Jonestown

The full horror of the Jonestown tragedy is told for the first time.

Our Father Who Art in Hell

Congressman Leo Ryan made his final decision to go to Guyana after meeting with the Concerned Relatives group in California. It was fittingly close to Halloween, for this had become a political Halloween story. The date was October 25, 1978.

To his staff, Ryan announced his decision grim faced. He was not looking forward to the trip. It was good politics and good constituent service: Ryan’s congressional district was just south of San Francisco, where the Reverend Jim Jones had held his position as the powerful chairman of the city’s Housing Authority. But Ryan had a distinct sense of possible danger. An affidavit by Deborah Blakey, a former disciple of Jones, with its report of weapons, security guards, and mass-suicide drills, had been brought to Ryan’s attention. His staff interviews with apostates were hair curling. And he was receiving intelligence from a free-lance journalist named Gordon Lindsay, who had drafted an astonishing article about Temple bestialities for the National Enquirer. But the National Enquirer was not exactly a journal of record, and Ryan considered Lindsay’s story sensational fare for the checkout counter at the supermarket, not something one would want to base a congressional investigation upon.

The dates for the trip were set for November 14-20. Ryan had to be back in Washington on November 21 for a hearing on saving whales. On November 7 he was reelected to Congress with 61 percent of the vote. On November 9 Ryan met with the NBC team, which had asked to accompany him. There was no doubt that both the congressman and the newsmen appreciated the potential danger of their assignment, and each side reassured the other that it was tough enough and fearless enough for the mission. The following day, with the boss still in California, Ryan aides met in Washington with Deborah Blakey and Grace and Timothy Stoen. As the three apostates retold their stories and expressed their fears, their listeners at first were skeptical, for the three had once been enthusiastic practitioners of the very Jonesian tactics they now described in detail as dangerous and evil.

Word of Ryan’s trip spread rapidly. Once NBC was committed, the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner assigned correspondents. Soon the Washington Post joined. Suddenly the press party numbered nine, which for a congressional junket was very large.

Concerned Relatives were calling, for here was an opportunity to have, for once, a forceful spokesman for uncovering the truth at the bottom of the horror. Fourteen relatives, including Grace and Timothy Stoen, announced their intention to make the trip.

To the Temple, Ryan lamely maintained that neither the press nor the Concerned Relatives were part of his official delegation, but it was a futile effort at hairsplitting. From Jonestown the assault force looked formidable, and, for once, it was real. A flamboyant congressman who had officially sided with Timothy Stoen; a continent of the Temple’s most effective “class enemies”; a national television crew advised by the class enemy Gordon Lindsay; the two major dailies of San Francisco, where the last of the Temple’s friends and supporters were; and a reporter from Washington, who potentially could galvanize the interest of the federal government in yet more investigation and interference. The reputation and, in effect, the very existence of the Temple poised on the outcome of the visit.

On the weekend before the delegation departed, NBC reporter Don Harris began interviewing on-camera the principals on both sides of the dispute. To the Temple supporters he delivered the assurance that he was not out to do an expose: “I have absolutely no idea at this point what the story will look like, favorable or critical to the Temple …. By and large, your biggest safe factor is that we really don’t care how the story turns out.”

Perhaps he did not care, but he did know what his story was, as his producer, Robert Flick, later testified. It was a story of enslavement by a fanatic. Whether he could prove it on film was another matter. Then, in the cast of ethics and professionalism, he delivered what the Temple could only see as a threat.

“If we have to file in a hurry, give us the name of somebody in Georgetown or here,” he said, “because there will be time for only one phone call; that’s all: to say we are filing, and the story will be negative … or we are filing, and you don’t have anything to sweat. That’s all I can do for you. That’s all I’m supposed to do for you. That is all ethically we can promise anybody.”

In Jim Jones’s construction of the world, this was it. This was the moment. There would never be another like it. His existence, the existence of his life’s work, his bid for history, came down to one phone call. From Georgetown he ordered a 100-pound drum of potassium cyanide. It arrived on the Cudjoe several days before the press and congressional and “class enemy” phalanx arrived in Guyana.

“Jim Jones’s explanations had lost their credibility. Reports of fresh defectors were passed to the Father in whispers. Jones was dissolving before the very eye of his beholders.”

If one were to imagine what a successful Ryan mission might have been, it would be this: that the congressman would skillfully use his power as an official representative of the. United States government to gain entry into Jonestown, that he would manipulate the press in his party toward that end. Once in Jonestown, he would interview those on his list and perhaps discover that some did indeed want to leave the encampment; he would penetrate the elaborate front of Jim Jones and establish him as a fraud and a master of slaves. In doing so, he would emerge as the hero of a seven-minute story on NBC’s “Today” show.

His constituency would have loved it. Their congressman was becoming nationally famous. By theatrical standards and with the press interest in the trip, success was already assured — whether the congressman got into Jonestown or not, whether the trajectory of his comet ever targeted the eye of Jim Jones’s orbit or not. For here was a mission beyond the gray business of the hearing room and the constituent letter. Here was a politician engaged in his world and his age, grappling personally with a profound symptom of the spiritual dearth of the 1970s.

Indeed, Congressman Ryan boarded a plane for Guyana not expecting ever to see Jonestown. He would use every trick, every device he had learned, to break down the gate of Jonestown. He would put pressure on the American Embassy to put pressure on the Guyanese government to put pressure on Jim Jones to gain access. But in his mind he knew he would be impeded somewhere, perhaps all along the way. When it happened, the tailback position was to board a plane with the press and a few distraught relatives, fly to Port Kaituma, approach the locked gate of Jonestown, and, preferably with a sullen, gun-toting guard in the background, hold a press conference. This would prove to an American television audience that Jonestown was not what Jim Jones said it was.

