As the nightly suicide debates continued, it became clear to residents that voting against death was not an option. It didn’t matter what internal terror they felt; Jones wanted them to die. Every single one of them.
On Christmas Day 1977, which, for the vast majority of residents, would be their last, Jones told them it was Revolution Day, not Christmas. In the pavilion, the group sang odes to socialism and Jim Jones, and performed a skit demonizing capitalism. Temple leaders chastised residents for grumbling that it was the worst holiday they’d ever had.
As New Year’s approached, Jones started baiting residents by asking them if they wanted to return to the States. “Who here is homesick for California?” he’d ask the assembly in his gentlest preacher’s voice. Woe be the person who dared raise his or her hand. They’d be brought before Jones, who denounced them as “elitists” and “miserable capitalists,” and made them sorry for speaking up. One man who always took the bait was Tom Partak, a thirty-two-year-old Vietnam vet from Joliet, Illinois. He wrote Jones several notes asking to return home, and when his requests were ignored, he tried to kill himself with a cutlass. During his confrontation Jones told him he should be shot through the hips before descending from his green chair to slap Partak repeatedly.
Likewise, a free-spirited twenty-four-year-old San Diegan, Rose McKnight, was angry that her two-year-old son was assigned to a dorm with other toddlers. “If I’d known it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have come,” she told an acquaintance. For her “counterrevolutionary remark,” she was put on the learning crew, a group of people in trouble for offenses ranging from complaining about Jonestown to physically assaulting other residents. The learning crew was housed together in a dorm, prohibited from speaking to anyone, including each other, and required to run from one location to the next. They worked from dawn to dusk doing manual labor, such as splitting wood, digging trenches, or clearing bush, a chain gang without chains. For Rose, a severely obese housewife, the strenuous work in the glaring heat was arduous, but worse yet was the emotional punishment of being sepapated from her son. She learned to choke down her emotions, as Jim Bogue had, to do and say the unnatural.
Shortly after she was released from the learning crew, she wrote a letter home, marveling at the creations of the settlement’s kitchen. “Wait ’til you taste our Jonestown—cassava cookies, cassava cornbread, donuts, bread, biscuits, all made in expertly-made wood burning ovens and stoves. They are the best you have ever eaten—and you know how I love donuts!”
Her husband would arrive a few months later, enticed by his wife’s breezy missives, completely unaware of the terror brewing in the camp.
CHAPTER 15
CONTROL
Jones continued to send long, fretful letters to Guyanese officials, asking them to take sides in the custody dispute. “It is our understanding from the very beginning that the Guyana government would handle situations like that of my son, John Stoen, with a firm hand, by simply stating that there is no jurisdiction,” he wrote to Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy Reid. “But now we hear that the Cabinet will consider each of the ‘allegations’ as it arises. This creates for us an atmosphere of insecurity … we need to know where we stand.”
Although his government allies assured him privately that he would not be arrested, his Georgetown attorney advised him not to leave the project until the arrest order was canceled. Heeding his counsel, Jones thus became a prisoner in his own town, and would not leave Jonestown again until he was carried out in a body bag by soldiers with the US Army’s Graves Registration Company.
On November 18, 1977, a year to the day before the massacre, a California Superior Court judge in San Francisco awarded custody of John Victor Stoen to his mother, Grace Stoen, and visitation rights to Tim Stoen, as part of their divorce proceedings. The decree nullified all previous documents granting guardianship to Jim Jones and Joyce Touchette, and directed District Attorney Joseph Freitas, Tim Stoen’s current employer, to “take all actions necessary” to secure Jones’s compliance in surrendering John John to his mother. Freitas wrote Fred Wills, Guyana’s minister of foreign affairs, asking for help enforcing the order. If Jones didn’t comply, he wrote, “it will be our duty to apply to the court for a warrant of arrest against Rev. Jones.”
