A Thousand Lives

by Julia Scheeres

  “I know you want to go, but I can’t do it,” she said. She asked him to put her in her mother’s arms. At the table, she picked up a paper cup and threw it back as if it were a shot of whiskey. There was chaos at the end; no one noticed that Stanley didn’t drink himself. He put an arm around her and guided her out of the pavilion. As they walked, she kept saying, “I’m okay, I’m okay.” They got about five yards onto the grass when she started convulsing. He picked her up, struggling to hold her churning body. Her breath became a high squeak, and then she went slack. He found her family; her mother was lying on her back between her two sisters. He lowered Janice facedown onto her mom’s chest and put one of her arms around her mom’s waist before kissing her cheek and standing.

  Some of the guards were eyeing him with suspicion. He walked back into the pavilion and sat down on a bench, mind racing, trying to develop a plan. A guard grabbed the man sitting next to him and shoved him toward the vat. Stanley got to his feet and began to move backward through the crowd, from side to side, biding his time. There were only about one hundred fifty people left. Many just sat on benches with vacant eyes, shell-shocked, as nurses walked among them, plunging needles into their arms. He saw one woman fight the guards; a nurse came up and injected her. An old man was led up to the table several times, and each time, he turned around and walked back to his seat. Finally he, too, was injected; Stanley watched him fall to the dirt floor, crying, alone.

  Stanley walked into the field, where he saw Dr. Schacht pressing a stethoscope to people’s chests to make sure they were dead. Phyllis Chaikin was helping him. When a guard asked him where he was going, Stanley said he was looking for Eddie Crenshaw; they were going to “cross over” together.

  “Ed’s dead,” the guard said. Stanley had suspected as much. He pretended to head back to the pavilion. He came to the line of guards with crossbows and recognized a woman he was friendly with named Marie Lawrence. She looked scared.

  “If you feel like a rabbit, do like the rabbits do,” Stanley told her. She stepped back and drew her bow at him.

  Jones told the remaining residents to exchange a final embrace, so Stanley walked to the line of guards armed with guns and started hugging them good-bye. At the end of the line was Forrest Ray Jones, the husband of Jones’s adopted daughter Agnes. Stanley had his fist cocked to punch him and try to make a break for it when he noticed activity in the school tent.

  “I’m gonna tell them good-bye,” Stanley said, motioning toward the tent. Forrest let him through. He took a few steps and looked back. Forrest wasn’t watching him, so he sprinted into the darkness. He reached a field and kept tripping over rows of vegetables, falling and cursing, and getting up and running.

  When he was a safe distance away, he hid behind a bush. After a long silence, he heard cheers coming from somewhere in the settlement, perhaps from the Temple leaders, who’d retired to Jones’s cabin for a final cyanide toast. He started walking back toward the pavilion when he heard a series of shots, probably someone killing the community’s dogs and Mr. Muggs, the chimpanzee. He hid again. Lights blazed in the pavilion, the medical offices, and a few cabins. After another hour or so, he went to his cottage to collect some clothes and photos of Janice. Then he went to the office, which was about fifty yards in front of the pavilion, to search for his passport. He turned on the light. They were in a crate in alphabetical order, and he quickly found his. As he took it, he heard a single loud shot nearby and slapped off the light.

  He crouched, breathing heavily. But there were no footsteps. No one barged through the door. After a waiting a few minutes, he got up and sprinted away.

  After watching his people die in agony and indignity, Jones must have spent a few moments taking in the scene before him. The camp was quiet, except for the occasional call of night birds. As he surveyed the bodies at his feet, he surely must have recalled that Sunday in Indianapolis, decades before, when he asked his congregants to lie on the floor for him. There weren’t many that day, only a dozen or so. Now almost a thousand bodies lay prostrate before him.

  It would be interesting to know his last, drug-addled thoughts before he placed the barrel of his .38 Smith & Wesson revolver to his right temple and pulled the trigger. This was probably the shot Stanley heard from the office. Was Jones satisfied with his handiwork? We’ll never know. He did, however, accomplish his long-cherished goal: He went down in history. Not as a great socialist leader, but as a madman, the architect of the largest mass murder-suicide in modern times.

