Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  Archie Ijames reestablished friendships with some Temple defectors and former Temple critics, and cooperated with the authors. He remained a self-styled universalist—committed to the concept of helping his fellowman and to Temple-style communalism. He harbored deep bitterness for the man who betrayed Temple ideals, Jim Jones. Archie and Rosie Ijames were blessed with a new grandchild in California, but when they moved to Florida to help their adult son Norman with a business venture, tragedy struck the family once again: Norman died in a Venezuelan plane crash.

  Dale Parks found work as an inhalation therapist in the Bay Area. The rest of his family moved back to the Ukiah area, and the Bogues did likewise. Juanita Bogue gave birth to a child conceived in Guyana.

  Tim and Mike Carter escaped prosecution and were living in Idaho.

  Stephan Jones started a new life for himself in the Bay Area.

  Some outsiders were permanently affected, and sometimes more adversely so than the survivors. Others readjusted quickly and a few profited from the experience.

  Sam Houston, despite more surgery and continuing health problems, not only fought back and resumed working at Associated Press but he also won an award as sports photographer of the year in the Bay Area. The family and Bob’s widow Joyce reached an out-of-court settlement with Southern Pacific railroad in connection with Bob’s still-mysterious death.

  Leo Ryan’s family—particularly his mother and one sister—pressed for full disclosure of government culpability and blamed the government for negligence in the congressman’s death. About two years after Jonestown, it was reported that one of Ryan’s daughters had joined an India-based cult; she insisted it was nothing like the Temple.

  Anthony Katsaris recovered from severe wounds and went on to a teaching career in northern California. His father Steve Katsaris buried his daughter near Ukiah and resumed his life as a private school administrator. The story of Peoples Temple, he told the authors, is how Jim Jones could turn a close and loving child like Anthony into someone like Maria.

  Howard Oliver survived his stroke, but was left in ill health; Beverly Oliver’s wounds healed. Since their sons were gone, they took a smaller apartment.

  Freddy Lewis, who lost twenty-seven relatives including his wife and seven children, kept working as a butcher at the same San Francisco supermarket. Each year on the anniversary of Jonestown, he returned to Oakland to the hillside mass grave of the unclaimed Jonestown dead, many of them children.

  Clare Bouquet, the mother who tried so tirelessly to rescue her son from the Temple, finally met her daughter-in-law’s family at Brian’s funeral. She returned to her teaching job but found time to push for government inquiries into its own responsibility for the affair and to campaign for candidates who supported that goal.

  Jackie Speier, who survived her terrible wounds, believed that Ryan in his dying breaths asked her to run for his congressional seat. She and a longtime Ryan aide, Joe Holsinger, ran against each other and lost to a third Democrat in the primary; a Republican took Ryan’s place. Speier eventually landed a seat on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. Both she and Holsinger have called for public hearings into the tragedy and have blamed the U.S. government.

  Like the Ryan family, Greg Robinson’s family sued for Temple assets, hoping to make some memorial to their son. Greg’s father also sued the State Department. With over $60,000 from the sale of Guyana photos, the San Francisco Examiner started a scholarship in Greg’s memory at San Francisco State University.

  Attorney Charles Garry resumed his law practice in San Francisco and tried to asist a number of survivors in readjusting, giving at least two of them jobs, and helping others. Garry still is haunted by the tragedy.

  Attorney Mark Lane wrote an unheralded book called The Strongest Poison and went on a tour of college campuses in 1979, delivering at least thirty lectures at $2,750 each. Esquire and Mother Jones magazines published articles portraying him as a publicity-hungry opportunist. He later turned up in New York, defending pro-Khomeini students during the Iranian hostage crisis.

