The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Buford kept attending Temple meetings, mostly to enjoy the fellowship of its members and out of obligation to the Mertles. Her opinion of Jim Jones changed after she spoke to him several times. Buford thought Jones must really have special powers—he was able to read her mind, telling her all kinds of personal things about herself and her very dysfunctional Pennsylvania family that Jones could not possibly have known. These weren’t things she’d told the Mertles, or anyone else at the Temple or in Redwood Valley. “Only much later,” she says, “did I learn that the Mertles were stealing letters to me from my family when they got to their mailbox. That’s how Jones got all that information, but since I didn’t know it then it gave him his first hold over me. He could read my mind, he had these powers, and the Temple was working toward the things that I believed in. So I joined.”