“Do you know how many left?” Jones asked.
“Oh, twenty-odd,” she said. “That’s a small amount compared to what’s here.”
“Twenty-odd,” Jones repeated, mocking her. “But what’s gonna happen when they don’t leave [safely]?
“There’s one man there who blames, and rightfully so, Debbie [Layton] Blakey for the murder of his mother, and he’ll stop that pilot by any means necessary.”
“I wasn’t speaking of that plane,” Miller said. “I was speaking about a plane for us to go to Russia.”
“To Russia ... it’s ... it’s....” Jones, flustered, was stammering. “You think Russia is gonna want us with this stigma?”
“I don’t see it like that,” she said. “I mean, I feel that as long as there’s life, there’s hope.”
“I am talking about what we have—no other road,” he explained. That was it—no other road. That was what he had been trying to explain since those first words, “How much I have loved you.” He had to persuade his people that all their options had been stolen by forces beyond his control: Larry Layton was acting on his own, the gunmen heading for the airstrip were acting on their own, and what they were doing with their guns precluded a migration to Russia.
Miller gallantly protested that the children deserved to live; no one could hold the children responsible for what happened. Jones agreed that the children deserved to live, but added, “What’s more, they deserve peace.” No protest issued from the nine hundred people before him—many with children on their laps or cradled in their arms.
Miller could not be muffled, however. The woman many Jonestown residents thought crazy or selfish was the only one to keep her wits. Her lone sane voice rang out in a sea of silence. She would not surrender the microphone. Big Jim McElvane, who had arrived in Jonestown less than two days earlier and perhaps wanted to prove his loyalty, broke into the exchange. Patronizing her, disparaging her and ridiculing her arguments, he told her that she had been nothing before she met Jim Jones, that Jim Jones had given her everything she had. “It’s over, sister,” he added resolutely, in his barrel-echo voice. “It’s over. We’ve made a beautiful day....”
Jones broke into the applause to say, “We win when we go down. Tim Stoen has nobody else to hate. Then he’ll destroy himself.” Switching tempos, Jones spoke almost biblically for a time, talked of laying down his “burden by the riverside,” then screeched about GDF paratroopers shooting innocent babies. “I’m not letting them take my child,” he shouted. “Can you let them take your child?”
“No,” the people shouted back. And with that, it was decided that the children would go first.
Once again Miller broke in. “You mean you want to see little John die?” she asked Jones in disbelief.
Subduing the hostile shouts directed at her, Jones said, “Peace ... Peace....”
“Do you think I’d put John’s life above others?” he asked her. “He’s just one of my children. I don’t prefer one above the other.”
Suddenly, a man shouted loudly, “Everybody hold it.” The gunmen had returned from the airstrip.
Jones, calming the crowd, said, “Stay. Peace.... Take Dwyer on down to the East House.” Jones evidently assumed that Dwyer (who really was in Kaituma) had returned with the truck as he had planned to do. Jones wanted him held with the attorneys, at the guesthouse.
Jones conferred with his aides and received a whispered report of what had occurred at the strip. Then he interrupted a woman speaker. “Stop talking,” he cried. “The congressman has been murdered!”
“We’re ready,” a woman called out. “It’s all over,” shouted another.
“It’s all over,” Jones agreed, almost as if satisfied. “What a legacy. What a legacy,” he marveled.
“Please get the medication before it’s too late,” he commanded. “The GDF will be here.... Don’t be afraid to die.” His voice rose urgently; his words flowed in powerful rushes, like a flood of water. The man was mad, and the madman was tired, but he summoned his energy for one last push of his people.
“I don’t know who shot him,” he cried. “How many are dead?” He received a report from the shooters, then told the crowd, “Oh, God almighty. Patty Parks is dead.” There was remorse in his voice, for Patty had been popular in Jonestown.
A woman asked, looking for a way out, some delay. “Can the others endure long enough in a safe place to write about the goodness of Jim Jones?”
“It’s too late,” he replied, and he urged them to come forward for their last drink.
