A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  Jonestown principal Tom Grubbs suggested a new method of behavior modification. He wrote Jones a memo suggesting troublemakers be confined to a small, enclosed space, that was “light tight, well ventilated, and soundproof.” Eventually, he settled on a shipping crate, which was lowered into an earthen tunnel that the community used for dry storage.

  “The theme idea is to deprive all sensation as much as possible,” Grubbs wrote. He explained that a supervisor would sit beside the crate to monitor the occupant, but would not communicate with the person for the first three days. Then, the second phase, as Grubbs envisioned it, began: “Short communications disparage all selfish, capitalistic behavior characteristics specifically. Communications should be 10–30 seconds long and not more often than once an hour. Statements need to be carefully thought out for clarity, brevity, emotional and intellectual impact. At this time the monitor does not engage in 2-way conversation at all.

  “Beginning about 30 hours after the onset of hallucinations, the substitution phase is initiated and with it the first 2-way communication… . My studies never mentioned any of the subjects as going insane, but that they did pass through disorientation and re-orientation and that it took nearly a week to appear ‘normal’ after the experience.”

  The first person sentenced to “the box,” as it came to be known, was Dana Truss, seven, who was in trouble for slapping another child. At the time, Dana’s mother was in California, desperately trying to get her back. She’d been told that Dana, accompanied by her grandma, would only be at the project for six to eight weeks, as a kind of educational field trip. But two months had turned into nearly a year, and she’d hired a lawyer who was provoking Jones’s ire.

  Groups of schoolchildren were brought over to witness Dana’s confinement. Edith Roller joined one of the groups, and wrote in her journal that Dana cried out for water as principal Grubbs sat taking notes. He dismissed Dana’s pleas, saying she was just trying to get attention, and the children listened with wide eyes as their playmate screamed. If they misbehaved they’d be next, they were told.

  The path to the box passed the cottage of Hyacinth Thrash, who rarely made it to rallies anymore and thus wasn’t aware of its existence. She saw kids released from the box walk by her, shaking and disheveled, and called out to them, “What happened?” but they only quickened their pace, refusing to talk to her.

  CHAPTER 17

  DRILL

  On the evening of February 13, 1978, a ham-radio aficionado in Bethesda, Maryland, was twirling the dial on his transceiver when he picked up a distress call from South America. The frantic man on the other end of the line identified himself as Larry Schacht, a doctor stationed at a mission village in Guyana. He needed to consult an obstetrician about a breech birth; the woman’s life was in peril. The ham patched Schacht through to his neighbor, Albert Greenfield, an ob-gyn.

  Schacht told Greenfield that his patient was pregnant with twins and two weeks overdue; she’d been in labor for fourteen hours and wasn’t progressing. Schacht explained that he was a general practitioner and had no experience with what he feared was a breech delivery. Furthermore, it was impossible to airlift the woman to Georgetown: The nearest jungle airstrip was unlit and covered in fog.

  Greenfield urged Schacht to perform an emergency C-section. He talked him through the entire procedure, starting with how to place the woman on the operating table. Schacht mentioned that the only anesthesia he had on hand was ether, and as Greenfield hung up, he had little hope that the mother or her twins would survive the ordeal.

  The next day, the ob-gyn asked his neighbor to radio the project to check on the patient’s status. To his relief, he was told that the mother had lost two pints of blood, but was doing fine, as were her twin girls. The Washington Star published a story on the birth, and Ambassador Laurence Mann honored Greenfield in a ceremony at the Guyanese embassy in Washington, D.C. The obstetrician humbly told the press that the real hero of the story was Larry Schacht.

  But there was one problem: the birth story was a complete fabrication. An Amerindian woman did deliver twin girls in Jonestown, but she did so vaginally, according to a survivor who assisted with the birth.

  Jones concocted the entire tale as propaganda.

  Laurence Eugene Schacht came from a family of progressive Jews living in Houston. His parents were communist sympathizers. His older brother Daniel was arrested for wearing an army uniform during an anti-Vietnam protest in a case that eventually went to the Supreme Court. He won on free speech grounds, and the court revoked an obscure law prohibiting citizens from wearing uniforms while ridiculing the military.

