Kinsolving was unmoved by the appeal from a man who would become his number two target. Less than a week after Stoen’s letter, Jones was put in a cross fire of accusation, from Kinsolving at the San Francisco Examiner and Carolyn Pickering at the Indianapolis Star. Their first installments hit newsstands with large headlines and prominent photo displays, actualizing the Temple’s worst fears in black and white.
Stoen’s letter had accomplished nothing except to provide Kinsolving with a sensational lead for his inaugural story on September 17, 1972:
“Redwood Valley—A man they call the Prophet is attracting extraordinary crowds from extraordinary distances in his Peoples Temple. ... His followers say he can raise the dead.”
Kinsolving’s expose quoted from Stoen’s letter and church newsletters and implied that the Temple had free rein in Ukiah.
The next day, in part two, Kinsolving led off quoting a true believer:
“ ‘I know that Pastor Jim Jones is God Almighty himself,’ cried one of the more than 1,000 people who overflowed the auditorium of Benjamin Franklin Junior High on Geary Boulevard....” There followed a skeptical eyewitness account of two resuscitations and of testimonies to healing powers and revelations.
Stoen himself absorbed Kinsolving’s third blast, on September 19: “Mendocino County’s assistant district attorney—who has written that his pastor, the Rev. Jim Jones, has raised forty people from the dead—has confirmed that he himself has solemnized the marriage of a girl who joined his church.” The story contended that Stoen had no legal authority to officiate at a wedding, an allegation he denied, saying, “I meet all the requirements of the State Civil Code.” Kinsolving implied that the Temple was arranging marriages of its young people, getting them to sign on welfare rolls, then obliging them to turn over their welfare checks to the church.
In an attempt to muffle the bad publicity, Jones already had sent out Temple members with fists full of change to buy every copy of the Examiner in the Ukiah area. Now this third installment, actually hinting at violations of the law, provoked Jones into action. He mobilized his troops to march against the Examiner.
A Ukiah member showed up at the Santa Rosa dormitories with the announcement: “There’s gonna be a bus here in ten minutes.” About three dozen students put aside books and classes and boarded the bus. They disembarked near the corner of Fifth and Mission streets in downtown San Francisco, where they joined contingents of members from the city and from Ukiah.
About 150 Temple members picketed outside the modern three-story Examiner building, waving signs that said: THIS PAPER HAS LIED; THEY SAW HEALING UNDENIABLE. AND WOULD NOT PRINT.
Kinsolving, apparently not content to let matters be, appeared personally out front, holding an Examiner security guard’s cap and mocking: “Brothers and sisters, nice to have you here. Alms for the poor.” While he tried to pass the hat, television cameras whirred. Tim Stoen was delighted with the foolery; it strengthened the Temple’s legal hand.
Kinsolving’s fourth story appeared on schedule, despite the pickets. It disclosed that the state attorney general’s office had been asked to investigate the Temple by Rev. Richard Taylor, former pastor of Ukiah’s First Baptist Church. “What is of utmost concern,” wrote Rev. Taylor, “is the atmosphere of terror created in the community by so large and aggressive a group.” The story noted that Temple security men were openly carrying weapons.
The Temple pickets returned in force. Perhaps as many as two hundred marched in a block-long loop outside the Examiner. Many had not read the stories they were protesting. Jones walked among them, scowling, determined. When acting city editor John Todd came out to speak with him, Jones demanded that the series be halted. Todd replied that he would give Jones a chance to tell his side of the story, in the interest of fairness. Jones called off his picketers.
The next day, Jones called the Examiner city room and told Todd he wanted to talk about interview ground rules. Todd invited him to the office. Jones would not come in to the Examiner. Instead he said he would send someone to pick up Todd.
Soon the newspaper security guard phoned upstairs to tell Todd he had a guest from the Temple waiting at the front entrance. Downstairs, Todd met a hulking black man named Chris Lewis—a community activist and thug who had choked a public official at a meeting a year earlier and who would shoot a man to death at another public meeting a year later. Of this, Todd was blissfully unaware. A block away, at the corner of Fifth and Howard streets, Lewis opened the back door of a limousine. Jones, sitting on the far side, motioned Todd in. Todd went ahead, and Lewis piled in after him.
