The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  This second story was also worrisome, and now Jones decided to act. On Tuesday morning, his Redwood Valley followers received orders to gather in the Temple parking lot. Even Temple kids were kept out of school so they could join their parents on the buses waiting in the lot. Only after they had boarded and were heading south was an explanation offered: the Examiner had printed something bad about Father and the Temple. Temple members hadn’t marched or protested in San Francisco against the Fillmore District’s deliberate demolition or in support of any other public cause, but they were summoned into action for this. Jones’s followers were dropped off in front of the Examiner’s building; some were given signs to wave (“This Paper Has Lied”), and everyone was instructed, “Keep marching, and don’t talk to anyone.” The protest garnered considerable coverage. Kinsolving, delighted at the response, came out to personally greet the protesters, who walked and waved their signs for several hours.

  On Tuesday they were back again, bolstered by a busload of the Temple’s students from Santa Rosa Community College. Kinsolving’s third installment, “D.A. Aide Officiates for Minor Bride,” focused on Stoen marrying teen Mildred Johnson to another Temple member. Kinsolving questioned whether Stoen was properly certified to do so—Stoen “contended, ‘I meet all the requirements of the State Civil Code,’ ” but the reporter didn’t agree. Kinsolving quoted “Mr. and Mrs. Cecil Johnson” of Indianapolis, Mildred’s parents, former Temple members who’d relocated to Mendocino County with Jones, became disenchanted with him, and returned to Indiana. The Johnsons told of how Jones predicted nuclear catastrophe in July 1967, and promised followers they’d survive only by moving west with him. Much worse was Kinsolving’s paraphrasing of the Johnsons’ description of how Jones tricked followers into believing he could read minds: “[He] uses people to visit potential church members, noting anything personal in the house, like addresses on letters, types of medicine in the medicine cabinet, or pictures of relatives. Then, when [the prospective members] show up in church, he tells them things about their ailments and the kinds of pills they take.”

  Stoen responded in the article for Jones and the Temple: “I don’t remember anything like this. I believe Jim’s gift is authentic.”

  There were still five installments scheduled, and the Temple protesters had no intention of giving up. Their numbers increased daily, and so did coverage of the protest by other Bay Area media. On Wednesday, when the Examiner ran Kinsolving’s “Probe Asked of People’s [sic] Temple,” John Todd, one of the paper’s editors, came outside to meet with Jones. That day’s installment was by far the weakest. Its gist was that Rev. Richard G. Taylor, a former pastor of Ukiah’s First Baptist Church and now a denominational regional official, had asked the Mendocino County district attorney and sheriff to investigate alleged Temple misconduct, including any possible involvement in the suicide of a local woman. Jones told Todd that Kinsolving must have some personal grudge against him. Stoen suggested ominously that what the Examiner had printed so far was “morally reprehensible and legally libelous.” Jones and Todd agreed that the Temple leader would meet with Examiner reporters, and Kinsolving would be excluded. But Todd would not agree that certain elements Jones considered objectionable—for instance, identifying him as “The Prophet”—would be eliminated from subsequent installments.

  Jones need not have worried. Examiner senior editors and the newspaper’s attorneys made the decision to cancel the four final articles. These were increasingly accusatory, alleging that the Temple stole from Maxine Hawpe’s estate and threatened “Mrs. Cecil Johnson” by phone for her family’s cooperation with Kinsolving. The reporter had tracked down Whitey Freestone, one of Jones’s favorite targets for verbal abuse before he quit the Temple, and Whitey and his wife, Opal, had lots of nasty, but unsubstantiated, things to say. Rev. George Bedford, pastor of San Francisco’s Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, told about Jones and other Temple members abusing his congregation’s trust, and Rev. L. S. Jones of the city’s Olivet Baptist Church, who’d lost members to the Temple, called Jones a “sheep stealer.” Bedford claimed that he’d recently buried “three [members] who became involved with Jones and the People’s [sic] Temple.” Kinsolving also wrote that 4,700 among Ukiah’s total population of 10,300 were Temple members, when in fact only a few hundred Jones followers remained in town.

