mood soured after some
Jonestown residents indicated they wanted to defect. The group was
ambushed as they tried to leave at a nearby airstrip. Ryan and four
others were killed.
Later that night, Jones told his followers ``the time has come for us to
meet in another place.''
As with the question of CIA involvement, different theories have been
forwarded on what led to the slaughter.
Mary McCormick Maaga, author of a new book, ``Hearing the Voices of
Jonestown,'' says it's a mistake to dismiss the tragedy as the work of
one man.
``If we spend the whole time demonizing Jim Jones and laying all the
evil at his feet there is nothing to learn from Jonestown,'' she said.
She believes the Peoples Temple did some good until the leadership
became obsessed with the movement's detractors. She also says Jones
wasn't the only one to blame, since he lost control to his inner circle
some months before the end.
Jynona Norwood, who lost 27 relatives in Jonestown, questions whether
Jones was ever motivated by benevolence. ``Everybody wants to paint
these pretty stories about how it started off OK. I personally believe
that Jim had deep hatred in his heart from Day One.''
Still, like Maaga, she believes his followers had idealistic hopes.
``Those people went over there to live and build a better world,'' she
said. ``When they got over there they found that they had entered into a
paradise of pain.''
Tilman Hausherr
TWENTY years ago the followers of Jim Jones committed mass suicide in
the jungle. Charles Laurence talks to one cult member who lived
The Daily Telegraph
14.11.1998
By Charles Laurence
On a steaming, exhausted night in the Guyanese jungle, Deborah Layton
stood in line in a makeshift compound called Jonestown and swallowed a
cup of fruit punch. Then she closed her eyes and prepared to die. All
around her were more than 900 fellow members of the People's Temple, a
religious cult led by a charismatic preacher with dyed black hair and
dark glasses, the Rev Jim Jones.
The drink, they knew, was laced with cyanide. Their end had come. Jones
had led his followers to the jungle clearing, had dominated them into
submission to the regime of a concentration camp ringed by armed guards,
and was now telling them that the time had come to "die with dignity".
Layton drank, but she did not die. This time, the ritual of forced mass
suicide was a White Night, a rehearsal. The congregation of the
pathetic, the half-starved, the beaten and the despairing that was Jim
Jones's worldly empire lived on. But a few months later, on Nov 18,
1978, the fruit punch was ladled out once more, and this time the
cyanide had been added. Jones and 913 followers died. The children, it
was discovered, died first.
Next Wednesday marks the 20th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre. It
still shocks. There has been Waco since and the suicides of Heaven's
Gate, but Jonestown remains the yardstick by which cult tragedies are
judged, the awful warning of just how badly the combination of blind
faith and perverse leadership can go wrong.
Layton was ready to die when she swallowed her drink in the jungle
compound. But weeks later, clinging to the last shreds of her survival
instinct, she escaped and went on to play a pivotal role in the final
unravelling of Jones's cult.
"When I drank that stuff, I thought it was real, and I hoped it was,"
she says. "This is what you must understand about Jonestown; it had gone
that far. I was that desperate. I believed that death was a better way
out than living like that for the rest of my life."
Flown home to California with the help of American consular officials in
Guyana, a former British colony, Layton revealed the hell of Jonestown
to the press. She was contacted by Californian congressman Leo Ryan, who
had been approached by relatives frantic with worry. He took her to
Washington to testify before Congress, which then sent him on a mission
to discover if Americans were being held at Jonestown against their
will. That was the trip that ignited the final mania of Jonestown. As
Ryan and his entourage returned to the airstrip from the compound, Jones
sent his guards to gun them down: the congressman and four others died,
and 12 more were wounded. Then Jones ordered his "revolutionary
suicide"; those who did not want to die were shot, or forced to drink at
gunpoint.
Among the very few who lived were some guards who baulked at orders to
take their own lives when all around them were dead. They were found by
the Guyanese army hiding among the piles of corpses. And at the
airstrip, one cult follower was discovered to have been an assassin sent
out with "defectors" making their escape with Ryan, who had shot two of
them. He was Larry Layton, Deborah's brother. He remains in jail in
California, 52 years old, serving a life sentence for conspiracy to
murder a member of Congress.
For years, Deborah Layton disappeared from view, as other survivors have
done. She found work as a trader at a bank; she married, and divorced,
and settled down in Piedmont, on the San Francisco Bay, with a man with
whom she lives today.
She is now 45 and has a daughter, Lauren, 12, and an airy, grey-shingled
house with a garden, a sun room and a shaded outdoor wooden deck. Tucked
into tight blue jeans, she looks younger than her years. Very few people
have known of the nightmares of mind-control and hunger in a far off
jungle that haunt her still.
"I went mute for 20 years because I was so ashamed," she says. "I simply
did not want people to know who I was. I am still ashamed. The People's
Temple was an evil cult, and I was a part of it. People think, 'how
could you?'. I have been touched by evil. I have seen the dark side,
what humans are capable of. If you live through that, there is guilt,
and there is shame."
Now, in time for a 20th anniversary which comes as some fear new
Jonestowns at the approach of the Millennium, Layton has published a
book, Seductive Poison, the first account of Jonestown by a survivor.
And Layton has co-operated with a documentary film which will be shown
on Channel 4 at 9pm on Monday. The crew flew her back to Jonestown,
buried 300 miles from Guyana's capital, Georgetown.
"I saw how deeply we had been imprisoned in the jungle, how lost, and it
was yet another realisation of how evil Jones had been," she says.
"After all these years, the jungle had grown back over most of
Jonestown. But the really strange thing was that from the air you could
see how nothing had grown around the Pavilion that had been the centre
of the compound. That was where the bodies had fallen, where good, naive
people had been forced to die. Not even the jungle wanted to be there."
By the time of the massacre, her brother, both of his two wives, and her
mother were all deeply involved with Jones. Her brother Larry had been
the first to join, when Jones established his Temple in northern
California in the late Sixties. The family, Layton explains, were
Quakers, and Larry had been a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war.
Jones had come to his rescue when he was drafted, helping to convince a
judge that his objections were genuine, and offering him "alternative
service". Within months of joining the Temple, Larry had lost his wife
Carolyn to Jones's bed, where she became one of many servile mistresses.
Layton was almost immediately drawn into the cult when she first went to
the temple compound to visit her brother in 1971. She was a spoilt,
demanding 17-year-old schoolgirl, the youngest of four children.
Jones, she admits, got her on his hook simply by making her "feel
special". Later, he coldly seduced her in the back of the bus he used
for his on-the-road revival meetings, and then denounced her in public
for selfishly demanding sex from him. That, it turned out, was a
mind-control technique he used on his covey of jealous, guilt-ridden
women. They would be summoned to "confrontations", and ordered to
denounce each other.
Layton's mother joined years later, divorcing and denouncing her
husband, and handing over a $250,000 divorce settlement to Jones. The
Laytons were cult aristocracy, wealthy, educated white people drawn to
the heart of an organisation in which the foot soldiers were for the
most part black. The young recruit soon had the special "inner circle"
role of travelling abroad to deposit millions of dollars fleeced from
gullible followers.
"Part of my book is about secrets," says Layton. "Secrets that leave a
void in your being." It was only at 16 that she discovered that her
mother was Jewish, and that therefore she was Jewish too. The mother had
been brought up in Germany in a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family
which, in 1938, had been among the last to escape to America with visas
organised by Quakers.
The family secret of Jewish blood led, Layton believes, to a tragedy
that foreshadowed her mother's death, from lung cancer, in Jonestown. At
the height of the Cold War, her father, an industrial chemist, took a
job running a top-secret government laboratory developing chemical
weapons. That prompted the FBI to run a rigorous family background
check: Layton's Jewish grandmother was so terrified that she was being
spied on by the American government that she jumped to her death from a
window.
"My mother made this momentous decision to bury her secrets even deeper,
and this festered within her for years," says Layton. "She felt
responsible for her mother's suicide."
Festering secrets, she feels, must have made her family vulnerable to
the lure of a cult. She also believes that the social turbulence of the
Sixties made likely victims of the weak-willed, looking for discipline
and security, and that her own family's absorbtion in material science
closed the door on the spirit. "We were all searching," she says,
"searching for a life with meaning".
It was her fear of more secrets that prompted Layton to write her book.
Her daughter, Lauren, had started asking questions at four years old.
Why was her uncle in jail? Where was grandmother? If she had died, where
was she buried?
And, in the end, there was the question simply of why? How could a
transparent charlatan - a man who paid followers to cough up chicken
livers in bogus miracle cures of cancers - persuade 900 people to live
on beans and gruel in a jungle camp, and then stay up all night
listening to his ranting sermons? How could he persuade them to drink
cyanide when they knew he was using teenage girls for his brutal sexual
pleasures?
"People do not join cults," says Layton. "They join a religious group,
or a self-help group, or a mission. And then it is like being in an
abusive relationship in which the abuser holds all the cards, and you
can't leave because there seems to be no safe harbour."
Then she talks of her father, the scientist who lost his wife to the
cult, his son to a life sentence, and for seven years his younger
daughter. In his 80s, he has read her book and wept at every chapter.
"When I was trying to escape, I found myself hanging on to something he
said to me before I rejected him for Jim Jones," she says. "He told me
just to think for myself. That's the best defence: think for yourself."
• Witness: Jonestown, featuring Deborah Layton, will be shown on Channel
4 at 9pm on Monday. Seductive Poison (Aurum Press, £12.95), by Deborah
Layton, will be published in January
Tilman Hausherr
On 18 November 1978, nearly a thousand cult followers died at the
People's Temple in Jonestown. Twenty years later, the horror of the
event still lingers - and so does the mystery.
The Daily Telegraph
17.11.1998
By Robert Templer
At the edge of the Evergreen Cemetery, overlooking a dusty suburb of
Oakland in California, is a small granite gravestone. It is inscribed
simply, in memory of the victims of the jonestown tragedy. A few feet
away is another stone, set flat in the dry earth, that gives some small
sense of the scale of that tragedy. It was put there by a man whose
wife, five daughters, two sons and sister all died on 18 November 1978,
in the worst mass suicide and murder of modern times. On that day,
nearly 1,000 people died in the jungle of Guyana, South America, in the
apocalyptic end of Jim Jones and his People's Temple cult.
This Wednesday, two groups will gather on either side of the United
States to remember the victims of Jonestown and to continue their search
for an understanding of why they died. In Oakland, families will come
together for their annual memorial service at the Evergreen Cemetery. In
Washington DC, a small group of scholars, led by Gordon Melton from the
Institute for the Study of American Religion at Santa Barbara, will go
to Capitol Hill to press Congress to release the documents about
Jonestown that are still classified on the grounds of national security.
Among this second group will be Mary McCormick Maaga, a Methodist pastor
in New Jersey and former university academic who lost three friends at
Jonestown. In her book Hearing the Voices of Jonestown, which was
published in America earlier this year, she dismisses the idea that
those who died were passive victims of Jim Jones and attempts instead to
explain what drove them to make their own decisions.
Two hundred and thirty-four of the 911 people who died at their commune
in Guyana after drinking grape Kool-Aid laced with cyanide are buried in
a mass grave at Evergreen Cemetery. Most of these are children (of whom
260 died in total) but, as they had no dental records, they were never
identified. Communities throughout America were so repelled by the
events at Jonestown that it took six months to find a cemetery that
would accept the bodies. At Evergreen, there is no mention of the number
of children buried there. Plans for a memorial wall in the cemetery had
to be abandoned because the committee which was formed by the families
of the People's Temple members could not agree whether Jim Jones's name
should be included among those who died.
Twenty years after the deaths at Jonestown, memories of the People's
Temple still cause horror and incomprehension throughout America. One
month after the deaths, a Gallup poll showed that 98 per cent of
Americans had heard about the People's Temple. The only events to have
made a greater impact on public consciousness in the US were the attack
on Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. The People's Temple has become the
archetypal cult, its members seen as the brainwashed victims of a man
who believed himself to be the reincarnation of both Jesus and Lenin.
Novelists such as Anthony Burgess and Armistead Maupin have used Jones
as an emblem of unfathomable evil.
Jim Jones was born in lynn, Indiana, in 1931. his father was frequently
drunk; his mother shocked the locals by wearing slacks and smoking
cigarettes. By the age of 12, Jones had turned to religion and gave his
first hell-fire sermon to a group of children in Lynn who were even
younger than himself. After leaving school he started a mission for
local Methodists, recruiting among the poor and black of Indianapolis, a
city which was once the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1954 Jones was expelled by the Methodists, who feared that he was
using their church to form a personal power base. Jones, by now married
to Marcelene Baldwin, known as Marcie, a nurse five years his senior,
was undaunted. The following year he founded the People's Temple Full
Gospel Church in Indianapolis. A decade later, having recruited several
thousand followers, he moved his congregation to Redwood Valley in
northern California. He had become obsessed with the threat of nuclear
war, and Redwood Valley had been named by Esquire magazine as one of the
safest places in the United States in the event of an atom bomb attack.
Jones's church soon recruited thousands more members, mainly
African-Americans attracted by its message of racial equality.
In the early Seventies he opened churches in San Francisco and Los
Angeles and began a period of political activity. Rosalyn Carter tried
to win his endorsement for her husband's presidential campaign in 1972.
People's Temple members campaigned vigorously for the liberal George
Moscone for Mayor of San Francisco and, after his election, Jones was
rewarded with the chairmanship of the city's powerful housing authority.
Among the many causes he adopted at that time was an unsuccessful
campaign to install a barrier on Golden Gate Bridge to prevent suicides.
As Jones's public power grew, his church became increasingly
authoritarian. Members were subjected to violent discipline and demands
that they prove their loyalty to Jones. Defectors told stories of
beatings and ritual humiliation of those who violated Temple rules. On
one occasion a 16-year-old girl, the daughter of two senior members,
Elmer and Deanna Mertle, was beaten 75 times in front of a congregation
of 600 for kissing another woman.
In 1974 Jones sent some of his followers to the former British colony of
Guyana to begin work on 'Jonestown', a 3,800-acre agricultural commune.
He was attracted by the isolation of Guyana which, like Redwood Valley,
he believed would protect his followers from nuclear war. He also felt
that Guyana's socialist government would be sympathetic to his commune.
In America, however, stories which accused Jones of physical and sexual
abuse began to circulate. By 1977, public attention, caught by the
testimony of defectors from the Temple, had focused on Jones's American
churches. An article in the California-based magazine New West detailed
the murky world of the Temple's political and financial activities as
well as documenting numerous allegations of physical abuse. Jones
decided to move his followers to Guyana.