Along one side of the building on a wooden table was a vat with the potion. Grape Flavor Aid, a Kool Aid-like drink, colored it purplish. Potassium cyanide was the poison. Liquid Valium and other drugs stood alongside it in vials. Dr. Schacht supervised about a dozen members of the Jonestown medical staff. Hypodermic needles were filled. Potion was poured into paper cups from metal and plastic tubs. Large syringes and small squeeze bottles were loaded.
Around the pavilion, security people and some who returned from the airstrip patrolled with guns. No one was to run. No one would pass through alive.
Odell Rhodes, a former drug user from Detroit, saw the first to die—a woman in her twenties with her month-old daughter. The children were brought forward first. A nurse directed the crowd and addressed them in a taut voice: “There’s nothing to worry about. So everybody keep calm and try to keep your children calm. They aren’t crying out in pain. It’s just a little bitter-tasting.”
Youngsters were bawling and screaming. Some were fighting, pulling away from their elders. Some had the potion shot to the back of their throats with syringes, where the swallowing reflex would bring it home. Parents and grandparents cried hysterically as their children died—not quickly and not painlessly. The doomed convulsed and gagged as the poison took effect. For several minutes, they vomited and screamed, they bled.
McElvane, validator of Jones to the end, spoke of his days as a therapist and of his study of metaphysics. Hoping to console the dying and the condemned, he raised his voice to inform them that dying people are often comforted by thoughts of reincarnation. “Everybody was so happy when they stepped to ‘the other side,’ ” he promised them.
While others cried in anguish, a woman took the microphone. “This is nothing to cry about,” she chided. “This is something we could all rejoice about.... Jim Jones has suffered and suffered.... He is our only God.”
Telling them he loved them, Jones moved among the dying. His followers stood in groups, hugging each other, saying good-bye to old friends. People wept and cried in anguish; Jones begged them to die with dignity.
McElvane and other security people strode up to people, coaxing them ahead. “Come on, brother, let’s go.” McElvane almost carried one man along to the vat. The guards brought people forward, then went off to find others.
Tim Carter had been waiting at West House with Annie Moore and two children. She was looking for further instructions from Maria about what to do with the children. Frightened and apprehensive, Carter went back to the pavilion to see what was happening there. Ten to fifteen bodies were on the ground. Mothers were kneeling down with their children. His wife was kneeling too, bent over their child, tears streaming down her cheeks. He hugged her. She was cold. “I love you,” he said. She convulsed; she had taken the poison.
Survival instincts took over. Carter, who was trusted enough to play double agent, was seized by one thought: if he stayed, he too would die. He headed back toward West House.
The testimonials to Jim Jones began as they always did, even as other people wailed in contortions of pain, mouths foaming and nostrils bloody. Said one woman, “I’d like to thank Dad because he’s the only one who stood up for me.”
A man spoke of his love of children as he looked out over the bodies of dozens of them. “I’d rather see them lay like that than to see them die like the Jews did,” he said. “I’d like to thank God for giving us life and also death.”
; Proclaimed Jones: “Anyone who wants to go with their child has a right to go with their child. I think it’s humane.”
“I want to see you go [to your deaths]. They can take me and do whatever they want, but I don’t want to see you through this hell no more. No more. No more....”
He jumped from one subject to the next, much as he had during Ryan’s visit. He urged people to calm themselves. He talked about people rotting twenty years in nursing homes, people locking others in chains, stealing their land away from them. Then, back to the congressman’s murder:
“I don’t know who fired the shot, but as far as I’m concerned, I killed him,” he said. “He had no business coming. I told him not to come.”
As the crying mingled with the voices of adults, Jones’s words reached a powerful timbre: “Die with respect. Die with a degree of dignity.”
He addressed himself to the children, saying the sweetened potion was merely something to put them to rest. Still, an outburst of crying caused him to exclaim, “Oh, God.” Then he thundered, “Mother mother mother mother mother mother! Please, mother, please, please, please, don’t do this! Lay down your life with your child, but don’t do this....” His wish evidently was fulfilled; she took the final drink. “Free at last!” Jones proclaimed.
