A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  On the day she left Jonestown, she was so stricken with fear that Jones could read her traitorous thoughts that she silently counted from one to ten, repeatedly, until the dump truck dropped her off at the Port Kaituma airstrip.

  In the States, she contacted Mark Lane for legal advice, worried she could be prosecuted for her Temple activities. They’d worked on legal strategies together in San Francisco, where she complained that Lane was constantly coming on to her. When she returned to the States as a defector, he readily agreed to represent her, although he was still on Jones’s payroll.

  In October, Sharon Amos raised the stakes with Timofeyev. She told him Jones was dying, hoping the information would spur Russia’s decision. Of what? the diplomat wanted to know. Amos gave him different answers on different days. He had a mysterious ailment that gave him 106-degree fevers, she said. He had a bad heart. He had lung cancer. Timofeyev, who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, asked if Jones was a smoker. When Amos said he wasn’t, the consul was incredulous, so Amos told him Jones contracted cancer from talking on the radio too much. This made Timofeyev more dubious, and when pressed, Amos admitted Jones’s illness was a hoax. The medical department had even sent diseased cells to a laboratory, she confessed, because they “were just trying to see how far [the government of Guyana] will go thinking Jim is dying.”

  Soon afterward, Timofeyev told Amos that the Soviet Union would not allow the group to immigrate. He explained that it was nearly impossible for a single person to get permission to move to Russia; it would be that much harder for a thousand.

  That night, Jones relayed the news to the startled community: The Russians had rejeceted them. The Soviets would only take his immediate family he said, and he wasn’t about to abandon his followers. The residents were heartsick at the news; death now seemed inevitable. Some fell into a numbed apathy. Others retreated inward, and stopped speaking altogether. Marceline tried to rein in her husband’s murderous impulses. After Debbie Blakey’s defection, she publicly protested Jones’s cryptic statement that “When Mrs. White drops by, she makes us all equal. [We] should see Mrs. White now and again.” Marcie knew Mrs. White was a code term for death. She later publicly apologized for disagreeing with her husband. Marcie wasn’t told of his first mass suicide threat, on September 11, 1977, until after the crisis was over, and whenever she was included in the secret discussions of the last stand, she made it abundantly clear that she was opposed to killing children.

  Jones’s Georgetown allies also grew weary of his pushiness and bizarre threats. In October, Jones recorded a private message of “utmost gravity” for the Minister of Home Affairs, Vibert Mingo. In it, he repeated his litany of gripes regarding the custody suit before launching into a lecture on socialism. Sharon Amos reported back to Jones that while the tape played, Mingo rummaged through papers on his desk and then covered his face with his hands in apparent exasperation. Afterward, Mingo canceled his weekly meetings with Amos altogether.

  Jones developed a persistent cough and strange fevers, and played these up for sympathy. He told his followers that he had lung cancer and with the strains upon him, could only expect to live three or four more years. For this reason, he said, all complaints must stop.

  Dr. Schacht, with his limited expertise and equipment, couldn’t get a clear diagnosis of Jones’s maladies, aside from a urinary tract infection. Government officials assured Jones that he wouldn’t be arrested if he came to Georgetown for medical care, but they refused to commit their promises to writing, so Temple aides asked his personal physician from San Francisco, Carlton Goodlett, to examine him. Goodlett was wary of making the trip; after moving to Guyana, Jones called him several times via shortwave radio, always in the middle of the night, to complain about the mounting conspiracies against him. Goodlett suspected Jones was suffering from manic depression. But when Marceline Jones personally showed up at his office in August and begged him to go, he relented. In Jonestown, he found the Temple leader had a temperature that ran to 102.8 degrees, and a deep, nonproductive cough. The X-rays were normal, however. There was no sign of cancer, tuberculosis, or pneumonia. He reassured Jones that he wasn’t dying, but urged him to get a bronchoscopy to rule out a possible fungal infection in his lungs.

  On his return to San Francisco, Goodlett met with Marceline and other Temple leaders at 1859 Geary Boulevard. He cautiously alluded to Jones’s drug addiction and mental instability, and recommended he be taken immediately to a Venezuelan clinic for treatment.

  “You know he’s not going to do that,” Marcie responded.

  “If you can’t convince him, then take him,” Goodlett said.

  Jones’s followers sensed their leader was losing control of himself. When he read the news over the PA system, his tongue lolled in his mouth as he slurred or mispronounced words. Sometimes he even sounded some words out, as though he were speaking a foreign language. He blamed his vocal impairment on exhaustion, illness, or the sound equipment. His temper grew worse, and he raged over the loudspeakers about perceived slights. At one point, he ordered nearly twenty people to be medically sedated. A survivor who passed by Jones’s cottage in the final weeks recalled over hearing Jones yelling “White night! White night!” over a trivial matter before Marceline prevailed in shushing him: “No, Jim! That’s not necessary!”

  As Jones deteriorated mentally and physically, he spent entire days holed up in his cabin, attended by his dark-haired concubines. Toward the end, he feared his followers as much as they feared him. He stationed armed guards outside his door and warned residents to stay away from his cottage lest they find themselves “in a lot of trouble that’s meant only for mercenaries.” He carried a .357 magnum revolver in his waistband and gave Carolyn and Maria lighter-weight .25 caliber pistols. He assigned two guards to watch his food being prepared so that no one poisoned it, and ordered an antidote in case someone still managed to do so.