As the Ryan party readied for departure, Sharon Amos, the Temple’s fanatic public-relations woman in Georgetown, was issuing a press release announcing that the Concerned Relatives had now enlisted a right-wing congressman, a supporter of the Pinochet regime, in their cause, and that while Ryan was ostensibly coming to “investigate” charges against the Temple, the trip was really “a contrived media event, staged to manufacture adverse publicity for the Jonestown community, hopefully by provoking some sort of incident.” In a nice twist of the same language used against the Temple, the press release also put Ryan “on official notice that [the Jonestown residents] will be requesting Guyana police protection in the event that attempts are made to enter the Jonestown community against their will.” Regrettably, no such official request was ever made to the Guyanese police, not by the Temple or by Ryan. The embassy had specifically informed Ryan that it could not provide any security for his trip.

On Wednesday morning the Temple’s resistance softened slightly with an invitation to Ryan and one aide to visit Jonestown, but no press and no relatives. Ryan was not particularly warmed by the invitation. For a start, it stripped him of the personal protection he now felt the press afforded. It gave nothing to the relatives accompanying him. Where was the political theater in it? Besides, the original plan had called for a trip to Jonestown on the following day, Thursday, and a plane had already been chartered. But Wednesday dragged on with a lunch at the embassy and a meeting with the Guyanese foreign minister, most of which was absorbed in talk of American sugar quotas. By late afternoon there had been no word from the Temple. Ryan began to smell a stall. He gathered with the relatives for a status conference, allowing the cameras to film it. He promised to try direct communication with Jonestown that evening, for the situation was now for Jones and him to resolve. He praised the relatives for their patience, which was far more than he would have been able to muster were he in their shoes. “I have no relatives there. No financial commitment. No emotional commitment. I’m simply here in response to questions which have been asked. My job is to separate out the emotional tension between Jim Jones and you and sit down and talk with him. In the interest of fairness, his point of view needs to be represented before I make up my mind as a member of Congress.” But he was being sucked inexorably into this poignant human dilemma, losing sight of his official reason for being there.

Ryan hoped, if he was able to travel to Jonestown the next day, to persuade Jones to permit the relatives to visit on Friday. But as the sun dipped toward the horizon on Wednesday, only a few preliminary calls between Sharon Amos and a Ryan staff man had taken place. So, after dinner with Ambassador John Burke, Ryan took the matter on himself, catching a taxi to the Temple headquarters at Lamaha Gardens.

“Hi, I’m Leo Ryan, the bad guy. Does anyone want to talk?” he said cheerily as he strode into the living room. Out of 30 stunned communards, Sharon Amos was one of the few who would talk. All other conversation in the room ceased awkwardly. But Ryan mustered his charm, and the initiative went well, at least according to Ryan’s account. At one point he told Amos he wanted to visit Jonestown, but not just get the “two-dollar tour.” He really wanted to talk to people.

When Ryan returned to his hotel later, he bubbled about his minor triumph, and the following morning Sharon Amos conveyed to a Ryan aide her pleasure with the meeting as well. Perhaps one of the Concerned Relatives and a few correspondents could accompany the congressman on his Friday trip after all. But later Thursday morning Ryan blundered. He convened the press, invited several Guyanese reporters, and got carried away in describing his coup of the night before. He had seen no signs of religious life in the Temple headquarters, only plaques citing various humanitarian awards for Jim Jones. If this was not a religious organization, why was it tax-exempt? “There is a posturing of religious belief, but I’m not sure it exists,” he said sharply. Would they get into Jonestown or not? The press wanted to know.

“If [they] refuse me entry, then this is a prison. There are social-security laws involved here, finance and tax laws, as well as passport regulations, and I intend to pursue that through every area of the U.S. government.”

This tough talk, of course, got back immediately to Sharon Amos, and she called a Ryan aide to express her shock and disappointment. The congressman had questioned their faith and had mentioned Jonestown in the same breath with the Red Cross convention on prisoners. His objectivity was now in doubt, and his trip to Jonestown the following day was now “up in the air.” It would have to be ironed out when Temple attorneys Mark Lane and Charles Garry arrived in Guyana after midnight.

Before noon the following day, Ryan seemed to be off for his dry press conference at the closed gate to the commune, but what he did not know was that a Temple truck had been parked in the middle of the Port Kaituma airstrip, defying any plane to land.

Newly arrived, Temple authorities Lane and Garry repaired to Lamaha Gardens to talk by radio to Jones. But when Jones came on the radio, he sounded as if he were dead. That, at least, was Garry’s impression. Lane put forward the attorneys’ recommendation that everyone — Ryan, press, and relatives — be welcomed. Jones would have nothing of it. He ranted about his righteousness and about the perfidy of traitors, etc., etc. But there was little now that tirades could accomplish. The congressman was on his way. He was coming with a planeload of press and Concerned Relatives, a Guyanese government official, and the second in command at the U.S. Embassy. With the matter unresolved, Lane and Garry hustled to the Georgetown airport to make the 2:00 P.M. departure. Negotiations could continue in Port Kaituma. If Jones kept his truck on the airstrip, he stood to embarrass himself profoundly, not only before the American public and the American Congress but before his Guyanese hosts as well. Ryan had won the first round.

A half-hour into the flight, the plane suspended, as it were, on the seam of civilization, Jones tried for the last time to turn Ryan back. The pilot of the plane received a message from Port Kaituma, saying that the light had dwindled rapidly and it was unsafe to land. Perhaps Jones still had some small reservation in his mind about the execution of his grand design. But the pilot was spunky. He would make a go of it after he passed over the airstrip to judge its condition himself.

The Jonestown Arrival

On the airstrip a Temple dump truck and tractor awaited the party. Without difficulty the plane touched down at 3:40 P.M. Temple escorts ushered Ryan, the American diplomat Richard Dwyer, and the Temple attorneys onto the truck with the word that they would proceed to Jonestown, while the press and relatives remained behind at the airstrip — under guard by two Guyanese policemen.

