DEBORAH LAYTON
Seductive Poison
Deborah Layton was born in Tooele, Utah, in 1953. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and attended high school in Yorkshire, England. After her escape from Jonestown, Guyana, in May 1978, she worked as an assistant on the trading floor for an investment banking firm in San Francisco until she resigned in 1996 to begin writing Seductive Poison. Layton lives in Piedmont, California, where she is raising her daughter.
For
Lauren Elizabeth,
my daughter,
who asked tough questions and gave me the strength to go
back and face the darkness
In memory of my mother, Lisa Philip Layton,
her mother before her, Anita Philip,
and
the nine hundred thirteen innocent children, teenagers, and families
who perished,
wholly deceived, in Jonestown
Contents
Foreword by Charles Krause
Prologue
ONE
1. Secrets and Shadows
2. Exiled
3. Lost and Found
4. Indoctrination
5. Father Loves Us
6. Resurrection
7. Bad Press
TWO
8. Exodus to Paradise
9. Guyana—The Promised Land
10. Welcome to Jonestown
11. Hints of Madness
12. Dark Days—White Nights
13. Sickly Ascension
14. Forsaking Mama
15. Escaping Paradise
16. No Place to Hide
17. Emergency Standby
THREE
18. Doesn’t Anyone Hear Me?
19. Descent into the Abyss
20. Hope Extinguished, November 18, 1978
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Foreword
CHARLES KRAUSE
In April 1978, Debbie Layton Blakey was still in Jonestown as I was taking up my new assignment for the Washington Post in Buenos Aires. We didn’t know each other then, nor would we meet for many years to come. Yet our lives would soon be intertwined.
That spring twenty years ago, Debbie, increasingly worried about conditions in Jonestown, was about to make a decision that would reverberate around the world; I was a young reporter intrigued by the prospect of covering wars and revolution in Latin America. Buenos Aires was my first foreign assignment after having spent five years covering local politics in the Washington suburbs.
I knew that reporting, especially from countries where leftist guerrillas were battling right-wing military governments, and where the press was often suspect, could be dangerous. But no one had ever mentioned cults—or being shot at by Americans. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that in April 1978 no one at the Washington Post—or probably in Washington—had ever heard of the Peoples Temple or Jonestown.
As I was en route to Buenos Aires from the United States, it is entirely possible that my Pan Am flight overflew Guyana, the former British colony turned socialist Co-operative Republic of Guyana, located—“lost” might be a better word—on the northeast bulge of South America.
I had no way of knowing that down below, Debbie Layton, her mother, and some nine hundred other Americans were living as virtual prisoners in the Guyanese rain forest; Jonestown, the Utopia they had been promised before they left San Francisco, was essentially a Potemkin village. Nor was there any way I could possibly have known that seven months after arriving in Buenos Aires, I would be shot and nearly killed because of the fateful decision Debbie would make in May 1978 to escape from Jonestown—to seek help for her mother and for the hundreds of other members of the Peoples Temple she believed were being held in the jungle camp against their will.
There were probably many things that could have triggered Jonestown’s fiery end. But, sadly, it was Debbie’s decision to escape and seek help that became the catalyst for what is still perhaps the most bizarre and tragic episode in the history of American religious movements and messianic cults—the mass suicide-murder of more than nine hundred of Jim Jones’s followers on November 18, 1978.
For weeks, Jonestown would remain front-page news, not only in the United States but around the world. Even today, I suspect there are few Americans over the age of thirty who don’t remember where they were when they first heard that more than nine hundred of their countrymen had killed themselves, having drunk Flavour-aide laced with cyanide, in a place called Jonestown.
At the time, as horrified and as fascinated as they were, it was easy for most Americans to dismiss the Peoples Temple as a bunch of “crazies”—people not like us—and to dismiss what happened in Jonestown as solely the result of religious fanaticism, or the craziness of the times, or the bizarre hold of charismatic leaders like Jim Jones and, more recently, David Koresh and Marshall Applewhite, on a particular group of ignorant, emotionally needy, confused, or simply naïve followers.
Yet Jonestown did not happen in a vacuum.
Cults and cult-like groups had begun to proliferate during the 1960s in the United States, in reaction to the profound political, social, and sexual revolutions then under way. For many Americans, especially many young Americans, the civil rights and antiwar movements provided a very real sense of liberation. Yet others could not cope with the new freedom and the consequent disintegration of family structures, institutions, and traditional values.
Drugs, sex, rock ’n’ roll, dropping in and dropping out, all became a part of the new culture. But nobody was supposed to get hurt. There weren’t supposed to be consequences. So the awful reality that hundreds of Americans—men, women, and children—had died of cyanide poisoning in the Guyanese rain forest came as a real shock, even to those enveloped in their own psychedelic haze.
Instantly, “Jonestown” entered the lexicon, an ominous warning to all those Americans who sought meaning for their lives, and “truth,” by experimenting with all manner of quasi-religious, quasi-psychological, quasi-libertarian, or quasi-authoritarian self-help movements and cults. Jonestown would demonstrate in bold relief just how dangerous these groups—and their leaders—could be.