Jones didn’t comply, so the Stoens flew to Georgetown on January 4. That same day, Jones threatened to play his trump card again. The head of the Temple PR crew in the capital, Sharon Amos, complained in a letter to the Cabinet that “conspiratorial custody harassments” were “bleeding” the project’s finances and causing low morale among residents. “Please don’t let people push us with any more demands,” she pleaded. “Living does not mean that much to us if we have to go through harassment here as we did in the States.”
The implied suicide threat brought swift results. The Ministry of Home Affairs issued the Stoens a one-day visa, ordering them to leave the country within twenty-four hours. When the US Embassy intervened on their behalf, a furious Amos tracked down US Consul Richard McCoy. “If John goes, we are all just going to sit down and die,” she told him. McCoy would later note that she was very careful not to use the word suicide.
“That’s a lot of nonsense,” he replied.
At a January 7 hearing, Supreme Court Justice Aubrey Bishop ruled in the Stoens’ favor on several points, and they left the courtroom confident they would win the case. As they waited for their flight home at Timehri airport, a group of Temple members surrounded Tim and threatened to kill him and Grace if they didn’t drop the custody suit.
During the two weeks the Stoens were in Georgetown, Jones held nightly crisis meetings to vent his frustration and paranoia. After a full day of hard physical labor, it was a feat for people to sit still and stay awake deep into the night, despite the hard benches. Some people pinched themselves to keep alert, others jogged in place. Jones decreed that anyone who fell asleep or talked to a bench mate while he was speaking would be assigned to the learning crew. He told residents that the Guyanese government seemed to be cooperating with the Stoens, and warned that the so-called conspirators might fly up again to demand John John, this time backed by a platoon of Guyanese soldiers. He picked people out of the crowd to ask their opinion: Should they fight the invaders or commit revolutionary suicide?
Despite the severe repercussions of being called on the floor, residents still voted overwhelmingly to fight. Jones discounted this option as unrealistic; their ragtag security team was no match for professional soldiers, he said. Besides, he reminded them, they had a “long-standing commitment of one for all and all for one.” He pledged that he would die before surrendering John John—and so would they.
Night after night, Jones held his death vote. Security guards nuzzled those who refused to raise their hands with their guns and brought them to the front of the pavilion so Jones could confront them. The meetings wore on until dawn brightened the sky, and people started voting for death just so they could return to their cabins for a few precious hours of sleep. After a while, Jones’s obsessive suicide talk lost its shock value and began to bore them.
In the middle of January, US Consul Richard McCoy arrived in Jonestown to do a welfare-and-whereabouts check. During a brief exchange of pleasantries in the pavilion, Jones complained of kidney problems, and McCoy later noted the Temple leader was pale and that his speech rambled. Then the consul got down to business. He came bearing a dozen letters from relatives asking him to check on residents. The Social Security Administration, which had stopped forwarding checks to Guyana during the September siege, also wanted him to talk to twenty recipients to follow up on rumors that residents were forced to sign over their checks to the Temple.
McCoy led his interviewees to the open field next to the pavilion, where he was sure there were no electronic bugs and no one could eavesdrop. He’d heard rumors that troublemakers’ heads were shaved as punishment, and while he was talking to a young black man who’d supposedly been disciplined in this fashion, McCoy r
eached over and yanked his afro to make sure it wasn’t a wig. The youngster protested; he’d never had his head shaved, he told McCoy. Everyone he talked to that day told him the same thing: They were perfectly happy in Jonestown.
If residents complained of being depressed or said they wanted to return to California, Jones suggested it was because they weren’t busy enough. When there was down time, people tended to grumble.
Jones himself slept in most days, recovering from drug- or booze-induced hangovers. His followers were told not to disturb him because he was doing important work for the cause, and his aides played tapes of him reading the news over the loudspeakers so residents would believe he was awake.
He appointed a surveillance force whose job was eavesdropping on residents and reporting them for negative remarks—especially a desire to go home. His lieutenants made other recommendations for keeping people in line. “Hitler did his indoctrination speeches around six to seven p.m., when workers were home eating and their resistance to change was lower,” one of his aides suggested. But Jones one-upped Hitler; his voice droned on for most of the day, and usually late into the night, as residents tried to sleep. Sitting in front of a microphone in his cottage, he read random items over the loudspeakers: his thoughts on guerilla warfare, biographies of revolutionary personalities, textbooks on the structure of the United States government, and whatever else he fancied. Whenever Jones was speaking, everyone else was expected to stop talking and listen, even if it was just a tape recording.