Nearly an hour later, Jones’s wife, Marcelline, met this first contingent as it arrived in Jonestown. People came and went amiably within the community, making no particular fuss over the arrival, exhibiting no hostility. In the pavilion the band practiced. Marcelline conducted what Ryan coined the first “two-dollar tour,” past the child-care center and the facility for the disabled and the mentally retarded and the other manifestations of the commune’s good works. In time, Bishop Jones appeared. The diplomat, Richard Dwyer, was struck by this apparition. In May, when Dwyer had seen him last, Jones had been fat and relaxed. Now he was considerably thinner, his demeanor tense, his face gray. His first words went to his poor health and his high fevers. He was defensive and self-pitying from the start. He did not want his people harassed. As the congressman could see, people came and went as they pleased. Ryan said that he was there to see which of the allegations were fact, and which fiction, and got right to the point of the newsmen back at the airstrip. Garry and Lane pitched in again with their recommendation for an open-arms policy.

“Okay, let ’em all in, what the hell,” Jones said with a wave of the hand.

What about Gordon Lindsay? someone piped up, referring to the National Enquirer reporter who was now considered a “class enemy.”

“All except him,” Jones snapped.

As time dragged on at the airstrip, newsmen sweated under the hot afternoon sun and one of the policemen grew increasingly relaxed with several reporters. From time to time, once or twice a month, he related, small planes landed to pick up injured Americans from Jonestown. The local people were always told that the injuries were sustained in machete or machinery accidents, but explanations were suspicious.

“When you go there, keep your eyes open,” the policeman told the reporter. “We really hate these people. Reverend Jim Jones should have died long ago.”

At 6:00 P.M. the tractor returned to the airstrip to collect the newsmen, all except Lindsay. An hour and a half later, after inching through deep mud on the Jonestown road, the press joined the congressman in the early dark of the forest. For the time being, the front consumed the reality. The buildings impressed. The residents were friendly and rational, seemingly well fed. Coffee was passed around, then hot pork sandwiches and greens and edo roots. Jones presided over the feast, wearing a red polo shirt and only lightly tinted glasses. He was relaxed and conversational at first. Marcelline Jones was the consummate hostess. Soon enough, the show began. Deanna Wilkinson, Jonestown’s version of Aretha Franklin, and the Jonestown Express roared into the Guyanese national anthem with feeling, then “America the Beautiful,” and continued with their customarily superb rock and blues numbers. The visitors were frantically trying to match their preconceptions with what they were seeing. Residents “looked programmed,” some observers thought — whatever that was. At one point, in a whisper, Congressman Ryan remarked on how the older members were clapping trancelike to the soul music, as if this amounted to profound revelation. But he had discovered nothing so far to substantiate the allegations of abuse and much that belied such charges. As the entertainment proceeded, individuals on his list were brought to Ryan to be interviewed. When the politician sensed his moment, he assumed the microphone.

“Questions have been raised about your operation here,” he began. “I’m here to find out. I can tell you right now from the few conversations I’ve had so far … there are some people here who believe this is the best thing that’s happened to them in their whole life… “

Riotous applause overwhelmed him for more than three minutes. When it finally subsided, Ryan wished they were all from San Mateo.

“It’s too bad you can’t vote for me,” he cracked.

“We can… by absentee ballot,” Jones responded.

Ryan took the comment at face value. “My work is important to me, and I know it’s important to you as well. Thank you for hosting us here tonight. We really appreciate it. I don’t want to spoil your good time here tonight with political speeches.” If he only knew…

“Oh, no,” Jones replied. “These traitors! All is lost!” Now there were 13 who wanted to go. Tension swept through the camp. Defectors were afraid to get their belongings.”

Close to ten o’clock the congressman and the diplomat Dwyer went to the radio shack to make contact with Georgetown. In the pavilion Jones was holding forth for reporters as the music continued more quietly. His conversation was disjointed, moving without link from one passion to the next. All his contradictions were on display. He admitted his Marxism but insisted that his was a religious movement. In the custody dispute between himself and the Stoens, he insisted that John Victor Stoen was his son, bringing the boy forth to bare his teeth, comparing them with his own, but then reacted adversely to the suggestion that he had had an “affair “ with Grace Stoen. He described his experiment as a community of sharing but balked at the label “Socialist.” “Call me a Socialist,” he said huffily. “I’ve been called worse.” Since no one had ever challenged his illogic before, he faltered and looked hurt at his obvious inconsistencies. He began to look increasingly ridiculous and seemed to realize it. He hated power, violence, and money, he said with emotion. Did people have normal sex lives in the community? His sexton, Harriet Tropp, sitting next to him, mercifully answered in his place.

“People do fuck in Jonestown,” she declared emphatically, citing as proof the 33 babies born in the camp.

Close to eleven o’clock the entertainment ceased, and the audience drifted out into the night air. To the side, watching Jones wind down like a whirligig, Richard Dwyer stood alone in the shadows. A slender white man approached the diplomat warily, his face etched with terror. He must leave, must leave at once, that night, the man whispered, for he could not remain in the community much longer. Dwyer could not help him, not just yet. It had been decided that the newsmen would return to Port Kaituma and that Ryan and Dwyer would overnight in Jonestown. This Dwyer explained, and after taking the man’s name, one Vernon Gosney, he insisted that Gosney seek him out in the morning. The terrified apostate drifted into the night once again, only to find reporter Don Harris, who was waiting for his crew to pack up their gear. Gosney passed him a note, scrawled with a magic marker, crying for help to escape for both himself and a Monica Bagby. Harris slipped the note into his boot.