  In Texas, the Schacht family was harassed both for its ideologies and heritage. Vigilantes fired shotguns at their house, burned a cross on their lawn, and threatened to kill them in letters and late-night phone calls. Schacht’s high-school classmates remember him as a Bob Dylan wannabe, a dark and brooding kid who liked to sing folk songs about injustice. But in his late teens, he started using crystal meth, supplied by a friend who was a chemist. The drug made him paranoid; he told his friends that the FBI was following him.

  In 1969, he had a vision telling him to go to California, an acquaintance would later tell the FBI, and once there, he had another vision telling him to join Peoples Temple. He arrived in Redwood Valley with a stepladder of injection marks scarring his forearms. The Temple dried him out and sent him to medical school, and he graduated from the University of California at Irvine with high honors.

  But a mere five weeks into his required internship at San Francisco General Hospital he disappeared. He wrote his family that he was going to complete his residency in Guyana, but the truth was later revealed: Jones had ordered him to Jonestown. Schacht procured and administered various narcotics to the Temple leader while he was in California, and Jones wanted him to continue this personal care in Guyana.

  The lack of hands-on experience that doctors gain during their residencies hindered Schacht in Jonestown, where he paused frequently during patient consultations to thumb through reference books.

  When the Guyanese Minister of Health, Hamilton Green, heard the twenty-nine-year-old was practicing medicine in his country without a license, he tried to stop him. In the United States, doctors are legally required to complete at least three years of a residency before they can practice medicine, and in Guyana, the requirement is a year. Green wanted Schacht to complete his residency at a Georgetown hospital, but Jones refused to let him leave Jonestown. Privately, Jones feared Schacht wouldn’t return to the settlement if he let him go. Publicly, he tried to prove Schacht was indispensable by fabricating the C-section story.

  Jonestown residents regarded Schacht as a strange bird. Survivors would describe him as a loner who was “extremely intelligent but emotionally unstable.” One man complained to the FBI that Schacht “enjoyed giving prostate exams to men who didn’t need them.”

  As the sole doctor for nearly one thousand people, a third of whom were senior citizens, Schacht was overwhelmed by his caseload. He frequently used the settlement’s ham radio to consult with the Medical Amateur Radio Council (MARCO), a group of ham-radio users working in health care who tuned their sets to a certain frequency every evening to provide free consultations to far-flung listeners. Schacht’s questions were so simplistic—about basic procedures to set broken bones or treat skin rashes—that the MARCO members were surprised to learn he was a practicing physician.

  Schacht worked fifteen to sixteen hours a day, after which, he told Jones, he resorted to knocking himself out with Valium. He was always behind on his appointments, and worried that his coworkers would write him up for a poor attitude or job performance.

  Like Jones, he had depressive tendencies, and he self-medicated to control his moods.

  “I am a pisser when I wake up, hate to face an onslaught of human needs. Spoke today about wishing I could blow my brains out,” he wrote to Jones on January 1, 1978.

  His one free day each week was Wednesday, when
he stopped healing Jonestown residents and instead researched ways to kill them. When Jones directed the medical team to find a way to carry out the mass suicide, Schacht responded with enthusiasm. He ordered a microscope, slides, and test tubes for his makeshift lab and asked the nursery to save empty baby-food jars for him, as they worked well for growing microbial cultures. A few weeks later, he wrote Jones that he felt encouraged because he’d succeeded in producing a culture that looked like the botulinum bacteria under the microscope, but that may have been tetanus. In another update, he noted that he was working on twenty-one different cultures, including a fungus that could be injected into people to make it look like they had died from meningitis. “I need a good book on forensic medicine—[something that] tells many different ways people are actually killed,” he wrote. “There is a good chance I can develop germicidal means—botulism and staphylococci in process now. But with time pressing in (and) my confidence level low, my expertise is lacking in this area. I am quite capable of organizing the suicide aspect and will follow through and try to convey concern and warmth throughout the ordeal, have told the rest of the team this and Joyce Parks and myself will commit suicide last after graduating our adult comrades on the team.”

