A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  As the cameras rolled, a pallid Jones walked up to the Parks family. “Please don’t go with him,” he begged them. The Parks family had been with him since Indiana; it would look very bad if his longtime followers abandoned him now. “Wait a week or two,” he said, “and I’ll give you your passports and five thousand dollars.”

  It was a provocative offer. Like all Temple members, they’d signed over all their material wealth to the church and would be going home dirt poor. The family debated his proposal for a few minutes before rejecting it. Once the delegation left, they reasoned, Jonestown would again become a sealed village and they would be regarded as traitors. Emboldened by their decision, Jerry Parks didn’t mince words with Jones. “You held us here as slaves and now we are getting out,” he said.

  Jones turned and walked away. Gone was the gloating, the crowing, the preening vulgarity. He sat on a bench, alone, his shoulders slumped.

  Tommy Bogue saw Edith Parks talking to Jackie Speier and panicked. Everyone had been ordered to stay away from the guests—or else—and here was Mrs. Parks speaking with the congressman’s aide in plain sight. It was obvious to him that she was asking for help, and he sprinted away to find his dad. Jim Bogue told Tommy to gather his sisters and head to the sawmill for an emergency meeting.

  Tommy rushed to the sawmill with Teena; Juanita and Marilee followed. Already there were his dad, Al Simon, Al’s two little girls, and Al’s dad, José Simon. There was no time to delay, Jim Bogue told the group. Jonestown was unraveling, and he was sure that Jones would call the final white night as soon as the congressman left. They wouldn’t live to see tomorrow if they stayed. He glanced at Tommy, who was wearing a red nylon basketball jersey and shorts, and shook his head. The boy was practically naked, and they had to trek through miles of brambles, biting ants, and mosquitoes to reach the railroad.

  Al hadn’t been able to locate his boy, six-year-old Alvin Jr. “I’m gonna get him and I’ll be right back,” he told the group. Bogue promised they’d wait for him; the two men had forged the path together and together they’d hike it out. A few minutes after Al left, Jim’s estranged wife, Edith, sauntered up the path with Harold Cordell. Bogue cursed under his breath, fearing they’d been sent as spies.

  Edith asked to speak with Teena. They walked to a log a short distance from the sawmill and sat down. Edith told her daughter about Tommy’s strange questions, and asked her whether she thought he was planning to run away again.

  Teena started to cry. “Are you going to turn Tommy in?” she asked her mother. Edith assured her she’d never inform on anyone again. She mentioned the container of poison Harold unloaded from the boat, and Teena cried harder. “Mom, so help me, if this is a trick …” she started to say, but Edith stopped her. “It’s not a trick,” she said. “I’m afraid for our lives.”

  As they were talking, Juanita showed up. She looked from Edith to Teena with suspicion. “Mom is with us,” Teena told her.

  Next, Marilee arrived, belatedly responding to Tommy’s summons. Everyone knew she couldn’t be trusted. They loved her, but she was a true believer. They forced the conversation onto another subject. When the time was right, they’d jump her.

  As the group waited for Al, two security guards ran up and asked if they’d seen a young woman named Leslie Wilson and her two-year-old boy; Wilson’s husband, a security guard, suspected she’d fled. They hadn’t, and the guards left. But the fear fluttering in their hearts made it clear that it was time to move.

  Al Simon didn’t return and didn’t return. Finally Jim Bogue decided they should go look for him. Teena and Edith found him in the cottage area talking to Agnes Jones, the adopted daughter of Jim and Marcie Jones. “This is it,” Agnes told them. “Try to get yourselves out.” The Bogues and Simons then decided to cast their lot with Congressman Ryan; it seemed a surer bet, at that point, than hiking to Matthew’s Ridge.

  Jim Bogue walked into the pavilion and told Congressman Ryan his family also wanted to leave Jonestown. Ryan said that the dump truck was filling quickly, so they might have to wait for a second load. There were now twenty defectors, in addition to the newsmen and visiting relatives.

  “There won’t be another load,” Edith Bogue told him bluntly.

  “Yes, there will, because I will stay right here with you,” Ryan said.

  “You are one person, and these people are many,” she said, glancing around at the crowd surrounding the pavilion.

