A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  Back in San Francisco, she attended services at the Geary Boulevard church to keep up appearances, but eventually found her way to the Concerned Relatives. She told them about the various ways Jones controlled residents, by using sleep and food deprivation, hard labor, or even forcing them to eat hot peppers, such as she’d seen Tommy Bogue do. Her anecdotes only ratcheted up the group’s fear for their loved ones’ welfare.

  Steven Katsaris, the relatives’ chief organizer, had only recently learned that his daughter was one of Jones’s favored mistresses. During her first months in Guyana, Maria sent her father upbeat letters about the project’s expansion. But after Katsaris called the church to try to coordinate a visit to Jonestown, he started receiving menacing phone calls. “We know you live on a ranch by yourself,” a man snarled into the receiver one night. “If you go, you’ll get burned out.” The threats only stoked his desire to see his daughter. In a phone patch to the mission, Maria sounded cool and discouraged him from coming, telling him Jonestown had a policy forbidding visits. But Katsaris knew this was untrue; previously she’d written that the settlement received daily guests for medical care or tours. He offered to meet Maria in Georgetown, but she still declined, saying she’d be in Venezuela with her fiancé, Larry Schacht, the camp doctor. Another father in the group told Katsaris that his daughter was also engaged to Dr. Schacht, and later he’d learn of more fake betrothals to Schacht, all designed to throw meddling parents off track: Who wouldn’t want their daughter to marry a doctor? Katsaris forged ahead and flew to Georgetown to try to arrange a meeting from there, but at the US Embassy, Consul Richard McCoy told him Maria refused to see him because doing so would “bring back some painful experiences from her childhood.” Katsaris looked puzzled, so McCoy elaborated: Paula Adams said Katsaris had sexually abused Maria when she was as girl. It was a bald-faced lie, concocted by Temple leadership several years earlier to discredit Katsaris if he ever spoke out against the church, which he now was.

  Undeterred, Katsaris flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with various officials in the State Department and press for an investigation into the Temple. He also met with Guyanese ambassador Laurence Mann, Paula Adams’s lover, and paid him a three-thousand-dollar bribe to arrange a meeting with Maria. Katsaris returned to Georgetown, and, after many days of delays, Jones finally sent out his daughter. Her physical appearance astonished him: She was bone thin and had pronounced dark circles under her eyes. More bewildering was her demeanor. The daughter who ended her letters with “I love you and miss you” just a few months earlier, now refused to look him in the eye. She also refused to discuss the supposed molestation, but accused him of being part of a conspiracy to destroy the church. Her speech seemed robotic; her voice lacked conviction. He couldn’t help wondering if she’d been coached on how to respond to him. But his hands were tied; Maria was twenty-four years old—he couldn’t force her to come home with him. He told his daughter that he’d leave return airfare at the embassy for her in case she changed her mind, and left the country disheartened.

  Beverly and Howard Oliver also joined the Concerned Relatives. They’d given their two teenaged sons permission to go to Jonestown for a brief vacation, but then weeks turned into months with no sign that their boys were returning.

  As lapsed members, the Olivers knew the media exposes were true, and they feared that Jones’s violence and instability would only escalate in the wilds of Guyana. Like other Temple parents, however, they’d forfeited guardianship of their sons as a loyalty test. Their son Bruce was nineteen, but they hired an attorney to demand the return of seventeen-year-old William. A California court ruled in their favor, and they wrote Billy telling him a plane ticket was waiting for him at Timehri airport. Most certainly their letter was withheld by Jonestown’s censors, for Billy was quickly flown to Georgetown and married off to a female member who, his parents were told, was carrying his child. In reality, Billy’s bride was already in a relationship with another resident, the father of her two-year-old daughter. Jones arbitrarily paired and wed couples, even sending them to Georgetown for marriage licenses, as a way of “proving” to pesky relatives that their kin had found love and happiness in Jonestown.