  “The People’s [sic] Temple and Maxine Hawpe,” “The Reincarnation of Jesus Christ—in Ukiah,” “Jim Jones Defames a Black Pastor,” and “Sex, Socialism and Child Torture with Rev. Jim Jones” were never published in the Examiner, even though subsequent events proved some of Kinsolving’s allegations in the stories to be true, particularly that Temple members were punished in cruel and unusual ways for minor transgressions.

  Jones guessed that Kinsolving wouldn’t let the matter rest. To eliminate the Examiner reporter as a threat, Jones turned to one of the newest Temple members. In Brazil, evangelist Ed Malmin’s teenage daughter, Bonnie, had lived for a while with the Jones family. They lost contact for several years, but in 1971 Bonnie, now married to a former Bible student and living in California, reconnected with the Joneses. She attended some Temple services and eventually joined. She resumed a warm friendship with Marceline, and Jones appointed Bonnie to the Planning Commission. She was shocked to hear other members talking about Jones’s serial infidelity to Marceline, but wrote later that Jones “never tried anything illicit with me.”

  After Kinsolving’s first articles appeared in the Examiner, Jones asked Bonnie, who was very attractive, “Do you think you could seduce Kinsolving and get him off our back?”

  She felt an obligation to protect the church in any way necessary and told Jones that she would try. But she never had to follow through because Jones found a better way to stymie the reporter.

  To counter the four negative Examiner articles that had been published, Jones instructed that packets of positive newspaper stories be gathered and sent to various publications, including church magazines. Some material appeared under the letterhead of Rev. John V. Moore, Carolyn’s father and a distinguished leader in the regional Methodist Church. Though there was no actual message from Reverend Moore, the clear implication was that he had collected and sent the glowing stories rather than Jones and his followers. Moore learned about it only when he was contacted by the editor of Christianity Today, who wanted to know why he was endorsing Peoples Temple. Moore was furious, and became more so when Lester Kinsolving found out about the packets and demanded an interview with him. Grudgingly, Moore granted the interview at his house across the bay from San Francisco. It didn’t go well. Kinsolving was hard at work on the follow-up to the Temple stories, and knew that two of Moore’s daughters were members. Moore recalls, “It was not a friendly conversation. He seemed to want facts and if not that, then innuendo. I asked him to leave and he did, but after he did I discovered that he had left his briefcase behind.”

  Moore decided he would send Kinsolving’s briefcase back to him, but spoke to his daughters Carolyn and Annie before he did. When Moore mentioned the briefcase, they asked him and their mother, Barbara, to come to the Temple at once to discuss the matter. The Moores went, but as a precaution left the briefcase at their house. At the San Francisco temple, Jones and a few other Temple leaders demanded to be given the briefcase. Moore refused. Finally, Jones and the others seemed to give up.

  “They kept pleading and pleading and then, all at once, stopped,” Reverend Moore remembers. “My wife and I went home, and I sent the briefcase back to the reporter. Only later did we learn that while we were kept occupied at the Temple, someone, I suspect our daughter Annie, went to our house and copied everything that was in the briefcase. So after that, Jim Jones knew exactly who [Kinsolving] had been talking to, and what facts he had or didn’t have about Peoples Temple.”

  After perusing copies of the briefcase contents, Jones felt reasonably certain that Kinsolving didn’t have enough new information to write more Temple exposés—or, at least, t
hat there wasn’t enough solid evidence for the Examiner’s management to agree to publish them. Still, he didn’t intend to be surprised by the print media again. Jones established a new Temple department called Diversions, and told Terri Buford that she would run it.

  “ ‘Diversions’ meant that we would divert the press’s attention from Jim,” Terri Buford later explained.

  Buford and several assistants began searching out information about other controversial preachers with large followings—Reverend Ike and Rev. Sun Myung Moon in particular. “We went through newspapers and magazines, police records, getting anything that looked bad, and sent copies on ahead to the media in whichever towns Jim would be preaching in next. We’d write letters to the editors of the city papers about it, and call the TV stations. We had one woman who’d call the TV people and say this or that preacher tried to have sex with her, or else had an illegitimate baby. We also started going through the trash at local magazines and newspapers, trying to see what the writers there were up to.”