  The road out of Jonestown was the longest road Stanley Clayton would take in his life. He ran blindly in the dark, slipping in the mud and trying to keep his precious photos from getting dirty, half-expecting to hear the dump truck’s diesel engine gunning behind him.

  He’d lost everything. The family who’d buoyed him up, who kept him from becoming a career criminal, who taught him that black was beautiful, and, more important, that black was powerful. Certainly he’d hated many aspects of Jonestown. Jones and his guards had become cruel tyrants. But there were also all the brothers and sisters who loved and supported him, who accepted him for who he was. And Janice, with her pure heart and megawatt smile. Now they were all dead, and the only thing he had to show for his years in the Temple were a couple of photographs. Eventually, he’d lose those, too.

  CHAPTER 28

  BODIES

  As the massacre was underway, a female radio operator in Jonestown, most likely Maria Katsaris, radioed Lamaha Gardens in Georgetown, and in a heavily coded message, passed along Jones’s final order for all Temple members to kill themselves.

  US Embassy Consul Doug Ellice intercepted it. He’d been monitoring radio transmissions between Jonestown and Georgetown throughout the day on November 18 to keep tabs on the congressman’s visit, and he recorded several of them, including Dwyer’s request for a second plane. He grew alarmed, however, when, shortly after five o’clock, the Jonestown operator grew strident and she started speaking in code. “A lot of people have seen Mr. Fraser,” she said. “I think Mrs. Brownfield has offered to help … get S.B. to help.” She repeated the peculiar message several times, and Ellice wrote it down before calling Ambassador John Burke to inform him that something strange was happening in Jonestown. The two men were puzzling over the cryptic messages when they got word of the airstrip attack.

  Eventually the FBI would decipher the code: “A lot of people have died; do whatever you can to even the score… . Get Sandy Bradshaw to help.” This was Jones’s order to Temple leaders in Georgetown and San Francisco to enact the last stand and begin murdering Temple enemies—defectors, politicians, and critics—before killing themselves.

  Ellice also heard the Jonestown radio operator tell Sharon Amos to take her children to see “Mr. Fraser,” and Amos’s reply that she didn’t have any “vehicles” to do it. The Jonestown operator then switched to Morse code, tapping out “K.N.I.F.E.” Amos herded her three children—Liane, twenty-one, Christa, eleven and Martin, ten—into an upstairs bathroom, where she used a butcher knife to slit her two younger kids’ throats before helping Liane press the blade against her own neck. She murmured, “Thank you, Father,” before collapsing. With difficulty, Liane then cut her own throat.

  The killing stopped there. Although the Jonestown operator had ordered the basketball team, which was in Georgetown for a tournament and was comprised primarily of Jonestown security guards, including Stephan and Jim Jones Jr., to go to the Pegasus hotel and kill the Concerned Relatives, Stephan refused to follow the directive, and also called Temple leaders in San Francisco to dissuade them from enacting the last stand in California.

  At first only 409 Jonestown residents were reported dead. US Army helicopters buzzed the jungle searching for survivors, as soldiers on board called over loudspeakers that it was “safe to come out.” Back in the States, relatives grasped at straws, certain that their loved ones had managed to escape. But when the soldiers started removing the corpses, they found bodies stacked on bodie
s, parents on top of children. The number rose to 909.

  Guyana’s chief medical examiner, Leslie Mootoo, who flew up to Jonestown on November 20, estimated that at least seventy bodies showed signs of puncture wounds on their upper arms, and deduced that many residents had been forcibly injected with cyanide.

  In Jones’s cabin, thirteen bodies were found, including those of John Victor Stoen, Carolyn Layton and her son Kimo, Maria Katsaris, Jim McElvane, Dick Tropp, Annie Moore, and several other Temple leaders. All died from poisoning except Moore, who both ingested the cyanide and was shot in the head. Guyanese police found a .357 Ruger Magnum beside her body, along with her suicide note.

  “I am at this point right now so embittered against the world that I don’t know why I am writing this,” it read. She called Jonestown “the most peaceful, loving community that every existed” and Jones the “most honest, loving, caring, concerned person” she’d ever met.

