The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

by Shankar Vedantam

  “When I found out there were two planes, I was really terrified, because I knew that whatever I did would be a waste,” Layton later said. “But then I knew—I felt like, well, I have to go on…. I feel like I volunteered. I do not feel like—you know, I felt like what I was doing was right. And—but I was terrified because a lot of things went wrong. Like sixteen was always an unlucky number for our group. And sixteen people were getting on the plane…. I felt like everything was going bad, very wrong.”

  Jones and Katsaris had anticipated the problem. Right before Layton was dispatched, Katsaris told him, “If there are two planes, make sure you get on the first plane.”

  Layton pushed his way forward and demanded to board the first plane, a six-seater Cessna. While the other defectors were assembling on the airstrip, Layton snuck aboard. Representative Ryan ordered Layton off. The defector could not have been on board for more than a few seconds. He was searched, found clear, and allowed to reboard. He sat in the second row behind the pilot. Vern Gosney sat beside him, and Temple members Dale Parks and his sister sat in the back row. Another member, Monica Bagby, sat in front next to the pilot.

  A flatbed truck arrived at the airstrip and stationed itself close to the second plane. Layton knew that other Jones loyalists had been dispatched to the airstrip on that truck, but he did not know what they had been instructed to do. “I mean, I thought I was going to be on the plane and that was the end of it,” he would later say.

  “You expected the congressman to be on that plane also?” the psychiatrist who later interviewed him asked.

  “I expected everybody to be on that plane,” Layton replied.

  Layton’s plane began taxiing. But as defectors began to board the second plane with the congressman, the flatbed trailer swerved into the path of Layton’s plane, and gunmen on the trailer opened fire on Representative Ryan and the others.

  “I didn’t know these guys were coming out,” Layton would recall. “Well, I remember some people coming out in a truck. But the first I heard was, Boom! Boom! Boom!”

  Vern Gosney, sitting beside Layton, started screaming. “They are killing everyone! They are killing everyone!”

  Oh hell, Layton thought.

  Their plane had still not gotten off the ground. Layton was still intent on crashing his plane—even though it no longer made any sense. He started yelling at the pilot, “Get it off the ground, get it off the ground.”

  But the Cessna was blocked. The men on the trailer concentrated their fire on the defectors on the second plane.

  When Vern Gosney turned around, he saw Larry Layton was holding a gun.

  At point-blank range, Layton shot him. He pointed the gun through the front seat and shot Monica Bagby. Then he whipped around and placed the gun at Dale Parks’s chest. He pulled the trigger.

  Parks fell back in his seat. It took him a moment to realize that he was still alive. The gun had misfired. Parks leaped forward and wrestled Layton for the gun.

  Gosney, despite being injured, helped Parks subdue Layton. The would-be suicide terrorist was not a big man, and he certainly was not much of a fighter. Parks grabbed the gun. He whipped it around, pointed it at Layton, and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired again.

  The men on the flatbed trailer killed Representative Ryan and four others. There was wild chaos on the airstrip. The passengers on the Cessna deplaned. Shortly afterward, Guyanese police arrested Layton. He made no effort to escape.

  He signed a confession that said, “I, Larry Layton, take full responsibility for all the deaths and injuries that took place at the Port Kaituma airstrip. I had begged the Bishop Jim Jones that I be allowed to bring down the plane but he disapproved. My reason for supporting this was because I felt those people were working in conjunction with CIA to smear the Peoples Temple…. I went to the airport intending to bring down the plane. But when the shooting started, I also started shooting.”

  Layton was not responsible for all the deaths at the airstrip. The people he shot, Monica Bagby and Vern Gosney, were injured, but neither was dead. It was the men on the flatbed trailer who had killed the congressman and others.

  In the months and years to come, people would puzzle over why someone like Larry Layton would agree to become a suicide terrorist, and why he claimed responsibility for things he had never done. Later, at trial, defense and prosecution lawyers would clash over whether the airstrip confession was coerced. But from within the perspective of the tunnel, both Layton’s actions and his confession made total sense.

