Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  “You don’t understand.”

  Williams advised him to stay and take on the accusations, whatever they might be. It was still several weeks before New West and the Examiner published. But Williams would never again hear from Jones directly. The pastor of Peoples Temple had run, ignoring friends and allies who had admonished that it would be perceived as an admission of guilt.

  Finally, in late July, the long-awaited August issue of New West appeared. Entitled “Inside Peoples Temple,” the article told the stories of ten defectors and displayed in counterpoint Jones’s political trophies and connections. It documented the “crimes”; yet it did not—and could not —provide a cogent explanation. Despite the sensational new disclosures, the nature of the organization remained murky: “... life inside Peoples Temple was a mixture of spartan regimentation, fear and self-imposed humiliation.” The article went so far as to add a section: “Why Jim Jones Should Be Investigated.” It cited areas of possible wrongdoing and danger—operation of care homes, property donations, treatment of young charges and signs of an exodus. “The story of Jim Jones and his Peoples [Temple],” the article concluded, “has only begun to be told....”

  Locally, the article created a stir; it was picked up by wire services and described briefly in newspaper articles. Tracy appeared on local talk shows and started preparing a second article, about suspicious deaths in the Temple. Kilduff went back to the Chronicle. His rather contrite city editor Steve Gavin came to him and gave him free rein to cover new developments.

  Many Temple friends in the liberal and progressive communities dismissed the story as bad-mouthing by disgruntled former members or as part of a rightist campaign. Some viewed the story as the second volley of an attack that had started with an uncomplimentary New West story about Mayor Moscone. The article, though hard-hitting, did not in any sense deal a lethal blow to the organization; much of the damage could have been repaired, some of the allegations blunted, the ugly picture tinted if only Jones had dug in for a fight.

  Lavish expressions of solidarity marked a July 31 rally designed to unify Temple members and their supporters. Some public figures stood before the Geary Boulevard congregation to impugn the motives of the attackers; others simply, and safely, reiterated their endorsement of the church’s good works. Public officials across the spectrum leaped to Jim Jones’s empty pulpit to defend him without ascertaining the truth of the New West allegations. Some of the Temple’s siege mentality had actually rubbed off.

  State Assemblyman Willie Brown: “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.”

  Yvonne Golden, principal of Opportunity High School: “We who support Rev. Jim Jones will continue to stand behind him. We find solace in the eloquence of Thomas Paine: ‘Tyranny like hell is not easily conquered....’ ”

  The climax of the rally was Jones’s long-distance speech, transmitted by radio from Guyana. His voice a combination of Billy Graham-on-amphetamines and petulant, foul-mouthed child, he delivered a long scatalogical diatribe, calling his enemies “bitches” and “bastards,” vowing that the press never would get him. “I know some of you are wanting to fight,” Jones shouted over the loudspeakers. “But that’s exactly what the system wants. They want to use us as sacrificial lambs, as a scapegoat. Don’t fall into this trap by yielding to violence, no matter what kind of lies are told on us or how many....” The crowd sprung to their feet time and time again, jutting their fists into the air. Their sustained screaming bordered on hysteria.

  When Jones finished, State Assemblyman Art Agnos, who was visiting for the first time, turned to county supervisor candidate Harvey Milk. “Harvey, that guy is really wild.”

  Milk smiled. “Yeah. He’s different all right.”

  Particularly ardent support came from the black community’s watchdog and guardian—the Sun Reporter. Without investigating, Dr. Goodlett wrote a lengthy front-page editorial dismissing the article, upbraiding the authors and questioning the sources.

  In the meantime, Nancy Dooley and I had found many of the people interviewed by New West. Other defectors came forward, given courage by signs of media interest. When word spread that the Examiner was pursuing the story too, I was invited to meet with a group of former members at Mickey Touchette’s apartment.

