Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  After sitting for about thirty minutes in complete silence, Clayton ventured out of the bush. He would need his passport if he wanted to slip past Guyanese and U.S. authorities. The passport was inside Jonestown. About twenty-five yards from the edge of the clearing, he heard what sounded like handgun fire. Not four, not three, but five shots: he was sure of that. After one of the shots, he heard Muggs screaming. Another shot. Silence.

  When Clayton ran back into the bush and hid, he heard what sounded like a male voice out in the field, someone looking for him. He went deeper into the undergrowth. After a long time, he came out of the bush.

  He felt that he should head for the main road. Keeping low and moving cautiously, he worked his way back into Jonestown’s housing areas. He was sweaty and muddy, having stumbled into swampy spots along the way. He went to his house and changed into dry clothes, and exchanged his tennis shoes for boots. He noticed the time: about ten forty-five.

  As he skirted the compound, he tried to get a clear view of the pavilion. He could tell the lights were on but could not see the bodies.

  He went through the kitchen. All was quiet. He opened the door to the room where the passports were stored. He waited five minutes motionlessly to make sure he was alone. He had never been in the passport box before, but fortunately it had been left unlocked. The passports, over nine hundred of them, were in alphabetical order, so he found his quickly. Just as he shut the box, he heard one more shot.

  He froze. He could tell it had come from inside a building. It was closer and louder than the other five, and might have come from the pavilion or from West House. Jim Jones’s house.

  Clayton watched in both directions, thinking someone might be coming. He closed the door and turned off the light, and waited. After a few minutes of silence, he emerged from the building and padded slowly, his eyes toward Jones’s house. Then he took off down the road, running. Behind him, the only sound was the barking of dogs.

  In the pavilion, Jim Jones lay dead, a bullet hole in his temple, a gaping exit wound where his brains and skull were blown away. The bullet had traveled at an upward angle through his head and into oblivion. A gun was resting, mysteriously, some twenty feet away. His body lay in repose on a cleared space near his throne, between two other bodies. His head of raven hair was cushioned by a pillow, as though someone had made him comfortable before—or perhaps after—the squeeze of a trigger removed him from his misery. Marceline had taken final rest among the people, poisoned.

  In Jones’s house, thirteen people died. Among them were the two small boys Jones claimed to have sired—John Stoen and Kimo Prokes. Maria Katsaris, Carolyn Layton, Jim McElvane were among the others. A man, a woman and a baby—believed to be Lew Jones and his family—died on a bunk. There were still others, all poisoned except for one. Annie Moore’s body was sprawled near a filing cabinet. Next to her lay a bloody gun, a .357 magnum said to be Jim Jones’s personal weapon. A massive bullet wound to the head had ended her life.

  Next to her body on the blood-splattered floor was a spiral notebook with a red cover. Annie Moore had written her own suicide note.

  “I am twenty-four years of age right now, and I don’t expect to live to the end of this book. I thought I should make some attempt to let the world know what Jim Jones and Peoples Temple is—or was all about. ”

  “It seems that some people—and perhaps the majority of people—would like to destroy the best thing that ever happened to the one thousand two hundred or so of us who have followed Jim. I am at a point now so embittered against the world that I don’t know why I am writing this.”

  She wrote in praise of Jonestown, saying, “It seems that everything good that happens in the world is under constant attack.” And she spoke with love of the man whom she nursed and comforted: “His love for humans was unsurmountable and it was many whom he put his love and trust in, and they left him and spit in his face.”

  The final line was added in a different color ink and at a different angle:

  “We died because you would not let us live.”

