“Debbie is very difficult to deal with.... Sometimes she is so kind and thoughtful and other times she’s short-tempered and pissy. I have not found her helpful in organizing here.”
The next day, Debbie Blakey disappeared, leaving the public relations staff very worried about her intentions. They confirmed the worst when Debbie Touchette spotted her at the post office with an Embassy political officer.
“What’s wrong, Debbie?” asked Touchette.
“I’m leaving,” Blakey replied. “I’m sorry. I know this comes as a shock to you, but I just can’t take any more of this.”
Touchette pleaded with Blakey to reconsider, or at least to call Jones and explain personally why she was leaving. Blakey finally agreed to dictate a note through Touchette, saying she wanted to leave and settle down:
“I have nothing vindictive against the church,” Blakey said. “I’m just tired. I thought it was unfair to have a crisis when there wasn’t one. People can’t live on a string. A lot of times [Jim] says [for] people to give opinions, [but] they are put on a list to be watched ... I always had the fear I wouldn’t explain myself well, and it would be the learning crew [for me].”
As a member of the financial team and an experienced radio operator, Blakey had made herself almost indispensable. She had persuaded Jones to let her work in Georgetown, so that she could plot her defection. She had called her sister collect in the United States to say she wanted to leave. Then her sister had sent her a return ticket, and McCoy had provided her an emergency passport.
The Temple tried again to stop Blakey. Terri Carter Jones of the Georgetown staff tailed her to the airport, then concealed herself among the passengers for the Pan American flight to New York. As Blakey walked through the electronic security gate with Consul McCoy, Terri Jones popped out to confront her.
“It would ease the mind of the one who loves you most if you would just keep in touch,” said Jones. Blakey nodded slightly.
Terri Jones started to cry. “Why are you doing this to Jim?”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Can you imagine how he feels right now? He’s so sick, Debbie.”
Unmoved, Blakey boarded a United States-bound jet with McCoy, who was returning to Washington for scheduled consultations. The consul was delighted to have a defector on his hands. He had been frustrated in Guyana, deluged by both angry relatives and the Temple. He thought a defector, especially such an articulate one, might clarify matters. But, as she talked, it seemed that she was exaggerating.
Back in Jonestown, the effect of the Blakey defection was predictable and instantaneous. “Alert, alert, alert,” Jim Jones shrieked over the loudspeaker. It was his forty-seventh birthday, but there was no celebration. Everyone streamed to the pavilion. Another White Night was about to begin.
The alert sent Stephan Jones running to the radio room, picking up bits of information on the way. His father, talking to Georgetown, was learning details of Blakey’s desertion. In the radio room, a crowd had gathered: Carolyn Layton, Harriet Tropp, Larry Schacht, Marceline Jones and the Jones boys. Jones asked the doctor how everyone could commit suicide.
“Well,” Schacht replied, “we could sedate everybody and give them an injection into the heart.”
“We could shoot everyone, too,” Jones added.
Stephan and Marceline Jones felt Schacht was just telling Jones what he wanted to hear. As usual, Marceline opposed such talk, and Layton and Tropp began arguing heatedly with her.
“Do you really think you can take the lives of a thousand people?” asked Stephan. “It’s not that easy.” His mother was vigorously nodding her head.
Jones shut them off. “How many bullets do we have? Count the bullets. I’ll do it myself. I’ll walk around and put a bullet in everyone’s head.”
Young Jones thought his father was posturing, but he continued to argue. “Do you know what a bullet does when it hits a human body?” Stephan asked. He thought his father was basing his idiocy on TV and movie violence.
Yet Jones was certain that Debbie Blakey could open up the camp to its enemies. “It’s better for us all to die together, proud, than have them discredit us and take us apart and make us look like a bunch of crazy people,” he said.
“What do you think everybody committing suicide will look like?” Stephan wanted to know.
“Well, at first, maybe they’ll think we’re crazy,” Jones said. “But it’s going to go down in history as a great act.”