With this slight fissure in the facade, Dwyer realized that the situation had altered dangerously, and he went to find Congressman Ryan. As a start, bringing in more Concerned Relatives the very next day was a terrible idea, Dwyer whispered to Ryan. “We’ve got to get out of the travel business,” he said, and Ryan agreed. The newsmen, too, realized the significance of the note and the danger of it. This was the story they had come for, but on the other hand, they could not become involved personally in an evacuation operation, not with a desperately ill and volatile leader like Jones.

An hour later the reporters were dumped off in Port Kaituma. Characteristically, they got a· bottle of good rum and sat down in a joint called Weekend Disco to drink for several hours and tell war stories. In time, a local policeman drifted into the establishment and turned out to be open, even quite anxious, to talk about Jonestown. In due course, he took three reporters back to the police outpost, there mentioning that at least one automatic rifle had been registered to the Jonestown arsenal-against strict government policy. When the three returned to the Weekend Disco, they shared the information. For Don Harris, contemplating his scheduled interview with Jones in the morning, there were now two flash points: the defector’s note and the automatic rifle.

Leo Ryan was up at dawn on November 18, breakfasting on pancakes and syrup with bacon, all cooked over charcoal. In the school tent adjacent to the pavilion, children giggled at “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” on a television set. Jones had assured the reporters that a truck would fetch them around 8:00 A.M., but it did not show up in Port Kaituma until after 10:00 A.M. Ryan spent the morning holding interviews in the corner of the pavilion without harvesting a single dissident. The reporters arrived close to 11:00 A.M. Harris conducted several soft interviews with residents. Harris’s mind was on his promised confrontation with Jones, and he wanted it to take place at the end of the visit. He told Richard Dwyer that the night before, in Port Kaituma, he had learned things that he knew would be unsettling to Jones; so he wanted his “hard-hitting interview” to come at the last.

It began near 1:00 P.M. Much of the substance had already been covered in bits and pieces, but this was the interview that mattered. Covering the litany of charges against Jones, Harris was relentless. Fifteen minutes or so into the interview, he raised the matter of the registered automatic weapon.

“This is rubbish. I’m defeated. I might as well die,” Jones said in sudden dejection, his voice rising. He began to sweat profusely, licking his lips again from the Nembutal in his system. “The guns have never been used to intimidate people.”

Harris unsheathed the note given to him the night before, with the names of Monica Bagby and Vernon Gosney clearly printed. That marked them as the first to be shot three hours later. Lies, games, perversions: Jones’s explanations had lost their credibility. Reports of fresh defectors were passed to the Father in whispers. Jones was dissolving before the very eyes of his beholders.

“Every time they go, they lie,” he wailed. “The more that leave, the less responsibility we have. What I thought was keeping them here was the fear of the ghetto and alienation (in the States]. I must have failed somewhere. I want to hug them before they go… “

Edith Parks, a granite-faced little white-haired lady in her sixties, was the first to get Father’s ghostly embrace. Her defection took place on national television, for as the cameras whirred at a distance out of earshot, Jones spoke in hushed tones to her, desperately trying to change her mind. The little lady in shorts sat, eyes fixed forward, jaw set, unspeaking, her hands held firmly in her lap. Soon enough, her whole family had voted to go as a unit, a blood unit, defying all Jones’s efforts to make blood insignificant. Then came another family, the Bogues, arguing among themselves, arguments of people with identity, for a change, but somehow arriving at a rocky consensus to leave. Earlier, Jones had succeeded in splitting the Bogue family, giving the father, Jim, a black companion and the mother, Edith, a man named Harold Cordell. But Cordell had seen the shipment of cyanide off-loaded from the Cudjoe only days before, and he saw the execution of Jones’s vision coming. In this first group of public defectors, knowledge of the recent shipment of the cyanide was the key to their defection. All the talk was ending. The moment of the apocalypse had arrived, and they meant to take their last chance to escape it. They wanted to live.

This clutch of public traitors was white, but a group of black fugitives was also on its way out-but secretly. With street cunning, nine blacks slipped out of the camp early that morning, while Jones and his security force were preoccupied with the commotion of the visit. This group, too, contained blood units, with the exception of its leader, Robert Paul, who had left his wife, Auletta Paul, nine years his junior, and his three children behind in Jonestown.

The Jonestown Spiral

After the news of the first defections, Jones crawled deeper into his personal hellhole. Charles Garry stood beside him as the catastrophe hit, and the attorney was transfixed at the sight of Jones’s shuddering.

“Jim, what’s the matter with you?” Garry asked. “Let them leave. So what? Wish them well and ask them back when they feel like it.”

“Oh, no,” Jones replied, vacant-eyed. “These traitors! All is lost!”

‘In his vainglory, Jones evoked the Epistles of St. Paul: “I’ve been born out of this season just like all you are, and the best testimony we can make is to leave this goddamn world.”’

Now there were 13 who wanted to go. Tension swept through the camp. Defectors were afraid to get their belongings; so Leo Ryan accompanied them back to their cottages, absorbing the hateful looks, comforting the refugees as insults were hurled at them. Residents stood at the doors of their barracks or at a safe distance from the rushings back and forth in the pavilion, glancing furtively at one another and back at Ryan. Dwyer could feel it. It was time to get the journalists out of there — and fast. Violence still did not cross his mind. It was just time to go home — right then. Still another family approached him, the Simonses, the father, Al, and his three children. That made 17. The Ryan plane would hold only 19. Dwyer rushed off to call Georgetown and order another plane to come. The press would have to be bumped. “What’s wrong?” Sharon Amos’s mystified voice crackled from Georgetown. “Are they bringing sick people?” But Al Simons’s wife, Bonnie, did not want to leave. Husband and wife argued. The husband picked up the children’s things and started for the waiting truck. Dwyer hustled the defectors and the press toward the truck. A desperate scream knifed out of the air.

“No, no, no,” the woman’s voice shrieked. It was Bonnie Simons, reaching out to her children.

