The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Peter Wotherspoon was a pedophile, accepted into Temple membership despite his openly admitted failing. He was informed from the beginning that even the slightest further illicit act with a child would be unacceptable, but he couldn’t resist. A ten-year-old Temple boy reported that Wotherspoon had engaged him in a sex act, and Wotherspoon was brought before the Planning Commission to answer for it. An obvious solution would have been to turn Wotherspoon over to the police, but that ran counter to Temple tradition. Instead, Wotherspoon was taken to a back room and ordered to strip and lay his genitals flat on a table. Then Jack Beam, wielding a length of rubber hose, pounded W0therspoon’s penis and scrotum until they were swollen several times over. Wotherspoon had to be catheterized and lay in bed for days afterward, unable to move. But he was allowed to remain in the Temple, with the understanding that any additional transgression would result in something even worse. Though no commission member questioned the seriousness of Wotherspoon’s statutory rape or that a substantial disciplinary act was required, some were shaken by the barbarity of his punishment.