A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  Over the following days, Jones periodically allowed community life to return to normal for a few hours so people could shower, weed the crops, or prepare food. Then he’d call an alert again, and they’d drop their soap, trowel, or stirring spoon, and sprint back to the line. Aides gathered the older children in the school tent and younger ones in the nursery, giving sedatives to those who proved inconsolable. Teenage boys tried to prove their valor by charging to the front lines wielding cutlasses. When Jones wasn’t ranting, he led his people in civil rights anthems, such as “We Shall Overcome.” At one point, he walked down the line crying, bidding his followers farewell before the supposedly imminent invasion.

  At the height of the six-day siege, the US Postal Service notified the Temple that the Social Security Administration had ordered it to stop forwarding Social Security checks to the Temple’s address in Guyana. The move effectively cut off Jonestown’s monthly income of $35,000, and was further proof, Jones said, of a systematic plot to destroy them.

  On September 8, the lawyer Jones hired to replace Tim Stoen, Charles Garry, an avowed Marxist famous for defending the Black Panthers, held a press conference in San Francisco to announce the alleged conspiracy against the Temple. The meeting was dramatically interrupted by a second sniper attempt on Jones’s life.

  Jones kept up the scare.

  In the pavilion, he held all-night rallies. He led his 700 followers in socialist anthems with a raised fist; parents cradled sleeping infants in one arm and raised their other. At Jones’s cue, they turned toward the jungle to scream at the imaginary menace. “Come get us!” they yelled, and slapped their palms over their mouths in an Indian war whoop. There is a video of this: The pavilion is a blaze of lights against the dark jungle. Inside, as the camera pans over the crowd, some smile, other look serious, others bored. They’re a snapshot of the 1970s: The men wear dashikis or bucket hats, the women’s hair is styled into crowning afros or corn rows or worn long and center-parted. The old women wear scarves tied daintily beneath their chins. Their skin color runs the gamut from milk white to coal black, but the vast majority is dark-skinned. A handsome blond youth from Seattle named Michael Rozynko stands out, flapping his hand over his mouth with narrowed eyes, looking pointedly side to side as if to avoid the camera’s gaze.

  Jones upped the ante as his speech wore on: He would rather die than return to the United States. Wouldn’t they?

  He would rather die than surrender a single one of his people to the fascists. Wouldn’t they?

  He would rather die than endure more harassment. Wouldn’t they?

  He suggested they protest their treatment by committing revolutionary suicide, introducing the notion to rank-and-file members for the first time, and took a vote. Only two people raised their hands in favor of mass suicide, according to a survivor: Maria Katsaris and Harriet Tropp. Everyone else wanted to fight; they didn’t come to the promised land to die—they came to thrive. They still believed Jones was sincere when he promised them a better life for themselves and their children.

  On September 9, Jeffrey Hass returned to Jonestown. This time he flew up on a Guyana Defense Force plane, with several reinforcements: a court marshal, a superintendent of police, and a local constable. Justice Bishop told him the writ compelling Jones and John Victor Stoen to appear in Georgetown could be served by posting it at three locations in the community. When the party’s Land Rover turned down the road into Jonestown, they noticed the security post, a small shed where guards radioed ahead to announce the arrival of guests, had been camouflaged with branches. It was the first sign of trouble. As they drove into the main area, again a menacing crowd gathered; here was the enemy Jones warned them about. Hass again asked to see Jones, and was again told he was gone. He was surprised to see Harriet Tropp there, no longer acting the friendly tourist. The court marshal read the writ aloud, then tried to hand it to Tropp. She let it fall to the ground, then kicked it away. The lawmen nailed copies on several buildings, but residents tore them down just as quickly. A group of brawny young men surrounded the party, arms crossed, biceps flexed. Some wore army fatigues. The officials told Hass to wait in the car. The superintendent of police, feeling the need to assert himself, asked residents to bring him all the weapons in the camp. They produced only two, a shotgun and a pistol, both of which were legally registered.

  Back in Georgetown, a perturbed Justice Bishop issued his third, and most serious, order: “It is ordered that a bench warrant be issued for the arrest of the infant John Victor Stoen now in custody of the Respondent, and that the said child be made a ward of the court and that leave is hereby granted for contempt of Court on Jim Jones …”

  When Paula Adams read the order to Jones over the radio, he took a second suicide vote. This time, the number of advocates rose to three: Maria, Harriet, and Carolyn Layton.