“Don’t worry. We’re going to take care of everything,” John Jones, the Reverend’s adopted black son, said to her.

Dwyer and Ryan huddled. If neither of them stayed, there would be retaliation against Bonnie Simons. Dwyer agreed to accompany the party to the airport; Ryan would stay to arbitrate the new custody battle, spending another night. Dwyer hurried back to the loaded truck, through the thick mud. It had begun to rain heavily.

Ryan stood near the pavilion, talking with Lane and Garry and Jones. Suddenly, from behind, an arm was around Ryan’s neck, a knife point indenting the skin of his throat. “I’m gonna kill you. This is what you’re gonna get,” the voice from behind shouted.

For a split second Ryan thought that it was horseplay. The knife felt like a ballpoint pen. He collapsed limply backward, batting the knife away as he fell, realizing that this was no joke. Lane had time to grab the wrist of the assailant, holding the knife away from Ryan’s neck. Garry got the attacker in a head hold. They tumbled to the ground, the knife slashing the assailant and splattering blood on Ryan’s shirt. As others jumped into the pile, trying to pin down the attacker, trying to wrest the knife away from him, Jones stood at the side, dazed, acting as if nothing were happening.

But soon he was animated. Screams from the attack reached the truck with the newsmen, and it emptied, Dwyer leading the race back to the pavilion, the newsmen on his heels. Jones rushed out to stop the charge. A quick negotiation took place. Along with Dwyer, one photographer, Greg Robinson, was allowed to proceed. It marked him for later.

Jones’s face was pallid, stupid with fear. “I wish someone had shot me,” he said.

“This is a serious occurrence,” Ryan said, collecting himself, brave, downplaying the horror. “I’ve seen good things in Jonestown. This doesn’t mean everything’s over.” If Jones would immediately call in the Guyanese police and have the assailant arrested, Ryan would place weight on that. The congressman still insisted that he would stay to arbitrate the Simons problem.

Dwyer took him aside. “I want your ass out of here… and now,” the diplomat said, pulling rank. “You could become the focal point of a more terrible incident.” Ryan relented, as Dwyer promised to return to Jonestown to handle the Simons matter after the congressman was airborne.

They moved to the truck. At a distance, slowly licking his parched lips, Jones stood in conversation with several security members, among them one Joseph Wilson, a beefy brute with neatly cornrowed hair, a New Jersey ex-convict whom Jones had plucked from prison before his time was up. At the last moment a new defector, draped in a poncho, had joined the contingent. Minutes before, this last passenger, named Larry Layton, had embraced Jim Jones.

“You will be proud of me” were Layton’s last words to Father.

The rain poured down ferociously. Ryan climbed into the cab of the truck, along with the NBC cameraman, intent on more mood shots. Spinning its wheels in the mud, the truck slid helplessly into a ditch and had to be extracted by a bulldozer. Finally they were under way. At the brow of the hill overlooking Jonestown, the cameraman demanded that the truck stop again for more mood pictures. One of the Parks family, Dale Parks, was near hysteria at the delay. He kept whispering to the outsiders that Larry Layton was not a genuine defector, that he was there to cause trouble, that he probably had a gun. The truck should hurry, for the Temple guards were sure to be after them. The NBC producer, the ex-paratrooper Bob Flick, made his way toward the back of the truck where Layton hung on in silence. Flick was a head taller than the insignificant Layton. If Layton tried something, Flick was ready to throw him off the truck.

The eight-mile trip through rain and mud took nearly an hour and a half. As the truck arrived at the airstrip, the rain ceased and the sun emerged. But the planes had not yet arrived. His bespattered shirt open to his solar piexus, a bedraggled Ryan sat down in the tin shack on the side of the dirt runway, waiting for the television crew to set up its cameras so that he could convey via film the details of his brush with death. Richard Dwyer rushed off to the local constabulary to report the attack on Ryan. When he got to the police hut in Port Kaituma, he found the constable drunk and the police radio out of order. In the sky the planes appeared, first the small Cessna, then the 19-seat Otter.

With the planes on the ground, Ryan began his interview.

“Where do we go now?” Harris asked toward the end.

“A report will be filed,” Ryan said. “I’ve asked that the man be arrested as soon as possible, because the reputation of the People’s Temple as a place of law and order is at stake.”

Harris thanked him for his time.

“Can I just add there are a lot of good people who are there on a positive and supportive and· idealistic basis, trying to do something that is different and important to them.”

On this generous note, Ryan turned to the details of boarding the flight. Richard Dwyer arrived back at the airstrip now with the policeman, bearing a shotgun. Dale Parks frantically kept insisting that Layton was a plant, that he should be searched. The matter was debated. Minutes passed. With his shin-length poncho still on, Layton slipped into the small plane, stowing a revolver under the seat. The planes were parked 30 feet apart. A Ryan aide stood between the two planes, deciding who should board which plane. Finally, it was decided that everyone would be searched. Layton was called out of the Cessna and directed to board the Otter. He objected fiercely. Congressman Ryan had promised him he could go out on the first plane. Ryan conciliated. What difference did it make? Layton was searched and then allowed to reboard the Cessna. Soon he was joined by Dale Parks and his ten-year-old sister, Tracy Parks, and by Vernon Gosney and Monica Bagby, the original defectors. The pilot started the motor.

At the door of the Otter, the other refugees were searched and boarded. The newsmen waited their turn. Three hundred yards down the airstrip, the Temple dump truck reemerged from the Port Kaituma road, followed by a tractor pulling a flatbed trailer. Nearly abreast of the Cessna the dump truck stopped. Three men emerged, striding toward Ryan. The tractor-trailer crossed the runway and halted between the two planes.

