All but one of the defectors who fled with Ryan were white, as Jones had so pointedly reminded his flock. Most who fled on their own, either before or during the suicide ritual, were black. When Jones gave everyone the day off that Saturday, nine members—including security chief Joe Wilson’s wife and baby—made their exits before the climax of the Ryan visit. Some pretended to go on jungle “picnics,” but most simply walked off, believing that Jones had gone mad, perverted their common dream and started the death march.
Once the death ritual began, only the savvy and the lucky survived. Street-smart and independent young blacks such as Stanley Clayton and Odell Rhodes saved themselves through cunning when all seemed doomed, as did Grover Davis, a seventy-eight-year-old black man who slipped into the jungle. Finally, there was one survivor who actually remained in Jonestown while the nine hundred died. An elderly Los Angeles-area black woman named Hyacinth Thrash slept through the entire night; she awoke in her cabin to find her sister and everyone else dead.
On that horrible Saturday, no one, save Christine Miller, took on Jones; no one kicked over the vat of poison or turned guns on their leader to stop him. No one could stop him, not after he had manipulated his people into believing their fortunes lay only in a grandiose final statement, not after he had sealed their compact with the airstrip murders and the command: bring the children first. The executioner had initiated an act of such enormity and tragedy that Jonestown—the life-sustaining symbol and dream for his followers—would become a degraded international synonym for unspeakable evil and waste. The worldwide perception alone would prove the last gesture a failure, Jones’s closing act a fraud.
From the day of the holocaust, outsiders refused to accept the interpretation Jones sought to place on the self-destruction of his movement. They viewed it as madness, cruelty and later as deception by a Satanic leader, not as a political or social statement; even committed socialists and communists and the USSR disassociated themselves from this bastardization of Huey Newton’s concept of “revolutionary suicide.” The terrible images of poison being squirted down the tiny throats of babies, of screaming adults twisting on the ground in death throes or being forcibly injected with poison, of entire families dying inside a perimeter of guns, crossbows and jungle—the incomprehensibility of all this caused the world to shudder in revulsion and disbelief.
The horror of Jonestown, however, did not end in a muddy jungle clearing. The state of mind lingered and traveled like the stench of death. Paralyzing fear grabbed the church enemies as the first reports of Temple “hit squads” were transmitted. For once, law enforcement agencies took seriously the stories of the defectors: public officials, reporters and ex-members all were potential targets of those Jones called his “avenging angels.” But the supposed “hit squad”—the basketball team and the public relations team—was held under virtual house arrest at Lamaha Gardens.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, as elected officials, law agencies and mental health professionals took steps to avert the spread of violence and death, ex-members gathered under police protection at the Human Freedom Center in Berkeley to await word about the identities of survivors.
Unbeknownst to the “traitors” and enemies, the same sorts of fears permeated the camp of the loyalists. The troops at the San Francisco temple expected to be attacked in a backlash against the church. They were so afraid of McCarthy-era types of prosecutions and official harassment, and perhaps of their own legal vulnerability, that some smuggled church documents and records past police cars stationed outside, then burned them in a nighttime beach bonfire. Others surrendered perfectly legal weapons to police through an attorney, fearing they might be shot if found armed.
Meantime, the temple building itself was besieged by the nation’s news media and by angry and distraught relatives of the Jonestown dead looking for someone to blame. Day after day, the relatives hung around the temple’s chain-link security fence, crying and shouting at equally grief-stricken but more sober-faced loyalists such as Archie Ijames.
As it turned out, no one attacked the temple, or rounded up large numbers of Temple members. And no Temple hit squad stalked back to the United States with guns and millions of dollars to buy death contracts. Jones was not coordinating his elite security squad trained in martial arts; Jim Jones was dead. And the most logical candidate to succeed him or to carry the banner, Stephan Jones, had publicly condemned his father’s actions and said he hated him.
Among the church’s influential friends, especially the politicians, this was a time for nauseating self-examination-or strategic retreat. For some a painful, sometimes slow realization pulled at their insides as they asked themselves how they were fooled, what went wrong, or whether they should not share responsibility for the rise of Jim Jones and all it had wrought. Some, Carlton Goodlett and Willie Brown among them, continued to defend the Temple and showed no remorse at first. Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally successfully hid from reporters’ questions. The White House quickly sought to minimize contacts between Jones and First Lady Rosalynn Carter. When Mayor George Moscone heard about Jonestown, he vomited and cried. And he called the families of the dead and injured in the Ryan party, including mine, to express his sympathies. While that climate of terror endured, Moscone himself was assassinated, along with another Jones supporter, Supervisor Harvey Milk, by right-wing supervisor Dan White in a dispute unrelated to the Jonestown holocaust.
