A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  Over the years, the deceit grew more streamlined. In San Francisco, greeters would write down the names of visitors and pass the information along to staffers, who’d rush upstairs to call the person’s home, acting as a pollster. The data from the subsequent survey they conducted was then brought to Jones, who’d read it from scraps of paper during the calling-out portion of the service. His sunglasses, which he rarely took off in public, served a key function: They hid his eyes while he read from his crib notes.

  At the same time, he sought to inspire trust in visitors by using the crude language of the street and stating his economic status on signs hanging behind the pulpit: “Pastor Jones wears a used choir robe to cover his modest clothing… . His robe is not symbolic of any special glory or honor.”

  Few knew the darker side of his ministry: he started drugging people surreptitiously to “prove” his paranormal abilities. His aides who worked in hospitals stole tranquilizers for him; others feigned insomnia to get sleeping pills. Jones was especially anxious to obtain Methaqualone, better known by the brand name Quaalude, which was widely prescribed at the time as a hypnotic and sedative.

  His staff slipped the drug to old women under the guise of offering them vitamin C. The potent sedative would disorient them or knock them out entirely, and when they came to, they’d find a cast on their leg and a concerned staff member telling them they’d fallen and broken their tibia. At the next service, Jones would cut off the cast with much fanfare, and command them to walk. The audience would go wild as they witnessed yet another of Father’s “healings.”

  Jones also drugged people to punish them. He made troublemakers “drop dead” during services as a general warning not to defy him, then “resurrected” them as the drugs wore off. He warned a man caught cheating on his wife that he would feel the effects of “touching God” in his body. A short time later, as Jones ordered him to have his picture taken with the three women he was sleeping with, the man collapsed and was carried out of the sanctuary. “His blood pressure and pulse revealed he was dead,” a witness later wrote. “Jim eventually went back to revive him. Anyone who doubted that he had died was urged to go back and look at him.”

  Another man mocked Jones’s “miracle” of multiplying fried chicken at a potluck; he’d seen another member drive up with buckets stamped KFC. That man was given a slice of poisoned cake, and the ensuing diarrhea and vomiting brought him to his knees. Still weak, he was led to the front of the church to apologize for questioning Jones’s powers.

  At the same time that he was privately toying with his followers’ health and well-being, Jones’s church swelled into a movement. As the number of Temple members rose into the thousands, he formed a governing board called the planning commission, comprised of his one hundred most faithful followers.

  His energy seemed boundless. He opened a satellite church in Los Angeles, and every other weekend led a bus caravan of members on a six-hour drive south to preach there. Every Wednesday, he chaired a disciplinary meeting. In between, he hobnobbed with politicians, managed church business, and counseled individual members. He could preach for hours and not flag. He boasted that he only needed a few hours of sleep a night, so dedicated was he to the cause, and demanded the same of his top aides.

  While his assistants swilled coffee or chomped on hot peppers to stay awake, Jones availed himself of stronger stuff: Dextroamphetamine, sold on the street as dexies. An associate pastor, David Wise, who was curious about Jones’s supernatural energy, discovered a prescription bottle for the drug in Jones’s toiletry bag. Wise was furious: Jones berated his aides for not keeping up with him, but he was secretly hooked on speed. Dextroamphetamine is prescribed to treat attention deficit disorders, and while the drug does enhance users’ focus and alertness, prolonged and heavy consumption can make the user paranoid—which is exactly what happened to Jim Jones.

  He began warning his Redwood Valley congregation that unnamed enemies were “after” him and on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1972, his words seemingly came true. After a potluck in the church parking lot, as folks milled about socializing and a group of teenage boys played basketball, shots rang out. Jones fell, clutching his chest as a red stain spread across his gold shirt. Women screamed. His aides rushed him to the parsonage. A half hour later, the Temple leader strode back into the sunshine. Miracle of miracles, Father healed himself.

  “Jim was shot but they couldn’t kill him!” people cried.

  The incident served as “proof” of his godhood, as well as “verification” that his life was in jeopardy. In truth, Jones had staged the whole thing. Outspoken progressives were being gunned down across America: Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Kennedy brothers. To be assassinated was to be important, and Jim Jones longed, more than anything, to be important.

  The shirt he was wearing was displayed in the sanctuary so everyone could marvel at the bullet hole. Jones told his congregation that he’d “neutralized” the bullet, and then he made an ominous statement: “Lenin died with a bullet in his body, and someday, so will I.”

  One can only imagine the cynicism necessary to plan such a drama. Which aides did he trust enough to help him pull it off? What did he use for the fake blood? How long would he wait, while his followers suffered, before miraculously reappearing? How would he explain the absence of a bullet?

  Jones had a history of staging such attacks. Once, while visiting friends in Indiana, Jones was alone in a room when a rock shattered the window. As the family ran in, he shouted that racists were trying to get him. But they discovered the rock had been thrown from inside the room; the glass lay below in the yard. Jones vehemently denied breaking the window himself, and his wife, Marceline, backed him up, costing her the friendship.

