The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  The remains of Jim and Marceline Jones caused special concern. It was November 30 before Marceline’s remains were identified in Dover, but once they were, Walter and Charlotte Baldwin wanted their daughter, along with the rest of her immediate family, buried in Richmond’s Earlham Cemetery. None of the Baldwins’ great-grandchildren had been identified, but there was still Marceline, Jim, Lew, and Agnes. The Baldwins contacted a local funeral parlor to coordinate with Dover Air Force Base. But when word got out journalists and newscasters from around the country wanted to cover the services, and demanded to know the date and time. Of greater concern was the FBI, which warned of possible violence in the cemetery commited by Peoples Temple followers. Local residents complained that their town would be desecrated by Jim Jones’s remains. The undertaker and the Baldwins decided to have Jones’s body cremated and his ashes deposited in the Atlantic Ocean. Marceline, Lew, and Agnes were buried in Earlham Cemetery without incident.

  None of Marceline’s surviving children were present. Suzanne had been estranged from her parents, and Stephan, Jimmy, and Tim were still trying to extricate themselves from the authorities in Guyana. The Guyanese wanted badly to prosecute someone for the tragedies, if only to demonstrate to the world that theirs was a law-abiding nation, not a haven for religious zealots and murderers. Larry Layton was locked up, though there was some doubt whether he could be tried for murder, let alone convicted. He’d shot people at the airstrip, but none of his victims had died. Chuck Beikman was a more obvious possibility. He’d been closed in the bathroom where four people died and had been prevented from cutting the throat of a nine-year-old girl. Hearings to determine the charges to be brought against Beikman commenced shortly after his arrest, and when Stephan Jones was required to testify, he came perilously close to being charged with murder himself.

  Nineteen-year-old Stephan had been under crushing pressure since the afternoon of November 18, when he tried desperately to avert the suicides in Jonestown and Georgetown that were ordered by his father. Stephan was more successful convincing Temple members in San Francisco not to kill themselves. Laura Johnston Kohl remembers that, through much of the awful night, “Stephan called [the San Francisco temple] every half hour, telling them they shouldn’t commit suicide. They would have, if it hadn’t been for him. He was a real hero.”

  In the days that followed, Stephan assumed leadership of the Temple survivors in Georgetown. His increasing sense of guilt for his father’s action boiled over during the Beikman hearings. Furious at hearing the slow-witted ex-Marine described as a cruel, cunning killer, and hoping to save him, Stephan blurted that he was the one who killed the children in the Lamaha Gardens bathroom. He was promptly remanded to a dank cell. Stephan remained there for weeks, until the Guyanese reluctantly concluded that he was innocent. They retained Layton and Beikman in custody, and in December began allowing surviving Temple members to return to America. Most, exhausted and sickened by all they’d endured, were glad to go—only to learn that their troubles were far from over.

  * * *

  Based on what they’d read in magazines and newspapers and seen on television, many Americans considered surviving Temple members pariahs, apparently capable of any deranged act. One Pan American pilot refused to take off from the Georgetown airport because some of the Temple men were supposed to be onboard. Upon landing in the United States, everyone was questioned by FBI agents, who could not be shaken in their belief that Temple hit squads roamed the country, ready to strike. Before being permitted to go on their way, they were relieved of their passports, and told these would only be returned upon repayment to the government of their travel and living costs. All of the survivors had been penniless, so the United States covered airfare as well as their meal and lodging expenses incurred in Georgetown while the Guyanese government required their presence during its investigations.

  The government also wanted reimbursement for every cent spent on airlifting bodies from Guyana to Dover Air Force Base, and all costs incurred during the lengthy identification process. In all, the estimated bill was $4.3 million. The approximately eighty survivors could hardly be expected to come up with even a modest fraction of that amount, so U.S. investigators and attorneys turned to what remained of Peoples Temple in San Francisco. It was known by now that there had been a lot of money in Temple domestic and foreign accounts, along with property and capital investments that undoubtedly had substantial value. One story in the San Francisco Examiner estimated Temple assets at $26 million—enough to pay back the government if the FBI located the money, but not enough to satisfy the suits brought against the church by relatives of the Jonestown dead and former members now in full cry that they had been defrauded. By October 1979, there were 695 claims totaling $1.78 billion.