The car pulled away from the curb. Crushed between Lewis and Jones in the back seat, Todd became extremely uneasy. Behind the wheel was an unidentified black man. Riding shotgun was Tim Stoen, who did not identify himself. It was not a friendly get-acquainted session. Stoen and Jones ganged up on him verbally, haranguing the editor ceaselessly as the driver cruised aimlessly past the rotting old docks of the Embarcadero and through industrial sectors near the bay.
Jones kept pounding him with the question: “Why do you want to attack me?”
And Stoen said: “You’re destroying a good man. It’s morally reprehensible and legally libelous.”
They argued about the handling of the Kinsolving stories, which Todd had had no part in editing, since Kinsolving worked under the executive editor. Jones maintained that Kinsolving’s attack was part of a personal grievance. In some ways, he was right. Once the Temple marched against him, exposing Jim Jones had become a sort of crusade to the opinionated columnist. Moreover, Kinsolving’s taunts on the picket line had pegged him as a hostile investigator. In that light, Jones was successful in demanding his exclusion from the agreed-upon interview. But he failed to persuade Todd, despite his strong-arm tactics, to agree that the word “Prophet” would not appear in any printed rebuttal.
Jones was trying to recover lost ground. He was not ready to go public with the title “Prophet Jones,” because it broke down the dual identity he had tried to maintain. Inside the church, or on fund-raising tours, he could bill himself that way for purposes of control and stature to attract crowds and money. But to the Establishment in Ukiah, and even more so in the big city of San Francisco, where he was cutting a toehold, he needed to uphold a purely humanitarian image.
While John Todd had been getting an hour’s worth of Jones’s bully tactics, Examiner management, in consultation with the newspaper’s lawyers, had decided to hold off on the remaining stories in the Kinsolving series. The series had run for four days, with three stories to go. The picketing, and phone calls from Temple friends to publisher Charles Gould, were not in themselves enough to do the trick. But by now the Temple had threatened to sue and had brandished its attorneys. Furthermore, the remaining installments were not well substantiated, and they went beyond Kinsolving’s expertise in religious matters into areas of possible criminal wrongdoing. Kinsolving too, by antagonizing the pickets, had helped spike his own stories. Continuing the series seemed a risky proposition, at least without more work from an investigative reporter.
Kinsolving’s unpublished articles delved into Temple internal affairs in a way that no other stories would until 1977. But though he had collected pieces of the mosaic, he had failed to form a coherent picture. He had put his finger on Jones’s claims to be the reincarnation of Christ, on his predictions of nuclear doom and the secret cave, his visit to Father Divine, on Temple tithing, catharsis, socialist readings, survival training for children, on Temple political power in Ukiah and more.
The Examiner did not intend to drop coverage of the Temple altogether. But the remaining stories required substantiation. It was hoped that the upcoming question-and-answer session might provide material to beef up Kinsolving’s canceled stories. But Jones was too clever for that.
Jones’s first on-the-record confrontation with the press was waged in the conference room of the Examiner on September 20, 1972. The interview was conducted by Examiner reporte
r John Burks, with Todd looking on. Jones brought his two Temple attorneys, Tim Stoen and Eugene Chaikin, to advise him during the two-and-a-half-hour tape-recorded session.
When Jones confirmed the claim of raising forty-three people from the dead, with no failures, Burks voiced skepticism. “In sports terminology, that’s like pitching a no-hitter. The implication is that you and your people can somehow live forever....”
Replied Jones: “We haven’t evolved that far.... If there’s some dimension that the mind can conquer, I’m all for pursuing it.”
Burks pointed out to Jones one of his own contradictions. “On the one hand, you are preaching nonviolence, brotherhood of man, racial harmony, all that sort of thing,” he said. “On the other hand, you seem to feel a necessity to have armed guards at worship services. Isn’t this a contradiction?”