  Jones walked up to Jim Bogue and threw his arm around his shoulder as if they were old buddies.

  “You know you don’t have to go,” Jones said in a confiding voice.

  Bogue just looked at the ground and shook his head.

  “And if you do go, you’ll be welcomed back anytime,” Jones continued. “Even some of those who have lied against us have come back.”

  Bogue just let him talk. He had nothing more to say to him.

  The sky had been swirling with dark clouds all morning and now a giant wind heaved through the pavilion, rocking the planters hanging from the rafters, and knocking over the carefully displayed crafts. It was as if all the tension in Jonestown had condensed above it, and now, on this final, horrible day, was transmogrified into its own physical force. Rain began to drill the pavilion’s metal roof, silencing talk, stifling movement. A moat formed around the structure’s edges.

  When the rain let up, Ryan and Speier chaperoned the defectors to their cottages to retrieve their meager belongings and Jones pressed his hand to his chest and asked Marcie for a pill. She tried gently to dissuade him. Behind his shades, his eyes were glazed. He wasn’t listening to her. He was planning his last sermon.

  Jim Bogue searched frantically for his youngest daughter. At one point after they returned to the pavilion he’d spotted Marilee, but then she disappeared into the crowd. His companion, Luna Murral, walked up to him.

  “Are you really leaving?” she asked.

  “Come with us,” he said.

  She shook her head and walked back to her five children.

  Harold Cordell saw his youngest son, fourteen-year-old James. They’d always been close. He tugged on Jimmy’s arm.

  “Come on, Jimmy, let’s get out of here,” Harold said. “We gotta go.”

  “No,” James said without hesitation. He was raised in the church to be dedicated to the cause, and in Jonestown, he was such an avid communist that people called him “Jim Stalin.” Harold offered to take Jimmy to Cuba, but still, the boy refused. He was about to tell him about the poison when his son backed away from him with a look of contempt stamped on his face. He saw his father as a deserter, and wanted nothing to do with him.

  Tommy saw Brian Davis. He was standing next to his dad with his arms crossed, watching the defecting group, watching Tommy, with huge, scared eyes. This was the third act of their Creature Feature, when the heroes finally triumphed over the monster. They could make it this time.

  He beckoned for Brian to join him. But Brian’s father, a true believer, was standing right next to him, ready to grab his son’s elbow and physically prevent him from doing so. Brian was only sixteen. He wasn’t free to do what he wanted. He was just a kid. He looked miserable, and shook his head sadly at Tommy.

  “Good-byes” and “See you laters” seemed beside the point. There was no time to waste; the departing residents sensed that the longer they tarried, the more danger they were in. The crowd seethed with fear and anger. One woman pressed a note into Beverly Oliver’s hands: “Keep your damn mouth shut,” it read.

  Those who stayed behind blamed those who were leaving for breaking ranks and provoking Jones, yet many longed to join them. The NBC crew filmed residents as they huddled in doorways, conferring in whispers, their eyes darting back and forth, chewing their cuticles to the quick.

  As the Parks family walked past the camera toward the waiting dump truck, a woman announced over the loudspeakers: “Bonnie Simon, Bonnie Simon: Please come to the radio room.” The camera cut to the Simon family. Al, his f
ather José, and Al’s three kids were walking toward the dump truck. Then the camera panned to Bonnie as she rushed over to yank Alvin Jr. from his grandfather’s arms. She turned to shriek at her husband, striding toward the truck with Summer in his arms and Crystal trotting beside him:

  “You bring those kids back here! Don’t you take my kids!”

  He kept walking.

  “Mother!” Bonnie called in desperation. Marceline came over to calm her and José picked up his grandson and cradled him against his chest. The camera zoomed in on their faces: the grandfather’s grimly determined, the boy’s eyes wide with anguish. José caught up to Al, and the two men marched shoulder to shoulder toward the truck, casting nervous glances behind them.

  They almost made it.

  Charles Garry intervened. Al couldn’t just take the kids, he said. Congressman Ryan volunteered to stay behind to negotiate the matter.