  In California, the Temple and its leader were supposedly attacked on a regular basis: Molotov cocktails were thrown at Temple properties, dead animals flung into yards, glass shards hidden in Jones’s food. In one bizarre instance, he announced during a service that a hypodermic needle filled with poison had been concealed in his underwear. He wondered aloud whether he should wear a helmet to protect his head from snipers. In August 1973, the new San Francisco church was gutted by arson. Jones, who arrived at the scene while the building was still ablaze, told investigators that he intuited something was wrong. As “luck” had it, his staff had moved important files to Redwood Valley the weekend before. In March 1974, a security guard found an alleged bomb underneath the fuel tank of Jones’s bus, number seven. The Temple leader removed the device himself, before anyone else could get a close look at it.

  These staged attacks helped Jones close ranks. By creating a siege mentality, he spread the message that their movement was in danger, and that it was time to forget petty differences and dedicate themselves fully to the cause—and to him. The phantom enemy ruse worked well to keep members in line; Jones would employ it to even greater effect in Jonestown.

  Shortly after the bomb scare, the Temple issued a press release saying visitors would be checked as they entered the Sunday morning service. But they weren’t merely checked, they were downright frisked. Women were subjected to a seventeen-step procedure by female guards, who ran their fingers through visitors’ hair, felt along their underwear lines, and peeked inside their shoes. Babies were unwrapped, old women prodded. Rake combs, umbrellas, and other sharp objects were confiscated, as were cameras and tape recorders.

  Coming to Jim Jones’s church was now akin to entering a high-security prison.

  CHAPTER 5

  EDITH

  On February 5, 1976, a squat, middle-aged woman stood begging in San Francisco’s Financial District. The city had awoken to an inch of rare snow, and on California Street, businessmen turned up the lapels of their overcoats and rushed between glass towers, servants to capitalism’s amoral bidding.

  Few of them noticed Edith Roller as she braced herself against the chill, timidly holding aloft a flyer for her church. With her outmoded cat’s-eye gla
sses and dowdy clothes, she was easy to overlook.

  Edith stood only a few blocks away from Bechtel, the nation’s largest engineering and construction company, where she worked as a secretary. She felt awkward and somewhat embarrassed, and hoped none of her coworkers would see her panhandling, but Reverend Jones’s orders were clear: The entire congregation was to pamphlet for the next six days to raise money for the mission in Guyana. Edith only had time to do so on her lunch break.

  The leaflet Edith held was harder to ignore. On the cover was the photograph of a starving mother and baby in war-torn Biafra. As the woman gazed at the camera with fierce dignity, her child gripped the withered sack of her breast in both hands, trying to extract milk that had dried up long before. Below the image was a Bible verse: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” Matthew 25, verses 35–36. Striking and confrontational, the flyer summed up the mission of Peoples Temple: to offer succor in a world where, as Jones repeatedly told his flock, “Two out of three babies go to bed hungry every night.”

  Out of the twenty-five well-fed passersby that Edith approached, only one stopped to drop a quarter into her palm. When the lunch crowds thinned, she turned her wrist to glance at her watch before stuffing the flyer back into her purse, feeling both dejected and eager to return to the warmth of her office. Tomorrow, she’d try a different spot.

  An opinionated loner of sixty-one, Edith Frances Roller had a finely honed sense of justice. She was born in a Colorado coal town where she witnessed the struggle of miners, including her father, to obtain living wages and safe labor conditions. Her father died, after years of backbreaking work, from silicosis, a painful, incurable respiratory disease caused by inhaling silica dust in the mines.

  She graduated from Colorado State Teacher’s College with degrees in history and political science, and when World War II broke out, went to work in Greece for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, where she helped refugees displaced by the fighting. After the war, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, hired her, deploying her in Asia.

  When she returned to the States, eight years later, she settled in San Francisco, where she got an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State College in 1966. She stayed on at the school after she graduated to work as an academic secretary.

  Her life was more or less placid—books, opera, quiet dinners with a good friend—until a student strike broke out at the college in 1968. At first, students protested the administration’s collaboration with the Vietnam draft by providing records to the Selective Service, but their list of grievances grew. They demanded the creation of an Ethnic Studies Department, and the employment of more nonwhite teachers. The strike lasted a record five months. Every day as Edith walked across campus, she passed battalions of police in riot gear, ready to disperse the protesters by any means necessary. She saw police beat kids bloody with their batons and drag them, screaming, to police wagons. More than four hundred students were arrested. A rock shattered a window of the administration building where she worked. The violence rattled her. The plight of the striking students echoed all the other injustices she’d witnessed in her life; they seemed to be yet another dispensable minority. She rankled her bosses and coworkers by arguing vociferously on their behalf. One day, she found herself stranded in a hallway clogged with students holding a sit-in. As a photographer for the campus paper snapped a picture, she just stood there in a polka-dot dress, her shoulders slumped in mute sympathy. She’d worked for the college for seven years, but now felt like a cog in the wheel of oppression.

