A Staged Vat of Poison: Images of a Movable Feast

Bodies of members of the Peoples Temple who died after their leader Jim Jones ordered them to drink a cyanide-laced beverage. The vat that contained the poison is in the foreground.
Frank Johnston—AP/Wide World Photos



Title: Jonestown Mass Suicide
Caption: JONESTOWN, GUYANA - 1978: People lie on the ground dead from being forced to commit suicide. Over 900 people died by the direction of Rev. Jim Jones. (Photo by Frank Johnston/The Washington Post/Getty Images)




Photo flipped



FILE--Bodies are strewn around the Jonestown Commune in Jonestown, Guyana where more than 900 members of the People's Temple committed suicide in Nov. 1978. The Rev. Jim Jones urged his disciples to drink cyanide-laced grape punch. Jones, who was among those who died, led the Peoples Temple, which ran a free clinic and a drug rehabilitation program.(AP Photo/file) 1978 file photo
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Jonestown-and-City-Hall-slayings-eerily-linked-in-2548703.php#ixzz2O3cY0RRT
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November 22, 1978, The Bryan Times, UPI, Dignitaries attend closed-casket services for Rep. Leo Ryan, by H.D. Quigg,

The interview was the day before, or Tuesday, or in other words, three days after the mass suicide

November 22, 1978, The Toledo Blade, page 4, Cult leader Was Obsessed With Ego, Power, Son Says,

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) -- The son of cult leader Jim Jonas said Tuesday that his father was a sick man, a "man obsessed... a very frightened man," but he held enormous sway over his devoted disciples.

Stephen Jones, 19, said he and his mother recently had tried to keep his father, 46, out of the sect's decision making process, but they failed.

Stephen praised the communal life of the camp, but he said it was flawed by a growing paranoia and the egotism of his father.

"I feel Jim Jones was a man obsessed with his own ego and power. There were woman up there who worshiped him," he told reporters.

"My father was not a well man. He took many drugs for his ailments, and Mother and I tried to isolate him from decision making."

A San Francisco physician who treated Jim Jonas has confirmed that the religious leader was seriously ill, but the doctor would not specify the illness.

On Jones' orders more than 400 residents of the jungle camp of the People's Temple committed suicide Saturday. Jim Jones and his wife were among the dead.

Stephen, who came here from Jonestown three weeks ago as coach of the camp's basketball team, said his major concern now is the well-being of survivors, but he said it seems impossible to continue the settlement at Jonestown.

"I can't believe that this was a voluntary suicide," Stephen said. "There had to be the use of force, although some of it was blind loyalty."

Had he been in Jonestown, he said, he might have been able to talk his father out of ordering the deaths. If this failed, he said, h would have stood up and discredited and denounced his father to try to persuade people he was wrong.

Growing Dead People on Hardpan

If you compare the following two images I think you'll see the bare stab of a technique employed---what I'm calling "temple mounding" in honor of the ancient necropoles and tumuli of the dead---when the controlling  powers-that-be needed some rationale to excuse the sudden, inexplicable, and very tardy doubling in their stated census of counted corpses, by creating some small drops of evidence (whether real world or early computer generated imagery, I don't know) which might homeopathically implant a cure into the general consciousness. Stated more plainly: how to admit the responder's delayed realization that 500 missing corpses had been hiding at close hand underneath about 400 bodies already accounted for?


People's Temple Cult Commits Mass Suicide In Guyana
Caption: JONESTOWN, GUYANA - NOVEMBER 18: (NO U.S. TABLOID SALES) Dead bodies lie near the compound of the People's Temple cult November 18, 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana after over 900 members of the cult, led by Reverend Jim Jones, died from drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid; they were victims of the largest mass suicide in modern history. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

The Best of Several Gassed & Dead Dog Shots

Title: Jonestown Mass Suicide
Caption: JONESTOWN, GUYANA - 1978: People lie on the ground dead from being forced to commit suicide. Over 900 people died by the direction of Rev. Jim Jones. (Photo by Frank Johnston / The Washington Post / Getty Images)

Frank JohnstonThe son of the chief photographer at the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1940s and 1950s, Frank Johnston counted newspaper photographers as his childhood playmates and the darkroom his playground. "As a kid, I used to run around the darkrooms harassing all of the photographers as they came in from their assignments," recalls Johnston. In 1963, Johnston landed his first job as staff photographer with UPI, where he covered President Kennedy's assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald's shooting. As U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, Johnston volunteered to cover the ground war. Since joining The Post in 1968, he has covered the Watergate scandal, the People's Temple tragedy in Jonestown, Guyana, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. A three-time winner of the White House News Photographers' Photographer of the Year Award, Johnston is the co-author of "The Working White House" and "Jonestown Massacre."

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The effect given off by the launching of this idea on top of what were originally designed as raised agricultural beds criss-crossed by drainage ditches, but studded now with the last few remnants of a stunted banana plantation, is that only death will grow here. The black and white image is one of the most successful in the series, if for no other reason than it shows real dead white people---or if this is acting, it's very, very good acting..

Factoring in the variables, like angle, and the fish-eye lens used in one shot, I had to ask myself, could a plaid trouser leg, which nearly abuts the head of the man with the good boots and nice ass, really read like a massive alligator's tail in the color shot? Even if the underlying flesh was disparately puffing up like angel food cake and matzoh balls in a tropical oven?

But what looks like the white blouse of a girl with lower quarters dressed in red in the color shot, whose head is near that of a white youth against whose shoulder a gassed dog leaned in death, seems to have risen twice as high compared to the men.

In the black-and-white image the foreground appears as an intensely real single layer of human and canine, with a background you could fancy to be mounded corpses if you like; while in the color shot, it is the foreground that seems heaped in a strange pattern of kinetically still elevating anonymous beings, whose final convulsions commonly seem to have positioned them for a good rectal exam. Add to this what is meant to signify as the later dressing of shrouds, on this one or that, indiscriminately here or there, by blanket or towel, but which only reinforces the illogic and meaninglessness on display, and the failure to treat everybody with equal dignity by treating nobody with any.

As in any multi-fatality disaster, when lacking equipment, the first step would be to organize the corpses in an outdoor morgue of orderly rows for individual and universal access, with their faces turned up to the skylight for the purpose of  identification, instead of the inchoate storytelling photojournalists have on dark display here--plus the embedded participation of news reporters with a planned covert task to document a contrived script designed to shock, dismay and overwhelm.

Then, even if the great wealth of the United States failed to rapidly Chinook in the portable refrigeration containers necessary to store bodies until order was restored and the remains could be dealt with, at least these would rot in the fields as human beings and not less. That such care has been divinely ordained at least since the time Aeschylus and Euripides wrote about such matters, when even war would cease so the rites could be performed




30 Years After Jonestown

** ADVANCE FOR SUNDAY, NOV. 16 **FILE* * This Nov. 1978 file photo shows bodies of followers of cult leader Jim Jones are seen at the Jonestown commune in Guyana, where more than 900 members of the People's Temple committed suicide. Passage of time since the holocaust has faded the differences between some temple enemies and loyalists, because they have experiences in common. Many share painful memories, guilt-filled feelings, loss of loved ones and psychological scars from an incomprehensible event that has come to symbolize the ultimate power of a charismatic leader over his followers. Although Jonestown has long ago passed from worldwide headlines to history, people who were entwined with the calamity live with it daily. (AP Photo, File)
Stock Photo ID: 42-29667118
Date Photographed: November 01, 1978
Location: Jonestown, Guyana
Credit: © AP/Corbis



Corpses from the Jonestown Massacre of 1978

Dead bodies litter the ground after a mass suicide of the People's Temple cult followers, led by Jim Jones, the founder and leader of the cult. Over 900 adults and children died after drinking cyanide-laced punch. The Jonestown Massacre occurred on November 18, 1978, at the Jonestown commune in Guyana.
Date Photographed: November 20, 1978



Bodies in Jonestown

People's Temple Cult mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana.
Stock Photo ID: U1949910A
Date Photographed: November 23, 1978
Location: Jonestown, Guyana
Credit: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Jonestown Suicide Count Almost Doubled

Actually, it significantly more than doubled: 405 to 912.

They couldn't just go to the government of Forbes Burnham to get the immigration records for a count of the Americans since officials in Guyana had agreed to overlook the technical niceties of such paperwork in order to facilitate the "mass" influx of new arrivals. One observer was gobsmacked by the deaths of hundreds of children since the majority of them had only arrived four months previously. The early reporting consistently characterized the colony as having been established the year previously. Apparently, the advance work that had been going on for four years, and which may have consisted of up to 50 persons at various times, used temporary visas, and may have been focused on different priorities than the establishment of a productive, self-sustaining agricultural commune infrastructure. Hence the pittance of tiny immature show orchards put in as window dressing instead of the real deal. A longer term future was never projected for the Peoples Temple than the one they achieved. And while the controlling level is always willing to break eggs to make omelettes, they are loath to spend the real money if they think they can safely cut corners.

The "temporary" structures built for housing near the airport were of a far more substantial and useful nature than the porch-less shacks put up to house people of color and I can only imagine what the teenagers who made use of the "loft" spaces under the tin roofs had to endure in sweat to gain some privacy and autonomy.

19-year-old Stephen Jones had a wide screened porch on his large house, but then again, he also had an air-conditioner humming away too.

November 24, 1978, Kentucky New Era / AP, Jonestown Suicide Count Almost Doubled, by Lew Wheaton,






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Not Leo's best look for this kind of announcement.



November 19, 1978, The Milwaukee Journal / UPI, AP, Washington Post, California Congressman Shot in Guyana Attack, [nearest approximate link]

Georgetown, Guyana -- US Rep. Leo Ryan (D-Calif), on a mission to check reports that Americans were being kept prisoner at a religious colony, was shot and perhaps killed along with others in an ambush at a landing strip Saturday.

Georgetown police quoted police in Port Kaituma, about 150 miles northwest of the capital, as confirming that "about 20 people" were killed in a gun attack at the local airport.

The State department in Washington confirmed a report by a pilot who managed to escape that the attack took place. But it could not confirm that any of the party of about 25, including Ryan, had been killed.

