While Hyacinth was entertaining private doubts about Jim Jones at 1029 Geary Street, one mile to the east, a young reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle was doing the same thing at 901 Mission Street. Marshall Kilduff’s beat was City Hall, and he’d started to notice odd things at the Housing Authority meetings. Usually, the proceedings were tedious exercises in low-level bureaucracy. Tenants complained about landlords, contractors bid on maintenance projects, the commission reviewed Section 8 applicants. When Moscone named Jim Jones chairman of the authority in late 1976, the tenor of the meetings changed entirely. Reverend Jones swept through the door surrounded by an entourage: a coterie of white aides carrying paperwork, a group of imposing black male bodyguards, and a busload of senior citizens who filled the public seating area. As Jones sat on the dais wearing sunglasses, his guards—also wearing sunglasses—stood glowering behind him, while his aides crouched at his side, whispering and passing him notes. Meanwhile, the old folks erupted in applause whenever Jones spoke, sometimes delaying the proceedings for several minutes. The whole spectacle was absurd. A few months earlier, Kilduff had noticed the same weird display at a fundraiser for Jimmy Carter’s presidential bid. While the candidate’s wife, Rosalynn, drew only tepid applause, Jones received a thunderous ovation. Who was this man? Kilduff decided to sniff around.
He visited the Temple on a Sunday in January 1977, and received a canned tour: Here was the whirlpool for arthritic seniors, the day care for working parents, the kitchen which prepared free meals for low-income families, the legal-aid office that helped them navigate city services. He was shown a teen sleeping off a heroin overdose, a man getting physical therapy for a bum knee. A display case filled with plaques and commendations from the city board of supervisors, the state legislature, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and other important groups. The only thing that appeared suspect to Kilduff was the entry hall decor of leopard-skin sofas and smoked mirrors, which made the place look more like a bordello than a house of God. When the worship service began, he was ushered to a front pew in the crowded auditorium, and was dismayed to see his editor, Steve Gavin, sitting there, along with another Chronicle reporter. His colleages weren’t there in a professional capacity, but were attending the service with everyone else. Kilduff exchanged an awkward greeting with them.
Despite the polish, Kilduff had a hunch that something was amiss. The carefully integrated pews, the sound bites of his handlers: It all seemed a little too wonderful. When he pitched a story on Jones’s political clout and the Temple’s secretive nature to Gavin, his editor rejected it outright. The Chronicle had run several flattering stories on Peoples Temple, Gavin argued, and it would look schizophrenic to be aggressive now.
Undeterred, Kilduff approached a fledgling bimonthly magazine called New West, which was interested. But word got back to Jones about the piece, and his hackles went up. He convinced New West to cancel the assignment, saying it would jeopardize the church’s outreach programs. Next, San Francisco magazine accepted the pitch, but as Kilduff was revising the article, the editor who accepted it left and the new editor killed it. The expose seemed destined for the dumpster, but then New West hired a new editor, Rosalie Wright, who agreed with Kilduff that something strange lurked behind the Temple façade, and encouraged Kilduff to dig deep.
The magazine sent a photographer to a housing authority meeting to take pictures of Jones and his entourage, and a few hours later, Wright was barraged with phone calls. They were friendly enough at first: Was she aware of all the good work Pastor Jones had done in the community? As the days passed the calls became more menacing, impugning Kilduff’s credibility and demanding Wright cancel the story. In the following weeks, the magazine’s offices, both in northern and southern California, were besieged by phone calls, sometimes more than fifty per day. Prominent businessmen, social activists and politicians, including Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, joined the refrain: “Don’t criticize Jim Jones.” Temple allies even pressured New West’s advertisers to stop buying space in the magazine.
Jones refused to let Kilduff interview him, saying he was too biased; he also denied having anything to do with the campaign to stop the article. The threatening calls and letters, one warning of “militant action” should the article be published, prompted Wright to move her family into a safe house. Kilduff also got his share of calls. Sometimes they’d be from people claiming Jones cured their drug addiction. Other times, in the middle of the night, they’d be from people who didn’t say a word. He got the message anyway: They knew where he lived.