Harriet Tropp complained about the constant noise. “I have entertained the thought that you were deliberately using a known psychological technique of interrupting peoples’ thought processes with specific information, so as to keep them in a kind of disjointed state—a state that makes them both more receptive to information fed to them, and less able to do concentrated, (and often treasonous) things … whatever your reasons, it is driving me nuts.” But her complaint had no impact; instead, Jones upped the ante, announcing residents would be tested on the content of his rambling broadcasts.
The supposed news he read was a blend of fact and fiction designed to convince residents that whatever hardships they endured, it was preferable to live in Jonestown than in America. Most of his broadcasts dealt with the mistreatment of African Americans, who comprised nearly 70 percent of the community. He said black children were being castrated in the streets of Chicago, and that eighty cities had been destroyed by race riots. A sampling of the written exams collected by the FBI reveal the extent of Jones’s lies: American newspapers were publishing stories stating that blacks were “better off during slavery,” scientists had engineered a way to kill off minorities by poisoning the water and food supplies of inner cities, and the Supreme Court ruled that nonwhites could no longer attend college.
But some people weren’t fooled.
“I like to do a critical reading of the news to see if I can spot the bullshit stories and find the real thing,” Ron Talley, a thirty-two-year-old Long Beach native, wrote Jones.
Harold Cordell managed to sneak a small transistor radio into Jones-town, and he was also aware of Jones’s deceit. In the loft he shared with Edith Bogue, he pressed it to his ear so it wouldn’t be overheard. The Voice of America broadcasts he heard were completely twisted by the time Jones recounted the same news. As he ferreted out Jones’s lies, he grew increasingly terrified. His family had joined Peoples Temple in Indianapolis, and now he had a dozen relatives living in Jonestown, including his five children, his estranged wife, and his mother. There was only one reason Jones would paint such a bleak picture of the outside world, he figured: to make death more appealing than life.
Residents weren’t allowed to use the settlement’s ham radio, and relied on letters to communicate with loved ones in the States. Jones gradually cut off this link to the outside world. At first, he complained about paying for airmail stamps on letters sent to people who weren’t Temple members. Then he forbade writing nonmembers altogether, saying it showed residents were still attracted to life in the United States. Then he announced that all mail would be censored.
“We’re not so much worried about incoming mail as we are outgoing mail,” Jones said. “It’s the outgoing mail that can be devastating, when people make codes in flowers like some of our people have, and little shit. That’s what can really destroy us. So we’re not concerned about the incoming mail. People say, I don’t get my mail. You—you piss me off, ’cause you do get your mail. If you don’t get your mail, it’s because the US government is not letting your mail get through, or your goddamn relatives are just not writing.”
This was another lie; he withheld hundreds of letters both to and from residents. These would eventually be deposited in the archives of the FBI in Washington, D.C. Read by a stranger thirty years later, the letters are still sharp with heartbreak and desperation. A father chastises his ex-wife for taking their children to Guyana without his knowledge. A brother dying of cancer asks his sister to come home for a final visit. A mother is notified that her daughter has overdosed on reds and is in serious condition. A husband wants to know when his wife will be returning from her mission trip. Parents offer to pay the return airfare for their adult children. The censors summarized each letter for Jones, before writing: “Shall he/ she get the letter?” More often than not, his reply, scrawled next to the summary, was “Do not give letter.” Often residents weren’t told when one of their relatives died; Jones didn’t want people clamoring to go home for funerals.