  But the Olivers persisted and flew to Guyana on December 19, 1977, accompanied by their lawyer. The trip, financed by Howard’s wages as a security guard, cost them a small fortune, but the clock was ticking: Billy would turn eighteen on Christmas Day, and they were desperate to get him back before he was legally an adult.

  McCoy tried to arrange a meeting between Billy and his parents, but the Temple kept postponing it, and a few days after Billy’s eighteenth birthday, the Olivers returned to California alone. Jones won the round, but he feared other relatives would be on their way.

  Every day, more Temple members were silently disappearing from San Francisco. Edith Roller would eat dinner in the church dining room with a friend one evening, and the next evening, the person would be gone. As the congregation thinned out, the leadership kept her busy typing healing affidavits, letters to the editor, and pieces for the Temple newspaper, the Peoples Forum. The extra duties, on top of her full-time secretarial post at Bechtel, caused bursitis to flare up in her elbow and cut into her precious free time.

  In her apartment there was a tremendous clash of cultures between Edith, a widely traveled white woman who was conversant in the Hericlitean philosophy, and her roommates, who tended to be uneducated, elderly, black women. Edith insisted on being left alone in the evenings so she could listen to broadcasts of the San Francisco Opera at the kitchen table, but that didn’t stop her roommates from bursting in, wanting to chat or rifle through the cupboards for food. She thought they were uncultured, and they thought she was a prickly crank.

  Edith found one woman so irritating that she commanded her to stay in her room each morning until she heard Edith leave for work. She suspected, correctly in one case, that some of them were stealing small items from her, such as manicure scissors and tweezers.

  The tension came to a head one night when Edith woke in a coughing fit and found that a seventy-five-year-old woman from Virginia had placed a photo of Jim Jones on her chest and was beseeching the demon to come out of her in his name. In her journal, Edith wrote that she was puzzled by this voodoo demonstration, but believed it was prompted by “loving feelings.”

  It was easier for a loner like Edith to empathize with the plight of her roommates by reading books such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Keith Irvine’s 646-page tome The Rise of the Colored Races, both of which were on her bookshelf, than by spending time with them.

  When a Temple secretary told her to prepare to leave for Jonestown during the first week of January1978, Edith had mixed feelings. She noted in her journal that Temple handlers prevented one of her roommates from calling her son to let him know she was leaving, and she followed the bad press with curiosity. But she still believed Jones was doing more to promote racial equality than anyone else … and that he’d cured her arthritis. Her biggest concern about Jonestown was housing. Some folks thought Jones had promised seniors that they’d each have a private home. Edith hoped this was true. She took comfort recalling video footage of a cottage interior that was shown during a service. The brief segment appeared to be filmed as the cameraman sat, or lay, on a bed; the camera gazed up at a large open window topped by a sheer valance that fluttered in the breeze. After lingering on the valance for a few moments, the camera’s focus moved beyond the window to a dazzling white tower of clouds in an azure sky. The footage carried enormous appeal for Edith. There was no voiceover or background noise, just a beautiful silence. She could imagine glancing up from a book to survey this magnificent view herself.

  She had no idea, of course, that there were much graver things to worry about in Jonestown than her room assignment. None of the rank-and-file members in San Francisco were privy to the hair-raising conversations between Jonestown and the Geary Boulevard radio room during the September siege, or to the suicide votes.
Edith did note in her journal at the time of the crisis, however, that Marcy looked agitated during services. Jones’s long-suffering wife had to break the news of her husband’s adulterous liaison with Grace Stoen, and the ensuing custody battle, to the California congregation. She was forced to repeat the sordid story at various services for new ears, and looked increasingly distraught and exhausted, Edith wrote: “Marcy asked whether anyone had a problem with this. No one publicly admitted to having a problem.” Edith, knowing the leadership read her journals, didn’t include her own thoughts on the matter or include any communal gossip.

  She spent her final weeks at Bechtel doing what employees traditionally do during their last days: taking long lunches and frittering away time with personal business. She was told she’d have her own classroom in Jonestown, and leafed through textbook catalogues at her desk, composing lesson plans.

