“Revolutionary suicide is the only acceptable answer,” he repeated. He picked a cross section of residents—children, parents, black, white—to record statements explaining why they were willing to die for the cause, saying the tape would be released to the world press after they died.
One of the people he recruited was Edith Roller:
“I am Edith Roller, and I have had a very varied life,” she said into the microphone in a measured voice. “And I’ve always been distressed by the poverty and the discrimination especially against people in the underdeveloped areas of the world, and among the black people of our own nation and other minorities. It seemed to me when I joined Peoples Temple, it was an ideal society of egalitarian justice and love.” She emphasized the word “when,” and a perceptive listener could interpret this to mean that her view of the church—and Jim Jones—had changed. “I pray and hope that this tape will at least survive in portions so that [the world] can know what we stood for. I’m glad that my death will mean something. I hope it will be an inspiration to all people that fight for freedom all over the world.”
She’d later write in her diary that she “did not approve” of revolutionary suicide, but “intended to assent to whatever decision was made.”
After dinner, which was served in the pavilion, Jones took a suicide vote.
“At all times those in favor of revolutionary suicide were in the majority,” Edith later wrote. “However I felt that these were strongly influenced by his advocacy. The number of those opposed grew as thoughtful statements were made. I mentioned the world situation which seemed to be turning in favor of liberation movements [and] against the US and might result in war, which could be helpful to us.”
In the middle of the night, it began to storm. Raindrops pelted the corrugated metal roof like hurled stones, drowning out the baleful discussion. Residents huddled on the benches in grim silence, knowing Jones would not let them go to bed until they gave him what he wanted.
“When we resumed, opposition to the proposed suicide declined, (and) those in favor of carrying it out tonight seemed more determined,” Edith wrote. “I became convinced by the tired eyes of [Temple leader] Sharon Amos that I would be wrong to persist.”
On the next show of hands, Edith raised hers. The vocal opposition had fallen to about twenty people. Somebody asked about the Temple members who weren’t in Jonestown. Would they also die? Jones said that San Francisco members were all adults who “would know what to do.” But he decided to delay the suicide until a group of newcomers who’d just landed in Guyana reached the camp.
Edith crawled into her bunk bed as dawn broke over the compound, eager to deliver herself to blissful unconsciousness.
A survivor would later say of the suicide votes, “I figured if we just quit arguing with him, we could get some sleep.” One wonders how many other Jonestown residents felt coerced into voting for their own deaths. Certainly Edith did, and it’s safe to venture that many others did, too: On the next day, most of the students in Edith’s adult reading class said they didn’t understand what the crisis was about; they’d simply raised their hands because they knew they were expected to do so.
Jones, however, was encouraged; with every white night, the number of residents publicly opposing suicide fell. At some point during the crisis, perhaps when the downpour silenced the debate, he wrote instructions for what was to be done with the Temple’s money after he died:
“In view of the death of myself, and the destruction of my life’s work brought about by provocateurs … it is the community’s and my desire to have all of our funds that we have always intended to go towards the fostering of the spread of Marxist-Leninism to either Cuba or the USSR, whichever nation can readily receive the funds.” The note would be found in a safe deposit box at a Panamanian bank months after the massacre.
Back home in San Francisco, Debbie Blakey recorded an affidavit stating that Jones had grown so paranoid that he was no longer able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. By keeping Jonestown residents exhausted, underfed, and afraid, he’d weakened their resolve to the point where it would be possible for him to “effect a mass suicide,” she warned. “On behalf of the population of Jonestown, I urge that the United States Government take adequate steps to safeguard their rights. I believe that their lives are in danger.”
In Washington, McCoy briefed his superiors in the State Department on Blakey’s allegations. In the past, he’d called Jones’s threats “nonsense.” He found it impossible to believe that nine hundred people would line up and kill themselves; it just wasn’t civilized behavior. But Blakey seemed like a rational person, and her stories worried him. He lobbied the State Department to formally ask the Guyanese government to investigate Jonestown, but was told the First Amendment prohibited interference in the privacy and religious freedom of American citizens. Blakey’s plea for help was circulated among embassy workers in Georgetown before being filed away in their “general fund of information,” he would later testify.