  The Ryan party had probably left Jonestown around 3:30 or 3:45 P.M. The Port Kaituma ambush started between 4:45 and 5:00 P.M., the same time Jones was beginning to address his people. The suicide-murder ritual was well under way by 6:00 P.M., and the two attorneys already were on the run. Perhaps forty-five minutes later, at about 6:45, the attorneys evidently saw the Carter brothers and Prokes carrying the heavy suitcase of money out of Jonestown. Around the same time, Clayton fled into the darkened jungle at the Jonestown perimeter, where he hid for perhaps an hour or two, maybe until 9:00 P.M., when he apparently heard the final cheer of Jones’s inner circle before they took the potion. After another half-hour, Clayton started out but was driven back by the sound of shots, so he hid for a long time, probably almost an hour. When he came out, it was 10:45 P.M.—almost everyone was dead. He heard a shot, a final shot, which the authors believe—in part because of the positioning of Jones’s body—was Annie Moore shooting herself. Since there are no known living eyewitnesses to the death of Jim Jones by a “contact wound” to the head, the evidence suggests that either he shot himself or he was shot by a close aide, probably Annie Moore.75 Sources among survivors have said that Jones long had planned to have someone kill him when the final White Night arrived.

  At around 6:00 A.M., the last of our people had roused themselves and sat up, marking time. Dwyer showed up at the rum shop and without smiling announced, “I think we’re pretty much out of the woods. The first twenty soldiers arrived and staked out the airstrip. There will be eighty more, then some by train.... They’re mobilizing everyone in the country. Washington is aware of what happened.”

  He then blurted, “Sharon Amos has killed herself and her two children in Georgetown.” Soft exclamations traveled through the room. “Rumors of Jonestown are bad. It looks like there are killings and suicide. I’m sure that once this triggered it, the world collapsed.”

  Some of the defectors stiffened with new fear. They predicted that Jones’s avenging angels, members of the basketball team, would come to slay us and others.

  When asked about the mass suicide, Gerry Parks, eyes dark and receding in anguish, said, “This is what always was planned. If you go there now, you might find they are all dead, unless they could overcome the leadership. We never figured we’d make it out the gates. When you came, Jones said that you would come in to attack us with guns.”

  What in the world was revolutionary suicide? “The theory,” Dale said, “is that you can go down in history, saying you chose your way to go, and it is your commitment to refuse capitalism and in support of socialism.”

  At about eight-thirty a couple of Guyanese soldiers showed up and stood in the kitchen doorway. They were in green battle fatigues and carrying automatic rifles. We showered them with warm smiles. “It’s been a long night,” I said.

  Dwyer returned to give passports and other personal effects to the survivors. He handed me my watch, with a broken band, and a couple of muddy cameras that had weathered the night on the rainy strip. I stowed Greg’s cameras with the rest of his gear.

  Word spread fast that the soldiers had arrived, and more Guyanese descended on the disco. Some sipped coffee at the front entry corridor, which converted into a porch when storm boards were removed. I walked out for fresh air and a look at the roadway. The town looked friendlier by daylight.

  A man asked whether I was one of the Americans. I nodded. “A damn shame, man,” he said. Agreeing, I left and was accosted by the self-proclaimed airport manager. Though his speech had grown sloppier with each bottle of rum, he seemed to take credit for the arrival of the troops and reminded me of his assurances that we would be safe. Soon we were sharing a table with Carol and a soldier. With an experienced hand, the airport manager poured a couple of fingers of rum, then a couple of fingers of cool condensed milk into paper cups. The soldier turned down a drink with a contemptuous head shake.

  The breakfast concoction went down
smoothly, the milk cutting the fiery sweetness of the rum. We saluted our survival. The drink lightened my head and put something in my queasy stomach. My only food for the past thirty-six hours had been a cheese sandwich at the mission and a banana at the disco. We were running on adrenalin alone.

  Carrying my second rum toward the back room, I walked into the kitchen and found Gerry Parks crying into his fists. “The goddamn dirty bastard. The bastard. I’ve never done anything in my life to hurt anyone. He never had the guts to do anything on his own. He would sit there and laugh when twelve beat the hell out of one person.” His hatred for Jones wrenched his body and contorted his face.

  Embarrassed to have intruded, I went into a rear room where Jim Bogue, a bespectacled forty-six-year-old man with a tractor cap, sat in a corner with his twenty-one-year-old daughter Juanita. They wondered how to reconstruct their devastated lives.

