The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Movies were frowned on for the rank-and-file, but in spare weekend hours between meetings, especially when they were held in San Francisco or Los Angeles, Jones headed for the cinema. He loved mysteries and action films—over the years, he identified his favorites as Chinatown and M*A*S*H. Jones told the truth when he claimed to only wear hand-me-downs and clothes purchased at discount stores, but he had a fondness for a specific style of black lace-up shoes with thick soles. These were the only shoes he wore—but he had six pairs. Above all, though he swore in sermons that he spent every available minute on Temple business, he took vacations with his family, often for one or two weeks at a time. Members were told that Father was away on important business. These trips cost money, and Jones received no salary from the Temple—ostensibly the Joneses lived on Marceline’s earnings as a state employee. But Jones controlled the Temple bank accounts, and on at least two occasions he withdrew a few thousand dollars for personal expenses. It wasn’t embezzlement; the transaction records were logged in Temple files. Still, only Jones and a few discreet associates had access to these files, and he certainly preferred for the general Temple membership not to know.

After being gassed in World War I, James Thurman Jones, “Big Jim,” never passed a comfortable day, and deflected his physical and mental distress with pills supplied to him during treatments at regional VA hospitals. Almost forty years later, Jim Jones emulated his dad. As far back as 1965, Garry Lambrev remembers Jones occasionally pausing in mid-sermon to complain about his need to use pain medication. Jones said that he didn’t like doing it, but sometimes needed the pills to alleviate discomfort from various unspecified ailments. Temple membership was then less than a hundred and most had come west from Indiana with Jones. They knew him well and harbored no belief that he was a god above the human need for occasional self-medication. As the Temple grew, Jones’s references to personal use of pain pills stopped. Whether he’d actually discontinued them or not, his expanding ranks of more worshipful members couldn’t be allowed to think that Father needed drugs to function, especially since he forbade them to his followers. It would have been a contradiction that even Jones couldn’t explain away. But sometime around 1971 he began abusing drugs on a regular basis—amphetamines and tranquilizers, pills and liquids to provide significant boosts of energy, or else slow down his racing imagination and allow him to rest.

So Jones assembled a squad of personal bodyguards, mostly menacing-looking young black men. Prominent among them was hulking Chris Lewis, a San Francisco street thug who’d come through the Temple drug program, and who afterward balanced gratitude and loyalty toward Jones with a continuing attitude of barely suppressed violence. Jones went out of his way to support him, eventually using Temple funds to pay for Lewis’s successful defense in San Francisco against murder charges unrelated to Temple business. The murder case was an example of the government pursuing its vendetta against proud black men, Jones insisted. Some Temple members wondered—Lewis scared them. But they didn’t protest, to Jones or among themselves, because then they might be accused of being FBI infiltrators bent on causing internal Temple dissension.

Jones had occasional sex with male followers. Never as often as he did with women, but on a regular enough basis that younger men leaders were warned by some of Jones’s previous male partners, “If you ask Father to fuck you in the ass, take a douche.” Whenever he discussed same-sex coupling with his inner Temple circle, Jones insisted that “I have to be all things to all people,” and some male followers either needed to be sexually humbled or else encouraged to become even more dedicated to the cause, and intercourse with Jones produced those results. Jones was clearly bisexual, though he chose not to openly admit it. For a long time, he discouraged gay relationships among his followers. Garry Lambrev, who made several abortive breaks with the Temple, left for good after Jones refused to allow him even the possibility of having a long-term male partner.

Most of his followers had no idea that Jim Jones had numerous sex partners among Temple members. But it was impossible for Jones to keep his activities entirely secret from a growing number of Temple leaders. He was openly challenged only once. Juanell Smart, a black woman married to David Wise, a white assistant Temple minister, noticed a constant among Jones’s conquests and confronted him: “Jim, why do you only sleep with whites and never with blacks?” Jones snapped back that whites needed to be more dedicated to the Temple’s cause, and to its rejection of bourgeois attitudes; sex with Jones helped them retain an appropriate, socialist attitude. Blacks didn’t have that problem, so there was no reason for him to have sex with them.

