The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

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  By 1971, Jones already permitted himself a few personal indulgences that were concealed from most Temple followers. Movies were frowned on for the rank-and-file, but in spare weekend hours between meetings, especially when they were held in San Francisco or Los Angeles, Jones headed for the cinema. He loved mysteries and action films—over the years, he identified his favorites as Chinatown and M*A*S*H. Jones told the truth when he claimed to only wear hand-me-downs and clothes purchased at discount stores, but he had a fondness for a specific style of black lace-up shoes with thick soles. These were the only shoes he wore—but he had six pairs. Above all, though he swore in sermons that he spent every available minute on Temple business, he took vacations with his family, often for one or two weeks at a time. Members were told that Father was away on important business. These trips cost money, and Jones received no salary from the Temple—ostensibly the Joneses lived on Marceline’s earnings as a state employee. But Jones controlled the Temple bank accounts, and on at least two occasions he withdrew a few thousand dollars for personal expenses. It wasn’t embezzlement; the transaction records were logged in Temple files. Still, only Jones and a few discreet associates had access to these files, and he certainly preferred for the general Temple membership not to know.

  Eventually such minor pleasures weren’t sufficient to offset growing pressures, and, probably sometime in early 1971, Jones began turning regularly to a source of greater relief. He was influenced this time not by his mother, but his father.

  After being gassed in World War I, James Thurman Jones, “Big Jim,” never passed a comfortable day, and deflected his physical and mental distress with pills supplied to him during treatments at regional VA hospitals. Almost forty years later, Jim Jones emulated his dad. As far back as 1965, Garry Lambrev remembers Jones occasionally pausing in mid-sermon to complain about his need to use pain medication. Jones said that he didn’t like doing it, but sometimes needed the pills to alleviate discomfort from various unspecified ailments. Temple membership was then less than a hundred and most had come west from Indiana with Jones. They knew him well and harbored no belief that he was a god above the human need for occasional self-medication. As the Temple grew, Jones’s references to personal use of pain pills stopped. Whether he’d actually discontinued them or not, his expanding ranks of more worshipful members couldn’t be allowed to think that Father needed drugs to function, especially since he forbade them to his followers. It would have been a contradiction that even Jones couldn’t explain away.

  But sometime around 1971 he began abusing drugs on a regular basis—amphetamines and tranquilizers, pills and liquids to provide significant boosts of energy, or else slow down his racing imagination and allow him to rest. The more Jones used one, the more he needed the other. Access to these drugs wasn’t a problem. There were physicians sympathetic to the Temple cause who provided prescriptions, to Jones or else to followers sworn to secrecy as they passed the medications along to Father. Jones didn’t have to depend entirely on prescriptions, either. Temple members worked as nurses and aides in any number of hospitals and care facilities. In an era when records were kept by hand, it was relatively simple to smuggle out whatever Jones wanted. He stressed to these suppliers that they were serving Peoples Temple in a very special, private way.

  To a great extent, Jones was able to disguise the resulting mood swings from the general congregation. Out on the road, he could self-medicate in his private quarters aboard Bus Seven, acquiring chemically enhanced stamina for bravura public appearances, then drugging himself to sleep as the Temple caravan headed back to Redwood Valley and all the demands that awaited him there. The abuse to his system was evident in certain ways, but some, like a frequent sharp temper, weren’t readily identifiable as drug-related—Father had always been impatient. A more obvious side effect was red, watery eyes, and Jones, who had sometimes worn dark glasses, now began wearing them everywhere. He claimed this was because his inner powers were so great that holy energy often glowed from his eyes—followers looking directly into them might be scorched.

