December 4, 1978, People Magazine, Why Those Suicides in Guyana? Two Experts Describe How Religious Cults Can Cause Their Members to 'Snap', [Blog]
December 11, 1978, People Magazine, Death Takes No Holiday in San Francisco, as a Shocked City Mourns Two Murdered Leaders, [Blog]
December 11, 1978, People Magazine, Attorney Charles Garry Is Still a Believer—If Not in Jim Jones, Then in His 'Utopia', [Blog]
December 25, 1978, People Magazine, Reverend Jim Jones, [Blog]
December 25, 1978, People Magazine, One Pilgrim's Progress: from Church to Camp to Abattoir, [Blog]
February 26, 1979, People Magazine, Is Dr. Heinz Kohut Beside Himself? Rarely, but His Ideas on Fragmented Personality Revolutionized Psychiatry, by Giovanna Breu, [Blog]
May 7, 1979, People Magazine, 'Kids Are Being Warehoused for Profit,' Says Kenneth Wooden, Crusading for Foster Children, [Blog]
November 12, 1979, Vol. 12, No. 20, People Magazine, The Legacy of Jonestown: a Year of Nightmares and Unanswered Questions, by Clare Crawford-Mason, Dolly Langdon, Melba Beals, Nancy Faber, Diana Waggoner, Connie Singer, Davis Bushnell, Karen Jackovich, Richard K. Rein,
Dec 3, 1979, People Magazine, Mail
March 17, 1980, People Magazine, The Mills Family Murders: Could It Be Jim Jones' Last Revenge?, by Clare Crawford-Mason and Nancy Faber, [Blog]
March 15, 1999, People Magazine, Survivors: Jim Jones Jr. battles the ghosts of Jonestown, by Joanne Kaufman, Cynthia Sanz and Gabrielle Cosgriff, [Blog]
April 16, 2007, People Magazine, Picks and Pans Review: Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, [Blog]
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December 4, 1978, People Magazine, Why Leo Ryan and Jim Jones Met on That Day of Death in the Jungles of Guyana,
For two years Rep. Leo Ryan, 53, of San Mateo County, Calif. and the Rev. Jim Jones, 47, of the Peoples Temple in San Francisco were set on an unwitting collision course. One man was a crusading politician determined to pursue even the most improbable complaints of his constituents, the other a murderous ideologue masquerading as a social activist. The consequences when their careers finally intersected in a steamy jungle outpost in Guyana were hideous beyond imagining. In the aftermath, PEOPLE correspondents in Washington, D.C. and California filed this chronicle of the events that preceded that bloody meeting.
Congressman Ryan knew little about the Rev. Jim Jones until one fall evening in 1976 when he went to pay a condolence call on an old friend, Associated Press photographer Sammy Houston. Houston's son, Robert, who had joined the Peoples Temple in 1969, had been found dead in San Francisco, an apparent suicide. Houston was convinced he had been murdered by Jones' followers for trying to defect. Ryan must have been at least somewhat incredulous, for Jones at that time was chairman of the San Francisco Housing Commission, popular among Bay Area liberals and a highly effective community leader. Still, Ryan was intrigued by Houston's story, partly for personal reasons. He had been a high school English teacher before going into politics, and young Houston was one of his pupils. Moreover, Ryan's own nephew had mysteriously disappeared after joining the cult of Scientology. "Leo was not content to sit behind his desk relying on information from bureaucrats," says Rep. Stephen Solarz, who served with him on the International Relations Committee. "He felt he had a responsibility to help people who couldn't help themselves." Already involved in the congressional investigation of the Moonies, Ryan committed himself that night in Houston's home to find out the truth about Jones' temple as well. It was to be the last cause of the congressman's life.