Ryan, 53, was escorting nine Americans from the Peoples Temple religious settlement who apparently had decided to return to the United States.

Jeff Dieterich, of the State Department's Latin American desk, said that when the group had boarded one of two planes awaiting Ryan's party, one of the nine pulled a gun and began shooting.

After that person opened fire inside the plane, Dieterich said, a tractor pulling a trailer arrived at the jungle landing strip and more shots were fired by those in the trailer. The fire damaged one plane so extensively that it was abandoned.

The pilot and crew from the plane that was to carry the departing sect members jumped from the plane, Dieterich said, ran to a second plane and flew from the remote Port Kaituma strip.

The pilot reported general panic, with Ryan and an NBC news crew lying as if dead, others still moving but

Turn to Attack, page 22, Col 1.

The High Road From Cuyuni-Mazaruni

November 27, 1978, Associated Press / The Prescott Courier, Page 1, Jones discussed transplanting cult to Russia, by Peter Arnett, AP Special Correspondent,

Met Twice with Soviet Officials

GEORGETOWN, Guyana -- Top aides of cult leader Jim Jones conferred at least twice in Georgetown with an official of the Soviet Embassy who discussed their problems sympathetically and held out the promise of approval for the exodus of the whole Jonestown colony to Russia, according to a document made available to The Associated Press.

Jones' aide also discussed the "quick transference of money" from Jonestown to the embassy to aid such a move, according to the document. A few months after the meetings, Jones instituted compulsory study of Russian for his Peoples Temple in Guyana, demanding that each speak a Russian phrase before each meal.

Jones was known to be fearful of attacks from across the Brazilian border by mercenaries hired by relatives of some of his followers to return them to the United States. He was known to be seeking a safer haven and spoke of Cuba and the Soviet Union in his speeches.

A five-page typewritten memo found in the house where Jones lived and maintained his office revealed that aides of the cult leader met in Georgetown with the press attache of the Soviet Embassy, Feodor Timofeyev, in December 1977 and again last March 20.

The memo -- signed with the names Marcie, Sharon, Lew, Jimmie, Johnnie and Debbie -- said the cultists discussed the possibility of exodus to Russia at the December meeting, and Timofeyev referred the matter to Moscow. At the meeting in March he said he still had not received a reply.

"He said it was a very difficult thing to arrange exodus," the memo continued. "But when I cried and said it would be very painful for the door to be shut against the children (we adults don't matter so much but we need safety for our children) he said that the U.S.S.R. had taken in 5,000 Spanish children, taken care of them and returned them later to Spain, so he felt it was worth pursuing."

The memo added that Timofeyev told them there would be "no problem of getting visas at any time" for a delegation to visit the Soviet Union to discuss the matter.

The document said at one point "regarding the need for exodus, a quick transference of money, he doesn't see the need for such a situation developing right away, not within a year."

The memo said Timofeyev cautioned Jones about visiting Georgetown, where an emotional hearing over the custody of a child in the Jonestown settlement was in progress.

"He feels that the risks for Jim's life if he came to town might only be 10 percent but it is not worth taking," the memo said.

Timofeyev declined to talk with Jones over the radio-telephone link the cult operated between Georgetown and Jonestown, the memo continued, "but said he'd rather talk to J.J. in person when he comes to Jonestown -- he still is planning to come to Jonestown."

It was after the later visits of Timofeyev and other Soviet officials to Jonestown that the Russian-language classes were instituted on

Please turn to page 11

Cult-Russia

they got out of the settlement, they opened the suitcase and found $500,000 in cash and a letter addressed to the Soviet Embassy. Carter said they abandoned the suitcase and fled into the jungle.

Miss Katsaris was found dead of gunshot wounds in Jonestown. One of the signers of the memo, Sharon Amos, was the public relations director for the cult in Georgetown. a large scale.

Three survivors of the mass suicide-murder told reporters that the settlement's treasurer, Maria Katsaris, ordered them during the height of the death ritual to take a heavy suitcase "to the embassy."

One of the three, Tom Carter, said they thought Miss Katsaris meant the U.S. Embassy. But he said after She and her three children were murdered in Georgetown while the suicide ritual was taking place in Jonestown Charles Edward Beikman, a former U.S. Marine and a member of the cult, has been arrested and charged with the murders.

Timofeyev was not available for comment Sunday night.

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The preceding Associated Press article, Jones discussed transplanting cult to Russia, by Peter Arnett, published on November 27, 1978, was obviously printed in an afternoon edition of The Prescott Courier, since the Arizona newspaper also carries front-page word of the assassination of the San Francisco mayor and Supervisor that same morning. I have no way of knowing when Arnett's story came out, but I suspect it was rushed onto the wire that day, since to me it seems such a clear example of a fabricated news item attempting to deflect some attention away from a legitimate, if problematic, cause for public focus.

The compelling story for the previous eight days had been, of course, the traumatic murder-suicide of 900 American religious cultists in Jonestown, Guyana, but the only real news this afternoon on that subject is found on page 11 of the Courier, as the contingent of U.S. soldiers delegated the work of retrieving the dead go home with the last of the bodies.

I would need access online to other newspaper's coverage for this date to judge, but apparently some controlling agency prevents archived news of the troubled periods such as this from surfacing on the web, and it's only in chance encounters with small-market outlets on Google News that I've been able to locate national stories of historic importance,

I suspect the big-city editors didn't touch this story with a ten-foot pole, since it's based on a memo found at the former camp site of the recently departed despondents, which, as Peter Arnett put it, was "signed with the names Marcie, Sharon, Lew, Jimmie, Johnnie and Debbie," wherein said cultists "discussed the possibility of exodus to Russia."

Having just experienced a certain remake of the Biblical Masada story, I hear further claims being made on our ancient, collective subconscious, but springing ahead a little bit, this story of planning for the abandonment of one ex-pat community of barely a year's standing, in favor of more protective pasturage, reminds me of the driving out of Osama bin Laden from the sands of the Sudan to the caves of Afghanistan.

Recall here, that it was in March 1997 that "CNN correspondent Peter Arnett became the first (and I believe, only) Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden."

I don't ask for solely a subjective reading of the text to make my case for implausible fraudulence either. Unlike the sophomoric Marxist-Leninist screeds and polemics Jim and Marceline were given to as they curried popular favor with the Huey Newton's, the Angela Davis's and the Jane Fonda's of the world, all the while remaining California king-makers of a kind only holders of political snuff-film leverage could wield.

There are a quite a number of references in the record to this possibility of a communist emigration, irregardless of how irreconcilable it is with their former standing and compensation plan. It comes up in the "death tape," that hour of sing-song and Greek lament left behind as proof to the world of an ideological, if not logical, purity.

That distinction is made subtly by the press attache of the Soviet Embassy in the memo regarding contacts he had with a Brady Bunch more up Tempo than holy Temple:

The memo said Timofeyev cautioned Jones about visiting Georgetown, where an emotional hearing over the custody of a child in the Jonestown settlement was in progress.

In that case, Jim Jones claimed paternity of a five-year-old boy who rightfully belonged to a married couple who were high-level associates of his, and for this reason alone we are told never to sleep with the help. Likewise, his 28-year-old girlfriend, who he made treasurer of the organization, rightfully took a bullet to the brain instead of a sip from a Dixie-Cup. All of which makes for good whoredom but not good communism.

As Peter Arnett (who, don't forget, was also the single Western journalist to broadcast from Baghdad for several weeks at the beginning of the First Gulf War,) wrote:

A five-page typewritten memo found in the house where Jones lived and maintained his office revealed that aides of the cult leader met in Georgetown with the press attache of the Soviet Embassy, Feodor Timofeyev, in December 1977 and again last March 20.

Now here the possibility for an empirical comparison is possible.

Once upon a time, something called icehouse.net maintained a collection online called The Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy: Primary Source Materials From The U.S. Department of State. This disappeared down the memory hole some time ago to make way for its replacement, at jonestown.sdsu.edu, an extensive, apparently sincere, and seemingly comprehensive repository of like materials and analysis--that is, until you realize almost nothing predates 1988. At the thirty-year mark the floodgates of releases really opened up,  and the collection of essays, even by high-school students, is very impressive, but it does make you realize why there was a 70-year lag for the first written source of the New Testament narrative to appear. Lots of jockeying around between this Saint and that truth I bet.

In the perhaps ten percent of materials from the earlier archive recoverable at archive.org, is a document
dated Saturday, November 26, 1978, called the Jonestown Inventory. A pretty fundamental truth of actuality comes off of this document, which I'm sure applies to situations as diverse as invading Iraq to demolishing the World Trade Center. Created by consular officer Jim Ward for a V. Dikeos, it is self-described as: 

The following was dictated mechanically during a walk-through of Jonestown Saturday, November 25, 1978. Although the primary purpose of this walk-through was to compile a limited inventory of the personal effects and communal property at Jonestown, it also provides a subjective description of conditions, and for this reason I have left it in its informal, somewhat disjointed style.

Ward catalogues the interiors throughout Jonestown as being scenes almost totally "victimized by the looters." He includes some interesting sociological data as well. For instance

Jones' son's house is much larger than the normal Jonestown house. On the screened front porch is bedding and an empty foot locker. Again it looks like it was cleaned out by looters. There is an air conditioner still on the wall, the only one I've seen. The hut has its own sink and only two single beds. There is a carton marked "unexposed x-ray film", but broken, so presumably the film is no longer useful.

As for Daddy Bear:

Jones' house has been pretty well ransacked. There is a brand new radio receiver transmitter. An adding machine/calculator has been dropped and broken. The interior is really gutted, in bad shape. Its difficult to get to anything. It would take days to get through the books, photos and paperwork lying on the floor. There is a carton lying outside filled with drugs of various types. The safe in the central room of Jones' house is open and empty. I see two small portable typewriters, a case full of drugs, a half-size refrigerator, a case with the name S. Bradshaw on it. Scattered on the floor are large quantities of books, propaganda, old newspapers - the "Communist Manifesto" by Marx, "Street Fighting in the Courtroom", "The Peoples' Advocate", "When New York Succumbed to Riots", etc. The shelves in Jones' room have been emptied out, probably mostly clothes, a lot still on the floor. His bed is the fanciest one here - it is a 4 poster with mosquito netting and built-in draws underneath. Drawers appear to be filled primarily with personal medicines.

