I ached inside, but I did not cry.
“Beth, listen to me. I don’t plan to harm anyone. I just want to return to the U.S. and have my own life. One that only I will be in charge of. I want children, too, like you.”
“But your mother, Debbie. How can you desert her?” I could hear Jim’s directives seeping into her dialogue. She held me tighter, crying and begging me. “Please … Jim’s sick … he’s dying … just wait, Debbie. Oh God, why didn’t you talk to me first?” She wiped her nose.
“I couldn’t. You know that. I’m sorry. I will always …” I stopped. Karen was approaching us. Beth hastily pulled herself together.
“Wait, I have a message for you …” Beth caught her breath and I knew she was trying to repeat the exact words Father uttered to her. “It would ease the mind of the one who cares the most if you just keep in touch.” I looked away from her, out toward the airplane. “Debbie, it isn’t his fault. You never gave him a chance. You never told him. It’s not his fault that we aren’t perfect; you can’t blame him for that.”
“I’m not blaming him. I just don’t like some of the things going on out there.” I looked at Karen.
“You’ve never given him a chance.” Karen glared back at me.
“I shouldn’t have had to.”
I could see the consul urging me to hurry. It was time to board the plane. When Karen turned, I grabbed Beth’s hand. “Beth?”
“I know … me too, Luce,” she whispered, and rushed to catch up with Karen.
I was brokenhearted. The consul came rushing back for me, seized my arm, and pushed me forward, ahead of everyone to the front of the line. The agent opened the doors and pushed me outside. The consul stood back. I was alone out on the airstrip … ahead of the crowd.
I began to walk to the jet wondering why the consul was not at my side. No longer surrounded by people, I began to feel uneasy. The plane’s boarding ramp was fully extended. I reached the metal stairs and could feel their eyes watching me. The center of my back began to burn and I felt nauseated. I imagined a gun aimed at my spine. But I did not increase my pace. My steady, deliberate ascent was my statement to them.
“Welcome to Pan Am.” The stewardess directed me to a seat. “Would you like a blanket and pillow? You look exhausted.” With the pillow under my head and the blanket over my shoulders, I sat and waited for the other passengers to board. Thankful to be alive, I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. I knew I should be sad, that I should cry, but I felt absolutely nothing.
18
Doesn’t Anyone Hear Me?
The cabin shuddered slightly as we leveled off over the sapphire-blue Atlantic Ocean. Beth’s words echoed in my head. “For my sake, for Chioke’s … for the sake of our friends.” I was terrified that I might be sentencing my comrades to death.
I replayed the last forty-eight hours of my escape in my head. I’d been wise to be distrustful of the Embassy and not approach the consul prior to his visit to Jonestown. There was no doubt in my mind he would have half-wittedly divulged my identity. The whole situation had felt surreal from the moment I told the consul of our plan to blackmail him, through the fiasco with my passport stamp and the missing $10 bill. The embassy officials seemed to me like unschooled impostors in a Grandmasters’ chess tournament and each one of their moves had been absurdly orchestrated.
Dick McCoy had not taken my concerns seriously. Dan, too, had not grasped or considered the danger my life was in when he left me alone at the Tower Hotel. These two government officials, the people I had to depend on for my safety, who had to handle the repercussions of my defection in Jonestown, were completely oblivious to my warnings. Anxiously, I approached the consul, determined to get through to him. Dick McCoy had to know more … everything! I hadn’t told him about the foreign bank accounts, that I would be arrested, that I was on the wanted list of the CIA.
The consul looked less powerful sitting in the cramped space of the plane. Just another traveler on my flight back to safety. I tapped his shoulder and asked if we could talk further. He stared at me blankly as I recounted everything I could remember of importance. I spoke of the smuggling of firearms into Guyana, the diversion of funds to foreign bank accounts, the millions of dollars in assets held by the Temple, the millions in cash buried in Jonestown with mothballs to keep the bills from disintegrating. I spoke of the total control Jim had over all his followers and how no one could get out while everyone wanted to.
When the consul furrowed his brow in disbelief and asked why someone wishing to leave could not escape through the jungle, I explained, for the second time, about the presence of armed guards, Jim’s continual threats that the Guyanese would return any defectors, and the difficulty of escape through the tangled depths of the jungle. I advised him that even when someone from the American Embassy came to visit Jonestown to check up on the residents, there was not enough confidence in the ability of the official to take the resident out unharmed to warrant the risk.
I knew he didn’t believe me when he asked, “If it was so bad, how come people came? Wasn’t it of their own free will?”
I tried desperately to explain how all of us believed we were coming to a “Promised Land,” a paradise of freedom. Not one person thought they would be entering an armed camp and be forced into hard labor.
I told him I thought someone needed to help and asked if he thought I should go to the press. Perhaps my warnings would encourage a reexamination of the Jonestown situation. McCoy insisted I should not talk to the press. Rather, he said, I should approach the Customs agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
I wondered why he didn’t offer to assist me in these efforts. I was inexperienced and didn’t know who to call, and anyway, I explained to him, I would probably be arrested when we arrived in New York. He laughed.
“I’ve checked the Wanted List and your name’s not on it.”