  His followers overwhelming desire to live didn’t faze Jones. On the next day, a Saturday, he radioed Marceline in San Francisco and told her the community was prepared to die unless the arrest order was cancelled or they were given shelter in another country. He gave her a list of nations to contact to request political asylum, including Uganda. “That chap [Idi Amin] seems to be able to stand up for what he believes,” he said of the mass-murdering leader. Jones then gave his San Francisco aides a chilling ultimatum: They were to find Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy Reid and tell him that the entire Jonestown community would commit mass suicide at five-thirty that afternoon unless he stopped the custody proceedings. In a taped message for Reid, Jones distorted the suicide vote, stating “all but two” residents were willing to die over the matter.

  He gave his aides in the radio room at 1859 Geary Boulevard a little over two hours to find Reid. Teri Buford and Debbie Blakey frantically called FBI offices and police departments around the country asking if the politician was in town, but authorities refused to help them. Meanwhile, Dick Tropp, a former English instructor, drafted a final press release, sobbing as he composed it. Jones had assigned him the task of explaining to the world why they had committed so-called revolutionary suicide. Everyone in the room had loved ones in Jonestown—wives, babies, mothers. They popped tranquilizers to tamp down their emotions as they carried out Jones’s agonizing dicta.

  Finally, they tracked down Reid in Gary, Indiana, where he was visiting a friend. Marceline Jones, two aides, and Temple lawyer Charles Garry flew to Chicago, and drove to the house where Reid was staying. He wasn’t there, but his wife assured the visitors that the Guyana Defense Force wouldn’t attack Jonestown, and that Jones would not be arrested. Marceline relayed the information to Jonestown, and Jones called off the threatened mass suicide.

  When Hass returned to the Georgetown court on Monday, September 12, he learned that the custody suit had mysteriously ground to a halt. “We tried to get an arrest warrant for Jones, but the court clerk refused to sign it,” he later told a reporter.

  After the six-day siege concluded, a gloom settled over the settlement. Instead of enjoying the freedom land that their pastor had spent years selling them, residents felt shell-shocked. The crisis had passed, but Jones warned them that someday there might be a white night that they wouldn’t survive.

  The siege was the first rehearsal for Jonestown’s last night. Jones had presented his mass suicide idea to his top aides earlier—he called it the “last-stand plan.” The scheme was a pointed reference to Custer’s last stand of 1876, in which Lieutenant Colonel George Custer staged a final, suicidal attack on the Native American forces overwhelming his troops. Discussed in memos as if it were inevitable, the Temple’s last-stand plan called for the mass suicide of church members in a moment of crisis as a form of protest. Jones gave various triggers for the plan: to show solidarity with Chilean socialists, to protest capitalism, to defy America.

  For Jones’s lieutenants, pledging to die for Jim Jones was just another loyalty test. The more loyal you were, the more you wanted to die. The last stand was discussed among the Temple’s inner circle t
o the “point that it was boring,” one of his top aides would later tell the press. After the mass suicide, Jones’s appointed angels—aides he’d designated to survive—would kill the Temple’s enemies, including defectors and certain public officials. The church had amassed millions of dollars in overseas accounts to finance the hit squad, and Teri Buford would later claim that Sandy Bradshaw, the probation officer and Temple gunrunner, was to be its head.

  Jones had taken the initial major step in his last-stand plan by sequestering his group to a remote location where he had complete control over them. But now he faced another hurdle: He couldn’t figure out how to kill them.

  CHAPTER 12

  BULLETS TO KILL BUMBLEBEES

  The rank and file were unaware of the last-stand plan, of course. The leadership knew Temple members would not willingly kill themselves or their children. But Jones wanted the historical record to indicate that his followers agreed to commit mass suicide, so he laid the groundwork for this bald-faced lie. “Should anything happen that would kill Jim or bring about a last stand on the part of the organization in Guyana—please try to put both his life and death in perspective to the people,” Teri Buford wrote to Charles Garry’s secretary during the September crisis. “I am sure that many will say that it was perhaps a ‘crazy or hysterical act’ and my answer to that is that it has been the collective decision of the group and Jim for a long time that if it is not possible for us to live the lifestyle which we believe is the only fair and just way to live, then we believe we maintain the right to choose the circumstances of our deaths. If we do make a last stand, it will not be as an act of giving up but rather as a demonstration in the hopes some people will wake up.”