The Guyanese government was also stumped about what to do. The national chief of police, Skip Roberts, told McCoy he’d found no evidence of gunrunning and that whenever he or other officials asked the group, “Are you all going to kill yourselves?” the answer was always “No.”
Jones dismantled the isolation boxes—he’d constructed a second—after Blakey disclosed their existence to the media, fearing regional authorities would come looking for them. Harriet Tropp pressed him to go further. “The more ‘secretive’ we need to be, the more vulnerable we are to ‘defectors,’” she wrote him. “If our structure is more able to be publicly examined, then we are less vulnerable. Outsiders would be able to walk around the project, observe meetings, etc.”
But Jones did the exact opposite. He sealed off Jonestown from the outside world completely.
A reporter for a small California paper who flew to Guyana at the end of May discovered this firsthand. Kathy Hunter had written several flattering stories about Jones when he first moved to Ukiah from Indiana, but more recently, she’d penned sympathetic portrayals of Timothy Stoen and Steven Katsaris, prompting Jones to place her on his list of enemies.
Hunter assumed she’d be welcomed in Jonestown, based on her past friendship with Jones. But after she checked into her Georgetown hotel, mysterious fires were set in the hallways and bomb threats were called in to the front desk. When she went out, hostile Temple members surrounded her on the street, demanding to know what she was doing there. Georgetown officials did little to reassure her, and in fact suggested she leave the country for her own safety. She did. Upon returning to California, she related her ordeal to the media, which only heightened curiosity about Jim Jones, and what he was hiding.
A month later, the Guyanese government booted another snooping journalist from the country. Gordon Lindsay, on assignment for the National Enquirer, had received no answer to his repeated requests to visit Jonestown, so he flew to Georgetown to try his luck from there. But Jones had forewarned the government about Lindsay’s arrival, arguing that bad press for Jonestown was bad press for Guyana. Lindsay never cleared customs and boarded the next plane out. Undeterred, he flew to Trinidad and chartered a small aircraft with a photographer. The plane circled the settlement several times at low altitude, enraging Jones, who told officials the plane had “violated Jonestown’s airspace,” as if the camp were now a sovereign country. Jones suspected, correctly, that the tabloid was working on a smear piece, and ordered Charles Garry to get it stopped.
As pressure on the isolated community grew, Jones kicked his death plan into high gear. It was obvious that the farm wasn’t sustainable, and Jones was increasingly becoming an embarrassment to the Burnham administration. He pressed Schacht to hurry up with the suicide plan.
“Cyanide is one of the most rapidly-acting poisons,” Schacht wrote him a short while later. “I had some misgivings about its effectiveness, but from further research I have gained more confidence in it, at least theoretical
ly. I would like to give about two grams to a large pig to see how effective our batch is to be sure we don’t get stuck with a disaster like would occur if we used thousands of pills to sedate the people and the cyanide was not good enough to do the job. I also want to order antidotes just in case we may need to reverse the poisoning process on people … cyanide may take up to three hours to kill but usually it is within minutes.”
He requested an Australian medical journal called Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, whose November 1974 issue carried an article on acute cyanide poisoning. He even provided Jones with a cover, lest it raise suspicion among the San Francisco aides assigned to track it down for him: “We could say that a child was brought into our free medical clinic who had ingested rat poison containing cyanide and we want this article on the subject.”
Written by an anesthesiologist at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, the scholarly study described the cases of two patients who’d swallowed cyanide in suicide attempts, but who were saved by the diligent actions of emergency workers. In clinical detail, the author described the generalized hypoxic cell death caused by cyanide. Simply put, the poison prevents the body from absorbing oxygen, causing suffocation at a cellular level. It is an agonizing death. One sentence in the article—which was intended to help emergency workers save poisoning victims—gave Dr. Schacht the information he was looking for: “In adults, the lethal dose of ingested cyanide salt is 250 mg.”