Sometime in early 1971, probably in March, Jones chose an unlikely new sex partner. In her first contact with him, Grace Stoen disliked Jones as a person, though she strongly believed in the social missions he espoused. Tim Stoen in some ways was the most important member of Peoples Temple after Jones himself. Whatever Jones planned—sometimes plotted would be a more accurate term—Stoen was responsible for keeping it within the law. He was someone Jones couldn’t afford to alienate, let alone lose. Yet Jim Jones made his way into Grace’s bed. Around the end of 1970, it became common knowledge within Temple membership that all was not well between the Stoens. Survivors remember Grace complaining about her husband’s ego, and his penchant for leaving her alone at home while he counseled Jones at any hour. At some point, she mentioned that she and Tim had not been intimate for months. Jones made it his business to know every bit of personal gossip about his followers. Information cards on prospective members were constantly updated, and so were cards about current members. As soon as Grace Stoen began grumbling about her husband, Jones knew.

But Jones felt that he had the measure of the man. Tim Stoen was a passionate believer, if not in Jim Jones as God Himself, then at least in the Temple cause. Stoen could have made a fortune in private practice or as a partner in some venerable San Francisco law firm. He gave up not only personal wealth but professional prestige to hold down a staff job in the district attorney’s office of an isolated California county. His marriage was in trouble at least in part because of his devotion to his Temple obligations. Yet Stoen obviously believed that helping Jim Jones lead the way to a better world was worth these sacrifices.

Forcing Carolyn on his children was one of the main issues. Jones insisted that they treat her with the same respect as Marceline, but it didn’t take. Although Carolyn wrote a rapturous note to her parents claiming “the children love me like a second mother,” Stephan felt no warmth. Carolyn’s relationship with Stephan couldn’t have been as close as she claimed; she didn’t spell his name correctly, identifying him as “Steven” in her letter to the Moores.

appeal. Then came a reminder. Sometime after the birth of John Victor Stoen, Marceline Jones returned to her home near the Temple church in Redwood Valley and informed her husband that she was leaving him. She had fallen in love with a psychologist she’d met through her work for the state. Marceline planned to divorce Jones, marry the new man in her life, who lived in Fort Benning, Georgia, and take the children with her. Perhaps she hoped that Jones would beg her to stay, or at least admit that his own selfish actions had irreconcilably ruined their marriage. Instead, Jones summoned the children to join him and Marceline immediately in a family meeting. Jones took the offensive, saying, “Mom wants to break up the family.” He declared that she was being selfish, putting her own desires ahead of what was best for everyone. This man, this doctor or whoever he was, wanted to take Mom—and them—to Fort Benning, away from all the things they had in Redwood Valley, the horses and the pets and their friends and all the fun. Revealing his parental sense of chauvinism—Suzanne was a girl, so her opinion didn’t matter—Jones demanded of Lew, Stephan, and Jimmy, “Do you want to go with your mother?” All three said, “We want to stay with you, Dad”—choosing the familiar over the unknown. Jones felt that he’d won. Then Marceline said she would leave, marry the psychologist, and take the children anyway.

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.

During a commission meeting, Jones griped that the sexual demands being made on him were just too wearying. He called on some of the P.C. members who’d been with him. Efrein hadn’t. Quite a few Temple members felt that she had a crush on Jones, and hoped at some point he’d have sex with her. Now Jones turned his attention to Efrein. He told her to stand, and demanded that she explain to the rest of the group what she thought she had to offer Jones sexually. Then he ordered her to take off her clothes. Efrein complied—disobeying could have been interpreted as a traitorous act. When she was naked, Jones said that she’d “been coming on to [me]. . . . If I had a list of the people I didn’t want to fuck, you’d be on top of the list.” He demanded that Efrein admit she wanted him to die. After Jones verbally abused her some more, Efrein was required to remain naked for the remainder of the meeting, which lasted another few hours. A few weeks later, Sharon Amos called Efrein aside and explained that Jones was sorry for what had happened—it had been an attempt to provide her with “personal therapy.” Efrein replied, “It’s all right,” and remained a loyal follower.

Jones was careful not to become legally liable for physical punishment of children. When youngsters under eighteen were disciplined, their parents (or Temple legal guardians) signed releases that permitted the kids to be beaten. Eventually, Jones began ordering occasional boxing matches during private services. A transgressor would be instructed to put on boxing gloves, then fight another, usually tougher, member of the congregation. Sometimes, the person being punished would have to box several others in succession, until, in Jones’s estimation, he or she had absorbed enough punishment. Many onlookers cheered—Father’s justice was being administered. Those who felt differently questioned their own reactions.