Repeatedly, he called on his followers to keep down their emotions. He urged children and young adults to hurry for their potion so that seniors, the last to die, could get theirs. “Quickly. Quickly. Quickly. Quickly.”
The testimonials went on. A man said, “You people should think about how your relatives was, and be thankful the children would be laid to rest.” An elderly woman said, “I’d like to go for socialism and communism. I thank Dad very much.” Another thanked Jones for his “love, goodness and kindness to bring us to this land.”
And Jones, just before the reel-to-reel tape ran out, assessed the sight before him: “We’ve set an example for others. One thousand people who say: we don’t like the way the world is.”
“Take our life from us.... We didn’t commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”
The cries of children rose as a haunting counterpoint. The sequence of death would be children, young adults, adults, the elderly. Such a clever way to make sure all died: What would the adults have to live for after they watched the next generations die?
Despite the guns and guards all around, some people chose to rebel, to survive. When a nurse sent Odell Rhodes to fetch a stethoscope to check the bodies, Rhodes left the pavilion. He crawled under a building, cut through a garden, and slipped into the jungle. He kept on going, until he reached the police station in Port Kaituma at around 2:00 A.M.
Stanley Clayton saw his girl friend in the crowd, but did not dare tell her that he was going to break for it. He saw adults being forcibly injected with poison—murdered. It seemed there were about sixty of them. Christine Miller met her end with a needle, resisting. At one point, before nightfall, he had seen Annie Moore leaving the pavilion area with John Stoen. The boy had been crying, sniffing, and saying, “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.” Jones saw him and said, “Is that my son doing all that crying? My son shouldn’t be crying.” John did not fully stop; he tried to jerk away from Annie Moore as they walked toward Jones’s house.
During the ritual of suicide and murder, Clayton floated around the edge of the pavilion. But he knew he would be dead if he did not make a decisive move soon. After the security guards were ordered to turn in their guns at the radio room and were instead outfitted with crossbows, he felt his chances of escape were better. He counted about twenty persons with crossbows surrounding the pavilion. The only two persons carrying firearms were Billy Oliver and Lew Jones, who had told Billy that he had been specially selected to remain alive until the end, to make sure everyone was dead. Clayton judged himself a fairly speedy runner, and crossbows and pistols were not the most accurate of weapons.
As nightfall began to work in his favor, Clayton headed out toward Muggs’s cage and the road. Being shot seemed preferable to death by poison. He walked down the path, positioning himself several steps behind a security guard, Amondo Griffith, and started quickening his pace.
“Where are you going?” Griffith asked as Clayton passed him.
Clayton had planned to run as soon as he was fifteen or twenty yards beyond the guard. He said he was going to see Ed Crenshaw on security at the guns warehouse. Griffith said Crenshaw already had “gone over,” but Clayton kept walking.
Near the exit road, he came upon a group of about a dozen people with crossbows. “Hey, brother, what’s happening?” one called. Another, Marie Lawrence, held her crossbow at the ready.
Clayton had been hoping to just walk by them to see how they would react. Marie Lawrence’s response caused him to dig for another excuse: “I was instructed to count security heads.” It was the first thing that came into his mind. It worked.
As Clayton counted heads, he came to the last bowman between him and the open field. He told the man he was ready to die. The man hugged him, saying, “I’ll see you in your next life.”
Clayton then went into the school tent, telling the guard that he was going to say good-bye to more people. Instead, he dashed out the other side into the bush. After sprinting fifty yards or so, a short distance into the jungle, he paused to catch his breath and listen for pursuers. It was pitch black. The lightning bugs scared him; he thought he heard voices calling.
A short time after Tim Carter returned to West House, Maria Katsaris stepped out of the cabin with a suitcase and two .38-caliber revolvers. She was frantic. “There’s a lot of money in here and a letter,” she told Prokes and the two Carter brothers. “Give it to the Embassy.” She handed Prokes and Mike Carter the two guns with the instruction, “If you get caught, shoot yourselves.”
