A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  In one segment Jones gave a tour of the grounds. At the eight chicken coops, which Jones said housed “thousands and thousands” of chickens, he claimed, “We’ve lost no chickens whatsoever, a miracle of miracles.” Both statements were lies.

  Another long segment featured food: Close-ups of bacon being sliced, a heaping platter of barbecued ribs, sausages dangling from the smokehouse rafters. In the pantry, Jones opened a trunk containing packets of Kool-Aid, and a cheaper knockoff, Flavor-Aid. A big deal was made of a chicken dinner: The camera zoomed in on a woman eating a large piece of fried chicken as Prokes admonished her several times to move her hands so he can film the meat. He shifted to a table of self-conscious children before returning to the woman, now holding an even larger piece of chicken.

  Prokes interviewed several residents about their new digs. Back in California, Edith Roller must have smiled when her former roommate, Christine Bates, appeared on the projection screen wearing a blue sunhat and standing next to a big bush of white flowers.

  “Grandma Bates, how do you like it here?” Prokes asked.

  “I love it, I love it better than any place I’ve been in my life, and I’ve been many a place… . I’ve never loved a place, and been so healthy, and been so free, in my life as I am now,” she said in breathless enthusiasm. “When I came to this place I’d had arthritis in my knees for twenty long years. I couldn’t stoop. When I came here I was on a cane. And I threw my cane away the second day I came here. I can stoop, I can sit down with my legs under me now, and I don’t have a pain in my body. I thank you, Jim!”

  In her journal, Edith noted that the residents “were probably told to dress up, as many were in their best clothes and jewelry.”

  Jim Bogue appeared in a segment featuring a group of men dressed in matching orange and yellow dashikis who sat on rows of chairs facing Jones. “We’re a happy family, yes, we are,” the men sang, before recounting how Jones spared them from various construction mishaps.

  “I really appreciate being here, being able to work under father’s direction,” Bogue said softly when he was passed the microphone. “And I’m waiting for the whole family to be here as soon as possible.”

  Newcomers arrived faster than the workers could house them. In California, Jones had indicated that each family would have its own home, and parents were dismayed to learn this wasn’t true. Sometimes parents were allowed to sleep with their kids on the first night, but this was an exception. Babies slept in the nursery, and small children slept in Dorm 3. Sometimes couples were assigned to the same cottage, and sometimes they were split up. Lucky couples got lofts, which had double beds. Others slept in bunks, one over the other. Room assignments depended entirely on the whims of the powers that be, and residents had no say in the matter.

  Eventually, fifty-two cottages were built in the general housing area, not nearly enough for private family residences. Each dwelling measured fifteen by thirty feet—about the size of a typical living room—and housed an average of twelve people. Some had up to nineteen. The cottages were crude, but they had electricity, windows, and a deck with an overhanging roof.

  A daily schedule evolved. Each morning at six, guards walked around pounding the cottage walls with their fists and shouting as a wakeup call. Residents emerged onto the walkways in bathrobes and flip-flops and made their way to the communal toilets, which consisted of long benches with rows of holes cut into them. For many it was strange, and difficult, at first, to have a bowel movement with an audience. Eventually residents let go of their modesty, and even conversed with their neighbors as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The showers were also locker-room style, a row of spigots sprouting from the wall. There was only cold water, which although shocking at first spray, was not entirely unpleasant after a long day of heat.

  Jones and his inner circle lived better, of course. Jones was the king of his town, and his sons were the princes. Jones’s secluded, two-room cottage was built on a small hill and was twice as large as the other dwellings. He kept up the illusion of a happy marriage; but Marceline lived alone, and his top two concubines, Maria Katsaris and Carolyn Layton, took turns in his queen-sized bed. His cottage was furnished with a small refrigerator to store his Diet Pepsis, food, and drugs, and had both an air conditioner and a screened-in porch to keep out the heat and bugs.

