Our appreciation also goes to our agents Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen, to Professor Alex Greenfeld of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley; to copy editor Millie Owen, production editor Elisa Petrini, to typist Shirley Sulat and to Leonie Jacobs, who did important transcribing work for us. Thanks are also extended to Dick Reynolds of the Richmond Palladium Item, to Peter Carey of the San Jose Mercury News, and to Carey Winfrey, Wallace Turner and Joseph B. Treaster of the New York Times. And we deeply appreciate the cooperation of the law offices of Charles Garry, and of Pat Richartz.
Finally, we are indebted to our families and friends for bearing with us and indeed encouraging us during the months of reporting, writing and editing—and most of all, for listening and sharing our excitement at each juncture of this project.
—The Authors
Peoples Temple: The Principals
THE JONESES
Lynetta
Jim
Marceline
Stephan
Agnes
Stephanie
Lew
Suzanne adopted
Jimmy
Tim Tupper
Johnny Brown
THE FOUR PASTORS
Russell Winberg
Jack Beam
Archie Ijames
Ross Case
OTHER OLD-TIMERS
The Cordells
The Parkses
The Cartmells
The Beikmans
The Cobbs
The Swinneys
The Touchettes
STAFF
Patty Cartmell
Carolyn Moore Layton
Sharon Amos
Linda Dunn
Christine Lucientes
Sandy Bradshaw
Grace Stoen
Maria Katsaris
Teri Buford
Debbie Layton Blakey
SPECIAL AIDES OR ASSISTANTS
(ALL ON PLANNING COMMISSION
AT ONE TIME)
Tim Stoen
Gene Chaikin
The Mertles (the Millses)
Dick and Harriet Tropp
Joyce Shaw Houston
Bob Houston
Mike Prokes
The Carter brothers
Larry Schacht
Annie Moore
Paula Adams
Karen Tow Layton
CALIFORNIA SECURITY
Marvin Swinney
Wayne Pietila
Jim Cobb
Chris Lewis
Jim McElvane
JONESTOWN SECURITY
(BESIDES JONES’S SON)
Lee Ingram
Al Simon
Johnny Brown
THE EIGHT REVOLUTIONARIES
Jim Cobb
Mickey Touchette
Wayne Pietila
Terri Cobb
John Biddulph
Vera Ingram
Lena Flowers
Tom Podgorski
SOME OF THE “TROOPS,”
BLACK AND WHITE
The Olivers
The Bogues
The Edwardses
The Kices
The Slys
Birdie Marable
Leon Broussard
Le Flora Townes
Prologue
One afternoon near the end of 1976, a month or so after Bob Houston had been found dead along the tracks at the Southern Pacific railroad yards in the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco, his father pulled me aside. Sammy Houston—a wiry, jocular photographer who was a popular character around the San Francisco Associated Press office—did not come to me first as a friend. He wanted to confide in someone, and he thought I might be interested in investigating the death someday. Perhaps I also reminded him of his son: we were about the same age; we had both gone to Berkeley in the 1960s.
Sammy’s real name was Robert, like his son’s, but everyone called him Sammy because he came from Texas and was related to the general, Sam Houston. At the ballpark he was easy to spot, with his voluminous bag of cameras, and a hat with red feathers in the band. Around the office he was a bit of a cut-up. Yet things had changed since his son’s death. Sammy looked ten years older.
He was not coming to me for sympathy, but because of the mysteries in his son Bob’s death. Bob had been working two jobs at the time: days as a youth counselor, nights on the railroad, where he was nicknamed “Sleeping Dog” because he napped when things were slow. But Sam could not believe Bob had fallen asleep that night: it had been too chilly to nap outside, and he should have been rested after several days of vacation. Nor did it look like an accident: Bob was not careless, and his glove and lantern had been found neatly positioned on the train car. The father grimaced when he talked about his son’s death; the train wheels had mutilated the body terribly.
A church run by a faith healer named Jim Jones figured in the mystery. Bob and his wife Phyllis had joined Jones’s Peoples Temple some seven years before, shortly after Bob finished his courses at San Francisco State. Sam did not understand how a college-educated young man had fallen for a faith healer—although Sam admitted that the church had been known as a progressive, socially oriented organization.
While his son was in the church, Sam had seen little of Bob, his wife Phyllis or their daughters. There was a hint of friction between the Houstons and their daughter-in-law, perhaps because of problems in the marriage. In any case, Phyllis and Bob were later divorced, and Bob remarried. His second wife, Joyce Shaw, also was a follower of Jones.
The situation sounded complicated: the first and second wives both devoted their lives to the church; the two daughters by the first marriage lived with the son and his second wife; everyone was loyal to the church above all else. Furthermore, Bob had been donating all his income to the church for years.
Sam poured out more and more details in the course of several sessions. “What’s really bothering me is this,” he said one day in November. Sliding several letters out of an envelope, he explained that his second daughter-in-law had been writing recently. “I’ll just let you read them,” he said.
