“I thought I left this shit back in the States,” Jones said. “What do you do? A black woman comes up, wants to make love to you. They’ve been oppressed all their lives because they’re women and black. At first I said no, but she kept pressuring me. What should I do? Should I keep going to bed with her?”
Without exception, all the women told Jones to keep sleeping with Shanda James to make her a better worker, more loyal to the cause.
Carter was a little bothered by the affair, because he thought Jones had left behind his philandering in the States. But few of the rank and file knew much about Jones’s sex life, other than that he did it “for the cause.” They were not privy to all his partners.
One of those in the dark about Shanda James was Al Smart, a new arrival who immediately took a liking to her. When Jones spotted Al and Shanda chatting a bit too flirtatiously, he had Smart brought to the floor on another pretext. A few days later, Shanda sent Jones a note: “I care about you a lot, but I want to be with Al Smart.” Apparently she did not anticipate the hazards of throwing over Jim Jones for a nineteen-year-old black kid.
That night, she was sent to ECU and drugged. Jones explained to others that she had tried to kill herself. But Johnny Cobb told Tim Jones about the contents of Shanda’s note. The effect on the basketball team was electric; Jones’s treatment of a girl they all knew and liked outraged them. Over the following few days, she would emerge from ECU so dazed that she needed to lean on someone as she staggered around. She was a zombie.
The Jones boys were not upset because Jones had a new mistress, or a young one, or even a black one. His sexual promiscuity was institutionalized. But this affair unmasked his sexual motives.
Now, as his sickness spread like a malignant tumor, his deeds got more despicable and mean-spirited-and his lies no longer could gloss over his sins and weaknesses. Even for the expert juggler, there were too many balls in the air. Jim Jones was about to lose control. At the height of his powers, he could have cleverly concealed his weaknesses or defused accidental revelations of them. But now he was tripping over his own base instincts, laying them bare for public view.
Sometimes, when there was a lot on Stephan Jones’s mind, he liked to just sit alone in pavilion with the lights out and listen to the soft jungle sounds. Were it not for the thoughts racing through his mind, it would have been peaceful that night late in October when he heard his brother Tim walk by. He called him over.
Tim Jones still seethed with the anger of betrayal. He felt revulsion for the corruption and cruelty of his adopted father. “We gotta kill him,” he exploded. “We gotta kill him. We gotta have a revolution. We gotta throw this son of a bitch out.”
Stephan replied sarcastically. “This is funny. It’s been almost ten years that I’ve been putting up with this shit.” His words were biting, a touch bitter. “You’ve known about it for a month and you’re going nuts. You want a revolution. Let me tell you something. You know what would happen if you killed Jim Jones now? ... Some of these seniors think he’s God and he’s their only hope. And you’re gonna go up there and kill Jim Jones? That won’t work. The only way you can take care of Jim Jones is to hope he dies naturally or gradually phase him out. That’s the only way you’re gonna do it. I’m sorry There have been things I’ve wanted to do ...”
The next day, while Stephan encountered his father on the little path halfway to Jones’s house, Jones said, “Come on, walk me up. My security isn’t here.” On the way, they began to argue. Jones hardly could stand up. Stephan propped him up. As Jones gazed up at Stephan, he looked like a frail and sick man of average size, not God.
“What’s really wrong with Shanda?” Stephan demanded. “You put her in there because she wants to leave you, didn’t you?”
Jones drew back, perhaps surprised that he had been so obvious. “I can’t believe you’re saying that, that I drugged Shanda.” He pretended to be offended.
“You’re a fucking liar!” his son shouted.
“You’re a fucking liar!” Jones hollered back. He wheeled around and Stephan wheeled around, and they started in opposite directions. It was a rare burst of public disrespect. In his weakened condition, Jones could hardly walk away, but somehow he managed. Then he spotted Tim and Johnny observing the whole thing from the pavillion. In private, he ordered them to put Stephan under armed surveillance.