What's interesting about this description, coming as it does a full week after the mass disappearance of the ownership class, is that apparently no effort has been made to sort, organize, or retrieve "the books, photos and paperwork lying on the floor," which "would take days to get through," but which may have some procedural value. It's as though investigators knew what they they knew---but also knew what they didn't know and didn't need to know.

Is it possible that someone could have come in already, picked something up off the top of the pile, ruched out to share with Arnett his gushy tone of having a major international-relations news scoop? Yes, of course; and there's always still Sunday to work the pile.

But this is a perfect example of why the early factual reporting had to be held down by a foot on its neck in seven inches of water before a reconcilable version of reality could emerge, why I'm eager to recover the record, and why I don't trust the forces behind jonestown.sdsu.edu, even if it's headed up by a likable, and manifestly capable surviving family member who, for the most part, spares us the deadly emotional manipulations that define the later 9/11-versions of her compatriots.

And since the same truths abide in every generation, with the rich, the white, and the connected getting different outcomes than the rest of us--and like my analysis of 9/11 victims as likely to be secretly surviving in seclusion--I have to ask, in all Christian humility--wouldn't she like to see her sisters alive again? Authorities purposely dithered, letting the corpses rot, then pickle, beyond the possibility of autopsy, not only to preclude knowing the how of death, but also the who of death as well. Even Delaware wouldn't issue death certificates on those bags of mush, leading to a kind of legal limbo, like a Guantanamo on the Brandywine. But since the soulless organic portals and lizard people have Henry, Pierre, Eleuthère and Irénée on their side, it all worked itself out.

Well, to lighten up for just a moment, one thing that tickled me pink amongst all the veri·si·mil·i·tu·di·nous details in  Timofeyev's memo--the vague talk of money issues, the need for covert communication---is this two-sided gem 

Jones was known to be fearful of attacks from across the Brazilian border by mercenaries hired by relatives of some of his followers to return them to the United States.

If Jonestown lies somewhere between Matthews Ridge and Port Kaituma on the following map, than I think the approach of mercenaries would likely have to come from Bochinche, in Venezuela; with the Brazilian threat having to travel up the American Highway for the same tactic to avoid the mountainous terrain typical of Cuyuni-Mazaruni. Feodor would have known this. Jim's sex gangstas would know this. But Peter's ghostwriters who needed remedial geography lessons didn't.

Ha, ha.The second giveaway is in the line reading where Jones is afraid of "mercenaries hired by relatives of some of his followers," without paying even lip-service to several alternatives, like narco-terrorists or bill collectors. But the fact remains Guyana's decadent wobble into democratic independence had Langley and Tavistock (or Monsanto and Mobil, if you prefer) written all over it. And while San Francisco does have its foreboding paramilitary leather types, they're all a bit too...um...self-conscious and conspicuous...compared to the real deal.

This would be the mirror boomerang effect dreaded by the creators of illusion and fake reality. I mean, the missing-hyphen Peoples Temple get cause and effect all mixed up. Jones is espousing collective punishment and preemptive retaliation decades before it's fashionable. I can't believe the truth wasn't always this obvious, or maybe before the internet individual insights could be snuffed out before they got any traction in the universal id.

For instance, look at the Moscone–Milk assassinations Wikipedia page

The Moscone–Milk assassinations were the killings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, who were shot and killed in San Francisco City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White on November 27, 1978. White was angry that Moscone had refused to re-appoint him to his seat on the Board of Supervisors, from which White had just resigned, and that Milk had lobbied heavily against his re-appointment. These events helped bring national notice to then-Board President Dianne Feinstein, who became mayor of San Francisco and eventually U.S. Senator for California.

White was subsequently convicted of voluntary manslaughter, rather than of first degree murder. The verdict sparked the "White Night riots" in San Francisco, and led to the state of California abolishing the diminished capacity criminal defense. It also led to the urban legend of the "Twinkie defense", as many media reports had incorrectly described the defense as having attributed White's diminished capacity to the effects of sugar-laden junk food.[1][2] White committed suicide in 1985, a little more than a year after his release from prison.

Dan White had just resigned his seat---why, I don't know, or care. But it should be unthinkable to wonder if his real motive was to goad Moscone into not giving back something he had relinquished for mysterious and explainable reasons---then, like a woman's prerogative, changed his mind, wanted it back, and had motive to get mad and shoot two men in their skulls at point blank range with hollow-point bullets and blame Twinkie-eating for a lapse!

Was the "White Night" riots thing just a coincidence?

This suicide-note-slash-last-will-and-testament of Marceline Jones is beyond unbelievable since it moved into tacky. Like would she really wait to the very last minute to realize, "Oh my God! It's serious! It's on! I've got things to do! To me,the great thing about anticipatory death is that you don't have to pack. Like that hussy, Maria Katsaris, ordering those three guys, at the absolute height of the death ritual, mind you, to carry an extremely heavy suitcase filled with $500,000 all the way to Georgetown, or at least into the jungle past the gates, and miss the fun. How dare she! But Marceline is heading out on the big  trip and all she can think of is her resentment to keep her money out of "the hands of my adopted daughter." 

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Jane Fonda & Mark Lane

The nearly 39,000 pages of documents released by the FBI to Freedom under the Freedom of Information Act document the Peoples Temple as a mainstream congregation and show it enjoyed wide support, as from Jane Fonda, who wrote: "I also recommit myself to your congregation as an active full participant—not only for myself, but because I want my two children to have the experience."



A hat tip to the good Scientologists over at Freedom Magazine,


Photo credit: December 27, 1970, New York Times Book Review, Mark Lane: Smearing America's Soldiers in Vietnam, by Neil Sheehan,

[2009 Oct] Mark Lane and Jonestown by Christopher Bollyn ,

Congresswoman Jackie Speier

Media Darling

Jackie Speier Wounded in Jonestown

Jackie Speier, an aide to Congressman Leo Ryan, being taken from a plane at Georgetown on November 19, 1978, after its arrival from Jonestown where Speier was shot five times and Ryan and four others were ambushed and killed by members of the People's Temple. Congressman Leo Ryan was leading a group that went to Guyana to investigate reports of abuse and human rights violations by the People's Temple and its leader, Jim Jones. Fearing the results of the murders and further investigations into Jonestown, despite Leo Ryan's assertion that he was going to give a largely positive review of the People's Temple, Jim Jones led his followers in a "revolutionary suicide" On November 18, 1978, 909 Temple members died, all but two of which from cyanide poisoning, forming the largest mass suicide in modern history.
Stock Photo ID: 42-20693971
Date Photographed: November 20, 1978
Location: Georgetown, Guyana

Working the Gina Lollobrigida Angle

Speier at hearing following Jonestown Massacre

Members of Congress held an "informal" hearing on cult worship, as the star witness Jackie Speier, legal counsel to Representative of California Leo Ryan, who was murdered at Jonestown, looks over notes prior to testifying. Speier's right arm is still in a cast from wounds suffered in Jonestown.
Stock Photo ID: 42-20693970
Date Photographed: February 5, 1979
Location: Washington, DC, USA
Credit: © Bettmann/Corbis

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January 14th, 2011, Veterans Today, Rep. Leo Ryan’s Daughter Recalls His 1978 Murder

Three of them tucked into two first-class seats. Cozy.

AP/Duricka At top, Rep. Leo Ryan (far right) flies to Guyana on Nov. 18, 1978, along with consultant James Schollart and aide Jackie Speier. In 1979, Erin Ryan (at right in lower image) attended a congressional hearing on the Jonestown killings.
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Congresswoman Jackie Speier poses for a portrait on Nov. 14, 2008 in San Francisco, Calif. Thirty years ago Speier was shot five times while leaving Guyana as part of Congressman Leo J. Ryan's delegation to investigate Jonestown. Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle


Jackie Speier, center, who is running in an April 8 special election to replace the late Rep. Tom Lantos in his congressional seat, speaks with Espinola and Earl Sanders at a campaign event at an insurance office in the Sunset district in San Francisco, Calif. on March 27,2008. Photo by Mark Costantini / San Francisco Chronicle. Photo: Mark Costantini, The Chronicle


Leo Ryan's 28-year-old aide, Jackie Speier, was shot and wounded. "I was lying on the ground by one of the plane's wheels, pretending to be dead," she recalled in a 1988 interview with the Chronicle. Photo: Greg Robinson, SF Examiner / Bancroft Library


Thirty years after surviving 5 shots she received at Jonestown in Guyana, Congresswoman Jackie Speier poses for a portrait on Nov 14, 2008 in San Francisco, Calif. Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle


JONESTOWN-18NOV1978-REITERMAN - Guyana Ambush Scene - the bodies of five persons, including Congressman Leo J. Ryan, D-Calif., lie on airstrip at Port Kaituma, Guyana, in November 18, 1978, after an ambush by members of the Peoples Temple Cult. The reporter Tim Reiterman, who made it with the camera of photographer Greg Robinson, who was among the slain. San Francisco Examiner Photo: Tim Reiterman, SF Examiner / Bancroft Library
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Bodies on Airstrip in Jonestown, Guyana

Bodies lie on the Port Kaituma airstrip by the plane which was to carry them back to Georgetown. Congressman Leo Ryan and four other Americans were massacred (11/18) by members of the People's Temple after they had inspected the Temple to investigate charges by Ryan's constituents that their relatives were being held against their will and subjected to sexual and mental intimidation.
Stock Photo ID: 42-16112844
Date Photographed: November 18, 1978
Location: Jonestown, Guyana
Credit: © Bettmann/Corbis

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November 28, 1978 - This aerial view of the Jonestown agricultural commune shows the layout of the tin-roofed buildings that made up the settlement whose members died in a mass suicide-murder on November 19, 1978. At lower left is flat-pitched roof of the death pavilion and beside it are two long canvas-roofed school buildings. In lower right foreground are vehicle and equipment sheds. In the upper left corner are the wooden buildings of the older members of the commune and extensive agricultural plantings are beyond them to the edge of the jungle clearing. This photo was made on November 27, 1978, after the bodies had been removed.UPI/ San Francisco Chronicle File 1978 Photo: UPI, The Chronicle, File 1978
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November 17, 2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Congresswoman remembers day of horror, by Rep. Jackie Speier, Special to The Chronicle,

Second of Three Parts

"I'm 28 years old, and I am about to die."