  Deep in the Guyanese jungle, Jones created a vacuum of reason where his madness played out unfettered. He staged more “mercenary attacks” with the collusion of his sons, which kept residents afraid and obedient.

  Jones even managed to keep his subterfuge hidden from Carolyn Layton, according to a memo she sent him in Jonestown’s last weeks. “Someone must viciously hate you and think you a threat or the shootings and assassination attempts would not have taken place,” she wrote. “I think logically it must be CIA there.”

  In the same letter, she reflected on the cursed atmosphere of the camp. “Eventually we will have some defection, perhaps a young person leaving or a senior … if we make a stand or decide to die, how are we going to do it … do you give everyone pills?”

  From these sentences, it’s apparent that she didn’t even know of Dr. Schacht’s cyanide experiments. Although many Temple members had a piece of the puzzle, no one knew the complete layout of Jones’s macabre plan. Thirty years later, survivors would still be struggling to find and fit all the pieces together.

  CHAPTER 25

  NOVEMBER

  Congressman Leo Ryan, a Democrat from San Mateo, California, was known for his brash style. He wasn’t afraid to go undercover to expose injustice; he posed as a substitute schoolteacher to document living conditions in the slums of Watts, and as an inmate at Folsom Prison to investigate the penal system.

  Although Ryan had casually followed the Temple scandal in the Bay Area press, his interest piqued when an old friend and constituent told him he had family in Jonestown. Sam Houston’s son, Bob, was a Temple member who had died under mysterious circumstances a few years earlier. The day after Bob defected, he was crushed to death by a freight car in the railyard where he worked. Now, Bob’s widow was in Guyana with his two teenage granddaughters, and Sam Houston was worried about them.

  The Concerned Relatives felt that Leo Ryan was their last hope. Despite the dire warnings of Debbie Blakey and Yulanda Williams, the State Department was too fearful of violating First Amendment freedoms to press Guyana to investigate Jonestown, an
d it was increasingly apparent that Jones had the cabinet in his pocket anyway. This seemed especially obvious in the John Victor Stoen custody case; the presiding Guyanese judge, Justice Aubrey Bishop, quit the case after receiving phone calls from people with American accents who threatened to hurt his family if he ruled against Jim Jones. When the case returned to the docket, Chief Justice Harold Bollers didn’t reassign it, but simply let it stagnate, as the court had done with the arrest warrant, which was signed but never activated. The failure of Guyana’s judicial process infuriated Tim Stoen, who told the State Department that he was prepared to retrieve his son by force if necessary.

  Congressman Ryan’s offer to help seemed a more realistic way of recovering John.

  On November 1, the congressman sent Jones a telegram:

  Dear Reverend Jones,

  In recent months my office has been visited by constituents who are relatives of members of your church and who expressed anxiety about mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who have elected to assist you in the development of your church in Guyana.

  I have listened to others who have told me that such concerns are exaggerated. They have been supportive of your church and your work. Your effort, involving so many Americans from a single U.S. geographic location, is unique. In an effort to be responsive to these constituents with differing perspectives and to learn more about your church and its work, I intend to visit Guyana and talk with appropriate government officials. I do so as part of my assigned responsibilities as a Member of the House Committee on International Relations … .It goes without saying that I am most interested in a visit to Jonestown, and would appreciate whatever courtesies you can extend to our Congressional delegation.

  Although Ryan described his mind-set as “open and honest,” Mark Lane insinuated to Jones that the congressman’s sole purpose in coming—with an NBC camera crew in tow—was to smear the Temple. Based on Lane’s assessment, Temple aides wrote NBC a letter accusing the television network of being part of a “McCarthy-like web” spun to destroy the church, and flatly refused to allow the crew entry to Jonestown. Lane, for his part, wrote Ryan a letter accusing him of conducting a witch hunt, to which the congressman coolly replied, “The Committee does intend to leave as scheduled.”

  Jones worried that if Ryan were allowed to visit, at least one disgruntled resident would leave with him. That would create a snowball effect, he feared; the defector would talk to reporters upon returning to California, generating more pressure on the colony. Despairing, Jones told the Guyanese government, “We prefer death to this kind of harassment.” If Ryan and his entourage were allowed into the settlement, he continued, it would be a “grave mistake.”

  On November 7, US Consul Richard McCoy’s successor, Doug Ellice, flew up to Port Kaituma. The new consul was leery of Jones even before meeting him. When he took the Guyanese post, Temple members in San Francisco had flooded him with letters praising Jones. The mass mailing was shoddy work: Every letter carried the same date and format, even the same misspelling of his name. He was irritated by the stunt, and told Sharon Amos that his job as an American diplomat in Guyana had nothing to do with people living in California.