Some members, put off by the harsh discipline or by other Jones edicts (posted notices sometimes concluded, “Nothing is to be said in public or private in opposition to this policy as it was put into effect by Father”), tried to leave. Most found it difficult to get away. The problems involved in defecting began with money. Most dissatisfied members were destitute. If they lived communally, they’d turned over all that they owned, including paychecks if they had outside employment. Everyone was reduced to minimal personal possessions, and bank accounts were discouraged. Moving away from Redwood Valley or to some other neighborhood in San Francisco or Los Angeles required deposits on rent and start-up utility costs. Turning to relatives for money or a place to stay was often impossible. Jones actively discouraged contact with outsiders, especially kin who had not chosen to join the Temple. Many members had already been estranged from parents or siblings even before they decided to follow Jones.

Following his arrest, Jones began emphasizing a theme in his sermons and in Planning Commission meetings: everyone is homosexual. He’d occasionally made the statement before, but now it became constant. Those engaging in heterosexual intercourse were compensating for their real carnal desires. Anyone Jones wanted to take down a peg was required to stand and admit his or her homosexuality. Those who initially refused were browbeaten until they complied. Stephan Jones thought that his father “was just trying to feel okay about himself . . . for him to deal with [his bisexuality], every other guy had to have the same sexual feelings.”

Most Temple members thought Jones really did want everyone to go. Privately, he was more practical. The plan, always, was to restrict the Jonestown population to five hundred or six hundred. That was maximum capacity for the projected housing to be built there, and a sustainable number for the food that could be produced on-site, at least during early years as they experimented with various crops and livestock. But he hoped that half of the Temple’s 4,000 to 5,000 members would want to go. The competition would better ensure that those chosen would stick it out under living conditions that were far rougher than Jones led followers to believe.

He occasionally mentioned another potential sacrifice. Not everyone might get to the Promised Land, since so many malign forces were dedicated to preventing Peoples Temple from setting its persuasive socialist example. If the Temple couldn’t be discouraged by constant harassment, then the U.S. government would order the CIA and FBI to consider more violent means. Jones preached that the message to these enemy agencies must be, “If you come for one of us, you’re coming for all of us.” In a September sermon he added, “I love socialism, and I’d die to bring it about. But if I did, I’d take a thousand with me.” His followers surely assumed that he meant a thousand of the Temple’s enemies, but a few weeks later Jones sternly noted, “A good socialist does not fear death. It would be the greatest reward he could receive.” Loyal Temple members must not only be willing to dedicate their lives, but also their deaths, to the cause.

That same September, Jones reemphasized that point to the Planning Commission in an especially terrifying way. It began with an apparent treat. The Temple grew grapes on ranch property it owned in Mendocino County, never a big crop, but enough sometimes to make some wine. Jones generally forbade drinking alcohol, but on this night at the Geary Boulevard temple he told the P.C. members that it was all right for once. Each of them drank some, and after their cups were emptied Jones informed them that their wine had been laced with poison—all of them would die within forty-five minutes to an hour. There was no antidote. They were doomed.

Jones watched as everyone else sat around, some staring into space, some talking about dying, a few lamenting that they would no longer be around to protect the Temple children from the FBI and CIA and the rest of the evil outside world. After three-quarters of an hour, several said they were beginning to feel faint. Jones let them describe their symptoms for a few minutes, then announced that there was no poison in the wine. It had been a test of their loyalty; now they knew that they had it in them to face death unflinchingly. Cartmell got up and rejoined the group. No one criticized Jones for tricking them. Decades later, several of those present claimed that they knew all along that it was a hoax, exactly the kind of dramatic thing Jones liked to do to make a point. Terri Buford said that, in retrospect, she and the others missed the most important message: “Yes, we proved that we were willing to die, but what that night really proved was that [Jones] already had the intention or at least was considering the possibility that, at some point, he would kill us all.”