In December 1977, when Debbie Layton arrived in Jonestown from California for the first time, she had already been a member of the Peoples Temple for nearly seven years. Indeed, she was one of Jim Jones’s favorites, a member of the inner circle. Yet it did not take her very long to conclude that Jonestown was not the idyllic refuge she and all the others had been told it was before they got there.
Just twenty-four at the time, Debbie quickly realized that she and the others had been deliberately deceived; Jonestown was essentially a concentration camp in the jungle. Unlike many Temple members, though, Debbie was clear-headed enough to recognize that Jim Jones, the man they had given their lives to and had believed in without reservation, was increasingly paranoid, psychotic, and dangerous. That process of realization led her to contemplate trying to escape, even if that meant risking her life and leaving behind her mother, terminally ill with cancer, who had herself escaped from Nazi Germany forty years before.
The parallels—and ironies—are chilling. Both Debbie and her mother, Lisa, were obviously tough and intelligent women, survivors alert to the very real dangers around them. Yet both were, initially at least, taken in by Jones, the false prophet they chose to believe and follow, just as many German Jews of Lisa’s parents’ generation were somehow deluded into thinking that Hitler would never carry out his threats against them.
Neither Debbie nor her mom was deranged. Nor were they unstable women abnormally susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic preacher/politician. People join cults unwittingly. Even reasonable, intelligent people can be fooled by demagogue
s, and too often, the deeper they become involved in one of these quasi-religious or quasi-political groups, the more difficult it may be to see the potential dangers. As Debbie makes clear in this memoir, both she and her mother were searching for a life with meaning—not unlike so many other Americans at that time and since. Except that their search led them to the Peoples Temple and Jim Jones. Having escaped from the Nazis, it was Lisa’s fate to die in Jonestown.
During the few hours I was in Jonestown, it became apparent to me that there were a variety of reasons why people had joined the Peoples Temple. For some, it was a political statement; Jones offered the promise of a socialist society free of materialism and racism at a time when such a society was particularly attractive. For others, the Temple offered religion, structure, and discipline—a way to escape the violence of the ghetto and the dead end of alcohol and drugs (which were strictly forbidden).
But Jones cleverly manipulated both his followers and public perceptions of what he and the Peoples Temple were all about, and that is the larger lesson yet to be widely understood. In both California and Guyana, the Peoples Temple was allowed to become a state within a state, enjoying the privileges, and acquiring the legitimacy, that allowed it to thrive over many years. Meanwhile, that legitimacy hid Jones’s increasing paranoia and his increasingly erratic demands for control and for power.
The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to investigate religious organizations, even when, as was the case with the Peoples Temple, they deliberately seek political power to shield their immoral and illicit practices from investigation. Jim Jones was a Housing Commissioner in San Francisco, courted by the mayor, the governor, and Rosalynn Carter, even while he was raping young members of his church, stealing their parents’ money, staging fake “healings” to impress the ignorant, and threatening, perhaps even murdering, those who attempted to defect from the Temple.
Jones’s appeal to the politicians may be difficult to understand now, but it was simple—and he understood it better than they did. In 1968 the Democratic National Convention and Mayor Daley had put the final nail in the coffin of old-fashioned political machines in the United States. But to win, politicians still had to campaign and get out the vote on Election Day. Jim Jones was smart enough to identify the void; in the political free-for-all that was San Francisco in the 1970s, he had the only political machine in town.
Because he had absolute control over his own followers, Jones could, and did, produce legions of campaign workers for favored candidates, then made sure their supporters got to the polls on Election Day. Shiva Naipaul, whose book Black and White is, in many ways, the best examination of the politics of the Peoples Temple, describes the peculiar political culture in which it thrived. Among his many questions, Naipaul asked Jones’s political allies if they felt they had been taken in by him.
Strangely enough, what Naipaul found was that Willie Brown and most of the others with whom he talked were unapologetic, even a year after having lost more than nine hundred of their constituents to cyanide poisoning in the Guyanese jungle. How could they have known? Did they have an obligation to find out? These were questions that didn’t seem to register with Brown and the others.
Jim Jones was always a charlatan. But his delusions and paranoia grew more pronounced as he grew more powerful. The same could be said for the jungle retreat in Guyana. Whatever its initial reason for being, over the years it evolved into a terrible charade where appearances and reality grew further and further apart.
To the outside world, Jonestown was portrayed as a kind of multiracial kibbutz populated by willing pioneers determined to forge a new life in one of the world’s most remote and inhospitable environments. Visitors, including consular officers from the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown, Guyana’s fetid capital, were fooled into believing that Jonestown’s residents were well fed and well cared for.
In the end, it was the press, that other reviled institution protected by the First Amendment, not the prosecutors or the political establishment, which finally began to pierce the veil and reveal the truth about the Peoples Temple. Only then did Jim Jones flee California for Guyana, setting in motion the awful tragedy that would soon follow.
