With characteristic determination, Sharon Amos crossed through the living room to the kitchen, where she searched the drawers for a large, sharp butcher knife. Clutching it to her bosom, she walked back through the living room and motioned for Christa and Stephanie to follow her. “Come here, Martin,” she added. The kids followed her to the white-tiled bathroom at the end of the long corridor. Just before she turned into the hallway she motioned to Chuck Beikman, Becky’s husband, to follow her. As the person in charge at Lamaha, Amos spoke with the authority of Jim Jones; Beikman obeyed her.
As she led her three children into the shower, Amos was shaking and uncontrollably nervous. She turned to Beikman, saying she was going to kill the children before the police took them. She pulled Christa to her, and holding her by the face, she slit her throat. Christa fell screaming to the floor, her legs kicking up spasmodically. Beikman watched helplessly. He could not, or would not, interfere. Sharon then reached for Martin, who began to slink away from her, but she caught up with him, held him by his nose and mouth, and slit his throat, too. Beikman froze as she ordered him to kill Stephanie; he administered only a superficial cut and let her drop to the floor. Amos, meanwhile, turned to her daughter Liane and handed her the knife. “Here,” she cried, “you’ve got to do me,” and as Liane cut, Sharon urged, “Harder, harder.” She took Liane’s hands, and with her own hands guiding them, managed to complete her own suicide, murmuring, “Thank you, Father,” as she collapsed to the floor. Liane then turned the knife on herself. With some difficulty she slashed her own throat, before she fell convulsing to the floor.
People in the living room first heard Christa say, “Oh, Mama.” Then came the screams. Calvin Douglas, the forward on the basketball team, bolted from the card table and raced down the hall. When he threw open the bathroom door, Calvin found three bodies in a deep pool of blood. Amos’s oldest daughter was still barely alive; her body twitched, the knife still in her hand. There was hope for little Stephanie, with a relatively minor cut on her neck. So Douglas snatched her up and whisked her to the living room, where someone attended to her. The whole slaughter had taken just a couple of minutes.
During this time, close to 9:00 P.M., Stephan Jones was driving back to Lamaha Gardens from the Pegasus. He was crying. As he got out of the car, he heard an airplane pass overhead. “Please, let that be the Congressman,” he prayed to himself. There was no reason for optimism any longer, but Stephan was grasping for hope, trying to push back the awful inevitability. As he stepped inside the front door at Lamaha, he knew all hope was gone. He heard the news: “Sharon has just killed herself and her children.”
“What?” Stephan cried, incredulously. His mind raced as he ran to the bathroom. “Oh, oh, God,” he moaned as he saw Christa, cut from ear to ear, her blood mingled with her family’s on the white tile of the shower. He could not bear to look at little Martin’s lifeless body. Sharon was curled up, out of her misery, behind the door. Liane, up on her elbows, shaking violently, collapsed as he looked in. “God, call an ambulance,” he cried. But he knew it was over. People in the rest of the house were becoming hysterical.
Stephan went into shock. He wanted to fall asleep. His eyelids were closing involuntarily. After a moment of complete denial, of blacking out the horrifying bloody image in his mind, a wave of total hopelessness passed over him. Every other crisis lacked finality; something always had provided a way out. But these people were dead.
Fortunately, Lee Ingram had the presence of mind to call the San Francisco temple, twice to be sure, to tell them not to heed Sharon Amos’s White Night message.
Archie Ijames happened to be in the temple parking lot in San Francisco that Saturday afternoon when the temple custodian rushed up to him and declared, “They’ve shot Ryan.” As they sat stunned in the parking lot and listened to the news on a portable radio. Archie knew immediately that Peoples Temple was finished. There was no point in spinning fantasy scenarios of how to recoup from this disaster. For him, it was the final betrayal by Jim Jones. It was the end of everything.
The top leadership frantically gathered in the financial room upstairs. For hours, they tried futilely to reach Georgetown for more news. They could not know that Guyana police had already sealed off the Lamaha Gardens house and seized control of the telephone there, permitting only Lee Ingram’s call to San Francisco to cancel the White Night message.