At about this time a group known as Concerned Relatives began to push
for a government investigation into the People's Temple. Two former
members of Jones's inner circle - Grace Stoen, who had been his
mistress, and her husband Tim - sued for custody of their son, who was
living in Jonestown. The Concerned Relatives group enlisted the help of
Leo Ryan, the Bay Area Congressman, who travelled to Jonestown in
November 1978 to investigate allegations that Jones was holding his
'followers' against their will.
Accompanied by a group of American television and press reporters, Ryan
spent a night at Jonestown, where he was shown around by the members and
entertained with a musical show in the evening. Some two dozen Jonestown
inhabitants announced that they would leave with Ryan and return to the
United States. Their decision pushed the increasingly fractious Jones
and his chief supporters over the edge. One man tried to stab Ryan, who
was only superficially hurt but decided to cut short his visit and leave
Jonestown immediately. A group of Jones's supporters followed Ryan back
to the airstrip and opened fire on his plane, killing him, three
journalists and one of the Temple members who had decided to leave.
At 6pm on 18 November, shortly after the murders, the suicides began.
Jones told his followers that Guyanese troops would be arriving soon and
would kill their children. He talked incessantly to his followers and
much of what he said was recorded on tapes. Before the suicides he can
be heard speaking of the betrayal of those who had left and suggesting
that to prove their loyalty to him his remaining followers must die.
Their deaths, he assures them, will be remembered as an act of
'revolutionary suicide'.
The children died first, poisoned with the lethal combination of grape
juice and cyanide. The adults, whose bodies were found outside the
open-sided hall where the drink was served out, died soon after. Each
cyanide dose was measured out with a syringe, and two nurses marked each
person who had taken a dose with a cross in felt-tipped pen. A calm
female voice, never identified, is heard on the tape reassuring parents
that their children are not crying from pain but merely because the
grape drink tastes a little bitter.
Some 911 people died from swallowing or being injected with poison. Jim
Jones and a nurse, Annie Moore, died from gunshot wounds to the head. It
is still not known whether they were self-inflicted.
A few days later Sharon Amos, a Temple leader who was in the Guyanese
capital of Georgetown when she heard about the suicides, slit her throat
and those of her three children. The final suicide came three months
later when Mike Prokes, a Temple spokesman, shot himself in a motel room
in California, bringing the total of the dead, from the murders on the
airstrip to this last act, to 923.
American pathologists performed only perfunctory autopsies on seven of
the severely decomposed bodies from Jonestown, so there is no medical
proof of how many adults drank the cyanide potion voluntarily and how
many were forcibly injected with it. But survivors of the massacre have
testified that many of the victims were held down and injected against
their will.
The spate of books published in America soon after the deaths portrayed
Jones as an evil genius, his followers compliant women or
African-Americans seduced by promises of both an improved quality of
life and racial equality. In her book, Hearing the Voices of Jonestown,
Mary McCormick Maaga takes a different line. She claims that by the time
the group reached Guyana, Jones was taking increasing quantities of
drugs and his power was diminishing. His female followers, powerful and
competent women, were gradually asserting their control.
'The People's Temple members didn't see themselves as vulnerable, but as
empowered members of their community,' Maaga says. 'African-Americans
didn't join because they were deprived, they joined because Jones
offered them a vision of a society that was not available anywhere
else.' In her book, Maaga writes admiringly of Jones's attempt to create
a 'an egalitarian society in which hierarchies based upon race, class
and gender would be erased'.
But if Jones's female followers were gaining some form of control, it is
likely that those who attained it were the ones who complied with
Jones's sexual demands. Several senior women in the group were
mistresses of Jones, who was so convinced of his potency that he
believed women who defected from the group did so because he refused to
sleep with them.
Likewise, Jones's racial egalitarianism hardly stands up to scrutiny.
Around three-quarters of the residents of Jonestown were black, and half
were black women. Yet there were very few black men or women among the
Temple's leadership, and Jones did not admit black women into his
powerful coterie of mistresses.
Jim and Marcie Jones's son Stephan told Mary McCormick Maaga when she
interviewed him in 1992 that Jim Jones was afraid of being shown up as
sexually inadequate if he faced the 'aggressive, almost animal-like
sexual appetites' which he feared in black women. (Stephan had survived
along with two other brothers because he was away in Georgetown playing
in a basketball tournament at the time of the suicides.) Maaga maintains
that the suicides were not the result of Jones's overwhelming charisma
but of the collapse of his power. 'What I wanted to find out was at what
point did passion become blindness,' she explains. 'This happened at the
point where their focus shifted from creating an egalitarian community
to worrying more about what the people who defected were saying.'
For five years before the suicides took place, Jones had been preparing
members for them during sessions known as 'White Nights', in which he
indoctrinated them with his belief that loyalty meant sacrificing one's
life, and survival was tantamount to betrayal. Those in the leadership
were obliged to pledge in writing to kill themselves should there be the
need to stage a final 'White Night'.
Maaga quotes from a letter, which it is believed was sent to Jones by
Annie Moore several years before the deaths, in which she discusses
different ways to carry out mass suicides. 'I never thought people would
line up to be killed but actually think a select group would have to
kill the majority of people secretly without the people knowing it,' she
wrote.
Long before Congressman Ryan started to investigate Jonestown, the
community was already struggling. Two-thirds of the members were either
too young or too old to help with the agricultural work and so they had
to rely on food imports from outside. Unused to the heat and humidity of
the Guyanese jungle, members were also suffering from severe fungal and
parasitic diseases.
Jones was becoming crippled by his 'blood sugar problem', as he referred
to his addiction to tranquillisers. At Jonestown he seemed also to have
become increasingly paranoid, spinning apocalyptic tales of nuclear war
between China and Russia and telling people that the United States had
set up concentration camps for blacks. When the Temple members were
based in California they had enough contact with the outside world to
question Jones's more deranged views. In Jonestown, their isolation made
them considerably more susceptible.
Much of the pressure to re-examine Jonestown has come from the family of
Carolyn Moore, Jones's long-standing mistress and one of the leaders of
the cult. Carolyn, her son Kimo, who was fathered by Jones, and her
sister Annie all died at Jonestown. Carolyn's surviving sister, Rebecca
Moore, Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North
Dakota, has defended Jones's followers in her books A Sympathetic
History of Jonestown (1985) and In Defense of the People's Temple
(1988). 'My family's response was different from most of the families,'
Moore told me from her home in North Dakota. 'Most people felt this deep
shame about it and refused to talk about it but we did not. My sisters
were guilty of planning this event but I can still love them for their
humanity.'
Moore's reaction to Maaga's book, which shows her two sisters to have
been considerably more powerful in the People's Temple organisation than
she had thought, has been mixed. 'What really hit me was the fact that
my sisters were partly responsible for planning and implementing the
deaths. He could not have done it alone,' she says. 'It is also sad to
see the despair that took over the community in the last few days - the
choice between surviving and betrayal or dying and remaining loyal.'
The group of American scholars, led by Gordon Melton, who are going to
Capitol Hill this Wednesday will press the House of Representatives'
Foreign Relations Committee to release the results of the 1979
government investigation. These have been withheld until now, possibly
because of CIA involvement in Guyana. The classification of these
documents continues to fuel conspiracy theories linking Jonestown to
everything from the Kennedy assassination to secret mind control
experiments.
'We know that there are a considerable number of documents,' says
Melton. 'There have been a series of requests under the Freedom of
Information Act to release them but they have all been turned down on
the grounds of national security. But what security issues could be
involved in Jonestown 20 years after the event?'
Tilman Hausherr
SURVIVORS TRY TO PUT JONESTOWN BEHIND THEM PARKS
FAMILY TRIED TO LEAVE WITH REP. RYAN
18.11.1998
The Press Democrat
By Steve Hart, Staff Writer
Twenty years after Jonestown, Gerald Parks and his
three children still are trying to piece their lives
together.
"We did the best we could to put it behind us and
move on with our lives," said Parks, 66, who
returned to his job in a Ukiah supermarket a few
months after the Guyana massacre.
But it hasn't been easy. "I look back and I still
carry guilt for taking my family down there," he
said.
Parks' family was trying to escape Jonestown on Nov.
18, 1978, when Peoples Temple gunmen attacked a
nearby jungle airstrip, killing Parks' wife,
Patricia, Rep. Leo Ryan and three U.S. newsmen.
A few hours later, the Rev. Jim Jones and more than
900 followers were dead inside the Temple's Guyana
compound, victims of suicide and murder.
Parks and his family were longtime Temple members.
Gerald's mother, Edith Parks, met Jones in
Cincinnati in the 1950s and followed when he moved
the Temple to Ukiah in 1965.
Edith Parks said Jones cured her cancer after
doctors gave up hope. As the years went by, however,
she began having misgivings about Jones, who
dominated and mistreated his followers.
Still, she accepted Jones' invitation to move to
Jonestown in 1978 after the preacher told her the
Temple's Guyana farm colony would be good for her
health. A number of Parks' family members, including
son Gerald, daughter-in-law Patricia, 42, and
grandchildren Brenda, 18, Tracy, 11, and Dale, 24,
already were there.
Edith Parks, then 64, quickly discovered the reality
of Jonestown. The jungle heat was stifling and
Temple colonists were tormented by insects and
strange diseases.
They worked long hours in the fields while Jones
delivered endless harangues over the camp's
loudspeakers. The Temple's rank-and-file members ate
rice and melon for breakfast, while Jones and his
inner circle enjoyed meat and coffee.
The atmosphere in Jonestown was tense. Temple
leaders separated family members and administered
harsh punishment to anyone who spoke out or
threatened to leave. "I tried that the second day I
was there and they beat the hell out of me,"
recalled Gerald Parks.
Parks and his son Dale tried to warn Edith Parks not
to come to Jonestown, but Temple enforcers monitored
their phone calls and letters.
The colonists heard gunfire at night, and Jones said
armed mercenaries were roaming the jungle, waiting
to attack the camp. Gerald Parks said Jones staged
the shooting to frighten them. "I knew it was fake,"
he said.
Now addicted to drugs, Jones "became a different
person," said Gerald Parks. Jones was talking about
suicide and becoming less coherent by fall 1978. He
made his followers rehearse mass suicide in "White
Night" drills.
"He was crazy. He believed the government wanted to
kill him," Parks said. The family saw their chance
to get out when Ryan made his fact-finding visit to
Jonestown in November.
As Ryan prepared to leave, Edith Parks approached
Ryan's group and said her family wanted out. Jones
tried to intervene, but she insisted, and Ryan
agreed to take the Parks family with him.
A handful of other colonists joined them on the
short trip to the Port Kaituma airstrip outside
Jonestown. One of them, Larry Layton, 32, was a
Jones loyalist who secretly carried a gun and had
orders to kill anyone trying to leave.
Layton started shooting inside one of the airplanes
as Jones' security men arrived on the runway and
opened fire on Ryan's group. Patricia Parks was
struck in the head and killed instantly as her
family watched in horror.
The survivors, many of them wounded, fled into the
jungle. Brenda and Tracy Parks endured two harrowing
nights in the jungle before they reached a native
settlement.
Edith, Gerald and Dale spent the night with other
survivors barricaded in a rum house near the
airport, waiting for attackers to return. They were
rescued by Guyanese troops the next day.
Gerald Parks and his family later returned to Ukiah,
where his brother lived, and Parks went back to work
at a Ukiah supermarket.
He said friends and co-workers were supportive,
taking up a collection to help the shattered family.
"I was surprised by people," he said. Still, "there
are always those who are going to look down at you."
Edith Parks died a few years later. Dale works at
the veterans hospital in San Francisco, Tracy is
married and Brenda is trying to start a business.
Gerald Parks is now retired.
"For what they went through, they're doing all
right," said Gerald's brother, Dennis.
Gerald Parks said he doesn't have much contact with
former Temple members, even though he considers them
friends. "There were a lot of good people, lovely
people, in there," he said.
But he said Jonestown taught him the dangers of
believing in an all-powerful leader. "No human being
can tell if you will live or die. Our lives are not
in another human being's hands," he said.
Parks said he has since watched other messianic
figures lead people to their deaths, including David
Koresh. "When this thing happened in Waco I knew how
it was going to end," he said. "I don't think
they've learned a thing."
He believes few of Jones' followers committed
suicide. "There were a lot of them that didn't want
to die and a lot who didn't know what was going on.
They had no choice."
Parks said he has a hard time talking about
Jonestown because it brings back such terrible
memories. After 20 years, he still wonders if the
killing could have been avoided.
"I still ask myself why," he said. "There's no
explanation for it."
TEMPLE FADING INTO HISTORY MANY IN MENDOCINO COUNTY
WOULD JUST AS SOON FORGET JIM JONES
When reporter Les Kinsolving attended a church
service at the Peoples Temple in Redwood Valley in
1972, he knew there was something wrong.
The pastor, the Rev. Jim Jones, seemed like a
harmless faith healer. But there was a sinister
feeling about his church.
"I'd seen faith healers before -- a lot of them,"
said Kinsolving, who covered religion for the San
Francisco Examiner. "I wasn't particularly fooled."
What shook Kinsolving were the Temple's ushers. They
were carrying guns.
Six years later, on Nov. 18, 1978, Jones led more
than 900 followers to their deaths at the Temple's
jungle colony in Jonestown, Guyana. About 150 came
from Mendocino County, where Jones built his Temple
into a political force before moving to San
Francisco and ultimately to South America.
The dead included the 6-year-old son of a former
Ukiah attorney, the 24-year-old daughter of a Ukiah
school principal and a 42-year- old Ukiah mother and
her five children, ages 8 to 24.
Today, 20 years after Jonestown, the Rev. Jim Jones
and the Peoples Temple are a fading image for most
people in Mendocino County. But for some, today's
anniversary rekindles memories of the worst mass
murder-suicide in U.S. history. "It brings back a
lot of sadness," said Marge Boynton, a Ukiah civic
leader who knew Jones.
"People just want to forget about it," said Dennis
Parks, a former Temple member whose mother, brother,
nieces and nephew escaped Jonestown. Parks'
sister-in-law died there, along with an uncle and
several cousins.
The psychological roots of Jonestown can be found in
Mendocino County, although there are few visible
reminders of Peoples Temple. Jones' former church in
Redwood Valley, empty for years, now is home to an
Assembly of God congregation. The watch tower, where
Jones' armed guards once surveyed the Temple
grounds, is gone. So is the indoor swimming pool
where Jones held mass baptisms.
The county was the domain of ranchers, loggers and
fishermen when Jones and his Temple arrived in 1965.
Jones said he was worried about the threat of
nuclear war and wanted to find a safe place for his
growing flock.
