The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  Most, though not all, of the time Jones confined himself to adults. There were winsome underage girls in the Temple, and Jones had sex with at least one of them, a fourteen-year-old whose family found out and left the Temple, though without making the reason public out of respect for the cause. Jones sent emissaries to persuade them to return, but without success.

  Jones also crossed another sexual line. A young man recently recruited to the Temple, and immediately raised to a position of considerable responsibility due to Jones’s recognition of his organizational skills, was stunned after one service when his new leader mentioned casually, “I’ll fuck you in the ass if you want.” When he stammered, “No, thanks,” Jones grinned and said, “Well, if you ever want to, I can.”

  Jones had occasional sex with male followers. Never as often as he did with women, but on a regular enough basis that younger men leaders were warned by some of Jones’s previous male partners, “If you ask Father to fuck you in the ass, take a douche.” Whenever he discussed same-sex coupling with his inner Temple circle, Jones insisted that “I have to be all things to all people,” and some male followers either needed to be sexually humbled or else encouraged to become even more dedicated to the cause, and intercourse with Jones produced those results. Jones was clearly bisexual, though he chose not to openly admit it. For a long time, he discouraged gay relationships among his followers. Garry Lambrev, who made several abortive breaks with the Temple, left for good after Jones refused to allow him even the possibility of having a long-term male partner. “He said that if I had to have [gay] sex, I should go to some bar in San Francisco and have a one-night stand,” Lambrev said. “I wanted something more than that, and Jim wouldn’t allow it.” As with women followers, Jones showed some restraint in the men he approached, and, in those rare cases when he was turned down, didn’t insist.

  Most of his followers had no idea that Jim Jones had numerous sex partners among Temple members. But it was impossible for Jones to keep his activities entirely secret from a growing number of Temple leaders. He was openly challenged only once. Juanell Smart, a black woman married to David Wise, a white assistant Temple minister, noticed a constant among Jones’s conquests and confronted him: “Jim, why do you only sleep with whites and never with blacks?” Jones snapped back that whites needed to be more dedicated to the Temple’s cause, and to its rejection of bourgeois attitudes; sex with Jones helped them retain an appropriate, socialist attitude. Blacks didn’t have that problem, so there was no reason for him to have sex with them.

  * * *

  Sometime in early 1971, probably in March, Jones chose an unlikely new sex partner. In her first contact with him, Grace Stoen disliked Jones as a person, though she strongly believed in the social missions he espoused. Tim Stoen in some ways was the most important member of Peoples Temple after Jones himself. Whatever Jones planned—sometimes plotted would be a more accurate term—Stoen was responsible for keeping it within the law. He was someone Jones couldn’t afford to alienate, let alone lose. Yet Jim Jones made his way into Grace’s bed.

  Around the end of 1970, it became common knowledge within Temple membership that all was not well between the Stoens. Survivors remember Grace complaining about her husband’s ego, and his penchant for leaving her alone at home while he counseled Jones at any hour. At some point, she mentioned that she and Tim had not been intimate for months. Jones made it his business to know every bit of personal gossip about his followers. Information cards on prospective members were constantly updated, and so were cards about current members. As soon as Grace Stoen began grumbling about her husband, Jones knew.

  Jim Jones Jr. thinks his father always lusted after Grace, who, like Karen Layton, was very attractive: “He wanted to get in her pants. It’s that simple.” Even so, Jones had to recognize the risk involved. Tim Stoen was no meek Larry Layton. It would be bad enough if the man he relied on for expert legal advice left the Temple, and worse because, next to Jones himself, Tim Stoen knew all the Temple secrets. Jones, his natural paranoia exaggerated by drug use, was haunted by the belief that the FBI and CIA were eager for any potentially incriminating information about the Temple and its leader. Tim Stoen, seeking revenge on Jones for cuckolding him, would have plenty of dirt to dish.

  But Jones felt that he had the measure of the man. Tim Stoen was a passionate believer, if not in Jim Jones as God Himself, then at least in the Temple cause. Stoen could have made a fortune in private practice or as a partner in some venerable San Francisco law firm. He gave up not only personal wealth but professional prestige to hold down a staff job in the district attorney’s office of an isolated California county. His marriage was in trouble at least in part because of his devotion to his Temple obligations. Yet Stoen obviously believed that helping Jim Jones lead the way to a better world was worth these sacrifices.