I was curled up behind the wheel of an airplane on a jungle airstrip in Guyana, South America. This isn't what I expected when I signed on to work for a United States congressman. Our fact-finding trip to investigate the Peoples Temple in Jonestown had gone horribly wrong. I lay as still as I could, pretending to be dead, as an unknown gunman pumped five bullets into me at close range. Pop-pop. Pop. Pop-pop.

When the shooting stopped, I looked around and saw bodies, including that of my boss and mentor, Congressman Leo Ryan. Was he, too, pretending to be dead? I called his name, but he didn't respond. Looking down, I saw what appeared to be a bone. It was my own, and it was sticking out of my shattered right arm.

The thought raced through my mind: "I'm 28 years old, and I am about to die. This isn't how it's supposed to happen. I will never turn 80, never marry, never have children."

I said the Act of Contrition, the prayer Roman Catholics recite during confession, and waited for the lights to go out. I saw my grandmother's face and cried at the thought that she would have to go to my funeral.

A start in politics

My family wasn't particularly political. Mom and Dad voted, but that was the extent of their involvement. In fact, I ended up going to UC Davis because, to them, Berkeley was too radical.

The sisters at Burlingame's Mercy High School encouraged all of us to take an active role in our communities. I volunteered for the campaign of my state assemblyman, Leo Ryan, who seemed unlike other politicians. He was provocative; he didn't mince words or beat around the bush; he told you what was on his mind whether you wanted to hear it or not; and he took pride in not being able to be pigeonholed into any one ideology. For instance, he was a public school teacher, but supported education vouchers, opposed by teachers unions as a threat to public schools.

As a student at Davis, I interned in his Sacramento office. Leo (as he insisted we call him) said I could learn far more with first-hand experience than in my political science courses, which was exactly how he approached his job. He went to Watts after the 1965 riots to work as a substitute high school teacher and five years later, had himself booked into Folsom Prison to study conditions there.

By the time I graduated, Leo Ryan had moved on to Congress. He gave me an entry-level job in his Capitol office. The next year, he supported my decision to return home for law school. After I passed the bar in 1976, he offered me a position as his legislative counsel.

In March 1978, he and another congressman joined a Greenpeace mission to Newfoundland to document the slaughter of baby harp seals. I accompanied the delegation and, while witnessing hunters brutally club shrieking days-old seals, thought I would surely never see anything that violent again.

Eight months later, we were under fire in Jonestown.

Coerced by a demagogue

Constituents from our San Mateo County district had written the congressman about their daughters and sons who had joined Jim Jones' Peoples Temple and been coerced to accompany the charismatic demagogue to Guyana.

The State Department assured Congressman Ryan that the politically well-connected Jones was a decent man and his Peoples Temple compound was safe and open. But Leo wanted more information, so he asked a member of our staff to interview defectors. After listening to the tapes of those interviews, I had an ominous feeling. One ex-adherent spoke about rehearsing mass suicides in an exercise Jones called "The White Night." I informed Congressman Ryan, and he decided to go see for himself.

I had just placed a down payment on a condominium in Arlington, Va. Even though we had been reassured that our trip was perfectly safe, I asked the Realtor to add a condition making the transaction contingent on my return.

We left Washington with no protection other than the perceived shield of invincibility that came with Leo Ryan being a member of Congress. Every congressional delegation since is forbidden to travel without a military escort.

'We're all very happy'

Upon arriving in Georgetown, Guyana's capital, we were told that Jones would not allow us to visit. For three days, our delegation, including relatives of Temple followers and a press contingent, waited while Congressman Ryan, myself, U.S. Embassy official Richard Dwyer and Jim Schollart from the House Foreign Affairs Committee negotiated with Jones' representatives. Eventually, we were given permission to land at Port Kaituma, with no guarantee that we would be permitted to go any further.

On Nov. 17, we landed at Port Kaituma's airstrip. After a brief negotiation in which Congressman Ryan made it clear that he wasn't going to be deterred, our party was loaded onto a dump truck for the 7-mile trip through the jungle to Jonestown.

That evening, we were entertained by members of the compound and spoke to the Temple members whose families had contacted our office. To a person, they swore they were happy and had no desire to leave. Larry Layton, one of Jones' closest assistants, stepped in and said, "We're all very happy here. You see the beauty of this special place."

Don Harris, an NBC news correspondent, walked off to smoke a cigarette. He was approached by two people who slipped him notes saying that we were not seeing the real Peoples Temple. They were being held against their will and wanted to leave. Word spread, and more and more members came to us seeking protection and a way out of their tropical nightmare.

The next afternoon, after a torrential downpour turned the compound to a sticky, muddy swamp, the number of defectors had swelled to more than 40. We called for a third airplane and Congressman Ryan said he'd stay behind while I climbed back into the dump truck with the first group. I was surprised to see Larry Layton among the defectors and insisted that he be searched. Not having any professional security, a journalist patted Layton down, but missed the handgun hidden under his poncho.

Before the truck left, Leo Ryan returned, his shirt torn and bloodied. He had been attacked by a man with a knife while waiting with the other defectors. The situation had grown increasingly tense, and it was decided that we would all go to the airstrip together.

At Port Kaituma, we hurriedly loaded passengers onto two waiting planes. I heard screams and the unfamiliar sound of gunshots as, inside one of the aircraft, Layton opened fire. Within seconds, gunmen leaped from a nearby tractor and leveled their weapons at us. I dived to the ground behind an airplane wheel and pretended to be dead. The next thing I knew, I felt a crushing blow, as if someone had backed over me with a truck. It wasn't a truck, but the first of five bullets, tearing through my flesh.

I was afraid to move for quite some time after the silence resumed. Slowly, I looked around. Bodies lay crumpled on the tarmac. The wounded moved slowly, assessing their injuries. Congressman Ryan, three members of the media, and one of the defectors were dead. I dragged myself to an open airplane door and tried to crawl inside, but the plane's engine had been disabled, so it wasn't going to aid my escape. Some men gingerly laid me on the ground, not noticing that they had placed me on an anthill. I borrowed a reporter's tape recorder and began taping a final message to my family.

For 22 hours I lay, wounded on the muddy tarmac, altering between varying levels of consciousness. Some of the survivors found a nearby bar and brought me Guyanese rum to help dull the pain. At some point, word got to us that Jim Jones had ordered the "White Night," although we had no way of knowing how many of his followers had obeyed his madness.

A Guyanese military plane touched down the next day. I felt my prayers were answered, and I would finally receive medical attention. But the medic had only two aspirin. I remember telling him to just give me one, in case I needed the other later. Real aid wasn't administered until we landed at Georgetown, and I was transferred to a waiting U.S. military medevac plane.

Loss and recovery

I was flown to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. For the next two months, I underwent more than 10 procedures as surgeons tried to save my right leg and arm. At one point, I was told the leg would likely be amputated and I would never use the arm again. Fortunately, the excellent doctors and nurses who cared for me made sure that neither scenario came to pass.

When I returned to the Bay Area, I was not allowed to stay in my home because of death threats. As painful as my injuries were, as much as I cringed looking at my scarred and tattered body, nothing was as debilitating as living in fear. I refused to spend the rest of my life as a victim and was desperate for an opportunity to stand on my own two feet again. I decided to file for the special election to fill Congressman Ryan's now-vacant seat. It was my way of saying that I was done being a victim.

I lost that race, but was elected the next year to the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. Six years later, I won a seat in the state Assembly - the same seat Leo Ryan held when I first met him. I felt that life was beginning to return to normal and was able to lock away my Jonestown experience by convincing myself that tragedies happen to everybody. Because my tragedy was especially bad, I would probably be spared another one.

I fell in love with an emergency room surgeon. We married, had a son and tried for another child. After repeated miscarriages and fertility treatments, we were told it was unlikely to happen. But I'd learned that in life, you never take anything for granted. I got pregnant, naturally, at the age of 43. Then, three months into what was deemed a "high-risk" pregnancy, my husband was killed in a car accident on his way to work.

The loss of my husband was more traumatic than anything that had ever happened to me. I didn't want to get out of bed. But I had no choice. I was now the single mother of two children, one yet unborn. Because my late husband had no life insurance, I was financially devastated, too. I had to sell everything, including my home.

I only tell this story because I don't know how I would have coped with this had it not been for my experience, 16 years earlier, on that dreadful airstrip in Guyana.

In April 2008, I was elected to Congressman Ryan's old seat in the House of Representatives. Jonestown is no longer the first thing on my mind, but I would be lying if I said I don't think of it often. A car backfiring or the sound of fireworks or a violent scene in a movie hits me much like the truck I thought ran over me while lying on that tarmac. The past few months, while news organizations have prepared their coverage for the 30th anniversary of Jonestown, I have been asked numerous times to recall the ordeal. It's never easy, but talking about it has helped me put it in perspective. And as bad as some of the memories are, they are always eclipsed by one fond one: that of Congressman Leo J. Ryan.

Recently, the term "maverick" has been overused, but to me, Leo Ryan was the real deal. He carried around with him a righteous indignation and passion for the powerless of society and didn't shy away from questioning the status quo.

Leo Ryan is often the forgotten element of the Jonestown story. Not only is he the only member of Congress ever to be assassinated in the line of duty, more important, he was the only congressperson that thousands of Americans, from his district or not, knew they could trust when no one else would listen. He didn't win all his battles, but to Leo, the fight was as important as the outcome. There is a quote from Winston Churchill that reminds me of Leo Ryan: "Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts."