Jones grew up poor in rural Indiana and got his
start as a fiery, self-ordained minister. By 1955 he
was drawing large, interracial crowds to "miracle
healing" services in Indianapolis.
He chose rural Northern California for the Temple's
new home after finding it on a list of spots deemed
safe from atomic fallout. About 100 disciples
followed Jones from the Midwest to Mendocino County
in 1965.
Handing over income
There was another lure, according to Temple
historians. Under California's liberal welfare
policies, the Temple's poor parishioners easily
qualified for government aid and could use it to
support the church.
The Temple also made money operating state-funded
care homes for the elderly, the disabled and
troubled teen-agers.
Jones quickly made his mark in Mendocino County.
Within two years, he was a juvenile justice
commissioner and chairman of the county's grand
jury. Jones and his followers became known for their
good works, visiting the sick and feeding the
hungry.
His church welcomed all races, and Jones set an
example by adopting a mixed-race family. The Temple
brought busloads of inner city residents from San
Francisco and Oakland to his sprawling new church
when it opened in 1969 in Redwood Valley, eight
miles north of Ukiah.
The Temple's commitment to equality and civil rights
attracted idealistic young whites, such as Timothy
Stoen, a Stanford Law School graduate from a
well-to-do Colorado family.
But the Temple had another side. Ukiah teachers said
Temple children couldn't stay awake in class because
they'd been up all night at Jones' marathon sermons.
Temple families endured long bus trips to Jones'
appearances in other cities, sometimes sleeping in
the luggage racks.
There were whispered tales of adults and children
who were beaten for violating the Temple's strict
rules. Defectors said they were pressured to sign
over their homes and life savings to the church.
Trouble inside church
Jones' miraculous healings were a fake, claimed
former members, who said Jones now insisted he was
God. Ex-followers said Jones slept with the church's
young women and encouraged family members to spy on
each other.
The preacher, called "Father" by his disciples, told
them the Temple was under attack by outside forces
and they should be ready to die for their beliefs.
Jones warned Temple dissidents they would be
punished, and several Temple defectors died under
mysterious circumstances, according to ex-members.
Ukiah resident Brenda Ganatos said she was startled
by the accounts of ex-Temple members and pressed
local authorities to investigate. But no one in the
county's government would listen, she said.
Stoen, Jones' top aide, was the assistant district
attorney. Other Temple members held high positions
in other county departments and Sheriff Reno
Bartolomie was Jones' personal friend.
"Everywhere you went it was like hitting your head
against a brick wall," Ganatos said.
Kinsolving came to Redwood Valley to investigate the
reports of Jones' fantastic healing powers. He also
talked to Temple defectors who called it a dangerous
cult and said they feared for their lives.
After Kinsolving's series on the Temple started
appearing in the Examiner, he felt Jones' wrath.
More than 150 Jones followers picketed the paper,
accusing Kinsolving of spreading lies.
Stories were killed
When the Temple threatened to sue the Examiner for
libel, Kinsolving's editors killed the rest of his
stories. Kinsolving, who now hosts a radio talk show
in Washington, D.C., still is bitter about the
episode.
Jones' church continued to grow, opening branches in
San Francisco and Los Angeles. But cracks began
appearing in the Temple's foundation.
There were more defections and ex-Temple members
were speaking out. A turning point came in 1973,
according to Stoen, who left the Temple two years
later and became Jones' staunchest critic.
Eight of the church's members, students at Santa
Rosa Junior College, suddenly left a Temple house in
Santa Rosa. The defectors were led by Jim Cobb, a
black who said Jones had turned his back on
African-American followers.
"That's what made Jim Jones go crazy," Stoen said.
"The leader felt like he'd been dismembered. The
Temple went into a siege mentality."
By 1974, the Temple had pulled up stakes in
Mendocino County and moved to San Francisco, where
the message of social justice had a much wider
audience. Jones' flock grew to several thousand and
he soon became part of the city's liberal
establishment.
Won over politicians
He turned out voters to support San Francisco's
political leaders, and they rewarded him generously.
Then-Mayor George Moscone made Jones head of the
city's housing commission.
Elected officials, such as thenAssembly Speaker
Willie Brown, former Assemblyman Art Agnos and
then-Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally, rushed to Jones'
defense whenever he came under attack.
But the questions were mounting. The Temple faced a
government investigation for tax fraud and a pile of
lawsuits from exmembers who claimed they were
swindled out of their property. Relatives of Temple
members alleged they were being brainwashed.
Jones posted guards around the Temple's Geary Street
church.
Convinced his enemies would never give up, Jones
stepped up work on his ultimate plan. The Temple
would leave California for a farm colony in the
South American jungle, where his foes couldn't touch
him. The first Temple members arrived at Jonestown
in 1975 and Jones left the United States for good
two years later.
Stoen and Steve Katsaris, a Ukiah private school
principal who had a daughter in Jonestown, led a
parents' group that demanded the U.S. government
investigate reports of abuse at Jonestown.
Ryan's fatal visit
They were instrumental in arranging Rep. Leo Ryan's
1978 visit to check on the residents' welfare. The
San Mateo County congressman's trip ended in tragedy
when he tried to leave Jonestown with a handful of
Temple defectors.
After Temple gunmen attacked Ryan's party, killing
the congressman and four others, Jones told his
flock that suicide was their only way out. Of 913
Temple members who were murdered or committed
suicide in Jonestown, at least 150 were former
Mendocino County residents, including Stoen's son
and Katsaris' daughter.
At the time of the massacre, the Temple still
operated a Redwood Valley care home for disabled
adults, Happy Acres. State authorities later removed
its clients.
Tom MacMillan, a professor at Mendocino College,
said Ukiahns struggled for years to deal with
feelings about the neighbors they lost in Jonestown.
There was no memorial for the victims, "so there was
a lot of unprocessed grief," he said.
He said the Temple made Mendocino County more wary
of unusual religious groups. Still, he said the
county has been home to a diverse collection of
believers, including Krishnas, Moonies and neo-
pagans.
"If there's a religious belief practiced anywhere in
the world, I'll bet there's a place in Mendocino
County you can find it," he said.
Lifting the stigma
MacMillan said there was some closure last year when
Jones' former church in Redwood Valley was
rededicated by the Assembly of God. Ukiah religious
leaders and ex-Temple members gathered when the new
congregation installed a cross and fountain there.
"We wanted to be part of the healing process," said
Assembly of God Pastor Kim Harvey. "Since that day
we've had a really beautiful sense of community. The
stigma seems to have been reduced."
He said visitors from as far away as France have
visited the church to see a part of the Temple's
history. But the church doesn't look much like the
original Peoples Temple, Harvey said. "It's so
different they don't recognize it," he said.
Ganatos said the ghost of the Rev. Jim Jones may
never be completely exorcised because Mendocino
County swept his misdeeds under the rug. She said
the county never truly investigated the deaths of
Temple defectors or his misuse of the county's
welfare system.
Boynton said Jones' influence in government is
overstated. "The only people he controlled were
members of Peoples Temple," Boynton said. "He
attempted to manipulate and use other people but he
didn't control Mendocino County government."
Such debates may continue, but after 20 years the
Temple is starting to fade from the county's
consciousness. "I think the big impact has passed,"
MacMillan said. As old timers die and newcomers take
their places, "it's becoming pretty much a forgotten
deal."
Tilman Hausherr
LED TO DARKNESS THE SAGA OF JIM JONES' PEOPLES
TEMPLE STILL RESONATES IN THE BAY AREA AND BEYOND
The Press Democrat
15.11.1998
By Bob Klose, Staff Writer
People's Temple: The Road to Jonestown
Congressman Leo Ryan chatted with his family 20
years ago this month as he prepared to leave his San
Mateo County home for a fact- finding mission to
Jonestown, the Peoples Temple jungle colony in
Guyana.
"I distinctly remember him sitting in our kitchen,
talking about his trip," said his daughter, Patricia
Ryan who was 25 years old in 1978.
"He was trying to downplay it. He didn't want us to
be concerned," she said. "But we were aware that he
was getting involved in something bizarre."
There was reason for concern. Former Temple members
who had fled Jonestown said Peoples Temple's
charismatic leader Rev. Jim Jones was insane and was
holding nearly 1,000 Americans in the jungle against
their will and under armed guard. Jones' critics
said he had pledged to lead his members through a
ritual mass suicide if anyone attempted to interfere
with his church.
Temple members denied the charges in shortwave radio
transmissions from the settlement, but Ryan decided
to visit nevertheless- and 20 years later, his
daughter remembers the unease that clouded the
family discussion as her father prepared to leave.
"When he was walking out the door I said to him:
Don't let anybody shoot you. I said it in jest, but
it was a nervous comment and showed, I think, that
we were nervous about the trip."
That was the last time Patricia Ryan saw her father
alive. A few days later, on a Saturday, Nov. 18, she
heard on her car radio that there had been a
shooting at Jonestown.
Ryan drove home and with her family waited for word
all night, watching reports on TV and listening to
the radio, until their worst fears were realized.
"We heard about his death about 5 a.m. on the
radio," she said.
The report said Ryan, the Democratic congressman
from San Mateo, was dead along with two NBC news
men, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg
Robinson, and Patty Parks, a Peoples Temple member
who had attempted to leave Jonestown with Ryan and
return to her Ukiah home in Mendocino County.
The congressman's party was ambushed at a remote
airstrip and the bloodshed would ignite the madness
and paranoia that had seized Jim Jones and the
leaders of his church. When Guyanese investigators
arrived the next day, they found the bodies of
Peoples Temple members who died from poisoned fruit
punch.
The first day, they counted 400 dead. The next day,
the toll more than doubled. The final count showed
912 souls -- including more than 200 children and
infants -- died in the jungle that day. This week
relatives of the dead will celebrate and mourn the
victims of Jonestown, the largest mass
murder-suicide in modern history.
A time to remember
For Patricia Ryan, now 45 and a Sacramento health
care lobbyist, the 20th anniversary of her father's
death will be marked by a week of services,
workshops and meetings. It is an effort to find some
measure of understanding of religious movements that
become cults.
Ryan spoke last week from a Chicago hotel where she
was addressing the American Family Foundation, a
cult research and educational foundation. She
returns to the Bay Area today where hundreds of
other relatives and friends, clergy and academicians
are expected at large group services as well as
small, private family gatherings.
The main events will be 7 p.m. Tuesday at the the
San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese Cathedral of St.
Mary of the Assumption on Gough Street and 11 a.m.
Wednesday at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, where
the remains of 406 Jonestown victims are interred.
For Ryan and others whose lives have been
permanently marred by Jonestown, this week's
celebration and each annual celebration represent
their commitment to remember, understand, and
prevent similar tragedies.
It is a mission that, ironically, Jones himself
drove home to his Peoples Temple members with the
inscription -- in block letters on a sheet of
plywood nailed to a timber rafter in the Jonestown
dining room -- of American philosopher George
Santayana's warning: Those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it.
"I hope people are always learning from it. Kids are
growing up every day who don't know anything about
Jones and Jonestown. If these yearly events help,
then it is worth it and why I participate,"Ryan
said.
Idealistic beginnings
The Peoples Temple has been a preoccupation of
nearly 30 years for John Moore, who lost two
daughters and a grandchild in Jonestown.
Moore, a Methodist minister now retired in Davis,
was an activist religious leader during the socially
turbulent years of the 1960s and '70s. With his wife
and children, he lived in the Bay Area, supported
the farmworker organizing efforts of Caesar Chavez,
worked on behalf of racial equality, opposed the war
in Vietnam and provided comfort to military draft
resisters, and was campus minister to students at UC
Davis.
In the process, the Rev. Moore and his wife,
Barbara, raised children who championed their
parents' drive for social justice. Two daughters,
Carolyn and Annie, found in Jones' Peoples Temple
the perfect vehicle for helping poor people,
encouraging racial equality, and delivering
religious salvation.
Carolyn Moore joined Jones' church in 1968. Carolyn
had married Larry Layton, a Quaker from Berkeley,
the year before, and the couple moved to Redwood
Valley, eight miles north of Ukiah. Carolyn taught
high school French, and they joined the People's
Temple.
Mendocino county base
At that time, Jones was just three years in Northern
California but already a formidable religious and
political force.
A charismatic preacher from Indianapolis, Jones
moved to Mendocino County in 1965, bringing 145
members of his Indiana flock with him. Jones set up
a small church, first in Ukiah and then in Redwood
Valley, and then began a program of empowerment and
growth by a ministry based on faith healings, social
and racial justice programs and involvement in the
political structure.
Jones became foreman of the Mendocino County grand
jury and strengthened his ties with local elected
leaders with a jury report supportive of county
government. He was elected vice president of the
Legal Services Foundation in the county and became a
member of th Juvenile Justice Commission.
Jones became a powerful political presence. He could
produce busloads of church members in support of
political or social events and causes, and his
church membership became a potent voter bloc. He
would perfect the process in San Francisco, where he
became a similar source of influence after moving
his Peoples Temple headquarters into a building on
Geary Boulevard in 1971.
He amassed a fortune from Social Security income
signed over to the church by parishioners. Other
members deeded their family property to the Temple.
According to retired UC Berkeley psychology
Professor Margaret Singer, a cult expert, Jones had
raised some $10 million by 1975.
At his church on East Road in Redwood Valley, Jones
built a following which included many inner-city
black Americans weary with the state of race
relations in America. He exploited racial fears. He
instilled a group paranoia through staged shootings
during services and then offered the Temple and
himself as a salvation and a haven.
'Struggle for justice'
It was into this climate that Carolyn Moore Layton
and her husband stepped in 1968. Later, Annie Moore
would join her sister in Redwood Valley, join the
church and become educated as a nurse at Santa Rosa
Junior College.
"My daughters were idealistic young people. Their
whole lives were identified with struggle for
justice and we were engaged in compassionate
ministries. Peoples Temple was doing these kinds of
things. The group was predominantly black and Jim
Jones was charismatic," Moore said.
But Moore was troubled immediately upon hearing
about the Temple from Carolyn.
"She said Jim Jones said this, Jim Jones said that
and I wrote her and said I would rather know what
she thought. But that was what Peoples Temple was
about. Jim Jones was the authority and the people
were subordinate to Jones' views. That was a clue
very early on," Moore said.
There was no turning back for his daughters. Carolyn
had a son, Kimo, by Jones even though Jones remained
married to his wife, Marceline. Carolyn and Larry
divorced but remained entrenched leaders in the
Temple to the very end, Larry married to another
woman and Carolyn as one of Jones' multiple mates.
Annie would become Jones' personal nurse, and, it is
believed, the last person to see Jones alive.