Those relatives who didn’t receive mail contacted the State Department, and US Embassy personnel singled out their loved ones in Jonestown for interviews. To curtail suspicion, Jones ordered everyone to write their families upbeat letters. Mentioning that it rained every day could get a letter nixed, as could talking about the heat. As a result, letters home were full of bland non sequiturs: “I am really happy here.” “We eat meat every day: chicken, pork, beef and fish.” One recipient complained that the letters appeared “as if they had been written by machines.” “It is very obvious that the letters I have received have been written according to rules and saying only approved-of things,” another wrote his ex-wife, who was in Jonestown with their five kids, including the thirteen-year-old son of whom he had primary custody. Another woman objected that her mother, who always called her children by pet names, used their given names in letters written from Jonestown, and that her misspellings were crossed out and corrected in someone else’s handwriting. Others noticed that Jonestown letters arrived unsealed, or that the page bottoms were cut off. Toward the end, Jones insisted that all letters home be written in front of censors, because, he said, “They know how little words can be taken wrong and be used by the CIA.”
Edith Roller arrived into this maelstrom on Friday, January 27, 1978. The boat trip thrilled her. As old friends greeted her in the pavilion, she heard Jones announce her arrival over the PA system. He was in the radio room, only a few yards away, surveying the incoming group. He stated that she had fled the CIA and taken refuge in Jonestown. She found his words puzzling, but was flattered by the personal welcome.
Soon afterward, a hubbub erupted in front of the radio room. Jones was berating an old man who’d told a newcomer that “You can’t get out of Jonestown,” before asking the person if he’d brought any liquor with him. Edith made a note of the odd exchange in her diary.
She ate dinner in the dining tent, but got permission to skip the mandatory Friday night socialism class; she felt too tired and dirty. She hadn’t washed or brushed her teeth during the two day river journey, and her luggage was missing, compounding her discomfort. A friend lent her a clean shirt and escorted her to her residence. As she walked past rows of cottages, she must have recalled, again, the videotape footage of the fluttering valance, the towering white clouds. The peace and quiet.
But when she reached cottage number 48, in the last row and facing the jungle, she was dismayed to find it had no front door. Inside were four sets of bunk beds and
a loft. The construction crew was run ragged trying to house the flood of immigrants, her friend explained, adding that Edith should be grateful: her cottage wasn’t as crowded as most.
The movies hadn’t shown the full interior of a cottage. She now saw that the cozy room her imagination had constructed around that window was a chimera. The cottage’s three windows were covered with wooden slats, and the interior walls were unpainted, rough-hewn lumber. The bunk-bed mattresses were thin slabs of foam. She resolved to decorate her space, at least, and make it look more welcoming.
She felt self-conscious undressing with the wide-open door, and climbed into the top bunk, just in case a jungle creature padded inside during the night. She slept poorly. Her ankles were riddled with bug bites, the mattress was too thin, the blanket too thick. She listened to the cries of animals outside the gaping door, and ruminated on the confrontation she’d witnessed that afternoon. “You can’t get out of Jonestown.” What did he mean? By the time she fell asleep, the security guards were already roving between the cottages, banging on walls to wake people up.
More disappointments were in store. When her luggage finally arrived, she watched a supervisor confiscate her extra clothing, and the prescription drugs she took for menopausal hot flashes, telling her that everything was communal in socialist Jonestown.
She was eager to start teaching, but learned there was no classroom prepared for her, as she’d been told in San Francisco. She was shocked by how poorly equipped the school was—there was a dire shortage of books, papers, and pencils—and wrote Temple staff in California suggesting immigrating members pack teaching materials in their luggage. “NO GO,” someone wrote next to her suggestion. The letter was also a no go, and never sent, probably because of this criticism.
On her second day, Edith visited Christine Bates, her former roommate. Bates had sent Edith a letter stating she was “very happy” in Jonestown and Edith tracked her down to a massive dorm filled with dozens of seniors, many in triple-level bunk beds. The crowded quarters made Edith glad for her doorless, yet quiet cottage. When the two women were alone, Bates confided to Edith that she’d suffered from various illnesses since she arrived in Jonestown, despite boasting on the promotional movies shown in San Francisco that “she’d never been so healthy.”
A Thousand Lives Page 15