“But, Pop,” she pointed out, “people threatened Jim Jones. They honk their horns during church services, and they call us ‘nigger lovers.’ ”
Something serious was happening to Maria, but her father felt helpless to draw her out of her isolation. Since joining the church in 1973, she always had found excuses to avoid her father’s home. When invited to dinner, she would accept then cancel at the last moment. During her only weekend home, she looked haggard and worn and slept until noon the next day. Her father was tempted to look through her purse for drugs but was afraid to violate her privacy or push for answers.
Maria showed the classic signs of a dedicated Temple member. The cause consumed her life, and she thought that outsiders, including family members, were frittering away theirs. She was living in Temple dormitories, going to school, working on church finances and attending services. Another job, another fragment of routine, always awaited her. She had not yet discovered the difficult realities beneath that catchphrase of other children of the 1960s: “Revolution in our lifetime.”
Jones had touched her and claimed her by meeting her needs. Recognizing her inferiority feelings and insecurity, he elevated Maria on his organizational chart. Taking an average student who had shown little leadership aptitude, he built her confidence and gave meaning to her life by giving her an expanding role in the church.
In the Temple climate of radical feminism, her father was a convenient target—the domineering male ready to be blamed for Maria’s insecurity. That became the conventional Temple wisdom, along with the myth that Maria hated her father. Though Jones could demand pounds of effort from her, he could not decimate her love for her father. He had, however, created a tremendous conflict in her. She felt guilty about going home and was discouraged from doing so, but in her conversations with her friend in the dorms, Jeanette Kerns, she exuded respect and love for her father. No doubt Maria dreaded the day of decision, but with each passing year it became more inevitable. She would have to choose between her own father and “Father.”
Since he could make no headway with his own daughter, Katsaris chose another course, one that carried him into Jones’s lair. Knowing the Temple was inclined to isolate its enemies, Katsaris went to county counsel Tim Stoen’s office to plead his case. He told Stoen, whom he knew through official county business, that he was disturbed that Maria felt she could not maintain a close rapport with her family. To put the church at ease, Katsaris reminded Stoen that he had donated money to support the church’s good works.
“Let me talk to Jim,” Stoen said. Two days later, he reported back to Katsaris, “Jim is concerned.... And he wants Maria to maintain the highest possible contacts with her family.” Actually, Jones had told Maria to do everything possible to soothe her father’s concerns, meaning she should call, write or visit often enough to keep him at bay.
Maria’s contacts with her father, like the contacts of other members with their families, fell generally into three categories: the guarded conversations when she was at the Temple; more open conversations when she called from pay phones; and contacts she made for the express purpose of extracting favors that related to the church.
Maria had no trouble obtaining money and donations from her father, even if it meant lying to him. Once, when the church fined her and another woman four hundred dollars for improperly dispensing toilet articles, she told him she was seriously ill and needed that much money for a hospital stay. She got it. Then, around Christmas 1974, she called to ask for a favor that would prove fateful.
The Temple had chartered a plane to carry Jones, some top aides and a few settlers to Georgetown, Guyana, to inspect the overseas mission that would become Jonestown. Maria had apparently been invited along at the last minute. But she needed a passport, quickly. “Pop, I have a chance to go to a jungle mission in South America,” she announced enthusiastically. “Some people dropped out, so there’s room for me. I can go but I need a passport right away, and I need a birth certificate to get it.”
Katsaris had no objection to the trip; after all Maria was in nursing school at the time, and it made sense to visit a “medical mission,” as the newly founded settlement was described. He made a few phone calls and, as a result, Maria’s passport was processed in time. When Maria returned, she would tell him virtually nothing—though the voyage had changed her, permanently.
On the flight to Guyana, Maria had barely settled in before Jones sauntered over to her and took the seat beside her. He said something to her; she shook her head as he walked away. Patty Cartmell, who was laughingly known to aides as Jones’s “fucking secretary” because she wrote the names of his sexual partners in a slender notebook, took his place beside Maria.
The next time Jones returned to Maria’s side, he stayed for several hours. It was evident to all around that Father was about to take the next step in “building her self-esteem.” The other passengers watched him work on her. Some approved the display, others envied it, still others ignored it. But no one would have dreamed of interfering even had they known she was a virgin.
Instead they gazed on voyeuristically as Jones, at forty-four old enough to be her father, casually draped his hand around the back of her seat and showered her with his silvery voice, his engaging manner, his complete attention. Summoning every bit of his charm, he went through his well polished routine. Yet Maria responded without warmth or animation; she seemed more intent on finishing the book on her lap. Jones finally fell asleep, his hand gently resting on her shoulder.
But something happened during the next few days in the tropics. Maria was observed repeatedly at Jim’s elbow. On one occasion, she became excessively protective of him, almost possessive. While a Temple photographer was snapping pictures of Jones, she suddenly snapped at him: “Can’t you see Father isn’t feeling well? You shouldn’t be taking his picture now.” She was having trouble coping with what must have been a multitude of feelings, anxieties, uncertainties. She would start sobbing for no apparent reason. Jones would comfort her. After a few days, she looked awful, with her eyes red and puffy, marks all over her neck.