Roots of challenge
Jones' influence and power would rise dramatically
in the 1970s, but at the same time the eventual
challenges to his leadership and church would take
root within his innermost circle, as well as in the
press, where reports on church activity began to
surface.
Tim Stoen had met Jones in 1967 when he was
establishing a legal services office in Ukiah.
Within several years, Stoen had become assistant
district attorney. Privately, he was Jones' chief
legal and political adviser. His wife, Grace Stoen,
also held a position in Jones' hierarchy. She was a
recordkeeper and treasurer of thousands of dollars
in church funds, and also served as a counselor and
enforcer, passing along to Jones names of Temple
members who had broken church rules.
Jones and the Stoens would eventually be placed on a
collision course after the birth of a son to Grace
Stoen in 1972 at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.
Although the birth certificate shows Tim Stoen as
the father, within 10 days of the child's birth
Stoen signed a document declaring that Jones was the
boy's father.
Stoen would later claim paternity, but years later
-- after Grace Stoen had left the church and her
husband -- the issue would remain unresolved and
would become a flash point in the final collapse of
Jones' cult.
Meanwhile, the Peoples Temple underwent huge growth
in the 1970s. It opened its San Francisco
headquarters and a branch in Los Angeles. The church
leased 3,842 acres in the Guyana jungle near the
Venezuelan border, where a small group of Temple
members began building a utopian agricultural
project.
In San Francisco, Jones warmed to the political
establishment. He was appointed chairman of the
Housing Authority after helping George Moscone win
his race for mayor. His lieutenant, Tim Stoen,
became an assistant district attorney.
Jones and his Peoples Temple were at their peak when
the press began to expose church excesses, use of
armed guards, and phony healings. Jones and other
leaders moved to Guyana in 1977 as the now- defunct
New West Magazine prepared an expose in which former
members, including Grace Stoen, reported
irregularities in the transfer of personal property
to the church and beatings of church members.
The temple denied the charges, but Jones ordered a
mass exodus to Guyana. About 900 people obeyed.
'It was paradise'
Tim Stoen moved to Guyana in February 1977, six
months after his wife, Grace, left him and the
church.
"It was one of those wonderful kind of experiences,"
he said of the first few months of his stay in the
jungle.
"I worked in the sawmill during the days, pushing
logs through a planer. Then in the afternoons I'd
help my son, John John, with his lessons, and at
night we'd play. It was paradise," he said.
"Then Jim Jones arrived and it was hell," he said.
Although Stoen insists he is his son's natural
father, he left the boy behind with Jones when he
took an authorized leave from Jonestown after five
months.
In Colorado, he met his former wife, Grace, who was
then engaged in a custody fight with Jones for the
child. Stoen said he decided then to leave the
church and join the effort to get the boy out.
Over the next year, rigid lines would be drawn
between temple supporters in California and Guyana
and relatives of temple members who feared for their
family members in South America.
A group called Concerned Relatives was formed to
lobby the Peoples Temple in San Francisco and
government officials to answer questions into
conditions in Guyana. They charged that Jones was
holding their family members hostage and under
guard, and that Jones was prepared to lead his
congregation into mass suicide.
Telling the world
Their concerns were given credence when Deborah
Layton, the 25- year-old little sister of longtime
Jones lieutenant Larry Layton, escaped from Guyana
in June 1978 and declared that Jonestown was an
armed camp.
Deborah Layton, now living in Piedmont, in the East
Bay, ended 20 years of silence on her involvement
with Jones with the publication last week of
"Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of
Life and Death in the Peoples Temple." As one of
Jones' key secretaries, she helped take care of
millions of dollars he had deposted in Swiss bank
accounts. Although she said "inner voices" told her
to quit the church, she remained a member for seven
years, and with her mother joined the migration to
Guyana.
"The minute my mother and I arrived, I decided I had
to leave. Jim had gone mad from paranoia and drugs.
Everybody was afraid in Jonestown," she said.
Six weeks later, while on an official trip to the
Guyanese capital of Georgetown, 250 miles away,
Layton escaped. In San Francisco and later at the
State Department in Washington, Deborah Layton
warned officials and the press that Jones was
staging terrifying nighttime suicide drills in the
event the outside world invaded Jonestown.
Ryan's mission
During his 1978 re-election campaign, Rep. Leo Ryan
had received numerous calls for help by members of
Concerned Relatives. He promised to conduct a
factfinding mission after the election, and on the
second week of November Ryan led a small group of
aides, press and relatives to Guyana.
At Jonestown, the congressman was feted with dinner
and music with the temple members. It was a show,
and the warm welcome melted when 16 Temple members-
including members of the Parks family of Ukiah --
asked to leave with Ryan.
While boarding two small aircraft at a nearby
airstrip, the party was ambushed by Jonestown gunmen
who killed Ryan and four others, sparking the mass
murder and suicide at Jonestown.
Loudspeakers ordered the congregation to the dining
room, and there they voluntarily drank fruit punch
laced with cyanide. Those who refused were forced or
shot. In some cases the punch was injected into the
children. Within hours, 912 Peoples Temple members
were dead, including Carolyn Moore Layton and her
son Kimo, and Grace and Tim Stoen's son, John
Victor.
Jones spared himself suicide by poison and instead
was shot to death by Anne Moore, who then shot
herself to death.
There was not a living soul left when authorities
arrived the next day.
Twenty years later, opinions are mixed on whether
the tragedy of Jonestown could have been avoided.
Deborah Layton is critical of the government for
failing to believe her when she warned them about
Jones' intentions and "let Leo Ryan go down to the
insanity there."
John R. Hall, a sociologist and cult expert at UC
Davis, said the Jonestown murder and suicide was the
consequence of escalating conflict by opposing sides
who exaggerated their postions so that there was no
middle ground, a situation similar to the fiery end
to the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, in
which 80 people perished.
For John Moore, Jonestown was a colossal tragedy.
"The media was doing its job. Congressman Ryan felt
he was doing his job. Our family felt we were doing
what was best. Concerned Relatives thought they were
doing what was best. And everybody lost. I don't
think it could have been prevented," said Moore --
except if Jim Jones had never been.
"Jim Jones was center stage. He was the lead actor.
Without Jim Jones there would have been no Peoples
Temple and no cataclysmic end."
NORTHERN CALIFORNIANS STILL HAUNTED: COULD DEATHS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?
The Rev. Jim Jones made it his job to befriend
people who could help him.
He made sure his church's good deeds were widely
publicized. He delivered to politicians and other
community leaders attentive audiences, financial
contributions and foot soldiers.
In Mendocino County, Jones was named foreman of the
grand jury. After he moved his People's Temple
congregation to San Francisco, he was appointed to
the Housing Commission and became the confidante of
the city's liberal Democratic elite -- Mayor George
Moscone, District Attorney Joe Freitas, Congressman
Phil Burton, Assemblyman (and now mayor) Willie
Brown, Sen. Milton Marks and others.
Over time, doubts about Jones would begin to
surface. Stories and then news reports told of fake
healing ceremonies, beatings and Jones' demands that
church members turn over their money and property to
the church.
Eventually, fleeing the crescendo of negative
stories and the prospect of government
investigations, Jones would persuade his followers
to join him at a jungle outpost in Guyana where on
Nov. 18, 1978 -- 20 years ago this Wednesday- 914
people died in a murder- suicide.
Two decades later, doubts haunt Bay Area residents'
remembrances of the madness at Jonestown. Could
these deaths have been prevented? Were news
organizations slow to pursue stories of wrongdoing
by Jones? Were political leaders slow to respond
because of the debts they owed to him?
By its nature, madness defies our best efforts to
understand it. At some moment -- we don't know
exactly when -what appeared to be a well-meaning
preacher with a devoted flock became a madman
leading cult followers to their deaths.
San Francisco was still reeling from the shock of
events in Guyana when, a week later, Moscone and
Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated.
No one who lived in the Bay Area will forget those
terrible days.
Tilman Hausherr
foto of Jackie Speier and Fred Lewis. Lewis lost 27 family members in
Jonestown.
Tilman Hausherr
Woman recalls flight through the jungle
AP 18.11.1998
By MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- Twenty years ago
Wednesday, Leslie Wilson was fleeing for her life through the
Guyana jungle, her 2-year-old son tied to her back with a sheet.
She had gone to Jonestown in early 1977 with high hopes, one of
the hundreds who followed charismatic leader Jim Jones' message of
racial harmony and good works.
At first, there was beauty in Jonestown, she said.
But over time, she saw the dream die as food got scarce and Jones
became more obsessed with the enemies he believed were persecuting
him.
Wilson, who was one of the speakers at a memorial service
Wednesday for the Jonestown dead, said in an interview that she
vowed on Dec. 31, 1977 that it would be her son's last New Year's
Eve in the camp.
But as the wife of Jones' head of security, it was hard to win the
trust of anyone who dared contemplate escape, she said.
Eventually, she found a group of like-minded spirits led by
another disenchanted Temple member, Richard Clark.
On Nov. 18, 1978, the group saw their chance to slip away in the
bustle over the visit of U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, who had led a
delegation of reporters and concerned relatives to the camp.
Clark, who also spoke at the memorial service, sent one of the
women in the group to ask a guard for permission to have a picnic
in the jungle.
The response was, ``Have a good time and be back here at 1 p.m.
I've been on that picnic ever since,'' he said to laughter.
In all, eight people made their escape with Clark.
To keep her son calm -- and stop him from making any noise to
alert anyone who might come looking for them -- Wilson said she
dosed him with Valium procured by a friend who worked at the
pharmacy. To get him to take the drug, she stirred it into
fruit-flavored punch.
Hours later, after Ryan and four others had been killed in an
airstrip ambush, Jones would order his followers to drink
cyanide-poisoned punch in a mass murder-suicide that left 913
dead.
But at the time, Wilson thought it was just another day at the
camp as she the others walked on.
They followed railroad tracks for a while, eventually going 37
miles to the town of Matthew's Ridge.
She carried Jakari in a sheet tied to her back, taking turns with
some of the other adults when she got too tired.
By the time they got to the town, news of the deaths had spread
and the police at first wanted to arrest the escapees as possible
accomplices, Wilson said. But a train conductor vouched for them,
saying he had seen them walking in the opposite direction of the
camp hours before the killings.
Wilson would later learn that almost everyone in Jonestown was
dead, including her mother, her sister, her brother and her
husband, who had been among the guards holding guns on the
congregation as Jones ordered the suicide.
Wilson, now 40 and living in Sacramento, wants people to know that
Jones' followers weren't stupid or crazy.
``The people in Jonestown had a vision, had a dream. We were just
duped,'' she said.
Although she had been through some of Jones' suicide drills, known
as ``White Nights,'' she never expected Jonestown to end the way
it did.
Afterward, ``I felt like I should have known. I felt like I saw
the signs. But there are some things that are just unimaginable.
You don't even want to think about those things -- that somebody
could actually, actually go through with it.''
``You just don't think it. And that was my downfall.''
Survivors gather 20 years later
AP 18.11.1998
By MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- On a quiet hillside
spangled with sunshine, relatives of those who died in the madness
of Jonestown 20 years ago, and a few who escaped, met Wednesday to
look back and remember.
Horror lurked at their feet. The service was held on top of a mass
grave holding the bodies of many of those who died when Peoples
Temple leader Jim Jones ordered more than 900 of his followers to
drink cyanide-poisoned punch.
But speakers focused on the dreams, not the nightmare, of
Jonestown.
``The people of Jonestown went to Guyana to live, not to die,''
said Jynona Norwood, who lost 27 members of her family in the mass
murder-suicide. Norwood refused to join the Temple and went into
hiding with her young son Ed, who had become an enthusiastic
member.
But she could not stop other members of her family inspired by
Jones' message of racial harmony and social justice from following
him to the Guyana jungle encampment that bore his name.
``All my mother kept saying is, 'You're going to love it over
there. You're going to want to bring your son because this is
going to be a better place. We will build a better world.' They
believed that.''
Rank-and-file members of Peoples Temple weren't the only ones who
believed in Jones. After he moved to San Francisco in the early
1970s, he was courted by the political establishment, eventually
becoming chair of the city's housing authority.
But after an August 1977 magazine article detailed ex-members'
stories of beatings and forced donations, he abruptly moved his
flock to Jonestown.
Even there, the utopian vision of Jones' followers survived for a
while, said former Peoples Temple member Leslie Wilson, who spoke
about her experiences at the memorial service.
``The people in Jonestown had a vision, had a dream. We were just
duped,'' she said.
Wilson, who said she was going public about her experiences for
the first time, described how she and eight others escaped on Nov.
18, 1978 -- hours before the suicides -- by pretending to go on a
picnic.
They slipped out of Jonestown during the bustle over the visit of
U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan and kept walking, eventually traveling 37 miles
to the town of Matthew's Ridge, taking turns carrying Wilson's
2-year-old son strapped to their backs in a sheet. In an eerie
portent of what was to come, Wilson said she dosed the toddler
with Valium stirred into fruit punch to keep him calm during the
journey.
Richard Clark, the ex-Temple member who said he organized the
``picnic'' because he had lost faith in Jones, also spoke at the
service.
``I escaped ... because I didn't go over there to die,'' he said.
While the picnickers were walking to freedom, things were
spiraling toward tragedy back in Jonestown.
Ryan, who was heading a delegation of reporters and concerned
relatives, had been met with happy declarations of contentment
when he had arrived the day before.
But the mood turned sour after some Jonestown residents indicated
they wanted to leave. Ryan and his party were ambushed as they
tried to leave from a nearby airstrip. The congressman and four
others were killed.
Later that night, Jones told his followers, ``To die in
revolutionary suicide is to live forever.''
They started with the babies, squirting the poison into their
mouths with syringes. Then the adults drank. Some protested, a few
were able to escape into the inhospitable jungle, some were shot
to death by the armed guards ringing the camp.
Norwood's son Ed, now grown up and a pastor himself, said he has
struggled with the shame of admitting he was a member of the
Peoples Temple.
``As a child I sang in the choir. I was present when a 4-year-old
little boy was beaten unconscious by a 9-year-old boy in view of
the whole congregation,'' he said. ``People have asked, 'Why
didn't the people leave when they witnessed these alarming
events?' ... I don't know. Perhaps out of fear. Maybe they feel
they have nothing to go back to, that they're at the point of no
return.''
Jones' son, Stephan, also spoke. The young Jones, who was away
with the camp basketball team at the time of the suicide order,
described his recent visit to Jonestown, now virtually obliterated
by time.
``I came out of there reminded that those people had always been
with me,'' he said. ``I believe that a piece of them is with me,
that I carry a piece of their souls, as does everyone here.''