In 1976 Jones' reputation as a religious leader was not widely questioned, though some observers wondered why he traveled in a bulletproof bus and needed so many bodyguards (more than a dozen at a time). Anyone who cared to look further would have discovered that Jones' background was somewhat bizarre. The son of an invalid father and a mother who worked in a factory, he is recalled by childhood neighbors in Lynn, Ind. as a quiet and pious boy who delivered rousing sermons at funerals he held for neighborhood pets—and who was suspected of stealing cats for sacrificial rituals. Though a lackluster student, he graduated from Butler University and by 1953 had opened his first church in Indianapolis, financing it in part with profits from the sale of imported monkeys. Jones had an integrated congregation in the Klan-ridden city, served free meals to the indigent, fought for civil rights—and then, discouraged with community antagonism, became a missionary in Brazil.
By 1963 he had returned to form his first Peoples Temple. The following year he was formally ordained as a Disciples of Christ minister, and in 1965 he and 100 of his followers moved to Redwood Valley, Calif., where his little cult grew steadily. By the time he moved his headquarters to San Francisco in 1971, he had acquired several homes for juvenile delinquents, a fleet of buses, a parsonage for himself, several pieces of real estate—and the devotion of thousands of followers. Most were poor blacks whose loyalty was based on Jones' warning of nuclear holocaust or a fascist takeover in which all blacks would be herded into concentration camps. Even his wife, Marceline, a former nurse several years his senior, admitted the religion he preached was but a cynical facade for his radical Marxism. "In order to bring people out of their superstition, you have to give them a substitute," he told her.
Nevertheless, his ability to mobilize his disciples for campaigning made him a formidable political force in the city and beyond. By the time he applied to lease 27,000 acres for an agricultural commune in Guyana, his references included Vice-President Walter Mondale, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano and numerous other high-ranking Democrats. Indeed, when Ryan first intervened with the State Department on behalf of Sammy Houston, he was told the group in Guyana was "harmless."
Ryan's refusal to abandon his inquiry was characteristic of the man. The son of a newspaper reporter in Lincoln, Nebr., he learned politics as a boy at the dinner table. After submarine duty in World War II, he earned his master's degree in English at Creighton University. For five years he taught and worked as a school administrator before entering politics as a city councilman in south San Francisco in 1956. Later, in the California legislature, he made educational matters his specialty. To gain insight into the causes of the Watts riots, he took a job as a teacher in a ghetto school. Two years later, in 1970, he posed as an inmate at Folsom Prison to investigate conditions. First elected to Congress in 1972, he was known as a fighter for the environment and a fiercely independent voice for his constituents. "He was a gutsy, courageous guy," says Rep. Robert Drinan of Massachusetts. "When he believed in something he just pressed and pressed."
By mid-1977 Jones was feeling the heat. New West magazine, despite pressure from every prominent ally Jones could muster—from businessman Cyril Magnin to then Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally—published a damning exposé of Jones, based on horror stories told by temple defectors. Exploding the movement's carefully cultivated image as a provider of legal, medical and charitable services, the magazine described instead a heavily guarded slave camp, financed by members (who had to contribute one-quarter of their gross incomes) and residents (who had to give all their property to the church). Jones, the stories suggested, was skimming an enormous private fortune from the church and was manipulating his followers with sadistic glee. Defectors told of all-night "catharsis" sessions and "family meetings" in which hundreds of members would line up for paddlings. (The paddle was known as "the board of education.") They described vicious beatings of adults and children. And they told how Jones pretended to heal the sick—holding animal parts in his hand and claiming he had plucked "cancers" from his followers' bodies.
Soon after the series appeared, Jones, who had moved to Guyana, resigned from the Housing Commission and said he would not be returning to California. But emboldened defectors kept coming forward—to Ryan and to anyone willing to listen. In Guyana, they reported, Jones was becoming increasingly irrational, claiming at various times to be the reincarnation of Jesus or Lenin. Children were disciplined by being held underwater to the point of drowning. Jones babbled endlessly of conspiracy on the camp's loudspeaker system. Field work was dawn to dusk, meals were rice and water, and "we couldn't eat until he finished talking," one recent escapee recalls. "He kept talking and talking about resisting enemies, always that phrase—resisting enemies—and then he'd sit down and we could eat." He forced his most trusted aides to sign self-incriminating statements to insure their loyalty, and stepped up the suicide drills he had begun in San Francisco.