Inside the Cessna, Larry Layton was screaming. “Hurry up and take off! There’s going to be trouble!” The Cessna began to taxi. The three Temple Angels shoved a few local bystanders to the side. One snatched the shotgun from the policeman and pushed him back as well. A fist fight is about to break out, one of the reporters thought.

Men rose from the flatbed trailer and began firing rifles. Ryan was hit first; his body dropped, wrapping around the tire of the plane. Dwyer was hit in the rump. The fusillade was intense. Inside the Otter a bullet tore off the top of a fugitive’s skull. Inside the Cessna Larry Layton shot Monica Bagby in the back and Vernon Gosney in the chest. Dale Parks rose to restrain the Angel. Layton shoved the weapon into his chest and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired, but Parks fell back in his seat. Layton turned again to Bagby and Gosney, shooting them both a second time. Parks recovered and wrestled Layton to the floor. In the course of their struggle, Parks shouted, “Larry, you fool, I’m here to help!” With that Layton went limp. Outside, people were running to the bush for their lives. Bodies were strewn arqund the plane, some dead, some feigning death. There was a brief cease-fire. Several who lay still, waiting for their coup de grace, heard footsteps as the Angels trod among their victims. Three more shotgun rounds thudded point-blank into the chief enemies, making sure. The last blast slammed into the face of Leo Ryan.

As the trucks left Jonestown, missionaries moiled about their camp aimlessly. There was no more hysteria. The tension of the place ebbed away as the combustion noises of the trucks on the road faded. Marcelline Jones was soon on the loudspeaker, soothingly urging everyone to return to their cottages and apartments. Everything was fine. Later they would discuss the events of the day. Time passed languorously as the clouds vanished and the sun shone once again. With the community basically still intact, Charles Garry felt satisfied.

Almost halfheartedly, he advised Jones to report the knife attack on Ryan to Port Kaituma by radio and have the police come to arrest the assailant. The man’s name was Don Sly, Jones told Garry. His wife was a leader in the Concerned Relatives group. Like Larry Layton, Sly had this special need to prove himself to the leader. When the truck disappeared from sight, Garry turned to Jones. Up until the Ryan attack, Garry had felt that his side had won the public-relations battle. So a few rotten apples had left. So what? But the knife attack was different.

“This [knife attack] was the act of an agent provocateur, Jim,” Garry declared, still frightened by the vacant look in Jones’s eyes. “No one but an agent provocateur would do that.”

“No, the people are just angry,” Jones replied. Garry looked around him. He had seen no one angry. Anger, like love, had ceased to be a possibility in Jonestown. Only counterfeit emotions remained. And with counterfeit emotion no spontaneous action is possible. The script had been written in advance by Jones. There was some room for changes and deletions, depending upon the creativity of the actors, but the basic plot would stand. Jones had planned the knife attack, and now he could say their situation was hopeless.

On the loudspeaker the call to gather in the pavilion resounded. All around residents poured from their cottages. Their mood was festive. It was Saturday, a holiday, a day for television and games. Father sat on a bench, in despair. Next to him sat his chronicler, Harriet Tropp. Lane tried to be upbeat. “This can be the best day in the history of Jonestown,” he said cheerily. “The positive aspects of Jonestown have been seen and filmed. The congressman told me that he’ll write an objective report and that there will be no hearings.”

“You’re crazy! You’re crazy!” Tropp shrieked at him.

“All is lost,” Jones moaned.

In time he assumed his pedestal, adjusting the scepter microphone. For the last time, this Prince of Omega, the Caesar Godhead, left his secular station and invested himself in the Office.

“I’ve tried to give you a good life,” the master began. “In spite of all that I’ve tried, a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our life impossible. There’s no way to detach ourselves from what’s happened today. It was said by the greatest of prophets from time immemorial: No man takes my life from me. I lay down my life… If we can’t live in peace, then let’s die in peace.”

As they applauded, he warmed to the theme of betrayal. The synthesizer music began. The soft tones of a spiritual singer washed over them. He repeated the words of an idolater: if this experiment had worked for but one day, it had been worthwhile. It was time to touch them all. All his languages, all his tricks, all his voices, must go on display. This was his sermon in the swamp. He was calling in all his debts, and the tape of history was rolling.

“What’s going to happen here in a matter of minutes is that one of those people on the plane is going to shoot the pilot — I know that. I didn’t plan it, 11 he lied, “but I know it’s going to happen. They’re gonna shoot that pilot, and down comes that plane into the jungle. And we had better not have any of our children left when it’s over. Because they’ll parachute in here on us. 11 Parachute in as if they were the avenging angels of a wrathful Sky God. The suggestion brought the first scream of hysteria.

“So my opinion is that you be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to take it in ancient Greece and step over quietly, because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act. We can’t go back, and 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.”

His opinion, his decree, thus announced, he called for discussion. Was there dissent? Never, never dispute the Father in a white night; it was a law burned into their minds. If there was dissent, it would be planned. His foil searched for her courage. As she did, he talked on, building his case. If the children were left, they would be butchered. If they went on a hunger strike, they’d be striking against their Guyanese friends. It was too late for them to get their enemies — that would have to be left to the Angels. Finally, the foil asked about Russia. The debate raged, Jones’s deception on the Soviet covenant made clear, but it was too late to go to Russia, and he grew bored with the subject.

“I look at all the babies, and I think they deserve to live,” the foil, Christine Miller, said.

“I agree, but much more they deserve peace.”

“We all came here for peace,” she said. “Have they had it?” he retorted, besting her. They, not her.

“No.”

“I tried to give it to you. I’ve laid my life down practically. I practically died every day to give you peace.” His self-piety, his sacrifice, again. Could they rise, or descend, to his level? “And you still don’t have peace. You look better than I’ve seen you in a long while, but still it’s not the kind of peace that I wanted to give you. A person’s a fool to continue to say that you’re winning when you’re losing.”