Standing behind him, two young people held up a banner. On it were
the words that had been written on a sign that hung in the
Jonestown pavilion: ``THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE
CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT.''
Pictures of a nightmare past
San Francisco Examiner
18.11.1998
By ROB MORSE, EXAMINER COLUMNIST
Wall of shame
JIM JONES has come home to roost at City Hall, the temporary one
in the Veterans Building. He stares from behind dark glasses from
posters on the first floor, and from photographs arrayed near the
Board of Supervisors' meeting room on the fourth floor.
Twenty years later, it's almost unbearable to look at these
photographs of Jones and Jonestown, taken by Examiner photographer
Greg Robinson on the last day of Robinson's young and promising
life. The exhibition is called "Days of Darkness," and it's a
darkness many still can't fathom.
The painful part isn't seeing the bodies. It's seeing Robinson's
pictures of vibrant young children and older members of the
Peoples Temple. It's knowing that 900 of them will die in a few
hours, along with Congressman Leo Ryan and others in his
delegation to Jones' dystopia in Guyana. That includes the man who
took these great photographs.
"My first reaction is it's incredible to see that all these people
died on the same day," said Claes Ostlund. "You can't believe that
one guy can be that powerful, that he can get so many people to
kill themselves."
Ostlund and his wife, Karin, love San Francisco and come here
every other year from Stockholm. Like all of us, they tried to
make sense of how the evil of Jim Jones could grow in the heart of
San Francisco.
"It just brings it all back," said Lynne Tondorf, who works for
the Department of Social Services. "Twenty years later, and it all
comes back. . .. . It's something we shouldn't forget."
Some City Hall workers can't bear to look at the photographs. They
knew Jones. They knew people Jones murdered. They knew how Jones
had insinuated himself into the heart of the political
establishment of San Francisco, and how politicians bought his
act.
"I can understand why people here wouldn't like it, having to look
at that every day," said Patty Moran, pointing at Robinson's
famous portrait of Jones, with glazed eyes behind shades.
Moran was a Democratic Party activist when Jones was seducing the
liberal establishment. She worked for both George Moscone and
Harvey Milk, who would be murdered in City Hall by disgruntled
former Supervisor Dan White a week after the Jonestown horror.
Moran remembered how Peoples Temple members joined her political
club. "They infiltrated all the clubs. They'd send members in blue
suits and dark glasses, and turn out hundreds of members for
rallies."
Moran kept looking at the photographs, sighing and saying, "Yep"
and "Oh, Golly."
Some workers in city offices say they always were suspicious of
the man in the leisure suit and dark glasses and his believers who
would turn out for political events. But these are mostly people
who weren't in elective office.
I talked to several people like this, and none wanted to be
quoted. Twenty years later, Jim Jones is still a sensitive
subject.
Kandace Bender, the mayor's press secretary, said one colleague at
first said, "I'm not ready for this," but later came back and said
it was good to have to face the reality of Jim Jones and
Jonestown.
"We've had a lot of exhibits here, but very few with this power,"
said Bender. "For the first 48 hours I saw so many people who were
actually touching the photographs."
Bender found the exhibit painful because she had worked at The
Examiner, where Greg Robinson left so many friends. Even though
she didn't know him, the hurt was transmitted by newsroom osmosis.
That is how I know Greg Robinson, too. Because he was a friend of
friends, and I've gotten to know his work very well.
I'd only been here a year when November of 1978 struck San
Francisco, and I'm still trying to understand what happened. Is
there some darkness at the heart of this beautiful city, or is it
just that San Francisco welcomes anyone charismatic who preaches
social justice?
Never mind Jones' followers. How could such perceptive civic
leaders as Willie Brown and Herb Caen be seduced by Jones?
Jim Jones wasn't just a cult leader. He made San Francisco know
shame all too well.
Mayor Brown, who just returned from Europe, said he has not seen
the Jonestown photo exhibition yet, but intends to. I asked him
how Jones could line up so many important people in San Francisco
on his side.
"He fooled me. He fooled George Moscone," said Brown. "George even
appointed him to the Housing Authority."
Can another Jim Jones come along and work his way into the
political establishment?
"You can't stop them," Brown said. "Nuts can succeed if they work
at it. All you can do is go on with your work."
Brown, who has had bad press in the past because of his links to
Jones, said he would like to see a memorial wall with the names of
the Jonestown victims in Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery.
"We ought to co-sponsor something with The Examiner. We ought to
create a memorial for the victims. It couldn't cost more than
$30,000," Brown said.
The other memorial to the dead of Jonestown is the Greg Robinson
Scholarship Fund at San Francisco State University, established by
The Examiner to aid aspiring photojournalists.
If you have any doubts about the power of photojournalism, go to
the fourth floor of the temporary City Hall through Dec. 11. Even
if you're just passing by, you can't miss Greg Robinson's image of
Jim Jones staring from the front window.
Twenty years later, and we can still see the evil.
Family, friends share lessons of Jonestown
San Francisco Examiner
18.11.1998
By Ray Delgado, EXAMINER STAFF
Memorial is celebration of life
There were no tears shed at the gathering of family members,
friends and survivors who lost loved ones at Jonestown.
Instead, at St. Mary's Cathedral of the Assumption on Tuesday
night, there was a celebration of life and a sharing of lessons
learned.
Twenty years have not completely erased the pain of the tragedy
that befell more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple but time
has allowed those most affected by it to focus on the good that
has come out of the madness.
"We are going to take the memory of Jonestown and keep it for our
possession," the Rev. Arnold Townsend told the crowd of about 60
people gathered in the cavernous hall. "If you've carried grief
alone for 20 years, that's long enough."
The service in many ways mirrored a typical memorial celebration,
with an array of church hymns, scripture readings and choral
performances. The Family Christian Cathedral Ensemble led the
crowd in a moving rendition of "Amazing Grace" while a group of
children from Southern California rhythmically swayed to the
words.
But the similarities ended there as speaker after speaker took the
microphone to speak out against the horror of Jonestown, to try to
explain it, and to urge the audience to heed its lessons.
"It wasn't by accident that Jim Jones came to San Francisco and
seized the moment," said Supervisor Amos Brown, explaining that
Jones conned a Baptist preacher into leasing him the space where
the Peoples Temple was born. "San Francisco, as well as Jim Jones,
share some responsibility in what happened in Jonestown."
The most moving part of the evening came near the end, when two
survivors of Jonestown shared their stories.
Yolanda Williams described a life of hell in Guyana, where she and
members of her family quickly learned they were not living in the
utopia they had been promised but rather in an intimidating and
authoritarian community where beatings were common.
"I knew that that was not where I was supposed to be," said
Williams. "Through the grace of God, there was a way for me to get
out."
Williams said she managed to sneak a letter out to her mother back
in Florida asking her for help. Her mother traveled to Guyana to
retrieve her daughter - but Williams said she was forced to sign
letters incriminating herself and members of her family before she
was able to leave. She was also warned not to speak out against
Jonestown or she would be hunted down.
Once she left, she said, she wouldn't utter a word about it.
"It's been difficult to decide whether it's appropriate to tell
anyone where I came from," Williams said. ". . . For five years, I
said nothing and looked constantly around."
The notion she most wanted to dispel was that Peoples Temple
followers were dysfunctional for having believed in Jones and his
promises.
"We were people who had high hopes and expectations and wanted to
lead a better life," Williams said.
The Rev. Richard Clark, also a Jonestown survivor, echoed that
sentiment. He said he quickly learned to see through Jones' lies
and foresaw the plans for a mass suicide. Instead of staying and
dying, Clark said he and several other cult members fled Jonestown
on that fateful day and never returned.
"If I ever saw the devil, I saw him in Jim Jones," Clark said.
"Every day of my life I think about it.
"But I go around telling others there's hope."
Tilman Hausherr
Guyana survivors, kin gather in love
San Francisco Examiner
19.11.1998
By Anastasia Hendrix, EXAMINER STAFF
OAKLAND - Upon the grassy hilltop grave that holds the bodies of
hundreds of Jonestown men, women and children, a crowd huddled to
remember the tragedy and to seek a sense of closure that had
eluded them.
Several of the more than 250 people there faithfully had come to
each of the annual prayer ceremonies held over the past two
decades, but Wednesday's landmark anniversary also brought out a
handful of others to Evergreen Cemetery for the first time. It was
the largest crowd to visit the site.
Like Herbert Newell, a Los Angeles resident and onetime member of
the Rev. Jim Jones' Peoples Temple, many of those attending for
the first time said they finally had decided to come to try to
reconcile the past.
"It's been a difficult 20 years, with a lot of ups and a lot of
downs," said Newell, who survived the mass deaths in the Guyana
jungle because he had been working on a riverboat that day. But 12
of his family members who also lived at the Jonestown compound
were not so lucky. He began recounting each of their names on his
fingers - Mom, Ann, Jennifer, Isaac - before his voice trailed off
into silence.
They were among the more than 900 people who followed the
charismatic Jones in his attempt to create a utopian society, but
who succumbed to his orders to commit mass suicide by drinking
cyanide-laced fruit punch.
"Being here is very emotional and it's hard to describe how I feel
right now," Newell said, clutching a small camera and looking at
the crowd. "When it first happened I was tempted not to come back
to the States at all, because I thought people wouldn't understand
or say "I told you so,' but I can say now that I'm very glad I
did."
The two-hour ceremony was punctuated by an a cappella choir
singing gospel hymns, prayers from pastors and the words of
survivors who told of their experiences and the importance of the
day.
Even Jones' son, Stephan Jones, who survived the mass suicide
because he was away with the camp's basketball team at the time,
felt compelled to speak, though he hadn't planned on it.
After asking everyone to join hands for a moment of silence, Jones
said he believed the tragedy caused thousands - including himself
- to reflect, grow and learn in ways no one could have imagined.
"Today, this morning, I woke up with more hope, more healing, and
more love in my heart than I ever remember feeling," said Jones,
although admitting he still hated his father for what he had done.
"You probably know, most of you, that I went back to Jonestown
recently . . . and I looked hard and long for some trace of my
people . . and I came out of there reminded that those people have
always been with me.
"And I'm not talking about memories. I'm talking about spirit. I
believe that a piece of them is with me, that I carry a piece of
their soul, as does everyone here," he said. "And I believe that
with that comes a responsibility, because I believe that without
us they cannot realize their earthly purpose."
Jones' comments particularly touched the Rev. Richard Clark,
another Jonestown survivor from Champagne, Ill., who nodded and
smiled as the applause swelled after Jones left the podium. The
62-year-old Clark, who escaped Jonestown the morning of Nov. 18,
1978, under the guise that he and others were going on a picnic,
was so moved by Jones' comments he immediately rose from his
front-row seat to shake Jones' hand and thank him.
Ex-Peoples Temple member Leslie Wilson, who fled the compound on
foot that fateful morning 20 years ago with her 2-year-old son,
said she, too, was coming forward for the first time to urge
people to keep the memory of Jonestown alive so the tragedy is
never repeated.
"We have to keep going on and quit living in the past because we
have a future now," she said.
Michelle Allen, who traveled from Inglewood to attend the ceremony
with her 41/2-year-old daughter Simone and her 13-year-old son
Chaz, said she believed the theme of the day was more about the
future than the past.
She said she hoped plans to erect a memorial wall with the names
of those who died would succeed so that the tragic legacy of
Jonestown would be preserved for generations to come. "We have to
get the wall built so people can see it and remember," Allen said,
comparing its importance to the Vietnam veterans memorial in
Washington.
Grieving Survivors Mourn Their Jonestown Dead
Small gathering also honors slain Congressman Ryan
San Francisco Chronicle
19.11.1998
By Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
The grieving and the angry walked up a grassy cemetery hill in
Oakland yesterday and stood over a communal grave to take toll of
what 20 years have done to the ugly memory of Jonestown.
For some who fled in the jungle as the mad preacher Jim Jones
ordered a mass suicide and murder, the hopeless fury burned as
fresh as ever. For others, mostly relatives who learned of the
killings from afar back then, the anger had softened to
contemplative sorrow.
For all, there was, at the very least, a sliver of peace in coming
together on the 20th anniversary of the worst day of their lives:
the day 913 souls lost their lives to poison and bullets at the
Peoples Temple compound in Guyana.
A staggering 406 of those victims lie beneath a simple headstone
at Evergreen Cemetery, and it is the annual assembling point for
those who want to remember. This year was little easier than the
previous 19.
``We have lived with shock, anguish and pain all this time, and
tears still burn our eyes like the waters of the sea,'' John
Moore, a retired Methodist minister who lost two daughters and a
grandson at Jonestown, told the gathering of 100. ``Nevertheless,
we live.''
Moore wrestled with his next words, and the crowd urged him on
with calls of, ``Say it! Amen!'' He brightened, and thundered,
``Yes! We are survivors!''
More than a dozen speakers -- from survivors to Oakland Mayor
Elihu Harris to cult expert Margaret Singer -- spoke. The common
message: remember the dead, stay away from cults, and try to help
society learn from this tragedy.
``It was not a suicide in Jonestown, it was an engineered murder
at the hands of a man who tricked them all,'' Singer said. ``The
people who got involved in Jonestown were good. But it happened
that their leader didn't have the same moral and ethical values.''
Leslie Wilson, who escaped through the jungle on the morning of
the massacre with eight other people, said she had never spoken
publicly of her ordeal until yesterday. She slogged 37 miles
through the trees, her toddler son strapped to her back with a bed
sheet, to get away from Jones' insanity -- and her group only
learned of the slaughter when they reached the nearest town a
couple days later.
Among the dead were Wilson's mother, husband, brother, sister and
her sister's two children.
``I hid the past from people I knew all these years, told them I
lost my family in an accident or was an only child,'' Wilson said,
her voice cracking. ``The shame for many of us who were in that
place was too much, so we locked it away. But it's been locked
away too long. I will hide it no longer.''
The Rev. Jynona Norwood, who with her uncle Fred Lewis lost 27
relatives in Jonestown -- more than any other family -- told the
crowd that a long-stalled push to erect a memorial wall at
Evergreen is back on track. More than $5,000 was raised this week,
and she said she expects the rest of the $35,000 needed in
donations to come in soon.
The furious denunciations of Jones were eagerly welcomed by
Stephan Jones and Jim Jones Jr., sons of the dead cult leader.
They, too, came to mourn the dead and to warn against cults -- and
they were greeted like long-lost friends.
``The hatred people feel for my father is justified, and coming
here today was good for me,'' said Jim Jones Jr., who lives in
Pacifica. ``Now I can walk away and have some happy memories,
because I haven't had them for 20 years.''