By then, all of Jonestown had been assembled and waiting at least an hour. The people in the radio room were poised. Jones stopped before a mirror in an adjoining room, combed his hair, painted on his sideburns and adjusted his black Mao hat. Then he strode into the pavilion with his pistol. Stephan Jones thought to himself, “There goes the warrior, this little fat man, with his .357, which he thinks is a .45.”
The Emperor Jones took his throne, the green chair, and sat back against the pillow. His arms folded, his gun holstered, he scanned nearly a thousand human beings and listened as Harriet Tropp explained the dire situation.
The people were not told who defected—only that the traitor was involved in finances. Speculation centered on Tim Carter, whose brother Mike was on stage with Jones, handling the sound equipment. This death rehearsal began in the afternoon, and by 3:00 A.M., young Carter would be sick of it—and ready to die.
“Yes, let’s do it now and end the constant pressure,” would say many who approached the microphone. A small minority would say, “No, why now? We still have the children to live for.” And they usually would be called “chickenshit” and shouted down.
Jones, meanwhile, tested and pushed people to their limits. How much did the cause mean to them? How far were they willing to go? Would they defend Jonestown to the death? Would they kill themselves to make a revolutionary statement for socialism?
Several people consistently argued against death or suicide. One was Kay Rosas, a woman with emotional problems whose opinion carried no weight. Another was Christine Miller, a black woman in her early sixties from Los Angeles, who used to wear furs in the States with the special permission of Jones. She would argue that there was still too much to live for. But she betrayed her “materialist tendencies” when she argued, for example, “I sold my car and my forty-thousand-dollar house to come down here. I could be living comfortably. I didn’t come down here to die.” Miller’s arguments were counterproductive.
No one challenged Jones on the basic issue: that self-destruction was insane, meaningless and sure to be interpreted differently than intended. Enormous peer pressure kept them from saying so. Mike Carter, for one, was afraid to tell anyone his feelings, for fear of being reported. When Jones asked how many would be willing to die, Carter was careful to show uninhibited support along with the rest. It was impossible to tell how many were swept along, screaming for death just to protect themselves.
Dinner was served in the pavilion as the White Night continued. At 4:00 A.M., nearly everyone had dozed off. Looking around, Jones said, “Fuck it, let’s all take a nap,” and people stayed asleep on the wooden benches. When they awoke, Jones dismissed them. As Carter yawned, he saw the sun come up. But by noon, the meeting had started anew, with the same wearisome discussion of the same issues. Jones delivered progress reports on the anonymous defector, even changing the gender.
“He’s in Venezuela now,” Jones said. “He might be coming back. ... We’re not calling him a traitor yet.”
Finally, Jones terminated the White Night. “It isn’t our time to go yet. We have too much to live for....”
Jones’s first corrective action had been sending Maria Katsaris and Teri Buford out of the country to change all the bank accounts and rearrange the Temple’s finances in case Blakey tried to raid church funds. He also ordered Larry Layton immediately to Guyana. He did not want the defector preaching anti-Jones doctrine to her brother. When the church reached Larry, he was in his father’s swimming pool in the Berkeley Hills. He obe
yed orders and was barely dry before he was at the airport boarding a plane.
Without doubt, the Blakey escape represented a real crisis. But perhaps, with some fast letter-writing, Jones could neutralize the press in San Francisco, and defuse Blakey altogether....
Several weeks after Debbie Blakey left Guyana, accusatory letters came to me at the Examiner. Since there was no way of knowing that she had defected and was agonizing over whether to go to the press, the nine letters were particularly baffling. They ranged from mild to vehement, all with the same innuendo: Tim Stoen and other unnamed persons were plotting a mercenary attack on Jonestown, and Tim Reiterman had been identified either by Stoen or by “reliable sources” as a supporter of violence against the church. Only later did I see that the Temple might have wanted me on the defensive in case Debbie Blakey suddenly appeared and began talking, which is exactly what happened. It was June 15 when the phone call came inviting me to a semiprivate news conference, with just Marshall Kilduff and me representing the San Francisco news media. It was held at the offices of attorney Jeff Haas in a renovated brick structure across the street, coincidentally, from the Housing Authority.