  Another Jones trait was also in play. It was important to Jones that everyone else in Temple leadership demonstrate subservience to him. A special few were allowed more leeway than others. Jack Beam sometimes told less than worshipful stories about Father in the old days, and on occasion gently mocked Jones to his face. Archie Ijames cautioned Jones when he thought the Temple leader talked too much or too bluntly. Marceline was allowed to question some of Jones’s decisions, and Carolyn Layton had personal expectations of him that he allowed, though these were not always met. Still, they all acknowledged his supremacy. They might make suggestions, plead, or even argue, but they ultimately obeyed him. Jones’s relationship with Tim Stoen was different. Because of the legal acumen he possessed and Jones didn’t, Jones needed to treat Stoen almost as an equal. Ever since Stoen had joined Peoples Temple, Jones had no means of reminding him of his proper place in the Temple hierarchy, which might be above all other members, but still beneath Jim Jones. Then came an opportunity with Grace, who was unhappy with her husband—and had his permission to engage in sex with someone else. Stoen wrote in his memoir, Marked for Death, that he adopted an “open marriage” policy with Grace and took advantage of it himself with “a single lonely woman with five children.” If, at some point, Grace also wanted to stray, “I did not want to be a hypocrite.” Sometime during late March or April 1971, Grace Stoen became pregnant.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  FAMILY

  So far as almost anyone was aware, things were fine with Jones’s immediate family. Marceline Jones played an integral role in the Temple, helping to organize outreach programs, leading services in place of her husband when he was away from Redwood Valley, standing nearby when Jones was in the pulpit, coming forward sometimes to assist him in some way. Her public posture toward her husband never varied. Laura Johnston Kohl remembers, “Marceline seemed like she was just mesmerized by Jim. She would give him that adoring Nancy Reagan look.”

  The Jones children appeared to be thriving. Agnes remained frequently estranged, but Suzanne had grown into an attractive, self-assured young woman. Stephan, Lew, and Jimmy were generally boisterous, typical teen boys, and a fourth son had been added—Tim Tupper, the child of a Temple member, who was about Stephan’s age and had attached himself to the family. Though Jones and Marceline wouldn’t formally adopt Tim for a few more years, he’d already been accepted by them as a full-fledged family member.

  There were perks that all of them enjoyed. Though he kept the excursions from most of the Temple membership, Jones believed in family vacations. He took his brood to every World’s Fair, and they also made trips to Hawaii. A couple of sons accompanied their dad on a jaunt to Germany. These getaways were always great times, awkward only in the sense that if any lasted two weeks, Jones had Marceline along for one week and Carolyn for the other.

  The Jones kids had horses and a variety of pets. Besides dogs, there was a chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs, who occupied a cage just outside their house in Redwood Valley. Temple members were told that Jones had saved Mr. Muggs from death in laboratory experiments, though some later came to believe the chimp was purchased by Jones from a pet
store. Jim Jones Jr. remembers, “I think Stephan somehow saw [Muggs] tested and we got him instead of the ocelot I was supposed to get for my birthday.” The chimp became the unofficial Temple mascot.

  Other Temple youngsters learned that it was a good idea to be friends with the Jones boys—then you got to do more. The Jones gang of brothers and their pals were allowed to go to movies and wore spiffy sports gear. Some resentment grew among the general Temple membership about such favoritism, when the rest of the Temple kids and teens were expected to live as abstemiously as their parents. Carolyn Layton felt compelled to issue a statement: The Jones offspring needed extra privileges due to the constant pressure they felt because of outside threats to their father. And it was true that the Jones daughter and sons were under constant, sometimes emotionally crippling, pressure—not from outside threats against Jim Jones, but from their father’s own aberrant behavior.

  Forcing Carolyn on his children was one of the main issues. Jones insisted that they treat her with the same respect as Marceline, but it didn’t take. Although Carolyn wrote a rapturous note to her parents claiming “the children love me like a second mother,” Stephan felt no warmth. Carolyn’s relationship with Stephan couldn’t have been as close as she claimed; she didn’t spell his name correctly, identifying him as “Steven” in her letter to the Moores. Lew and Jimmy, both in many ways closer to their father than to Marceline, tolerated Carolyn. But all the children sympathized to some degree with their mother, and never considered Carolyn as a maternal replacement. Tension caused by what Stephan termed “a forced family” was constant.

  Jones’s additional sexual activities didn’t affect his children because, for a long time, they didn’t know about them. But his drug use had a particularly profound effect on the young Joneses, who soon realized that rather than lying down “meditating,” their father was passed out from self-medicating. There were pill bottles in medicine cabinets and trays of white liquid in the refrigerator. Once they found him facedown in the front hall. After Marceline revived him, Jones said to Stephan, “I’m sorry for the little scare, honey. There’s so much on me . . . I just can’t give any more.”

  The other children mostly compartmentalized—Jim Jr. says he had no idea of the extent of his father’s drug use until years later in Guyana—but Stephan was more sensitive to it. He’d suffered for some time from his own illness, congenital narrowing of the urethra that required surgery and catheterization. Jones explained that he couldn’t use his own healing powers to banish the ailment because suffering through the affliction would help Stephan grow as a leader. The youngster was pleased that Jones and Marceline both spent time with him at the hospital—“[It] looked like we were a family again, like everything might be okay.”

  But it wasn’t.