  About $7.3 million in foreign accounts was located, and the government claimed that. All Temple properties, from land to printing presses, were impounded and put up for public auction. Remaining members in San Francisco offered up $295,000 from domestic Temple bank accounts. In all, about $13 million in assets were eventually recovered. Creditors felt certain there was more, and would have pressed Peoples Temple for it, but were unable to do so, because Peoples Temple no longer existed.

  In the immediate aftermath of November 18, the San Francisco temple was besieged by picketers, and by friends and family members of Jonestown settlers who couldn’t be certain whether their loved ones were among the four hundred initially reported dead. They were sure that someone in the barricaded temple must know who still lived, but the few dozen members inside didn’t know. Then, as the death total rose until finally it was announced that all in Jonestown were certainly deceased, the picketers’ anxiety turned to fury. Many threats were made before they finally dispersed. The murder of George Moscone and Harvey Milk added to a citywide sense of bewilderment and despair, but nowhere did it match the sense of loss and helplessness inside the fenced property on Geary Boulevard. In those dark days, there was one act of kindness. Dianne Feinstein, now acting mayor of San Francisco, came calling, not to badger the Temple members for money or to threaten them, but to ask if they were all right and to take some of them to breakfast. Through Charles Garry (who had made his way safely back along with Mark Lane), a few members declared for a short time that Peoples Temple would go on, that its mission to feed the hungry and clothe the naked remained, despite what happened in Guyana. But common sense prevailed over hubris. On December 3, only thirty people attended the Temple’s Sunday services, and three days later papers were filed requesting that the organization known as Peoples Temple be formally dissolved.

  Jim Jones was gone, and so was his church.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  AFTERMATH

  In the aftermath of Jonestown and the dissolution of Peoples Temple, the U.S. Congress launched an official investigation. More than nine hundred people were dead, including Congressman Ryan. Almost three hundred of them were children. Based on initial media coverage, the potential for tragedy involving Jim Jones and Peoples Temple was evident long before November 18. Who had missed, or, worse, ignored the obvious? Responsibility had to be established, and blame assigned.

  “The Guyanese government was determined not to be the villain of this piece,” Kit Nascimento recalls. “The American government, the American public and press, took us for easy targets, and this was clearly unfair. We had a public information officer who was overwhelmed, so [Prime Minister] Burnham asked me to take over.”

  As orchestrated by Nascimento, Guyana’s defense was simple. They’d been tricked into accepting an American religious colony that was endorsed by high U.S. officials, including First Lady Rosalynn Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale. Whatever happened at Jonestown, the Port Kaituma airstrip, and Lamaha Gardens in Georgetown was no fault of the Guyanese. An official statement bluntly claimed, “Guyana’s involvement was not much greater than if a Hollywood movie team had come here to shoot a picture on some aspect of American life. The actors were American, the plot
was American. Guyana was the stage, and the world was the audience.” Nascimento was dispatched to the United States, where he appeared on several major television news broadcasts, always declaring that his country was victimized by Jones and Peoples Temple, too. “We suffered a devastating setback in world opinion,” he says. “We weren’t to know what was going on in the jungle. If Jones was so bad, why didn’t his own government do something to stop him before he even got here?”

  That was a question that both the U.S. State Department and the FBI wished to deflect. State launched an internal investigation that concluded its embassy personnel had done all that was legally possible. Staff had made regular trips to Jonestown and met with settlers whose families back in America claimed were being held there against their will. None of them indicated they were prisoners or asked to leave. By law, there was nothing else the State Department could do. It had no authority to interfere with an “American religious establishment.” U.S. citizens had the right to worship as they pleased, even if that included following a lunatic and living in the jungle. If Jones or any of his followers were committing crimes, that fell under the jurisdiction of the FBI.