  Jones bragged during Planning Commission meetings that Buford and the rest of the Diversions team was so good at sniffing out scandal, they could provide him the means to destroy anyone he pleased. “He made it sound like we were terrorists or something, that no one was safe from us if we wanted to get them,” Buford says. “It got so that lots of people on the Planning Commission were afraid of me. They thought if they did even the slightest thing that Jim didn’t like, [Diversions] might come after them next.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  REACHING OUT

  Despite what Jones and his followers had feared, Lester Kinsolving’s published stories did no damage. Even Mayor Alioto was sympathetic to Jones and his church. Alioto never attended a Temple service, but Joe Johnson, one of his assistants, did. When Jones invited Johnson to say a few words, the city official effusively praised the Temple for its good works. A few months later, when Jones prepared to lead Temple members on a cross-country trip that would culminate in Washington, D.C., Alioto sent a “To Whom It May Concern” letter ahead on his personal stationery, urging police and government officials in Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the nation’s capital to extend “every courtesy and consideration” to Jim Jones and his people, whose social service programs “are extremely supportive of local law enforcement.”

  Kinsolving’s stories helped with Temple recruitment, too. He’d intended to expose Jones as a fraud for claiming he could raise the dead. Instead, the Temple was contacted by people all over the country, some of them terminally ill and hoping for a miracle, others just willing to follow anyone with the power to revive the deceased.

  One of the prospective members who’d read the Examiner stories without being put off was Tim Carter, a white, sometimes homeless Vietnam veteran who had been emotionally scarred by his experiences there, and by a painful childhood where his mother died and his alcoholic father provided corporal punishment rather than nurturing. Following his discharge from the military, Carter wandered around the West for several years, seeking out various spiritual leaders. Then Carter heard about Jones and his church, and in January 1973, along with his sister, Terry, pooled what little money they had and traveled to the Geary Boulevard temple. A black Temple member, Lee Ingram, intercepted the Carters at the entrance—Carter learned later that Jones considered white males to be the most likely government spies. He and his sister were escorted “to a good-sized room and interrogated, though it felt like more of a conversation because they were so good at it.” For several hours, Carter told about himself, how during the worst of his war experiences he experienced a spiritual epiphany that left him certain there were great powers at work, and great possibilities for humanity.

  That convinced his interrogators to let the Carters attend the meeting. They climbed to seats in the balcony; as they seated themselves, Jones launched into a sermon that, to Carter, “was the synthesis of everything I believed spiritually and politically.” Mesmerized, Carter was eager to contribute when a collection plate was passed, but he only had some pocket change. “I whispered to Terry, ‘I hope you’ve got money for cigarettes, because I’ve just given my last sixty-eight cents.’ ” After the collection, Jones pointed dramatically up to the balcony, finger jabbing directly at Tim Carter, and announced, “You gave your last sixty-eight cents, and that means more than people who can afford to give a hundred dollars.” Carter was stunned. “I thought, ‘This guy has psychic ability.’ What I didn’t realize was that they had a guy planted in the row right behind Terry and me. He wrote what I’d said on a card and passed it to somebody who passed it to Jones. By the time that meeting was over, I felt that I’d come home.”

  After the service, Carter was stunned by how naturally blacks and whites interacted in the temple lobby. There was food for sale, and it all smelled and looked wonderful. Since Jones had announced to everyone that Carter had no more money, someone treated the former GI to a plate of collard greens. Then Jones himself came up, held out his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Jim.” As they left Peoples Temple, Carter and his sister debated who Jim Jones must have been in previous lives—Jesus? An apostle?

  Carter attended another meeting in Los Angeles, and was told, “Father wants to know if you want to move up with us in Redwood Valley.” When he replied that he had no money to get there, Carter was assured he didn’t need any. Carter joined the Temple. So did Terry and their brother Mike.

