The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  The Jones brothers’ next stop was the U.S. embassy. “We still thought we might have some time, that if we could just get to Jonestown we could stop whatever my dad was doing,” Jim Jones Jr. says. “The embassy could fly us there, we figured. But when we got to the embassy, it was closed up for the night. We got somebody on the intercom and tried to tell him what was going on, but they still wouldn’t let us in. So we got in the car and went back [to Lamaha Gardens].”

  Except for Sharon Amos and Lee Ingram, who’d been ordered by Stephan Jones to keep an eye on her, no one else at Lamaha Gardens—about four dozen Temple members not including the other members of the Jonestown basketball team—had any idea what was going on. Sometime after 7 p.m., several Georgetown policemen appeared at the door and asked if everything was all right. A few of the Temple members assured them that things were fine. Lee Ingram went to ask them who had been at the door, and that was all the opening that Sharon Amos needed. She gathered her three children—Liane, twenty-one; Christa, eleven; and Martin, ten; plus nine-year-old Stephanie Morgan—and took them into a bathroom along with adult Temple member Chuck Beikman, a relatively simple-minded, mostly illiterate former Marine who always did as he was told. Amos shut the door behind them. Odd sounds emanated from the bathroom, and then blood began leaking out under the door.

  Stephan, Tim, and Jimmy Jones jumped from their car and ran to the front gate of Lamaha Gardens. Someone told them, “Sharon killed herself and her children.” The Jones brothers and Ingram hurried to the bathroom. It was hard to get the door open. Amos’s lifeless body was blocking it from the inside. They shoved their way in. Liane, Christa, and Martin lay sprawled on the gory floor. Chuck Beikman, knife in hand, stood holding Stephanie, whose neck bled from several cuts. Ingram wrenched the injured Stephanie free. Martin and Christa were dead. Liane was in her death throes and quickly expired. All four had had their throats slit. The wounds of Amos and Liane Harris were self-inflicted. As her leader had ordered, Amos’s death tools were knives.

  The Georgetown police were called. The dead were taken away in body bags, and Chuck Beikman was arrested. Some of the dazed Temple members tried to clean up the blood in the bathroom and adjacent hallway, with limited success. They were unable to reach anyone in Jonestown. As soon as he’d sent his final messages to Lamaha Gardens, Jones shut down the radio line between the settlement and Georgetown. Exhausted and frightened, not knowing what had happened in Jonestown, only that it was bad, everyone at Lamaha Gardens tried to sleep. Jim Jones Jr. remembers, “I woke up a few hours later when a soldier stuck a gun in my mouth. We were all paraded outside, and they told us that more people were dead.”

  * * *

  In Port Kaituma, the survivors of the airstrip attack passed a long, nervous night. Just after midnight a radio message from Georgetown finally reached the government’s North West District office there, promising that help was on the way. But the troops would not arrive for hours yet, since they were flying into Matthews Ridge, taking the train some of the way to Port Kaituma, and then hiking the last few miles. Until then, everyone must stay where they were. Some of those sheltering in the river town’s primitive houses were badly hurt and barely conscious, but the others, wounded and unharmed alike, feared that every night noise signaled the return of the Temple assassins. Tommy and Teena Bogue, Tracy and Brenda Parks, and Chris O’Neal were still missing and presumed to be somewhere in the jungle.

  It was quiet in Jonestown, except for the rustle of night creatures emerging from the jungle, the small animals who hid from larger predators by day, then crept out under cover of darkness to scavenge whatever edible scraps they might find. On this night, they feasted.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  WHAT HAPPENED?

