A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  As the two men discussed who else to let in on their plan, they felt as though they were playing God, deciding who would live and who would die. Bogue decided not to confide in his Jonestown wife, Luna Murral. Even though the couple slept side by side every night, he couldn’t decipher what her true sentiments were—if her fervor for Jones was real or pretend. She held trusted jobs as a counselor and a nurse. If he did invite her along, what about her five school-age kids? If she told them, they might tell others and blow their cover.

  Al worried about evading his wife and finding a way to gather his children when the moment came. The Bogues assured him they’d help carry his three little ones. But what about Al’s sister, brother-in-law, and niece, who’d once dated Tommy, and who were also in Jonestown? All of the Bogue girls had boyfriends there, too. Such was the tapestry of Jonestown. Families were entwined and extended. Ultimately, the two men narrowed the list to their offspring. Despite his best efforts, Jones hadn’t broken their instinct to protect their children, and it would only take one loudmouth to land them all in the special care unit. They wouldn’t have two chances to get it right.

  Jim Bogue’s daughters fretted that their dad wouldn’t be strong enough to hike out. He’d lost nearly fifty pounds in Jonestown, and weighed less than one hundred as he forged the path. His daughter Juanita stole eggs for him from the chicken coops, which were near her job in the piggery, and boiled them in a can in the jungle. Al gave him some cured pork he’d swiped from the smoke house. The protein fueled their resolve.

  As they worked, they fine-tuned the details of their plan. The army base commander in Matthew’s Ridge had requested Bogue’s help locating ground water, and Bogue planned to take the opportunity, when they were alone, to ask him for shelter. He’d made a point of chatting the man up whenever he brought a load of sweet potatoes or cassava to sell to the base, and felt he’d be receptive to his request. After the base commander gave him his word, they’d wait for the right moment to lead their children to the railroad, where they’d flag down a train and ride to the base, and from there, contact the American embassy. He was still struggling with how to word his request. He worried that the base commander would repeat his disclosures to another resident, or even to Jim Jones. He recalled Jones warning them that the army was under orders to return runaways to the settlement. He hoped this was another of his lies.

  The men’s progress was agonizingly slow. The rain forest was dense with vines and saplings, and in some stretches, they’d hack for hours, until their muscles shook, only to clear few yards. Blisters caused by his water-logged boots covered Bogue’s feet, but his resolve to save his family was a powerful anesthetic.

  Somehow their plan would succeed; they had to believe it. The opposite was unfathomable.

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAOS

  In late summer, the Temple contacted author Donald Freed to see if he was interested in writing a history of the church. Freed came highly recommended by Temple counsel Charles Garry. The men knew each other through their work with the Black Panthers: Garry represented the group and Freed wrote a book about them. Like Garry, Freed was progressive and politically engaged. Even more appealing to Jones, Freed believed in conspiracies. He’d coauthored the screenplay for a movie called Executive Action, which blamed President Kennedy’s assassination on a shadowy military industrial complex opposed to his liberal policies, and he wrote a book suggesting the same cabal killed Robert Kennedy.

  When Freed heard there was a large group of American socialists living in Guyana that claimed to be harassed for its ideology, his interest was piqued, and he readily accepted Jones’s invitation to visit the colony.

  Jonestown spent weeks preparing for the author’s visit. In the pavilion, Jones rehearsed the answers to questions Freed might ask, as indicated in this tape recording:

  Jones: How’s the food here, madam?

  Female resident: The food is wonderful.

  Jones: [angry] I don’t know what wonderful means. What kind of food do you have?

  Female: We have chicken, we have pork, beef… . We also have plenty of fruits, vegetables.

  Jones: Okay. Uh, tell me, do you put people in boxes here and bury them in boxes?

  Male resident: No, uh, I …

  Jones: I’d look more shocked—I’d look more shocked than that. Male resident: No, we haven’t, you know …

  Jones: I’d say “What?! Hell no! What prompted that question?”

  Cottage supervisors coached residents for hours on responses to twenty-five negative questions Freed might ask. Afterward, Jones’s lieutenants went from cottage to cottage making sure everyone had memorized their lines. They were told to refer to Jones as “Jim,” not “Dad” or “Father,” to avoid being considered cultish. They were to lie and tell Freed that families lived together. They were to say they didn’t believe in suicide—it was a selfish act.