  Through his research, he decided botulism was the best bet for mass death: The botulinum toxin is the most poisonous substance known to exist; a single gram is capable of killing more than a million people. It causes death by paralyzing muscles—including the chest muscles—resulting in respiratory failure. The toxin is also fairly easy to produce. Its spores thrive in homemade preserves, and its cheap and easy production have made it the biological weapon of choice for murderers ranging from Pancho Villa to Saddam Hussein. And surely Schacht must have heard of the fifty-nine people in Michigan who were hospitalized in 1977 after eating contaminated jalapeño peppers at a Mexican restaurant; it was the largest reported outbreak of food poisoning in US history.

  But botulism is not a perfect killer. It is slow acting. Symptoms, including slurred speech, weak muscles, and difficulty swallowing, take up to seventy-two hours to develop, and death can take days.

  Another culture he succeeded in growing, staphylococcus aureus, wasn’t an ideal killer either. Commonly known as staph, the bacterium thrives in unrefrigerated meat and dairy products. Although faster acting than botulinum toxins, staphylococcal toxin’s worst effects—vomiting, diarrhea, and fever—are rarely fatal.

  Undeterred, Schacht returned to his lab.

  * * *

  On the same day that the Washington Star published an article on the alleged C-section, Guyana’s principal newspaper, the Guyana Chronicle, ran a letter to the editor blasting the Temple. The Chronicle had printed a puff piece a few days earlier describing the agricultural project in glowing terms, and the angry reader accused the Temple of aggressive self-promotion and chastised the paper for publishing “hand-outs … from persons who may have their own purposes to serve.” The author was no one less than the powerful Minister of Development, Desmond Hoyte.

  When Temple staff in Georgetown read the letter to Jones over the radio, his paranoia skyrocketed. He called the letter a slap in the face, and feared that the entire Guyanese cabinet was distancing itself from him. To make matters worse, one of his closest allies, Foreign Minister Fred Wills, had recently been fired for allegedly mishandling funds.

  By the early months of 1978, the negative press and rumors swirling about the Temple had reached the Guyanese populace. A large community of Guyanese expatriates lived in the United States, where they clipped news articles about the controversial church and mailed them home. When Jordan Vilchez and other members panhandled in Georgetown, they were asked blunt questions: Were residents free to leave Jonestown? Was there an armed guard posted at the entrance? How was the project financed?

  A former government official railed against the church on a popular Georgetown radio station: “Who are these people from Peoples Temple and who knows anything about them? Who are they to drive around town with a foreign license plate—what would happen if we were to go to America and drive around with our plates?”

  Jones feared the Stoens would use the divisiveness to their advantage. His aides shot off a new round of thinly veiled suicide threats to Guyanese officials, pressing them to take a stand on the custody case. “Why in hell’s half acre can’t a community of 1,000 people who have no indulgences or excesses but their own voluntary commitment to Guyana be guaranteed the safety that none of their residents will be moved?” Sharon Amos wrote cabinet members.“Are we wanted here or what?”

  Hoyte’s letter to the editor seemed to confirm Jones’s fear that Hoyte, Prime Minister Burnham’s heir apparent, had it in for him. Previously, Hoyte had complained about the settlement’s use of the Guyanese Defense Force planes to airlift patients to the capital, and five days later, the army started billing the Temple for flights.

  On February 16, at six in the morning, shortly after his Georgetown staff read him Hoyte’s letter, Jones got on the loudspeaker and ordered everyone to the pavilion. Edith wrote in her diary that by the time she reached the meeting space, the entire membership was crowded beneath the corrugated metal roof.

  Jones was livid. He ranted about shakeups in the Guyanese government, and suggested the CIA was behind them. The Cudjoe crew spotted Guyanese soldiers in Port Kaituma, and Jones feared they were amassing to attack Jonestown.

  In her diary, Edith noted that Jones slurred his words. He complained of a tooth infection, and periodically an assistant made a show of putting a “temporary filling” in his mouth. Most likely, he was high.

