For some, it was one blast too many. The repercussions of the article, picked up by wire services and others, were devastating. Once again the peculiar self-exiled preacher became a topic of conversation and gossip in the liberal-progressive political community. Former supporters found it increasingly difficult to dismiss the long-standing allegations against the Temple as a rightist vendetta. Even Temple friends had to ask themselves what kind of a man would agree to sire a child for a church member, then keep that child from his natural mother. Were they to believe that Jones’s stand with the boy in the jungle was only coincidentally related to published allegations against the Temple? Were they to believe that a man involved in such a bizarre carnal transaction was above beatings, forced property donations and manipulations of all sorts?
Even before Jones went public with his paternity claim, Steven Katsaris was becoming increasingly anxious about his daughter Maria’s well-being. Like others with family in the church, the former Greek Orthodox priest had learned too much through newspaper and magazine articles and his own exposure to trust Jim Jones—or anything his daughter told him while under the Temple sway. Bureaucracy, distance and expense kept many relatives from visiting their loved ones, but not Katsaris.
When the New West article appeared in midsummer, 1977, Katsaris had been heartbroken, though Maria had forewarned him and even persuaded him to send a telegram to the magazine’s owner. The serious allegations—some made by Maria’s former friend Grace Stoen—frightened him, and he felt betrayed. When Maria called from Georgetown a week after the article appeared, he gave vent to his disappointment.
“It’s all lies,” Maria replied. “Jim will be coming back to refute them.”
There were more calls. In one, Katsaris believed that his daughter, by seeking his permission to stay in Guyana, was actually signaling him that she wanted to come home—that she wanted him to order her back to the United States. Otherwise the call made no sense; his children normally did not ask permission, and Maria was over twenty-one. It was a tipoff, he thought, that something was wrong. Sick with worry, he let ten days pass. He became convinced that Maria finally had realized she was in a crazy group, but was too deeply involved to walk away.
Resolving to get her out, Katsaris called the San Francisco temple’s radio operator to relay a message to Maria: he would be in Guyana on September 26, 1977, and Maria should prepare a list of things she wanted him to bring.
When a week went by with no response, Katsaris got panicky. Had he overstepped the line? He called the radio operator again, and was told Jonestown had been out of radio contact. Katsaris tactfully informed him that he was familiar with ham radio communications and suggested atmospheric conditions would improve.
A few days later, he was jarred out of bed at 4:00 A.M. by a phone call. Adrenalin surged through his body. He had visions of something terrible happening. The woman on the line was calm and friendly. “Mr. Katsaris, I am part of the group that left Peoples Temple. We hear you’re going to see your daughter. We don’t think it would be a good idea.” She hung up. The next morning, a call came at 3:00 A.M. “If you are thinking of going to see Maria, you shouldn’t,” the woman said. “It’s a very strange group.” Two nights later came the third call. This time it was a man, and he sounded nasty. “We know you live on a ranch by yourself,” the man said. “If you go, you’ll get burned out.”
By the following night, Katsaris was ready for anything. He had not reported the calls to the local authorities because he had no faith in them when Temple matters were involved. But this time the call came from the church radio operator. He was connecting Maria Katsaris. “Those bastards,” thought Katsaris. “They tell me four nights ago that they can’t reach her, and then after repeated threats, they put her on.”
Loud screeches of interference interrupted their initial attempts to say hello. Katsaris thought the people at the Lamaha Gardens house were deliberately jamming the station. As chance would have it, the Federal Communications Commission was monitoring the call on September 15, 1977, less than a week after the end of the six-day siege. The FCC investigators could not hear Maria, only what was relayed to her father as her words.
“Maria, I’m going to be in Washington next Thursday,” Steve Katsaris was saying: “I’m going to ask the [Guyana] government if it’s okay for me to come down.... I would like to have you come in to Georgetown to see me. You are my daughter and we are family, and I would like to talk to you.”