  “It’s important that we all appear happy and exhibit satisfaction and know how to avoid the warning kind of question or not give information which can be used against us,” Jones instructed residents. “Everyone is to smile constantly and make the victory sign to each other in passing.”

  Jones selected an entourage to serve as Freed’s escorts/chaperones, and even scripted the escorts’ seemingly spontaneous jokes.

  Freed arrived in August. During his visit, the front rows in the pavilion were carefully integrated, and instead of forming the usual long lines in the dining tent, residents were served meals sitting down. The food was better, so naturally, residents looked happier. Several cottages were fixed up as model residences with fewer beds, to diminish rumors of overcrowding.

  Jones encouraged the author to get a physical exam during his tour to try out the settlement’s superlative medical services. He assented. During the eye exam, Freed was given drops that blurred his vision for ten hours, and while he found this odd, a later interaction with Jones caused him more concern. Jones, who didn’t take off his dark sunglasses for the entire visit, was strolling along a pathway with Freed when he casually mentioned the results of Freed’s rectal exam: He told the writer that he suffered from a type of gonorrhea that was only transmitted by homosexual encounter. Freed, a recent widower, wasn’t gay, and told Jones as much, politely suggesting the results were erroneous. But Jones blithely brushed aside his protests, assuring Freed that he was open-minded; he himself had been forced to have gay sex with his followers to keep them dedicated to the cause. As Reverend Jones continued to regale Freed with tales of his sexual exploits, Freed became increasingly uncomfortable. Yet he looked around at the smiling faces of people flashing the V sign at him and was inspired. Jonestown appeared to be a triumph, despite its eccentric leader.

  During Freed’s visit, Temple leaders collected residents’ biographies for him to use in his book. Edith Roller was asked to interview her students and transcribe their histories, and the exercise gave her a deeper empathy for them. Her younger students told her of struggling with drugs, both dealing and using, while her older ones described the violence and loneliness that plagued their existence in the ghetto. These testimonials were meant to prove that Jonestown was a haven for the downtrodden.

  For several nights, Freed spoke to the pavilion crowd about the supposed conspiracies behind the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and President Kennedy. As Edith took notes, she struggled to keep up with Freed’s jumbled stream of thought. His talk of sinister forces intent on destroying progressive movements was tailored to the crowd, especially its leader. Freed told the crowd that Tim Stoen was a CIA agent before he joined the Temple, without citing any evidence, which prompted Jones to suggest that Stoen was a spy even while he was a Temple member.

  One night during Freed’s visit, Jones summoned Edith to the head table to brag about her success teaching elderly African Americans how to read and write. Freed seemed touched by her efforts, Edith wrote in her journal, and she was flattered by the attention. But she also noted, as she stood at Jones’s side, what he and
the other Temple leaders were eating—chicken breasts compared to the giblet gravy served the rank and file.

  When Freed returned to California, his doctor told him there was no such thing as gay gonorrhea. He would eventually view Jones’s strange lie as a clumsy attempt to blackmail him. Still, despite his misgivings, Freed agreed to help Jones uncover the supposed conspiracy against the church. He enlisted his old friend Mark Lane, attorney and conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, to help him. Lane was Freed’s coauthor on the Executive Action screenplay. The duo’s first mission for Jones was to interrogate Joseph A. Mazor, a private detective who’d worked with the Concerned Relatives. Although Mazor no longer worked for the group, Jones wanted to know if he had an inside scoop on the relatives’ plans.

  Under the guise of paying Mazor $25,000 as a consultant on a movie about Jonestown, Lane and Freed rented a suite at a hotel overlooking San Francisco’s Union Square, and proceeded to interrogate him over a September afternoon.

  Mazor had a reputation as a con man, and indeed, Mazor’s web of lies rivaled those of Jones himself. He told Freed and Lane that he’d led an armed expedition of Venezuelan poachers to Jonestown to rescue children for the Concerned Relatives in September 1977, but changed his mind after noting there were no fences circling the camp and residents moved about freely. When Freed and Lane asked him whether he noticed anyone else outside of Jonestown at the time, Mazor volunteered that, as his group retreated, they’d encountered a band of ultra-right-wing terrorists who were laying siege to Jonestown.