  The first word that something terrible had happened in Guyana reached the U.S. State Department on Saturday around 9 p.m., a flash message from “African” Georgetown that Congressman Leo Ryan and eight to ten people were attacked “by a truck-load of whites” as they attempted to board a small plane. There was no confirmation that anyone had died. Reporters routinely covering the State Department soon learned of the message, and from there national and international news agencies clamored for more information. By the next day, when Ryan’s death was announced, the first murder of a U.S. congressman engaged on official business in American history and apparently at the hands of some jungle church cult comprised of U.S. citizens, journalists and broadcast crews began swarming into Georgetown. They demanded facts from spokesmen for the Guyanese government, who had very few to offer. Yes, five people had died on Saturday afternoon at Port Kaituma: Congressman Leo Ryan, NBC crew members Don Harris and Bob Brown, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and Jonestown defector Patricia Parks. Several others who were badly wounded had been brought out of Port Kaituma by plane on Sunday morning, then medevaced to a U.S. naval station in Puerto Rico. It was hoped that they would recover. [All of the Port Kaituma wounded did survive.] Five people who’d been lost in the jungle after the shooting had been located. Otherwise, there was nothing specific yet to tell. “The news was all over the world, but nothing substantial was known by us,” Kit Nascimento recalls. “We really had no idea of what might be going on.”

  There were two immediate questions: What had happened in Jonestown, and how many were dead?

  The Guyana Defence Force troops led into Jonestown on Sunday morning by Desmond Roberts sent back only vague reports. There were bodies everywhere. Amerindians darted through the settlement, grabbing what they could, and despite Roberts’s efforts to control his men some of the GDF soldiers were also looting rather than investigating. Skip Roberts, the Georgetown police commissioner, was dispatched to take over. When he arrived in Port Kaituma, he recruited reluctant assistants. After discarding their last suitcase of cash and their guns by the railroad tracks outside town, Mike Prokes and Tim and Mike Carter were arrested by Port Kaituma police. They were held in a cassava mill because the Port Kaituma jail had only one cell, which was occupied by Larry Layton. Skip Roberts asked them to help identify the dead in Jonestown. The lawyers also arrived. When he saw the Carters and Prokes there, Charles Garry exclaimed, “I can think of better ways to fire your attorneys than this.”

  The scene at Jonestown was horrific. Soldiers and investigators were shocked when elderly Hyacinth Thrash tottered out of her cabin and asked what was going on. The old lady was dehydrated and confused, but otherwise all right. Everyone else was dead, including settlement dogs and Mr. Muggs, the pet chimpanzee. The animals had been shot. The GDF gingerly poked around the human remains. Because of the heat, humidity, vermin, and maggots, advanced decay had already set in. Many corpses had burst open. Tim Carter and a few of the other Jonestown escapees who had also reached Port Kaituma identified some of the bodies. They found Jones, who lay sprawled onstage in the pavilion. “His abdomen was all swollen and bulging up from under his shirt,” Carter recalls. Even in death, Jones stood out from the rest because he appeared dead from a gunshot wound to the head rather than poison. Soon afterward, Annie Moore, also dead by gunshot, was discovered in Jones’s cabin. No bullet wounds were found on other bodies, but some had odd abscesses that a Guyanese pathologist later testified were caused by injection; they had apparently refused to drink poison, and were held down and forcibly injected. Tim Carter also noted abscesses on numerous bodies. Everyone had to die for Jones’s final statement to have the impact that he wanted. Because of the corpses’ continuing deterioration, no firm count of those forcibly injected could be made. Estimates ranged from as few as twenty to as many as a third of the Jonestown dead.

  The total announced deceased fluctuated for several days. The first report, based mostly on a haphazard count by the first arriving soldiers, was 383. The information was released by the Guyanese government and reported on air and in print. The Concerned Relatives in Georgetown, Temple members held under house arrest in Lamaha Gardens, and family members of Jonestown settlers back in the United States all fel
t hopeful—maybe their loved ones were still alive. If there had been more than nine hundred people in Jonestown on Saturday, and only 383 bodies, then perhaps everyone else was still alive—but where? The Guyanese government also wondered, though for a different reason. If five or six hundred people were loose somewhere in the jungle, perhaps they still comprised a rebel army. The first formal Jonestown body count, completed on Monday, increased the number of dead to 408, still not even half of the settlement population.