  Garry’s secretary, Pat Richartz, fired off a six-page response, upbraiding Jones for misinterpreting Newton’s concept of revolutionary suicide. Newton urged revolutionaries to go down fighting, not to kill themselves, she wrote. Richartz also questioned Jones’s brand of socialism, writing, “all roads lead to you—there doesn’t seem to be any independent thinking … or collective element in the decision making.”

  Buford herself was conflicted about the last-stand plan. At the height of the September crisis, she disobeyed Jones’s frantic demand to send down more guns and ammunition, fearing he would enact the mass extinction. As he raged over the airwaves from Guyana, she fiddled with the tuner knob on the shortwave radio in San Francisco, creating poor reception and distorting Jones’s voice. Debbie Blakey, who was in the room, later informed Jones of her actions.

  Jones’s bizarre threat lowered his credibility in Georgetown. US Consul Richard McCoy dismissed the stunt as a “psychological ploy.” Guyanese Ambassador Laurence Mann grew irritated at the letters flooding his office suggesting “people would die” if Jones didn’t get custody of John Victor Stoen. Deputy Prime Minister Reid was particularly embarrassed by it; as the nation’s second-in-command, he had his share of headaches, including a massive sugar strike that was crippling Guyana’s fragile economy. After the crisis was averted, he told Jones’s representatives to direct all communication to his inferior, Minister of Home Affairs and Immigration Vibert Mingo.

  On the trip upriver to Jonestown, Stanley Clayton, who arrived shortly before the siege, was in fine spirits. “It feels so good to be free,” he told another church member, a young woman. “It feels so good to be in a socialist land under black leadership.”

  The woman believed Stanley meant Temple members were finally free to do whatever they wanted. And what she wanted to do on that slow river journey was to have sex with a brawny Guyanese deckhand, so she did.

  The next night, an angry Jones called her before the entire pavilion. She’d broken the Temple rule forbidding relationships with outsiders. “I did it because Stanley said I was free,” she told the crowd. Jones then turned his fury on Stanley, and his guards followed suit, shoving and slapping him. His attempts to explain himself were futile.

  The next day, when he complained about this treatment to his buddy Ed Crenshaw, Ed advised him to go with the flow.

  Stanley now understood Stanley Gieg’s cryptic remark to him on the ride into Jonestown. When Stanley told Gieg, who was driving the tractor-trailer, how excited he was to be in the promised land, Gieg cut him off. “It’s not what you think,” he’d said, refusing to elaborate.

  As they bumped down the pitch-black road for nearly an hour, Stanley realized that Jonestown was even more remote than Redwood Valley. And when he arrived at the camp, eager to spend the night with Janice, a counselor told him there was a mandatory three-month separation for all newcomers who were in a relationship but not married to each other. It was the first he’d heard of it. He moved into a cottage full of strangers with disappointment.

  During the six-day siege, he was shocked, like everyone else, when Jones started talking about suicide. He thought perhaps it was a loyalty test. He saw Jones’s secretaries raise their hands to commit revolutionary suicide, but he voted against death with the rank and file. He held a cutlass against the jungle for six days because everyone else was doing it. He was going with the flow, as Eddie told him to do. At one point during the crisis, Angela Davis and Huey Newton called in to encourage the community, and Stanley’s spirits were buoyed when he heard Newton’s voice booming over the PA system: “I want the Guyanese government to know that you’re not to be messed around with.” A rumor had gone around that Newton was Stanley’s uncle—a falsehood Stanley didn’t bother correcting—and as Newton spoke, some residents turned to give him a thumbs-up. Janice, however, was terrified. He did his best to comfort her; Jim Jones would never let anything happen to them, he assured her, folding her against his sweat-drenched T-shirt.