A few minutes later, the boys came up to Stephan. “We’re supposed to be watching you,” they laughed. Then they all walked back together to the kitchen. The others took strength in seeing Stephan stand up to Jones. And it was an important moment for Stephan, too. No longer was he isolated from his brothers in his hatred of his father. Soon word spread through the whole basketball team.
After the confrontation, Stephan began to suspect that he was being drugged. His stomach felt awful, his face broke out, and there were days when he could hardly drag his body out of bed in the morning. He did not complain to anyone, however, and he did not even tell his mother; it would upset her. But one day when Jim Jones, disbelief on his face, watched him work, Stephan was certain his father was behind his weakened condition and accused him to his face. Enraged, Jones denied it.
When Jones saw Stephan huddled with his brothers, he ordered a turn-in of all guns in the compound. They were locked in a warehouse. There were two keys. Jim Jones had one and Joe Wilson, now his most trusted security guard, had the other. On the sly, Stephan kept his rifle.
During a catharsis session soon thereafter, another of Jones’s sons asserted himself. Going down a list of disciplinary infractions, Jones was criticizing Tim for playing music on guard duty, sleeping on the job and arrogance. Tim did not even try to defend himself:
“I ain’t got nothin’ else to say,” he said, refusing to play the penitent son. “I don’t wish to talk about it. Whatever you want to do with me, go ahead on.... Three-fourths of it is bullshit.”
“Don’t give me no stuff ...” Jones said. “That’s arrogant. If anyone else had done that to me, you’d have jumped off this platform. That’s totally wrong.”
“That’s right!” came the cries from the crowd.
“You know what it sounds like to me?” Tim said defiantly. “Someone isn’t getting his ass kissed....”
In the meantime, another family member took a stand. The unspoken rivalry between Marceline Jones and Carolyn Layton generated an open altercation, the only one ever in Stephan Jones’s memory. With old wounds still festering, the women argued in Marceline’s house while Stephan eavesdropped from the porch. Layton wanted Marceline to sign twenty blank sheets of paper in her hand. Marceline refused.
Stephan figured his mother was worried that Layton would use her signature on blank pages to somehow get back $8,000 that Marceline had had her parents place in a bank account for him.
“If you don’t want to sign these papers, you don’t have to,” Layton said indignantly. “I have better things to do [than to argue]. I’m not going to betray you. I’m not going to use these papers. I can’t believe you don’t trust me to do this.”
Marceline was calm. “You have to understand my position. I don’t know what I’m signing.”
Stephan tried to comfort his mother afterward. She told him she was tired of signing so many blank pieces of paper over the years.
Even so, Stephan cautioned her. “Argue when you really feel strongly about something. But don’t question everything, because then he’ll quit even coming near you, and he’ll quit listening to you. When you have something really strong to say, he’ll disregard that like everything else.”
Stephan and Marceline Jones could challenge Jones on occasion, but did not try to stop him. For the past year, every time Marceline left Jonestown, the last thing she told Stephan was, “Don’t kill him. Something will work out.” Stephan knew that physically it would be easy to remove Jones, but a blatant power grab or coup would never go over with the loyalists. It would take a dictatorship, he felt, to consolidate his revolution. But the teen-ager w
as not ready for that, nor equipped with the powers of persuasion and broad support it would take to depose his father.
Stephan could not succeed without the help of his mother—yet, for complicated reasons, the woman who had been compromised by three decades of collaboration with a tyrant could not or would not fight him.
Ultimately, Stephan Jones saw himself as the successor to Jones, the person who would take over, in conjunction with Marceline, if Jones became incapacitated or died. No doubt Marceline, too, longed for that eventuality. Carolyn Layton, Jones’s most important assistant, had already sent Stephan a letter which said, “I want you to know if anything ever happens to your father, I’ll be behind you 100 percent.” Stephan interpreted that letter to mean an official blessing of sorts. Succession would be easier, and cleaner, than throwing Jones aside. But despite the many signals to the contrary, those closest to Jones had failed to realize he had no intention of permitting his movement to survive him.