Across the bay in San Bruno later in the afternoon, a smaller but
equally mournful crowd packed the tiny chapel at Golden Gate
National Cemetery to remember Representative Leo Ryan, the San
Mateo County Democrat who was gunned down with his party by Temple
members at an airstrip on the morning of the massacre.
State Senator-elect Jackie Speier, who was Ryan's aide and was
badly wounded in the attack, told the gathering of 30 that she
cherishes Ryan in her memory as a man who ``taught us to be bold,
take risks and to shake up the system.'' The group then put a
bouquet and a U.S. flag on the small headstone where Ryan, the
only congressman ever assassinated, is buried.
``We didn't want to make a big production out of this
anniversary,'' Ryan's daughter, Erin, said quietly as she walked
to his grave. ``This is just a small gathering of those closest to
my father, and it's not about tragedy. It's about the inspiring
life he led.''
20 years after Jonestown, survivors find some peace
San Francisco Examiner
19.11.1998
By Anastasia Hendrix, EXAMINER STAFF
OAKLAND - Upon the grassy hilltop grave that holds the bodies of
hundreds of Jonestown men, women and children, a crowd huddled to
remember the tragedy and to seek a sense of closure that had
eluded them.
Several of the more than 250 people there had come faithfully to
each of the annual prayer ceremonies held over the past two
decades, but Wednesday's landmark anniversary also brought out a
handful of others to Evergreen Cemetery for the first time. It was
the largest crowd to visit the site.
Like Herbert Newell, a Los Angeles resident and onetime member of
the Rev. Jim Jones' Peoples Temple, many of those attending for
the first time said they finally had decided to come to try to
reconcile the past.
"It's been a difficult 20 years, with a lot of ups and a lot of
downs," said Newell, who survived the mass deaths in the Guyana
jungle because he had been working on a riverboat that day. But 12
of his family members who also lived at the Jonestown compound
were not so lucky. He began recounting each of their names on his
fingers - Mom, Ann, Jennifer, Isaac - before his voice trailed off
into silence.
They were among the more than 900 people who followed the
charismatic Jones in his attempt to create a utopian society, but
who succumbed to his orders to commit mass suicide by drinking
cyanide-laced fruit punch.
"Being here is very emotional and it's hard to describe how I feel
right now," Newell said, clutching a small camera and looking at
the crowd. "When it first happened I was tempted not to come back
to the States at all, because I thought people wouldn't understand
or say "I told you so,' but I can say now that I'm very glad I
did."
The two-hour ceremony was punctuated by an a cappella choir
singing gospel hymns, prayers from pastors and the words of
survivors who told of their experiences and the importance of the
day.
Even Jones' son, Stephan Jones, who survived the mass suicide
because he was away with the camp's basketball team at the time,
felt compelled to speak, though he hadn't planned on it.
After asking everyone to join hands for a moment of silence, Jones
said he believed the tragedy caused thousands - including himself
- to reflect, grow and learn in ways no one could have imagined.
"Today, this morning, I woke up with more hope, more healing, and
more love in my heart than I ever remember feeling," said Jones,
although admitting he still hated his father for what he had done.
"You probably know, most of you, that I went back to Jonestown
recently . . . and I looked hard and long for some trace of my
people . . and I came out of there reminded that those people have
always been with me.
"And I'm not talking about memories. I'm talking about spirit. I
believe that a piece of them is with me, that I carry a piece of
their soul, as does everyone here. And I believe that with that
comes a responsibility, because I believe that without us they
cannot realize their earthly purpose."
Jones' comments particularly touched the Rev. Richard Clark,
another Jonestown survivor, from Champagne, Ill., who nodded and
smiled as the applause swelled after Jones left the podium. The
62-year-old Clark, who escaped Jonestown the morning of Nov. 18,
1978, under the guise that he and others were going on a picnic,
was so moved by Jones' comments he immediately rose from his
front-row seat to shake Jones' hand and thank him.
Ex-Peoples Temple member Leslie Wilson, who fled the compound on
foot that fateful morning 20 years ago with her 2-year-old son,
said she, too, was coming forward for the first time to urge
people to keep the memory of Jonestown alive so the tragedy is
never repeated.
"We have to keep going on and quit living in the past because we
have a future now," she said.
Michelle Allen, who traveled from Inglewood to attend the ceremony
with her 4-1/4-year-old daughter Simone and her 13-year-old son
Chaz, said she believed the theme of the day was more about the
future than the past.
She said she hoped plans to erect a memorial wall with the names
of those who died would succeed so that the tragic legacy of
Jonestown would be preserved for generations to come.
"We have to get the wall built so people can see it and remember,"
Allen said, comparing its importance to the Vietnam veterans
memorial in Washington.
Tilman Hausherr
The Lessons of Jonestown
Evil is evil, even if done to advance the cause of 'social justice'
San Diego Union-Tribune
22.11.1998
By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley
A bisexual white communist named Jim Jones led
hundreds of Americans, many of them black, to a
South American jungle utopia, fleecedthem of their
money, and turned their lives into a living hell of
fear, fanaticism and servitude. Then the white
leader demanded that that his flock commit suicide,
and they did it.
Had such an idea been pitched in the fever swamps of
Hollywood it would have been shot down in an
instant, but that was the way it happened twenty
years ago. On Nov. 18, 1978, 913 people, including
267 children, perished at Jonestown, a remote
outpost in Guyana, in the largest known mass suicide
in human history. A ghastly and macabre event, to be
sure, but two decades later the reasons to remember
it remain stronger than ever. Misunderstood at the
time, forgotten by many, and scarcely known at all
by the Generation X crowd, the Jonestown holocaust
brims with lessons for our fin-de-siecle times.
These include the malevolence of socialism, the
shallowness of the press, and the naivete of
American liberalism. As portrayed in early press
reports and dramatic treatments, Jim Jones was
indeed a religious charlatan who used revivalist
worship forms and faked healings. But Jones' kingdom
of heaven was not in the afterlife but here on
earth.
By the time he was ordained in the Disciples of
Christ denomination in 1964, he had lost all belief
in the God of the Bible, whom he attacked as a cruel
"sky god." His was the social gospel of pie on the
earth, and his creed was orthodox socialism.
Jones called himself "God Socialist" and the
"Socialist Worker God," and baptized members "in the
holy name of Socialism." He told his flock that
their god was communism and their songs included
this refrain: "We are communists today and we're
communists all the way. Oh, we're communists today
and we are glad."
The Bible-toting Hoosiers of his home state were not
fooled by Jones, who found a more receptive audience
in the supposedly sophisticated Golden State,
specifically the City of Love, San Francisco. In
California Jones used sex and fear to control his
People's Temple congregation, despising "bourgeois"
sexual conventions. He appraised the orthodoxy of
male members by their willingness to be sodomized, a
task for which Jones volunteered. He also abused
children but his left-wing views were so politically
correct for the time -- he was championed by the
Black Panthers and held rallies for Communist Party
candidate Angela Davis -- that the state's liberal
establishment overlooked disturbing rumors and
proclaimed the coming of a prophet.
"Let me present to you a combination of Martin King,
Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, Chairman Mao," said
Willie Brown, now mayor of San Francisco, then a
state assemblyman, introducing Jones to 1976
gathering of luminaries. These included Mervyn
Dymally, California's lieutenant governor, who
defended the People's Temple even after New West
magazine exposed Temple abuses. San Francisco mayor
George Moscone appointed Jones chairman of the
city's housing commission and refused to investigate
the Temple despite continued evidence that children
were being abused. Jones' popularity even survived
an arrest for lewd conduct in the bathroom of a
cinema.
Walter Mondale praised the People's Temple for
defending the First Amendment. Joseph Califano,
secretary of HEW, praised Jones' "commitment and
compassion, your humanitarian principles . . .
furthering the cause of human dignity." Other
tributes came from Sen. Warren Magnuson, Jane Fonda,
Bella Abzug, Ron Dellums and Roy Wilkins. In the
fall of 1976, at the dedication of Carter-Mondale
headquarters, Jones gained a place on the platform
with Rosalyn Carter, who sent a letter to Jones
thanking him for views on Cuba.
Like the Symbionese Liberation Army and other
revolutionary gangs that lurked in the Bay Area
during the mid-1970s, the People's Temple stockpiled
weapons and maintained an elaborate security
network. Jones believed that America was Babylon the
doomed and sought a more pristine setting, his own
socialist state away from police, prying reporters,
politicians and the CIA and FBI he believed were
persecuting him. He selected Guyana, which he had
visited during the early 1960s, and whose black
socialist government cooperated with him. There
Jones feted Feodor Timofeyev, the Soviet consul,
telling him in front of a cheering congregation that
"the United States is not our mother.
The U.S.S.R. is our spiritual motherland." In
Guyana, Jones proved the axiom that absolute power
corrupts absolutely and that the worst tyrant is he
who torments in the name of progress and social
justice. He maintained a reign of terror, including
beatings, imprisonment, the torture of children and
suicide drills he called "white nights." Key members
defected, charging that relatives were being held
against their will. When Bay Area Democratic
Congressman Leo Ryan came to investigate, some
members wanted to leave with him. God Socialist
thought this was the end, that the evil CIA was
about to despoil his paradise.
Jones squad of "angels" gunned down Ryan and three
journalists.Then came the real "white night," with
nearly 1,000 victims, including 33 children born in
the jungle compound, drinking the potassium cyanide
solution that took their lives. But before the
holocaust began, Jones left instructions for more
than $7 million in Temple assets to be given to the
U.S.S.R. In a note, Temple secretary Annie McGowan
told the Soviets that "We, as communists, want our
money to be administered for help to oppressed
peoples all over the world, or in any way that your
decision-making body sees fit." Where all this money
wound up remains something of a mystery.
Early reporting and movies about the "Guyana cult"
provided little clue about Jones' socialist
orthodoxy. Neither did a recent one-hour special on
ABC's "20/20" which, though dramatic, failed to
examine Jones' politics and to see the event's
meaning.
In an age dominated by the medical model of human
behavior, in which sin is replaced by sickness and
redemption by therapy, Jonestown confirms the
reality of evil. Jim Jones, God Socialist, embodied
one of the most malevolent ideas of our time, one
shared by Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and Pol Pot. They all
believed that dictatorship, cruelty and death on a
massive scale were good things if they advanced the
cause of socialjustice, a kingdom of heaven on
earth, with wise leaders ordering life for the
greater happiness of all. That vision retains its
seductive power and, in an age in which
institutional religion has been discredited, its
comeback cannot be long delayed.
Jones himself had displayed the line from George
Santayana that those who cannot remember history are
condemned to repeat it, a principle Jones violated
by ignoring failed utopias past, along with the vast
graveyard of twentieth-century socialism.
Those who will carry American democracy into the new
millenium hold few memories of the socialist death
toll, which French author Stephane Courtois
calculates between 85 million and 100 million. The
memory of Jonestown might alert them to those larger
realities.
In a new century, as in the past, the struggle
against tyranny will be the struggle of memory
against forgetting.
Tilman Hausherr
20 Years Later, Indianians Remember Jonestown;
Hometown neighbors recall Jim Jones as dynamic, but [missing]
Salt Lake Tribune
19.11.1998
By Rachel Sheeley, Gannett News Service
RICHMOND, Ind. -- As word of the Jonestown massacre
spread 20 years ago Wednesday and television showed
the hundreds of bodies lying in the Guyana sun, this
eastern Indiana town earned an infamous title: home
to the Rev. Jim Jones.
Under Jones' leadership, 913 people died at the
Peoples Temple church compound on Nov. 18, 1978.
Some died willingly at Jones' urging, drinking a
cyanide-laced powdered drink. Others were
intimidated or shot.
The death ritual was magnified by the shooting
deaths of Rep. Leo Ryan of California and four
people traveling with him. Temple loyalists ambushed
them as they boarded their planes near Jonestown
that same day. Ryan had visited the Jonestown
settlement to investigate reports that some members
were being kept there against their will.
"It was a tragic human story," said Ashton
Veramallay, professor of economics at Indiana
University East and a Guyana native. "The intent was
good -- to transform the forest lands into
agricultural pursuits, and it was paying off. Then
things went haywire. Ironically, now Jonestown is a
ghost town. Because of the incident, it is haunted
-- the forest there is taking it over."
For some here, it is unsettling that the
orchestrator of history's largest cult death came
from the Richmond area, graduated from Richmond High
and founded his integrated Peoples Temple in
Indianapolis in the mid-1950s. Jones moved it to
California in 1965, then set up the Guyana compound
in 1974.
Some believe he became disillusioned as he saw
Christian concepts and racial integration, in
particular, succumb to racism.
But one who knew him, the Rev. Dixie Miller of First
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) here, said,
"I don't think there is an explanation for what he
did. It's one of those things that got out of
control within himself. He lost the ability to
discern between Jim Jones the human and God's will,
and that line that differentiates became very
narrow."
In the process, the Peoples Temple moved from church
to cult. People gave their money to Jones, split up
their families or beat their children at his
command, entered extramarital relationships and
finally killed themselves for him.
He had a need to lead, recalled those who knew him
as a child. "He loved to be in the center, loved to
be top dog," said Virgil Estep, 66, of nearby Lynn,
Ind., a friend of Jones' when they were in their
early teens.
Estep and others remember a complex young man: neat,
good student, not an athlete. Religious at an early
age. Dynamic, quick-tempered, even a bit cruel.
"I snuck out to his barn one day, and he was
preaching by himself out there," Estep recalled.
"Something went against him, and you never heard
such a line of cuss words. Then he was just fine. It
all happened that quick."
Nellie Mitchell, 91, of Lynn, remembered Jones as an
"ornery" boy. "He was just a cruel fella," she said.
"My husband told me he used to kill birds and have
funerals for them. I think he used to have funerals
for all the animals he killed."
In the end, Jones convinced his followers that death
need not be feared. The goal was to die for what
they believed.
"We hope that the world will someday realize the
ideals of brotherhood, justice and equality that Jim
Jones has lived and died for," said a note left by
one follower. "We have all chosen to die for this
cause."
In the weeks leading up to the massacre, Jones'
wife, Marceline, had signaled her fears, talking
about her husband's poor physical condition and her
own need to leave Jonestown.
Three of their sons were on the Jonestown basketball
team. When they traveled to Georgetown University,
Marceline persuaded them to stay there, escaping the
tragedy. And she got her parents out on Nov. 15.
But the Jones' children, Agnes and Lew Eric, died at
Jonestown.
Tilman Hausherr
Chicago Sun-Times
22.11.1998
By Michael Sneed
Sometimes, when the night is clear and filled with
stars, I hear children screaming.
It is not a loud scream. It is more like an old
whisper.