  After their arrival, many folks grumbled that Jonestown was not like the movies they’d been shown in San Francisco. The chicken dinners were sporadic at best, the local swimming hole was enjoyed by a privileged few. The astute ones kept their observations to themselves. They’d forfeited their passports and money for “safekeeping” upon their arrival. They couldn’t call a relative to retrieve them or hail a cab or a bus. They were in the middle of a wilderness, 4,000 miles from home.

  At the end of July 1977, a group of thirty-nine Temple members flew to Guyana in a single day. Among them was Edith Bogue. Jim hadn’t seen his wife in three years. He rushed toward her, but drew back when he noticed the coolness in her face. She managed a brittle smile, then informed him that she was still involved with Harold Cordell. They’d lived as man and wife in California during his absence and planned to continue doing so in Jonestown. The news struck Jim like a kick in the chest. The happily-ever-after fantasy that fueled him for years evaporated, and the old fury burbled up.

  Still, as he saw Edith standing in the heat and mud in her clean city clothes with her soft, pale skin, he pitied her. He was bruised by remorse when it came to her: about getting her pregnant when she was fifteen, about the death of their son Jonathon, about driving with her to meet Jim Jones that fateful Sunday, nine years earlier. He leaned toward her: “Be careful about those Touchettes,” he whispered. “They’ll carry everything you say right to the top.” And so did Edith, who marched over to Jones to tattle on her estranged husband. That night, he was called before the community and berated for his insolence. There seemed to be no end to his bad dream.

  CHAPTER 10

  GEORGETOWN

  In Guyana, Jim Jones was no longer the kingmaker he’d been in San Francisco, where he won powerful alliances by offering politicians hundreds of foot soldiers willing to canvass precincts, people demonstrations, and cross voting districts to cast their ballots.

  But now he had something else to offer men in power: a bevy of attractive women willing to do anything for the cause. He’d used this tactic to a lesser degree in California, but found it far more successful in Guyana. In an insular country of black and brown people, where there was no television and little tourism, white skin was exotic, and to the machista men in power, the fair-haired Temple women were alluring objects. Jones soon realized he could use their crude fascination to his advantage. He selected a group of comely young women to live in Georgetown, and sent out these “PR girls” to bedazzle influential men at their offices and their homes.

  The Temple purchased a spacious two-story yellow stucco home in an upscale neighborhood for its headquarters. Located at the end of a quiet street, 41 Lamaha Gardens was the base for the PR crew, which equipped a downstairs bedroom with a ham radio, three phone lines, typewriters, and equipment to record phone calls.

  It was well known, in certain circles, that the Temple women used provocative means to promote their cause. A coy look, a short skirt, a shimmy: They worked their charm on everyone from customs agents to cabinet members. Some men were swayed by mere suggestion. Wives grew suspicious; when a group of four PR girls showed up at the home of the Minister of Health, Labor and Housing, Hamilton Green, his wife took one look at them and told her husband to let his secretary deal with them from then on. Jones’s envoys spent most of their time on Georgetown’s principal boulevard, Main Street, which was lined with government offices, foreign consulates, and private businesses. They sashayed past secretaries bearing booze and greetings from their leader, who’d given himself the pretentious title of Bishop in Guyana. The designation certainly wasn’t used by the denomination that ordained him, the Discip
les of Christ, but he thought it lent him more gravitas than mere Reverend. The women came off as pushy and confrontational, and their unstinting praise of Jones irritated some officials. “Don’t give me your California hard sell,” the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fred Wills, chastised them. Wills did, however, concede to give them inside scoops in exchange for food. He asked the team to bring him a pint of milk a day, as well as soup, ice cream, oranges, and mangos.