She did not say which embassy, but the three assumed that she meant the Soviet Embassy. It was a correct assumption. In the last hours, the Temple’s financial secretary had been busy making hasty arrangements to transfer some $7.3 million to the Soviet Union government from Venezuelan and Panamanian bank accounts. The funds were held in fixed time deposits in the name of Annie Jean McGowen, a jovial and loyal seventy-year-old black woman born in Mississippi.
Two letters, signed by McGowan, instructed the Union Bank of Switzerland and the Union Banking Corporation, both of Panama City, to turn over the deposits as they became due to Feodor Timofeyev, the Soviet consul in Georgetown. “I am doing this,” a letter explained, “on behalf of Peoples Temple because we, as communists, want our money to be administered for help to oppressed peoples all over the world, or in any way that your decision-making body sees fit.... Cooperatively yours, Annie McGowan.”
Another letter with the suitcase was handwritten in blue ballpoint pen on lined paper: “I, Maria Katsaris, leave all the money in Banco de Venezuela, in Caracas, to the Communist Party, Soviet Union.... This is my final wish before I die.” It was witnessed by Jim McElvane and Marilee Bogue, who had refused to leave with her family. A letter directed the Swiss Bank Corporation (overseas) S.A. in Panama to transfer one sum of $577,000 and another of $1,486,000 to a new account in the bank, closing an old account.
The three couriers also were given two passports, which turned out to be those of Maria Katsaris and Annie McGowan. Apparently they were meant to provide signature comparison, since neither woman would live to verity their instructions.
The suitcase itself contained about $550,000 in United States currency and about $130,000 in Guyanese currency.
The three men would say later that they tired quickly as they lugged the money toward the main road. After a mile, they opened the suitcase, and removed and buried part of the money. Later, they hid the suitcase and more of the money in a chicken coop. They continued toward Port Kaituma, with $48,000 in their pockets, the two guns, the letters and the two extra passports. They were arrested by Port Kaituma authorities. At the time, they we
re heading toward the Cudjo mooring place, though the boat had been sent away earlier in the day by Jonestown officials.
Charles Garry and Mark Lane had run and stumbled in the dark until they reached a point about one hundred yards into the jungle, near the spot where the main road entered the compound clearing. Garry saw two people—Lane saw three—walking out of Jonestown. They were carrying what looked like a box on their shoulders. By Garry’s reckoning, it was about 6:45 P.M. The lawyers dropped to their knees; they were afraid, and it was too dark to tell who the people were. The pair plunged into the jungle, fearing for their lives.
The two lawyers—though they had not really been speaking to one another up to that point—them spent the night huddled together in the cold, wet rain. They called a temporary truce. In the course of the night, according to Garry, Lane disclosed that Teri Buford had been staying with him since her defection some three weeks earlier. Among other things, Lane said that she had told him that Gene Chaikin was a prisoner in Jonestown and wanted to leave. Garry suddenly realized why Lane had told him on Saturday morning when he asked to see Chaikin, “Don’t ask. You’ll never see him.” There was no doubt about it: Chaikin had been drugged.
And, though Lane later denied it, Garry would insist the conspiracy theorist had told him during the night that he turned down the cheese sandwiches that day because he thought they were drugged or poisoned. “You sonofabitch, why didn’t you tell me?” Garry asked him during the night. Lane laughed and said, “We weren’t speaking.”74
After a long time in the bush, Stanley Clayton heard the sound of voices, then a cheer. Three cheers. It was many people yelling. His first thought was that the poison was not real, that the people who keeled over really were not dead after all—and if that were true, he would be in big trouble for taking off. Then he recalled how an acquaintance had gone into the pavilion and had fallen into convulsions, gasping for breath, his eyes rolling. It was real; it was death. Maybe, he thought, the cheer had come from a small group close to Jones, going out with dignity as he had entreated them all to do, cheering before the final step.
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