It is the two decades-old sound of children dying on
a starry night in Jonestown, Guyana. It is the white
noise of cyanide-induced death that inhaled the
breath of innocent children and sucked the life out
of nearly 1,000 cultists led by a monster named Jim
Jones.
I never really heard the children die, but I covered
the story of Jonestown.
And I clearly remember walking away from my
typewriter, stepping onto the balcony of my squalid
hotel room, looking up at the sky and wondering
where all the screams of the children went.
I recall the odor of the shoes worn by my sidekick,
Tim McNulty, left outdoors on the balcony on
purpose; shoes permeated with the smell of death in
the South American sun.
The adrenaline of competing against journalism's
most aggressive reporters dictates focus that masks
emotion. It would be weeks before I was hit with the
shock of what I was covering.
Now, two decades later, I recall bits of that
nightmare story, shards that didn't appear in
bylined stories. The accommodations . . .
Georgetown, Guyana's capital, where the press was
based, was a Third World pit. Rivulets of effluent
were everywhere. The only decent food in town was
purchased through the black market. Breakfast and
lunch were always cheese sandwiches. Pea hens, not
sparrows, picked up crumbs under the hotel tables.
The hotel toilets rarely worked. We had to wash our
hair and shower by hauling buckets of water out of
the swimming pool, which we would use occasionally.
The water of choice was Red Label scotch. The bush
plane . . .
The only route to Jonestown, mired in the middle of
a jungle, was by bush plane. Jonestown was closed.
Entry was forbidden. But my photog, Val Mazzenga,
and I were the first crew to get "in" by persuading
a pilot to fly over the compound and get us as close
to the scene as possible. He flew so low we
practically touched the bodies and were the first
"on the scene," even though we never touched down.
The pilot also cooperated in a little conspiracy
that enabled us exclusivity because of a "weight
restriction." I was thin. Mazzenga was thin. The
other reporters didn't qualify. (He made us all get
on a weight scale!) Great ruse. It worked.
Our story described Jonestown as "The City of the
Dead," and the multicolored football-style jerseys
worn by the victims made the bodies look like
"colorful playing cards" strewn about a card table.
The New York Times went nuts. The first scoop . . .
Covering Jonestown like a Chicago crime story meant
tracking down Larry Layton, the young cultist jailed
for killing U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, whose death was the
precursor to Jones calling for his "White Night"
mass suicide.
Consider my surprise when a jail official gave me
permission to interview Layton and escorted me to
his jail cell the next day. (I was the only
journalist to interview Layton in his Guyanese
prison. He is now in prison in California.) Layton
was obviously out of it. He was confused, spoke in a
monotone and looked stoned or drugged. I remember
his eyes. They were glazed. He was barely audible.
He was barely an interview.
But I remember wondering why I was permitted to
interview him and did something I had never done
before: palmed some money to give the jail official
just in case. He refused to take it. "You were
polite," he said. "You treated me with respect.
That's all any human being wants." The death squad .
. .
The key to getting scoops was hiring a driver who
not only knew the lay of the land but had
connections.
Our driver was a Guyanese named Roland, who was able
to buy a new car and refrigerator with what we paid
him. He was worth every penny. He arrived at our
hotel one evening with news that a group from
Jonestown had survived "White Night" by escaping
through the jungle and were being secretly detained
at a hotel.
That was where I found Stanley Clayton, whose story
resulted in a copyrighted exclusive that again drove
the New York Times nuts. Clayton was the first proof
that what happened at Jonestown was murder, not
suicide. That guards with guns had forced people to
the cyanide vats; that babies were injected with
cyanide.
I found Clayton sitting on the floor between two
beds in his hotel room and listening to music on a
radio. In a monotone, he described how he survived
by pretending to be looking for survivors by poking
bodies in front of armed guards . . . and while
engaged in this ruse, working his way to the front
of the tent, telling a guard he was ready to die . .
. hugging the guard . . . and then diving under a
tent to escape. (In other words, Clayton had
pretended to be a guard.) The Carter story . . .
Roland also led us to Tim Carter, a cultist who
watched his wife and son die and did nothing to save
them. (It was the picture of his baby's son's feet
wedged in between two dead adults that became the
classic Jonestown picture.) I still squirm when I
recall his brainwashed demeanor.
One evening, in the midst of dictating notes to
McNulty, we both paused without saying a word . . .
and began to weep. Then, like a rainstorm across the
prairie, it was over. And we went back to doing our
job.
Jonestown has now been reclaimed by the jungle. And
I now write a gossip column. Imagine.
Tilman Hausherr
http://www.msnbc.com/news/217910.asp
Remembering Jonestown
20 years after the horrific mass suicide some survivors look back at the
tragedy
MSNBC
Nov. 27 — It was 20 years ago that an obscure commune called
Jonestown became a death camp — a charismatic preacher named Jim Jones
leading more than 900 followers in a mass suicide and murder spree. Who
can forget the images: a U.S. congressman lying dead on an airstrip,
bodies everywhere, and those cups of purple fruit drink laced with
poison consumed by so many. The tragedy hit home in a very personal way
at NBC News.
EVEN AFTER ALL these years, the images are still haunting. Jackie
Speier and Steve Sung went to hell and back together; living through a
nightmare that still makes many shudder.
It all began 20 years ago this month when they went to the South
American country of Guyana to meet the Rev. Jim Jones.
“I had a premonition about the trip,” says Speier. “There was
something that just made me feel a great deal of uncertainty.”
In 1978, Jackie Speier was a legal aide to San Francisco-area
congressman Leo Ryan. They were about to embark on a fact-finding trip:
to look into reports of abuse and brainwashing at the remote jungle
compound known as Jonestown.
More than 900 people had followed Jim Jones to Guyana. There were
entire families, senior citizens, teenagers and babies.
Steve Sung, a sound technician for NBC News, was assigned to
cover the congressman’s trip.
He recalls having no bad premonitions before the trip.
“To tell you the truth, no, I did not have those feelings
whatsoever,” says Sung. “Matter of fact, we thought, just an assignment
we’re going out on, another story. I didn’t have any premonition, or
that it was dangerous.”
NBC News also sent cameraman Bob Brown and correspondent Don
Harris, a respected investigative reporter and veteran of scores of
dangerous assignments.
Former NBC News producer Bob Flick knew it was a big story. “I
mean, people maybe held against their will in the middle of nowhere, in
a triple-canopy jungle, can’t escape, armed guards, who knows,” says
Frick. “Pretty good stuff.”
A POPULAR, CHARISMATIC PREACHER
The story began years earlier in the 1960s. Jim Jones was a
popular and charismatic preacher who had formed a church called The
People’s Temple. He’d also formed close bonds with California
politicians — so much so, that he was appointed to San Francisco’s
housing authority.
But by 1977, 20 years after Jones started his congregation,
reporters started looking into allegations of misconduct by Jones:
extortion, threats and sexual abuse. As more newspaper stories were
about to break, Jones went to the outpost he had been building in the
Guyana jungle. He called Jonestown a “socialist utopia.” Soon, though,
there were more signs Jones’ ministry had gone haywire. And that his
“utopia” had turned into an isolated, paranoid armed camp.
Also along on Congressman Ryan’s trip were several newspaper
journalists including San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson.
A group of family members came along too, desperate to get their loved
ones out of Jonestown — especially because of what they’d heard from a
former Jonestown resident.
“It was terror, it was living terror, living inside Jonestown,”
says Deborah Layton, who had escaped Jonestown a few months earlier with
bizarre tales of mind control, armed guards and suicide rehearsals.
They’re recounted in her new book, “Seductive Poison:”
“The suicide drills were the most frightening and disturbing
things there; we would be awakened from a dreamless sleep, to Jim’s
voice screaming over the loudspeaker, that we were going to die, that we
had to go into the pavilion, that mercenaries were coming to kill us,”
she writes.
So concerned was Layton about Jim Jones’ paranoia and siege
mentality, she put her concerns in a sworn affidavit to the U.S. State
Department months before Congressman Ryan’s trip.
Congressman Ryan and the journalists arrived in Guyana on
Tuesday, Nov. 14, 1978. “I intend to keep pushing as I’m long as I’m
here,” he said back in 1978.
After having to wait several days, and thorough negotiations,
they finally got permission to come into Jonestown on Friday, Nov. 17.
They left for the private dirt airstrip which served as Jonestown’s
lifeline to the outside world. After 45 minutes flying over some of the
most dense jungle on earth, there it was: the Jonestown compound.
The plane landed minutes later, even though the pilot was warned
by radio from Jonestown the airstrip would be blocked.
A SHOW OF AFFECTION
“I’m here from the United States government,” Congressman Ryan
said at the time.
After more tense negotiations, the journalists accompanying Ryan
left from the airstrip and headed to the Jonestown compound seven miles
away on Friday evening. They were anxious and getting more apprehensive.
“All of a sudden, all these people were waiting for us,” recalls
Steve Sung. “All these children, all these family members. They have a
big thing going on for us.”
The Jonestown welcome was warm and upbeat. The Jonestown band was
playing Earth, Wind and Fire. As cameraman Bob Brown took pictures,
Steve Sung recorded the sound and was struck by the faces of the
children. Everywhere he looked, children. Three hundred children lived
in Jonestown.
They’d been watching “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” on a
makeshift movie screen. Now, they were joining in the music. And then
there were the senior citizens. They looked happy until Steve Sung
looked a little closer. It dawned on him: they weren’t just putting on a
show of welcome, they were putting on a show.
“I guess it’s like they say, show and tell,” says Sung. “Just
tried to show us how happy they were, basically. Then, we knew something
was wrong.”
Jackie Speier remembers, “You had young girls, 18, 19 years of
age, saying they were getting married and that they were having a
wonderful life here. And it was almost like they were reading a script
because they all said the same thing.”
And the host himself seemed oddly detached. What were the first
impressions of Jim Jones?
“When we first saw him that night,” says Sung, “we thought
something was wrong with him because his eyes were kind of glazed. We
thought maybe he was under drugs.”
Finally, Congressman Ryan himself took the microphone. He told
the crowd he was on a congressional inquiry but also told them something
they didn’t expect to hear.
“Whatever the comments are,” said Ryan, “there are some people
here who think this is the best thing that happened in their whole
life.”
Jonestown went wild. More than a minute of solid cheering.
“And it was obvious to me,” says Bob Flick, “it was a pretty
orchestrated situation, not the congressman, but the reaction to him.”
As the music started up again, NBC correspondent Don Harris was
approached by one of the happy-looking Jonestown audience members.
“Don Harris called us to move aside,” says Sung. “I said ‘What’s
going on?’ And then he showed us a little piece of paper. The paper said
‘Help us to get out of this place.’ And we ask him ‘What’s going on? Who
wrote this letter?’” It was written by a longtime People’s Temple
member. It was the first defection of the trip, and it was proof that
there were people in Jim Jones’ “utopia” who wanted to get out.
Correspondent Harris would wait until the next day to question Jim Jones
about the note.
The next day would be like no other. No one could have ever
predicted what would happen then.
Remembering Jonestown, Part Two
For Cong. Ryan’s delegation, the horror was about to unfold
MSNBC
Nov. 27 — On Saturday morning, NBC cameraman Bob Brown was
getting his first daylight video of Jonestown. And for a remote jungle
outpost, it was impressive.
THERE WAS A nursery for the 33 babies born there recently. There
were well-constructed dormitories, activities for children, even a dance
workshop.
But since correspondent Don Harris was handed the secret note the
night before, Congressman Leo Ryan and his entourage now knew everything
wasn’t as it seemed.
As Harris waited to confront Jim Jones with the note, he
interviewed several families.
Unidentified young girl: “I wouldn’t want to leave.”
Don: “You’re happy here?”
Girl: “I’m very happy here. It’s the best place I’ve ever been.”
A young man who had come with Ryan’s group to get his sister out
cried when she insisted on staying. Yet nearby, the congressman’s legal
aide, Jackie Speier, was pulled aside by several Jonestown residents who
whispered to her for help. Speier asked them for oral affidavits.
Jackie Speier: “Say that you both want to leave Jonestown on this
date, Nov. 18, 1978?”
Response: “Yeah.”
“And then word started to travel,” says Speier, “and then more
people wanted to leave.”
Cameraman Bob Brown caught Jim Jones apparently trying to
intimidate the so-called “defectors” into staying. And finally, after a
long delay, correspondent Don Harris got to confront Jones himself.
Don Harris: “Last night, someone came and passed me this note.”
Jim Jones: “People play games, friend. They lie, they lie. What
can I do about liars? Are you people going to leave us? I just beg you.
Please leave us.”
JONESTOWN UNRAVELS
As the day wore on, Jonestown continued to unravel right before
the visitors’ eyes. More members decided to leave and custody battles
were breaking out.
NBC News producer Bob Flick could sense it was time to leave. But
he wanted to try to help the families who wanted to get out. “People
were crying and dragging kids back and forth between their mother and
father,” says Flick. “And it was pretty tough in there.”
Tension filled the humid air. Congressman Ryan, the journalists,
and the defectors wanted to leave as soon as possible. The entourage got
on trucks for the trip back to the primitive airstrip, their only way
out of the jungle.
“And all of a sudden you see Leo Ryan walking with a couple of
people down towards the truck and he’s got blood stains on his shirt,”
recalls Speier. “I thought, ‘Oh my God.’”
A Jones loyalist, trying to stop Ryan from returning to the
United States with negative findings about Jonestown, attempted to stab
the congressman. Ryan escaped serious injury.
After finally getting to the airstrip, correspondent Harris
interviewed Ryan:
Don Harris: “Did he say anything when he came up?
Leo Ryan: “Yeah, what he said was he intended to kill me.”
ALMOST OUT OF DANGER
The group was now at the airstrip about seven miles from
Jonestown, anxious to get on the planes and get out.
As the NBC crew recorded some last-minute footage, newspaper
photographer Greg Robinson took some still pictures. Jackie Speier was
making sure the Jonestown defectors getting on the plane were not hiding
weapons.
And then a vehicle could be heard in the background.
Steve Sung remembers the first thing he saw that signaled that
something was going to go terribly wrong. “All of a sudden three persons
get off the truck,” says Sung, “and [start] walking towards us,
menacing, as though they are looking for somebody.”
The vehicle held a posse from Jonestown, bent on stopping the
Ryan party and the defectors. And as Sung and Bob Brown attempted to
take cover, it happened. Within seconds, cameraman Brown was shot in the
thigh, but incredibly, he kept rolling. Correspondent Harris was hit. So
was Congressman Ryan and so was Jackie Speier.
“You’re helpless,” recalls Speier. “All of a sudden, you know,
Leo is running past me and falling on the ground and I sort of cowered
under a tire with my face down, trying to appear like I’m dead.”