Though many people suffered—thousands personally felt the losses in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas alone—in some ways it was the loyalists who were devastated most. At least some of the hundred or two hundred active members in the United States gladly would have swallowed the potion if chance had placed them in Guyana November 18, 1978. Instead circumstances doomed them to live with one of the greatest human tragedies in history, sentenced to a kind of living death for an indeterminate time. In addition to losing their loved ones overnight, they awakened to an unending nightmare, without their religion, their political organization, their leader, their self-image, their past and their future. Like many nonmembers who lost loved ones, they hovered near mental collapse. Their present held nothing, for they had lost everything, even their sense of identity. Scorned, isolated, directionless, they could only wait for the initial publicity, scrutiny, hostility and pain to subside, then try to begin new lives.
In the next two years, some would put the Temple behind them, with difficulty, sometimes with help from friends and family they had cut off for years. In resuming their lives, they found jobs and assimilated without fully forgetting who they were. A number would cling to other survivors—and in a few cases, would marry other survivors. They gravitated toward the few people who could understand them, who shared a common experience. Some survivors even reestablished friendships with ex-members once marked as traitors by Jones. And some families split by Jones reunited.
Other people suffered—not just on each year’s anniversary of the holocaust—but each day, unable to escape or cope effectively with the past or to venture into the present, let alone shape a future. Some endured almost incessant depression, turning deeper within themselves or turning toward drugs. Many felt classic survivor’s guilt, longing for the Temple and Jones, aching to die, to join their comrades, inwardly cursing fate for sparing them, yet not quite tormented enough to end it all too. Only one did so deliberately.
Several months after Jonestown died, Michael Prokes, Jones’s press aide for almost a decade, called a news conference in his hometown of Modesto, California. To convince reporters to attend, the former television newsman promised front-page news. He kept his promise. After he issued a statement praising Jones and attempting to explain the deaths of his comrades, he stepped a few feet away into the bathroom and, with reporters outside the door, fired a bullet into his brain. His suicide brought the headlines he promised and sent new spasms of terror through survivors, defectors and others.
Before his last news conference, the Temple public relations man had t
old relatives and friends that he hoped to write a book, to tell the truth about the Temple. But he also wondered aloud whether he would need to reveal the negative things as well, such as the sexual practices of Jones. He left behind a partial manuscript that made some effort at being even-handed; but he also claimed that he had joined Peoples Temple originally as a government agent. In his death, Prokes sought to prove Jones’s old conspiracy thesis. But he left behind not a shred of traceable evidence to prove or disprove his statement. He wrote, finally, “If my death doesn’t prompt another book, it wasn’t worth living.” To date, it has not.
Amid an initial whirlwind of checkbook journalism, many publishers bought and commissioned books on the tragedy. Jonestown was not a fleeting news event; public opinion polls ranked it only behind Pearl Harbor and the John Kennedy assassination in terms of public recognition. Magazines, newspapers and tabloids scrambled for stories, some offering money to survivors for exclusive rights. There were instant books by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. A number of ex-members and previously uninvolved writers turned out books, several by small religious publishing houses. The family of Debbie Blakey and Larry Layton, and escapee Odell Rhodes, wrote accounts with the help of professional writers. And an estimated two dozen other members began drafting manuscripts that to date have not been published. At least one commissioned book by a free-lance writer never was completed.
Immediately after Jonestown, the bidding by publishers probably was most intense for a nearly completed book by Jeannie Mills, formerly Deanna Mertle, one of the major sources for earlier exposes and co-founder of the Human Freedom Center in Berkeley. Mills aroused the ire of antimaterialist defectors and survivors alike when she used her $30,000 advance to buy a Mercedes Benz. Then, fifteen months after the tragedy, she and her husband Al were shot to death, execution-style, in their Berkeley home. Initially the murders resurrected the climate of fear, but police found no evidence of a Temple hit squad, and instead focused their attention on Eddie Mills, the dead couple’s teen-age son.
Other media sought to capitalize on the Temple tragedy, sometimes with incredibly poor taste, distortions and blatant exploitation. The Jonestown affair was immortalized in several calypso records, including one with the refrain, “Who Shot Jimmy Jones?” A film made in Mexico and called Guyana, Cult of the Damned drew the scorn of critics and was repulsive to anyone familiar with church history. CBS followed with a highly rated two-part “docudrama” depicting Jones as a good man victimized and corrupted by others, mainly by women and a black man named Father Divine. Unfortunately, such partially fictionalized and sensationalized accounts reinforced myths about the Temple and created new ones, and they retarded public understanding of Peoples Temple.
At the same time, the public never received anything better than a disjointed accounting of government conduct and culpability in the tragedy, which was in part the fault of news media. In the aftermath, a number of government agencies tried to shelter themselves from any blame. But since jurisdictions at all levels of government had investigations into Temple activities, since advance warnings came through news media and private citizens, it became gratuitous for public guardians to claim that Jim Jones had “slipped between jurisdictions,” that nothing could have been done to prevent the deaths of nine hundred Americans overseas, including a congressman.76 Whether they could have stopped Jones or not in Guyana is debatable, but it is undeniable that they squandered opportunities in the United States, and made little attempt to check him abroad.