It wasn’t the first time the Temple unleashed hellfire over an impending news story.
In October 1971, when Jones’s miracle crusade stopped in his home state, Indianapolis Star reporter Brian Wells attended two services in one day. He noticed that the folks healed in the morning session bore an uncanny resemblance to those healed in the evening session. When he published this observation, Temple supporters inundated the Star with angry calls and letters, including a five-page missive from attorney Tim Stoen, demanding a retraction. It was a tactic the Temple would refine over the years: Write something negative about Jim Jones, prepare for an onslaught of outraged readers and menacing lawyers. The ploy was enough to intimidate the most seasoned newshound.
In 1972, a religion writer for the San Francisco Examiner picked up the mantle. In a series of four articles, Lester Kinsolving ridiculed Jones’s claims that he could raise the dead, and questioned the Temple’s business transactions. When the third installment appeared, a group of 150 Temple members picketed the sidewalk outside the paper from morning to night. Meanwhile, the editor working on the series was besieged by threatening phone calls and moved his family to a motel for good measure. When the Temple threatened to sue the paper for libel, it killed the last four articles of the series, which charged the group with welfare fraud and child abuse, and depicted Jones as a sex-obsessed fraud.
The Examiner was nervous for good reason: At the same time that Temple lawyers were pressuring it to drop the series on the church, it was being sued for libel by Synanon, another controversial local group that helped rehabilitated drug addicts—and it was losing. The Synanon lawsuit would end up costing the paper’s publisher, Hearst, a record six hundred thousand dollars.
The press seemed to have backed off Jones’s case, until Kilduff came along.
The impending story created such paranoia at 1859 Geary that Jones started rehearsing members as to the “correct” answers to reporters’ questions, a practice that would become routine in Jonestown.
Jones himself called friendly Chronicle reporters and asked them if they knew what Kilduff was writing about or whom he’d interviewed. The Temple’s PR man, Mike Prokes, spent hours working his Rolodex. Prokes was once a reporter for a Modesto television station; his boss sent him to Redwood Valley to do a follow-up on the Kinsolving series, but he was seduced by Jones’s message and stayed.
The Temple’s best efforts failed to derail Kilduff’s New West piece. The story was too juicy, the reporting too solid. After an Examiner columnist wrote about Kilduff’s travails placing the article, he started getting a different sort of phone call, from former Temple members who wanted to talk. At Kilduff’s insistence, they bravely agreed to publish their names, and he corroborated their accounts with an extensive paper trail.
The article, which appeared on newsstands across the Bay Area on August 1, 1977, blew the cover off Jones’s charade and set the city abuzz. It was more damning than Jones could have imagined.
“Inside Peoples Temple” began with these words: “Jim Jones is one of the state’s most politically potent leaders. But who is he? And what’s going on behind his church’s locked doors?”
The defectors shared a similar tale: Jim Jones was once a loving preacher who wooed them with compassion, but he became a cruel and paranoid tyrant. Two men who once guarded Jones’s “cancer bag” revealed the mechanics of his healings, including their instruc
tions to eat the chicken gizzards, if necessary, to protect the hoax. A father described how his sixteen-year-old daughter was paddled so severely that her butt looked like hamburger. Yet another former member divulged how the church profited from operating care homes that received government subsidies. Still others spoke of Jones’s constant demand for money, paychecks, homes, and jewelry.
The Temple denied everything. Temple aides burned compromising files, then tried to make the article disappear by buying entire stacks of New West from vendors. But the cat was out of the bag; other reporters started following the story and more defectors surfaced, triggering an avalanche of local and national news coverage. The media that once hailed Jim Jones as Gandhilike was now calling him a charlatan. Thousands of miles away, he fumed in his eponymous village.
