The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Jones drew on his followers’ own dread of Stoen. During Stoen’s time as Jones’s chief legal strategist, he’d been feared by Temple members, who assumed that many of the harsher aspects of Temple life, especially the physical discipline, were instigated by him rather than Jones. In a sense, when Stoen went public with his support of Grace and, therefore, his opposition to Jones, it allowed Jones’s followers to also fixate on a specific foe rather than generic enemies identified by social status or agency—racist whites, the capitalist elite, the CIA, the FBI. Jones took full advantage; once, during an evening gathering at the Jonestown pavilion, he asked everyone to write down their preferred means of killing Tim Stoen. The more they despised him, the more Jones believed that he could count on their loyalty.