  Layton was not trying to take on blame that did not belong to him. Within the warped mental framework of the tunnel that was Jonestown, Layton was trying to take credit that did not belong to him.

  ——

  Five miles from the airstrip, after Layton had left on his suicide mission, Jones issued a prophecy that the plane carrying the congressman and defectors back to America was going to crash. He claimed it was another of his psychic revelations.

  “There’s one man there who blames, and rightfully so, Debbie Blakey for the murder of his mother, and he’ll stop the pilot by any means necessary,” Jones said, referring to Debbie Layton’s married name. “He’ll do it. That plane will come out of the air. There’s no way you fly a plane without a pilot.”

  Jones gave a long, rambling speech that ranged widely from animal rights to human rights abuses by Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. He warned his flock that Ryan’s visit was only the tip of the spear, that enemies were gathering to kill them all and torture the children. His paranoia had reached the point that he believed that Leo Ryan and the defectors would escape from the doomed plane via parachutes, come down over Jonestown, and open fire on the children.

  “What’s gonna happen here in a matter of minutes, is that one of those people on that plane is gonna, gonna shoot the pilot,” Jones told his audience. “I didn’t plan it, but I know it’s gonna happen. They’re gonna shoot that pilot and down comes that plane into the jungle, and we had better not have any of our children left when it’s over, ‘cause they’ll parachute in here on us…. So my opinion is that we be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over quietly because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act. We can’t go back. They won’t leave us alone…. When they start parachuting out of the air, they’ll, they’ll shoot some of our innocent babies.”

  The speech was taped, and later recovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It features the voices of several people in the audience, who declare they will do whatever Jones asks of them.

  In their final meeting with Larry Layton before they left Guyana, Rebecca Moore and Fielding McGehee were allowed to see the prisoner face-to-face. It was a short meeting. Moore embraced Layton, and McGehee shook his hand.

  In a letter to a family member of one of those who had died at Jonestown, Rebecca Moore, who later became a professor of religious studies at San Diego State University, summed up her visit. “I went to Jonestown thinking, hoping, my sisters had been murdered. I found out two things. One, they hadn’t been murdered. They chose to die. They made their choices. And two, Jonestown wasn’t such a terrible place. Jones was crazy, true. But people were committed to Jonestown, to the ideals they had…. There were few murders, if any: the children certainly were murdered. They had no choice. The others—they could have taken their chances with the guards, and a few did. Why were only two persons shot? I think it was because people could not bear to go on living knowing their life as a community was at an end.”

  In the Guyana prison, Layton gave every indication he was still inside the tunnel. He “feared being murdered in prison so he carved C-I-A on his stomach so that if he was killed, the rest of the world would know who was responsible,” said Stephan Jones, one of Jim Jones’s sons who was also imprisoned in Guyana.

  When Layton heard about the mass suicide, he immediately assumed it was because he had failed to carry out his mission prope
rly. If he had crashed the plane, everything would have turned out all right. He had failed, and so the community he had been trying to protect had been destroyed.

  Shortly after Layton’s mission and the mass suicide, a New Jersey psychiatrist named Hardat Singh Sukhdeo visited Guyana. He interviewed Layton on multiple occasions and made recordings of the conversations. “I just—I couldn’t accept, you know, that Jones had done that,” Layton told Sukhdeo at one point. “He was—that time period of my life, before I realized what a monster he was, he was like—like a supreme being to me.”

  “I looked upon him as like a savior,” Layton went on. “Not as a god creator, but as a savior. You know, like somebody that comes from a more highly evolved—well, maybe the most highly evolved being in the universe that has come to this planet to—straighten—bring in socialism. In a sense, you know, I saw him as the only god there is.”