Before the article appeared in print, Rosalie Wright had called Jones to read it to him. He left that same night for Guyana. At the settlement, he alternately sedated himself into indifference and cursed a blue streak over Jonestown’s ham radio. One amateur radio operator who helped patch calls between the jungle outpost and San Francisco was so offended by his vulgar screed that he doubted Jones was the “bona fide minister” he said he was, he later told the FBI, and stopped relaying calls from Jonestown altogether.
Jones’s powerful friends helped him mitigate the damage. His old friend California Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally wrote the Guyanese prime minister to reassure him that Jones was an upstanding citizen, and the men he helped elect—Mayor Moscone, City Supervisor Harvey Milk, and District Attorney Joseph Freitas—rallied behind him as well, refusing to heed calls to investigate the Temple. Moscone told reporters that there was no proof of criminal activity, only allegations of wrongdoing.
On August 21, 1977, the Temple issued an official response to the growing media uproar. The press release began with a blanket denial of misconduct, then blamed the smear attacks on a “well-coordinated conspiracy,” several years in the making, to destroy the church for its socialist beliefs.
While Jones paced in Guyana, Temple aides in San Francisco began a massive effort to bring his followers to him. The exodus was planned down to the last detail. A fleet of some seventy “special aides” departed the Temple well after midnight and drove to the communes, where they knocked on apartment doors and cheerfully inform the disoriented residents that Father had called them to the promised land. As the aides helped members pack, “coordinators” guarded the phones to prevent anyone from making calls, “reassurers” comforted those staying behind, and “troubleshooters” dealt with anyone who was hesitant to leave. They were told they could go to Jonestown another time, but they’d have to pay their own way. Although members were told they could visit the project for a few weeks or months and return home, this was clearly not the case from internal staff memos, which refer to the trip as being final for those taking it.
Once the communards were packed, they were driven to the Temple and loaded directly into buses, where Marceline Jones gave them a pep talk before their trip. A “freak-out table” was designated for those who made it to the Temple but then panicked or didn’t want to leave behind pets. Aides promised their animals would be shipped down later and gently guided them toward the waiting buses.
To dispel suspicions of an evacuation, members left from different airports. Some departed from San Francisco, others from Oakland, others were bused to Miami.
The local press kept a close eye on the Geary Street headquarters, and noted the plywood shipping crates being nailed together in the back parking lot and the late-night departures of Temple buses. All signs pointed to a mass exodus, but the Temple decried this depiction as biased and sensationalistic reporting and stated the church was “absolutely not pulling out of San Francisco or California.” San Francisco, nevertheless, felt the move in hundreds of empty classroom chairs and unpunched time cards, as entire communes were emptied in a matter of days. Members just vanished, without informing their relatives or settling their accounts. Collection notices piled up.
Fred Lewis, who was not a Temple member, returned home from his job as a butcher one evening to find his apartment stripped and his wife of seventeen years and his seven children missing. He later discovered that church staff had taken his furniture to sell in the Temple’s secondhand store. His wife left him a mattress, but no goodbye note. At first, Lewis worried his family had been kidnapped. Upon learning the truth, he went to Geary Boulevard to demand an explanation, but no one answered the door.
In some cases, children were taken to Guyana by noncustodial parents, or without permission of their legal guardians.
Temple aides forged letters to members’ relatives, which only raised more alarms. “I am still quite puzzled as to just why all of a sudden you gathered the kids up and went to (South America) on the spur of the moment without telling anyone,” responded one member’s brother. “This does not seem like the sister I know. I noticed you typed your letter, were you in the church office or something?”
Many of Jones’s followers were thrilled to be going. Stanley Clayton certainly was one of them.
On August 13, 1977, he was buffing the wood floor in the Temple sanctuary when a counselor called to him.
“Boy, this is your lucky day!” Lee Ingram told him. “You’re going to Guyana!”
Ingram told him that his girlfriend Janice was on her way down, too, before counting four twenty-dollar bills into Stanley’s palm. He told him to buy some summer clothes; he was leaving that night.