  At two-thirty, the newsmen and fourteen defectors were standing in the truck bed, anxious to go. It was still dripping rain. Stanley’s friend Eddie Crenshaw was the driver. He kept getting out of the cab and going over to talk to Jones and the security guards at the edge of the playground, even as the defectors yelled for him to pull out. They worried that Jones would kill them right there. Finally, the truck started rolling, but Eddie deliberately drove the massive tires into a ditch. As they waited for the bulldozer to pull them out, shouts erupted from the pavilion. The reporters jumped out and sprinted over. They found Congressman Ryan with blood on his shirt. As he was discussing the Simon custody problem with the lawyers, a burly ex-Marine named Don Sly came up behind him and pressed a knife to his throat, shouting, “Motherfucker, you are going to die!” The lawyers pulled Sly off, and he cut his own hand during the struggle.

  Jones watched the altercation as if he were in a trance. “I wish I had been killed,” he muttered.

  “You get that man arrested,” an angry Ryan told him.

  “Does this change things?” Jones asked.

  Ryan said it wouldn’t—as long as Sly was detained, he wouldn’t recommend further investigations of the camp.

  Ryan assumed that his position as a United States congressman would grant him respect and protection in Jonestown. The newsmen and relatives thought his presence would grant them safety as well. Now, as Ryan brushed himself off, Dwyer urged him to get out of Jonestown immediately. Not only might he be assaulted again, but his very presence could be a catalyst for violence; surrounding them were hundreds of people, some with openly hostile faces. Dwyer decided he’d better escort Ryan to the airstrip himself before returning to sort out the custody matter.

  NBC filmed Ryan walking toward the dump truck. His face was grim. He carried his briefcase in one hand, and his soiled shirt was unbuttoned to the waist, exposing his soft white middle. A last-minute defector shuffled alongside him in a long green poncho. It was Larry Layton, Debbie Blakey’s brother and a known Jones loyalist. Speier found it odd that Layton, who had sought her out a few hours earlier to state how happy he was in Jonestown, was now claiming the exact opposite. Some defectors had seen Layton whispering with Jones by the playground; the two men had even hugged. They insisted he was a plant; he wasn’t even carrying any luggage, they pointed out. But the American officials had no choice but to take his declarations at face value; they offered safe passage to anyone who wanted to leave.

  The six-mile drive to the airstrip took forever. Halfway out of Jonestown, over the defectors’ vehement protests, the truck stopped so the NBC crew could film more b-roll. Jim Bogue told Tommy to grab his sisters and head for the jungle if anything went down. When they got to the front entrance, the gate was closed, and a security guard with a pistol hanging from his jeans hopped on the running board and ordered the passengers to spread out. It was Joe Wilson, looking for his wife, Leslie, who’d fled into the bush with their toddler son and nine others that morning. He stayed hanging off the truck, glowering at everyone, all the way to the airstrip.

  There were no planes waiting for them, despite Dwyer’s request. Anxiety spiked again. Don Harris took advantage of the lag to interview Ryan.

  “All of a sudden we had a whole lot of people at the last minute who wanted to go, who suddenly rushed forward and said, ‘We want to leave,’ ” Ryan said. He’d been taking down their names when Sly jumped him.

  “What do you intend to do now?” Harris asked.

  “Put it all together,” Ryan said.

  After fifteen minutes, a five-seat Cessna appeared overhead and landed. It was followed, several minutes later, by a twenty-seat Guyana Airways Twin Otter. As the defectors loaded their gear onto the planes, they noticed Layton talking to Joe Wilson. The two men shook hands under Layton’s rain poncho, then Layton sat by himself with a “long, weird stare on his face,” a survivor later testified. Their agitation grew as they watched the tractor trailer arrive and drive down the side of the airstrip to park 200 yards away from them. Eddie Crenshaw drove the dump truck over to it. A dozen or so Jonestown guards stood around the two vehicles surveying the departing party.

  “I think we’ve got trouble,” Harris said to his colleagues.

  Speier was jotting down seat assignments on a piece of paper. There weren’t enough seats to fly all thirty people out, so some reporters would have to wait until the following day, she announced. The newsmen protested; each wanted to file his story first.