  Her Cole Street apartment was located several blocks from Haight Street in an area crammed with cars, stucco duplexes and a good number of Victorians, all gently rising toward Twin Peaks. I was the first arrival. As she set out nibbling food, I found myself wondering how she had got mixed up in all this: it was difficult to imagine Mickey Touchette as anyone other than a San Francisco office worker in her mid-twenties. I had no idea that her parents were the “administrators” of Johnstown.

  She spoke with the pleasantly softened twang of a midwesterner. “My grandparents heard about Jones in Indianapolis in the early 1960s, and my family came in 1966 and spent the summer in Ukiah.” She explained how the ties gradually became closer, through Jones’s “healing” of her grandfather’s heart attack and through Jones’s predictions of nuclear holocaust in Indiana. “We thought we were part of the chosen people.”

  As this young woman who had attended Indiana University and California colleges talked about Jones’s paranormal powers and healings, she smirked with disgust, “The power of positive thinking can do a lot for you.” Yet not a word about socialism or the political content of Jones’s earthy sermons slipped into her account; it was as though she was afraid the outside world would discount her story as political differences with Jones. Although I did not know it then, Jones would claim exactly that, calling Mickey Touchette and other members of the so-called Eight Revolutionaries “violent terrorists.”

  The rest—including most of the Eight—arrived in bunches, some carrying potato chips, six-packs of beer or jugs of wine. They embraced one another like long-lost relatives or friends. Most were young whites in their twenties.

  Soon Tracy and Kilduff wandered in. They greeted their sources and welcomed me to this incredible story. They appeared a little weary, almost jaded about the material, though they seemed to inspire the respect and confidence of the eighteen defectors there, some from as far away as Ukiah and Los Angeles.

  As the afternoon sun poured into the room, we settled into seats and drinks were poured. While others shared experiences or became reacquainted, I had my first opportunity to sit down with a large sampling of former members. It was no easy job to size up or define Peoples Temple. No label seemed to fit. At the time I looked upon the Temple as a church with a survivalist outlook, a charismatic leader, a dose of political-social activism and a Mafia-like code of silence.

  That last characteristic—of secrecy enforced through intimidation —fascinated me. It was—and would remain—the biggest obstacle to me as a reporter. After the frustration of trying to find willing talkers, this gathering was almost an informational overload. One person after another stated fears about “going public,” as they called it. “It’s hard to believe that a few months ago, all of us were in fear, of each other and of Jones,” said Elmer Mertle, who explained that he had changed his name to Al Mills in order to hide from his past and any pursuers.

  The ex-members recited other incidents, some of which were revolting, cruel, almost incomprehensible to me. As they did so, it became apparent to me that Jones was a very clever man who protected himself legally; terrible as they were, the incidents hardly seemed provable or prosecutable.

  —Anthony Rubin was drugged so Jones could raise him from the dead.

  —As punishment, Danny Pietila was drugged with a piece of cake, then raised by Jones.

  —A boy was forced to eat his own vomit.

  —Someone named Marvin Wideman was beaten.

  —A woman was stripped and ridiculed after expressing sexual desire for Jones.

  -Twelve-year-old Curtis Buckley died, possibly of a drug overdose, because church members t
ried to treat him by putting a picture of Jones over his heart.

  The ultimate cruelty recounted by these defectors was the story of the poisoned wine. They described it as a test of loyalty. “Jones suggested that we commit mass suicide to leave our mark on the world,” said Walter Jones. “He tested us every minute one way or another. Daily, you could see him getting crazier.”

  The group session provided an abundance of new leads and new contacts. Nancy Dooley and I expanded our list of sources among former Temple members to more than two dozen, and confronted the politicians and other Temple supporters.

  Given the remarkable contrast between the Temple’s public image and the internal practices, we had to apply a high degree of caution in weighing our information. Generally, we used a two-source rule to determine whether to use a given story, but often we had a half-dozen backup sources supporting particularly serious allegations. Even then, some statements from the defectors seemed too wild or explosive to use; for example, it seemed irresponsible to use the faked poisoning incident because it appeared a test of loyalty rather than a plan for mass suicide. It had been presented to us as theatrics, a cruel mind game mixed with gallows humor.