Although Peoples Temple struggled financially in its early days, by 1975 the church had some significant money. Much of it, though not all, was dutifully recorded in Temple ledgers. The church had been granted tax-exempt status, but Jones always wanted financial records ready for audits by state or federal authorities. Jones also had a few private accounts. Though he proudly proclaimed that he never took a salary as Temple pastor, with his family living on Marceline’s state pay, Jones needed additional funds available for personal expenses, like the Jones family vacations that most Temple members knew nothing about. Jones also hid money in savings accounts under the names of various family members. Marceline had personal accounts of as much as $200,000 (almost $800,000 in today’s dollars). At one point, his mother, Lynetta, had accounts totaling $89,584 ($380,000 in current value) in eight different California banks. Whether in terms of its public records or Jones’s private accounts, the Temple was flush. Yet this brought Jones no comfort—if anything, the Temple’s wealth added to his ever-burgeoning sense of paranoia. His schemes to ensure that no one other than he knew how much money there was, and where, owed as much to uncontrollable compulsion as to deliberate design.

With so many transactions taking place each month in multiple countries, keeping two sets of records—one official, one private—became staggeringly difficult. Over time, a code was developed to track the complicated finances. Though he publicly scorned the Bible in Temple services, a Bible became Jones’s secret ledger, with coded account information scribbled along an inner seam on specific pages. This Bible was always kept in Jones’s private quarters, limiting access to Carolyn, Maria, and Jones. Temple bookkeeper Terri Buford estimated that the Temple’s foreign accounts totaled about $8 million. In fact, the total was around $30 million. Yet in several San Francisco services, Jones asked that everyone donate their wristwatches to the cause—these were in high demand for resale in Guyana, where, if an immediate amount of additional money wasn’t received, the Jonestown project might very well fail. Every cent counts, Jones thundered at his followers, upbraiding them and sending collection plates around for an extra turn or two if the half dozen offerings regularly taken at each Temple meeting failed to produce satisfactory sums. They had no idea of the vast fortune their church had already amassed, or why, no matter how much they gave at Temple services, it was never enough to please their pastor.

Tim Stoen’s role was curious. He had earlier decided to separate from the Temple. But whether he believed it possible that he might be John’s biological father or not, Stoen considered the boy to be his son, too, and loved the child. In the wake of Grace’s defection, which Stoen writes that he did not know about in advance and did not expect, the best way to ensure his continued contact with John was to stay with Jones and the Temple, doing his best to act as a go-between for his estranged wife and his pastor.

Jones’s rambling sermons grew more bizarre. He challenged God (“I’m a liberator, he’s a fucker-upper”), and claimed that, in another life, he personally witnessed a drugged, still living Jesus taken down off the cross by loyal followers (“He went to India and he did a lot of teaching over there. . . . I don’t care whether you believe it or not”). A few times Jones even described himself as an extraterrestrial: “I was the greatest on [another] planet, [and] only I could get down here.”

Read decades later, such declarations seem nothing more than obvious, grandiose self-delusion. But many among Jones’s followers didn’t regard them that way. There were few brand-new members now. Jones already had sufficient numbers to impress politicians and plenty of people to send out on buses to march in support of freedom of the press or in protest of some bureaucratic act. Additional recruits, at least in San Francisco and Los Angeles, weren’t worth the trouble of weeding through to find potential true believers. Among those who were already part of the Temple fellowship, only a handful remembered the days in Indianapolis, when Jim Jones wasn’t declaring himself to be God. Followers who joined from the first Ukiah days onward had become conditioned to his claims as they gradually escalated. Tim Carter says, “It was like the frog in the pot of water. If you drop him in water that’s already boiling, he’ll try to hop right out. But put him first in a pot of lukewarm water and then turn up the heat little by little, and he’ll stay in the pot even though he’s finally being boiled to death.” Some didn’t believe any of it but followed Jones to help bring about the advancement of socialism.

Mostly, though, Jones spoke. Sometimes he still preached, but more often he gave his personalized accounts of recent U.S. and world news, much of it gleaned from Soviet sources and all of it embellished by his own imagination. In Washington, D.C., military leaders at the Pentagon had drawn up plans for killing blacks. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan had recently increased 100 percent, and even the children of Klan members openly wore white-sheet uniforms. Idi Amin of Uganda in Africa was proving himself to be a great leader—he intimidated antagonistic white leaders of other countries by “acting like a crazy nigger.” Temple members should follow his example. Virtually every night, Jones described something shocking that just happened, some great evil that the Jonestown settlers escaped only because he had led them to the Promised Land. He went on for hours, either oblivious to or ignoring the fact that most of his audience, exhausted by their long days, struggled to stay awake. Officially, it was lights out in Jonestown at 11 p.m. But Jones often spoke until midnight or even later; settlers might only be dismissed at two or three in the morning, and Jonestown reveille came at 6 a.m.