  Jones’s star performer—his “political prostitute,” as she once called herself—was a petite brunette named Paula Adams. She was constantly checking the tide of opinion toward the Temple, determining how much officials knew about the scandals back in the States before artfully leading them to believe Jones was under attack for his progressive views. The twenty-eight-year-old moved to Guyana in January 1974, and began dating the Guyanese ambassador to the United States, Laurence “Bonny” Mann, soon after. Mann was an easy target. He was a known playboy, and had no qualms about squiring his blue-eyed mistress around Georgetown’s top restaurants and nightclubs, gossipers be damned. Mann was on his third marriage at the time, and Adams was wed to a Temple member in San Francisco.

  The couple couldn’t have made a stranger combination. Mann was an arrogant bon vivant, while Paula was quiet and down-to-earth, accustomed to the humble Temple lifestyle. She hailed from Ukiah, and entered the Temple a confused twenty-two-year-old who was wrestling with drinking, drugs, and manic-depression. In Georgetown, Adams played the part of long-suffering mistress to the hilt, complaining about Mann’s all-night poker games, his possessiveness, his drunken rages. He, in turn, criticized the way she dressed, belittled her association with the Temple, and hit on her friends. Paula’s ultimate allegiance was to Jones, which angered her lover. They moved into an apartment together, where she took dictation for him, had his Scotch ready when came home from work, and memorized which item he kept in each pocket of his guayaberas, so she could arrange them in his preferred order after his shirts were laundered.

  Ambassador Mann was Jones’s ace in the hole. Not only was he a highranking diplomat himself, he was also related to Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. Adams was a classic honey trap, exchanging sex for valuable information and influence. In the late summer of 1977, as the American media continued assailing his group, Jones was desperate for reassurances that the Guyanese government still supported him. Paula constantly queried Mann about the cabinet’s position on Jones, and radioed the information to Jonestown nightly.

  When Paula wasn’t playing housemaid, she rifled through Mann’s briefcase, taped his phone conversations, and jotted down any perfidious comments he made. She gave these materials to Jones, who underlined Mann’s criticisms of Guyanese officials and indications that he was a less than ardent socialist, and periodically leaked them to his allies in the Guyanese cabinet.

  Mann helped Paula ingratiate herself with local officials. “Most of Georgetown relates on a forum of drink,” he told her. It was impossible to buy quality liquor in Guyana, so, on the basis of his recommendation, immigrating Temple members stopped at JFK’s duty-free shop to buy bottles of single-malt whiskey for “the cause.”

  That summer, the most pressing issue on Paula’s agenda was a fresh scandal: an unseemly custody battle involving so-called Bishop Jones. A five-year-old boy named John Victor Stoen, the son of Temple attorney Tim Stoen and Grace Stoen, was at the center of the case. Twelve days after “John John” was born, Tim Stoen signed a peculiar document:

  “I, Timothy Oliver Stoen, hereby acknowledge that in April, 1971, I entreated my beloved pastor, James W. Jones, to sire a child by my wife, Grace Lucy (Grech) Stoen, who had previously, at my insistence, reluctantly but graciously consented thereto. James W. Jones agreed to do so, reluctantly, after I explained that I very much wished to raise a child, but was unable after extensive attempts, to sire one myself. My reason for requesting James W. Jones to do this is that I wanted my child to be fathered, if not by me, by the most compassionate, honest, and courageous human being the world contains.”

  Jones’s wife, Marceline, signed the document as a witness.

  Whether the document was just another loyalty test or an authentic declaration of paternity, no one will ever know. It’s too late for DNA testing. Although Jones liked to brag that the boy’s features reflected his own, John had a mop of thick dark hair that he could have inherited from either man, or from his mother.

  Grace Stoen, who worked as a Temple counselor and accountant, defected in July 1976, after growing tired of Jones’s relentless demands. But she was unable to retrieve her son, who was being raised communally and lived apart from her. Complicating the matter were two forms she signed before leaving. One gave the Temple parental authority over John and the other allowed him to travel to the promised land. A few months later, her estranged husband signed another power of attorney granting control of their son to church leaders, who whisked John to Guyana.