If there's anything I want others to take from my ordeal it is this: When life leaves us alone on that tarmac - whether it be the devastating loss of a loved one, shattering of a lifelong dream, loss of a job, or painful personal injury - we can always learn to walk again.

In my life, anyway, losing is just the first step toward future success.

Inside: Jim Jones Jr. says he finally had to forgive his father after years of hating him for what he did. A16
Tuesday: Ex-Chronicle reporter Duffy Jennings describes the chaotic scene after the City Hall slayings.














June 12, 2012, Los Angeles Times, War hero gives Purple Heart to civilian injured at Jonestown, by Lee Romney,

SAN FRANCISCO — This is a story of two politicians who share private horrors, a special bond and, now, a rare honor.

Paul N. “Pete” McCloskey, the former eight-term Bay Area congressman, led six bayonet charges as the head of his platoon while in Korea. The holder of two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and the Navy Cross, he returned home to dedicate his public life to fighting for peace and the environment.

Now 84, with a square face and shock of white hair, McCloskey prefers not to recount the battles that twice left him wounded, telling a documentarian not long ago that recounting his experience would be “unseemly” braggadocio. Instead, the longtime Republican-turned-Democrat recounted a dream he can’t seem to shake: Teenage faces of enemy soldiers in a trench gaze up at him before he fires.

Jackie Speier was a 28-year-old staffer who accompanied then-Rep. Leo Ryan to Guyana in 1978 to investigate Jim Jones and his People’s Temple for alleged human rights abuses. Their entourage was ambushed as they shuttled defectors onto an airplane, and Speier was shot five times as she lay on the jungle tarmac in a polka-dot dress.

She waited 22 hours for help. Ryan was killed.

Now 62 and a Democratic congresswoman from California, Rep. Speier rarely speaks of her experience. The terror she endured that day, she noted recently, is one that the military men and women fighting America’s wars face constantly.

For years, McCloskey bridled over the fact that Speier — who still has two bullets lodged in her body, one near her heart — was never publicly recognized for her sacrifice. So he did something about it.

One of his Purple Hearts now is displayed in Speier's Washington, D.C., office. An inscription notes "the perils of civil life often require more courage" than those of the battlefield.
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"She earned it," McCloskey said recently from his farm in Northern California, where he tends citrus and olive trees. “She got hurt worse than I did.”

McCloskey, a Stanford Law School graduate and former Marine Corps colonel, was elected to Congress in 1967. But his politics were far from party-line. He was the first Republican to oppose the Vietnam War and the first congressman to call for President Richard Nixon's impeachment. Known as a “Teddy Roosevelt progressive,” he helped write the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

After losing a 1982 Senate bid, McCloskey and his wife, Helen, moved to the remote farm in Yolo County; he continued to practice law part time with a firm in Redwood City.

Outraged by what he saw as corruption within the GOP, McCloskey came out of political retirement in 2006 to launch the “Revolt of the Elders.”

He took on Rep. Richard Pombo of Tracy, losing the primary race but contributing to Pombo’s defeat in the general election. In 2007, McCloskey switched his party affiliation.

Speier was a teenager when she met McCloskey, whom she called a “rock star” politician, at his first election-night celebration.

In a gesture to honor him two years ago, she read a statement into the Congressional Record, calling him “a true American maverick” who “pursues the truth no matter where it leads him.”

The daughter of working-class San Francisco parents, Speier had volunteered for Ryan while in high school. She went on to become an intern and ultimately his legal aide. Two years after the Jonestown massacre, she won a seat on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. A career in state government followed — six terms in the Assembly and two in the state Senate. Elected to Congress in 2008, Speier is known as an advocate for veterans, the environment and abortion rights.

“She is pure,” McCloskey said of Speier. “She’s a true public servant inside and out.”

The decorated war hero long had pondered the sacrifice Speier and her boss had made in the line of public duty.

Then last fall, when he and law partner Joe Cotchett were chatting about his medals, “Jackie’s name came up,” Cotchett said. “And out of Pete’s mouth came the words: ‘You know, she should get a medal.’ ”

McCloskey formulated a plan to give Speier one of his — a Purple Heart that he modestly described having received for being “nicked by a bayonet” in hand-to-hand combat on a North Korean hillside.

The two men crafted an inscription to Speier from their firm, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, describing the Revolutionary War roots of the order of the Purple Heart. While it “has yet to be authorized for wounds received in the nation’s service in civil life,” they wrote, “we believe that our Congresswoman, Jackie Speier, has demonstrated incredible valor.”

Speier was in the dark when she took the duo up on their insistent invitation to attend the law firm’s Christmas party. When McCloskey presented her with the medal, Cotchett said, “she was so transfixed. She had tears in her eyes.”

“I was totally blown away,” Speier said in a recent interview, “as close to speechless as I’ve ever been.”

The story had not received public attention until late last month, after fellow Democratic Rep. Mike Thompson of California, a Vietnam veteran, saw the Purple Heart in Speier’s office and learned the details of McCloskey’s gesture. Without her knowledge, he called a reporter with Capitol Hill’s Roll Call.

Robert Caughlan, a longtime environmentalist and political operative who had worked for Ryan, made the 2008 documentary about McCloskey’s life. Passing along the Purple Heart, he said, was “something Pete would do.”

“If you go through life-threatening experiences, it gives you a humility,” Caughlan said. “That’s what happened with both of them.”

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June 11, 2012 , UPI, Ex-congressman gives away Purple Heart,

Jackie Speier, pictured in Washington May 26, 2011. UPI/Roger L. Wollenberg

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/06/11/Ex-congressman-gives-away-Purple-Heart/UPI-60831339436494/#ixzz2O85Znlko

SAN FRANCISCO, June 11 (UPI) --Former U.S. Rep. Paul "Pete" McCloskey said he gave one of his Purple Hearts to Rep. Jackie Speier for her sacrifice in the Jonestown massacre of 1978.

McCloskey, who was wounded twice during the Korean War, gave Speier the Purple Heart at his law firm's Christmas party after he heard she had been shot five times as an aide to Rep. Leo Ryan, who was killed during a fact-gathering mission at Jonestown, Guyana, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Most of the more than 900 people who died at Jim Jones' People's Temple at Jonestown committed suicide.

Speier survived an attack by gunmen on the congressional team.

McCloskey, a Republican, was in the U.S. House from 1967 to 1983. Speier, a Democrat, has been in Congress since 2008. Both are from California.

McCloskey said Speier deserved to be recognized.

"She is pure. She's a true public servant inside and out," McCloskey said.

Speier said she was surprised to be presented with the honor.

"I was totally blown away … as close to speechless as I've ever been," Speier said in a recent interview.

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November 18, 2008, The Chronicle, Ten days That Shook the City, Duffy Jennings, Special to The Chronicle,


Former San Francisco Chronicle reporter Duffy Jennings, who covered the shooting of Mayor George Moscone and Sup. Harvey Milk in 1978, poses for a portrait in his office, on Thursday Nov, 13, 2008, in San Jose, Calif. Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle


Former San Francisco Chronicle reporter Duffy Jennings, who covered the shooting of Mayor George Moscone and Sup. Harvey Milk in 1978, shows off his press pass and historic clippings, on Thursday Nov, 13, 2008, in San Jose, Calif. Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle


Dianne Feinstein bows her head for a moment of silence in memory of slain Mayor Goerge Moscone and Supervisor Havey Milk, before the supervisor meeting on the day of the murders. Photo: Jerry Telfer, The Chronicle

John Monaghan, a George Moscone aide, and staff members wait in the main reception office. They are still in shock as the bodies of Moscone and Harvey Milk lay in the inner office immediately after they were assassinated by Sup. Dan White at City Hall in San Francisco November 27, 1978. Photo: Gary Fong, The Chronicle

Last of Three Parts

Monday, Nov. 27, 1978. 10:35 a.m.

I'm sitting at my desk in the city room on the third floor of The Chronicle at Fifth and Mission streets, reading the newspaper and waiting for a story to do.

A moment later, assignment editor Richard Hemp beckons me urgently as he hangs up a call from Bob Popp, our police beat reporter stationed at the Hall of Justice.

"Some kind of police activity going on at City Hall," Hemp says. "Lots of units responding."

"On the way, Dick," I answer, already out of my chair, grabbing my coat and notebook. "What do we know?"

"Report of a shooting is all. Call me from the car."

In front of him on the desk stands a small microphone wired directly to head photographer Gordon Peters own the hall. Hemp leans in to the mike, presses down the button. The radio crackles to life.

"Shots fired at City Hall, Gordo. I'm sending Duffy."

"Roger, Dick," Peters responds. "Clem's up."

I meet photographer Clem Albers hustling out of the photo lab. We rush down to his blue Chevy Corvair staff photographer's car parked behind the building and take off up Mission for the short ride to City Hall. Rounding the corner at Seventh, I lift the two-way radio microphone from its holder on the dashboard, pull it to my chin and push my thumb down on the talk switch.

"Jennings to desk. Any more details, Gunny?" I ask Hemp, an ex-Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who at 59 still walks with a drill instructor's upright swagger and wears his dress shirts heavily starched and creased in the back. An ex-Marine myself, I use the Corps' informal term for his rank.

"Popp says the mayor may have been shot," Hemp replies. "And now we have shots fired in the supervisors' offices, too. I'm sending two more teams.

"Sandy's on the beat today," he continues, referring to reporter Maitland "Sandy" Zane. "Meet him up there, and call me as soon as you know more."

"Aye, aye, Gunny. Over and out."

Clem guns the accelerator.

10:45 a.m.

In the second-floor press room at City Hall, San Francisco Examiner reporter K. Connie Kang drops the phone, bursts out of her cubicle and runs past Zane. "SHOOTING IN THE MAYOR'S OFFICE!" she yells and races out the door. Zane leaps to his feet and chases after her across the building to Room 200, the mayor's office.

10:50 a.m.

Clem pulls up to the Polk Street entrance, parks diagonally against the curb. Black-and-white units converge from every direction, sirens wailing, tires squealing. My first thought is that this looks like a scene from "Dirty Harry." I wonder if this is really just a movie shoot and we heard the police radio wrong.