Feeling ridiculous and ashamed, I returned to my seat. We arrived in New York at 11 P.M. Alone, I made my way to the hotel where Annalisa had made a reservation for me. I thought of Mama and our glass of wine at the restaurant. Suddenly I panicked and called Annalisa, whose number I remembered without difficulty now, to ask her to redirect my flight to Sacramento. I was certain the Temple would be lying in wait for me at the San Francisco airport. I also told her to call Larry immediately and tell him Jonestown was a prison camp, that he had to talk with me before he left. But I knew he’d probably already been told something that had thoroughly discredited me in his eyes. And I knew that I would have believed the same stories about Larry if our roles had been reversed.
Annalisa was superb. She left my original booking the same, under Deborah Layton Blakey, and booked me under Annie Moffitt, a childhood friend of mine, from New York to Sacramento. Still, within minutes of my arrival at her home in Davis, Pan Am called to ask if I had made it home safely. Obviously, airlines do not call to make sure that their passengers have arrived home safely and we realized the Temple was already looking for me. Annalisa, visibly shaken, immediately called our brother Tom, drove me back to the airport, hidden on her car’s floor, and sent me off to Los Angeles and into the safe care of my big brother.
Tom had arranged for us both to stay at one of his friend’s home in order to elude the Temple’s detectives. A Harvard-trained archaeologist, Tom debriefed me on tape for three long days. He asked me questions about the Temple, how I joined, what I believed, and where I had traveled to. He had always sensed that the Temple was suspicious if not dangerous and kept my first words as documentation.
My second night in America, I had the first of many haunting dreams about my escape. I had been running away from Jonestown with hundreds of people hanging by their hands from my outstretched arms and Mama and Mary holding onto my neck. I must have cried out because when I opened my eyes Tom was sitting on the bed next to me, stroking my hair.
“You’re home, Debsy … You’re in America now,” he whispered softly. The following morning
he told me of a story he had read about a concentration camp survivor who had pinned an American flag over his bed, so that when he awoke from a nightmare, he’d instantly know he was safe. I wondered how long it would take me to stop having nightmares and feel safe. Little did I know it would only take a few more months before Jim was dead and I had no more reason to fear for my life.
On my third day in America I called John, the angry voice I had heard in the Jonestown radio room demanding to speak with his family. His parents had joined in Indianapolis when he was only eleven and his sister was six. I had always trusted him. When he left for law school, his first chance ever to be away from the Temple, he had gained the clarity to leave. John’s defection had indelibly impressed upon Jim that no one, not even “almost blood” sons could remain loyal and resolute away from “Father’s aura.” John never gave up trying to get his family out.
I found his number through the operator. At first he was suspicious of me but said he was willing to fly to Los Angeles and talk to me. He would make an arrangement with Grace Stoen for his protection: If he did not call her every hour, she would contact the police. He told me of another member who had pretended to have escaped in order to infiltrate the Concerned Relatives as an informer for Jim.
I promised I was not sent to hurt him. Tom understood my need to speak to a former member, but he arranged to meet John at a place at the airport where he could first make sure that John had come alone. Everyone was afraid of everyone else … just as Jim had taught us.
That night, John became a beacon of light in the haze of my return to freedom. I felt drawn to his rational demeanor and his careful explanations about Jim and the Temple. He assured me that my fear of an FBI and CIA investigation of me was irrational. He wasn’t mean and he seemed comfortable with his decision to leave the organization. I believed he was the only one who could truly understand the massive confusion I was feeling and I wanted to talk on and on with him about what he knew.
I remained in hiding but I was impatient to live on my own, make my own decisions, and be with people who had lived and seen much the same as I. Four days later, with hours of our taped discussions in his possession, I convinced Tom that I needed to return to San Francisco and though he was concerned, he acquiesced.
On the way to the airport I saw a police car driving alongside us and I panicked.
“Oh my God! Watch out, Tom … There’s a police car!” I yelped.
“Debsy, honey, to me the sight of that car is reassuring.”
In that moment I realized for the first time just how skewed my perception of reality was and I wondered how I was going to make it in the strange new world. Could I ever escape my deeply ingrained fears? Did I even know how?
Finally home in the Bay Area, my reunion with Papa was tearful and filled with joy. But as he cried and asked me questions about Mama and Larry, I could feel Jim’s condemnations of him resonate within me. It had been a long time since I had considered him my father. It would take me many months to stop viewing him as “Old Man Layton” and trust him as I used to. Papa begged me to stay and live with him in our old house in Berkeley, but eager to begin a new and independent life in San Francisco, I declined.
The next thing I did was call Dick McCoy. It was May 17 and he was still in Washington, D.C. I urgently wanted to know whom he had informed, which agencies were now involved, and if he had sent my affidavit to the department heads at the State Department. But I could not get any answers from him. He tried to assure me that he had everything under control, and reiterated that I should not approach the press.
Fortunately, I had support from John and Grace and Tim Stoen. John and Grace had met me at the airport upon my return from my brother’s in Los Angeles. Grace was suspicious of me at first, but once we began talking she saw that I was genuinely afraid. Grace and John became mentors, guides back into a world I had not visited since I was sixteen. I pelted them with a thousand questions: Had the wretched CIA questioned them? Did the evil FBI hound and pester them? Had the Temple put a rattlesnake in their mailbox, too?