  Despite the finality of the epitaph Annie Moore left beside Jim Jones’s body, tell-tale signs point to the possibility that Jones had in fact made a plan for escaping the fate of his followers. Jones had always felt that a mass suicide might be subject to misinterpretation, that someone —he—would be needed to explain it to the press and authorities. On November 18,1978, Jones spoke of being the last to die, which would have allowed him to flee after his people had killed themselves. The means for a last-minute escape were at hand and partially mobilized: the Port Kaituma airstrip assassins had left untouched the small plane, the Cessna, although they had disabled the larger plane. Did Jones make plans to escape by air with some of his aides?77

  Jones apparently was alive when the Carter brothers and Prokes left the encampment with money and guns: Prokes, a onetime licensed pilot, certainly could have flown the Cessna on the Kaituma strip, and for that matter, so could Maria Katsaris, likely one of the last to die in Jonestown. Assuming that Prokes was designated pilot, the Carter brothers could have served two other functions: Mike was a radio man; Tim was a Vietnam vet with some knowledge of weapons and was Jones’s most recent double agent. What did happen? The Carters and Prokes were apprehended in Kaituma, where they said they were sent to board the Cudjo, which is curious because the boat had been sent upriver that day.

  If such an escape plan was readied for execution, or as a backup measure, we can only speculate as to whether Jones aborted it or whether someone else made sure that he did not survive the death of his movement. Unless new, documented information comes forward, the mystery will always remain: who shot Jim Jones?

  Notes

  1. Several of Lynetta Jones’s literary efforts used in this book as epigraphs show at least a subconscious understanding and need to capture her son’s personality problems and strengths. His grandiosity and her half-belief in his “godlike nature” are expressed by her poem about shaping a young child like clay; it was almost certainly her child. The foreboding tenor of her essay, The Poisoner, is undeniable. Though the effort was prompted by the poisoning of Temple dogs in Ukiah, it seems likely Lynetta was cognizant of the poisoning of the Joneses’ chimpanzee in Indianapolis—and the atmosphere of paranoia and persecution which led to the mass poisoning after her death. Her “Ode to Liars” stands as a morality tale; one can almost imagine her showing it to her son, so that the unsubtle message might reach him without a direct confrontation. Whether intentionally or not, it tells the story of Jim Jones’s lies, growing ever larger until they overtook and consumed him.

  2. Mother-child scene related by Alicia Heck of Crete. Events in Lynetta’s early life and marriage are based largely on her taped recollections and writings, mainly those designated 10B and 0761 by the FBI.

  3. Boyhood friends said there was no indication that Jim’s father belonged to the Klan, though Jim himself wore a sheet for religious reasons, and for theatrical reasons in the loft. The Lynn area was not considered Klan country; blacks were very scarce in the entire county. And just a few miles from Lynn, Levi Coffin had operated a way station for the underground railroad in Fountain City. What emerges is that Jim Jones blamed his father for the pain of his youth—and cast him later in a villainous role at times. Lynetta in her writings makes reference to bigotry in her husband’s background, but does not venture any allegations about the Klan or overt racism.

  4. As Lynetta Jones wrote about herself in 1974, in her lofty rhetorical style, “I had read the signs correctly in the early years of our marriage; economically, this marriage was and never could be greater than my ability to endorse it with whatever worldly goods were required to make it. I was of limited strength, but according to my philosophy, nothing was impossible and my ambition for my son knew no bounds. I had chosen what I had considered a favorable time to bring him into the world, and my judgment had been at its lowest ebb at that moment. My son was born right in the midst of the Depression and all he had se
en of this world since had been the grinding aftermath of depression.”

  5. Lynetta evidently sensed that neighbors disapproved of her motherly conduct. She wrote in 1974, in a manuscript obtained from the FBI under FOIA, that some people resented “something about my attitude toward my son. These I assumed to be close associates of my husband’s sister-in-law, who held that one’s character of a housewife was dwarfed by working outside the home....”

  6. The train incident is based on a July 30, 1976, letter from Mrs. Kennedy to Lynetta.

  7. Lynetta Jones, in a narrative called “Skid Row,” written evidently in 1974, ventured the opinion that Uncle Bill was murdered by some men who were angry with him over a $36 debt. In the course of her narrative, she also indicated that she and her husband did not sleep together, confirming information by George Fudge. The reason for separate beds was not explained, but perhaps it was related to Mr. Jones’s coughing spells.