Relay: “She says she will not be here that particular day you are coming. Why that particular day, she wants to know?”
“Because the following week when I come back, Maria, I’m going to go to the hospital for extensive surgery, over.”
Relay: “What’s wrong with him?”
“She knows what’s wrong with me and I don’t want her playing this cat-and-mouse game. She has known about it before.”
Relay: “She says she isn’t playing any cat-and-mouse game. She says what you need to know, she’s already told you on the telephone.”
“I can’t understand why she won’t meet me in Georgetown.”
Relay: “She’s going with her boy friend to Venezuela....”
“Do you copy, Maria? I’ll meet you in Venezuela.... I’d like to meet him, too. I won’t take too much of your time. ”
“I don’t need to see the project. I need to see my child.... I’m beginning to get extremely anxious as to why my daughter doesn’t want to see me.... The only thing that comes to my mind is that she would not be permitted by someone within the church to come and meet with her father, in which case I’m now desperate and I’ll take whatever legal means there are to be able to come down and see if my child is all right. Over.”
At that point, the Jonestown radio signal faded.
More determined than ever, Katsaris sent Jim Jones a telegram through the U.S. Embassy, summarizing the phone call, communicating his anxiety and puzzlement at his daughter’s refusal to see him and reiterating his intention to arrive in Guyana on September 26. There was no reply. Katsaris had sent the cable because he wanted to proceed openly, not in a threatening manner. To Jim Jones, there was no such thing as a nonthreatening approach.
When Katsaris landed in Georgetown, Maria was nowhere to be found. After a few days, he boarded a homeward-bound flight, dejected, but not defeated. He already was planning his next trip.
In the interim, Maria Katsaris sent her father two letters. The first was very conciliatory. She explained that she had declined to meet him on his September 26 visit, because she had wanted to be alone in Venezuela with her “fiancé,” Dr. Larry Schacht, but had been too embarrassed to go into details over the radio. She then expressed concern over rumors that her father had seen several congressmen about her situation and may even have contacted “that guy Mazor, a man who is part of the conspiracy against the church.” She concluded that she could understand his concern, but she insisted she was fine. She signed the letter, “Love, Maria.”
Maria’s next letter, dated October 28, 1977, hit Katsaris with a one-two combination of hostility and the threat of total cutoff:
“The board said it was ok for you to go ahead and come on your own.... However, there is something I want to know first. I have heard from rather high sources in the States that you have been cooperating with the worst kind of people, stirring up trouble. You did not tell me the truth [when you denied] that you had contacted that bunch of criminals and others.... I know you are up to trouble. If you want my love and respect for you ruined totally—you are succeeding. If you do not come straight, and you do not stop this immediately, that’s it. I will never see you anymore.”
That was only the prelude to the bombshell, dropped during a tape played for Georgetown consul Dick McCoy by Paula Adams. On it Maria Katsaris accused her father of sexually molesting her as a child. The same allegation went out in a Temple press statement.
For a former Greek Orthodox priest who now directed a school for emotionally disturbed ch
ildren, this was a lunge for the jugular. Maria’s accusation inflicted a deep wound, yet Katsaris fought back. He prepared to sue Peoples Temple for defamation, a tactic that would drive his daughter further away. And he flew to Washington again.
This time he met with Guyanese Ambassador “Bonny” Mann and persuaded him to intervene. Later, however, in Guyana, oddities and hitches surfaced, though Jones had assured Mann that Katsaris could see Maria. First, it was discomfiting to discover that “Bonny” Mann was playing house with a Temple woman at the residence of Arthur Chung, the President of Guyana. Worse, that woman was Paula Adams, who had run the “child molester” tape for Dick McCoy. In fact, when Mann invited Katsaris over for drinks, Adams fixed them. The depth of Temple-government rapport became even more evident when Mann took Katsaris by the Lamaha Gardens house, and the people there greeted Mann like a long-absent friend.