  At Jones’s invitation, Mazor flew to Jonestown, where he repeated the fallacious expedition story to Jones’s lieutenants, thereby “confirming” that Jonestown was under mercenary attack during the September siege. Jones was delighted.

  Mark Lane arrived in Jonestown just after Mazor left. He later said Jones never left his cabin during the day while he was there, but emerged at night to interrupt discussions of proposed strategy with long, rambling asides. But Jones’s strange behavior didn’t stop Lane from promising the Temple leader that he’d get to the bottom of the conspiracy. A man who’d cry conspiracy over sour milk, Lane did not hesitate to present Jones’s most paranoid fears as truth. “Even a cursory examination reveals that there has been a coordinated campaign to destroy Peoples Temple and to impugn the reputation of its leader,” he wrote Jones. He proposed conducting a full-scale investigation, and at the beginning of October, he flew to California, where he posed as a journalist to interview Temple critics Kathy Hunter and Steve Katsaris. A few days later, he and Don Freed held a press conference at the San Francisco church, where they announced plans to file a “massive, multi-million dollar lawsuit against all the agencies of government” for attempting to destroy the Temple. He even got the “facts” of Mazor’s story wrong, telling reporters that an Interpol employee led a killing force of twenty men armed with guns and rocket launchers through the jungle to fire at the compound for six days.

  A skeptical reporter asked why the mercenaries continued firing their weapons after noting the absence of fences.

  “That’s a good question, we don’t have a satisfactory answer,” Lane hastily replied, before making his main point: The United States was trying to undermine Jonestown because it was embarrassed by the success of the socialist experiment.

  Media coverage of the conference was paltry and derisive. The San Francisco Examiner buried its story and described Lane’s lawsuit as targeting “virtually everybody but the Coast and Geodetic Survey.” KSAN radio reporters mocked Lane’s findings, then feigned concern that the lawyer would accuse them of being CIA agents for disagreeing with him. The Chronicle sent two reporters to the conference, but didn’t publish a word on Lane’s allegations, furthering Jones’s contention that San Francisco’s largest paper was part of the vast plan to destroy him.

  Charles Garry thought Mazor’s jungle tale was “bullshit,” he told Temple leader Jean Brown. He was also repulsed by Lane, whom he considered an amoral opportunist who was tapping into Jones’s paranoia for profit. When Jones told Garry that Lane believed Stoen was a government plant all along because he belonged to the Rotary Club, Garry laughed aloud in disbelief; he’d once been a member of the service group himself.

  Garry had already peppered Washington, D.C., with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and failed to uncover any government interest in the Temple. Only the FBI sent him its information on Jim Jones, which consisted of four letters Jones himself wrote requesting his “file.” Garry stopped believing Jones’s conspiracy hype, and focused on defending the church from mounting lawsuits brought by former members. But Garry’s inability to crack the supposed conspiracy angered Jones, who suggested Garry might also be “in the pay of the CIA.” For his part, Garry suspected Jones hired Lane as a red herring, hoping the conspiracy fable would divert attention away from Temple scandals. After the massacre, Garry would accuse Lane of being “morally responsible” for the mass deaths because he’d ratcheted up Jones’s paranoia.

  A turning point in Lane’s relationship with Jones came when he single-handedly squelched the damaging exposé commissioned by the National Enquirer, something Garry had been unable to do. Lane managed to get a draft of Gordon Lindsay’s story, which ran nearly one hundred pages and was based on interviews with twelve former members. It described Jim Jones as a “mixture of Moon and Manson,” and quoted Stoen saying Jones was “bored with life” and got “his kick out of power.” It revealed the affair between Paula Adams and Ambassador Mann, and described horrific conditions in Jonestown, including children who “all have ringworm, parasites, hair missing, gashing wounds on their legs.”

  The unpublished article also dropped a bombshell: The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office wanted to extradite Jones to testify in several extortion cases brought by former members who said the Temple leader threatened them when they balked at giving him their homes.