“I don’t think it necessary [to have armed guards].” Jones explained at length that the guards were posted because the church board of directors had overruled him.
As Todd listened, he was impressed with Jones’s abilities as a con man. Jones could fend off any questions convincingly, slide out of a tight spot, tell a boyhood story, then return to the subject from his own point of view. The harder he was pressed, the cooler he got. He could look Burks in the eye and lie through a smile. Rev. Jones was one of the smoothest salesmen these newsmen had ever seen.
On Friday, September 22, Todd reviewed the question and answer story with Jones and assured the pastor that it would not be doctored, though there would be an introduction to provide the context of the interview. Jones objected heatedly to use of background material and objected specifically, again, to any reference to “Prophet Jones.”
Saturday’s preview edition read: “Jones doesn’t exactly like being called a Prophet, not that he denies he’s got some powers along those lines. It’s just that to him the title seems sort of unseemly.”
On Saturday afternoon, the Examiner newsroom began getting irate calls from the Temple. The desk man, who was unfamiliar with the story, suggested that they call Todd at home and unwisely gave out his home phone number. Soon the phone sounded in Todd’s Marin County home. Todd recognized the caller by voice as Tim Stoen; speaking as a lawyer, the man demanded that the story be pulled from the remaining editions and alleged that it was defamatory and libelous to Jones. Todd refused.
A half hour later the phone rang again, in the bedroom. Another anonymous voice: “Is this John Todd?”
“Yes.”
“You’re presenting a story about our Rev. Jim Jones, and what you’re doing is hateful. May the devil never forgive you.”
The caller clicked off. Barely five seconds later the phone rang again. Same damning message. After fielding a half dozen calls, Todd walked to the kitchen to fix himself a drink. He hoped the calls would stop. But the phone started ringing in the kitchen too.
Three hours after the first phone call, Todd and his wife and children—who had been planning a quiet weekend—were moving into a motel. When Todd went home to check Sunday, the phone still was sounding off like clockwork. On Monday night, after forty-eight hours away from home, Todd’s family moved back to their house. The calls had relented.
When upper-level Examiner management heard about Todd’s travails, they remained cautious and did not run the rest of Kinsolving’s series. Again, the risks seemed to outweigh the benefits.32
And so the Examiner quit the story. A nobody named Jim Jones had worn down a big San Francisco daily. It would be almost five years before the Examiner embarked on a major effort to untangle the Peoples Temple story. By then, the stakes would be much higher and the target more elusive.
Virtually nothing came of Kinsolving’s stories. The state attorney general’s office concluded they had no jurisdiction. The Mendocino County sheriff’s office concluded there was nothing illegal about members carrying guns on Temple property. Mendocino County District Attorney Duncan James privately told Stoen that he was concerned about Stoen’s professional reputation being tarnished, but Stoen and others stated their defense in the Ukiah Daily Journal. In fact, several months after the series, Stoen was keynote speaker at a Boy Scouts meeting in Santa Rosa.
Meanwhile, the Temple debated continuing the offensive, though church attorneys decided that a lawsuit might expose the Temple’s peculiar practices, jeopardizing both its tax-exempt status and its standing with Disciples of Christ.
Already the Temple had stepped up donations to the Disciples in response to the crisis. The church sent $2,000 within a month of the Kinsolving series, then $2,000 more in January 1973. This apparent strategy paid off. When inquiries from member churches and others inundated the Disciples national headquarters in Indianapolis, national president A. Dale Fiers wrote a form letter dated February 8, 1973: “The article is inaccurate, prejudicial and misleading. For one thing, the main charge that the Rev. Jones claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ has been categorically denied by Jones himself....” About two weeks after the letter was drafted, the Temple sent $2,000 more to the church.