To light candles, to curse the darkness: before, this was how they posed their dilemma. Now the twain were joined. Before, he had scoffed at the Epistles of Paul: “Servants, obey all things in your masters, according to the flesh, not with eye service as menpleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God …. Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a master in heaven.” Now, in his vainglory, he evoked Paul.

“Paul said there is a man born out of this season. I’ve been born out of this season just like all you are, and the best testimony we can make is to leave this goddamn world.”

The servants cheered, the raptures of slaves. The master ordered the potion. The crystals from 500-gram plastic bottles sprinkled into the purple solution of flavored drink. The syringes were scattered on the wooden picnic tables by the fistfuls, needles attached to some, making them weapons. Dr. Larry Schacht, their Albert Schweitzer transmogrified, marshaled his nursing corps. Ruletta Paul, 24 years of age, wife of Robert Paul, leader of the fugitive band that had slipped into the jungle that morning, stepped forward with her child in her arms. Her atonement for her special guilt was to serve as first example. The child opened its mouth. The doctor squirted the liquid far back toward the uvula. “Children,” Paul had told the Colossians, “obey your parents in all things, for this is well pleasing unto the Lord.”

“Oh, God, we’re dying. It’s starting to hurt,” someone cried.

“Great God, who said that?” Jones asked in irritation and then relented. “Come on up and speak, honey.” He harked back to their enemies. They were responsible for this. “We win. We win when we go down. Tim Stoen don’t have nobody else to hate. He’ll destroy himself.”

So that was their victory. They must all die so that Timothy Stoen would be deprived of an object for his hatred. For this inane absurdity, it took the Prophet’s clairvoyance. Christine Miller was going too far. The foil was becoming sincere. She punctured his ridiculousness, and the centurions began to heckle her. “You’re afraid to die.” “You’re no fucking good, goddammit” “You’re only standing here because of him.” She absorbed the abuse as she watched the babies and small children being carried out into the field. Jones made a show of protesting her dissent as he directed the communion.

Complete Devolution

“Hold it. Everybody hold it. Not much longer. Lay down your burdens. I’m going to lay my burden down by the riverside …. When they start parachuting out of the air, they will shoot some of the innocent babies. Can you let them take your babies?”

The congregation responded as it had been taught. Did no one pinch himself? Did someone not, at least, exchange a quizzical glance with his neighbor? Christine Miller reached for her last argument, her final challenge.

“You mean you want to see John die?” she asked, referring to John Victor Stoen.

“What?” he said, startled, buying a second to think.

“You mean you want to see John, the little one, die?”

“John — John? Do you think I’d put John’s life above others? He’s no different to me than any of these children here. He’s just one of my children. I don’t put one above another. I can’t separate myself from your actions or his actions. If you’d done something wrong, I’d stand for you. If they wanted to come and get you, they’d have to take me.”

Christine receded into the mass. He complimented her. She was honest, and she had stayed with him, not running away with the betrayers. Her life was precious to him, as precious as John Victor Stoen’s. Now he could get on with it. Now he saw that this was the will of the sovereign being. The Sky God was reinstalled. Had they noticed that only white people had betrayed them? Even he was deceived at the end. As the children came for their potion, he blessed them. Peace. Peace. Peace. Peace. Peace. The peace of God which passeth all understanding.

“I’ve tried so very, very hard from the time we were here,” he groaned. “Together it’s just easy. It’s easy. Yes, my love.”

“At one time I felt just like Christine,” a woman said, “but after today I don’t feel anything, because the people that left here were white, and I know that it really hurt my heart.”

“It broke your heart, didn’t it?” he said, selectively sentimental.

His adopted son came to him, whispering the news from the airstrip. He announced it frantically: “It’s all over, all over. What a legacy! What a legacy!” Ryan was dead. Many of the traitors were dead. His “red brigade” had shown them justice. The enemies had provoked this. They were responsible, not he. His voice rose with urgency. The process was too slow. Children’s screams filled the arena.

“No, no, please, no,” a boy’s scream pierced the pandemonium.

He issued orders. “Please get some medication. There’s no convulsions with it. …”

There were convulsions. There was vomiting. The potion took four minutes to work. He wanted it to work faster. The Guyanese soldiers were coming. Quicker. Keep moving. Faster. It was an administrative problem. A nurse tried to help. “The people that are standing there in the aisles will have to move,” her flat usher’s voice announced. “Everybody get behind the table and back this way, okay? There’s nothing to worry about. Everybody keep calm and try to keep your children calm. They’re not crying from pain. It’s just a little bitter tasting. We have lots of little children here, and we will serve them.”

But the agony of it persisted, the organ strains and the Valium in the mix doing little to dampen the pain. These things take time. It would take three hours to finish the job. By “serving” the little children first, Jones’s managerial talent surfaced again: having murdered their children, how could the parents have a strong will to live? He fortified their guilt for this crime against nature with a metaphysical argument: they could not separate themselves now from the crimes of their archangels.

“You can’t separate yourself from your brother and sister. No way I’m going to do it. I refuse. I don’t know who killed the congressman, but as far as I’m concerned, I killed him. You understand what I’m saying. I killed him.” They understood they had killed him, too. Later he wailed, “They can take me and do anything they want, whatever they want to do with me. But I want to see you go. I don’t want to see you go through this hell anymore. No more, no more, no more…”

The reverberation of his voice was lost in the screams of children. Pandemonium was hell’s capital, and no amount of his brilliant, loathsome oratory or his organ player’s dirge or his monster-doctor’s Valium could keep the place from consorting with chaos. On the perimeter the centurions trained their rifles and crossbows. Some waded into the herd to help inject the obstreperous. At his children’s antics· Father grew angry.

