By choosing the time, place and manner of the death of his movement, Jones could deprive his enemies of the chance to bring him down; he would avert defeat. And this escape would not be forgotten—it would have meaning. Their statement: that members of Peoples Temple could no longer tolerate the cruelties of this world. That statement would define Jones’s place in history: from the filthy depths of defeat, “one gallant, glorious screaming end.”
In 1973, several months after the Kinsolving series, Jones first broached the subject of mass suicide. At the time he also made clear his own intention to remain behind to explain the self-destruction. Jack Beam protested that Jones ought to perish with the rest, but that was the only major note of dissent.
By 1975-76, with more serious trouble brewing, Jones actively began promoting his plan again. He started by testing his inner circle of one hundred. Jones hoped to gauge people’s willingness to throw aside their will to survive and to make the “ultimate sacrifice.” The first experiment occurred during an unusually festive planning commission meeting at the San Francisco temple, in the very room where the church entertained some of the most important politicians in California. On this particular night Jones suspended a Temple prohibition. He announced that some very good wine had been made from grapes grown on the church’s Redwood Valley properties. And he ordered wine poured and passed around for a rare celebration. Some p.c. members hesitated—it was against all practice, after all—but finally they tried the wine. Sipping and socializing, the group began to feel loose, even relaxed. This certainly beat catharsis or a business meeting.
Jones went around making sure everyone had tasted at least some wine. Then, suddenly, he called for everyone’s attention in a foreboding voice. The party mood snapped. The wine contained a potent poison, he informed them. They would all die within forty-five minutes. Jones proceeded to explain the rationale for his unilateral decision: by killing themselves, they would be protesting the inhumanity of the world.
To show he was serious, Jones sent cups of wine upstairs to his own living quarters, ostensibly for his sons. Soon various people around the room slithered out of their chairs like dead fish. Jones warned: Anyone who tries to escape will be shot by Mike Prokes or other armed security watching the exits.
No one rose to question the judgment of Jim Jones. No one rebelled, no one challenged his insane logic, no one called for an antidote. No one questioned the right of Jim Jones to make the decision for them to die. In fact, some even voiced concern that children and others not attending the p.c. meeting would be left behind to suffer in the cruel world. Could they not be brought in to take the potion as well? It was not necessary, Jones assured them: he would soon detonate a nuclear bomb that was sitting nearby in a van, thus mercifully destroying San Francisco and all the children with it.
As some members keeled over, apparently dead or dying, other p.c. members held their seats. Some, like Joyce Shaw, believed they were dying but did not react; death sounded like a long vacation from an exhausting and unsatisfying life, and they were consoled by thoughts of reincarnation. Some shared Jones’s vision of a glorious final statement. Some, no doubt, were in a state of shock, afraid of the oncoming death from poison or afraid of the bullets from Mike Prokes’s gun, afraid of being seen as cowardly or disloyal. These people froze, blank, uncertain. Many were skeptical, thinking the ritual surely could not be real. Most could not be sure, and others, like Sandy Bradshaw, did not care one way or the other.
Only a few, the actors, knew for sure. Even Patty Cartmell, Jones’s longtime stagehand, may have been left out of this secret—at least Jones wanted the others to think that. At one point she made a wild, screaming dash for the door: she was going to “kill enemies,” she shouted. Prokes intercepted her and a shot rang out. The explosion, almost point-blank, knocked her to the floor. It was only a blank, but the percussion had torn her clothing and she had seemed to pass out. Momentarily, she recovered, dazed and sputtering angrily. One of Jones’s lieutenants had failed the loyalty test and the others were amused.
Soon the slapstick was over. There was no poison after all, Jones announced.
But there had been a test, and Jones wanted to evaluate the success of his experiment. He ordered two Temple women, one of them Joyce Shaw, to ask p.c. members on tape whether the charade had fooled them. The interview result: about half had believed, and half were skeptical. The nonbelievers did not so much doubt that Jones would do such a thing; rather it was the poor acting, the amateurish “dying” of the “victims,” that had tipped them off.