Katsaris spent the next three days in limbo, trapped between contradictory signals from the church. Yes, he could see Maria. No, her flight had not come in yet from Matthews Ridge as expected. Yes, she was in Georgetown, but she had gone out to dinner. And so on.
On the fourth morning, Paula Adams called. It was seven fifteen. She said Katsaris could see his daughter in forty-five minutes at President Chung’s residence. “Bonny” Mann would be there, as would consul McCoy, if Katsaris wished.
The air was sultry as Katsaris arrived at the large white house with the beautifully landscaped gardens. They retired to the terrace off the living room, so they could catch the Caribbean breezes. A circle of wrought-iron chairs had been arranged. Maria walked in with Carolyn Layton and two large men; one man kept his coat on, which prompted Katsaris to wonder if he had a gun. Her father was shocked by Maria’s condition. He knew she would be pale and too thin. But her complexion was terribly sallow, and there were bags and dark marks under her eyes.
When he embraced her, she remained stiff, with her hands at her sides. She turned her cheek away. He wanted to sit opposite her in the circle so he could observe her closely, but he was partially deaf in one ear, so he sat beside her instead, with his good ear toward her. She was cold and distant and wasted no time in launching an attack on her father.
Katsaris had left the priesthood, but his spiritual life was still very important to him. When he mentioned God, she stood up abruptly. “We don’t believe in God,” she burst out. It was an awkward overreaction, almost a conditioned reflex. Carolyn Layton tried to temper that peculiar admission by a “Christian” church member. “It’s true we don’t believe in God,” Layton said soothingly, “but we believe in good things.” But the outburst confirmed Katsaris’s fears that Maria had been rehearsed, maybe even worked over during the four-day delay.
Jim Jones knew how potentially dangerous this encounter was. Steve Katsaris, a respected, trustworthy man in Ukiah, possessed the professional and financial resources to mount an attack, publicly or legally. To Jones, losing Maria would be more than simply losing a mistress or a capable financial secretary. Out of Jonestown and the church, Maria could lend new ammunition to attacks upon the church; John Stoen’s surrogate mother could join his natural mother.
But Katsaris’s hopes were melting away. Maria kept up her hostile barbs. She accused him of hiring a criminal-Joe Mazor—and of getting Guyana blackballed from some international human rights organization. McCoy and Mann corrected her on both counts.
Katsaris was outraged at the transformation of his daughter; still he kept a grip on himself. One false move, and he might never see her again. He looked around for ways to hustle her out of the room, but one man stood directly behind Layton, and the other blocked the path to the door.
If she showed any sign of wanting out, Katsaris planned to ask for asylum in the American Embassy and somehow get her there. But Maria never vacillated, never deviated from her cold exterior. Steve Katsaris thought she might have been deprived of sleep.
“Maria, I just want you to listen,” he said. “You know I was here last month.” He was not even sure she had been told.
“Yes.” The answer was too abrupt. Then, when he tried to raise the child molesting accusation, Maria said, “That is a subject we shall not discuss.”
“You have to discuss it,” McCoy broke in. “He came six thousand miles to discuss it.”
Mann could not restrain himself either. “I have children, too,” he said, “and if they refused to discuss it, I would be pained to the point of death.”
“That is a subject we shall not discuss.” Her words seemed wooden, hard, inappropriate, coming from one so frail.
“Maria, I’m worried about you,” her father pleaded. “I’ve been told you signed an undated suicide note and that they would kill you if you showed signs of wanting to defect.”
“What is the source of your information?” she said sharply and much too fast.
“That’s not important,” Katsaris replied. “If you’re afraid they’ll kill you, tell me, and I’ll get you out. If you didn’t sign the note, tell me and I’ll stop worrying.”
“If you will not reveal your source of information,” she repeated, “that is a subject we shall not discuss.”
Katsaris was on the spot. His source was Temple defector Liz Foreman, his former employee and Maria’s former friend. She had been present when Maria had signed the suicide note, but was now a Temple enemy. Katsaris had not spent a fortune, traveled this far and ignored threats back home in order to betray a Temple defector.