  Layton ambled over and insisted on being seated on the Cessna. Speier paused; that was the plane she planned on taking. She took Ryan aside and said she didn’t trust Layton, so the congressman suggested she ride on the Otter instead. At the defectors’ insistence, Ryan patted Layton down for weapons. He didn’t find anything. Layton climbed aboard the Cessna followed by Dale Parks, his twelve-year-old sister Tracy, Monica Bagby, and Vernon Gosney.

  The other defectors boarded the Otter as Speier tried to coax out an Amerindian child who’d scuttled up the gangway. The journalists stood on the tarmac, still arguing about who should get a seat, when they heard the tractor-trailer’s diesel motor gunning toward them above the plane’s twin engines and turned.

  The tractor stopped about thirty feet away, parallel to the plane. The driver, Stanley Gieg, a nineteen-year-old from the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek, waved away Guyanese bystanders as six men who were hidden in the trailer bed stood up, holding guns. They jumped to the ground, and shot out the Otter’s front wheel before training their weapons on people.

  Tommy was sitting directly in front of the open door. “Duck down!” Harold Cordell shouted. Patty Parks, forty-four, buckled into the seat in front of Tommy, didn’t move fast enough. She was hit in the back of the head, and her brain landed on the empty seat next to her. Tommy jumped up to close the gangway, putting himself in the line of fire. He knew they’d all die if he didn’t. But the mechanism was too heavy. Teena rushed to help him and together they pulled it up as bullets zinged around them. When Tommy sat back down, he noticed his left calf was bleeding profusely from tiny holes riddling his flesh; he’d taken a shotgun blast, and Teena had been shot in the leg by a .22.

  Outside, Ryan ran around the plane’s nose and crumpled to the dirt. “I’ve been shot!” he yelled. He grabbed his neck and wrapped his body around the front tire, trying to shield himself from the bullets. NBC cameraman Bob Brown bravely continued to record the attack until a slug burrowed into his leg; he groaned as he was hit, and an instant later, the film dissolved into gray static. The gunmen walked among the wounded, shooting them at point-blank range, killing Bob Brown, Greg Robinson, Don Harris, and Leo Ryan—the only congressman to be assassinated while in office.

  At the far end of the runway, the Cessna was also under siege. Larry Layton pulled out a .38 revolver hidden in his clothing and seriously wounded Bagby and Gosney before his gun jammed. Dale Parks wrested it from Layton and punched him in the face, subduing him. He gave the gun to Dwyer, who’d been shot in the thigh but was still mobile. The diplomat asked a bystander to drive Layton to the police
station, and on the way to Port Kaituma, Layton begged, unsuccessfully, to be brought to Jonestown instead.

  Witnesses would later say that as the tractor-trailer drove back to the settlement, the men riding it smiled and flashed victory signs at onlookers.

  CHAPTER 27

  END

  After the shooters left, Tommy lowered the Otter’s door and stepped cautiously down the gangway. Under the plane, bodies, blood, and brains were spewed everywhere. Some on the ground survived by playing dead when the assailants delivered the coups de grace, but they were badly wounded. The survivors started to regroup when someone yelled, “They’re coming back!”

  “Run!” Jim Bogue told his son. Tommy grabbed his sister Teena and sprinted toward the shade line of the jungle.

  After the defectors left, Marceline got on the loudspeaker. She assured residents that everything was okay, and instructed them to return to their quarters to freshen up for dinner.

  Garry and Lane dropped their shared enmity and took a walk together to discuss the day’s events. Garry mentioned that he hadn’t seen Gene Chaikin all weekend, and Lane told him about the drugged sandwiches, among other alarming things he’d learned from his now-client Teri Buford.

  Around five o’clock, Jim McElvane and another Jones loyalist, Jack Beam, tracked down the lawyers and asked them pointed questions about the defections. Jones wanted to know if his legal team still supported him. Garry started to criticize the lack of free expression in the community when Jones’s voice came over the PA system, summoning residents to the pavilion. A few seconds later, the walkways were flooded by a river of people. As they passed Garry and Lane, many smiled and called out greetings. McElvane, apparently not content with the lawyers’ answers, ordered the men to accompany him to meet with the Temple leader.