Workdays lasted until six or six thirty. Sundays were half days; work was over at noon, but only two meals were served on Sundays instead of three, so everyone was even hungrier than usual. And while at work, no matter where on Jonestown’s acres the settlers found themselves, it was impossible to escape Jones, or at least his voice. Sometimes they were pleased to see him. Jones would cheer up a hot, sweaty work brigade in the fields by initiating an impromptu water fight, or even work alongside them for a few minutes until urgent business called him away. Mostly, though, they listened to him, and involuntarily. Jonestown had a loudspeaker system that was audible in every part of the main settlement, and an eclectic collection of tapes featuring artists from the blues and jazz of B.B. King and Nat King Cole to the pop stylings of Percy Faith and the Ray Conniff Orchestra, with Earth, Wind and Fire and the O’Jays in between. But often, the tunes would be interrupted by Jones making an announcement, expanding on some topic he’d discussed the night before, or even playing a tape of one of his previous evening addresses.

Given their hard lives of backbreaking labor, primitive surroundings, limited rations, strict rules, and constant haranguing by their leader, it was inevitable that some settlers grew dissatisfied with life in Jonestown, but those who did found it almost impossible to leave. Passports were locked away, and Jones made it clear that while the Temple paid all travel costs to Guyana, deserters would have to pay their own way back to the States. Given that no one was allowed to enter Jonestown without surrendering all they owned, and that most were either estranged from family outside the Temple or in only sporadic touch with them, very few could afford to go home.

Less than a week after Jones arrived, Yolanda Crawford persuaded him to let her, her mother, and husband leave the settlement and return to the United States. They had to pay their own way, and Jones had requirements beyond that. In a deposition made a year later, Crawford described what was required of her before Jones granted permission: I was forced to promise [Jones] that I would never speak against the church, and that if I did I would lose his “protection” and be “stabbed in the back.” Furthermore, Jim Jones ordered me to sign a number of self-incriminating papers, including that I was against the government of Guyana. . . . [Even] before leaving [the United States] for Guyana, I was ordered to fabricate a story and sign it stating that I killed someone and threw the body in the ocean. I was told that if I ever caused Jim Jones trouble, he would give that statement to the police.

Jones accepted and even welcomed visits by Guyanese officials, seeing these as opportunities to demonstrate how everyone in Jonestown was fine, and how much progress the settlers were making in establishing their self-sustaining agricultural mission in the jungle. Each of these visits was painstakingly stage-managed. The Guyanese were led to specific buildings and fields, where, apparently by coincidence, they would encounter settlers placed there in advance who would parrot memorized praise of their lives there and their leader. Then the government visitors would be invited to join the colonists in what they were told was a typically abundant Jonestown meal that included lots of meat and tasty desserts. All the settlers looked forward to these occasional feasts, which were their only opportunities to eat hearty portions of something other than rice and thin gravy.

The Guyanese inspectors always had a grand time, with Jones playing the role of genial host. For some, the only problem was overattentiveness by the settlers. Gerald Gouveia, a Guyanese military pilot who occasionally accompanied government officials to Jonestown, remembers, “Everywhere you went, one of them came right along with you. Why, if you went into the toilet, one of them would come and stand there beside you and talk to you while you did your business. But at least they were always friendly.”

Jones more than anyone understood Stoen’s ability to construct, then carry out, plans of attack couched within legal limits. Stoen had utilized this talent on behalf of Jones and Peoples Temple for years. Now he was not only in position to use all his skill and insider knowledge against them, he had a burning, personal cause. He wanted John Victor back, and there was clearly antagonism even beyond that. Jim Jones Jr. says, “Tim for so long really believed in [Jones] and the Temple, I’d even say he loved my dad, and Dad went out and hurt him in the worst way, getting his wife pregnant.” To a degree far beyond his fixation with any other enemy, Jones prepared for war. In consultation with Charles Garry, Jones laid out an attack plan focusing solely on Tim Stoen. The first step was “writing to the newspapers, or calling them, re TOS [Timothy O. Stoen].”