Debbie Blakey arrived without fanfare, looking every bit as icy as I had imagined upper-echelon Temple women to be. It appeared that she had joined forces to help the Stoens; Haas was their attorney, too. Blakey appeared childlike, little more than a teen-age refugee from Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. She seemed reserved, and dressed tastefully. She was pretty. Ever-protective Haas explained how reluctant she had been to speak out and how difficult it was. Only a month had elapsed since her escape. But why was “escape” necessary?
“They have armed guards, about fifty, and they encircle the camp to make sure everyone is working,” she said. “They have weapons—handguns and rifles, not machine guns. They have twenty-five guards in the daytime and twenty-five at night. There’s one at Jim’s house around the clock. ”
“It’s really depressing there,” she added. Blakey sounded somehow unconvinced, as if her heart were not in it. Her speech seemed hollow, her allegations sensational. “In San Francisco, it was beatings, but down there, it was literally torture. ”
“There was a guy, Don Sly, [who] put his knuckles in your temple and pressed. There were free-for-alls. Faces were bashed in. People tried to not show their expression when the torture was going on. They looked at Jim. The tortured were indoctrinated and tested ... in front of 1,100 people.”
Blakey portrayed Jones as a fat, pistol-toting tyrant at the command of a group that sounded more militant and better armed than the California church had been. “They’ve got guns and enough poison and liquor to put people asleep,” Blakey said, when asked about her reference to “mass suicide” plans. Yet she also conceded that guns never had been used on members, just for target practice. And she admitted some had been purchased in Guyana under legal permits for security and hunting.
“But there’s no meat and no hunting,” she said. “When there’s a crisis, two hundred to three hundred rifles and about twenty-five hand-guns come out. There’s lots of ammunition, and some people are working on a bazooka. I never saw the bazooka.”
After the interview, I felt anguished. I wanted badly to write a story from the Blakey material and realized its importance—as an inside view of Jonestown—but my gut feelings were negative. Though she may have shown real courage in escaping and speaking out, her story conflicted with Broussard’s and Mrs. B.’s in some ways, and more than that, it presented the familiar problem: How could I write an extremely damaging, uncorroborated account about an agricultural mission six thousand miles away? Was it not possible Blakey was a plant, sent to seed the news media with false accounts? Given the Temple’s past strategies, the chances of a Temple agent provocateur did not seem remote—and an irresponsible story, even a hoax, could discredit everything the media had printed about Jim Jones.
Although the Chronicle did run the story, the Examiner decided to hold off on the Blakey allegations; one story would not resolve conclusively our questions about Jonestown, and probably would put me further away from a visit there. With positive appraisals being offered by Charles Garry and others, things had become too muddied for me to settle for anything less than a personal visit.
Meanwhile, in a hospital in Georgetown, Debbie Blakey’s mother, Lisa Layton, was dying of cancer. Everyone had taken pains to keep the news from the fading woman, but Jones got her to sign an affidavit criticizing her daughter’s character and motives.
“Her attitude is positive,” said Karen Layton in a daily reports to Jones about her mother-in-law. “She has said many things against Debbie, including that she thinks Debbie has a criminal mind.... Of course, I gear a lot of the conversation, but she adds a lot, too.” Soon thereafter, Lisa Layton went home to Jonestown to die.
In about October of 1977—between his two futile trips to Guyana —Steve Katsaris had systematically contacted all the ex-members mentioned in the original New West story. He first gathered with them at the Berkeley home of Jeannie and Al Mills, defectors who were starting a Human Freedom Center to shelter and counsel refugees from cults. After Katsaris’s November 1977 trip to Guyana, the group met again and expanded sufficiently—to a dozen or so—that they planned a public protest at the San Francisco Federal Building. Sherwin Harris—the ex-husband of Temple public relations woman Sharon Amos and father of her oldest daughter—had written a flyer for the protest, dubbing the group the “Concerned Relatives.” The name stuck.