  The FBI was equally adamant that it was blameless. The agency claimed that its only alert involving the Temple came in June 1978, when the office of U.S. senator S. I. Hayakawa of California passed on a letter from a constituent claiming Americans were held prisoner in Jonestown. After dutifully investigating and determining that “the people involved were adults who allegedly went to Guyana on their own,” the FBI turned the information over to the State Department for further action, if any was required.

  On May 21, 1979, investigators made their official report to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. The report found that the U.S. embassy staff in Guyana had been careless and demonstrated lack of common sense. There was considerable misinterpretation of laws regarding religious rights and freedoms, and the State Department in Washington and embassy staff in Guyana did not communicate efficiently about it. State Department personnel were reluctant to challenge Peoples Temple because of the church’s “tendency to litigate” and because the Temple was able to muster “massive public pressure” whenever it felt threatened. State was also intimidated by Jones’s influence with San Francisco city government. The Guyanese had “looked the other way”; the Temple may have bribed some of its leaders, and there was “probably” an affair between an unidentified Temple representative and a high Guyanese official. But no individual culpability was cited, only collective bad judgment.

  The Guyanese issued their own “Confidential: Inventory Analysis of the People’s [sic] Temple Agricultural Settlement, Jonestown, North West District,” which in a few short paragraphs absolved the Burnham administration of any responsibility, went on for several hundred pages listing everything found in Jonestown, and concluded that Jonestown might still offer benefits to Guyana by becoming a tourist attraction or eventually being turned into a shopping mall.

  Both governments agreed that someone had to legally answer for all the deaths, and the most obvious options were Larry Layton and Chuck Beikman; both remained in Guyanese custody. Even here there was disagreement. Guyanese leaders wanted to wash their hands of the entire Jonestown affair by shipping the men back to American courts. But by U.S. law, America had no jurisdiction over any killings committed in Guyana with the exception of the murder of a U.S. congressman. Leo Ryan was dead, but neither Layton nor Beikman killed him on November 18. The assassins who did had all died that same day in Jonestown.

  Beikman was present in the bathroom when Sharon Amos killed her children; a Guyanese court sentenced him to five years in prison for his involvement in those deaths. Beikman served his entire sentence and returned to his old home in Indiana, where he died in 2001. But Layton appeared likely to escape punishment altogether. The Guyanese obligingly tried him for murder, and he was acquitted. He’d shot Jonestown defectors at the Port Kaituma airstrip on November 18, but none of them died, and no one claimed that Larry Layton killed Leo Ryan.

  But the United States was determined that Layton should pay for some crime. He was extradited to America at the government’s request, and charged with conspiring to murder a congressman. Layton swore that he couldn’t remember much, and his first trial ended with a hung jury. But he was convicted in a second trial, and though Layton was a cooperative, even model, prisoner eligible for release after five years, he served eighteen before finally being paroled in 2002. Afterward, he moved to Northern California, where he lives in virtual anonymity, avoiding the media. He has only the most occasional, fleeting contact with former Temple members who had known him in Mendocino County, San Francisco, and Jonestown.

  There was no smooth reassimilation for anyone who had been part of Peoples Temple. Even those who left prior to Jonestown were considered suspect. Something had to be wrong with anyone who’d even briefly followed Jim Jones. Violent events heightened the perception that Peoples Temple and death were synonymous. On March 13, 1979, Michael Prokes called a press conference at a motel in Modesto, California. He promised reporters that if they attended, they’d get a front-page story, and they did. After handing out a statement defending Jones and Peoples Temple, Prokes retreated to a bathroom and shot himself, leaving behind more pages urging that his death encourage further investigation into Jonestown—then the world would finally learn about the conspiracies that undermined an admirable organization and cause. In February 1980, Temple defectors and co-organizers of Concerned Relatives Elmer and Deanna Mertle, who had changed their names to Al and Jeannie Mills to avoid Temple retaliation, were found murdered in their home. The crime was never solved, but police investigators assured the FBI that there was no indication that any former Temple members or a Temple hit squad were involved.