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.

There was no work assigned that day. The settlers remained in the pavilion, growing progressively fearful. Jones periodically left to take radio reports, finally announcing that armed forces were on their way. They would attack in a matter of hours. Their intention was to kill all who lived in Jonestown, including the children. Rather than that, everyone present must take their own lives. That would rob their enemies of any triumph. There were some murmurs of disagreement, but no one openly argued. There was a sense that the time had finally come. Some of Jones’s followers were pleased—this would be a true revolutionary gesture. Others, worn out from the months of tension, simply wanted to get it over with. Vats of dark liquid were produced. Everyone was told to line up, fill a cup, and drink. The poison in the drink would kill them in about forty-five minutes. Now some did protest. Guards pushed them forward and made them drink first. Jones promised that their deaths would be peaceful. As Edith Roller stood in line, she thought how ironic it was that she would not be able to record the event in her journal. Some, who’d been on the Planning Commission in San Francisco when their leader claimed to have poisoned their wine, suspected that Jones was conducting another test, and they were right. When everyone had swallowed their drinks, Jones declared, “You didn’t take anything.” It had been a test to see if they truly were willing to lay down their lives for the cause, and th...

Jones had wondered whether his followers would collectively obey an order for suicide, and now he knew. With that knowledge came certainty. In Jonestown or in Russia or wherever the uncertain future took him and his followers and hope was lost, there could be a grand gesture, one assuring Jim Jones’s deserved place in human memory and history books. It had always been a possibility, but after this White Night it was no longer a matter of if, but when. On Jones’s instruction, Larry Schacht ordered one pound of sodium cyanide, enough for 1,800 lethal doses. It cost $8.85.

The next day, Jones reconvened everyone in the pavilion and instructed them to write essays on the topic “What I Would Do if This Were the Last White Night.” The responses were chilling. Some suggested it would be better to die fighting, taking as many of the enemy with them as possible. One woman wrote that she was willing to take poison, but “only after putting the children to sleep. This would be hard for me because I don’t like to face the fact of killing my own child.” Another admitted, “I am scared of dying a long painful death. . . . I can’t believe that after all this struggle and pain we all will die.” Everyone wrote something, and though no one directly challenged the apparent certainty of future mass suicide, some now wondered if Jones actually intended to order such a precipitous act. It might be another of his ploys to gauge loyalty. Enough settlers thought so for Dick Tropp to send Jones a private memo: “People with a fair degree of savvy and intelligence [are beginning to believe that] White Nights are really a kind of elaborate ritual testing.” Jones, satisfied that February 16 had served his purpose, did not respond.

Though most still believed in Jones as a leader, and as their spokesman against the racism, capitalism, and elitism that they all deplored, there was no longer, for most, any element of worship. “In Jonestown, after a while, Jim Jones lost his divinity,” Laura Johnston Kohl says. “Everyone saw too much.” Often, they heard too much. Jones’s cabin was connected by phone to the camp radio and loudspeaker system. When lying on his bed, not completely blacked out in a drug stupor, he would harangue the settlement and workers in the fields with incoherent barks and mumbling. One day, overwhelmed by hours of gibberish, radio operators in the communications shack switched off Jones’s phone, and everyone basked in the blessed silence.

And there were moments when Jones fleetingly reminded others of what had attracted them to him in the first place—his unabashed playfulness in starting spontaneous water fights out in the fields, or those increasingly rare evenings when, instead of railing against enemies or whining about how much he sacrificed for others, Jones spoke movingly about the need for compassion and equality, and why Jonestown must set an example for the rest of the world. Some Jonestown settlers had followed him for so long that they had long since given up thinking for themselves; dozens of younger followers had never known anything other than life in Peoples Temple and obedience to Jim Jones. Even those who otherwise had grave misgivings about their leader were in full agreement with his message that the outside world teemed with enemies.

Stoen and Steven Katsaris served as primary drafters of a forty-eight-page document titled “Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones Against Our Children and Relatives at the Peoples Temple Jungle Encampment in Guyana, South America.” Signed by twenty-five self-described “grief-stricken parents and relatives of thirty-seven persons in Jonestown,” the document was a clever hybrid of testimony by members of Concerned Relatives and detailed descriptions of specific horrors supposedly taking place in Jonestown. The horrors were also conveniently listed in a series of bullet points for those who wanted the gist without too many details. A “decision to die” excerpt from Pam Moton’s March 14 letter to Congress was the most damning material.