  “When you came in, we knew there would be mass suicide if anyone, even one, wanted to leave,” Juanita said. “He’s threatened it a lot, but ...” Guilt apparently set in. “I knew we’d get it before we got to the front gate. We would have got it right there at the gate on the truck, but they couldn’t get the tractor there on time.”

  Her father slumped noticeably when I asked if they would be leaving with us. “I just can’t leave without my kids,” he said. “There are two in the bush ... and my youngest daughter, Marilee, nineteen, wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t even answer me [when we went to leave]. She knew what was going to happen. She’d take the poison without a gun to her head.”

  When word arrived that the medical evacuation planes had landed, I walked down the strip to survey the scene. A couple dozen soldiers rimmed the field, firearms at the ready, some facing the surrounding jungle. One yellow med-evac plane of uncertain vintage and Guyanese origins was parked near the crippled plane the soldiers had been guarding. Far down the strip, I could make out several lumps on the ground around the Otter. The bodies had not yet been moved.

  Near the first plane, Guyanese soldiers and a woman medic hooked up intravenous tubes and did what they could to patch up the injured as they were rushed aboard the aircraft. Remarkably, Steve Sung was walking under his own power. His straight black hair in disarray, he grinned and called my name. We shook hands and I embraced him, accidentally jostling his sore arm. His joy and strength attested to his resilience. He had weathered a night of delirium, hot and cold sweats, and was going to make it. Incredibly, the rest had survived, too, though Anthony was in particularly serious shape with breathing difficulties, and Jackie had gangrene in her leg.

  There was some outside chance—with the five-hour time difference —that I could make the final deadline for Sunday’s paper if I left on the first plane, if the editors could stretch production schedules, if I could make a quick phone call from Georgetown, if I could dictate fast and clean. There were many uncertainties, but it was worth a try. I knew it was a big story, though I was not certain how big because the events in Jonestown were hazy unknowns.

  Javers and I discussed the situation, and each of us decided against staying behind in Kaituma to cover the story. We were really not sure of the seriousness of our wounds and the possibility of infection. And after being out of touch with our offices for almost forty-eight hours, we were anxious to get to a phone rather than risk being out of touch for another newspaper cycle or more.

  Dwyer said we could take the first plane, because we were among the half-dozen most severely wounded. “Do I have time to get my gear?” I said. “Hurry,” he said. Though I had Greg’s camera gear, his pack and my pack were back at the disco.

  When I bolted through the front door, Carol Boyd looked up and came over to me. “The first plane is ready to leave,” I reported. “And they’re taking out the injured. I’m going out.”

  Her mouth dropped and she grabbed my arm. “I don’t want to stay with these people, no matter what.” Carol did not trust the defectors and did not want to be left alone with them. “Come on,” I said. “Maybe there’s room.”

  On the way out, I paused to shake hands or clasp the shoulders of the men and women who had shared that horrendous night. We wished each other luck and exchanged tight smiles. They were good people, I thought, good people like those who had left the Temple long ago and spoken against Jones. Good people like those at Jonestown.

  At the side of the evacuation plane, Dwyer told me there was no extra room for Carol since she was uninjured. So I gave her my seat, and Javers gave his seat to Beverly Oliver, who had foot wounds. Fortunately, a second med-evac plane soon landed across the runway, and we were told that it would get us to Georgetown at about the same time because of its superior speed. We both agreed to wait for it.

  Leaning in the door of the first plane, I bade good-bye to our companions. “We’ll see you in Georgetown.” Some of them waved weakly as the plane started its engines. Javers and I carried our baggage to the second plane, skirting puddles and knots of natives gathered to witness local history. We placed our packs against a wall across from the door, and rested for a moment. “Where’s your camera?” I asked.

  “It’s lost,” he said. He had tossed it off while scrambling through the bush.

  “Someone’s got to take a picture of this, or people will never really see what happened here,” I said. Rummaging through my canvas pack, I was unable to find my Olympus compact. I figured it was with my tape recorder, sitting in a mud puddle alongside the strip somewhere.