“Stop these hysterics,” he scolded. “This is not the way for Socialistic Communists to die.” He was right about that, at least. “We must die with some dignity. We had no choice. Now we have some choice.” He meant the choice of the group, not the choice of the individual, but the two were dangerously moving into opposition. “You think they are going to allow this to be done, allow us to get by with this?” This crime against humanity he seemed to mean. “You must be insane.” The growing weakness of his noble arguments occurred to him. His accent shifted to their crime, their responsibility, his naked power.

“Mother, mother, mother, please, mother, please, mother, please, please, please, please. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child, but don’t do this.” Be mannerly in your slaughter.

“We are doing this for you?” a woman shouted at him. Was it a final, bleating rebuke?

He ignored it. “Free at last. Peace. Keep your emotions down. Keep your emotions down, children. It will not hurt if you will be quiet.” As if hurting, like the slightly bitter taste of the potion, was the point.

As youthful screams melded with music, he tried history.

“It’s never been done before, you say? It’s been done by every tribe in history, every tribe facing annihilation. All the Indians of the Amazon are doing it right now. They refuse to bring any babies into the world. They kill every child. They don’t want to live in this kind of world…. The Eskimos? They take death in their stride.” His final identification was with the aborigines of the world.

But they would not be dignified, not his notion of it, anyway.

“Quit telling them they are dying!” he demanded, as if lying to the children were more dignified. “If you adults would stop some of this nonsense! ADULTS! ADULTS! ADULTS! I call on you to stop this nonsense. I call on you to quit exciting your children when all they are doing is going to quiet rest. I call on you to stop this now, if you have any respect at all. Are we black, proud, and Socialists?”

“YES!” came the diminished response. “… or what are we? Now stop this nonsense now.”

“All over, and it’s good.” This cadence suggested the Bible again. And God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good. “No sorrow that it’s all over,” he sighed. “Hurry. Hurry, my children: Hurry. Let’s not fall into the hands of our enemy. Hurry, my children. Hurry.” The children were gone. The old and the infirm were next. From somewhere came still more to try to please him with flatteries. For once, he needed no further gratification. “Where’s the vat, the vat, the vat? Where’s the vat? The vat with the green potion.” He brushed them aside, matter-of-factly, mistaking the color of the stuff. “Bring it here so the adults can begin. If you fail to follow my advice, you will be sorry. You will be sorry.”

In the radio room his mistress, Maria Katsaris, directed the final details. Three aides, all white, were called and given their mission to carry the letters and the cash to Feodor Timofeyev, their contact at the Russian Embassy in Georgetown. Later, all security bearing arms, some 25 people, were summoned. There was to be no mayhem among the guards at the end. Meanwhile, Katsaris messaged to Georgetown in code what was happening. Angels were to be dispatched to Georgetown hotels to murder the remaining enemies there, particularly Timothy Stoen. Then they were to kill themselves. How was it to be done? the question returned. They had no firearms in Georgetown, no potion. Slowly, in Morse code, the letters came back. K-N-I-F-E.

Then Katsaris gave her last order to the radio operator. “Now tell Georgetown that we’re having a power failure,” she ordered. This transmitted, she held out her hand. The operator yanked a critical part from the transmitter and handed it to her. She walked off to her private ceremony in the West House, dying in Jim Jones’s bed.

Meanwhile, at Lamaha Gardens, in Georgetown, unaware still of what was happening, Sharon Amos assumed her post in the radio room. As the news crackled in from Jonestown, she contacted San Francisco, instructing the Geary Street apostles to move high up on the band for an emergency dispatch. Frantically, San Francisco searched for a connection without success. But in due course the telephone rang.

From a great distance, Amos spoke the code urgently. “Do what you can to even the score.” The code had been in force for a long time. It meant that the last stand had come and that the avenging angels were to go forth against the iniquitors. But they were not dispatched. In Georgetown Jones’s son Stephen and several others did go to the hotel where Timothy Stoen waited for news, but the young Jones’s only thrust was verbal. “Why did you cause all these deaths?” he said lamely. No knife was drawn, not there, not in San Francisco — not yet, anyway.

Hysterically, at the Temple House, Sharon Amos screamed the news to the 75 or so communards, urging that their ritual-of-the-knife begin. It had been decreed from Jonestown. Her mates looked at her dully. She was not Jim Jones. This was not Jonestown. They never liked her much anyway. Outside, the cars of another reality puttered by. In disgust, she climbed the stairs to the second-floor bathroom, summoning first her son, aged 10; her daughter, aged 11; then her hefty daughter Lianne, aged 21; and, finally, Charles Beikman, the 43-year-old idiot ex-Marine. Lianne brought the butcher knife. First, Amos slit her young daughter’s throat, then her son’s. Then she had Beikman hold her 21-year-old daughter, and that was the end of Lianne. Finally, she started on herself, and the loutish Beikman finished the job.

The Jonestown Legacy

When the troops approached Jonestown more than a day later, spread out in battle formation, inching into the camp in full combat attire, expecting the mad surge of fanatics, they found only a few signs of resistance. The overwhelming preponderance of the evidence pointed to acquiescence, to complicity.

And they found Pastor Jones. His body lay, face up, on the steps of his manifold pedestal, his red dime-store shirt falling open on either side, exposing his soft belly, his head upon a pillow, his eyes locked open skyward. The bullet had entered behind the left ear and departed from the right temple. Its path was consistent with suicide by a left-handed person, but Jim Jones was right-handed. A 38-caliber pistol was found 30 yards from his body. In his stomach was a lethal dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital, which had not had time to circulate through his system. So at his last moment he had needed a fistful of pills to steel himself to meet his Maker.

His hand lay limp on the fold of his belly, his middle finger bent to the center of his palm in a gesture of teaching, his passion waned away at last. Nirvana.

As with everything it seems, politics got in the way of even a memorial in Oakland for the victims of the Jonestown Massacre. Thankfully the living managed eventual peace, however. We have an interview with the Jim’s son and more insights within these very pages.