He placed an order for one pound of sodium cyanide from J. T. Baker, a chemical company in Hayward, California. The order, which cost $8.85, was for enough poison to kill 1,800 people.
CHAPTER 22
CONTROL
The extreme duress of life in Jonestown made people crack. They didn’t care about socialism if it meant chronic hunger, exhaustion, and fear. Their days were ruled by anxiety. They ate their miserable food in silence and filed into the pavilion each night with trepidation: Would this be the night they’d be called on the floor? Would this be the night Jones made good on his death threat? They worried about being reported for some blurted aside, and stopped confiding in their spouses and children. They withdrew into depression and apathy and cynicism.
Some tried to gain favor by informing on people who didn’t smile or praise Dad enough. Larry Schacht reported patients who took pain poorly, such as Helen Snell, seventy-six, who cried out when he stuck a needle in her foot. Jones himself sometimes administered pain tests during rallies to determine how residents would respond to torture, telling them, “I don’t trust you if you can’t take pain.”
As Jones receded into a chemical haze, he spent more time in his cabin and less time with his people. He appointed a triumvirate to manage the community’s daily operations, which included his longtime mistress Carolyn Layton, Harriet Tropp, and Johnny Moss Brown—one of the few African Americans in leadership. The internal surveillance team kept an eye out for strange behavior, and even reported Jonestown principal Tom Grubbs: “Yesterday he went to the very back of the cottages and looked around the jungle for a while. This is not the first or second time he has done this.” Some residents informed on themselves before others could do so, hoping their voluntary confession would soften their punishment. It was hard to know whom to trust. Loyalists divulged their partners’ pillow talk. Grubbs’s girlfriend, Bea Orsot, told Jones about Grubbs’s private fears, dreams, and sexual proclivities. He suspected she was informing on him, but she denied it. At the end of October, Grubbs would find himself in trouble after telling Orsot that he thought Jones was deliberately brainwashing the community.
One night, Vince Lopez, the fifteen-year-old teen who’d flown to Guyana with Tommy Bogue, found himself the focus of Jones’s rage. His guardian, a defector named Walter Jones who now lived with Grace Stoen, was filing lawsuits in California trying to bring him home, and this did not endear Vince to the Temple leader.
Vince’s mother died in childbirth when he was in first grade, and his father was a heroin addict who was in and out of prison; he was eleven years old and homeless when a juvenile court in Oakland sent him to a foster family that belonged to Peoples Temple. (He was one of twenty-two foster kids sent to Jonestown.)
In Guyana, Vince was often on the learning crew for sleeping during meetings or cracking cynical jokes.
“Did you get any of the bacon they sent you?” he asked one befuddled senior. “How tall are you?” he asked another. When the woman asked why he wanted to know, Lopez replied: “The woodshop wants to know how long your casket should be.”
One night, Jones gave Vince the chance to dance his way off the learning crew. He ordered the boy to imitate a Pentecostal Holy Roller by running up and down the aisles pretending to speak in tongues. Vince refused to make a fool of himself. The crowd shouted encouragement, but he refused to budge. One of Jones’s guards threatened him: “He told you to do it, punk, now you run up the fucking aisle.” Vince still wouldn’t move.
“You’re a goddamn masochist!” Jones finally yelled, before telling his guards to “Get him out of my sight.”
The next time Tommy saw Vince, a week or so later, his friend was doing the “Thorazine shuffle” down a pathway. When Tommy called to him, Vince barely lifted his head. Frightened and confused, Tommy veered away. Something was obviously very wrong with Vince, something that was allowed to happen.
Soon afterward, Tommy was sentenced to scrub pots all night in the kitchen, alone, when he made a strange discovery. Opening the fridge, he was surprised to find a tray of vanilla milkshakes. He couldn’t resist. He took a few sips from each, making sure the liquid in all the glasses was even when he was done. The next day he felt loopy; everything was slow and surreal. He complained to his mother, and, after much prodding, she elicited his transgression. “Don’t drink those shakes,” she warned. “Those are Jones’s shakes. Now you know they have something in them.”