A 50 percent credibility rating on the suicide rehearsal was no mean feat. Only one person had tried to escape—and perhaps had been acting. Most of all the little exercise had been unifying. The thought of dying had raised expressions of loyalty, and sacrifice, even of the lives of their children. For some, incredibly, it was a beautiful sight to behold.
The mechanism was tested and in place.
Although Jones often denigrated Bob Houston, he wanted to keep him in the fold. He was a devoted member. This could not have been more dramatically demonstrated than when he returned to his commune after doing time on the Temple work crew repairing damage from the fire.
Instead of diminishing his commitment, Bob Houston rededicated himself. Wholeheartedly he threw himself into a positive-minded critique of the Temple’s communal structure, which involved over 400 people and a few dozen communes in San Francisco. He systematically assessed its strengths and weaknesses, and suggested solutions. His thoughtful and detailed written evaluation noted that some 50 key people were bearing the load for the entire system and that the talents of the 350 others were being wasted, at the expense of their sense of belonging and personal commitment.
“Members are becoming increasingly resentful and disgruntled that the promises of ‘all your needs being met’ are not being fulfilled, and the buck keeps being passed around and around,” he declared.
Little was forthcoming in the way of improvements. If anything, the communal amenities became more meager, the overall strategy more desperate and the structure more centralized. In 1976, despite the Temple’s newly acquired political might and upgraded public image, the deterioration became pronounced. High visibility had heightened Jones’s fears of government crackdowns and renewed media inquiries. In April 1976—through numerous phone calls and letters, and by badgering newspaper personnel—Jones was able to defuse a San Francisco Chronicle story by reporter Julie Smith. Nevertheless, such scares made the building of a sanctuary seem more urgent.
Inside the church, Jones told his followers to tighten their belts to save money for the exodus to Guyana. They all might be forced to flee sooner than expected, he said: civil war might break out if Jimmy Carter, a southerner, was elected in November. As an added inducement to sacrifice, Jones showed his people a silent film of the December 1974 visit to Jonestown, complete with store-bought fruit.
As a first step in consolidation, the church initiated a rule in January 1976 that all members must eat meals at the Temple dining hall on Geary Boulevard. That economy move represented great hardship for the Houstons. The church was a ten-minute drive across town from Potrero Hill, and there was only one commune car to bring twenty-four hungry mouths back and forth. Practically the entire evening was spent shuttling people to dinner.
The new mealtime arrangement was accompanied by a new bookkeeping policy too: all communal money would be handled through central bookkeeping. The Temple would monitor and maintain control of every dime, paying rent, phone bills, and other allowable expenses. Wage earners signed over their checks; in turn, they were allotted a certain amount of money for their needs and had to submit requisition slips for the rest, even personal articles such as toothpaste, shampoo and sanitary napkins.
The meals policy, coupled with the intrusion of some problem adults on Potrero Hill, caused Joyce and Bob to request new quarters. In April 1976, the commune moved into a more convenient Victorian house on Sutter Street, within easy wal
king distance of the Temple. The house was stuffed with people, nearly twenty living at least three per room in six rooms, including the living and dining rooms. Joyce roomed with two girls, and Bob with two boys. There was no space for socializing or conducting communal activities. In this flophouse, sleeping was the primary activity. As far as Temple leadership went, that was just fine: it mitigated against any independent communal identity.
The Sutter Street commune’s refrigerator was barren; without mealtime gatherings, there was no forum for discussing problems and solving them, or for sharing interests. Instead they marched to the church, where they endured food lines and often were unable to sit together. Every night was a cafeteria meal. Discipline in the house deteriorated; the children sassed adults and showed no respect. Joyce and Bob soon became miserable.
The ironies did not escape Joyce. The very day she handed the church an $800 paycheck, she had to submit a request for $10 for the children’s monthly birthday outing. The bureaucratic requirements were stifling and nonsensical, and the poor diet drove her to complain repeatedly. “This is a rich organization,” she told Jones in planning commission meetings. “So why don’t our children have [even] the standard of living of kids in the slums?” Jones reiterated his statements about the need for money to flee the country, and Joyce was ridiculed by others as a selfish white middle-class intellectual.
