The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  Jones proposed a solution that would spare the Jonestown children from enslavement and the settlement seniors from slaughter: “My opinion is that we be kind to children and 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. They’re now going back to tell more lies, which means more congressmen. And there’s no way, no way we can survive.”

  Some of his audience felt certain that this was just Dad testing them again, leading them right up to the brink. Surely he’d back off at the last second, as he so often had before. But others weren’t certain. Don Sly, who’d been turned loose the moment that Ryan left the settlement, stood and asked, “Is there any way that if I go, that it’ll help us?” Many in the pavilion cried, “No,” and Jones said it, too: “You’re not going. I cannot live that way. I’ve lived for all, and I’ll die for all.”

  Christine Miller, a successful real estate broker back in California, called out, “Is it too late for Russia?” When Jones said that it was, Miller challenged him. Had he asked the Russians? How did it make sense to kill “1,200 people” in response to the defection of so few? Jones reminded her of the plane that was about to crash, and Miller said that the plane she was talking about was one taking everyone in Jonestown to Russia. Jones asked if Miller really thought “Russia’s gonna want us with all this stigma” from Ryan’s imminent murder. She replied, “Well, I don’t see it like that. I mean, I feel like as long as there’s life, there’s hope. That’s my faith.”

  Jones had always held his followers close by stressing hope, that no one was so lowly that a better life was impossible. Now, wanting their acquiescence in their own deaths, and even in these last minutes still able to read not only the mood, but the potential, of an audience, he neatly used Miller’s own words to make his case: “Well, someday everybody dies, some place that hope runs out, because everybody dies. I haven’t seen anybody yet [who] didn’t die. And I’d like to choose my own kind of death for a change. I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of.”

  Most of the crowd shouted in approval.

  * * *

  The Carter brothers could hear Jones’s amplified voice as Maria Katsaris led them to a room near the radio shack. There were two cots. The Carters sat on one, and Katsaris on the other. She told them, “Mike Prokes is going to take money to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. It fills three suitcases, and they’re heavy. Are you willing to help?” When they said that they were, she said they should wait there while she went to clear it with Jones. While she was gone, they heard the lengthy exchange between Jones and Miller. There was a brief pause—Katsaris had probably called Jones to the side of the stage to get his approval for the Carters to help carry the suitcases of money. Then the brothers heard Jones say, apparently to quiet Miller so he could continue, “Someone get in touch with the Soviets and see if they’ll take us.”

  Then Katsaris returned. She said that Jones agreed. The Carters were taken to their cottages to change clothes, and then over to the West House, Jones’s personal cabin, where Mike Prokes and Carolyn Layton were busy typing letters. Their sister, Terry Carter, was also there. The Carter brothers saw three plastic suitcases, two larger than the other, all stuffed with cash. Some gold bullion had been crammed in, too, but then removed. The gold was so heavy that it would have torn through the bottom of the suitcases. Now it was piled beside them. Merilee Bogue was entertaining John Victor and Kimo, trying to keep the little boys distracted. Annie Moore shuffled papers, evidently looking for some specific documents. The adults all seemed calm for people who knew they were about to die. Someone brought Prokes and Mike Carter their passports. Tim Carter, who’d just returned to Jonestown from California a few days before, still had his. Katsaris gave pistols to Prokes and the Carters, and told them to deliver the suitcases to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. She didn’t explain how they would get there. They assumed they were to walk from Jonestown to Port Kaituma and then find transportation. Katsaris told them that if they made it and turned the suitcases over, then they could go wherever they wanted: “Have a nice life. Don’t be taken alive. If you’re caught, kill yourselves. Is that understood?” They said it was. Katsaris told them, “Security will leave you alone,” and wished them good luck.

  Tim Carter was trying hard to think clearly. What he wanted was to get back to Gloria and Malcolm. It was still possible that Jones was testing everyone again. When Prokes suggested to Carolyn Layton that perhaps a Temple truck should take him, the Carters, and the suitcases down the road from Jonestown to the main road leading to Port Kaituma to save some time, Carter volunteered to go and ask Jones. As he left the cottage, he heard Kimo and John Victor begin crying, and his sister, Terry, and Katsaris attempting to soothe them.