  The most harmful side effect was Jones’s heightened sense of paranoia, a typical side effect of amphetamine abuse. Jones already assumed there were individuals and entities out to get him, and taught his followers to believe the same. An integral aspect of Jones’s hold on his followers was their belief, constantly reinforced by their leader’s citing of the latest headlines, that their own government was a danger to them. Increasingly on edge as his drug use escalated, Jones began offering specifics: He had learned, he said, that the FBI and CIA were tapping Temple phones. The U.S. government, led by notorious witch-hunters such as President Richard Nixon and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, thought Peoples Temple was dangerous because it helped so many people and in every way exemplified how generous-spirited socialism was far superior to blood-drenched capitalism. The FBI planned to infiltrate the Temple with undercover spies, if it already hadn’t. Members had to be constantly alert, and suspicious of everyone, even each other. Everyone was to be on the lookout for questionable behavior, and report it immediately. An obvious example would be someone speaking against Jones, criticizing him in any way. That’s what an FBI infiltrator would do, try to shake belief in Father.

  Jones had previously posted guards on the Redwood Valley church grounds. Now he warned of a new threat. The U.S. government had tried to kill Fidel Castro and might have been involved in the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy; in fact, the murders of anyone trying to lead Americans to a better, more egalitarian way of life. Obviously, Jones would be on such a hit list. The government hated and feared Peoples Temple, and its leader most of all. So Jones assembled a squad of personal bodyguards, mostly menacing-looking young black men. Prominent among them was hulking Chris Lewis, a San Francisco street thug who’d come through the Temple drug program, and who afterward balanced gratitude and loyalty toward Jones with a continuing attitude of barely suppressed violence. Jones went out of his way to support him, eventually using Temple funds to pay for Lewis’s successful defense in San Francisco against murder charges unrelated to Temple business. The murder case was an example of the government pursuing its vendetta against proud black men, Jones insisted. Some Temple members wondered—Lewis scared them. But they didn’t protest, to Jones or among themselves, because then they might be accused of being FBI infiltrators bent on causing internal Temple dissension.

  Some of Jones’s bodyguards were armed. Everyone carrying a gun was first required to qualify for the appropriate permits—Jones was not about to have members charged with unlawful possession or use of a firearm. Now, when the Temple Greyhound convoy was on the road, a few guns were stored on Bus Seven, just in case. On some occasions the bodyguards also wore uniforms—matching shirts, pants, ties, and berets. Their appearance was intended to impress the rest of the Temple fellowship as much as to intimidate potential outside attackers—their presence was proof that Father was determined to protect them. These guards, and the less militaristic security teams prowling the Redwood Valley church and local Temple-owned buildings at night, noticed but did not mention to others a significant change in Jim Jones’s personal behavior. Before, unless he was out of town, Jones could routinely be found working in his office well past midnight, and sometimes all night, occasionally emerging to offer encouraging words to members who were also up late attending to Temple tasks, or else to chide perceived malingerers, and shame them with his own self-sacrificing example. Now, most nights, sentries posted outside his closed office door heard loud, wet snores. Father, after bursting with superhuman energy all through the day, was now sleeping soundly, if noisily, for much of the night. They didn’t realize why.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  SEX

  Jones had always been frank and open about sex—up to a point.

  With teens like Mike Cartmell and Bonnie Malmin, Jones matter-of-factly discussed masturbation and intercourse, making it clear that these were natur
al rather than obscene subjects. Even Marceline’s ten-year-old cousin Ronnie Baldwin received detailed facts-of-life lectures from Uncle Jim when he lived for a while with the Joneses, and wowed his elementary school pals with his new knowledge. When Marceline could no longer engage in sex, Jones told his children that was why he took Carolyn Layton as a lover. As pastor of Peoples Temple, Jones insisted on being familiar with all aspects of his followers’ sex lives, and telling them who they should and shouldn’t sleep with. He generally stopped short of forbidding anyone to have sex. “He couldn’t completely regulate it,” former Temple member Tim Carter recalls. “People [were] going to do it. But he tried to at least make it as difficult as possible. It was one more way for him to control us.”