Both the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the State Department itself criticized the State Department’s handling of Peoples Temple. But neither provided a full airing of the government’s role in the affair. State Department officials who dealt extensively with the Temple and who appear compromised in the Temple’s internal reports never testified in public, nor were they subjected to public cross examination. And thousands of pages of documents—some reportedly indicating the depth of the government’s knowledge about the Temple and the scope of the complaints brought to government attention—were classified. Many documents, especially those concerning the CIA and its knowledge of the Temple, have been exempted from disclosure. However, the House Committee on Intelligence, after months of study, found no evidence to suggest that the CIA knew about mistreatment of Jonestown residents, nor that the agency conducted mind-control experiments there, as some alleged, nor that it used Jones for its own purposes. Although Concerned Relatives said they asked the FBI for help, FBI Director William Webster maintained the bureau had opened no investigative file on Peoples Temple.
Larry Layton and Chuck Beikman were the only two Temple members ever charged in connection with the Guyana deaths; Beikman pleaded guilty in Guyana and was sentenced to prison for his role in the throat slashings of Sharon Amos and her children in Lamaha Gardens. Layton was acquitted there of attempting to murder defectors on the small airplane, then he was returned to the United States for prosecution in the murder of Ryan and the wounding of U.S. diplomat Richard Dwyer. Layton was not accused of actually having fired the shots, but of aiding and conspiring with others. After one mistrial, Layton was convicted in 1987 and was paroled in 2002.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in claims were placed against the assets of Peoples Temple by the families of the slain Ryan party members, by defectors and survivors. The federal government wanted $4 million to cover the cost of shipping the bodies back to the United States. A total of about $7 million was retrieved by a court-appointed receiver for disposition.
In Guyana, where the political opposition seized on the tragedy to embarrass the regime of Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, the government conducted an almost laughable inquest. A five-man jury concluded—at the government’s direction—that all Jonestown residents were murdered by Jones. Later, the government appointed a high-level commission to study the Temple in Guyana, but the commission had yet to meet three years afterward. The affair exacted no political costs on the ruling party. In fact, in December 1980, Burnham was elected to another five-year term, in what an impartial British observation team concluded was another rigged election.
In California, the state attorney general’s office, which declined to probe Temple matters in both 1972 and 1977 for jurisdictional reasons, finally investigated after the November 1978 episode. Investigators concluded that state health and welfare officials failed to handle properly serious complaints not only bearing on the treatment of foster children and children under guardianships, but also on the well-being of every child in Jonestown. It found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Tim Stoen, nor of any Temple welfare fraud conspiracy.
Virtually all local and state politicians associated with Jones have rebounded nicely. The lone exception was Stoen’s former boss, District Attorney Joseph Freitas, who was defeated for reelection. Former California Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally was elected congressman in a Los Angeles district in 1980. Assemblyman Willie Brown of San Francisco was elected by his peers as Speaker of the California State Assembly, considered the second most powerful office in the state. San Francisco voters elected former Sheriff Richard Hongisto to the county Board of Supervisors. Republican State Senator Milton Marks ran successfully for reelection, after winning the nomination of both major parties.
But despite any culpability of government bureaucrats, investigators or politicians, blame for the Jonestown tragedy must ultimately come to rest in the deranged person of Jim Jones. His ends-justify-the-means philosophy, paranoia, megalomania and charismatic personality must weigh much more heavily in the balance than any oversight, ineptitude, weakness or political exploitation by those outside the church. It was not the Temple’s enemies that brought down the Temple, but Jones’s destructive personality. The prophecy of doom had become an end in itself.
Despite his movement’s collapse, some people continue to see the world through his eyes. Three years after his death, some still read his prophecies into world events and accept his world view.
Though their leader is gone and their dream dashed, time has borne out some of Jones’s social and political predictions. Most strikingly, his followers have seen a right-wing resurgence with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, the growing boldness of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis. But now they face the troubled times alone, no longer with Jim Jones or the hierarchy of the Temple to guide their lives or to interpret history. Instead they have begun reestablishing their identities and making decisions about their lives as autonomous human beings. They have chosen life over death —and even chosen to bring children onto this wretched earth.
Contrary to the predictions of Jim Jones, the relationship of Grace Stoen and Walter Jones survived the years. They married and continued to live in San Francisco, Grace doing clerical work, and Walt working as a builder. In the Jonestown aftermath, they opened their home to survivors and tried to help them.
Tim Stoen weathered an attorney general’s investigation, then migrated down the California coast to a small town to work on a book about the Temple and practice law. After the murder of the Millses, Stoen, deeply resented by some survivors, moved to parts unknown.
Teri Buford cooperated with attorney Mark Lane on his book about the church and continued to believe the church fell victim to government conspirators as well as to Jones.
Jim Cobb returned to dental school, intending to practice children’s dentistry someday. He and his brother Johnny established a relationship and kept in touch with other members of the Temple basketball squad, including Stephan Jones.
Debbie and Mike Touchette lived in northern California. They became parents of a son and renewed ties with some defectors. After running the Temple boat in the Caribbean, Touchette’s father Charlie joined him.
Sandy Bradshaw worked as a legal aide in San Francisco. Almost single-handedly she tried to present the positive side of the Temple experience—and she provided the authors with the perspective of a Jim Jones loyalist.
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