The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

After that, Jones might announce a miracle or two, generally something that couldn’t be disproven: someone had been fated to die in a car wreck the next morning, but because he’d come to Peoples Temple that day and believed all he’d heard there, he’d be spared. This was a plant, who’d rise up in tears to thank Jones for saving his life. Visitors taking that kind of pronouncement for hokum were often astonished when Jones next directly addressed them, by name and often describing something in their lives—an ill, elderly relative, a car that kept breaking down—that seemed impossible for him to know anything about. Few realized that the chatty Temple members visiting with them prior to the service, usually Patty Cartmell and others experienced in assisting Jones’s public performances, scrawled notes with information they’d learned and passed these along to him before he came out to preach. Jones would assure them that Granny’s bladder problems were about to get better, or that the family car was going to start running perfectly. If that didn’t turn out to be the case, come and tell him, because he and everybody in the Temple cared about these problems and wanted to help.