That same day, Tim Stoen and Steven Katsaris launched a new courtroom attack on Jones and the Temple in Mendocino County Superior Court, a $15 million libel suit against Jones “and his agents” for Maria Katsaris’s allegations that her father had sexually molested her. Stoen didn’t stop there. Over the next five weeks he filed two additional lawsuits; one for $18.5 million on behalf of elderly Wade and Mabel Medlock, who claimed the Temple had bilked them of all their property, and one for $22.9 million on behalf of Gang of Eight member Jim Cobb for libelous comments and “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” Defending himself against the lawsuits would obligate Jones to return to America and appear in court, which in turn would make him liable to arrest for ignoring previous court orders to turn over John Victor Stoen—now called “John Jones” in Jonestown—to his mother. If Jones didn’t contest the suits, the resulting adverse court decisions would trigger a new round of bad publicity. At the same time, Stoen sent a private message to Jones, telling Temple member Walter Duncan, who was about to go to Jonestown, that “if Jim Jones was smart, then he would return John Stoen to me and then I would get off his back.” Jones had no intention of doing that. Besides the possibility that surrendering custody of John Victor would trigger the loss of many other Jonestown children, he remained adamant that the child was his. So long as the Guyanese courts failed to act, Jones f...

Jones was not available for comment. Kilduff concluded the article with Debbie Layton’s claims that Temple bank accounts in Europe, California, and Guyana totaled “at least $10 million.”

Jones began relying on drugs not only for personal relief from stress, but to control certain followers. A hut was designated “the Extended Care Unit,” where settlers demonstrating any worrisome behavior—complaining too much, acting especially tense—were confined and heavily sedated. Gene Chaikin left Jonestown without permission, hiding out temporarily in Trinidad with the intention of defecting permanently. But he left his wife, Phyllis, and their two children behind, and made the mistake of writing Jones a long letter explaining why he had left—general disenchantment, he said—and asking that his family be allowed to join him. Phyllis remained fiercely loyal to Jones. At her request, Gene came back to Jonestown to speak with her. He was held by members of Jones’s security team, drugged, and placed for a time in the Extended Care Unit. Afterward, he resumed his previous place as a legal advisor, but was drugged and confined again any time there were visitors in the settlement, for fear he might approach them for help in a second escape attempt.

Without Jones’s permission, some of the young men in Jonestown began using a concrete slab as a basketball court; they hung makeshift baskets at both ends and played boisterous games after work and on the half days off Jones allowed on Sundays. Jones’s own grown sons participated as well as their friends, many of whom served as camp security guards. Jones had always eschewed the concept of Temple sports teams, particularly the possibility of them playing outside squads. Such competition, in his mind, was anti-socialist. When he ordered the games discontinued, Marceline intervened, arguing that the young men needed to have some fun. In fact, they should get uniforms and, as an organized team, play Guyanese squads in friendly exhibition games that would promote goodwill and demonstrate to the government that it was the Temple’s intent to integrate itself with the people of its host nation. Jones grudgingly agreed, and even allowed Sharon Amos to meet with Desmond Roberts, who oversaw many government-sponsored youth programs. Roberts decreed that Temple sports teams “could not participate in our national championships, but their basketball team could engage in exhibitions with our national team if they wished—that would be appropriate.”

Ryan and the Temple lawyers continued their negotiations all through Thursday and into Friday morning. The congressman took a harder line. During his visit to Lamaha Gardens, he said, “There was not a religious picture on the walls, there was no one saying prayers. I [did not hear] anyone mention God.” Perhaps, when he returned to Washington he would look into whether Peoples Temple really deserved tax-exempt status as a church. The threat gave Garry and Lane a new argument to use privately on Jones—there was more than bad publicity and the potential loss of a few settlers at stake.

passed along to Jones at the pavilion. Jones couldn’t resist exaggerating.

Everyone at Lamaha Gardens had been anxiously awaiting word from Jonestown about how things had gone that night with Ryan. Around midnight, the radio crackled with a terse, three-word report: “Everything went okay.”