  Her coworkers threw her a good-bye party that was well-attended, and she received a glowing letter of praise from Caspar Weinberger, Bechtel’s general counsel and future US secretary of defense. She was cagey, however, when her officemates asked about her retirement plans, telling them she was going to volunteer for an agency that rehabilitated delinquent American youth on the borders of Venezuela. They gave her a blue suitcase as a parting gift.

  When Edith called her sister Mabs to tell her she was leaving, she wrote in her journal that her sister’s only response was “a sharp intake of breath.” Her three younger sisters had kept each other abreast of the Temple scandals, xeroxing copies of negative articles and mailing them to each other. Dorothy phoned Edith to deride Jones’s supposed powers, and they argued. Whenever her sisters told Edith they feared for her well-being, Edith retorted that she was worried for them, given the imminent fascist takeover of America that Jones predicted.

  Dorothy and Edna flew to San Francisco to visit her before she left. The sisters went to a jazz club to hear a performance by Anita O’Day, but the next day tension erupted again at a lunch Edith hosted at her communal apartment. She’d invited a few Temple friends, hoping her sisters would warm to them and finally understand her dedication to the group. The plan backfired. When Edith tried to draw one of her friends out by asking what brought her to the Temple, Dorothy protested that she did not want to be propagandized. The lunch became awkward as the second guest clammed up and Edith fumed over her sister’s caustic behavior. When Dorothy told Edith she was putting sixty-two dollars into an emergency fund in case Edith wanted to return to the States, Edith thanked her but secretly planned to use the money to buy textbooks.

  In December, another cord tethering Jim Jones to reason snapped when his mother died in Jonestown. A lifelong smoker, Lynetta was in the last stages of emphysema when she moved to Guyana. She lived in a private cottage with a small mutt named Snooks that she’d brought from California, and rarely strayed from bed. In early December, she suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed and died within two days. A few hours after her death, an emotional Jones gathered his followers in the pavilion to notify them. He described his mother’s last moments as she gasped for air with her “tongue hanging out, saliva flowing down her face. She couldn’t move her eyes.” He invited people who knew Lynetta well to take a last look at her. Although she looked horrific while she died, in death she looked “very well, very well indeed,” he said.

  Lynetta was the one person Jones allowed to call his bluff and get away with it. In Jonestown, when she overheard him bragging about shooting a wild turkey with a pistol at a two-hundred-yard distance, she chortled and called over her daughter-in-law. “That man didn’t shoot any turkey,” she told Marceline. “Anyone knows you can’t shoot anything with a pistol from two hundred yards!”

  When she died, her moderating influence also ended. On December 21, in the middle of a rambling screed against the Olivers in the pavilion, Jones abruptly asked his followers:

  “How many plan your death?”

  Residents murmured among themselves.

  “Do you ever plan your death?” he repeated impatiently. “There’s a number of you that do not lift your hand and say you plan your death. You’re gonna die. Don’t you think you should plan such an important event?”

  He called on a seventy-five-year-old Texan named Vera Talley.

  “Sister Talley, don’t you ever plan your death?”

  On the tape recording of the conversation, she sounded hesitant.

  “No,” she finally said.

  “And why don’t you, dear?” Jones asked.

  “I don’t know, I just hadn’t thought about it,” she answered.

  “Don’t you think it’s time to think about it? It’s a terrible thing to have it be an accident, like I saw my mother, and in many ways your mother, to be, uh, wasted and just laid in a box. I think that’s a kind of a waste, don’t you think?”

  The old woman was confused; she thought Jones was talking about life insurance: “My husband quit paying it and I didn’t have no money to pay it, and I just let it go, and I hadn’t thought no more about it.”

  “I’m not talking about insurance,” Jones said impatiently. “I’m talking about planning your death for the victory of the people. For socialism, for communism, for black liberation, for oppressed liberation … Haven’t you ever thought about taking a bomb and running into a Ku Klux Klan meeting and destroying all the Ku Klux Klan people?”