The night dragged on with horrifying suspense. Every one of them had relatives in Jonestown. Were they dead or alive? If they were alive, why didn’t they call or somehow get in touch with their loved ones? The San Franciscans knew there might be a massive reaction, maybe a mass suicide. They could only hope some people would be able to escape.
At mid-afternoon Saturday, congressional committee staffer Jim Schollaert took a cab with Howard Oliver to Timehri Airport to greet the Ryan party. Although the planes were running late, Oliver had wanted to come along to be there when his wife—and possibly his two sons—disembarked. While the two men bided their time at an auxiliary terminal, an Otter landed. But it was the wrong plane.
Around 5:00 P.M., curious as to whether airport officials had heard anything of the Ryan party’s flights, Schollaert and Oliver went into a control room. The Chinese man who headed the airport was on the radio, saying excitedly to someone, “Stay calm. Stay calm! Close the door! Close the door!” Schollaert did not realize immediately that he was overhearing the airport official talking with the Otter’s pilot during the ambush at Kaituma. When he learned there had been trouble, Schollaert sent Oliver back to the Pegasus by cab to wait there with the rest. He spared Oliver the news, because he was not in the best of health.
Soon, airport officials notified Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. U.S. Ambassador John Burke was summoned immediately to the prime minister’s residence. By 6:15 P.M. Embassy officials knew there had been a shooting at the airstrip. They told Schollaert, who tried without success to contact the congressional committee chief of staff in Washington, D.C. But no one at the Embassy contacted the Concerned Relatives staying at the Pegasus Hotel, to warn them that their lives might have been in danger. Over two hours later, at about 8:30 P.M., Sherwin Harris bounded into the spacious hotel lobby, bubbling with hope after his visit with his daughter at Lamaha Gardens. The relatives there were, in general, expectant, happy to hear that some defectors were coming out with Ryan, hopeful that someone could corroborate Debbie Blakey’s story.
Within fifteen minutes, however, the mood dissolved. The hotel manager began calling the Concerned Relatives in to talk to him, one by one. With two police inspectors present, the manager told the relatives that he could not divulge what had happened, but that the relatives, for their own safety, could not leave their rooms. If they needed to leave the hotel for something important, they were to notify the management. After Grace Stoen and several others were called in, the process collapsed; the relatives spread the word among themselves, and their anxiety climbed to new heights. In their worst nightmares, they could not have visualized what was happening at that very moment in the jungle.
A few minutes later, Sherwin Harris was called to talk with the manager and the police; it was a special message. His ex-wife and her children—including his daughter Liane—had been found murdered, their throats slit. It hit him with the force of megatons; within an hour, his mood had traveled from elation to horrified despair. Now these mingled suddenly with fear. Madness had been unleashed. He quickly made two phone calls to the States to his family: he ordered his daughter to leave their house immediately and to hide; he asked his brother to protect his surviving children. There was no way to know who might be next, who might be targeted for revenge.
The Concerned Relatives gathered in Steve Katsaris’s room to await further news. They had been deliberately trying to keep calm since 6:00 P.M. when they heard that the Ryan party might be staying overnight in the jungle; they had thought all along the situation might be explosive, and now they knew something was amiss. Bit by bit, they learn
ed of the terrible events, each revelation worse than the last. No one really broke down; they held each other up, braved it together.
From Schollaert and from a California relative of Katsaris, they heard Leo Ryan had been shot. By phone, reporter Gordon Lindsay exchanged information with reporters in the United States. When they heard that Ryan and others had been killed, they were stunned and frightened, helpless to do anything to save their loved ones. They were tortured through the night with uncertainty, wondering, “What is happening in Jonestown?” That morning Howard Oliver suffered a stroke.
It was a normal slow, Saturday afternoon at the San Francisco Examiner. Weekend editor Dexter Waugh had just hung up the phone when another one rang. Assistant city editor Fran Dauth was typing a memo while waiting for a story from Tim Reiterman in Guyana. There was plenty of time to make the last deadline for Sunday’s paper. Waugh motioned Dauth to the phone.