  Ellice and Vice Consul Dennis Reece conducted their welfare and whereabouts interviews in the field next to the pavilion; no one complained or accepted their offer to leave. During lunch, the Jonestown Express sang “America the Beautiful,” and residents stood and pressed their hands to their hearts. It seemed obvious to the guests that the song was chosen for their benefit. When Jones appeared after a long time, he was wearing a gauze mask and walked with the help of two assistants. He complained that he had a fever of 105 degrees, but both Ellice and Reece noted that his palm was dry when they shook his hand, as was his forehead. While Jones’s mask hid his chronic lip-licking—a dry mouth is a common side effect of drug abuse—it couldn’t hide his mental impairment. At one point, the visitors noted, Jones tried several times to spell a simple word that he didn’t want a nearby child to hear before giving up in frustration.

  The visit was cut short by an approaching thunderstorm; the pilot wanted to fly back to Georgetown before it hit. As the officials skimmed the settlement in the plane, they noted in their report that they didn’t see “barbed wire, any guards, armed or otherwise, or any other physical sign that people were being held at Jonestown against their will.”

  The State Department passed along the information to Ryan. As a result, the congressman’s staff was more concerned about travel logistics and wardrobe choices than they were about potential violence. The Temple and Ryan’s office were still negotiating the possibility of a visit, despite Jones’s bluster, when the Chronicle published an article about the planned trip. The paper quoted Ryan as saying that he was going to investigate the living conditions of more than a dozen minor children and other relatives of constituents, and that he intended to stay down there “as long as it takes to find out what is going on.”

  His comments made it clear to Jones that the congressman was on a mission. When he announced Ryan’s intended visit to Jonestown residents, he described him as a hostile racist, and swore that the politician would never set foot in the project. He was worried, however, that Ryan’s party might try to sneak in from the Kaituma River, and warned that they would suffer the consequences if they did so.

  On November 9, he ordered the adults to line up and sign a resolution stating their refusal to see Ryan or his entourage.

  In Jonestown’s cramped cottages, gossip was rampant about Ryan’s visit, as well as Jones’s physical deterioration. The Temple leader could barely walk; his face and body were swollen with edema, his hands puffed to almost twice their usual size. Naturally, some residents pondered taking advantage of his weak condition to make a break for it, and Jones seemed to sense this temptation. “See if you can make it to any railway,” he told the pavilion crowd eight days before the end. “See if you can get to any passport. Try. I dare you to try. You don’t know who you’re talking to. Just because I don’t use the language of the church, I am that which they call God… . I will see you in the grave. Many of you.”

  Dr. Schacht was ready for Ryan. Although the paper trail doesn’t reveal whether his experiment on a large pig was successful, it does show that he began to stockpile cyanide. He placed multiple orders for the poison, including a pound of sodium cyanide, and three 500-gram bottles of potassium cyanide.

  Toward the end, survivors would say, Dr. Schacht walked around muttering to himself and was constantly shaking, as if he were sick. The military prosector who performed his autopsy detected large levels of Thorazine in his system, perhaps taken to steel his nerves as he plotted the deaths of more than nine hundred people, almost a third of whom were children.

  * * *

  The week before Ryan flew to South America, Harold Cordell witnessed a large drum of chemicals arrive aboard the Cudjoe. It was Cordell’s job to take an inventory of items shipped to Jonestown, and the drum wasn’t on the manifest. Furthermore, no one knew who ordered it. Agronomist Russ Moton read the label and told him it was a poison that was highly lethal if it were mixed with water and swallowed. Cordell sent the drum to the warehouse, but its presence lingered in his mind. He wondered if Jones were planning to poison the congressman and his party—or if he were planning to poison the entire community by dumping the chemical in the wells. He whispered the news to Edith Bogue late one night as they lay in their loft, and the wall of suspicion between them collapsed. They both confessed to being terrorized at what Jonestown had become. There was an urgency now; Jones had the means to make good on his suicide threats. After they cleared the air, they began to plan. How could they save their kids? How could they even raise the subject of escape with them? What if their children reported them? Lately, Tommy had been asking Edith strange questions: “If he and his sisters left the church, would she stay?” She wondered if he was going to run away again. Between them, Harold and Edith had nine children in Jonestown. They
schemed and schemed but each time returned to the same fear that their own kids would turn them in if they broached the topic of escape; they had been trained to do so.

  Word of the mysterious drum of chemicals raced through the community. The young woman who washed Hyacinth Thrash’s hair told her about it, adding darkly that Hy might not need a cane much longer. Hy didn’t understand. “You mean I’m gonna get healed?” she asked in a hopeful voice. The young woman didn’t answer.

  The tension of those last weeks could have sparked in the air. On Sunday, November 12, Joyce Touchette told the three George children—the Amerindian children she’d adopted in Jonestown’s early days—to pack their things and go back to their mother. They did so. Something ominous was brewing in Jonestown, they told their mom, and they were scared. But she was too poor to feed them, and sent them back against their will.

  Five days before the end, when Jones told the group that he was prepared to make a great sacrifice, Jim Bogue knew exactly what he was referring to. He and Al Simon were ready. Their pathway to freedom was finished; they were just waiting for the right moment to lead their children out. Bogue was due in Matthew’s Ridge on Monday, November 20, to consult with the army about finding groundwater; they’d have to bide their time until then.