Only after the contingent came home to the States did word filter down that Jones had accepted a new mistress on the trip. The story current among Jones’s staff was that Maria, devastated by jealousy when she learned Jones had made love to another woman, demanded he sleep immediately with her, even though it meant giving up her virginity. Staff members were not surprised that Maria had “sought” Jones’s love, since they thought the young woman had a low self-image and a history of domineering men. It never seemed to occur to them that Jones’s lovemaking could be less than selfless.
By 1975, Maria had been fully established as one of Jones’s principal mistresses. She had quit school and moved into the San Francisco temple as a full-time worker. Those who had known her prior to her rise were dismayed by the changes in her. Her self-effacing humor evaporated —she became an ultraloyalist. As was expected of her, she reported people for minor infractions such as smoking and once turned in another member for an imagined homosexual overture. Occasionally, and with a few select people, her plucky sense of fun returned. But sleeping with Jones was a punishing experience—it thrust a companionable young woman into an arena of rivalries, hostilities and jealousies for which she was ill prepared.
Once word got around that a particular woman had been intimate with Father, she was competing directly with other mistresses, and the unchosen would turn on her. Once she had been a wonderful person, they would carp—now she was just another bitch. The hypercritical posturing and snappishness of a Carolyn Layton or Maria Katsaris may well have been a defense to such resentment. They knew they could expect nothing better: the reward was the curse.
Steven Katsaris was surprised to learn that Maria was taking flying lessons with Debbie Touchette at an Oakland flight training school. Maria had shown almost an aversion to flying since childhood days in Utah where Katsaris, an experienced pilot, had used a plane often for both priestly duties
and pleasure. Frequent airsickness had caused the kids to vow to stay earthbound. Now, Maria maintained to her father, she hoped to become a commercial pilot—she did not mention the planned church migration to South America, and the possible need for pilots there.
This newfound common interest in aviation became a tenuous link in the father-daughter relationship. Seeking his advice as an experienced pilot provided Maria with a safe rationale for maintaining contact and flying provided her with relative freedom of movement.
Fatherly concern took over at the outset. At one point, Katsaris and a friend who was an airline pilot checked out Maria’s technique. Although it was a gusty spring day with difficult flying conditions, Katsaris was comforted to see Maria’s light touch on the controls, her calm professional manner. The lessons had not been wasted. “How am I doin’, Pop?” she asked, still seeking approval. Proud, he complimented and encouraged her, and offered her use of his airplane. She thanked him, but never took the offer.
Katsaris called Maria once or twice a week at the San Francisco temple. He noticed the long delays before she took the line and the strained conversations, and wondered whether the calls were being monitored. Sometimes he offered Maria use of the plane. Sometimes he invited her to dinner. There always was an excuse, distance politely interposed. His feelings were hurt, but he took comfort in the fact that Maria’s calls from pay phones, presumably unmonitored, brought out more warmth.
One morning in 1976, while Katsaris worked on the roof of his house, a small plane circled overhead, knifed between two pine trees and buzzed him. It was a neat pass. A short while later, Maria called from Red Bluff to tell him she was on another cross-country flight. But that swoop of her plane had said it all: she was still her father’s daughter.
TWENTY-TWO
The Arms of God
Steve Katsaris had been correct in his reading of the local people. They viewed the Temple’s strange behavior and security precautions with alarm. Certainly there were some rednecks who talked about driving the church out of town, but generally area residents were more than happy to keep their distance from the large, increasingly militant group. Yet they were curious about the many people who seemed to come and go in secrecy. And they wondered what kept lights burning and traffic flowing until early morning.
The crew at the volunteer fire department often watched the bustle of the Temple office-apartment complex next door. They could not tell which children belonged to which adults, or who was married to whom. For inexplicable reasons, most Temple members acted distant or unfriendly, though Grace Stoen always made it a point to exchange cheery hellos. The church members who came to shop at the local market were polite, but they never bought cigarettes or liquor. Sometimes they brought along a baby chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs.
At first all this merely baffled the locals. Then things became disconcerting.
First, Temple members started taking down the license number of every vehicle parked near their complex or in front of their laundromat, which was open to the public. They even jotted down the numbers of cars pulling up to the adjacent volunteer fire department during a fire emergency. Then, using an old black and white police car outfitted with a CB radio, church security members started tailing people who drove past the church late at night. A woman walking home passed the Temple one night and suddenly was bathed in an eerie gray: the church grounds had lit up like a prison courtyard.
Gradually the church had taken on the appearance of an armed compound. Chain-link fencing topped by barbed wire circled the place. Floodlights attached to telephone poles were spaced around the perimeter, facing outward, apparently to illuminate or blind intruders. A guard shack was built atop a tall cage for the chimpanzee; now and then a local would spot a Temple patroller with a gun.