As their days were numbered, the powerless in Jonestown could not hope to overthrow the madman; their only feasible act of rebellion was escape. Only someone or some group who already possessed some power —like the aristocratic German army officers who plotted to blow up Hitler with a briefcase bomb—could hope to succeed. But without Stephan and Marceline Jones, there would be no revolution. The madness would rage.
FORTY-NINE
The Congressman, and Others
Back in the United States, the state of affairs in Jonestown remained an agonizingly inconclusive issue. For more than a year, nearly a thousand Americans had lived in the South American jungle under a cloud of accusations that, if true, meant that their lives were in danger of being extinguished at the whim of Jim Jones. Because some visitors hailed Jonestown as a utopian paradise and because the situation could never come to a head in California courts, the central question never changed: What really is going on in Jonestown?
The search for someone to galvanize the issue had actually ended almost a year earlier, though that was not yet clear. My November 13, 1977, story about Bob Houston’s life and death had ignited the interest of Leo Ryan, a U.S. representative from the suburbs south of San Francisco. Soon afterward, at his own initiation, the congressman visited Sammy Houston at his house, where the photographer was recovering from his throat cancer operation. Looking gaunt and grim, Houston wore a cloth bib around his neck to hide the breathing hole in his throat. The Houston family tragedy touched and shocked Ryan, arousing both the empathy and sentimentality of the sometimes blustery Irishman. He came as a friend to help the photographer he had roomed with almost twenty years earlier in Washington, D.C., at the Kennedy inauguration. The contrast was sad. In those days, when Ryan was a teacher, Sam was healthy, and Bob a member of the high school band.
Houston could not talk, so he pounded a typewriter: “Hello roommate,” he began. “Welcome to our home....” His briefing of Ryan touched all the points and emphasized the conflicting welter of facts and charges.
Over the next six to eight months, Ryan’s interest was aroused further by new developments reported in the press—the custody fight over John Stoen (in which he wrote a letter on behalf of Stoen), the defection of Debbie Blakey, the emergence of the Concerned Relatives. Various constituents wrote the congressman voicing alarm over the deteriorating situation, especially Jones’s veiled threats of mass suicide. He invited one of them, Burlingame schoolteacher Clare Bouquet, to come talk to him personally about her fears for her son Brian. Battered by bureaucratic indifference, she went to Ryan’s office in the summer of 1978 with only a glimmer of hope. “We are desperate, Mr. Ryan,” she said, expecting him to pass the buck.
“I’ll tell you what, Clare,” Ryan said. “I’ll promise you right here and now ... I’ll go down there.
“I’m not going alone,” he added. “I want a group.”
In a short time, Ryan met with various members of the Concerned Relatives and told them he would make the trip only after the November general election, and would not try to capitalize on it for his reelection campaign. The relatives agreed to keep the trip confidential. In the meantime, Ryan directed his staff to begin exploring logistics and to compile information about Peoples Temple. After meeting with some high State Department officials, Ryan wrote on October 4 to Representative Clement J. Zablocki, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, seeking approval for a fact-finding mission to Jonestown.
Unfortunately for the Temple, Ryan sat not only on the Foreign Affairs Committee but also on the International Operations subcommittee, which concerned itself with protecting the lives and property of U.S. citizens abroad. Objective as he might try to be, Ryan in the eyes of the Temple carried built-in biases: his nephew’s membership in the Church of Scientology, his friendship with Sam Houston, his letter regarding Tim Stoen’s paternity claim, and the fact that the bulk of the pretrip research came from Temple detractors. Furthermore Ryan, as a rebellious Irish Catholic and political maverick, had little reverence for either churches or the Temple’s friends in high places. Most important, he was a compassionate man, and he had been moved by the appeals made to him.
Independent, brash, tenacious, Ryan would be no easy mark for Jim Jones. Diversions and stall tactics would be wasted; if anything, the standard church games would awaken the same competitive spirit and sense of mission that had driven Ryan on other quests: to play schoolteacher in Watts after the riots there; to live behind bars in Folsom Prison to assess conditions; to hike over snowy wilderness in an effort to save baby seals.