We bolt up the front steps to the gilded entry doors, flash our press credentials at officers guarding the entry and vault the inside stairs two at a time up to Room 200. A chaotic scene unfolds. Plainclothes detectives, officers in uniform and city officials scurry in and out of the mayor's main office door and through two side doors to the inner offices.

Off to my right, the elevator door opens, and out rushes KGO-TV reporter Peter Cleaveland. He almost collides with two fast-moving cops, one with his service revolver drawn, another holding a shotgun aloft. "GET DOWN!" one of them barks. Instantly, I drop into a crouch against the wall, glancing around for a shooter. Cleaveland tries to enter the mayor's outer office.

"Not this time!" snaps the officer barring the door.

Two plainclothes officers emerge from a side door of the mayor's offices. "El alcalde esta muerto," one of them says in a hushed tone, Spanish for "the mayor is dead."

"Is Moscone dead?" I ask another officer. "Who shot him? Is Mel Wax here?" I am hoping that Wax, Moscone's press secretary, will confirm something, anything.

"Wait'll the chief gets here," comes the terse reply.

This is so unreal, so confusing, I think. Why won't they tell us anything? I wonder if this is connected to the mass suicides of the Peoples Temple cult at Jonestown, Guyana, only nine days before. Last of Three Parts

Monday, Nov. 27, 1978. 10:35 a.m.

I'm sitting at my desk in the city room on the third floor of The Chronicle at Fifth and Mission streets, reading the newspaper and waiting for a story to do.

A moment later, assignment editor Richard Hemp beckons me urgently as he hangs up a call from Bob Popp, our police beat reporter stationed at the Hall of Justice.

"Some kind of police activity going on at City Hall," Hemp says. "Lots of units responding."

"On the way, Dick," I answer, already out of my chair, grabbing my coat and notebook. "What do we know?"

"Report of a shooting is all. Call me from the car."

In front of him on the desk stands a small microphone wired directly to head photographer Gordon Peters down the hall. Hemp leans in to the mike, presses down the button. The radio crackles to life.

"Shots fired at City Hall, Gordo. I'm sending Duffy."

"Roger, Dick," Peters responds. "Clem's up."

I meet photographer Clem Albers hustling out of the photo lab. We rush down to his blue Chevy Corvair staff photographer's car parked behind the building and take off up Mission for the short ride to City Hall. Rounding the corner at Seventh, I lift the two-way radio microphone from its holder on the dashboard, pull it to my chin and push my thumb down on the talk switch.

"Jennings to desk. Any more details, Gunny?" I ask Hemp, an ex-Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who at 59 still walks with a drill instructor's upright swagger and wears his dress shirts heavily starched and creased in the back. An ex-Marine myself, I use the Corps' informal term for his rank.

"Popp says the mayor may have been shot," Hemp replies. "And now we have shots fired in the supervisors' offices, too. I'm sending two more teams.

"Sandy's on the beat today," he continues, referring to reporter Maitland "Sandy" Zane. "Meet him up there, and call me as soon as you know more."

"Aye, aye, Gunny. Over and out."

Clem guns the accelerator.

10:45 a.m.

In the second-floor press room at City Hall, San Francisco Examiner reporter K. Connie Kang drops the phone, bursts out of her cubicle and runs past Zane. "SHOOTING IN THE MAYOR'S OFFICE!" she yells and races out the door. Zane leaps to his feet and chases after her across the building to Room 200, the mayor's office.

10:50 a.m.

Clem pulls up to the Polk Street entrance, parks diagonally against the curb. Black-and-white units converge from every direction, sirens wailing, tires squealing. My first thought is that this looks like a scene from "Dirty Harry." I wonder if this is really just a movie shoot and we heard the police radio wrong.

We bolt up the front steps to the gilded entry doors, flash our press credentials at officers guarding the entry and vault the inside stairs two at a time up to Room 200. A chaotic scene unfolds. Plainclothes detectives, officers in uniform and city officials scurry in and out of the mayor's main office door and through two side doors to the inner offices.

Off to my right, the elevator door opens, and out rushes KGO-TV reporter Peter Cleaveland. He almost collides with two fast-moving cops, one with his service revolver drawn, another holding a shotgun aloft. "GET DOWN!" one of them barks. Instantly, I drop into a crouch against the wall, glancing around for a shooter. Cleaveland tries to enter the mayor's outer office.

"Not this time!" snaps the officer barring the door.

Two plainclothes officers emerge from a side door of the mayor's offices. "El alcalde esta muerto," one of them says in a hushed tone, Spanish for "the mayor is dead."

"Is Moscone dead?" I ask another officer. "Who shot him? Is Mel Wax here?" I am hoping that Wax, Moscone's press secretary, will confirm something, anything.

"Wait'll the chief gets here," comes the terse reply.

This is so unreal, so confusing, I think. Why won't they tell us anything? I wonder if this is connected to the mass suicides of the Peoples Temple cult at Jonestown, Guyana, only nine days before.I call Hemp with the confirmation. "All right," he says. "Draper's writing the lead. Sandy will do White. You do City Hall, the reaction, the mood, what it's like there. Call back when you're ready."

The city was in shock. So was The Chronicle.

Carl Nolte, the assistant city editor that day and still on The Chronicle staff, put it this way when we talked recently: "We didn't know what the hell was going on. We just had one of our own guys shot down in a South American jungle, now this. No one really knew much about Dan White. We knew our politicos could be weird, but they didn't just shoot each other. It knocked a hole in what we thought San Francisco was about. It shook the city to its roots. It was a crazy-ass day."

White surrendered soon after the killings. Six months later, I covered his murder trial, sitting with the late Jim Wood of the Examiner inside the bullet-proof glass separating the trial participants from the courtroom gallery.

On May 21, 1979, when the astonishing verdict of voluntary manslaughter came in, I rushed back to the office, pounded out the story, then went back out to join the other Chronicle staffers covering the ensuing "White Night" riot at the Civic Center.

I was more distraught than I admitted publicly, even to myself, over Moscone's death and White's lenient verdict. As The Chronicle's City Hall reporter during Moscone's first two years in office, I knew the mayor well from our frequent briefings in the same back parlor where White gunned him down.

From time to time, his Kennedyesque charisma and my close relationships with some of his top staff tested my journalistic objectivity, and that was one reason I returned to general assignment reporting.

I didn't realize it immediately, but a decade of one terrible event after another was taking its toll. I was barely out of my 20s, and I had already covered what many young reporters would consider a career's worth of big stories.

The Zodiac case, the Patricia Hearst kidnapping, the Zebra killings, the Golden Dragon restaurant massacre - I had shared in the newspaper's reporting on these sensational crimes and other major stories.

In between, I worked graveyard shifts on the police beat, went on call 24/7 with homicide detectives, fought fires with Engine Co. 21 and wrote about more death, disaster and destruction than I care to remember.

By 1980, I was burned out. I left the paper to be the Giants' publicity director and later went into a public relations career.

Now the 30th anniversary of that historic November is upon us. What stays with me today, more than my eye-to-eye exchange with now-Sen. Feinstein that burnished the moment into memory for both of us, is an understanding of how Moscone changed the city forever. Sadly, his legacy has been overshadowed by the memory not of how he lived, but of the way he died.

Moscone had his critics, some with good reason, but he loved San Francisco, a passion I share as a fellow native. An entire generation of San Franciscans today knows little about him other than the convention center bears his name.

He fought against racism and for civil rights, against downtown power brokers and for neighborhoods. He opened the doors of City Hall and the seats of power to people from all walks of life, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. As deservedly iconic and significant as Harvey Milk has become to the gay community, it was Moscone who broke down the barriers.

His was a remarkable story in its own right. Perhaps on one of these anniversaries, Hollywood will give us a movie titled "Moscone."

Dates in Dan White's life

Sept. 2, 1946: Dan White is born in Long Beach. The son of a firefighter, White grows up in San Francisco.

November 1977: A conservative former police officer, White is elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors after a campaign in which he pledges to defend traditional values. In the same election, Harvey Milk - openly gay and liberal - is also elected to the board.

Nov. 10, 1978: White impulsively resigns from the board, citing financial difficulties. Pressed by his supporters, he later asks Mayor George Moscone to reappoint him. Moscone initially agrees. But he is dissuaded by Milk and others who see White as a political foe.

Nov. 27, 1978: Moscone is ready to appoint Don Horanzy, a federal housing official, to fill White's seat. White takes his gun to City Hall, avoiding the metal detector by climbing though a basement window. He goes to Moscone's office, argues with him and kills him. Then he confronts and kills Milk. Hours later, he surrenders to police.

May 21, 1979: After White is convicted of voluntary manslaughter, not murder, angry protesters burn police cars in what becomes known as the "White Night Riots."

January 1984: White is paroled after serving more than five years in prison.

Oct. 21, 1985: White kills himself, using a hose to funnel carbon monoxide into a car in the garage of his family's house in San Francisco's Excelsior district.

___________________________________________________________________________

November 17, 2008, San Francisco Chronicle, Jim Jones' son remembers the tragedy, by Susan Sward, Chronicle Staff Writer,

Jim W. Jones Jr., shown here after coaching basketball practice at City College of San Francisco, Calif., on Sunday, November 16, 2008. On Nov. 18, 1978, the day of the mass suicide at Jonestown, Jim Jones Jr. was about 150 miles away -- in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. The night before, he and other youths from Jonestown had been narrowly defeated in a basketball game against the national team of Guyana. Among those who died in the mass suicide was Jones Jr.'s 18-year-old wife, who was pregnant with their child. Today Jones is a Bay Area businessman. He is married with three sons -- one of whom plays for the University of San Diego. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle

The radio call came before the suicides began.

On Nov. 18, 1978, Jim Jones Jr. was 18 years old and living in a Peoples Temple compound in Georgetown, Guyana, 150 miles from the Jonestown settlement. The previous night, he and his teammates on the Peoples Temple basketball team had played in a tournament, narrowly losing to the Guyanese national team. That afternoon, via shortwave, the Rev. Jim Jones, the boy's adoptive father, contacted him with a chilling order: All 60 Temple members living in Georgetown should immediately "get knives, wire and scissors and take our own lives."