  When Gordon Lindsay called Garry for a comment, the lawyer refused to confirm or deny the charges. But Lane did more than that—he made several stern phone calls to the Enquirer threatening libel, prompting the tabloid to kill the story. An elated Jones told the community that night: “We got a new set of attorneys now. I ain’t dealing with ‘old toupee Garry’ now. By God, you open your mouth, [Lane] threatens to sue your ass.”

  After the massacre, Lane would say Lindsay’s article was “absolutely, 100 percent true.”

  Over the summer and into the fall, Jones told residents that their survival depended on Russia. If the Soviets let them set up a cooperative there, he led them to believe, they could avoid revolutionary suicide. Although many of the African American residents were worried about rascism in the USSR, the move was obviously preferable to the alternative. Gene Chaikin, Tom Grubbs, and Dick Tropp ordered books on Russian geography and researched locations that had warm enough climates to support long growing seasons. They submitted a list of preferred areas to Jones on October 25, marking the east coast of the Black Sea as their top choice.

  Residents signed a petition asking the Soviet Union for permission to immigrate and attended mandatory Russian language classes. Edith Roller and a few others who knew a little Russian taught these, aided by books and records. To make sure residents did their homework, Jones instituted a new policy: As residents stood in line for a tray of food, aides asked them a question in Russian. If they answered incorrectly, they were sent to the back of the line. The collective effort to learn the foreign language and possibly avoid revolutionary suicide prompted a renewed camaraderie among residents as they helped each other learn vocabulary words and saluted each other on the muddy pathways with “Privyet!” (Hi!) and “Kak dela?” (How are you?).

  In Georgetown, the Temple PR crew courted the Russian embassy. Sharon Amos continually badgered a junior diplomat named Feodor Timofeyev for an answer on whether the group could move to its “spiritual mother land.” Their meetings had a distinctly Cold War flair, with Timofeyev switching on a radio as soon as Amos walked into h
is office because he assumed that the CIA had bugged it.

  Timofeyev hemmed and hawed for months, as Amos gave him different reasons for the move’s urgency: Jones believed the Guyanese cabinet was becoming more conservative and would turn against him; he feared Venezuela would reclaim the Northwest territory, including Jonestown. Finally Jones taped a personal message for the Russian diplomat: “Are we or are we not welcome in the Soviet Union?” he asked. “If the Soviet Union is out, I don’t think that I can make it.” Even Timofeyev grew tired of Jones’s paranoid obsessions. “The Temple thinks every movement of the moon deals with it,” he told Amos.

  In all likelihood, Jones was just stringing residents along with the notion of moving to Russia. After all, the poison was already ordered, the death plan already in place. But that was a secret he didn’t yet want to divulge to his followers, so he made it look like Russia was a viable alternative, cruelly toying with their hopes once again.

  Jones suffered another blow three weeks before the end, when his lover and financial secretary, Teri Buford, defected. She’d flown back to San Francisco to be deposed by Garry in a lawsuit and disappeared. Buford was one of the few Jonestown residents privileged enough to travel freely and plot her escape.

  Although Buford sent numerous memos to Jones supporting the “last-stand” plan, she got scared when she realized he was actually going to go through with it. In Guyana, Jones had grown increasingly tyrannical, and the plan appeared less like Custer’s valiant final stand and more like the Nazis’ final solution. She’d witnessed Jones’s mental deterioration on an intimate level. He’d become abusive during sex, pointing guns at her or choking her and telling her what a big rush it would be for him if she died. When she joined the church Buford believed Jones was God, but by the time she escaped, she knew he was a madman. It became apparent that Jones didn’t care if the farm succeeded, or whether his people were fed, or healthy, or happy. The only person who mattered to Jim Jones was Jim Jones. “This is the age of the antihero,” he told Buford, “I will go down in history, mark my words.” Shortly before she left Jonestown, she crossed paths with Marceline, who told her, “A person on these kinds of drugs doing these kinds of things might be psychotic.” Teri didn’t respond to the leading remark, fearing Marcie was testing her loyalty. A few days earlier, Jones had drawn her aside to tell her he had $3 million in the safe in his cottage, and that it only cost $500 to hire a hit man.