Stanley bought new jeans and boots at J. C. Penney and Woolworth, then stopped by a liquor store. The allure of so much cash in his hands was irresistible. He got drunk, and in his inebriated state decided there was one person he must see before he left: his mother.
He took a bus to Berkeley, and knocked at her door wearing his new duds.
As always, she looked dismayed at the sight of him.
“I just wanted to tell you that you won’t be seeing me no more,” Stanley said.
“Where you going, boy?” she asked in a scornful voice.
“I’m going to South America.”
“Boy, you ain’t going nowhere!”
He tried to put his arms around her to hug her, but she squirmed away.
“Get outta here, talking crazy to me,” she said.
Stanley wasn’t surprised at her reaction; he’d told her many lies in the past. But this time, he was telling the truth. He was going to make something of himself, be part of something important.
When he returned to the Temple, everyone was in a panic looking for him. His plane was departing in an hour. A counselor sped him to the airport and marched him up to the security checkpoint before handing him his passport and ticket.
At JFK, Janice saw Stanley walking toward the boarding gate, and her face lit up. She squealed and ran to him, leaping into his arms.
“I told them I wasn’t leaving without you!” she cried.
It turned out that Janice got all the way to New York before she balked. She refused to go to Jonestown without Stanley. She wanted them to experience every thing together.
CHAPTER 8
PIONEERS
In July 1974, Jim Bogue boarded the Cudjoe in Miami and set sail for Guyana with fifteen other church members. Their designated captain was an Indiana native who was unlicensed, and had never before piloted anything as large as the sixty-eight-foot shrimp trawler. The ten-day journey was harrowing. The group tailed a homeward-bound Guyanese vessel across the Caribbean, and crowded into the wheelhouse when rough seas cracked the windshield and washed loose cargo overboard.
After registering in Georgetown, the Americans followed the country’s coastline north, and crossed into Venezuelan waters before realizing they’d overshot the Waini River, their entry point to the jungle. By the time they navigated the river mouth, the tide had gone out, and the Cudjoe’s rudder snapped on the bottom. They clamped it together as best they could, then waited for the water to rise high enough to carry the ninety-ton
vessel onward.
Such fits and starts characterized the early days of Jonestown. What the pioneers lacked in skill, they made up for in dogged persistence.
The draw of that lonely outpost, some four thousand miles away from California, was different for everyone. Some wanted to escape the ghetto. Others wanted to be part of a bold social experiment. They were going to give a big thumbs-down to AmeriKKKa. Everyone they knew was going. They planned to volunteer at the mission for a few months. In the beginning, Temple members referred to the settlement as the promised land or freedom land. In the end, it would only be known as Jonestown, a place of misery and mass death.
Guyana seemed tailor-made for the Temple project. It was English speaking, socialist, and dark skinned, a rough reflection of the Temple membership. The former colony of British Guiana was liberated in 1966 and its first prime minister, a black man named Forbes Burnham, declared the newly christened Guyana a socialist state.
But while most Caribbean nations owed a large chunk of their national income to tourism, Guyana didn’t have the natural resources that travelers demanded of such latitudes. It had the heat, but not the white beaches. By a cruel trick of nature, the Amazon’s tremendous effluent flows north from Brazil, washing away Guyana’s sand and dumping a thick layer of mud on its coast.
Under Burnham’s reign, Guyana suffered worse problems than being snubbed by tourists: It didn’t produce enough food. Large sectors of the population suffered from disease and malnutrition. One of Burnham’s revolutionary ideas was a campaign he called, simply, “Grow More Food.” It proposed that the country attain agricultural self-sufficiency by farming its vast hinterland, an area that comprised 75 percent of Guyana’s landmass and was only accessible, for the most part, by boat or light aircraft. When the coastal dwellers balked at moving to the rain forest, Burnham extended the invitation internationally, and Peoples Temple accepted it.
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