"We swore we would do anything to further the cause of socialism to make Jones a worldwide ruler," Wanda Johnson, a member of the inner elite, recalls. "All of us signed pacts that, on Jones' command, when something went wrong we would first kill our children and then ourselves." Why did his followers remain devoted to a man who was clearly going insane? There is no easy answer. In secret meetings, Johnson remembers, Jones would rant for hours. "He told us he was cursed with the largest penis of any man on earth, and that he must love men and women equally," she says. Debbie Blakey, another associate, recalls buying him mascara, to darken his hair and eyelashes and to simulate sideburns and chest hair.
Blakey also noticed that Jones had gained a lot of weight and "always took a lot of medication. He complained of every ailment you can imagine—heart problems, ulcers, cancer. He carried a white bag filled with pills and medication—mostly Percodan and Valium—with him all the time." In fact, his mental deterioration may have been related to an undisclosed illness that Jones claimed was terminal. Whatever the reason, his facade of sanity was crumbling fast by the time Congressman Ryan arrived in Guyana. "I curse the day I was born," he blurted on the day before the massacre. "I feel like a dying man."
He was, of course, tragically close to the truth. Congressman Ryan found what he had dreaded: people living in slaves' quarters, frantic communards desperately hoping to escape with his party, and Jones behaving strangely. The next afternoon Jones was told that a family of six had asked to leave. "They never stop," he screamed. "This is the finish. It's finished." Soon afterward Ryan was attacked by a man with a knife. Jones' lawyers, Mark Lane and Charles Garry, managed to disarm him. ("Now no one can call this a junket," Lane joked.) Ryan thanked Lane for saving his life, but within hours Jones' expressionless assassins were doing their bloody work at the airport, and back in Jonestown smiling lieutenants were telling Lane, "We're all going to die." Over the loudspeaker Jones rambled on about "the beauty of dying" as the men, women and children gathered to drink the Kool-Aid and cyanide.
Ryan would have been shocked by what happened next, but perhaps not entirely surprised. In the wake of the horror, as hundreds lay dead, a Bay Area psychologist spoke of "the tremendous influence, the mind control and brainwashing that these charismatic leaders have. Ryan was one of the few in Congress, or at any legislative level, who really understood what was happening." His tragic death gave hope that more would try to understand in the future. As for Jones, whose obsession with a place in history left him crumpled on his altar with a bullet in his head, the best that can be said of him is that he is gone.
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December 4, 1978, People Magazine, Why Those Suicides in Guyana? Two Experts Describe How Religious Cults Can Cause Their Members to 'Snap'
The mass suicide of more than 400 members of the Rev. Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in Guyana is the latest and most sickening example of the power of cults to control the personalities of their disciples. For four years researchers Flo Conway, 37, and Jim Siegelman, 28, studied this bizarre phenomenon, and they now have written a book about it titled Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change (Lippincott, $10). Conway has an M.A. in communication, psychology and anthropology and completed her doctoral work at the University of Oregon, while Siegelman is a Harvard honors graduate in philosophy and English. They combined disciplines in a project that took them to 29 states for interviews with more than 200 ex-members of cults. The authors also talked with former evangelical preachers, "deprogrammer" Ted Patrick and ex-Manson family member Leslie Van Houten. Conway and Siegelman, both single and residents of Manhattan, talked about their findings with Cheryl McCall of PEOPLE.
What is snapping?
It is a sudden, drastic personality change. In our opinion it represents a new form of mental and emotional disorder, a growing phenomenon unlike anything this country has witnessed.
Were you surprised at the mass suicides in Guyana?
No, the people in this group were totally suggestible, and they totally identified with their leader. Those who did not apparently fled into the jungle. It wasn't 400 individuals who killed themselves; it was 400 Jim Joneses. When he gave the order, for most there was no question of rejecting or doubting; they simply complied.