  Jones asked his followers for their take on the situation, and radioed his Georgetown reps to clarify the views of different government officials. He suggested the crisis could force the group to leave Guyana, and asked for opinions. Long lines of residents formed. Some suggested returning to the United States. Others wanted to move to a communist nation: Cuba, the Soviet Union, or various African countries. Edith wrote Jones a note suggesting they send able-bodied members to Africa to join a revolution. A guard carried her note to Jones, but he chose not to read it aloud. She then stood to make the same suggestion to the crowd, but her voice was drowned out in the hubbub. Jones shot down each alternative: They had too many nonworkers, he said, too many seniors and young children, for any country to take all of them, and he refused to leave anyone behind.

  Hours passed. A meager breakfast was served. Armed guards escorted groups of people to urinate behind a nearby building.

  As the day wore on, Jones effectively dismissed any option but revolutionary suicide. In the late afternoon, he told the astonished group that mercenaries were on their way to attack them.

  “It’s all over, they’re coming in right now to kill us,” he announced. He argued that it was better for them to die by their own hand because the CIA-backed soldiers would surely torture them as they had done to socialists in Chile. He leapt from one paranoid scenario to the next, each ending with mass suicide.

  After residents realized it was futile to argue with him—as he would just outtalk them or berate them into submission—his aides carried a large vat to a table at the front of the pavilion, along with towers of paper cups.

  He commanded them to line up and drink the “potion”—a dark liquid that he said would take about forty-five minutes to do its job. He assured them it was painless; they’d just feel as if they were falling asleep. After ensuring everyone had “crossed over,” he’d drink it himself.

  Some protested. They didn’t understand the jumps in his logic, or why he wanted to die over a letter to the editor. Guards forced these to drink first, marching them to the table and standing over them as they drained their cup, then leading them into the field next to the pavilion to lie down and wait for death. This intimidation stifled further rebellion. Seniors were allowed to remain seated and nurses carried trays to them. Everyone else joined the line. Someone asked Jones about the nursery workers and the babies, as well as the people w
orking in the kitchen and at the piggery. “They’ve already been taken care of,” he said.

  The planning commission members who’d partaken in the suicide drill in San Francisco wondered if it was another loyalty test. Small children failed to grasp the gravity of the situation. “Oh boy, I’ll get off the learning crew!” yelled a seven-year-old boy named Irvin Perkins. The line wound through the pavilion and stretched behind it to the radio room. It moved slowly. Some people had to be coaxed to drink. To others, suicide was more appealing than another day in Jonestown. Those who wanted to live sized up their options as they drew closer to the death vat. If it were just another loyalty test, and they refused to drink, they’d be branded as anarchists, or worse, traitors, and face days, weeks, or even months of harassment. Armed guards surrounded the pavilion, and Jones, sitting impassively in his green chair, warned that anyone who tried to flee would be shot.

  While some people went mute with disbelief and others sobbed with abandon, Tommy Bogue and Brian Davis joked around. “That’s not poison,” Tommy whispered to his friend. They laughed at the people who drained their paper cups then immediately dropped to the ground convulsing. They looked ridiculous, whether they were dying or not. Guards dragged them to the field by the arms. Tommy didn’t give a damn about socialism; he couldn’t wrap his brain around most of what Jones said. He was tired of the constant gloom and doom, the exhaustion, lousy food, and the tension. When Principal Grubbs showed his class the box, Tommy fantasized about climbing into it. Grubbs said it was soundproof; he wouldn’t have to hear Jones’s drivel anymore. He’d be left alone.

  When Jones saw the two boys joshing around, he bellowed into the microphone. “What are you laughing about?” Guards hustled them to the front of the pavilion, where Tommy didn’t miss a beat: “We’re just so happy to be dying for the cause, Father,” he responded in a sincere voice. He knew what he was supposed to say. Jones ordered them to get back in line. It was a turning point for both boys: They now knew Jones could not read their minds. He couldn’t even tell they were lying. He had no paranormal powers.