  In Redwood Valley, Carter worked in the Temple letters office all day and then filed index cards for most of the night. He lived in East House, one of the Temple communes, along with eleven others and loved it. Soon, Jones gave Carter the responsibility of organizing Temple bus trips. The details involved were staggering, and when Carter confessed he didn’t think he had the experience or talent to do the job well, he was assured that Father believed in him. So Carter tried, and, to his amazement, discovered he had a talent for organization and planning. Jim Jones apparently knew him better than he knew himself. It reinforced his belief in and loyalty to Jim Jones, who clearly was something more than human.

  Temple recruitment efforts didn’t always go as smoothly. About the same time Tim Carter first visited the Geary Boulevard temple, Merrill Collett did, too. He and his wife lived in the Western Addition, about a dozen blocks away from the church. Collett, who is white, was intrigued by his black neighbor’s description of what a Temple service was like and wanted to see for himself. Like Carter and his sister, the Colletts were stopped in the lobby and required to speak with Temple members. As they were escorted to a small room, Collett noticed a table in the hall stacked with copies of an article in a recent issue of Psychology Today: in “Violence and Political Power—The Meek Don’t Make it,” sociologist William Gibson concluded that “in the U.S. experience, a group that wants political clout and recognition is likely to do better when it is large, centrally organized, and ready to fight if push comes to shove.”

  Their questioning by Temple members was periodically drowned out by the tune being loudly performed in the adjacent auditorium as part of the service—Collett was surprised that it sounded like “a rhythm-and-blues ensemble, not a gospel choir.” Eventually the Colletts were allowed to go sit “in one of the very upper rows” of the auditorium balcony. One of their interrogators, a young white man, went with them, and immediately offended the couple by informing them that they were about “to be niggerized.” He gestured down at the main body of congregants on the floor, many of them older, most of them standing up and dancing to the pulsating music, and explained that “What we really have is two churches,” one comprised of politically astute members working to bring about social change, and the other made up mostly of pensioners “[who] won’t take a shit unless they’re read[ing] the Bible, but they’re the backbone of the church.”

  Collett felt violently repelled by Jim Jones, who “was in dark glasses . . . swaggering around on the stage in full paranoia mode, violently denouncing this and that cabal who were out to get him and the c
hurch. He scared the bejeezus out of me.” When the service finally ended, Collett says, “I was thrilled to get back into sunlight and fresh air.” The Colletts did not join.

  But many did, and in some of these recruits Jones found exceptional qualities that he and his church badly needed. One of his strengths was not casting his congregational net toward a single type of individual or personality. It was as though Jones could almost effortlessly reach out into the communities around him and pluck those individuals whose talents and experience perfectly qualified them to serve him and the Temple in different, critical ways.

  Prior to joining the Temple, Jean Brown was a Republican committeewoman from Mendocino County, making her a natural conduit to that party’s politicians. Brown became one of the Temple’s most effective public relations operatives, often dealing with the staffs of elected officials and various other government entities. In Brown, Jones had an advisor who understood the best methods of communicating the Temple’s socialist goals without unduly alarming conservatives. Sandy Bradshaw was a probation officer in Ukiah. Bradshaw’s expertise was invaluable as the Temple attempted to rehabilitate young offenders separately from the justice system. Bob Houston was a teacher at the same Mendocino County public school as Carolyn Layton. A gifted musician, writer, and an innovative educator, Houston was a perfect father figure for troubled teens who became legal wards of the Temple. Gene Chaikin, a deputy counsel for Shasta County in California, attended some services in Redwood Valley and volunteered to work with Tim Stoen on the Temple’s legal affairs. He soon quit his county job and joined the Temple, working for Jones full-time. Chaikin’s wife, Phyllis, was equally driven to contribute to the Temple cause. At Jones’s request, she earned a nursing degree so that she could help manage the church’s extensive senior care operations. Dick Tropp was a former college professor whose insightful intellect and exceptional communication skills were assets to Jones from the first day Tropp joined the Temple. Tropp brought with him his sister Harriet, an especially articulate former law student with a gift for sorting out organizational problems and a knack for solving them. For Jones, her only drawback was her fearlessness: Tropp became the Temple member most likely to tell Jones the truth, even if he didn’t want to hear it.