Why didn't they question his command?
The cult was backed into a corner and believed they had no other way out. They were isolated and indoctrinated. The surviving members may be insane or in shock from coming out of that rigid a structure with nothing to guide them.
What are other examples of snapping?
The most dramatic can be found in America's religious cults, like the Reverend Moon's Unification Church, Hare Krishna and the Divine Light Mission. Young people seem to change overnight or in the course of a few days. So often we have heard these people say, "Something snapped inside me."
What sort of behavior accompanies snapping?
Many exhibit bizarre states of disorientation, delusion, withdrawal and profound hallucinations. One rather vivid example of delusion is in the Church of Scientology, where some of the higher-ups are firmly convinced that they lived trillions of years ago on other planets.
What is your definition of a cult?
Any group that cuts its individuals off from society, severs their personal and family relationships and appears to have as its primary function the recruitment of new members, the solicitation of funds and the aggrandizement of its leader.
In your interviews, didn't you go farther afield than religious cults?
Yes, we found evidence of snapping among participants in mass-marketed self-help therapies such as est, Scientology's Dianetics and Transcendental Meditation. We also found it in some charismatic and Pentecostal sects of the "born again" movement.
What causes people to snap?
Simply put, it is caused by a sudden intense, overwhelming experience. There's a whole new technology used by these groups to engineer and concoct these intense experiences, which some participants feel is a new form of enlightenment or revelation. But when others confront their whole lives, they are not prepared to cope with it. Instead of enlightenment, it's like falling off a cliff.
Can you describe this new technology?
Some of the techniques are borrowed from classic Freudian theory and Skinnerian psychology of behavior modification; others include encounter groups, psychodrama, guided fantasy, meditation and rituals from Eastern religions. All of these can be orchestrated to produce a drastic alteration of the workings of the brain and nervous system. It's like a whole new drug.
How does this act on the mind?
One way is through deprivation, not allowing people to smoke, to eat, to sleep or use the bathroom. Some cults change their members' diet to deprive them of protein. The nervous system is not given the nutriments it requires. Then there are techniques that simply distort and convolute information. The ability to think clearly, to feel and to make choices is impaired. That's the beginning of mind control.
What happens then?
After they've isolated you and induced all these experiences, the final step-is the call to let go. Every major cult does this. They tell you to release the mind, to suspend doubt, to stop questioning. When an individual heeds that call, that's when the snapping moment can occur and with overwhelming power; you lose the ability to think for yourself. Free will is not invulnerable—it can be relinquished by simply heeding this suggestion.
Who is most susceptible to this sort of mind control?
In general, it's the younger population, middle and upper-middle class and from very good homes. They tend to be the best, most imaginative students, the people actively searching for answers or purpose in their lives. They're sitting ducks for recruiters, who do most of their proselytizing on college campuses.
Why has snapping become such a problem now?
The '60s were a very social decade, when people tried to help others, stop the war, poverty, discrimination. There was cynicism but also a lot of hope, that Aquarian spirit. In the '70s we have a turn toward the self, the new narcissism, with people preoccupied with their own happiness and fulfillment. Some feel the only way they can discover themselves is to escape into a fringe movement.
Why are so many celebrities involved?
The cults want the beautiful people with earning power. The cults are very slick, very media-oriented. One celebrity linked to them is worth a thousand ordinary converts—George Harrison with the Hare Krishnas, John Travolta with Scientology, Congressman Hamilton Fish's daughter with the Moonies, Valerie Harper and John Denver with the est movement.
Are you saying that these people have snapped?
No, but most of them have, by their own admission, undergone sudden and dramatic changes of personality. It may be pure enlightenment, but it's hard to say without interviewing them.
You say that three million Americans are involved in cults. Isn't that inflated?