Grace laughed and called Jim a “lying asshole.” Like the sight of the police car in Los Angeles, Grace’s words alarmed and terrified me. I caught my breath and stood perfectly still, shocked that she could be so irreverent. Father had ceaselessly warned us that something bad would happen to us if we spoke blasphemously of him. I expected lightning to strike us dead. But nothing happened. My coffee hadn’t even spilled!
Grace proceeded to tell me just how many lies we’d been told. She started with her own son, John-John. “Tim is John’s biological father,” she said, then spoke in detail of Carolyn Layton’s son, Kimo. Many of Father’s clandestine missions had been visits to Carolyn’s secret apartment in Berkeley to see her and their newborn son. He had explained Carolyn’s year-long absence by saying that she had been arrested while on a mission to try to save the life of one of our members. He said she’d been tortured and raped in a Mexican jail, which spurred me to write her numerous heartfelt letters. When she came back after that year and I took care of Kimo, the product of her rape in Mexico, I never thought to question his blond hair and frightfully pale skin.
All those years I had mentally whipped myself for being selfish, for wishing I could have a relationship, dreaming of having a baby. While I tortured myself, wrote myself up, admitted to being imperfect, and yearned to be like Father, Jones was sneaking off to movies. While the rest of us stayed up all night counseling troubled members, he was in Hawaii vacationing. I listened to Grace and John as they revealed one evil lie after another, and I was crushed by the sheer enormity of deceit that had been at the center of my existence for the past seven years.
By the end of May I had found a job on my own at a large stock brokerage firm in the financial district of San Francisco. My résumé stated, correctly, that I had been the financial secretary for the Disciples of Christ, the denomination that Peoples Temple was part of. I’d hoped by mentioning my schooling in England that they’d think I was smart. It was the first job I had ever had and I felt quite proud of my salary of $1,000 per month.
I was becoming acquainted with life outside the Temple but I still felt like an impostor. The ease with which my colleagues lived their lives often astounded me, so accustomed was I to living in fear. Here, no one I met was afraid of his or her neighbor. These people seemed to live each day as if they would always have another.
Most of my free time was spent worrying about my family and friends in Jonestown. On June 1, 1978, I received a letter from the Temple, addressed care of Annalisa. It had been mailed from Ukiah, California. The postage stamp glued to the letter warned:
Fear to do ill and you need fear naught else.
The unsigned letter conveyed a veiled threat:
Debbie,
You should know something that involves you personally. The Consul has told us that you approached him on the plane with an offer to go to the press, which he says he advised you against. Our opinion is that that doesn’t sound like you…. The conspiracy goes on…. It is good to have something to stand for. There are people who care for you very much. You will always be welcome here, as long as you do not try to cause any destruction …
Why had McCoy jeopardized my life like that? What was his purpose in telling Jim I had offered to talk to officials and press? I had confided in him and I couldn’t believe that he had betrayed my confidences to Jones.
I was confused and upset by McCoy’s actions but was afraid to alienate him. He was now my only contact with Jonestown. Remembering his mention of an August Jonestown visit, I composed a letter to my mother and sent it to him asking him to please read it to her in private. I prayed that he would be more careful with the lives of those I had left behind than he had been with mine.
My dearest Mama,
I have asked Dick to read this letter to you as I was concerned that otherwise it would be given to the Clearing Committee and you would never receive it.
It took me a lot of time
to figure out how to leave, but from the first day we both got into Jonestown I realized I was not cut out for that sort of life. By all means I had wanted you to come with me, yet I could not figure out how to do it. You mean so much to me and although they have told you horrible stories about my character and morals, I am doing very well. I have a respectable, well-paying job and have begun a new and structured life of my own.
Please believe and trust me—if you are willing to leave—go now with Dick. He can get you a new passport and your ticket is awaiting you in Georgetown. He assisted me in my departure and he will safeguard yours as well. Annalisa, Tom and I will help you when you return and you need not worry about your only possessions there. We can replace them here. It sounds frightening at first, as it is such a big move, but neither Jim nor the church will hurt you.
Things are not what Jim makes them to appear…. Of course nothing in the world is perfect or just, but at least here it is your own decisions and you are never threatened by death, mass suicide, the tortures of the box or the Learning Crew.
Lastly, there is no CIA plot either—You can even ask Dick McCoy.
I love you always and forever, Debbie
I never received a reply from Dick and was never contacted by the embassy. I decided I could no longer remain silent with so many lives at stake. With Grace Stoen’s assistance, I found an attorney and with her help, I wrote an eleven-page, thirty-seven-point affidavit entitled “The Threat and Possibility of Mass Suicide by Members of the Peoples Temple.” It detailed the morbid conditions in Jonestown and Jim’s threat of a revolutionary suicide, most specifically in the following points:
1. The purpose of this affidavit is to call to the attention of the United States government the existence of a situation which threatens the lives of United States citizens in Jonestown, Guyana…
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