  8. Lynetta apparently was conscious of her own eccentricity. Whether she was fantasizing or recounting, she revealed some of that attitude in a short narrative called “Jim Babe’s adventures on the long walk.” She said that she used to talk to two stuffed animals she made for Jim—Ms. Bear and Ms. Samantha. “I often discussed with them the vexations of our times and the trials and tribulations of my days. I missed them when they were absent from the big crib when dusk came, just as I missed young Jim at that hour when he was overdue from his wanderings. A psychiatrist would dub such conduct on my part as a departure from the norm, no doubt just as I, on the other hand, have always entertained a deep conviction that the theory advanced by the doctors of psychiatry is merely the outward manifestation of deep seated disturbance of the mind. There is no verification of the claim that psychiatry ever ‘cured’ anything or anybody.”

  9. In a Sept. 1977 tape made in Jonestown, Jones admitted great feelings of hostility and inferiority as a child. A partial transcript was published in the Guyana Chronicle, Dec. 6, 1978. The tape itself (Q134) was obtained under FOIA from the FBI.

  10. These perceptions reflect Temple tapes of Jim and Lynetta, and Lynetta’s written accounts. Pentecostal churches are organizations that seek fulfillment by absorbing the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. The members strive to emulate the early disciples of Christ who, on the first Pentecost, received the “gift of tongues.”

  11. In a 1974 account, Lynetta confirms Jim’s urinary expertise, as related by boyhood friends Don Foreman and George Fudge. She said that after he was circumcised, apparently late in childhood, he could “piss over the chicken coop.” Most likely, he won the contests because he developed a technique and because he called for contests when his bladder was full. Throughout his life, he would drink tremendous amounts of fluids, and in later life, he had minor urinary tract problems.

  12. Lynetta Jones, in a tape recovered at Jonestown, confirmed Jim’s hatred of the pool hall-card parlor, and of his father’s routine. She also said he once gathered up rat poison to save the rodents riddling the building. Jones himself in the aforementioned tapes confirmed his hostility and lack of respect for his father.

  13. Late in his life, Jim tried to recast his own youth. He wanted to be remembered as a great rogue in Lynn, courageously challenging the Middle American norms. He claimed in the Sept. 1977 Jonestown interview that he had dated the school “whore,” the girl whom no one took out in public but whom everyone took to bed. He claimed that he brought her to his prom and they danced by themselves, with all the sneaky hypocrites looking on. Actually, he dated the nice girls, the popular ones—and had moved out of Lynn before the prom.

  14. Richmond preaching scene was described by Don Foreman, who witnessed this after giving Jim a ride there.

  15. In a Temple tape recording made in 1977, Jones related the following:Once as they washed dishes, Marceline told her husband, “I love you, but don’t say anything about the Lord anymore.”

  “Fuck the Lord,” Jim snapped—and they argued again. Out of frustration, Marceline threw a glass at him and cried. There were other rows, too.

  16. Jones viewed his mother, the union organizer, as a potential target of the “Red” hunters at this time, when the FBI was snooping around factories.

  17. The tendency to keep running, changing jobs and homes, etc. is one of the classic traits of paranoia.

  18. If it was vitamin B12, the shots likely either were useless or were used as a placebo. As an experienced nurse, Marceline would have known that someone with secondary anemia—after a disease, for instance—would not benefit from B12 except as psychological support. And Dr. Wayne Ritter, an internal medicine specialist on call to the Temple nursing homes, would have told her that anemia most likely would not have caused a collapse unless there was hemorrhage. Most likely, Jones was faking collapses in an effort to gain the sympathy of those around him, or a combination of drugs and fatigue had caused a physical reaction in a stressful time. Whether he was abusing drugs at this time is not known—but he certainly had access to prescription drugs. He once offered Winberg some Darvon for headache.

  19. On Dec. 4, 1962, Lynetta Jones wrote a friend and mentioned her concern for Jim’s health. “It is imperative that I have my birth certificate acceptable to immigration authorities at once as my son is ill in South America and I must go there as early as possible.”

  20. In a passage of a biography being prepared by the church, Jones apparently referred to the incident, with some changes and embellishment. “I ... [took] him by the nape of the neck and [threatened] to throw him out of the second story window.”