But Jones didn’t drink the milkshakes himself; he gave them to people he wanted to squelch. To prepare for visitors, Joyce Parks would regularly sedate troublemakers, such as a woman who grew distraught upon learning her dogs had been sold in California without her consent. Other unruly residents were assigned to the special care unit, where they were given a choice: they could either swallow tranquilizers voluntarily or be forcibly injected with them. What happened in the SCU eventually became an open secret, and Jones would read the names of residents who were in danger of being confined to the SCU over the PA system.
Drugging people allowed Jones to control them without leaving evidence of physical harm. Eavesdropping ham-radio operators would later tell the FBI that in the colony’s last months, Jonestown operators ordered a tremendous amount of drugs and syringes. Sedatives were always requested in one thousand doses, enough to subdue Jonestown’s entire population.
But Jones’s narcotics-buying spree was hampered in October 1978 by the passage of the Psychotropic Substances Act, which cracked down on recreational abuse of drugs.
In San Francisco, Temple leader Jean Brown couldn’t find injectable tranquilizers such as Valium. “The only way it can be gotten is if you get a personal prescription, which someone with blood pressure problems is attempting to do,” she wrote Jones.
A week later, Jones told Joyce Parks, a camp nurse who traveled frequently between Jonestown and Georgetown, to buy all the tranquilizers and disposable syringes she could get her hands on, and within two days, she’d located 100 vials of Thorazine. In this piecemeal fashion, Jones built up an impressive opiate stockpile; indeed, the first doctor who entered the Jonestown pharmacy after the massacre said it contained enough psychotropics to keep every resident continually sedated for two years.
One of Jones’s more egregious abuses of power was his drugging and rape of a young woman named Shanda James. Jones’s preferred female body type was rail thin and white. Shanda, nineteen, was the first African American woman he pursued. When she rejected his advances, Jones committed her to the SCU. Stanley Clayton happened to be there at the same time, sick with the flu.
The beds in the SCU cottage were only separated by curtains, and one day Stanley watched as Jones walked past him and pushed aside the curtain where a doped-up Shanda lay. A few minutes later, he heard heavy breathing and the bed moving. He was outraged. When he told Ed Crenshaw what he’d seen, his buddy warned him to be quiet, lest he himself be drugged into silence. When Shanda was released, her friends were shocked at her appearance. She clung to a railing of a walkway, barely able to stand, as her blue bathrobe hung open exposing a breast. Jordan Vilchez walked by her with a group of field-crew workers, but didn’t stop. “We got so used to not questioning things, to minding our own business,” she’d later say. “Life became a series of odd things.”
Shanda herself, in a lucid moment, wrote Jones a confused note: “I cannot sit down for ½ hour before I fall asleep… . I don’t know what I’m taking but it really affects me. I feel awful.” When she finally realized what was going on, she swallowed a handful of oral contraceptives to avoid getting pregnant, and became violently ill.
As residents grew more desperate, there was a rash of violence, runaway attempts, and mental breakdowns. Jones accused people of faking emotional disorders to get out of work, and threatened to shoot runaways in the legs. Some launched quieter protests; Tennessean Alleane Tucker, forty-nine, was reprimanded for singing slave songs in the field.
Residents wondered why they should exert themselves weeding vegetables or hauling lumber when they were repeatedly told that they’d have to die or abandon Jonestown for another, uncertain, location. Farm coordinator Jack Beam told Jones that residents’ apathy was just as serious as the garden infestation. The Jonestown leadership considered different ways to motivate people, such as honoring a worker of the week, handing out wooden beads as merit badges, or dubbing subliminal messages into the music cassettes played over the loudspeakers—“produce for socialism,” or “remember the news.”
A Thousand Lives Page 20