Brown’s camera got hit, finally ending the recording. Soundman
Sung heard Brown cry out in pain, and turned his head.
“And sure enough, right afterward, I heard three loud pops right
next to my ears, explode in my ears,” says Sung. “The pain hurt so bad.
I got shot right in the arms.”
Bob Flick recalls, “Boy, there was a lot of shooting, a lot of
gunfire, a lot of noise.”
Photographer Robinson was hit. Still another round of gunshots,
this time fired point blank, hit cameraman Brown in the head. He died
instantly.
“Bob Brown,” says Sung. “It was a sight I’ll never forget.”
In just a few seconds, the toll was staggering. Along with Brown,
NBC News correspondent Harris was killed, as was Congressman Ryan and
San Francisco Examiner photographer Robinson. And so was one of the
Peoples Temple defectors. Her 12-year-old daughter watched her die.
Several others in the group were seriously wounded and those who
could ran for the dense jungle. Jackie Speier and Steve Sung had among
the worst injuries and couldn’t run. All they could do was play dead,
knowing the gunmen might shoot again at anyone who moved.
“Lucky for me, the instinct took over,” says Sung. “Saved my life
completely.”
Speier’s entire right side was riddled with bullets. “I had bones
jutting out of my arm,” says Speier. “I mean, it was just a sight. So I
lied there and said the act of contrition and just waited for the lights
to go out.”
NBC producer Flick remembers, “I was sure they were gonna die,
and no way they were going to make it.”
When the shots rang out, Flick had hit the ground. Luckily, he
was not injured. And as darkness fell and the group was stranded on that
deadly airstrip, Flick organized the other survivors to help the badly
wounded. “And they were troopers,” says Flick. “You know, no whimpering,
ask for a little water, whatever. Unbelievable, the people that were
shot.”
Hundreds of miles from a doctor, Jackie Speier and Steve Sung
somehow held on to their lives, and later, each other’s hands. “And I
kept saying, you’re going to live Steve, you’re gonna live,” says
Speier.
Sung recalls, “It’s very comforting, somebody holding hands in a
desperate situation.”
Back in 1978, Sung told Speier, “I say, ‘Jackie, you better stay
alive, cause if you stay alive, I will stay alive.’”
“It’s funny, when you’re in that situation,” says Sung, “you
think about your family.”
“I did an oral will,” says Speier, “and told my parents I loved
them. That I wanted certain items to go to certain friends and that was
that.”
“Lucky for me, I remembered Don Harris always carried a flask of
whiskey in his backpack,” says Sung. “And I poured it in my wound and it
hurt so bad, I decided to drink the whole bottle. I was drunk. We were
so worried. We didn’t know what was going on, we couldn’t sleep of
course.”
They thought Jones’ gunmen were coming back.
“We thought they’re coming back to kill us,” says Sung. “Anytime
there’s a little movement, any noises from the jungle, we thought they
were coming back.”
THE END OF JONESTOWN
But it turns out there was no need to worry about a second ambush
by Jones’ gunmen. Because a few miles away in Jonestown, there had been
a shocking development.
In the very same pavilion where the musical show was held the
night before, Jim Jones, the spiritual leader of the Peoples’ Temple,
commanded his followers to drink cyanide-laced fruit drink. He called it
“revolutionary suicide.” Everyone was forced to take the poison.
A tape-recording from that night is a testament to the madness:
Jim Jones: “I call on you to quit exciting your children, when
all they are doing is going to quiet rest. All they are doing is taking
a drink they take to go to sleep. That’s what death is, sleep.”
The aftermath was difficult to comprehend. Nine hundred and
thirteen people went to their deaths at the behest of one man, Jim
Jones.
“I always kind of shake my head in disbelief when they refer to
it as a suicide,” says Speier. “Those people were not in control of
their minds. They had been brainwashed.”
Sung, Speier and the rest of the survivors were finally rescued
by Guyanese troops the following morning, 17 hours after the ordeal
began. Somehow, with their grievous wounds, they lived through the
night. Later that day, they were flown out by the U.S. military.
Former NBC producer Flick says he has the comfort of knowing he
did everything he could to save lives on the trip. “There were 15 or 20,
out of whatever, close to 1,000,” he says. “That’s not very good odds,
but at least it’s something. So, you know, I’m, well, I did what I
could.”
After leaving NBC News, Flick went on to work for other programs
and is now retired. Steve Sung is now a videotape editor for NBC News in
Burbank. And this month, Jackie Speier was elected to the California
state senate.
“I mean, I had no idea what was going to happen to us,” says
Speier. “But if you don’t believe you’re going to survive, you’re not
going to survive.”
The only person ever convicted of crimes related to Jonestown was
Larry Layton — one of Jones’ lieutenants and the brother of Jonestown
escapee Deborah Layton. Larry Layton is serving a life term for
conspiring to kill a United States congressman.
At NBC News headquarters in New York, there is a memorial
dedicated to correspondent Don Harris and cameraman Bob Brown. Their NBC
News colleagues have never forgotten them or the risks journalists too
often face in covering the news.
Michael 'Mike' Gormez
20 years later, scholars request secret Jonestown documents
By KATHERINE PFLEGER
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 19, 1998
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WASHINGTON -- Marking the 20th anniversary of the Jonestown tragedy, a
group of academics asked Congress on Wednesday to declassify as many as
5,000 pages of documents containing potentially revealing details about
what happened at the Guyana commune.
On Nov. 18, 1978, on orders from the Rev. Jim Jones, 912 members of his
Peoples Temple committed suicide or were murdered, along with Rep. Leo
Ryan of California, who was investigating the group.
Twenty-two academics now want the House International Relations Committee
to help remove the secrecy surrounding that day.
"It's a way to prevent scholars or family members from being able to piece
together things," Mary Maaga, author of Hearing the Voices of Jonestown,
said at a news conference.
A pastor at a United Methodist Church in Sergeantsville, N.J., Maaga has
spent six years investigating Jones and his religious movement. She thinks
the classified information contains reports from at least eight federal
agencies, including the FBI, CIA and IRS, that had monitored the commune
for years.
Maaga and other scholars say the CIA's claim that releasing the documents
could threaten national security no longer holds up. Moreover,
marginalized religions, such as Scientology, want the information to
continue their own investigations into the tragedy.
CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher couldn't confirm that the agency had the
documents or how many there are. But she said, if they do exist, the
request is not unprecedented.
-- Information from Times files was used in this report.
© Copyright 1998 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.
--
Scientology & Dianetics
Tax-exempt child abuse and neglect?
http://home.wxs.nl/~mike_gormez/childabuse.html
Tilman Hausherr
San Francisco Chronicle
4.12.1998
JONESTOWN `VICTIM' DESERVES RELEASE
Editor -- Maitland Zane's story on Jackie Speier and the Jonestown
tragedy did not mention some very important facts about the matter
of Larry Layton (``Surviving the Heart of Darkness,'' Peninsula
Friday, November 13).
Layton was a victim of Jim Jones and the horrible conditions at
Jonestown. While Layton was convicted after two trials (the first
trial was 11-1 for acquittal), the only people Layton shot or
tried to shoot -- Monica Bagby, Vern Gosney and Dale Parks -- all
requested leniency for Layton at the time of his sentencing. So
did several of the jurors who convicted him and others.
Judge Robert F. Peckham was the brilliant and well-respected
federal judge who presided over Layton's two trials and all of the
proceedings during the several years the case was pending. He was
legally required to give Layton a life sentence but Peckham
recommended that Layton be released from prison after serving five
years of his federal sentence, in part because Layton had already
spent years in a Guyanese jail, in inhumane conditions, before his
return to the United States.
Nevertheless, 20 years after the tragedy, these pleas have fallen
on deaf ears, and Larry Layton remains in federal prison, a model
prisoner and no threat to anyone, and the only person who was ever
prosecuted in connection with the matter.
The time has come for his release.
FRANK BELL
San Mateo
Anonymous
By Charles A. Krauser Washington Post Foreign Service November 21, 1978
JONESTOWN, GUYANA When the Rev. Jim Jones learned Saturday that Rep. Ryan
had been killed but that some members of his party had survived, Jones
called his followers together and told them that the time had come to
commit the mass suicide they had rehearsed several times before.
"They started with the babies," administering a potion of Kool-aid mixed
with cyanide, Odell Rhodes recalled yesterday when I revisited Jonestown
to view the horrifying sight of 409 bodies — men, women, and children,
most of them grouped around the altar where Jones himself lay dead.
Rhodes is the only known survivor of Jonestown who witnessed a part of
the suicide rite before managing to escape. He was helping Guyanese
authorities identify the dead yesterday.
Most of those who drank the deadly potion served to them by a Jonestown
doctor, Lawrence Schact, and by nurses, did so willingly, Rhodes said.
Mothers would often give the cyanide to their own children before taking
it themselves, he said.
But others who tried to escape were turned back by armed guards who
ringed the central pavilion where the rite was carried out, Rhodes said.
They were then forced to drink the poisoned Kool-aid and shortly after
the mass killings began, Rhodes said, "it just got all out of order.
Babies were screaming, children were screaming and there was mass
confusion."
It took about five minutes for the liquid to take its final effect. Young
and old, black and white, grouped themselves, usually near family
members, often with their arms around each other, waiting for the cyanide
to kill them.
They would go into convulsions, their eyes would roll upward, they would
gasp for breath and then fall dead, Rhodes said.
All the while, Jones was talking to them, urging them on, explaining that
they would "meet in another place." Near the end, Rhodes said, Jones
began chanting, "mother, mother, mother" — an apparent reference to his
wife who lay dead not far from the altar.
Yesterday, a stilled Jonestown looked much as it must have moments after
the mass suicide ended two days earlier. The bodies were where they had
fallen, the half-empty vat of cyanide-laced Kool-aid was still on the
table near the altar in the open air pavilion. The faces of the dead bore
the anguished expressions of their terrible deaths.
More than 390 of the bodies were grouped around the altar, many of them
arm-in-arm. They were so thickly bunched together that it was impossible
to see the ground beneath them.
Even the dogs that lived in Jonestown had been poisoned and now lay dead
on sidewalks near the pavilion. The Peoples Temple's pet chimpanzee, Mr.
Muggs, had been shot dead.
In Jones' house, approximately 10 others lay dead. C.A. Roberts, the
Guyanese police commissioner in charge of investigating the killings,
said his men were "finding new bodies in isolated places" throughout the
Jonestown property.
It was a gruesome scene.
The bodies, which had been on the ground for almost three days in the
muggy climate here, were beginning to bloat. A Guyanese doctor was sent
in yesterday to puncture them because it was feared many would burst open
before today, when U.S. Army medical teams are scheduled to arrive at
Jonestown to begin identifying and shipping them back to the United
States.
Of the 405 members of the community who died, Jones and two others were
shot rather than poisoned, according to C.A. Robert, the chief Guyanese
police official at Jonestown yesterday.
Another who was shot was Maria Katsaris, whose brother, Anthony, had come
with Ryan Friday to try to persuade their sister to leave Jonestown.
Anthony Katsaris was one of those badly wounded during the Saturday
massacre that left five dead and approximately 12 wounded.
Rhodes said he managed to escape when the doctor said he needed a
stethoscope. Rhodes volunteered to go with a nurse to the infirmary,
about 300 feet from the open-air pavilion where the suicides were being
carried out.
Rhodes said the armed guards let him through with the nurse and he hid
under a building when she went into the doctor's office for the
stethoscope. At 7 p.m., when it seemed that the mass suicide had ended,
he left his hiding place and walked through the jungle to Port Kaituma,
five miles away.
It was Rhodes, according to Roberts, who gave the first hint to Guyanese
authorities that hundreds had died in a mass suicide. Rhodes said he had
hoped to reach Guyanese officials in time to stop more people from being
killed.
Rhodes also recalled yesterday that shortly after Ryan and his party left
Jonestown, Jones told his followers that Ryan's plane was going to "fall
out of the sky."
The plan, according to Rhodes and other information made available late
yesterday, was that one of the defectors, who really was a plant acting
on Jones' orders, would shoot the pilot of Ryan's plane after it left the
Port Kaituma airstrip.
The person apparently chosen for the task, however, boarded the wrong
plane and started shooting before it was off the ground. Two passengers
on that plane were badly wounded.
According to Dale Parks, a bona fide defector from Jonestown who was
aboard that plane, the man who did the shooting was Larry Layton, a U.S.
citizen who is so far the only person under arrest here in connection
with any of the violence.
In addition to the man sent to infiltrate the defectors and shoot the
pilot, Jones took the extra precaution of ordering a group of his
followers to go to the airstrip in a tractor and trailer loaded with
guns, apparently to shoot whoever was not aboard the congressman's plane.
The clear intent was that everyone who had gone to Jonestown with Ryan
was to be killed.
The assailants returned to Jonestown and reported, out of the hearing of
lawyers Mark Lane and Charles Garry, who had stayed behind, that the
congressman was dead but others had lived. It was then that Jones
announced that all his followers must come immediately to Jonestown's
open-air pavilion. There he told them Ryan had been killed and that there
would be "trouble."
"We've all got to kill ourselves," Jones told everyone, according to
Rhodes. One woman, Christine Miller, protested, Rhodes said, "but the
crowd shouted her down."
Roberts said that so far the only non-Americans found among the more than
400 known dead were seven Guyanese children adopted by the Jonestown
community.
As Guyanese police officials continued their search of Jonestown
yesterday they discovered more than 800 American passports loaded in a
trunk. They found cash, checks and valuable jewelry and metals, including
gold.
The most perplexing question left to be answered was the whereabouts of
the approximately 400 Jonestown residents whose bodies have not been
found.
There was speculation that hundreds of people fled to the jungle and
simply have not yet found their way out. But there was also another
theory that some of the Jonestown security men took hundreds of the
commune's residents to a remote area possibly to be shot.
Lending some support to that theory was the fact that Tom Kice, one of
those believed to have been among the gunmen who attacked Ryan's party,
has not been found.
Also, lawyers Lane and Garry, who escaped into the forest when the
killing began, reported yesterday that they heard scattered screaming and
shooting in the forest while they were in hiding.
According to several of the Jonestown residents who left with Ryan on
Saturday and survived the attack at the airstrip, residents of Jonestown
had gone through several rehearsals for a mass suicide.
The procedure even had a name. When Jones decided that his church was
finished, he had told followers here he would send a coded message to his
church's other headquarters in Georgetown, Guyana, and San Francisco that
they should join the Jonestown faithful in taking their lives.
They were to wait for the words "white nights."
© Copyright 1978 The Washington Post Company