A little uncomfortable, I breezed through the first pages. The tone was one of deep concern. These were not hastily scrawled notes, but a strangely loving epistle from a widow to in-laws whom she hardly knew except for abbreviated and awkward family encounters. Begun as a sort of “briefing” of the Houstons, the letters had turned ominous.
Joyce Shaw told how she and Bob had lived together in a communal church framework devoted to social justice and community work. Peoples Temple was much more than just church on Sunday, she noted; it was a life commitment. In the final analysis, Joyce Shaw explained, that meant that church goals justified whatever means it took to realize them. In the process, the dream was crushed. Joyce had left Peoples Temple shortly before Bob’s death.
Although she lacked evidence of Temple involvement in Bob’s death, she believed he might well have been murdered. In fact, the church maintained that Bob had resigned from the Temple the morning of his death. “There are several interpretations of this. One is that Jim Jones who supposedly has a lot of supernatural power could not admit that a member of his ‘inner 100’ was killed.” She implied that Jones made up the story of Houston’s untimely defection. “The other [interpretation] is that anyone who tries to leave the church will die.”
Joyce Shaw did not stop there with her disclosures. She wrote of disciplinary “boxing matches” and mandatory confessions to false crimes. She said the Temple, as a test of loyalty and perhaps more, required them to sign false confessions and blank pieces of paper that could be used any way the church wished. “One thing I need to tell you,” she said in her November 27, 1976, letter. “I, Bob and every person who was on the Planning Commission or church board wrote and signed documents to the effect that we had sexually abused our children. Yes, incredible but true..”
“Sam, if I hadn’t heard these insensitive people had gone to [relatives] with their filthy lies, I never
would have burdened you with all of this mess....”
Reading this, I was as baffled as Sam. Were these things true? Were church members capable of killing? What kind of a humanitarian organization would demand such perverse self-incrimination?
As I read on, it became apparent that the church had a hook into Sam Houston. Joyce Shaw warned the Houstons not to allow his two granddaughters ever to go to the church’s South American jungle project, because, she said, it was a fraud and Jones was evil. “Legally, I am powerless to do anything. You and Nadyne, as their grandparents, are the only ones....”
Having lost his only son under unclear circumstances, Sam now had found out that his son’s church seemed willing to do literally anything to keep his two grandchildren under its sway. And yet with his son dead, how could Sam prevent them from going to South America, if their mother remained loyal to the church, hostile to the grandparents?
“I don’t know what to do or what to believe,” Sam told me. “Tim, I’m afraid if I do anything, they’ll keep the girls from me,” he said. “At my son’s funeral, we asked Phyllis if she and the girls would please come sit with the family. One of the Temple members shook her head—it was like the Gestapo.”
“It seems someone should look into this,” I ventured to Sam. “But without doing some checking, I can’t be sure there’s a story.”
“Now’s not the time for a story,” Sam stressed. “They’d think I put you up to it. And I’m afraid, Tim. I’m afraid they’ll keep my granddaughters away from me. I want to do what I can do for them,” Sam stressed. His voice turned metallic with determination, and his face hardened at the thought of his son’s death.
Every so often, Sam Houston would update me on his depressing bout with a situation he could neither control nor fully understand. Each contact with his lawyer, each letter or phone call from his daughter-in-law, was related for a while, but nothing got resolved. His son was dead; his granddaughters were out of his grasp. Helplessness gnawed at him, and his misery showed. His co-workers were saddened that a good man was obsessed with something beyond changing. I too cautioned him not to let the problem consume him. But how could you tell a man to shove aside his son’s mysterious death and forget the future of his granddaughters?
Two years later, on November 20, 1978, I lay wounded in a hospital bed on the guarded VIP floor of Malcolm Grow Medical Center at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. With an intravenous tube in me, with a bullet hole through my left forearm and lead imbedded in my wrist, I had spent a virtually sleepless night, writing stories longhand and dictating them by phone to my employer, the San Francisco Examiner. FBI agents hung around waiting to interview me, because they knew little about events in Guyana two days earlier and virtually nothing about Peoples Temple. The phone in my room kept ringing until the switchboard cut off the calls, then the messages came in notes. News media of all sorts wanted to talk with me, and some offered money for an interview. A publisher assured me that I could sign a quickie book contract within twenty-four hours if I wanted. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to hear the bloody details of the airport ambush of U.S. Representative Leo Ryan’s party, to know the final body count in Jonestown.
With my dead colleague Greg Robinson’s cameras in a box nearby, with my bloodstained and muddied clothing in the hospital laundry, I asked myself how those first conversations with Sammy Houston sucked me into a whirlpool of events that almost cost me my life, how my investigation of Peoples Temple over the past eighteen months had led to my own victimization at the hands of Jim Jones as he brought down his movement in a final act that took the lives of more than nine hundred human beings, including Sam’s granddaughters.
In those days after the holocaust, I decided two things. I would not speak about the Temple until I understood what had happened. And I would not write an “instant book” to capitalize on the worldwide interest without adding any perspective.