The verbal punishment persisted at meetings in spring and early summer of 1976. She and Bob were ostracized for taking a “white” attitude, ignoring the fact that children were starving all over the world. Maintaining a white middle-class dietary standard was expensive and unnecessary, they were told. Besides, Joyce and Bob were becoming territorial about their little group. A self-centered communal identity undermined the larger community, Peoples Temple.
Righteous doubts as troubling as a suicide rehearsal had flooded Joyce Shaw’s consciousness. To her, there seemed to be no free exchange of ideas, no effort to encourage criticism, no attempt to adopt the sorts of positive changes Bob had suggested. The lifestyle was growing more spare, the organization more autocratic and authoritarian. Her respect for Jones was fractured.
In June 1976, as her discontent deepened, Jones elevated Bob to the planning commission. Joyce interpreted the move, correctly, as an attempt to placate him and control her. Although Bob did not join in the criticism of Joyce at the next p.c. meeting—much to Jones’s chagrin—the appointment nevertheless added an element of mistrust to their marriage. Joyce did not share with Bob the details of her growing disaffection.
Meanwhile, she had started having late-night conversations with a couple of women members who had secret doubts about the church. The three of them broke a taboo one night by smoking cigarettes and drinking wine in a bedroom. As they savored each puff and sip, breaking the rules together, they established a bond of trust. They talked rebelliously, but were still too scared to act on it.
At about this time, happenstance provided a climate for Joyce to make a decision. Because her parents were coming to visit from Ohio and because she made good wages as a legal secretary, she was allowed to remain in San Francisco during the church’s annual cross-country bus trip.
With the children away from the commune, she slept longer, and fell into a more conventional routine. As the effects of sleep deprivation wore off, her misgivings about the church came into focus. Her willpower strengthened. She assured herself that she possessed the skills to earn her way in the world and that her family would shelter her if necessary. In that regard, she differed from many Temple members without the youth, education, background and outside resources to make a clean split.
On the night of July 15, 1976, Bob drove her to work. She was a little early, so the two sat talking in an old Pontiac on California Street. There were warm feelings between them, despite a certain wariness. Bob suspected she was anxious to leave but did not suspect her defection was just hours away. “If you leave, it will hurt a lot of people,” he said. Her responses were awkward and restrained, revealing nothing. It was too late. She had already put aside a couple of paychecks, stowed belongings bit by bit with an outside friend and purchased a bus ticket.
That night after work, with a little Buddha statue and few other belongings in a bag, she stepped onto the street in her high heels and hailed a cab. She was leaving behind her husband, six children under her guardianship, and several years of her life. At the Greyhound bus station in downtown San Francisco, she boarded the 1:15 A.M. bus to Santa Rosa, where an old friend had offered her a place to stay.
Less than twenty-four hours after defecting, Joyce called Bob at the San Francisco Youth Guidance Center, presuming that phone would not be bugged. Predictably, Bob pleaded with her to return. He reminded her of the Temple’s good deeds and told her he felt doubly hurt because they had been planning to move back into the same room together in the commune.
Joyce tried to explain herself, but shied away from criticizing Jones or contradictions in the church. Bob would not even acknowledge that their own relationship had been victimized by Jones. The conversation got nowhere. She knew the prestige of a p.c. seat still meant a great deal to him, and it would take time for the luster to wear off.
For three weeks, Joyce lived on the midway at the Sonoma County fairgrounds and other fairs, selling T-shirts at her friend’s concession stand and learning to slow down. Still, she kept reaching back. She called Bob two or three times and also placed a call to Jones. As did many defectors, she nearly apologized to him. She was trying to find herself, she said. “And I don’t believe the revolution is coming,” she added. Instead of abusing her, Jones salved her with understanding, encouraged her to go ahead with her search. And he extended her an open invitation to return.