Locals wondered if they had a paramilitary army on their hands. One hot summer day, dozens of Temple security guards with black uniforms and berets stood at attention in 100-degree heat across the front of the property. The reason: the Hell’s Angels had been observed in bars in the area en route to a Lake Mendocino outing. Ostensibly, the Temple wanted to be ready for any attack. It was a long wait.
Local people did not doubt that some individuals with bellies full of beer might have shouted racial slurs at the church, or honked pickup truck horns or tossed a rock or beer can while driving past the church grounds. But they had not heard or read about any incidents warranting extreme measures.
About the only mention of harassment came in the early 1970s in a Kathy Hunter article headlined: LOCAL GROUP SUFFERS TERROR IN THE NIGHT. The few incidents it detailed were reminiscent of those in Indiana —a breather making phone calls in the middle of the night; an anonymous caller threatening, “Get out of town”; references to right-wing retaliation, and the random comment of some dim-witted gas station attendant: “We ought to rock ‘em out of town.”
Church members saw the menace of the surrounding population in much more vivid and violent terms than the alleged incidents committed to print and police blotters. Every minor incident inflamed the growing security panic which sprang from organizational needs and personality changes in Jones.
Despite his “big scare” rhetoric in the 1960s, Jones had maintained an appearance of Gandhian or Kinglike nonviolence, the Christian posture of turning the other cheek. Still, it was no great task for Jones to inure his pacifistic flock to violence. He had long since perfected the trick of keeping the audience’s attention on one hand while the other did the magic. Though he condemned the outbreak of leftist and antiwar violence, he began to drift, almost imperceptibly at first, toward the acceptance of force. Through fear, violent rhetoric and fakery, he conditioned his people gradually to accept defensive violence, and he enlarged the definition of self-defense until it became: attack at my command and in defense of principle—socialism—and of me.
At the end of the 1960s, as the Temple began to expand into larger cities, Jones engaged himself in greater conflict. Now he was competing directly with urban ministers and to some extent with militant groups such as the Black Panthers or Black Muslims. He sought and took on the trappings of a movement leader.
Jones protested on many occasions that he did not fear losing his own life for the cause. Martyrdom—in the style of other great leaders of the 1960s such as Martin Luther King, Jr., the Kennedy brothers and Malcolm X—was a sort of inspirational vision to him. He foresaw himself at a podium going down in a spray of hot lead: Malcolm X in New York in 1965. He promoted this image through the most underhanded means, manipulating the love of his people, filling them with his own fears of hostile or threatening outsiders. He even convinced them that never-definable enemies had been making attempts on his life.
Jones fantasized attacks on the church and magnified some real hostility from the outside community, blowing it all into a siege mentality that would remain to the end. He conditioned his people to self-defense and armed an elite and put them in uniform. He involved both men and women in unarmed security duties around the church and in taking karate lessons. Having stripped his men of false macho attitudes, he exploited those same tendencies by urging them to heroic and protective feats. He encouraged the natural tendency toward radicalism in Temple students, prodding them in the direction of urban guerrilla game playing, even arranging weapons training for some.
By the mid-1970s, all the military elements were in place. The church had stockpiled almost two hundred guns; a security squad of a few dozen people had been trained; Jones traveled everywhere with bodyguards ; there were procedures for searching all who entered Temple services, and Temple buses had armed escorts. Paranoia, an inflated view of his own importance and the need for an atmosphere of apprehension kept security as a primary concern. But Jones could not rely on drunken rednecks or an occasional epithet to keep his people in a besieged state of mind. Thus he found it necessary to whip them up with sermons and absurd, orchestrated attacks. Feigning violence was but a short step beyond phony healings. All Jones required were some gunsho
ts fired from a mysterious source; then he would take over with a routine that combined both the heart attack and stigmata acts. At first, the culprits were assumed to be local rednecks. Later, the villains—none were ever apprehended—took on other identities.
The collision course had been set, because Jones could not elude his own sickness. Lynetta Jones, lamenting the unsolved killings of two Temple dogs, provided a wrenching portent of things to come:
“... These animals, instinctively seeking help, dragged themselves home to die. To die in the excruciating pain of one spasm closely followed by another. The rigidity of jaw, the foam-flecked mouth, the glazed eyes, mute testimony to the present day savage who kills for the joy of killing. Grim handywork of the cowardly poisoner who would prolong the agony of death to sate the devil within himself.”
In addition to threatening phone calls and verbal assaults, various other incidents of harassment were reported to church members. Some were relayed to the sheriff; many were not. Garbage was dumped on the Temple grounds. Someone threw crayfish on the driveway and crushed them with a car. Someone hung a Temple dog with a spike through its neck. As in Indiana, dead animals were hurled at the church. A burned-out firebomb was found at the building (in Indiana it had been a stick of dynamite on the coalpile). And someone apparently tried to run down some black children walking to school.
It was a fairly convincing array of attacks. Yet most members still did not conclude that they were engaged in a life-death struggle. No one had been seriously injured, let alone killed. The closest brushes with death were near-accidents from faulty car components—dangers predicted by Jones. Members would find that a tire was about to fall off or their steering mountings were completely loosened, or a vehicle would almost run them off the road at a place described by Jones.
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