  Layton was released from the Guyana prison because authorities were reluctant to prosecute crimes conducted by an American against other Americans. Layton was extradited to the United States and stood trial in California. Since his victims Vern Gosney and Monica Bagby were traveling in a foreign country and presumably under the jurisdiction of foreign laws, the case around Layton centered on whether he had conspired to kill Leo Ryan, who, as a member of Congress, was entitled to protection under U.S. laws even while traveling overseas.

  After multiple trials, Layton was sentenced to a lengthy prison term. He became a model prisoner. But the infamy of Jonestown and the fact that he was the only person convicted in its aftermath meant he was always turned down for parole. Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Layton came up for parole again. It was probably the worst time in the history of the nation for a suicide terrorist to be asking for clemency.

  But in a last minute twist, the man that Layton had shot, Vern Gosney, heard about the parole hearing. Gosney was now a cop in Hawaii. He bought an air ticket on his own and flew in for the hearing.

  The paranoia and psychological tunnels that produced the September 11 terrorists, Gosney said, were built from exactly the same kind of cloth as Jonestown. “That is what Jim Jones was talking about, being willing to die, suicide bombers, being willing to die for your cause,” Gosney told me in an interview. “I didn’t do anything overt to kill anyone, but I started to see how I could have very easily been in Larry’s position. We were all subject to the same indoctrination and mind control, and he was just as much a victim as I was.”

  Gosney’s emotional testimony on behalf of his “brother” Larry Layton turned the tide at the parole hearing. Layton was released shortly afterward and now lives in Northern California.

  While he was still in prison in Guyana, Layton once mused about what he had learned. How had a community that had been founded on the highest ideals lost its way so badly, and how had a man who’d started life as a Quaker become a suicide terrorist?

  “Where did things go wrong?” Layton asked himself in a letter he wrote back home from the Guyana prison. “First, when discipline became so austere that people were afraid to speak their minds. Second, religious states of mind and politics don’t mix well. The advance of democracy has coincided with increased secularization of religion. Third, power corrupts absolutely.”

  “There is a lot I will never know about Peoples Temple,” Layton said. “The only thing I can say is that it started out looking like a civil rights movement, and Jim Jones started out looking like Martin Luther King. Obviously, things turned out differently.”

  About obeying Jones’s summons to go to Guyana, he wrote, “I was a fool to leave California, but then I was a fool long before that.”

  As he sat in his prison cell in Guyana, it slowly became apparent to Layton that the world he had inhabited for so long was not the real world, that it was only a tunnel that had appeared to be the whole world. For years, Layton had falsely believed he was being hunted and persecuted, and that family members who tried to warn him about Jones were his enemies. Now, with the whole world against him, Layton found that there were still people like Rebecca Moore and Fielding McGehee who were willing to travel long distances to stand by his side and wave the family flag.

  “If there is one thing that jail teaches you, it is appreciation for freedom,” Layton wrote. “If there is one thing that being vilified and deserted teaches you, it is appreciation for those who stand by your side when it appears the world has turned against you. So much for my paranoia.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Shades of Justice

  Unconscious Bias and the Death Penalty

  This chapter focuses on an issue that has been widely explored in the media: racial disparities in the criminal justice system. New research into the hidden brain provides surprising information about the nature of these disparities.

  I am about to describe two murders that took place some years ago in Philadelphia; both crimes were solved and the court cases produced convictions. As you read these accounts, keep your eyes open for clues that tell you which of the men convicted of murder got a sentence of life in prison and which man got the death penalty.

  It was a lovely April morning in South Philadelphia. Raymond Fiss left his home at seven-thirty carrying a brown bag—lunch his wife, Marie, had packed for him. Fiss was a heavy man, two hundred sixty pounds crammed into a five foot eight frame. He slid into his silver and black convertible, and drove away. It was the last time Marie would see him alive.