The son tried to argue.

"Dad, this doesn't make sense. Isn't there another way?" he remembers saying. "Dad said the avenging angels would come and get our enemies, but we needed to lay down our lives 'as a revolutionary suicide.' "

After taking his father's call, Jones Jr. said he rounded up his teammates, who included two other sons of Jones, Stephan and Tim. They went to the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown to try to get personnel there to stop anything from happening. But no one at the embassy would open the doors, he said.

The next day, Guyanese troops were sent to Jonestown and found 909 bodies, victims of the mass suicide. Jones Jr. didn't go. Though he wished at the time he had been permitted to travel there, today he is glad he did not see the dead. Among them was his 18-year-old pregnant wife.

Thirty years later, Jones lives in the Bay Area and is a medical equipment salesman with a territory that includes San Francisco, Hawaii and Guam. He has converted to Catholicism, and is happily married with three sons - one of whom plays basketball at the University of San Diego.

Looking at his past, Jones says that he finally had to forgive his father after years of hating him for what he did. That was the only way, Jones said, he could forgive himself - riddled as he was with survivor's guilt.

Up until the mass suicides, he said, he had been pretty much of a "true believer" in his father.

"In 1960, I was the first Negro child ever adopted by a white family in Indianapolis," Jones said. If he hadn't been adopted by Jones Sr. and his wife, Marceline, he probably would have ended up in foster homes or prison, he said. But as the Rev. Jones' son, "I felt I owned the company store," he said.

After the tragedy, he said, many people never wanted to hear anything about Jonestown except "that everyone was crazy. That's all they wanted to hear so they could put it in a box and could say, 'This can't happen to me.' "

These days, if people really want to hear about Jonestown, Jones says he tells them that he remains proud of what the Peoples Temple followers tried to do - "to build a new world. They tried, and they failed dramatically, horrifically."

Recently Jones was diagnosed with kidney failure. He will need dialysis and a transplant. He says the way he looks on it, 30 years ago he "had the opportunity to miss death" and now he attempts to live each day fully, volunteering at school and church activities and working on "how I can impact my world. I have been blessed by the grace of God."
______________________________________________________________________________

January 14, 2011, NPR, Rep. Leo Ryan's Daughter Recalls His 1978 Murder, by NPR Staff

The effects of the recent attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords are being felt far beyond Arizona. For Erin Ryan, the attack brought a flood of memories from another national tragedy. Her father, Rep. Leo Ryan, was killed in Guyana in 1978.

The California congressman had traveled to the Jonestown compound of the Peoples Temple cult to investigate Jim Jones' religious settlement. But his group was attacked as they attempted to leave. Ryan and several others were killed.

When it came to his work, Rep. Ryan was no stranger to risk, as Erin tells StoryCorps. For instance, his work on prison reform inspired him to spend a week on death row in the maximum-security Folsom State Prison.

"My dad had a fair amount of self-confidence and bravado," she says.

As Erin recalls, her father came away from Folsom with an unusual souvenir: a reminder of the prisoners' affection for chess.

Isolated from one another, they would call out moves. As Erin recalls, the prisoners used "a chess board they had made out of toothpaste and toilet paper, with a cardboard board. When he left, they presented the chess set to him. It became his prized possession."

Attack On A Congressman

At top, Rep. Leo Ryan (far right) flies to Guyana on Nov. 18, 1978, along with consultant James Schollart and aide Jackie Speier. In 1979, Erin Ryan (at right in lower image) attended a congressional hearing on the Jonestown killings.AP/Duricka

When Rep. Ryan was in Congress, Erin was in college, attending Washington's Georgetown University. On the night before her father left for Jonestown, she had him over for dinner at her apartment.

"We didn't talk a lot about the trip," she says. "It was just a chance to hang out with my dad. Dad had done a lot of adventurous things in his life, and everything had always turned out well."

It was around 8 or 9 o'clock in the evening that Erin got the first report that her father was in trouble.

"There was a flash news report on the television," she says, "that said that a congressman has been shot, and possibly killed. It was gut-wrenching, to not know what was happening. I mean, I can still feel it to this day when I think about it. It was brutal."

But soon after her father's death, Erin and her family found a message from him, something he'd written for them long beforehand.

"The night before he married my mom, he wrote a letter to his children. And it's the most beautiful letter you can imagine, about his hopes and dreams for his children in the future. And that was a tremendous gift to us."

Erin says she has a message of her own for the families of the victims of Saturday's shooting.

"Feeling that gaping hole in your life — I mean, for me it's been 32 years, and it can still bring me to tears — but, you can't make that a defining moment of your life, or of the person who died.

"I've always said to myself that I was lucky that he was my dad, and I was lucky to have had him for the years that I had him. And that's what you have to hold onto."

Now 53, Erin Ryan works as legal counsel to Rep. Jackie Speier, who represents Leo Ryan's old district. Speier, who was on Rep. Ryan's staff, was with him in Guyana when he was killed. She was shot five times, but survived.

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo.
______________________________________________

Dead Dog & Gas Mask Shot

#suicide
#the peoples temple

#kool aid
#jim jones

#dead
#mass suicide
#cult


Timeline of People's Temple

September 1954: Jones speaks at Laurel Street Tabernacle, an Assemblies of God Pentecostal church in Indianapolis.

April 4, 1955: Several members of the Laurel Street Tabernacle join with Jones to form the Wings of Deliverance church, later renamed the Peoples Temple. The church was formed in part to further Jones’ beliefs in racial diversity.

1960: The Peoples Temple officially becomes a member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and Jones is ordained as a minister, despite lacking any formal training. The church changes its name again to the Peoples Temple Christian Church. Twenty percent of church members are African-Americans.

1965: The Temple moves with 70 families, half of whom are African-Americans, to Ukiah, California. The church and Jones tried to escape personal threats and conflicts over radical theology. Jones also believed California to be a “safe zone” in the event of nuclear war, where racial equality could grow.

1972: The church opens a second congregation, in San Francisco.

1974: The Peoples Temple is granted a lease from the government of Guyana for a tract of land for colonization.

1977: Jonestown, Guyana, grows to 50 people. They come under suspicion of the Internal Revenue Service for revenue generated from elderly care homes they maintained. At this point, Jones begins urging his followers to move to Jonestown.

November 14, 1978: Congressman Leo Ryan travels to Jonestown on a fact-finding mission over concerns of family members and in part to investigate a child custody dispute between Jones and a former church member.

November 17: Ryan tours Jonestown and interviews members. Sixteen members leave with him.

November 18: Ryan continues his tour of Jonestown, but cuts it short when a member tries to cut his throat. While preparing to leave from an airstrip, a truck carrying armed Temple guards opens fire.

Ryan, three journalists and a Temple member are killed. Following the attack, Jones calls his congregation together, telling them they are being forced to commit "revolutionary suicide" by the outside world. One woman dissented but she was suppressed.

The Temple members line up to drink a fruit drink mixed with potassium cyanide and sedatives. Mothers fed the poison to their children. Jones is later found shot to death. In the end, 913 people died, 276 of them children.

#jonestown
#cult

#dead bodies
#mass suicide

“Death is not a fearful thing, it's living that's treacherous”—

#cults
#go outside

#suicide
#acid
#horror

Members of a US military team prepare aluminum coffins for shipment to the United States, following the more than 900 deaths in the mass suicide staged in Jonestown by members of the People’s Temple and their leader, the Reverend Jim Jones,Georgetown, Guyana, November 24, 1978.

Posted 1 year ago and has 24 notes
#vintage #photography #mass suicide #peoples temple

The dispensation of so many bodies presented the State Department with a difficult problem. Issues like deciding whether to perform autopsies on all the victims and finding a mortuary prepared to handle the large volume of bodies delayed the repatriation efforts for many months. In the photo above, workers in Dover, Del., the city chosen as the first stop on U.S. soil, move some of the Jonestown coffins onto a truck after their arrival from Guyana in April 1979.

http://prettylittlewonder.tumblr.com/post/21426521971/jim-jones-at-the-pulpit-in-jonestown-guyana





Family After Math

Jim Jones' wife, Marceline (left), was found poisoned at the pavilion.

Found near Marceline Jones' body was a signed and witnessed will leaving all bank accounts “in my name” to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and writing that Suzanne Jones Cartmell should receive no assets.

On the final morning of Ryan’s visit, Marceline had taken Stephan, Jim Jr. and Tim Jonesreporters on a tour of Jonestown.

Stephan, Jim Jr., and Tim Jones did not take part in the mass suicide because they were playing with the Peoples Temple basketball team against the Guyanese national team in Georgetown. At the time of events in Jonestown, Stephan and Tim were both nineteen and Jim Jones Jr. was eighteen. Tim’s biological family, the Tuppers, which consisted of his three biological sisters, biological brother, and biological mother, all died at Jonestown. Three days before the tragedy, Stephan Jones refused, over the radio, to comply with an order by his father to return the team to Jonestown for Ryan’s visit.

During the events at Jonestown, Stephan, Tim, and Jim Jones Jr. drove to the American Embassy in Guyana in an attempt to receive help. The Guyanese soldiers guarding the embassy refused to let them in after hearing about the shootings at the Port Kaituma airstrip.

Later, the three returned to the Temple’s headquarters in Georgetown to find the bodies of Sharon Amos and her three children. Guyanese soldiers kept the Jones brothers under house arrest for five days, interrogating them about the deaths in Georgetown. Stephan Jones was accused of being involved in the Georgetown deaths, and was placed in a Guyanese prison for three months. Tim Jones and Johnny Cobb, another member of the Peoples Temple basketball team, were asked to go to Jonestown and help identify the bodies of people who had died.

After returning to the United States, Jim Jones Jr. was placed under police surveillance for several months while he lived with his older sister, Suzanne, who had previously turned against the Temple. When Jonestown was first being established, Stephan Jones (right) had originally avoided two attempts by his father to relocate to the settlement. He eventually moved to Jonestown after a third and final attempt. He has since said that he gave into his father's wishes to move to Jonestown because of his mother.