It was Joe Holsinger, Leo Ryan’s administrative assistant. There had been a shooting at the airstrip near Jonestown, he said. Ryan and others, possibly nine or ten, were dead. Dauth felt an electric bolt shoot through her. By coincidence, city editor Jim Willse called in at that moment from the Cal-Stanford football game in Berkeley; Tim Reiterman’s parents were attending the Big Game too, oblivious to the trouble.
Reporters from all over the country immediately began calling for information. A long—agonizingly long—night of waiting had started. Nancy Dooley, Reiterman’s collaborator on some Temple stories, raced to the office to write the main story. Dauth had already begun writing trip background: “The doomed trip began Monday.” Reporter John Jacobs said he had a bad cold and a car that would not start. Then the impact of Dauth’s call hit him. He took a cab to the office, not knowing this was the first night of a story he would work on for the next three years.
Unlike some other big stories, this one was no fun. Everyone hoped against hope that neither Reiterman nor Greg Robinson would be listed among the dead or injured.
By 8:00 P.M., Jim Willse and photo editor Eric Mescauskas left for Guyana. As official representatives of the Examiner, they could claim bodies, if need be. At 1:00 A.M. Sammy Houston called the paper with a tape he had just made of a phone conversation with his wife, Nadyne, who was at the Pegasus. Radio and television were carrying the news of Ryan’s death to millions, and the Examiner replated its front page as often as necessary, three times for the final edition. The Washington Post called the Examiner for help. Their man Krause was incommunicado with the Ryan party, and there was nothing in their clippings about Peoples Temple. There was still no news about Reiterman or Robinson. Around 3:00 A.M. word came that the last unidentified victim had been wearing three cameras. The real chill set in. The final deadline passed, and still people clustered in the news room.
Shortly after 5:00 A.M., 10:00 A.M. Guyana time, reporter Pete King rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter and called the Guyanese Ministry of Information, for what was perhaps the hundredth time in the past twelve hours. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for the Examiner,” said Minister Shirley Field-Ridley. “Greg Robinson is dead.”
King’s mind stopped. He could not think of the next question. People gathered around his typewriter. He had spelled “dead” as “died.” People began to cry. Greg’s friend, Bob McLeod, went into the darkroom to develop an obituary photo of Greg. Managing editor Dave Halvorsen called Greg’s parents, and Mr. Robinson broke down on the phone.
It was only a few minutes’ walk from the massacre site to the Port Kaituma “rum shop.” The dirt roadway around the building was dark. We straggled along a short walkway, then took a few steps up and passed through a doorway. I carried my gear and Greg’s camera bags down a short corridor that opened into a small dance floor. White wooden tables ran along two black-painted walls like those at “Mike’s disco” crosstown. The phosphorescent graffiti took on the ghoulish cast of Halloween decorations. Oddly, someone had painted two-foot-tall phone numbers as decorations, though there were no phone lines stretching to the town. Behind the bar climbed several rather bare shelves of local rum and whiskey and imported British gin. There were no stools at the counter, no brass railing, no gut-sprung bartender, only a dark-haired, olive-complexioned little woman who had just stepped out of the kitchen to the left.
After taking drink orders, Bob Flick and I bellied up to the counter for beer and rum and Pepsi. Our Guyanese friends sat down to drink among us, and for the first time we could talk in relative comfort and with a measure of security.
Dwyer came in and posted himself in the middle of the room. With a clipboard tucked under his arm, he announced that help was on the way but might not reach us until morning. Either this announcement or a later one included mention of helicopters, troops and evacuation planes; it was impossible to be sure what was arriving or when. Taking a relatively strong leadership role for the first time, the low-keyed diplomat stated that the uninjured would care for the nonambulatory in shifts, two per shift.
Bob Flick seemed to me the most resourceful of the survivors, so I was happy when we took the second watch together. A local man escorted us back to the wounded via an overgrown path. As we set foot on the strip, lights from a truck bathed us momentarily, then went out. We were recognized before we had a chance to use the password.