To try to neutralize the press, the Temple simultaneously went after Kinsolving and promoted its own image as an advocate of press freedom. In the months after the expose, it donated several thousand dollars to various newspapers in support of freedom of the press. To its credit, the Examiner returned a $500 donation. But the San Francisco Chronicle, which did not print any allegations against the Temple, passed its $500 donation to the journalism society Sigma Delta Chi. It was during this well publicized “free press” campaign that Representative George Brown placed flattering stories about the Temple into the Congressional Record.
Meanwhile, the Temple set sights on Kinsolving as a declared enemy. At one strategy session, an overzealous church leader suggested that he be kidnapped, stuffed in a bag, then beaten or “eliminated.” Instead they launched a full-scale effort to destroy their tormentor’s reputation and effectiveness. A week after the series ran, Kinsolving’s home was burglarized by unknown persons who took nothing but duplicates of his newspaper articles and his checkbook stubs. They kept his Berkeley home under surveillance and sent negative letters to newspapers that carried his syndicated column—most of which would later cancel him. In looking for dirt on the reporter, they used phone books from all parts of the country to locate relatives. The Temple had started a dossier on Kinsolving. They clipped virtually every word written by him or about him. Over the years, the file would swell to half a foot in thickness.
By early 1973, no law enforcement agencies and no newspapers were investigating the Temple. The only people doing anything about the Temple were members of an informal Christian prayer group in Ukiah, a group run, appropriately enough, by Ross Case, Jones’s onetime associate in Indiana.
Case, though he had bid adieu to Jones some eight years earlier, had not been forgotten by his former pastor. To Jones, Case may well have been living too nearby for comfort. The previous year, someone threatened Case by phone. Though Case strongly suspected the Temple and urged a police investigator to look into dangerous trends in the church, he did nothing on his own. But this time he started his own investigation.
The situation arose by accident when Case, visiting a neighbor in Ukiah, met Birdie Marable, a Temple dropout who was operating a care home for several elderly women. Case offered to drive the ladies to church sometime. A short time later, when he paid a visit to Marable’s house, he found several elderly black ladies waiting for him on the porch. Immediately they began complaining to Case about Jones’s sacrileges—the spitting and stomping on the Bible, his swearing like a drunken sailor.
Seeing Case was all ears, Marable spurred on one of her charges: “Mother Brown, why don’t you tell Brother Case about the miracle?”
Obligingly, Janey Brown told how she had been lured out of a service in San Francisco, deliberately jostled by some Temple girls, then rushed to a hospital by Temple nurses. Without being examined by a physician, her arm was diagnosed as broken and put in a cast. Bef
ore the plaster had fully hardened, she was back in the church service. The moment she reentered the building, Jones cried from the pulpit, “Uh-uh. Ain’t nobody comin’ in here like that. Take that cast off, and that arm will be healed.” Poor Janey Brown did not know what to do except hold still as Marceline Jones cut off the cast with surgical scissors. The suspense mounted. Finally, Father handed Mother Brown a ball and instructed her to toss it with her “broken” arm. As the ball went sailing into the air, Jones danced back and forth on the stage, delighted: “That arm ain’t broken now, is it, Mother Brown?”
Brown’s was only one of many anecdotes collected by Case as he conducted Bible study classes for the five women. He passed on information to the sheriff’s office. Again he was told there was not adequate evidence to prosecute Jones. But this time Jones found out: two of the ladies in Case’s class had returned to the Temple and informed on him.
On August 24, 1973, less than a month after he had started his informal investigation, Case was attending a religious conference near Disneyland when he got a call there from Leo W., a black acquaintance from the Temple’s Indiana days. Case had opened Leo’s first checking account and, when Leo wanted to marry a white woman, had gone out of state to perform the ceremony.
On this day Leo’s conversation was, as usual, nearly incoherent. But what had started out as an oddly casual long-distance call suddenly turned desperate.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” Leo said in an overly friendly tone. “Want to know how you been getting along. Like a brother, long time ago, thinking about coming up to see you.” Then he began to lay the snare. “Get kinda hot. Get kinda hot. You and I had a pretty good time together ... in the parking lot.”
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