The father wanted his daughter at least to reassure him about her own safety. And yet she would not answer. He suspected the worst of the Temple. He could not help noticing that Maria’s brown woven purse was roomy enough to hold a small tape recorder. And when Carolyn Layton hiked up her rather revealing sleeveless dress, Katsaris recognized it as a deliberate distraction.
“Maybe you want to give Maria time,” Layton offered, playing the conciliator. “She’ll be all right after a while.”
As a last resort, Katsaris tried to appeal to his daughter’s sense of family, to her love for her Papou, her Greek grandfather, who helped raise the kids.
“Maria, I tried to think what Papou would do in my position,” he said. “I know he’d do what I have done. I love you, Maria. I came all this way to see you, yet there are all these people and lawyers.”
“There are certain things called guardianships,” Maria replied tersely.
Finally, it was clear what Jones’s worst fear had been and why he had wanted the Temple’s local legal counsel present for the meeting. They had suspected that Katsaris might serve conservatorship papers on her, as parents of “Moonie” children were doing in the States.
It was futile to discuss anything. So Katsaris turned to McCoy. “Thanks for the meeting. I’m convinced she wants to stay here. I’ll be leaving on the afternoon flight.”
To Maria, he added, “There will be a ticket home at the Embassy if you want it. If you want to cash it in, you can do that, too.” He embraced her again, but she was cold. The only option that remained, he felt, was abduction. But, true to his word, he made plans to leave that afternoon. As he got to the Pan Am ticket counter, he saw a message to phone Dick McCoy. He dialed in a trembling hand. Had Maria defected? No.
“Both Ambassador Mann and I think that something was strange there this morning,” McCoy said. “I stayed behind to talk to him. We want you to know that because you are very upset, I’m writing a full report to State, and you will get a copy.”
Katsaris never did get a copy, but he felt relieved to know that at least one State Department official now believed something peculiar was going on.
Less than a month after Katsaris’s visit, some other anguished parents, Howard and Beverly Oliver, came to Guyana to retrieve their sons, Billy, seventeen, and Bruce, nineteen. The black couple had given them permission for a brief Jonestown vacation. However, the passage of weeks and reports of the Temple exodus had convinced them that their sons were gone for good.
When the Olivers first demand
ed that their sons return, they had received gushing letters about life in Jonestown. But the letters did not wash with Mrs. Oliver, a former Temple member.
Next, the Olivers obtained a court order in San Francisco for the return of Billy, still a minor. But Billy would be eighteen soon, and Jones could stall until then. Furthermore, the boys had told visiting attorney Charles Garry that they were happy in Jonestown. In fact, Bruce had said he would rather “run into the jungle” than return to the United States.
On December 19, 1977, Howard and Beverly Oliver arrived in Georgetown with their attorney. It was a heavy financial burden for Oliver, a security guard. For eight maddening days they tried to see their boys. At one point, Howard Oliver thought he would get an audience with the prime minister, but that turned into another runaround. The U.S. Embassy tried to arrange for the boys to come into Georgetown to see their parents, but the Temple kept postponing. Finally, the Olivers were told that the church council decided it was best that the couple not see their sons. Frustrated, they left. They would be back to try again, even though they had to borrow travel money.
FORTY-TWO
White Nights
When Mike Touchette returned to Jonestown in December 1977, from a four-month stint in Georgetown, he was dismayed by the living conditions there. Instead of eight to ten people crowded into each cottage, there were fourteen. Instead of free time after work, there were catharsis sessions and long rambling discourses by Jim Jones three or four nights a week. Instead of the entertaining movies rented from Georgetown, they saw propaganda shorts on Soviet life supplied by the Soviet Embassy and video-cassette documentaries about the abuse of old people in U.S. convalescent homes or problems of returning Vietnam war veterans. Attendance was mandatory, and everyone was tested on the programs afterward.
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