  On Tuesday the GDF was replaced by American troops, who discovered that the name tags placed on bodies identified earlier were illegible because rain had washed away most of the ink. They started over, and to their astonishment, the bodies they inspected proved to be only a top layer. There was another underneath, and another beneath that. The bottom layer was mostly comprised of infants and children, who apparently had been the first to die. The lower layers of dead were even more badly decomposed than the top layer. The U.S. commander contacted Washington to request snow shovels to scrape up some of the remains. Immediate identification of most bodies was impossible. Remains were shipped by air to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where a mixed team of military and civilian pathologists would try to figure out names from fingerprints on file in the United States and Guyana and from dental records.

  The announced number of dead grew to 700 on Thursday, 780 on Friday, and finally, a week after the tragic event, 909. Counting Sharon Amos and her three children, plus Ryan and the other four killed in Port Kaituma, the final death count of November 18, 1978, was 918.

  The sheer magnitude of the number, and the manner of death, made Jonestown/Peoples Temple a story that simultaneously horrified and fascinated the public. There was demand to know more, to know everything, and the media did its best to oblige. Every available Georgetown hotel room was occupied by press, who congregated at the U.S. embassy and Guyanese government offices demanding information that no one had, and haunted the lobbies of the Pegasus and Park hotels where the Concerned Relatives and the various Jonestown survivors remained. The Guyanese were still trying to sort out who might be blamed. Almost four dozen Temple members remained under house arrest at Lamaha Gardens. Larry Layton was transferred to a Georgetown jail where Chuck Beikman was incarcerated. Mike Prokes and the Carter brothers were also held for a time, then allowed to move to the Park Hotel, where some of the Concerned Relatives begged to be protected from them. Stories had appeared about supposed armed bands of Temple members bent on wreaking revenge for Jim Jones, not only in Guyana, but in San Francisco. That fear became even more widespread on November 27, when an embittered former Board of Supervisors member named Dan White gunned down Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Though it was soon determined that White had acted alone, there was initial widespread suspicion that Peoples Temple was somehow involved. If more than nine hundred of its unbalanced members had been willing to kill themselves on the command of the Temple’s very weird leaders, why wouldn’t some of its surviving members in San Francisco murder the mayor and a supervisor?

  In the weeks immediately following November 18, media outlets vied to describe Jim Jones and Peoples Temple in the most provocative terms possible. In that pre-Internet age when facts—and unsubstantiated innuendo—were not immediately available in a few computer keystrokes, TV, radio, and print reporters had to actively seek out sources, whose frequently florid testimony was reported immediately because of the competition between stations and newspapers to break the latest story first. Fact-checking suffered; any connection with Jones or the Temple was considered a sufficient credential to warrant someone’s appearance on a program or quotes in an article, and the more inflammatory the better. Jim Jones had wanted his grand gesture to make an impression on the entire world, and, to that extent, he succeeded. But the Jonestown deaths quickly became renowned not as a grandly defiant revolutionary gesture, but as the ultimate example of human gullibility.

  Previously, any investigative reporting on Jim Jones and Peoples Temple was almost entirely confined to reporters in Indianapolis and San Francisco. Even with the bus trips and services around the United States, Jones and the Temple had only a regional reputation. Now all the biggest news outlets scrambled for information, some wanting the scandalous even more than the significant, and plenty of both was discovered. In Lynn, in Richmond, in Indianapolis, and Mendocino County and Los Angeles and San Francisco, Jones and the Temple had made enough impact that there were many people eager to add to the growing opinion that everything about the group and its leader was warped from the start. The political figures who’d eagerly sought Temple support mostly declared that they’d hardly interacted with Jones or his followers at all. Only Willie Brown and Carlton Goodlett spoke at all of the Temple’s many positive programs. In Georgetown, Jonestown survivors were encouraged to add salacious insights. Tim Carter, reeling from the loss of his wife and son, was asked by one famous TV journalist to describe his Jonestown sex life—some reporters assumed that Jonestown was a commune and free love was the predominant pastime.