We dropped to the ground near the tent so we could hear our charges if they called for us. Among the clouds, stars stood out in sharp swirls. The soldiers loitered in the dark a few paces behind us, between the tent and the airplane. One was fiddling a little too frantically with the jammed action of his automatic rifle. The others offered advice. The scene was not comforting.
Nursing a Banks beer, I folded my arms against the slight chill of my water- and blood-dampened clothes. We speculated quietly about our immediate future, wondering aloud whether we would survive the night. I felt more secure with modern weapons close at hand, but Bob had little confidence in the Guyanese crew guarding us; he thought they would probably run into the bush at the first sign of attack.
A moaning brought us to our feet. “I’ll go,” I said. Once inside the cramped tent, I could not see my patients, so I had to borrow a flashlight from a soldier. The insanity of our situation struck home at that moment. Four persons in serious and perhaps critical condition lay before me, someone with virtually no first-aid experience. Soldiers in war zones received better care, I thought. All were in pain, if not shock. Our stock of medicine consisted of a few aspirin, an undefined “pain-killer” or two, rum and water from rain barrels or the river.
In that rank-smelling air of rotting flesh and sweaty canvas, the four slept or stared into the darkness. When they heard me groping around, new requests were whispered out loud. Anthony Katsaris, bathed in sweat, felt chilled and thirsty. I pulled his clothes and blankets more tightly around him and brought him a drink of water, managing to spill much of it on him. Steve Sung was sleeping soundly, thanks to the rum he had quaffed right after the shooting. For a moment he looked to be dead, but his breathing became audible when I nudged him. Vern Gosney, the one Temple defector among the group, had been wounded in the back; he needed water and a change of position; I helped him sit up for a moment so he could breathe easier.
Near the front of the tent, Jackie Speier called my name. As I knelt to feel her clammy forehead, she murmured, “It’s hurting. My arm is hurting.” Her black hair was tangled and matted with sweat. She was in bad shape and knew it.
“There’s one pain pill here at your head,” I said. “Just one. Do you really need it now? There’s just one.”
Her breath seething with pain, she sighed, “No. I’d better hold off. There’s some rum.” A bottle was on its side next to her litter. Propping up her head with one hand, I poured as she gulped. I stopped pouring when it started dribbling down her neck.
Back outside, Bob and I folded our legs and talked in low voices while keeping watch. Any time a truck bounced down the road toward us, the soldiers snapped to the ready. Fortunately, each time th
e intruder was only a local resident. The natives were taking Dwyer back and forth from the town communications center to the rum shop, and patrolling the village.
After a bit—I could not tell exactly how long, having no watch—I was relieved from my post. My escort back to the disco was the curly-haired young man who claimed to be airstrip manager, the one who assured us that the Guyanese Defense Forces would drop from the sky with rescue planes and helicopters within minutes. After calling for rum to treat the wounded, he had appointed himself guardian of the liquor.
After he and another Guyanese with the same thick booze-garbled accent tried to steer me across town for a party at the other disco—the one run by a Temple sympathizer—I demanded that we turn around. Within a few minutes, we barged into the “safe” disco. A few handfuls of Guyanese occupied the tables. Without Americans, the crowd might have been a crew of Saturday night regulars, except that music was not wailing and not a smile broke in laughter. Under one cocktail table sat Greg’s gear, which I had asked my companions to watch closely. Irritated and a little worried that something might have been lifted, I put the bag on my shoulder, ordered a bottle of rum for my escorts, then struck up a conversation with a few locals.
One man, of East Indian or Amerindian extraction, told me he had served in the country’s army as a colonel until two years ago. “When the army gets here, I may have to put on my old uniform again,” he joked.
“Do you have any guns?” I asked again.
“One shotgun is on the way,” someone said. “Maybe two.”
In the kitchen, I found Krause and Javers sitting pensively, elbows on the table. The lady of the house, the petite woman who tended bar, was heating water on a burner near the back door. The door was equipped with a small slide lock. Still, at least there was a rear exit.
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