Amiable as the forty-five-minute conversation was, Joyce did not trust Jones. She wrote her first husband, the Hungarian, in Vienna, briefing him on her defection and warning him that if any harm befell her, the church was responsible. The letter alarmed him so much that he sent a copy to Joyce’s mother. The family tried unsuccessfully to contact Joyce through the Temple and were given phony excuses for her absence. They became frantic. Finally, as her mother and brother made plans to fly to California to search for her, Joyce telephoned home to ask for asylum. She had remembered Jones’s admonition to defectors: If you go five hundred miles away, no one will harm you.
Still nearly in shock, she flew home to Ohio. The Temple dominated her dreams; she flashed back in time. She slept and slept, sat around idle, incapacitated, asking herself what had happened to her. It was therapeutic, she discovered, to tell her parents about her experiences. But she knew that her next step must take her outside her own closed cosmos; she needed to occupy herself and regenerate. One day in the shower, she decided the best option was to return to school. Within two months of leaving, she enrolled for the fall term at Wright State University.
Though more convinced than ever of Jones’s deceit, she could not forget Bob. She called him on their second anniversary, October 2, 1976. It seemed apparent that Bob wanted her back as much as she wanted him. But his words offered little hope that he soon would quit the church. He said he was looking forward to a vacation in Guyana. Secretly, he was recording the phone call.
“Bob, I don’t believe the ends justify the means,” Joyce said, refusing to return.
“I do believe that,” he said. “I do believe that.”
“I can’t make your decision to leave,” she said. “But I want you to know where I can be reached. If you want to leave, we can get together and I will do anything to help the girls.”
The invitation to reunite hung there, openly. Was some part of him listening?
At the end of their conversation, Joyce had asked Bob to send some clothes she had left behind. The clothing was mailed to Joyce’s parents’ house the morning of October 4, 1976, before Bob went to work at Juvenile Hall. After his first eight-hour job, he went to work at the railroad.
In the small hours of October 5, 1976, the gener
al yardmaster of the Southern Pacific railroad yards, Ben Rhoten, drove south from San Francisco to San Bruno. He parked and walked up to the door of the single-story house where Bob Houston’s parents lived. Rhoten was a golf partner of Sam Houston’s, and he had visited the house previously. This time he was dreading it.
Nadyne Houston answered the door in her nightgown. She went immediately to get her husband out of bed. When Sam Houston walked to the front of the house, his friend Ben greeted him with a taut expression. “Sam, I’ve got something to tell you.” His face said it all.
“Is it Bobby, Jr? Is he dead?”
About a hundred people, including a contingent of at least fifty Temple members, gathered at the San Bruno Funeral Home for Bob’s services. The turnout provided some consolation to the grieving parents; it indicated that Bob had been a popular Temple member. But these were not Bob’s friends. Most of his friends had left the church, and none of the friendly senior citizens Bob used to shuttle around had been selected for the Temple contingent.
The family abided by Bob’s wish—and Temple practice—that he be cremated. His remains would be put to rest at Skylawn Cemetery, where he had played taps years earlier as a Boy Scout. The Temple would contribute $200 to the burial cost.
At the mortuary, Joyce Shaw sat with the Houstons; Phyllis refused, both for herself and for her daughters. The relationship between Mrs. Houston and Phyllis had never been particularly warm, but it meant a great deal to Bob’s parents to have their granddaughters beside them. Instead, the girls sat tearless among the Temple contingent, showing no emotion.
Nadyne Houston’s minister presided over the services. Bob’s former bandleader said a few kind words, and some ex-Temple members delivered short but complimentary eulogies. Jim Jones did not attend, but his son-in-law and onetime designated successor, Mike Cartmell, stood to say that Bob had been working too hard recently and that Rev. Jones had encouraged him to trim back his schedule. Joyce Shaw was disgusted at the self-serving eulogy: now no one could say the Temple, by overworking him, had indirectly contributed to his death.
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