  * * *

  While instructions were being given to the three couriers in West House, Jones moved on from verbal sparring with Christine Miller. Someone in the crowd asked if he wouldn’t at least spare John Victor, and Jones refused: “He’s no different to me than any of these children here.” Of course, the six-year-old was different to Jones—retaining custody of John Victor, and the subsequent court battles with Tim and Grace Stoen, had helped precipitate this final crisis. But Jones preferred that the child die rather than be returned to his birth mother because then Grace and Tim Stoen would, in some sense, have won.

  Carter was hurrying to the pavilion when more cheering erupted. The tractor-trailer was back from Port Kaituma, and the men leaped off and ran into the pavilion shouting, “We got the congressman!” Bob Kice, one of the gunmen, told Carter, “We got the congressman and some others. They’re all dead.”

  Jones made the formal announcement: “It’s all over. The congressman has been murdered.” Schacht and the Jonestown nurses appeared at the side of the stage. They brought with them bundles of filled syringes. It was time. Jones wanted the infants, toddlers, and older children to be first. “It’s simple, it’s simple,” he promised their parents. “Just, please get it, before it’s too late. The GDF [Guyana Defence Force] will be here, I tell you. Get movin’.”

  Some parents didn’t move fast enough to suit Jones. He warned them, “They’ll torture some of our children here.” Some of the guards stepped up. No one was given the choice of whether to participate. Jones told the armed men to allow parents who wanted to die with their children to join them in the line: “Who wants to go with their child has a right. . . . I think it’s humane.”

  There is nothing humane about death by cyanide. As a means of suicide, its only advantage is absolute lethality if taken in sufficient dosage. Cyanide robs the body’s cells of the ability to absorb oxygen in the blood. Suffocation is sure—and slow. In The Poisoner’s Handbook, Deborah Blum writes, “The last minutes of a cyanide death are brutal, marked by convulsions, a desperate gasping for air, a rising bloody froth of vomit and saliva, and finally a blessed release into unconsciousness.” As the nurses used syringes to squirt poison into the mouths of the first few infants, many parents herding their children forward hesitated, particularly when the babies began foaming at the mouth and convulsing.

  Jim McElvane took over the stage microphone, allowing Jones a few moments to catch his breath and observe the poisoning process. As McElvane began cheerily describing the pleasures of death—“It feels good. . . . You’ve never felt so good as how that feels”—Tim Carter was about to reach Jones’s side. Just before he did, he saw nurse Sharon Cobb squirting poison into his fifteen-month-old son’s mouth. “Gloria was standing right there next to him, she was going to go next, I saw that and I felt guilty that I wasn’t saving them. On that last day, it felt like walking through mental quicksand. I believe all of us were a little bit drugged ahead of time, maybe at that last meal. They used to tranquilize Gene Chaikin by putting drugs in cheese sandwiches, and that’s what we all had for lunch in Jonestown that day, cheese sandwiches.” When
Carter was asked later why he didn’t charge off the stage and simply knock over the poison vat, he replied, “There was no vat out there yet, only the syringes.”

  Carter approached Jones and asked about a truck to take the money couriers to the main road. Jones said, “That’s not a good idea.” He reached out, took Carter by the arm and added, “Son, I’m sorry it had to end this way. I love you.” Carter pulled free. He found Gloria and Malcolm about ten yards away. A dozen other mothers and babies lay around them. All were foaming at the mouth. Some were jerking spasmodically. Gloria held Malcolm. The little boy was already dead; Gloria had froth on her lips, tears streamed down her face and she couldn’t speak. Carter knelt beside Gloria, cradling her and the baby in his arms, and repeated, “I love you so much,” until she was gone, too. The guards began urging the remaining children and some of their parents toward the nurses and syringes. Many of the children were screaming in fright, and some of the adults screamed, too, but the stage microphone was pointed away from them and none of the screams would be audible on the tape. Those who refused to move forward were pushed ahead by the guards. Carter says, “By that point all the people in the pavilion were realizing that they were surrounded by these people with guns, and that they had only two choices—fight and be held down and injected, I know that happened to some of them, or else think, ‘My time is up,’ and go ahead and take the poison.”