  “We died because you would not let us live in peace,” she wrote in her last sentence, believing, to the end, Jones’s claims of harassment.

  Dick Tropp, the former English instructor, wrote a longer note. Like Moore, he continued to spin reality even as hundreds of people agonized in death throes a few hundred yards away.

  Nov. 18, 1978—The Last Day of Peoples Temple

  To Whomever Finds This Note:

  Collect all the tapes, all the writing, all the history. The story of this movement, this action, must be examined over and over. It must be understood in all of its incredible dimensions. Words fail. We have pledged our lives to this great cause. We are proud to have something to die for. We do not fear death. We hope that the world will someday realize the ideals of brotherhood, justice and equality that Jim Jones has lived and died for. We have all chosen to die for this cause. We know there is no way that we can avoid misinterpretation. But Jim Jones and this movement were born too soon. The world was not ready to let us live.

  As I write these words people are silently amassed, taking a quick potion, inducing sleep, relief. We are a long-suffering people. Many of us are weary with a long search, a long struggle—going back not only in our own lifetime, but a long painful heritage. (Please see the histories of our people that are in a building called teachers resource center.)

  Many of us are now dead. Each moment, another passes over to peace. We are begging only for some understanding. It will take more than small minds, reporters’ minds, to fathom these events. Something must come of this.

  There is quiet as we leave this world. The sky is gray. People file slowly and take the somewhat bitter drink. Many more must drink… .

  We did not want it this way. All was going well as Ryan completed [his] first day here. Then a man tried to attack him, unsuccessfully, at the same time, several set out into the jungle wanting to overtake Ryan, [his] aide, and others who left with him. They did, and several [were] killed. When we heard this, we had no choice. We would be taken. We have to go as one, we want to live as Peoples Temple, or end it. We have chosen. It is finished.

  Hugging & kissing & tears & silence & joy in a long line.

  A tiny kitten sits next to me. Watching. A dog barks. The birds gather on the telephone wires. Let all the story of this Peoples Temple be told. Let all the books be opened. This sight … o terrible victory.

  If nobody understands, it matters not. I am ready to die now. Darkness settles over Jonestown on its last day on earth.

  Poetic yes, but also riddled with errors, outright lies, and ignorance—willful or not. There were no soldiers poised to storm the camp; the death scene was anything but peaceful.

  The police found another four bodies inside the special care unit; one of them was surely that of Gene Chaikin. One wonders what Jones’s aides told the shut-in seniors and sick bay patients—that the poison was just a little medicine? One wonders whether Phyllis Chaikin stopped helping Dr. Schacht long enough to hug her and Gene’s children good-bye.

  Most Americans heard about Jonestown for the first time the next evening, when the networks interrupted their regular programming with special reports on the massacre. The news from Guyana was sketchy in the beginning, and so were the broadcasts, which announced that a “strange religious” cult had ambushed Congressman Ryan and his party. Over the following days and weeks, the mass murder-suicide would generate thousands of new stories worldwide, and photographs of the bodies would appear on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Both used the same headline: Cult of Death.

  One reporter arriving at the scene by helicopter would say that, from the air, the colorfully dressed bodies looked like a patchwork quilt. Others were less charitable and portrayed Jonestown residents as brainwashed zombies. They were deemed monsters, and therefore deserving of their fate. It was far easier to condemn Jones’s victims than to comprehend them.

  In San Francisco, crowds gathered outside the Geary Boulevard Temple shouting “Baby killers!” at Temple members who’d gathered inside to comfort one other. Television crews knocked on the door, telling associate pastor Guy Young, “We heard you’re going to commit suicide, and we want to film it.” Some members were followed by FBI agents. Others, returning from Guyana penniless and hungry, were denied welfare and food stamps.

  Guyana refused the United States’ request to bury the 909 bodies in situ, so the Army flew in its Grave Registration Unit to retrieve them. By then the corpses had lain in the jungle sun and rain for four days and were bloated to the point of bursting. Soldiers placed them in body bags using snow shovels and loaded them into the cavernous hold of a C-141 Starlifter, which flew them to Dover Air Force base in Delaware for processing. Army forensic examiners were only able to identify 631 of the 913 dead, or 69 percent of the bodies. More than two hundred children would never be identified; their small bodies decayed faster than the adults’, and many did not have dental or fingerprint records.