  21. In a Nov. 1978 Indianapolis Star News story, Thomas Dickson of Tampa, Florida, a former assistant minister, said that Jones had started a church interrogation committee in the late 1950s after visiting Father Divine. Dickson said Jones believed people in the church were plotting against him, so he squelched dissent.

  22. In preparation for the journey to California, Jones incorporated Wings of Deliverance in Indiana as a nonprofit tax-exempt religious corporation to receive properties donated by church members and to manage church business. Though Jones tightly guarded his personal and church finances, he most likely planned to use Wings to hold property donated by California pioneers; their homes and real estate could be held indefinitely tax-free, then sold as needed or when the real estate market was favorable. The procedure—which the Temple also would employ in a later exodus—provided another benefit: tying members financially to the Temple.Although there were separate corporations, the distinction between church property and Jones’s personal property had blurred. For years, Jones never took a salary, and he gave a great deal to the church; later he would give everything to the church in exchange for financial security for himself and his family.

  The exact activities and revenue of the corporations never were recorded, and there is no indication that more than a handful of properties were donated to the Temple in Indiana. Indiana tax officials would revoke the charters of both entities on the same day in 1970 for failure to file any returns. In 1972, Wings would be reincorporated and a church member signing for Jones would liquidate a house, a nursing home, another property and the church building itself.

  23. The Hindus believed in deities of many forms, in reincarnation and in liberation from earthly evils—a precept that jibed nicely with the personal sacrifice required of Temple members. Buddhism also emphasized self-sacrifice, teaching that extinction of the self and of the senses can transcend suffering and even existence. To Jones, there was great appeal in these concepts.

  24. Christine Lucientes’s conversion is taken from her account as described in a Temple chronicle called “No Haloes Please....”

  25. A Temple account said that Jones wanted nothing less than the position of assistant senior elder in Golden Rule.

  26. Vitamin B12 is a placebo, something a physician might have suggested for hypochondria, which Jones later and earlier showed symptoms of having. An overdose of insulin, according to physicians, might well have made him incoherent. Among his
physicians, there was some disagreement about whether Jones was diabetic or not.

  27. This account, confirmed in part by Grace Stoen, is taken from a handwritten document to Jones from Tim Stoen.

  28. As one 1970 leaflet put it: “Notice! Some in San Francisco have tried to hinder us from coming. In order to get a hall, we must pay $500 to rent the facilities, not including other items such as chairs, a P.A. system, organ, etc....”

  29. It probably was wise to maintain a Republican image in a county with a Republican district attorney, and a 37 percent Republican registration that converted into victories for Ronald Reagan in the gubernatorial race and for Richard Nixon in the presidential contest.

  30. The Temple had laid the organizational groundwork for the new church some time earlier. After donations to the Southern California Disciples of Christ organization and on the recommendation of the northern California leadership, the Temple was accepted for affiliation with the Southern California region, as well. Dual affiliation was unusual, but Disciples considered the generous and large congregation a boon to the denomination. The Temple’s large crusades and bus caravans even caused some officials to wonder whether Jim Jones planned to establish a nationwide church.

  31. This account of John Stoen’s escapades comes from undated prose by Lynetta Jones in Temple files.

  32. Kinsolving later criticized the Examiner for bowing to pressure from the Temple. Yet on Oct. 5, 1972, he wrote a memo to a San Francisco journalism review in response to its inquiry: “I have been assured by men whom I trust ... that the Examiner is by no means abandoning this subject because of extended picketing and threats from three attorneys. What we are waiting for now are further developments of a legal nature and which involve more legal than ecclesiastical ... coverage.”Kinsolving said in a 1981 interview that he tried subsequently to get the Examiner to run the rest of his stories, but failed in that effort and in one to convince Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press and others to pursue the story. In 1975, though no longer with the Examiner, Kinsolving picked up the chase again and lined up several Bay Area newspapers to publish a column on the Temple. But the Temple got wind of it and drew up a suit that probably scared off Kinsolving’s publishers.