  There were books, too—by Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman (written with fellow journalist John Jacobs), the Washington Post’s Charles Krause, Debbie Layton, Mark Lane, Jeannie Mills (published before her death), Bonnie Burnham Thielmann, and many more. A few were objective, others sincere but one-sided, and some overtly self-serving. None were blockbuster bestsellers, but collectively they kept the subject of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple before the public, as did several sensationalistic movies. In Indiana, members of the Jones family assiduously avoided the press. Even though they greatly resented print, television, and film depictions of themselves as uneducated and racist, they tried to remain anonymous out of fear that relatives of those who died in Jonestown might retaliate against Jones’s kin. In Richmond, the Baldwins did their best to meet with the media and politely explain that Marceline Baldwin Jones was a wonderful person, and that they were as surprised as anyone by what happened in Jonestown.

  The survivors straggled back to America and tried to rebuild their lives. Tragic ends awaited some. In Georgetown, Paula Adams had been torn between her loyalty to Jones and her love for Laurence “Bonny” Mann. Immediately following November 18, Adams, along with Stephan Jones, served as primary spokespersons in Georgetown for Peoples Temple. Mann divorced his wife and married Adams. They moved to Washington, D.C. But Mann and Adams separated, and in October 1983 he murdered her and their child, then killed himself.

  Suzanne Jones reunited with her brothers after they were finally allowed to leave Guyana and return to California. But she remained resolutely opposed to any further acknowledgment of family ties to Jim Jones or Peoples Temple—after Suzanne remarried and had children, she did not tell them about their family history, and, on the few occasions when Stephan, Jimmy, and Tim cooperated with print or television interviews, she threatened never to speak to them again. Suzanne died of breast cancer in 2006.

  Stephan, Jimmy, and Tim Jones did their best to put what had happened in Guyana behind them. It wasn’t easy—each had more than his share of personal struggles. But all three eventually built decent lives and remain close. Though Tim Jones now avoids all public comment, Stephan and Jimmy occasionally speak to interviewers. Stephan also
contributes occasional essays to the Jonestown Institute website, which has become an almost therapeutic forum for former Temple members, family, and friends to share opinions and memories among themselves and with the public. Formally called “Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple,” the website is maintained by Rebecca Moore, sister of Carolyn Layton and Annie Moore, and her husband, Fielding McGehee. Besides essays, it includes access to information about all aspects of Peoples Temple in the United States and Guyana, detailed timelines, and transcriptions of most of Jim Jones’s recorded sermons and addresses as well as Edith Roller’s minutely detailed journals of life as a Peoples Temple member.

  For years, Moore and McGehee have also served as conduits for out-of-touch or even estranged Temple members to reconnect. Separate from Jonestown Institute gatherings, the remaining Temple “family”—it can be properly described as nothing else—also gathers annually on November 18 for memorial services at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland. Monuments there mark the mass grave, engraved with the names of all who perished that day in Guyana, including Jim Jones. His inclusion sparked controversy in the press and hard feelings among some survivors and relatives of the deceased, but majority opinion held that all the dead were, in some sense, victims, including Jones, whose delusions, compulsions, or criminality—there’s considerable debate which—cost him his life.

  These survivors represent the same diversity of race, background, personality, education, and professional achievement that characterized Peoples Temple at its zenith. Every year there are fewer of them. But the pain and frustration persist. The only ones who understand are themselves, a rainbow family brought together by Jim Jones and bound eternally by shared loss and suffering.