  Still, among some members of Peoples Temple, there was a certain reticence, even prissiness, about sex. In 1972 and 1973, the pornographic film Deep Throat became a national sensation, and its star, Linda Lovelace, was for a time one of the most famous women in America. Linda Amos, one of Jones’s most devoted followers, was so humiliated by the X-rated notoriety of the actress that she insisted on being called Sharon, her middle name, rather than share a first name with Lovelace. Jones himself, for all his frequent references in sermons to the human sex drive, sometimes including his own, rarely engaged in public displays of affection with Marceline, and one reason most members never guessed of his relationship with Carolyn Layton was because he never touched her in public, either. Except for his oft-told tale of having intercourse with an ambassador’s wife in Brazil in return for her generous donation to an orphanage, so far as most Temple followers were concerned, the only evidence of Father’s actual sex life was his son Stephan.

  But about the same time he started abusing drugs, Jones began sexually indulging himself beyond Carolyn Layton. In many ways, his relationship with Carolyn took on aspects of marriage, including a gradual lessening of intimacy. Jones considered himself above reproach; the only restraint on him was his own sense of self-control, and with every passing day it diminished. Two years earlier, because of Marceline’s physical problems, he’d needed a different source of sexual gratification and limited himself to a single new partner. This time, Jones didn’t replace Carolyn Layton. He began having sex with others—essentially, Carolyn became the senior concubine in an ever-evolving harem. For her, and for those followers who formed Jones’s inner Temple circle, there was nothing discreet about it. Jones picked out whom he wanted among members, took them, and afterward bragged about it locker-room style with pals like Beam and Ijames. Carolyn was hurt, and furious, but Jones didn’t consider her feelings to be critical. He believed that he needed more sex with a variety of partners. It would be good for him, and therefore good for the Temple. As he had with Marceline, Jones correctly guessed that Carolyn would reluctantly acquiesce. She still had her turns in Jones’s bed, and an important place in Temple operations. If Carolyn resented Jones’s infidelity, that was her problem, not his.

  Jones’s quandary was whom to pursue first. He confined himself to Temple members—since Father discouraged even passing friendships with outsiders, Jones could hardly risk consummations beyond the church. But, having never tested these impulsive sexual waters, Jones wasn’t prepared to force himself indiscriminately on female followers; he would have been hard-pressed to explain away complaints about unwanted advances. He began with a safe target.

  Besides total belief in and devotion to Jim Jones, Karen Tow Layton, Larry Layton’s second wife, had the additional advantage of being one of the most attractive young women in the Temple. When he took Carolyn away from Layton, Jones helped persuade Karen to take Carolyn’s place as Layton’s spouse—she was an attractive consolation prize. It helped bolster Layton’s bruised ego that so many other men in the Temple envied him his new, much prettier wife. But Karen’s primary allegiance was to Jones. Taking her as a lover in 1971 was both a satisfying and safe move on Jones’s part. Beyond Karen’s own devotion to him—she gladly gave herself to Father, so there was no risk of repercussion there—Jones also knew that there would be no protest, at least overtly, from her husband. Larry Layton was completely under his control. Carolyn initially found some solace in believing that the attraction was one-sided on Karen’s part, and wrote to her parents that “[Karen] has stated repeatedly . . . that she is very much in love with Jim,” but Jones made it absolutely clear to the lovestruck young woman “that nothing will ever be reciprocated by [him] at this level.” (Carolyn also wrote that Larry Layton had a homosexual crush on Jones, which was one reason she divorced him. There is no evidence that this was true.) By the time Carolyn realized that Jones was equally attracted to Karen, it was too late.

  While her brief affair with Jones lasted, Karen took pride in the relationship—Father wanted, needed, her. Ijames tried tactfully warning Jones to keep his sex life private: “Brother Jones, I think you trust people too much.”

  Once his desire for Karen was satiated, Jones moved on to other Temple women. His sexual self-image bloomed to a point where he believed that all women, regardless of age and whether they would admit it or not, were attracted to him. The result was a subtle, but significant, change in the way he asked females to take on particularly difficult Temple tasks. His encouragement of men remained the same: “You’ve got qualities we need to get this accomplished.” But now he told women, “You can do this because you love me.”