  Of the identified dead, only about half were buried by their relatives. Some families didn’t claim their dead because they were too poor to pay for transportation and interment; others were ashamed that a family member had fallen prey to a “suicidal cult.”

  The bodies of 408 victims are buried in a mass grave at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland. Most of these are children; the babies were buried two to a casket. Marilee Bogue, who was last seen in Jones’s cottage playing with John John and Kimo after her family left, is also buried at Evergreen, as are the three George siblings, David, Phillip, and Gabriela. After the massacre, their oldest sister, Valita, spent a day at the camp turning over bodies, but she failed to locate their remains.

  The bodies of Jim and Marceline Jones were cremated, and their ashes scattered over the Atlantic.

  Edith Roller, Body 89-D, was identified by a fingerprint match with her US Department of State ID card. Her sisters had her remains cremated. Sadly, just as Edith had feared, her family viewed her supposed suicide as an indication of her mental instability.

  CHAPTER 29

  SURVIVORS

  Tommy Bogue hit the jungle with Teena and kept on running. Following at their heels were Brenda and Tracy Parks, and Brenda’s boyfriend, Chris O’Neil. The small holes peppering Tommy’s calf hemorrhaged blood, but adrenaline propelled him forward; he was terrified the attackers were returning to finish them off.

  Remembering the skills the Amerindians taught him, Tommy led the group in circles and walked up streams to keep the trackers at bay. But he was missing the primary survival tool: a knife. Without one, he couldn’t build a shelter, make a snare, or drink from the vine with the tea-flavored sap.

  At the Port Kaituma rum shop where the other airstrip survivors had taken refuge, Jim Bogue told reporters he wasn’t worried about Tommy. “He knows the bush,” he said proudly. “He’ll lead out those other kids who ran with him.” He didn’t know, of course, that his son was badly wounded.

  By the second day, Tommy was delirious from blood loss. The kids spent most of their time hiding behind trees. Tommy would lead the group toward a light in the d
istance, thinking it was a way out of the jungle, only to find it was a light well created by an opening in the canopy.

  On the third morning, Tommy was at a loss. He didn’t know which way to go. He imagined he saw a man leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette. He thought he saw people jumping from trees into the river. He heard bird calls and thought they were signals made by their assailants, communicating their positions to each other as they zeroed in for the kill. The world’s largest beasts no longer terrified him; his church brethren were the ones who wanted to murder him.

  His leg began to smell like rotten meat. Maggots infested the bullet holes. It was hard to walk. Toward noon the group heard the faint hum of a generator, and Tommy sent the Parks girls and O’Neil to investigate it; he and Teena were too weak to walk any farther. When the trio didn’t return for several hours, he feared the worst.

  Then he heard the splashing of boat oars, and someone calling his name in a lilting Guyanese accent: “Tommy Bogue! Tommy Bogue!” He and Teena waded into the river and crouched behind a log. When the canoe slid into view, he recognized Sorrel, one of the Amerindians who’d taught him to survive the jungle.

  His rescuers carried him on a stretcher to the Port Kaituma rum shop, and for the second time in his life, he saw his dad cry.

  Hyacinth Thrash opened her cottage door on the morning of November 19 and walked out into brilliant sunshine. Usually, she heard Mr. Muggs, the chimpanzee, grunting in his cage, which was only a few yards from her cottage, but on this morning she was greeted by a deep stillness.

  The evening before, she’d heard people outside her cottage calling for Rheaviana Beam, and then a gunshot. She thought Rheaviana, who’d also followed Jones from Indiana, might have been playing hooky and that the guards had fired a weapon to flush her out. But when Zipporah and her other roommates didn’t return from the meeting, Hy grew worried that Jonestown had indeed been invaded by mercenaries, and she crawled under her bed to hide. It wasn’t difficult for her to compact herself into the reduced space: she’d lost thirty-three pounds in Jonestown and weighed a mere eighty-nine pounds. During the long night she got uncomfortable, however, and crawled into her bed.