That may be a conservative figure. A Gallup poll showed that six million Americans have done TM. Over 170,000 have participated in est. Scientology claims 3.5 million followers worldwide. The Gallup poll reports that 50 million Americans say they've been born again, which also involves a sudden drastic alteration of their personalities.
What is the difference between snapping and being born again?
When we began, we didn't even consider that the born-again experience would be part of our investigation. But when we talked to members in the Campus Crusade for Christ, many displayed the characteristics of the cult members we had interviewed. Warning signs include glazed eyes, a change in voice and posture, dropping all social activities to focus on one group and inability to carry on a normal conversation.
Once a person has snapped, is the process reversible?
It's quite beyond the power of parents or loved ones to get people out of these groups by talking to them. The whole process of mind control has gone too far. It requires the direct intervention of a psychiatrist or skilled deprogrammer who knows how cults work.
Is almost any American susceptible to snapping?
Yes, because these techniques are used throughout our culture, whether it's behavior modification in schools, management practices or the incredibly sophisticated sales pitch used by Madison Avenue. But it's only in the cults that these techniques are orchestrated and manipulated to achieve mind control.
Do cult converts pose any threat?
Most are victims, many are slaves. We've got a total spiritual and psychological free-for-all going on right now. The danger is that members may so identify with their leaders and become so vulnerable to suggestion that if they're given any command, they will execute it. That's what happened in Guyana.
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December 11, 1978, People Magazine, Death Takes No Holiday in San Francisco, as a Shocked City Mourns Two Murdered Leaders,
This city has just gone crazy," said California State Assemblyman Willie Brown. "Maybe the whole world is crazy." Scarcely a week after the numbing news of the mass murder and suicide of members of the Peoples Temple, the city of Saint Francis was staggered again by two more killings. Mayor George Moscone, 49, and Supervisor Harvey Milk, 48, were shot to death in City Hall, allegedly by a political antagonist.
That evening a crowd of 30,000 stunned people, many of them homosexuals, marched through the Christmas-decked streets to City Hall. They carried candles, and the only sound that could be heard above their shuffling feet was the mournful beat of three drums. They came to honor both men, but their grieving—in a city where one out of every six citizens is thought to be gay—was mainly for Harvey Milk, the only acknowledged homosexual ever elected to city government. In the square the marchers listened to Acting Mayor Dianne Feinstein (under heavy police guard), folksinger Joan Baez and other speakers. Then Gay Democratic Club president Harvey Britt read from a prophetic tape recording made by Milk after his 1977 election: "I know that when a person is assassinated...there are several tendencies. One is to have some people go crazy in the streets...and the other is to have a big show and splash...I want neither." As a final tribute, Harvey Milk got his wish.
That evening a crowd of 30,000 stunned people, many of them homosexuals, marched through the Christmas-decked streets to City Hall. They carried candles, and the only sound that could be heard above their shuffling feet was the mournful beat of three drums. They came to honor both men, but their grieving—in a city where one out of every six citizens is thought to be gay—was mainly for Harvey Milk, the only acknowledged homosexual ever elected to city government. In the square the marchers listened to Acting Mayor Dianne Feinstein (under heavy police guard), folksinger Joan Baez and other speakers. Then Gay Democratic Club president Harvey Britt read from a prophetic tape recording made by Milk after his 1977 election: "I know that when a person is assassinated...there are several tendencies. One is to have some people go crazy in the streets...and the other is to have a big show and splash...I want neither." As a final tribute, Harvey Milk got his wish.
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House December 11,
1978, Vol. 10, No. 24, People Magazine, Attorney
Charles Garry Is Still a Believer—If Not in Jim Jones, Then in His 'Utopia',
by Dianna Waggoner,
For nearly all his 69 years,
lawyer Charles Garry has been a rebel with one cause or another. The son of
Armenian immigrants, he worked his way through law school at night and was a
Depression socialist who began his legal career defending militant trade
unions. In the 1950s he represented alleged Communists before the
Un-American Activities
Committee—and refused to answer questions himself: "I told them to kiss my
ass." Then for a decade he served as the embattled chief counsel for the
Black Panthers, defending Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver with
such a flair for courtroom dramatics that one policeman, under intense
questioning, jumped from the witness stand and pulled his gun on Garry.