Cheese sandwiches were set out for those who felt hungry. While most people ate, Jones spoke with the would-be defectors, after first asking the newsmen to stay back and allow them some privacy. Jones summoned all the warmth he could, putting his arms around the shoulders of the Parks family members, reminding them that everyone else in Jonestown was part of their family, too. Marceline Jones promised Vern Gosney that if he stayed, things would be better because “we’re going to have a lot of reforms.” But no minds were changed. Ryan and Speier volunteered to go with the defectors while they returned to their cottages and gathered their few belongings. Gosney urged Ryan to hurry. The congressman assured him, “You have nothing to worry about. Nothing will happen.”

But where the attorneys saw redemption, Jones saw the opposite. The Temple leader who considered one defection to be a staggering betrayal was deeply offended by twenty-six, and though that was an insignificant percentage of Jonestown’s population, they would still serve as examples, and inspirations, to remaining settlers who might grow equally tired of jungle life or Jones’s erratic rule. There inevitably would be more of them, and, after this, what was to prevent them from waiting until the next visit by embassy consuls to announce that they wanted to go, too?

Jones stood watching. He was flanked by several of his most trusted followers—Patty Cartmell, Jack Beam, Jim McElvane, Maria Katsaris. They whispered back and forth. Some of the remaining settlers shouted insults at the defectors boarding the truck. The bed was high off the ground and some had trouble getting up. Just as everyone was loaded and the driver prepared to pull out, a short, slight man wearing a poncho hauled himself aboard. Larry Layton told the others that he’d decided to defect, too. The departing settlers were immediately suspicious, and whispered to the newsmen that something was wrong; Larry Layton was devoted to Jones and would never leave him. But it was almost three o’clock, and if the pilots of the getaway planes were already at the Port Kaituma airstrip, how long would they wait for passengers before flying back to Georgetown without them? Layton was allowed to stay. The driver started his engine and the heavy vehicle lurched forward, though not for long. A few hundred yards down the narrow road leading out of Jonestown, its wheels stuck fast in the thick mud. After a few minutes, a tractor rumbled up to push the truck free. As it did, more shouting erupted back in the settlement.

As Leo Ryan stood in the pavilion chatting with Lane and Garry, an assailant charged him from behind. Everyone in Jonestown was fond of Don Sly, who’d adapted so well to jungle life that he’d taken to calling himself Ujara in an attempt to leave his old American identity behind. Sly was a gentle man and not aggressive in any way. But now he held a knife to the congressman’s throat and hissed, “Motherfucker, you’re going to die.” But he hesitated an instant, and that allowed Garry, Lane, and Tim Carter to pull him away before he could slash the blade across Ryan’s windpipe. In the struggle, Sly was cut with the knife and blood splashed on Ryan, who crouched frozen in place. Security guards dragged Sly away. Jones came over, and instead of inquiring whether Ryan was all right, he asked, “Does this change everything?” The shaken congressman replied, “It doesn’t change everything, but it changes [some] things.” The lawyers were concerned about what Ryan would tell police. Ryan said that if Sly were turned over to the authorities to answer for the assault in court, that would be sufficient.

Jones watched as the truck drove away, standing with his arms folded, his mouth jerking with its nervous tic. Almost everyone had been instructed to return to their cottages. Jones muttered, “I’ve never seen Jonestown so peaceful.” A few minutes later he said, “I think Larry Layton is going to do something. He’s very loyal to me.” One of the lawyers told Jones that, except for Sly’s attack on Ryan, things had gone well. Very few people had asked to leave. Jones replied, “If they take 20 today, they’ll take 60 tomorrow.” He stalked back to his cabin. A few dozen yards away, seven or eight armed men boarded a tractor-trailer and drove out of Jonestown.

Jones’s original plan was simple. He would have a loyal follower join the other defectors, who with them would board an airplane along with Leo Ryan in Port Kaituma and fly off to Georgetown. After the plane was aloft, Layton would take the pistol hidden under his poncho, shoot the pilot, and die with everyone else as the aircraft crashed in the near-impenetrable jungle. Layton was the obvious choice for assassin. He worshipped Jones, and was always eager to demonstrate his devotion. Layton must have felt honored when his beloved leader called him in late Friday night or sometime Saturday to give him such a critical assignment. That he would die completing it would mean less than the thrill of knowing Jones placed so much trust in him.