The Temple, of course, tried to cast Ryan as a right-winger, but in fact he held many liberal and humanitarian beliefs. During his first term in office he had authored an amendment strengthening the congressional oversight on the CIA; on a trip to NATO nations, he had made contact with Italian Communist party leaders against the wishes of the U.S. Embassy there. Ryan disliked bureaucracy and all government authoritarianism, and had led a fight to cut aid to the Marcos regime in the Philippines for violating human rights.
Travel guidelines of the Foreign Affairs Committee compelled Ryan to try to find a colleague to join him for the Jonestown expedition. His letters to his colleagues interested only one committee member, Representative Ed Derwinski of Illinois—and he would bow out at the last moment. It was not particularly surprising that Ryan’s cohorts passed up the invitation. On the face of it, the trip sounded crazy—who would volunteer to enter one of the most inaccessible jungles on earth to check on the welfare of someone else’s constituents?
On November 1, 1978, a week after receiving committee permission for the congressional delegation, Ryan wrote Jones in Guyana, telling him politely of his concerns and his planned visit and asking for cooperation. In the meantime, Ryan and various members of his staff requested and received five briefings from the State Department, the last on November 13. At the initial meeting on September 15, Ryan expressed concern that people might be held against their will, and he asked about the mass suicide threats reported by Blakey. One department official characterized the report as “nonsense.” The State Department evidently also did not accept Blakey’s report that Jonestown residents were coached for Embassy visits.
At the September meeting, the State Department advised Ryan against including four or five Concerned Relatives whom Ryan had mentioned as possible companions. The same position was taken in November when the group had expanded to eighteen relatives and nine news media representatives, all unofficially traveling with Ryan’s congressional delegation. In the interim the Temple, through an Embassy official, told Ryan that it wanted no press coverage; it already went without saying they did not want their avowed enemies, the Concerned Relatives. And at the same time, Guyanese Ambassador Mann, who had his own very personal tie to the Temple, informed the Embassy that Guyana would not and could not force Jonestown to open its gates to Ryan’s group.
Ryan’s congressional staff members felt that the U.S. government also was not cooperating sufficiently. They thought the State
Department was being overly cautious in its interpretation of the Privacy Act, guarding too closely Embassy files about Temple members. Also, although Ambassador John Burke in Georgetown had recommended that a State Department lawyer travel with the Ryan party, the department said none was available. As a substitute, State Department legal officers briefed committee staffer Jim Schollaert and Ryan aide Jackie Speier to explain the negligible legal standing the delegation would have in Guyana. All would depend on the grace of the Guyanese government and the hospitality of Jim Jones.
After Ryan won reelection and the trip date drew close, some members of the Concerned Relatives—Grace Stoen, Debbie Blakey and Steve Katsaris—flew to Washington to make final rounds briefing congressmen on the controversy They also met with committee staffer Jim Schollaert, who would accompany Ryan. After hearing their stories for three or four hours, Schollaert became concerned about the volatility of the Jonestown situation.
On November 13, 1978, the day that Concerned Relatives and news media boarded a San Francisco jet to rendezvous with the Ryan delegation, Ryan arranged a final meeting with the State Department, so they could hear firsthand Debbie Blakey’s allegations. This meeting provided State Department officials in Washington with their final opportunity to share with Ryan any information which might prove valuable on his trip, yet they did not avail themselves of it. They did not ever mention to Ryan the Leon Broussard escape, which would have partially confirmed Blakey’s account and provided additional guidance. More important, though this session occurred six days after a U.S. Embassy official had visited Jonestown, the department failed to relate this very telling, new eyewitness account.
On November 7, McCoy’s successor, Consul Douglas Ellice, Jr., had found Jones in a bizarre condition, slurring his speech, unable to spell simple words, wearing a gauze mask, claiming a 105-degree fever and complaining of a recent heart attack. Ellice later would say that he had tried to tell Ryan about Jones’s condition when the congressman came through Georgetown, but that Ryan had brushed him off with the assurance of someone who already had done his homework.
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