  For many, Jones’s manic, at times incoherent, rantings during the crisis became background noise; they responded by rote with a cheer or a curse when everyone else did. Others secretly wondered why Jones, who maintained he was God, didn’t use his paranormal powers to save them, or why the enemy would hike through the virtually impassable jungle when they could simply drive into the settlement. Yet others noticed a pattern: Jones waited until midafternoon to call the alerts, after workers had picked enough food for supper.

  One man who did take Jones’s threat seriously was Temple attorney Gene Chaikin.

  Gene was a Los Angeles real-estate lawyer when he and his wife, Phyllis, met Jones in 1972. Both came from leftist backgrounds, and Jones’s socialist message struck a chord in them. In short order, they moved from Los Angeles to Ukiah with their small children and became part of the planning commission. Gene was part of the leadership group that flew down to Guyana to scout out the area that would become Jonestown and negotiate the lease. By 1977, however, the Chaikin marriage, like that of many other church members, was strained by Jones’s constant demands on their time. The family was further weakened when their children were moved into other members’ homes to be raised communally.

  During the September crisis, Gene flew to Guyana from San Francisco to calm Jones down. But once he was there, he realized Jones was ratcheting up the crisis as a strategy. Reid had always supported the Temple in indirect ways, Gene warned him; putting the politician on the spot would only antagonize him. Charles Garry told Chaikin that the mass suicide threat was “dumb, stupid shit,” and the Temple’s Guyanese attorneys concurred that Jones’s behavior was unbecoming of a leader.

  But Jones refused to listen to Gene, so the attorney grabbed his suitcase and stormed out of Lamaha Gardens to hail a cab to the airport. He’d reached his breaking point. He was leaving Peoples Temple and Jim Jones behind.

  In a letter to Jones, Gene elaborated on his reasons for defecting: “A relatively modest and ultimately controllable incident was made, by you, into a catastrophe of major proportions involving the full expenditure of such goodwill and energies as we have available… . The whole thing was handled in a hysterical and destructive fashion.” He conceded that Jones had won this round, but what would he do when Hass returned? “I have substantially los
t confidence in your leadership,” Gene continued. “You will ultimately alienate all of your friends and tear the organization and people apart.

  “I left because I am no longer willing to live in a situation of weekly or biweekly crisis, and the atmosphere of anxiety, hysteria and depression that exist with it.” His letter is remarkable for its bluntness. He stopped short of calling Jones insane, suggesting, instead, that he suffered a “lack of balance—both of perspective and behavior.” Although Gene agreed that creating a “conspiratorial atmosphere” in California had encouraged members’ devotion to the cause, the tactic had gotten out of hand in Guyana, where Jones had become so uptight that he was using “bullets to kill bumblebees.” The only way Gene could make himself heard above the “claque of ‘yes people’” surrounding the Temple leader was by taking a dramatic action himself, by leaving.

  Gene’s move was audacious, but Jones had the upper hand: Gene’s two children—Gail, sixteen, and David, fourteen—were in Jonestown. Gene asked Jones to send them out, and Jones initially agreed, but then sent Gene’s estranged wife instead. “Phyllis will come in tonight and I suppose we will talk,” Gene wrote when he heard about Jones’s about-face. “But I think you and I now have very little to say to each other.”

  Jones began to employ this tactic to prevent other defections: Whenever a resident left Jonestown for a medical checkup or some other business, he made sure at least one of the person’s relatives stayed behind as ransom in case the resident tried to flee. Gene Chaikin was forced to return to Jonestown when Jones withheld his children, and he soon started complaining of a host of mysterious ailments: muscle spasms, chills, sudden sleepiness, poor balance, blurred vision, and an acute desire to cry. Perhaps he suspected he was being drugged into submission, but he was never able to confirm it.

  After Chaikin’s marriage broke up in Jonestown, Jones assigned school secretary Inez Wagner to seduce and spy on him. Gene made the mistake of falling in love with her, even as she reported their private conversations to Jones, who no longer trusted him after his attempted defection. Jones feared Gene would mouth off and routinely sedated him whenever important visitors came to Jonestown. Teri Buford discovered this one day when Maria Katsaris brought a tray of grilled cheese sandwiches to the radio room, where she was working. Most were sliced diagonally, but one was cut straight across. Buford reached for it, but Katsaris stopped her, saying, “That one’s for Gene.” The implication was clear.