  Maria Katsaris, back from West House, took the microphone from McElvane and tried to soothe the crowd: “There’s nothing to worry about. Everybody keep calm and try and keep your children calm.” A moment later, listening to the wails of the dying children, she said, “They’re not crying from pain. It’s just a little bitter tasting.”

  Jones returned to the front of the stage and said, “You got to move.” One who wasn’t moving was his wife. Marceline stood far to the side; if Jones had expected her to help, she wasn’t. Instead, she screamed, “You can’t do this!” Even those settlers most devoted to Jones loved Marceline, too. He was Father and she was Mother. Alone among everyone left in Jonestown, her resistance might inspire enough opposition to ruin Jones’s last defiant gesture. He had to stop or at least quiet her, and knew exactly how. Marceline had spoken with Jones before he took the pavilion stage, and he’d surely told her then that besides the mass suicide about to take place in Jonestown, he’d also radioed Lamaha Gardens in Georgetown and ordered everyone there, including their three sons on the basketball team, to take their own lives, too. Marceline Jones once wrote to her husband that she lived for her children. Now he expected her to obediently die with them, and, as a reminder, said sharply, “Marceline? You got forty minutes,” or about the time it might take everyone at Lamaha Gardens to line up and kill themselves. Jim Jones Jr. says, “My mother was all by herself there. We [Tim, Stephan, and Jimmy] were in Georgetown, so she didn’t have her team that could have tried to stop it with her. She got told right then by [Jones] that her children had died or were going to die, so why would she want to keep on living? [Jones] understood her. He understood her so well.”

  Marceline knew her loss was not limited to three sons in Georgetown. Lew was there in Jonestown, and Agnes, as well as Lew’s little son, Chaeoke, and Agnes’s four children. They would die, too. Anguished, she watched as the last of more than two hundred children were administered poison from syringes. By half past five, no later than 6 p.m., almost all of the little ones were gone, and it was the turn of the adults.

  Tim Carter left Gloria and Malcolm where they lay, and made his way back toward West House. “I did not give a fuck about anything,” he remembers. “I kept thinking, ‘They murdered my son.’ But there was also a voice in my head saying, ‘You cannot die,’ and I made a choice that day. I wanted to kill myself on the spot, but maybe I could tell what had really happened.’ ” Carter’s brother and Mike Prokes were waiting with the suitcases. On his way back to them, Carter passed Carolyn Layton. She reflexively asked, “What’s wrong?” He said, “They’ve murdered my son,” and she replied, “Oh, Tim, we had no other choice.”

  The three men each picked up a suitcase and walked through the settlement toward the road that led to the front gate. It was hard going, especially carrying the heavy suitcases, which Carter remembers “weighed forty or fifty pounds each.” A layer of mud as much as six or eight inches deep covered every bit of ground. They left two of the suitcases behind even before they were out of Jonestown, burying one in a cleared field and the other in the settlement piggery, making certain to note the exact spots so the cases could be retrieved later—by whom, they had no idea. The three men didn’t talk much—what was there to say?—and took turns carrying the remaining, smallest suitcase as they trudged toward Port Kaituma. The last thing they heard behind them in Jonestown was Jones’s voice over the loudspeaker. He was saying something that sounded like, “Mother, Mother, Mother.”

  * * *

  The Carter brothers and Prokes weren’t the only ones on their way out of Jonestown. During the confusion at the pavilion, Odell Rhodes and Stanley Clayton individually managed to sneak off into the jungle. Grover Davis didn’t sneak at all. As soon as the poisoning began, he walked up to a perimeter guard—it was Ray Jones, husband of Jim Jones’s daughter Agnes. Ray asked, “Where do you think you’re going?” Davis said simply, “I don’t want to die.” Ray said, “Have a good life,” and stood aside while Davis walked out to the edge of Jonestown, where he hid in a ditch. Garry and Lane also talked their way past the armed men holding them in a cabin, and circled through the brush until they found the road to Port Kaituma.