  The microphone buzzed loudly, interrupting the dialogue and angering Jones. He admonished people sitting in the back of the pavilion to stop playing with their babies and pay attention.

  Maya Ijames, eight, a biracial girl with a cloud of soft black hair, lifted her hand. She, too, was confused.

  “What does planning your death mean?” she asked sweetly. On the tape, her voice is shockingly innocent and clear.

  In his response to Maya, Jones launched into a diatribe, the essence of which was captured in this sentence: “I think a healthy person has to think through his death, or he may sell out.”

  The remark revealed Jones’s deepest fear, that his followers would “sell out” or betray him if they left the church, as had the former Temple members who’d spoken to the press. He’d rather they die first. “When somebody’s so principled, they’re ready to die at the snap of a finger,” he continued, “and that’s what I want to build in you, that same kind of character.”

  He began discussing various methods of death. “Drowning, they say, is one of the easiest ways in the world to die. It’s just a numbing, kind of sleepy sensation.”

  The crowd was solemn, and their lack of enthusiasm infuriated him. “Some of you people get so fuckin’ nervous every time I talk about death!” he shouted into the microphone. He stuck out his tongue and pretended to gag, just as he’d seen his mother do in her last breaths. The crowd laughed uneasily.

  An elderly woman refused to smile at his antics, and he turned on her: “You’re gonna die someday, honey!” he bellowed. “You old bitch, you’re gonna die!”

  He started keeping lists of residents who didn’t raise their hands when he held votes for revolutionary suicide, and of parents who were “too attached” to their children. He directed the medical team to research ways to kill everyone and encouraged them to be creative; there weren’t enough bullets to shoot hundreds of people. Their suggestions would later be found in the materials collected by the FBI.

  “It would be terrorizing for some people if we were to have them all in a group and start chopping heads off or whatever—this is why it would have to be done secretly,” wrote Ann Moore, twenty-three, Jones’s personal nurse and Carolyn Layton’s sister. “What a slap in the face to fascists it would be to take our own lives before they could have the pleasure of it.” She recommended poisoning Jonestown’s food or wells, or perhaps confining everyone to an enclosed space before releasing carbon monoxide fumes into the air. She offered to help kill children.

  Gene Chaikin’s wife, Phyllis, who was Jonestown’s medical director, suggested the community “meet as a gro
up in the pavilion surrounded with highly trusted security with guns. Names will be called off randomly. People will be escorted to a place of dying by a strong personality … [where] they are shot in the head. If Larry [Schacht] does not believe they are definitely dead their throat is slit with a scalpel. I would be willing to help here if it’s necessary. The bodies would be thrown in a ditch. It might be advisable to blindfold the people before going to the death place in that the blood and body remaining on the ground might increase their agitation.”

  Marceline Jones, also a nurse, argued that the adults should be allowed to choose their fate, and that anyone under eighteen should be spared. “For many years I’ve lived for just one reason, and that was to safeguard the lives of children,” she wrote her husband. “If some asylum could be arranged for our children, especially the babies and preschool children could be saved for socialism and they are young enough to adjust to a new culture and learn a new language.” She volunteered to help kill the adults, if necessary. “I, with Dr. Schacht, would stay back to see that everyone else was cared for humanely.”

  Michigan native Shirlee Fields, forty, who worked as a dietician and lived in Jonestown with her husband and two young children, thought the community should starve themselves to death. “I feel that if we do commit revolutionary suicide we should do it in such a way that we will be heard in all quarters of the world and get the most publicity we can get for communism. One way I think we can do this is by reference to food. Food and malnutrition is an emotionally packed subject. The idea that we could stop eating or cut down as we are in our heavyweight program occurred to me last night in our meeting. This would be a different way to commit revolutionary suicide and I wonder how many people who believe in suicide would be willing to do this.”

  In San Francisco, Temple leader Jean Brown pushed to send more aamunition down to shoot everyone rather than have Jones enact any number of the grisly suggestions.