  But one misconception evolved into part of the cultural lexicon. Initially, most news outlets correctly reported that the Jonestown settlers died by ingesting cyanide that was stirred into a vat of Flavor Aid, an inexpensive powdered drink. But some reports mentioned Kool-Aid. As a familiar brand, “Kool-Aid” proved more memorable to the public than “Flavor Aid.” “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid” became a jokey catchphrase for not foolishly following deranged leaders. “It . . . still hurts every time I hear it,” says Juanell Smart, who lost four children, her mother, and her uncle in Jonestown. “I hated that people laughed when they said it, like what happened was somehow funny.”

  There was nothing funny about what investigators found at Jonestown. Besides the mounting body count, they discovered that some of the Jonestown dead left messages explaining what they’d done. These provided convincing evidence that many went willingly to their deaths. In a stenographer’s notebook found by her side, Annie Moore defended Jones: “His love for humans was unsurmountable and it was many whom he put his love and trust in and they left him and spit in his face.” Annie expected some “mentally fascist person” to find the notebook and throw it away, but she wanted the world to know that “we died because you would not let us live in peace! From Annie Moore.” An unsigned document, usually attributed to Richard Tropp, began “Collect all the tapes, all the writing, all the history. The story of this movement, this action, must be examined over and over. . . . I am sorry there is no eloquence as I write these final words. We are resolved, but grieved that we cannot make the truth of our witness clear.” Teenage Candace Cordell scribbled a succinct message in ink on her forearm as she waited in line to die: “Why couldn’t you leave us alone?”

  Guns were found in Jonestown—ten handguns, fourteen rifles, and eight shotguns, enough to arm the Port Kaituma airstrip assassins and a squad of Jonestown security guards, but far fewer than had been expected. Even with the possibility that additional firearms were stolen by the GDF or natives, it was still too meager an arsenal to arm a substantial band of insurrectionists. The Guyanese government could stop worrying about a large-scale revolt.

  Filed documents far exceeded what investigators anticipated. In Jones’s cottage, in various Jonestown buildings, there were stacks of letters, invoices, index cards, and other records, so many that after the FBI declassified most of them, they totaled almost sixty thousand printed pages plus several hundred tapes of Jones’s sermons and radio broadcasts that, if transcribed, would potentially add another twenty to thirty thousand pages to the total. Each document had to be scrutinized, every tape listened to—it took the FBI uncountable man-hours, the mass of trivial information making it hard to ferret out anything substantial.

  There was an astonishing amount of money found in Jonestown, too. Even before the U.S. forces arrived, Guyanese police and the GDF, led to the locations by the Carters and Prokes, took possession of the three cash-filled suitcases Jones had intend
ed for the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. It took some time for Guyana to return the estimated $300,000 to the United States. Another $635,000 was found in Jones’s cabin, along with Guyanese currency worth an additional $22,000 in American dollars. No one seems to know what happened to the gold bullion. There were bundles of uncashed Social Security checks. Additional investigation by the U.S. government turned up about $7 million in foreign banks. Back in the United States, Terri Buford tried to cooperate with the FBI, but there were many foreign accounts she did not know about. The Bible listing these accounts in secret code was never recovered from Jones’s cabin. Its pages may have ended up plugging gaps in the walls of Amerindian huts, or else providing spiritual comfort to some soldier of the GDF who never realized the significance of the pencil scribblings along its spine.

  The greatest mystery, though, involved the bodies. For the next four and a half months, military and civilian staff struggled to identify as many as possible. The number of bodies involved, and the demand by loved ones, relatives, and friends of all the deceased for something to mourn and bury, made it a tense, frustrating task. Photographs were useless. Faces were decomposed. Clothing didn’t help. Jonestown settlers routinely traded garments so name tags sewn into shirts and pants were no help. Dental records were spotty. Lots of settlers hadn’t been to a dentist in years, if ever. Some identities were determined from fingerprint records, but in hundreds of instances the skin on all ten fingers was destroyed. Because the infants and children had decomposed the most, more than two-thirds of them were never identified. The total count of unidentified bodies was 409. After a considerable search for a burial site that would accept these remains, Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland offered ground for a mass grave, where they were interred on May 11, 1979.