To me, that tragedy—the mass suicide-murder of more than nine hundred of Jim Jones’s followers and the bloody ambush that preceded it—seems as if it happened yesterday. I can still remember, vividly, the call from my editors in Washington several days before, telling me that a congressman from California, Leo J. Ryan, would be leaving California the next day to investigate “some crazy cult group” in Guyana.
I was in Caracas, interviewing voters and politicians for a story I was writing on Venezuela’s upcoming presidential election. The trip and the coverage had been approved, but now it could wait, I was told. We want you to meet up with the congressman. “It sounds like a more interesting story.”
I wasn’t entirely convinced. But the next day, I flew from Caracas to Trinidad, where the congressman’s flight from San Francisco and New York would stop en route to Guyana. It was nearly 10 P.M. as we took off on the final leg of that flight to Georgetown. For the next hour, I was told chilling stories about Jonestown.
According to a group of concerned relatives aboard the plane with Congressman Ryan, the Jonestown commune was a hellhole where armed guards, torture, tranquilizers, sleep deprivation, and, above all, misplaced faith had combined to trap hundreds of innocent people against their will. Jones was described as a good man gone bad, a charismatic figure who’d led his followers astray, a sadist, a megalomaniac, the Devil incarnate. People were starving in Jonestown, I was told; there wasn’t enough food, water, or medicine. Anyone who complained or expressed doubts was beaten or worse.
I listened. But I was skeptical. How could nearly a thousand Americans be tricked into leaving California for Guyana? How could they not have known what they were getting into? Could any of what I was being told possibly be true?
For three days, the congressman, his staff, the concerned relatives, and a small brigade of journalists, my colleagues, waited in Georgetown. Jones and his lawyers, Mark Lane and Charles Garry, did whatever they could to stop us from reaching the jungle commune, which was located about three hundred miles from the capital near a tiny Guyanese village called Port Kaituma.
Finally, on Friday, November 17, frustrated by what he perceived to be stalling tactics, the congressman announced that we would fly to Port Kaituma that afternoon and try to enter Jonestown, with—or without—Jones’s permission.
Yes, Jonestown was technically private property and, yes, the Peoples Temple was technically a religious institution located in a sovereign country. But the congressman said Jim Jones had no right to stop a United States congressman from determining for himself whether anyone in Jonestown was being seriously mistreated or held there against his or her will.
What I didn’t know at the time was that much of the congressman’s information, and urgency, was the result of an affidavit Debbie had written shortly after she escaped from Jonestown the previous May; in effect, it was Debbie who had convinced Congressman Ryan that the situation was serious enough that he should investigate, and the longer Jones stalled, the more determined the congressman became to reach Jonestown.
At about 4 P.M. that Friday, we boarded a tiny Guyanese Airways plane that had been specially chartered for the hourlong trip. There was room for no more than two dozen passengers, so most of the relatives were forced to remain behind. Although they didn’t think so at the time, in many ways they were fortunate. Just twenty-four hours later, the congressman and three of the journalists aboard the plane would be dead, and most of the rest of us wounded—victims of the mass hysteria that was about to ensue.
The airstrip at Port Kaituma was nothing more than a clearing in the jungle: no terminal or tower, no lights in case of darkness, and no mechanic in case of trouble. The landing strip wasn’t even paved—it was mud, like everything else in the ra
in forest.
Once on the ground, the congressman, his staff, and the two Temple lawyers were taken immediately to the commune, about five miles away. The rest of us were held at gunpoint by the local sheriff for about an hour, until Jones sent another dump truck to the airstrip; the relatives and all but one of us journalists would be allowed to proceed.
I will never forget my first impressions of Jonestown as we made our way through the simple wooden gate and continued down the long muddy road toward the central Pavilion. What I saw reminded me of a Southern plantation before the Civil War, not so much because of the architecture but because of the scene. To one side of the large wooden Pavilion was a communal kitchen where women, mostly black, were cooking large vats of stew; others were baking bread. Young children were playing in what appeared to be a schoolyard. Still other members of the Temple, black and white, young and old, were eating their dinner in and around the Pavilion, which served as both an open-air dining hall and a meeting place.
At the center of the Pavilion, seated at the head of a long table, was the white master, Jim Jones. He was an arresting man, his hair dyed jet black. Although he had a kind of commanding stature, it also quickly became clear that he was unnerved by our presence; as we journalists gathered round to ask questions, he responded rationally one minute, emotionally and irrationally the next.
“Threat, threat, threat of extinction,” he bellowed in response to a question about Debbie Layton and others who had defected. “I wish I wasn’t born at times. I understand hate; love and hate are very close. I wish I wasn’t born sometimes.”
Those were his words, recorded and played back many times since. Yet despite his odd behavior, there was no visible evidence of starvation, torture, or, initially at least, that Jonestown’s residents were desperate to leave. We saw no guns or signs of the kind of intimidation that the concerned relatives talked so much about. Considering its location, Jonestown itself was rather impressive.
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