  One more person escaped death, though not immediately from Jonestown. Some of the oldest settlers never came to the pavilion. They lay on cots in their dormitories; guards and settlement nurses took syringes and cups of poison and dosed the elderly men and women there. Hyacinth Thrash was asleep; they mistakenly believed that she was already dead and left her alone.

  * * *

  As the couriers departed West House with their cash-crammed suitcases, the adults in the pavilion began shuffling into line. Some went proudly; they worshipped Jim Jones, believed that they were making a grand revolutionary statement, and looked forward to a new consciousness on some higher plane. Others accepted poison as a preferable alternative to slaughter by the enemy forces they believed must be converging on Jonestown. Whether death was dreamless sleep or reincarnation or spiritual relocation to someplace better, they were ready. Most of the rest were too tired or disgusted to spend their last moments fighting armed guards. Asked decades later what he thinks he would have done, Jim Jones Jr. said there’s no question: “My wife and my mother were going to be gone, they drank what they were told to. If I’d been there with the rest of the real security team, then no, we would never have gone out to shoot Leo Ryan. But back there [at the pavilion]? I can see myself saying, ‘I’m tired of this shit. Fine, all right, I’ll drink your goddamn poison.’ ”

  But there were holdouts. They refused to move or shouted defiance or cried as they begged to be spared. Jones urged, “Lay down your life with dignity. . . . Stop these hysterics. This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.”

  Marceline must have started screaming again, because on the tape recovered later, Jones, using the name she was called by most Temple members, commanded, “Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, please. Mother, please, please, please. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child[ren], but don’t do this.”

  A few people in the poison line thanked Jones for all that he’d done for them. His response was to call for more of the poison that would kill them: “Where’s the vat, the vat, the vat? Where’s the vat with the green ‘C’ on it? Bring the vat with the green ‘C’ in, please, bring it here so the adults can begin.”

  The vat was fetched, and as a woman who was about to die shouted “Go on to Zion, and thank you, Dad,” Jones began a rambling monologue: “We used to think this world was not our home. Well, it sure isn’t. .
. . We said, one thousand people who said, ‘We don’t like the way the world is.’ ” He interrupted himself to tell someone in line, “Take some,” and then continued. “Take our life from us. We laid it down. We got tired. . . . We didn’t commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

  Then the tape ran out.

  * * *

  Concerned Relative Sherwin Harris spent much of Saturday afternoon and early evening at Lamaha Gardens. When he returned to the Pegasus Hotel, he happily reported that he’d had a fine time visiting with his daughter, Liane, who’d even agreed to see her father again on Sunday. Most of the other Concerned Relatives passed Saturday in the Pegasus lobby or swimming pool. They expected Leo Ryan and his traveling party to return from their Jonestown trip by 3 p.m. Ryan would immediately go into a meeting with Prime Minister Burnham, while Jim Cobb, Beverly Oliver, Carol Boyd, and Anthony Katsaris, the four Concerned Relatives who’d accompanied the congressman, would return to the Pegasus and brief everyone about who they’d seen and what they’d learned. But about the time Ryan and the others were supposed to arrive, someone phoned the Pegasus to tell those waiting there that the flight from Port Kaituma was delayed and now would reach Georgetown about 5 p.m. No reason was given, or any cause for alarm. Then came a second call. The anticipated arrival time would be 7 p.m., and Congressman Ryan was bringing nine extra people back to Georgetown with him. The Concerned Relatives at the Pegasus were thrilled—who was coming? Which of their family members might be included?

  Shortly after 7 p.m., newcomers burst into the hotel lobby—but they were Stephan, Tim, and Jimmy Jones, plus one or two other members of the Jonestown basketball team. The wild-eyed young men demanded that the Concerned Relatives tell them what was going on in Jonestown. No one had any information to offer. Some of the Concerned Relatives thought that the Temple members had come to kill them as part of some plot and were relieved when they abruptly left. But they had a new concern—what had happened in Jonestown? Stephan Jones had said something to Tim Stoen about his father wanting everyone to die. Why was the plane delayed so long in Port Kaituma? As they talked among themselves, someone from hotel management told them to go upstairs to their rooms—now.