  In July 1969, she decided to speak out publicly. She held a press conference to announce she was resigning in protest of the school’s “outright fascist trends.” Her coworkers scoffed when they heard about it—who cared what a lowly secretary had to say?—but Edith foresaw this reaction, and addressed it in the eleven-page press release she sent to local media. “I have already been informed what the acting president is to reply when asked about my statement. Two words: ‘Edith who?’”

  But reporters did come. And although the San Francisco Chronicle buried its brief mention of Edith Roller, the item caught the eye of Jim Jones. He told his aides to find her and invite her to his church.

  Peoples Temple was a natural fit for Edith. Although she described herself as a “square, conservative old lady,” she had the soul of a freedom fighter, and Jones recognized this. She longed for a way to foster social justice in the world, and the Temple provided it.

  Jim Jones also enthralled her. On her third visit to the Temple, Jones called her onstage and clasped her hands, which were inflamed with arthritis, in his. “It will be all right,” he said, peering into her eyes. And so it was. The stiffness that made her typing work an exercise in pain disappeared. Edith was bowled over by this apparent miracle and moved to Ukiah to be closer to Jones. She taught high school equivalency classes at the town’s evening college, and an apostolic socialism class at the church, which Jones made mandatory for all Temple members living in Redwood Valley.

  Edith Roller appeared to have found her calling.

  The Temple’s move to San Francisco in 1972 marked a parallel rise in power for Jim Jones. The new building at 1859 Geary Boulevard, once a Masonic Temple, was a three-story structure with ornate brickwork. It was flanked on one side by the former Fillmore auditorium, where legendary psychedelic rock stars such as Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane cut their teeth, and on the other by a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  With the move to the Fillmore, African Americans became the Temple’s largest demographic, and Jones tapped into several conspiracy theories swirling through the black community to increase his draw.

  One was the so-called King Alfred plan, which posited that the federal government would place blacks in internment camps during a national emergency, as was done with Japanese Americans during World War II. The plan was pure fiction, created by a novelist who photocopied portions of his manuscript and distributed them on a Manhattan subway, where they worked their way into popular hysteria. But Jones noted that fences being constructed around vacant lots in San Francisco were “proof” that the plan was underway, and instructed members to write hundreds of letters to Congress in protest. He also latched onto a scaremongering tract called “The Choice,” which combined real incidents of government abuse with imagined future horrors to suggest the existence of a massive, systemic plan to exterminate African Americans.

  Jones didn’t need to resort to fiction; he could have drawn examples from real life. During a two-year period beginning in January 1968, for example, police killed twenty-eight Black Panthers in what the group said was a concerted effort to destroy them. And in 1972, a new horror came to light: Federal scientists in Tuskegee, Alabama, had allowed hundreds of poor black men to endure syphilis for forty years while they pretended to treat them, just so they could study the effects of the disease.

  One of the most cherished narratives in the black church is that of the exodus, in which Moses led the enslaved Israelites out of Egypt to freedom. There are clear parallels between the Israelites and the Africans who came to America in chains. Jones appropriated the exodus narrative for himself, painting himself as a modern Moses who would save his people from the depredations of the US government.

  He was preparing them for his ultimate goal, moving them to the “promised land” of Jonestown.

  While Jones’s miracle services attracted religious folks who believed in faith healing, mostly poor whites and blacks, his apostolic socialism appealed to anyone who was unhappy with the status quo. San Francisco has always been a haven for fugitives from the straitjacket of middle America. Hippies, queers, black militants, feminists, vegetarians, anarchists: Most everyone in the city felt passionate about something, and the Temple was a natural church
for this counterculture. In 1974, Jones established his third California church in South Central Los Angeles and quickly filled it.

  He called himself the “spokesman for the people.” He was charismatic, intense, and warm when he needed to be, but just unpolished enough to be viewed as authentic. In his polyester leisure suits and thick comb-over, he came off as earnest, if a bit rustic. He initiated friendships with local progressive leaders, including American Indian activist Dennis Banks and radical feminist and Black Panther member Angela Davis. He trotted out his multiracial family for the cameras. His churches in San Francisco and Los Angeles were planted smack dab in the middle of the ghetto, where they became a mecca for the urban poor, offering free health care, child care, career counseling, drug rehabilitation, legal aid, and food. What wasn’t to like? The veneer was spotless.

  Soon, the politicians came calling. With a throng of followers who voted en bloc and were available, at a moment’s notice, to canvass neighborhoods and fill rallies, aspiring public officeholders longed for Jones’s blessing. In 1975, at the height of Jones’s power in San Francisco, the Temple helped elect Mayor George Moscone, City Supervisor Harvey Milk, and District Attorney Joseph Freitas. Former members would later say Jones broke the law by bussing in out-of-district followers to cast their ballots for his favored San Francisco slate.