Stephan Jones is now a businessman, and married with three daughters. He appeared in the documentary Jonestow

One year later, he appeared in the documentary Witness to Jonestown where he responds to rare footage shot inside the People’s Temple. Jim Jones Jr., who lost his wife and unborn child at Jonestown, returned to San Francisco.

He remarried and has three sons from this marriage, including Rob Jones, a high-school basketball star who went on to play for the University of San Diego before transferring to Saint Mary’s College of California. n: Paradise Lost which aired on the History Channel and Discovery Channel. He stated he will not watch the documentary and has never grieved for his father.

Lew and Agnes Jones both died at Jonestown.

Agnes Jones (left) was thirty-five years old at the time of her death. Her husband and four children all died at Jonestown. Lew Jones, who was twenty-one years old at the time of his death, died alongside his wife Terry and son Chaeoke. Stephanie Jones had died at age five in a car accident.

Suzanne Jones married Mike Cartmell; both turned against the Temple and were not in Jonestown on November 18, 1978. After this decision to abandon the Temple, Jones referred to Suzanne openly as “my goddamned, no good for nothing daughter” and stated that she was not to be trusted.

In a signed note found at the time of her death, Marceline Jones directed that the Jones’ funds were to be given to theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union and specified: “I especially request that none of these are allowed to get into the hands of my adopted daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell.” Cartmell had two children and died of colon cancer in November 2006.

Specific references to Tim Stoen, the father of John Stoen, including the logistics of possibly murdering him, are made on the Temple’s final “death tape,” as well as a discussion over whether the Temple should include John Stoen among those committing “revolutionary suicide.”At Jonestown, John Stoen was found poisoned in Jim Jones’ cabin.

Both Jim Jon (Kimo - right) and his mother, Carolyn Louise Moore Layton, died during the events at Jonestown.

#jim jones

Watching a documentary on Jim Jones If your #Guyanese your parents have probably talked about this story watch channel 33 #cnn
#guyana
#people temple
#cnn
#jims jones

Meanwhile, the Jones Town Massacre is on CNN. I swear that’s the only thing most Americans know about my country. I didn’t even really know about the Jones Town Massacre until I was living in this Country. It’s not that deep back home. Most people in the country didn’t know anything until after everything happened. My mother just told me she didn’t even know where Jones Town was and she was born and raised there. She just knows it’s up in the jungle somewhere.

#guyana
#history
#jim jones
#massacre
#thoughts

Jim W. Jones Jr., shown here after coaching basketball practice at City College of San Francisco, Calif., on Sunday, November 16, 2008. On Nov. 18, 1978, the day of the mass suicide at Jonestown, Jim Jones Jr. was about 150 miles away — in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana.

The night before, he and other youths from Jonestown had been narrowly defeated in a basketball game against the national team of Guyana. Among those who died in the mass suicide was Jones Jr.’s 18-year-old wife, who was pregnant with their child.

The radio call came before the suicides began.

On Nov. 18, 1978, Jim Jones Jr. was 18 years old and living in a Peoples Temple compound in Georgetown, Guyana, 150 miles from the Jonestown settlement. The previous night, he and his teammates on the Peoples Temple basketball team had played in a tournament, narrowly losing to the Guyanese national team. That afternoon, via shortwave, the Rev. Jim Jones, the boy’s adoptive father, contacted him with a chilling order: All 60 Temple members living in Georgetown should immediately “get knives, wire and scissors and take our own lives.”

The son tried to argue.

“Dad, this doesn’t make sense. Isn’t there another way?” he remembers saying. “Dad said the avenging angels would come and get our enemies, but we needed to lay down our lives ‘as a revolutionary suicide.’ “

After taking his father’s call, Jones Jr. said he rounded up his teammates, who included two other sons of Jones, Stephan and Tim. They went to the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown to try to get personnel there to stop anything from happening. But no one at the embassy would open the doors, he said.

The next day, Guyanese troops were sent to Jonestown and found 909 bodies, victims of the mass suicide. Jones Jr. didn’t go. Though he wished at the time he had been permitted to travel there, today he is glad he did not see the dead. Among them was his 18-year-old pregnant wife.

Thirty years later, Jones lives in the Bay Area and is a medical equipment salesman with a territory that includes San Francisco, Hawaii and Guam. He has converted to Catholicism, and is happily married with three sons - one of whom plays basketball at the University of San Diego.

Looking at his past, Jones . says that he finally had to forgive his father after years of hating him for what he did. That was the only way, Jones said, he could forgive himself - riddled as he was with survivor’s guilt.

Up until the mass suicides, he said, he had been pretty much of a “true believer” in his father.

“In 1960, I was the first Negro child ever adopted by a white family in Indianapolis,” Jones said. If he hadn’t been adopted by Jones Sr. and his wife, Marceline, he probably would have ended up in foster homes or prison, he said. But as the Rev. Jones’ son, “I felt I owned the company store,” he said.

After the tragedy, he said, many people never wanted to hear anything about Jonestown except "that everyone was crazy. That's all they wanted to hear so they could put it in a box and could say, 'This can’t happen to me.'"

These days, if people really want to hear about Jonestown, Jones says he tells them that he remains proud of what the Peoples Temple followers tried to do - "to build a new world. They tried, and they failed dramatically, horrifically."

Recently Jones was diagnosed with kidney failure. He will need dialysis and a transplant. He says the way he looks on it, 30 years ago he “had the opportunity to miss death” and now he attempts to live each day fully, volunteering at school and church activities and working on “how I can impact my world. I have been blessed by the grace of God.”

#jonestown
#cult
_______________________________________________________________________

December 24, 2007, Sports Illustrated / CNN.com, Escaping Jonestown, by Gary Smith,

Marceline

Marceline (Marcy) Jones

Jim Jones' wife, Marceline, was found poisoned at the pavilion.[104] On the final morning of Ryan's visit, Marceline had taken reporters on a tour of Jonestown.[105] Stephan, Jim Jr. and Tim Jones

Stephan, Jim Jr., and Tim Jones did not take part in the mass suicide because they were playing with the Peoples Temple basketball team against the Guyanese national team in Georgetown.[15][103] At the time of events in Jonestown, Stephan and Tim were both nineteen and Jim Jones Jr. was eighteen.[106] Tim's biological family, the Tuppers, which consisted of his three biological sisters,[107][108][109] biological brother,[110] and biological mother,[111] all died at Jonestown. Three days before the tragedy, Stephan Jones refused, over the radio, to comply with an order by his father to return the team to Jonestown for Ryan's visit.[112]

During the events at Jonestown, Stephan, Tim, and Jim Jones Jr. drove to the American Embassy in Guyana in an attempt to receive help. The Guyanese soldiers guarding the embassy refused to let them in after hearing about the shootings at the Port Kaituma airstrip.[113] Later, the three returned to the Temple's headquarters in Georgetown to find the bodies of Sharon Amos and her three children.[113] Guyanese soldiers kept the Jones brothers under house arrest for five days, interrogating them about the deaths in Georgetown.[113] Stephan Jones was accused of being involved in the Georgetown deaths, and was placed in a Guyanese prison for three months.[113] Tim Jones and Johnny Cobb, another member of the Peoples Temple basketball team, were asked to go to Jonestown and help identify the bodies of people who had died.[113] After returning to the United States, Jim Jones Jr. was placed under police surveillance for several months while he lived with his older sister, Suzanne, who had previously turned against the Temple.[113]

Lew Jones, Terry and Chaeoke

Agnes Jones

Kimo

When Jonestown was first being established, Stephan Jones had originally avoided two attempts by his father to relocate to the settlement. He eventually moved to Jonestown after a third and final attempt. He has since said that he gave into his father's wishes to move to Jonestown because of his mother.[114] Stephan Jones is now a businessman, and married with three daughters. He appeared in the documentary, Jonestown: Paradise Lost which aired on the History Channel and Discovery Channel. He stated he will not watch the documentary and has never grieved for his father.[115] One year later, he appeared in the documentary, Witness to Jonestown where he responds to rare footage shot inside the People's Temple.[116] Jim Jones Jr., who lost his wife and unborn child at Jonestown, returned to San Francisco. He remarried and has three sons from this marriage,[103] including Rob Jones, a high-school basketball star who went on to play for the University of San Diego before transferring to Saint Mary's College of California.[117]

Lew, Agnes and Suzanne Jones

Lew and Agnes Jones both died at Jonestown. Agnes Jones was thirty-five years old at the time of her death.[118] Her husband [119] and four children [120][121][122][123] all died at Jonestown. Lew Jones, who was twenty-one years old at the time of his death, died alongside his wife Terry and son Chaeoke.[124][125][126]Stephanie Jones had died at age five in a car accident.[15]

Suzanne Jones married Mike Cartmell; both turned against the Temple and were not in Jonestown on November 18, 1978. After this decision to abandon the Temple, Jones referred to Suzanne openly as "my goddamned, no good for nothing daughter" and stated that she was not to be trusted.[127] In a signed note found at the time of her death, Marceline Jones directed that the Jones' funds were to be given to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and specified: "I especially request that none of these are allowed to get into the hands of my adopted daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell."[128] [129] Cartmell had two children and died of colon cancer in November 2006.[130] [131] John Stoen and Kimo

Specific references to Tim Stoen, the father of John Stoen, including the logistics of possibly murdering him, are made on the Temple's final "death tape," as well as a discussion over whether the Temple should include John Stoen among those committing "revolutionary suicide."[93] At Jonestown, John Stoen was found poisoned in Jim Jones' cabin. [67]

Both Jim Jon (Kimo) and his mother, Carolyn Louise Moore Layton, died during the events at Jonestown. [132]

^ "22 - Rob Jones." University of San Diego Official Athletic Site. Accessed: 2009-10-03. Archived by WebCite
^ Agnes Paulette Jones Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple]. San Diego State University.
^ "Forrest Ray Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
^ "Billy Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
^ "Jimbo Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
^ "Michael Ray Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
^ "Stephanie Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
^ Lew Eric Jones Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
^ "Terry Carter Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.
^ "Chaeoke Warren Jones" Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. San Diego State University.





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