  Fiss had a routine on Saturday mornings. Right before he reached the small beauty shop he owned at 2701 McKean Street, he tooted his horn outside a nearby home. This was the home of Catherine Valente, a septuagenarian who liked to get her hair done on Saturday mornings; she also did odd jobs for Fiss. That morning, Fiss wanted Valente to get the rollers ready before his other customers arrived. The beautician drove on, parked outside his salon, picked up his brown paper bag, and went to unlock the door.

  Angelina Spera was sitting in front of her bedroom mirror and had just finished combing her hair. Her house was across the street from the Fiss beauty salon. Spera got up to go downstairs to make some coffee, but lingered a moment by the window. She saw Fiss, who had owned the salon for twenty-one years, being accosted by a black man. She watched as Fiss opened the storm door and unlocked the main door of the salon. Spera heard him tell the accoster, “Get the hell out of here!”

  The man pushed Fiss into the salon. The moment they disappeared from sight, Spera raced to the telephone and called the police. She took the phone to her window to keep watch.

  Inside the salon, Fiss and his assailant went past chairs and hair dryers. The salon was tiny, about nineteen feet by seventeen feet. There was a small bathroom; it had just a toilet and a sink. We do not know what words transpired between the two men, but we do know that at a range of a little more than three feet, the man shot Fiss. Burning its way through the blue jacket Fiss was wearing, the .38 caliber bullet left a grayish residue. It blasted into the beautician’s chest, broke his sixth rib, was deflected by the bone, bruised his right lung, and tore his esophagus. It also tore his liver and sliced through his aorta. Dark blood surged into Fiss’s chest, and into the tunnels of tissue that the bullet had excavated. Having done its worst work, the bullet then shattered Fiss’s tenth thoracic vertebra, passed between his tenth and eleventh ribs, and came to rest just beneath the skin of his left back. The beautician fell to the ground. His legs protruded through the bathroom’s doorway. His eyes were open, but glazing.

  Catherine Valente arrived at the salon just in time to hear a pop that sounded like a car backfiring. The lights were not on inside the salon, but it was sunny outside and some natural light had entered the space. She saw a black man inside the salon. He half turned toward the back of the little room, and mumbled, “I’ll be back, I’ll be back.” He pushed past her and exited. From the building across the street, Angelina Spera did not get a good look at the man’s face, but she saw that he was carrying a brown paper bag. The man unlocked the beautician�
��s convertible, jumped into the car, and drove away at high speed.

  By the time police reached the beauty salon, Fiss was dead. Catherine Valente, who found the body, was in shock. Yes, she told police, she had seen the assailant, but no, she didn’t think she could identify him.

  “Would you be able to recognize this man if you saw him again?” the police asked her, according to a statement she signed at her home later that day.

  “I don’t think so,” she replied.

  Angelina Spera also told police she would not be able to identify the assailant.

  The killer had taken the money Fiss had on him—about thirty dollars. The murder incensed the community; crime was on the rise in Philadelphia. Three days after the murder, a meeting was called at Saint Edmond’s parish hall. Residents demanded two housing projects in the neighborhood be closed, and asked authorities to keep black “outsiders” away from white neighborhoods. There was intense pressure on the police department to crack the case, but the trail was cold. The man who’d killed Fiss had vanished.

  Six days after the murder, Catherine Valente was sitting by the television as the twelve o’clock news on Channel 6 got under way; the picture was on but the sound was off. She saw a mug shot of a man accused of robbing a jewelry store.

  “That’s him! That’s him!” she shouted to her daughter. “He’s on television, he’s on television!”

  On the same day that South Philadelphia residents were accusing authorities of not doing enough to protect them from crime, two black men showed up at Gentile’s Golden Nugget jewelry store at 1910 East Passyunk Avenue in Philadelphia, about one and a half miles from the beauty salon where Fiss was murdered. The owner of the jewelry store, Vincent Gentile, buzzed them in. A third man was close behind. The men were interested in gold charms. Gentile had the charms in a locked case. The men inquired about a King Tut charm, and the jeweler told them it cost five hundred fifty dollars. They asked to see it. Gentile fetched his key.