  The credibility of our sources was another important consideration, no matter how many confirmed the allegations. Numerous times we asked ourselves, “How could intelligent, seemingly well adjusted people join and put up with that abuse? How reliable is information from people who would follow such a man?” The answers were never 100 percent conclusive. Yet members who went public seemed to have nothing to gain by doing so; many apparently dreaded it. Their stories jibed well with documentation the Examiner obtained; their stories appeared consistent with a pattern of Jones’s past troubles and disregard for legal formalities. And most important, the accounts of various members—whether interviewed personally in the Bay Area or by phone all over California—meshed and matched to a reassuring degree.

  After a few weeks of investigation, Nancy Dooley and I wrote what would be the first of two lengthy front-page packages for the Sunday Examiner. Probably more than a million people saw the headline story on August 7, 1977. “Rev. Jones: The Power Broker; Political Maneuverings of a Preacher Man.” An opus by newspaper standards, the story filled dozens of column inches and featured sidebars, including a history going back to Jones’s monkey-selling days in Indiana.

  The Temple responded, predictably, with a gush of mail. They had, however, learned a lesson from the Bill Barnes exposé—and refrained from calling out their political friends.

  The next story appeared on August 14, 1977. “The Temple, a Nightmare World,” went beyond the New West article in describing a dehumanizing lifestyle—of children being assigned to beg in the streets, of two-dollar weekly allowances for adults who turned over everything, “catharsis” sessions, faked healings and resurrections, boxings and beatings. We also had been told about, but did not print, stories of children being punished with an electric shock device called the “blue monster” while their screams were amplified for the rest to hear. Though I had been told people would kill for Jones, it was not printed. There was no evidence, and I did not fully believe the accusation.48

  Jones’s departure made it easier for some people to abandon the Temple; but most of those in liberal and progressive circles adopted a wait-and-see posture without drawing definite conclusions. The church’s most important supporters—namely Willie Brown, George Moscone and Carlton Goodlett—stood behind the Temple publicly.

  Moscone was deeply disturbed by the New West article. His closest aides had the impression he felt duped. Nevertheless the mayor believed that until someone proved the allegations, his only tenable public position was support for his Housing Commission chairman. Moscone refused a political rival’s demand that he launch his own inquiry into the Temple. But the mayor privately made it clear to Temple representatives in San Francisco that he did not want an absentee commissioner: he demanded to know how long Jones would be in Guyana. Housing officials, after checking with the Temple, assured him that Jones would be coming back soon. But a short time later, August 2, 1977, Jones dictated his resignation over the radio-telephone.49

  THIRTY-SIX

  Exodus

  One afternoon in August 1977, a frantic man called the Examiner. He was desperate to speak to someone about his “common-law wife” of several years, Le Flora Townes. The call was transferred to me, and after a brief conversation I agreed to meet with him.

  His upstairs Potrero District flat looked out over a block where Latino children played tag around cars left disabled on the sidewalks. After almost a minute of rapping, the door swung inward and there stood Harold Turley. His ebony skin glistened, and a few beads of water trickled down his neck to his clean white T-shirt. He smelled as though he had stepped out of a bath; his boxer shorts hung almost to his knees, nearly meeting his gartered black socks. We scaled the steep stairs.

  In a back room, he cleared some clothing off the only chair, for me, then hunkered on a mattress; behind him the pastel-painted rooms were as naked as his knees. “She gave the furniture away,” he explained. “She wants that new stove and icebox to go to the Temple.”