  Unflapping Greg’s bag, I pulled out a Canon motordrive, but it was crusted with mud. The second Canon’s lens was cloudy with moisture. An old Nikon rangefinder camera in a front compartment was clean and more to my liking. The frame counter showed Greg had taken about twenty-one or twenty-two shots, meaning the balance of a thirty-six-shot roll was available without reloading or risking the film inside.

  Stepping outside, I framed a couple of photos of the soldiers and the tent where our injured had spent the night. The difficult part still faced me. The few hundred yards to the Otter passed slowly. Dizzy and slightly nauseated, I stopped fifty yards away and took a head-on photo of the plane. The range was too long for that lens. The plane looked like a toy through the viewfinder, the bodies like baggage. I would have to walk closer.

  Holding the camera in my right hand, I strode resolutely to the plane and swung to the right. A group of soldiers near the waiting shack watched me, their guns poised. It was eerie, stifling, ghoulish. But it had to be done.

  For the final time, I approached Greg’s body. Someone had rolled him over, apparently when he was stripped of personal effects and perhaps looted. His shirt had pulled open to the waist. My eyes could not focus on his muddied face, but I noticed his glasses were not there. Examining his wounds seemed pointless. I picked up a couple of articles around him—a key to his room at the Pegasus and a severed piece of camera strap.

  Nothing on earth could have made me take close-ups of Greg and the others. Without snapping the shutter, I backed off and circled the plane, past the remains of Patricia Parks and Bob Brown. Taking several more paces away from the plane, I filled the frame with the scene and took a couple of photos. Then my path went full circle, past the Otter’s nose and a little to the right. Finally, I had found an angle showing all the dead, the plane, the open cargo door and the extended boarding stairway—the mute horror of the massacre. My left arm was not much help, so, holding a deep breath, I squeezed off a one-handed shot with my right hand. As the shutter slammed closed, I realized that the camera was aimed along the death squad’s line of fire.

  When I tried to cock the shutter again, the film jammed. Several shots were still left. Just then, a jeep with Bob Flick and others drove down to pick me up.

  Within a few minutes, our plane lifted off and left behind that muddy strip where bodies still sprawled around the Otter. Then gray turbulent clouds soon screened the meandering rivers and deep green jungle.

  Neville Annibourne, the government man, was sitting across the aisle, just behind
an army officer. He was in a reflective mood. Leaning across the aisle, I asked, “Is this the end of the Peoples Temple mission?”

  He started to say something about others having to make such decisions, but stopped abruptly. “I can think of no better way to put it than that,” he said. “It’s ended.”

  Epilogue

  As Jim Jones had prophesied, the Guyanese army descended upon Jonestown. But they came not to kill and maim and to steal children, but to assess Jones’s carnage. They found the bodies of Jim Jones and Annie Moore, each with a single bullet wound to the head. John Victor Stoen and Kimo Prokes were dead. The poison also had killed Marceline Jones, the Jones’s adopted daughter Agnes, their adopted sons Lew and Johnny Brown. It claimed Jones’s closest aides too: Carolyn Layton, Karen Layton, Maria Katsaris, Jack Beam, Patty Cartmell, Dick and Harriet Tropp, Jim McElvane, Dr. Larry Schacht. Drugged attorney Gene Chaikin and dissenter Christine Miller died, as did the loyalist Marilee Bogue. Rebellious schoolteacher Tom Grubbs died, as did students Patricia and Judy Houston and their mother Phyllis. Those who made the trip to the airstrip to attack the Ryan party—Tom Kice, Joe Wilson, Wesley Breidenbach, Albert Touchette and others—took the potion. Old friends Le Flora Townes and James and Irene Edwards died, and so did Billy and Bruce Oliver, Brian and Claudia Bouquet, and Christine Cobb and several of her children. Shaun Baker, the singer who had entertained San Francisco politicians, was dead. Carolyn Looman, whose family believed she wanted to leave, was dead. Jane Mutschman, who expressed her doubts and dedication so sincerely, was dead. Shanda James, whose drugging helped turn Jim Jones’s own sons against him, was dead. In all, 913 Temple members had perished in his final White Night. Very few people in Jonestown escaped death; very few outside the reach of Jones’s voice followed his orders.