  Stephan Jones was twelve when he swallowed fourteen Quaaludes from a bottle on his father’s dresser, hoping to seem sick enough afterward to be allowed to skip at least some of a Wednesday night Temple meeting. Marceline, a trained nurse, saved his life, rushing Stephan to Ukiah General Hospital where he received emergency treatment. She and Jones had to subsequently endure a hospital meeting with psychiatric staff that was a condition of Stephan’s release. The boy deliberately took heavy Quaalude doses twice more, leaving suicide notes both times. In an essay written decades later, he mused that he didn’t intend to actually kill himself, just get more attention. Once he had to be taken to the hospital again, this time to one in San Francisco since Jones didn’t want to risk any more local gossip. Stephan remembers that on this drive, his brothers took turns slapping him “with a little too much verve” to keep him awake. After the first incident, and even after the second and third, Jim Jones still left his pills and liquid drugs in places where they were easy for anyone to find. Marceline always thought that in spite of his flaws as a husband, Jones was at least a good father. Now he was willing to endanger his children because he wanted his drug stash handy.

  * * *

  Two years after her husband had taken up with Carolyn Moore, Marceline might still have held some hope that he would tire of the other woman. Meanwhile, Marceline had her children, her rewarding job with the state, and a continuing role in Peoples Temple, if no longer as her husband’s primary advisor. It was hard, but she bore up. When Marceline’s younger sister Sharon divorced, Marceline invited her to move with her kids to Redwood Valley—it would have been a comfort for Marceline to have a sister so near. Sharon made a visit, but after hearing her brother-in-law preach about his godly powers had no desire to be around him. Marceline stayed in her own difficult marriage, perhaps thinking that after Carolyn Moore and drugs, things couldn’t get worse. But they did.

  For a short time, Marceline may not have been aware of Jones’s increased sexual activities with other Temple members besides Carolyn. Everyone in the Temple loved her, even the women sleeping with her husband. No one dropped cruel hints, hoping to enjoy her dismay. Certainly in the two years since Carolyn began sharing Jones’s bed, Marceline had learned to ignore clues that might cause her additional pain. She had enough problems already.

  Then on January 25, 1972, John Victor Stoen was born in Santa Rosa Hospital. The healthy infant’s birth certificate listed his mother as twenty-one-year-old Grace Lucy Grech Stoen and thirty-four-year-old Timothy Oliver Stoen as his father. Under California law, that established the two as John Victor’s legal parents. But on February 6, 1972, Tim Stoen signed a statement addressed “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN”:

  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.

  The child, John Victor Stoen, was born on January 25, 1972. I am privileged beyond words to have the responsibility for caring for him, and I undertake this task humbly with the steadfast hope that the child will become a devoted follower of Jesus Christ and be instrumental in bringing God’s kingdom here on earth, as has been his wonderful natural father.

  I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.

  In his memoir, Stoen said that as a lawyer he believed the statement, which was not an official affidavit, “had no legal effect, could not constitute perjury, and could never be used in court. . . . Everything about the declaration was untrue,” except that Stoen had chosen to believe that Jones was, in fact, John Victor’s father. If he had any doubt—or any hope—it wasn’t true, in 1972 there was no scientific means to prove or disprove paternity. The human leukocyte antigen test (HLA) compared HLA levels in a child’s blood to its putative father, but it did not rule out paternity. There was also a blood type matching test—a child with blood type O could not have been sired by a father with type AB blood. But DNA testing was still a decade away.

  Jones, Stoen wrote, came to him a week before the child’s birth to inform the stunned attorney that he was John Victor’s biological father. By Stoen’s account, his belief in Jones was so strong that “I could not fathom a good person saying such a thing if it were not true.” So, to reassure Jones that he would never “seek to take” the child from him, Stoen signed the “inordinately eulogistic” statement whose “only possible purpose [was to cause] me maximum embarrassment in the highly unlikely event of my ever trying to deprive Jones of John Victor.”

  Jones didn’t demand that the child be turned over to him immediately—John Victor would remain in Stoen and Grace’s care. But he now had the signed statement from Stoen, with all its humiliating overtones. Even if requesting it was substantially motivated by Jones’s own love for the baby and fear that he might somehow be denied
contact with him, another factor was certainly in play. Tim Stoen was acknowledging that Jim Jones slept with his wife and got her pregnant. The humiliation was deliberate—the statement could certainly have been worded in a kinder way toward Stoen. But Jones intended the document to humble not only Stoen, but also someone else. There was a line at the bottom of the statement for the signature of a witness. There were plenty of available Jones loyalists who would have gladly served in the role. But Jones had someone else specifically in mind, another person besides Stoen he believed needed reminding of her proper, subservient place. On the witness line, written in painfully neat cursive, appeared the signature “Marceline M. Jones.”

  Marceline’s mood when she signed can’t be determined, but her actions in the months immediately afterward prove that she had reached the end of her patience with Jones. She told someone that if she could be any animal, it would be a turtle, so that she could crawl back into her shell. Marceline found herself a new shell of sorts when she rented an apartment in Santa Rosa, about sixty miles south of Redwood Valley. Previously, she’d often spent a few weeknights away from home; her state job inspecting health care facilities required some travel. But now she was home only on weekends, when she obediently carried out her Temple duties, standing in for Jones when he was out of town and playing supporting roles during services if he wasn’t. During those public moments, her demeanor remained substantially the same, respectful of her husband, supportive of the Temple and its existing programs. Still, there was a sense that she had become emotionally withdrawn; new members felt Marceline was hard to get to know. Veteran Temple members noticed she was less active in developing new outreach efforts.