  It pained him obviously to talk to a stranger about his personal life, yet he had no hope of winning her back. “I wouldn’t want her back because I’d be afraid of her,” he snapped. “But somebody has to know the truth.” Compulsively he told me his story:

  Le Flora had followed Jones for almost seven years. A short time after her conversion, she and Harold began living together. They had never married because Jones opposed marriage. She badgered Harold to join her church, but he was turned off by the fifteen or twenty members he met over time; they always talked against the American system.

  Their routine had been common enough. Le Flora had worked for a decade as a maid at a downtown hotel, while Turley did odd jobs and sometimes collected welfare or attended City College. Then Jones came between them.

  “She’s fifty-five and ignorant,” he said. “She always tried to get me to go to the church. She’d talk all night long about Jim Jones. She used to brag about what she gave the church. She went four or five nights a week and gave well over a thousand dollars a year. She bought a brand-new washer and dryer and gave it to them too.”

  He held open a tiny notebook in the palm of his hand—a record of donations, in Le Flora’s own shaky hand. Under the initials “P.T.” ran columns of dates and amounts ranging from $5 to $100, some on back-to-back days. During three months she had donated a total of $572. She also contributed to the church by moonlighting at a Potrero Hill convalescent hospital donated to the Temple by her friends, James and Irene Edwards.

  She began behaving strangely, Turley said. Before the Temple, her life had revolved around Christianity and church bingo games. But when she came home after Temple activities, including exercise and karate classes, she threw karate chops and kicks at dumbfounded Harold. She was full of vinegar. “She said they had her on guard duty at various times around the church and there were guard dogs too. This was after the arson fire at the church. She told me, ‘We got girls who can whip yer ass.’ ”

  All this confused and aggravated Harold Turley, especially when Le Flora visited the Temple every day for a solid week and would not tell him a single word about it afterward. It also miffed him when she paid $150 and took off from work to join a Temple trip to New York. He had his own Svengali theory to make sense of it:

  “Jones had intercourse with every one of them. He had control of them sexually. When she tells me she’d sell her pussy for the church, what does that tell you?”

  In disgust, he pushed to his feet and paced. Turning to face me, he went on, “She can barely read. She’s ignorant, I tell you. And Jim Jones is a master of speaking. He’s crude and clever. That’s how he did it.”

  “But what was he after?” I asked.

  “Her money,” he said, explaining that she had accumulated some $98,482 in social security in forty years of working. “I saw
the slip myself,” he said. “Almost $100,000! And she can collect her social security payments in the other country. That’s what they want.”

  For some time, Le Flora had talked about the Temple’s Garden of Eden. “Jim’s telling us to get our passports because something bad’s gonna happen here,” she told Harold. She had seen some films of the mission, and it did look like paradise, just like Jones said. Apparently jungle life agreed with her friends James and Irene Edwards; Edwards, a six-footer well over 200 pounds, had trimmed down to a fit 160 pounds in the tropics, she told Harold.

  Then the phone calls from the Temple increased in frequency and urgency. One Wednesday, a caller told her, “You better get your passport quick.” The next day she was gone. She took one suitcase, all that the immigrants were allowed to bring. She left behind a closet full of clothes, kitchen implements and appliances.

  On the way out, she grinned and called to Harold: “I’m leavin’. I’m not supposed to say where I’m goin’, but I’ll write.” She was tickled to be resettling in the Promised Land.

  “When people get old, what will he do with them then?” Harold shouted back at her. “And suppose you don’t like the place and want to come back? He’s not going to permit that.”

  But Le Flora did not want to hear it. At midnight, five buses pulled away from the front of Peoples Temple: in one of them sat Le Flora Townes.

  For many months, workers at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Francisco’s Federal Building had observed a strange phenomenon. Hundreds—perhaps as many as five or six hundred by July 1977 —had come through the lines requesting passports for the obscure country of Guyana. They came in little groups. Most were either very young or very old people, and there was always a supervisor. Each was already prepared with the necessary shots, passport photos, passport fee and proof of citizenship. Nothing about the preparations was illegal. There was nothing to report to any authorities.