By the same token, there were factors that made me hesitant to undertake a long-term research and writing project on the Temple. As with other survivors, the subject naturally depressed me—many times I relived those days in Guyana minute by minute. The experience left me torn by conflicting emotions—helpless outrage over the brutal airstrip murders; grief for those who died in Jonestown, especially the children; guilt that somehow my presence had contributed to the terrible outcome; a desire to be rid of the subject once and for all, as well as the need to get to the bottom of the story; and a measure of fear of the unknown, because the unthinkable had happened once before.
Several months later, after being contacted by E. P. Dutton, I decided to write a history of the church. My primary goal was somehow to express the humanity of the members—including Jones; to make them into real people for the first time. In print, they had been treated as insensitively as their bodies were handled after the holocaust; as worthlessly ignorant victims of a conniving minister-turned-madman. I knew from talking with defectors and from meeting Jones and his followers in Jonestown that the preacher had an incredibly raveled personality, that the Temple attracted a variety of basically good people. And I recoiled when outsiders took the attitude that they or their children would never be crazy or vulnerable enough to join such an organization. Such complacency is self-delusion, for the lessons of Jonestown, while hard for some to accept, raise fundamental issues about this country—about the failure of institutions, including the churches; the growth of nontraditional religions; the importance of the nuclear family; the depth of racism; the rise of the Right; the methods of distributing economic resources; the susceptibility of the political system to manipulation by well organized groups; and the treatment of our unwanted children, elderly and poor.
Peoples Temple was—as many communes, cults, churches and social movements are—an alternative to the established social order, a nation unto itself. The Temple I knew was not populated by masochists and half-wits, so it followed that the members who gave years of labor, life savings, homes, children and, in some cases, their own lives had been getting something in return. I wanted to capture the lure of the Temple, to convey the thinking and personalities of not just disgruntled defectors but also of the heartbroken loyalists with something positive to preserve and remember—and to unmask the real Jim Jones. And I wanted to humanize them all to get at the truth, to make the ending comprehensible.
To get through the walls erected by Jones and into the minds of Jones’s people, my coauthor John Jacobs and I would conduct more than eight hundred interviews—of Temple members, ex-members, relatives, officials and others—and review tens of thousands of pages of documents, hundreds of hours of tape recordings, film and videotape.
There was no easy or simple explanation of the Peoples Temple tragedy. It was necessary to explore the life of Jim Jones and of his organization from birth to death, to trace both the rise and the fall. Though the pages that follow fall naturally into two halves—the story of the coalescence of a personality and group, then the degeneration of that same personality and group—it would be well to remember that in truth both aspects of Jones’s personality, the positive and the negative, coexisted.
From the very beginning.
PART ONE
HELLBENT
I took a piece of plastic clay
And idly fashioned it one day,
And as my fingers pressed it still,
It molded, yielding to my will.
I came again when days were past,
The bit of clay was firm at last,
The form I gave it, still it wore,
And I could change that form no more.
A far more precious thing than clay,
I gently shaped from day to day,
And molded with my fumbling art,
A young child’s soft and yielding heart.
I came again when years were gone,
And it was a man I looked upon,
Who such godlike nature bore
That men could change it-NEVERMORE.
LYNETTA J
ONES1
ONE
A Scruffy Start
There was more than the usual anticipation that spring as hardwood groves burst into green and plows cut ribbons across the sandy loam fields in east central Indiana. As in other years, the fertile farmland would yield many tons of grain and tomatoes. This year, however—1931—was one of the cruelest of the Great Depression. Farms and livelihoods were being ravaged by forces more sinister than any midwestern twister. Just two years after the Crash of 1929, the country’s economy was spiraling downward, taking tens of thousands of mortgaged farms with it. Farm prices were caving in. Foreclosure notices were being tacked on fenceposts and county courthouses. These were the bitterest of times. Yet in the country-side, one could momentarily forget....
One day in the spring of 1931, a road crew shoveled its way up Arba Pike toward the half-dozen houses that made up the settlement of Crete. The laborers paused to take note of another sign of spring; on the front porch of a white two-story house on a knoll overlooking hundreds of acres of gently rolling fields sat a tiny dark-haired woman of about twenty-eight. She was basking in the warm sun, cradling a round-faced, black-haired baby boy. The infant had been born to Lynetta Jones and her husband, James Thurman Jones, on the thirteenth day of May that year. They had named him James Warren Jones and they called him “Jimmy.”
Despite the classic mother-and-child image seen by the workers, motherhood was an ambivalent state of affairs for Lynetta Jones. For years before her marriage, Lynetta’s steel trap of a mind had been locked on the notion that she would neither marry nor bear a child. Instead she would pursue a business career, perhaps breaking new ground for women; she would give free rein to her individuality and ambition, without the drag of a husband or a child. But personal tragedy evidently had altered the course of this would-be businesswoman.2
Born near Princeton, Indiana, Lynetta was the oldest child of Jesse and Mary Putnam. Lynetta grew into a rather odd combination of fanciful dreamer and aggressively ambitious achiever. Full of imagination, she felt almost as much kinship with animals as people; she even looked upon snakes as her friends. She evidently picked up her ambition from her father’s foster father, a businessman named Lewis Parker, who became her paternal role model when her father died.
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