  When the New West article appeared, Jones learned that Grace had initiated court proceedings to get John back. He quickly went on the offensive, ordering Jonestown residents to write affidavits claiming Grace was an unfit mother. They obliged him, portraying her as sexually depraved and emotionally unstable; they wrote similar statements about other former members who spoke to New West.

  During the mass exodus, Marshall Kilduff called Ambassador Mann to get the Guyanese reaction to his investigation. Mann reported the conversation to Temple leader Jean Brown, who taped it for Jones. In it, Mann said:

  “I said, ‘Look … our embassy is three thousand miles away. Please look at it from my point of view. Please know that the bishop had a public office in San Francisco.’ I said, ‘If you are the chairman of a housing authority, if you are a public office holder in your own country and own city, would you expect us to believe you are a con man?’ I said, ‘Moreover, not a single allegation had been proved, not a single charge has been brought in San Francisco or anywhere else… . We have no quarrel with them.’”

  Now, Jones wanted to make sure the Guyanese government would be on his side if Grace Stoen did, in fact, pursue the custody matter all the way to South America. In a rambling letter to Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy Reid, Jones defended the affair. “Committing adultery with this woman was one of the more noble things of my life,” he wrote. “I consulted with my wife and my entire church before I did it and I sure didn’t want to have anything to do with her.” On Main Street, Paula Adams assured cabinet ministers that it was “the only case of such a situation in our group.”

  Of course, these were lies. Jones never asked his congregation if he could have sex with an attractive devotee; he acted on impulse, not principle.

  When a San Francisco court awarded Grace Stoen custody of her son in August 1977, the legal victory changed the entire tenor of Jonestown. Before the ruling, Jones had put on his best game face as he walked around his town, pausing to chat with seniors, visiting the newest litter of pigs with John John, and joking with the construction crew. After Grace got custody, he spent less time in the community, and more time secluded in his cottage raging over the ham radio to his San Francisco lieutenants about the custody case.

  Then came another blow. Grace’s estranged husband and Temple chief counsel Tim Stoen defected. A staff member who was rummaging through his briefcase learned he was withholding part of his paycheck from the Temple and had passbooks for various overseas bank accounts. After leaving, he joined forces with Grace to get John back.

  This was a risky move for Stoen. He was privy to Jones’s dirtiest secrets, from his lewd conduct arrest in 1973 for exposing himself to an undercover cop in a Los Angeles movie theater, to his shady real estate transactions, to the money smuggled into overseas banks, to the intimidation of defectors. Stoen himself had devised some of the scare tactics. He could blow down Jones’s house of cards with a tiny puff of air, but by doing so, he would also implicate himself.

  Temple aide Debbie Blakey would later report that before leaving, Tim Stoen retu
rned to 1859 Geary Boulevard to try to purge compromising files containing his name. He’d later tell reporters that he left after realizing Jones’s tyranny and paranoia were out of control.

  For Jones, the stakes in the custody battle were extremely high. It wasn’t just about who got physical possession of the boy. It was a matter of maintaining the respect of his people, who thought he was God, omniscient and all-powerful. If he was forced to return John John to his mother, he would lose his aura of inviolability, and there would be little incentive for his followers to obey, or fear, him.

  CHAPTER 11

  SIEGE

  Hyacinth Thrash and Zippy Edwards reached Jonestown a few weeks before the New West story broke. Jones himself drove the sisters to the passport office in San Francisco to fill out their forms, then pocketed the documents for “safekeeping.” They left California believing they were going on a yearlong mission to help the Guyanese get on their feet.

  In Jonestown, the sisters were assigned to smaller living quarters located behind the pharmacy that were reserved for longtime Temple members. There were only six cottages. Married couples occupied several, and Marceline Jones, who also had an air conditioner, lived in one. The sisters shared theirs with two other older women, one of whom had been Jones’s housekeeper from Indiana. Each woman had a full-sized bed in a corner, and Zip crocheted bright rugs to cover the plank floor between them.