Tim Stoen had begun to participate in the meetings, although he had been reluctant to switch sides entirely. The group met at night and talked into the small hours of the morning; sometimes the meetings were staked out by Temple surveillance teams which checked out the license numbers of the parked cars to determine their enemies. While defectors gave the relatives an education in Temple history and practices, the group talked strategy and studied transcripts of the Temple’s coded radio transmissions, intercepted by the Millses and others. And they shared details of their frustrating individual experiences.
A common sense of impotence and frustration now allied some defectors and relatives. Media disclosures heightened their concerns each passing month. Letters from Jonestown appeared almost childishly contrived ; phone patches arranged through the Temple also sounded artificial. Many concluded that something was terribly wrong—yet could not reach Jonestown. And on March 14, 1978, the Temple raised another red flag. In a letter addressed to members of both houses of Congress, Temple member Pamela Moton complained of alleged harassment and threatened: “I can say without hesitation that we are devoted to a decision that it is better even to die than to be constantly harassed from one continent to the next.”
By the spring of 1978, anxious relatives and the beleaguered church had fallen unwittingly into a peculiar symbiotic relationship. Each action fed a reaction by the other side, and each exchange made a collision course that much more certain.
The Concerned Relatives made their strongest and best-organized public plea on April 11, 1978, when a contingent of about fifty persons led by Steve Katsaris and Howard Oliver assembled outside the San Francisco temple. Though stopped by the chain-link fence surrounding the Temple, the group delivered a petition along with a list of “accusations of human rights violations.”
At the head of the list of grievances, the relatives excerpted the “decision to die” statement sent to Congress by the Temple. “We frankly do not know,” the relatives said, “if you have become so corrupted by power that you would actually allow a collective ‘decision’ to die or whether your letter is simply a bluff designed to deter investigations....”
The Concerned Relatives protest touched off public relations skirmishes and an exchange of lawsuits. Taking the offensive, the Temple arranged during the next week for various Guyana residents to contact their relatives. With reporters listening, the Jonestown residents insisted they wanted to remain in Guyana and criticized relatives for attacking the church. Th
eir voices could be heard over radio-telephone hookup in the law offices of Charles Garry, accusing the Concerned Relatives, in their presence, of being perverts, drug addicts, heavy drinkers and so forth.
One of the organized relatives, bearish and bearded Sherwin Harris, received a 10:30 P.M. call on April 13. After fourteen months, the Temple finally had put his daughter Liane in touch with him—but the hardness in her voice shocked him and convinced him she had been coached. Harris wrote himself the following note about the call: “I had only a few minutes ... to talk to her. ‘Liane, I love you, I miss you. I want you to come home for a visit.’ She answers me, ‘Dad, are you a robot or a machine? Is that all you can say?’ It is not my daughter....”
In May of 1978, a Burlingame schoolteacher and divorcee named Clare Bouquet experienced a similar feeling of futility. Since the initial exposes in 1977, she had felt deep concern over her grown-up son Brian’s membership in the Temple. When she read my story about the Stoen-Jones paternity suit, she clipped the article, wrote on it—“Whoever is telling the truth, how can you respect these people? They’ve got to be a bunch of kooks”—and sent it to Brian’s Los Angeles address along with a five-dollar check for Easter. Because the check went uncashed, she wrote her son a follow-up letter. Finally, in May, still with no reply, she telephoned the San Francisco temple and was informed that Brian had been living in Guyana for months. Hanging up the phone, she cried in despair.
Brian Bouquet had been brought to Peoples Temple in 1975 by Tim Carter, another white Catholic Burlingame boy. Of the four Bouquet children, Brian seemed the least likely to submit to an authoritarian organization. The thin, brown-haired, brown-eyed boy was open-minded by nature, appreciative of good music and good writing, but also inclined to challenge authority. As he grew older, Brian became a conscientious objector and let his hair grow longer.
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