  Jones began engaging in episodic sex typified by whim rather than even short-term seduction. Consciously or not, Jones restricted himself to young women either securely in his personal thrall or else so uncertain of themselves that they would feel overwhelmed and submit. Eventually, almost all the women in Jones’s inner circle became his occasional conquests. They either considered it part of their duties to him and the cause, or else an honor bestowed on them for distinguished service. Jones always insisted he was doing it for them as well as himself—they needed sex with Father; it was good for their self-esteem.

  In almost every case, Jones’s advances took them by surprise. Terri Buford was working in an adjacent office during a Temple service. Jones came into the room during a lull while the collection plate was being passed and asked her, “Who are you attracted to?” Buford, caught off guard, mentioned a few Temple men. Jones, sounding offended, said, “You’re not attracted to me?” Buford said that she’d never thought about Jones that way. He pressed her, and they soon had sex. Reflecting decades later, she said that it wasn’t anything special, besides the fact that it involved Jones. It didn’t occur to her to resist—this was Father, after all.

  Debbie Layton’s account in her memoir, Seductive Poison, indicates that, at least with her, Jones crossed the line into rape. Layton, then about nineteen, was invited by Jones to ride with him in his private bus compartment on a drive back to Redwood Valley from San Francisco. She was shocked when he told her to unbutton her shirt, and mumbled, “I am doing this for you . . . to help you.” Still clothed, “pants opened just enough,” Jones pushed her on the bed, clambered on top of her, satisfied himself, and got up. Layton, confused, somehow felt obligated to tell Jones that she was sorry. He replied, “Don’t worry, my child. You needed it.” Then Jones instructed her to stay where she was; he’d order everyone else to get off the bus at the next rest stop, and she could make her way out and to another bus unnoticed.

  Jones had sex with Debbie Layton a few more times, once in a Peoples Temple men’s room, never in any situation where Jones asked permission or Layton had time to think about it. Jones eventually promoted her to positions of greater Temple responsibility; she felt honored to be part of an inner circle that included Carolyn Layton, Karen Tow Layton, Terri Buford, Sharon Amos, Tim Stoen, and one or two others.

  Because Jones had managed to keep his long-term affair with Carolyn Layton so closely guarded, for a while some of the women with whom he had liaisons believed that they had replaced Marceline as Father’s new mate—in Terri Buford’s words, “God’s chick.” They were soon disabused of the not
ion. Once they’d been taken by Jones, he no longer bothered to disguise his additional sexual activities. Buford learned she wasn’t Jones’s only lover when she heard him loudly having sex with another woman in the next room. But neither Buford nor any of the others ever caused a scene, or accused Jones to his face of sexual abuse or deception. They never made public complaints about his actions to the wider Temple membership. For some, it was because Jones’s constant preaching about bourgeois attitudes and selfishness made them feel guilty for even contemplating airing a personal grievance. Others realized that the bulk of Jones’s followers would always align themselves with Father in any dispute. Leaving Jones, and the church, was rarely considered an option. Jones always found some means to make his sex partners feel even more committed to the cause, often, as with Debbie Layton, by assigning them new, critical roles. His manipulative gifts were never more evident. Jones himself never formed an emotional attachment to any of the women. They’d served his pleasure, and that was their reward.

  Jones even found a way to make his sex life rewarding to a devoted female follower that he didn’t want. No one adored Jim Jones more than Patty Cartmell; she was always ready to unquestioningly obey him, and would have felt honored to serve Jones sexually. But she was grossly obese, and Jones’s professed motivation to help raise up women by having sex with them didn’t apply to one so physically unattractive. When Jones’s serial sexualizing reached near-frantic proportions—there always seemed to be one more Temple woman that he just had to have—he included Cartmell by putting her in charge of his “fuck schedule,” a notebook listing who Jones was scheduled to sleep with, and when.