As a group, the Panthers were hardly easy to defend. But no client betrayed Garry so cruelly as did the Rev. Jim Jones; no case in the lawyer's 40 years of practice came to such a catastrophic end. "I can't put any sense to it," he says. "I saw a place where there was no such thing as racism, sexism, elitism, ageism—Utopia in action. Now those 914 people are dead, and that beautiful dream is destroyed."
Garry played a special role in events leading up to Congressman Leo Ryan's fatal visit. "I radioed Jim Jones from Georgetown," he recalls, "and told him he had two alternatives: He could tell a U.S. congressman, the media and the concerned relatives they could go screw themselves, or he could let them come to Jonestown, to see what I had seen. 'If you do that,' I told him, 'you will have a red-letter day.' " He still marvels at how tragically wrong he was.
Garry has represented Jones and the Peoples Temple since mid-1977, when they came under attack in the press and Jones fled to Guyana. Memphis attorney Mark Lane was also retained by the Temple in September, and though Garry was no great fan—"I have trouble working with him because he shoots off his mouth"—Lane's presence in Jonestown may well have spared the two men from death. When Ryan's party left for the airport in nearby Port Kaituma, where they were ambushed, the lawyers stayed behind. "I think Jones intended to have us shot," says Garry, who was taken with Lane to a guesthouse as Jones' followers massed around the vat of poison. "Pretty soon two young men with guns at the ready came to us. They said they were ready to die and happy about it, because they were going to expose this racist, fascist society. Mark very quickly said, 'Charles and I will write about you.' I think that saved our lives. They said okay and hugged us. We bid them goodbye and left."
Walking along the road at sundown, they spotted several men. "We freaked out and went into the jungle. By this time it was pitch-black, so we just dropped right where we were. We lay on the ground for 14 hours."
Lane and Garry, who was dressed in suit pants, dress boots
As a group, the Panthers were hardly easy to defend. But no client betrayed Garry so cruelly as did the Rev. Jim Jones; no case in the lawyer's 40 years of practice came to such a catastrophic end. "I can't put any sense to it," he says. "I saw a place where there was no such thing as racism, sexism, elitism, ageism—Utopia in action. Now those 914 people are dead, and that beautiful dream is destroyed."
Garry played a special role in events leading up to Congressman Leo Ryan's fatal visit. "I radioed Jim Jones from Georgetown," he recalls, "and told him he had two alternatives: He could tell a U.S. congressman, the media and the concerned relatives they could go screw themselves, or he could let them come to Jonestown, to see what I had seen. 'If you do that,' I told him, 'you will have a red-letter day.' " He still marvels at how tragically wrong he was.
Garry has represented Jones and the Peoples Temple since mid-1977, when they came under attack in the press and Jones fled to Guyana. Memphis attorney Mark Lane was also retained by the Temple in September, and though Garry was no great fan—"I have trouble working with him because he shoots off his mouth"—Lane's presence in Jonestown may well have spared the two men from death. When Ryan's party left for the airport in nearby Port Kaituma, where they were ambushed, the lawyers stayed behind. "I think Jones intended to have us shot," says Garry, who was taken with Lane to a guesthouse as Jones' followers massed around the vat of poison. "Pretty soon two young men with guns at the ready came to us. They said they were ready to die and happy about it, because they were going to expose this racist, fascist society. Mark very quickly said, 'Charles and I will write about you.' I think that saved our lives. They said okay and hugged us. We bid them goodbye and left."
Walking along the road at sundown, they spotted several men. "We freaked out and went into the jungle. By this time it was pitch-black, so we just dropped right where we were. We lay on the ground for 14 hours."
Lane and Garry, who was dressed in suit pants, dress boots
and a stocking cap to keep
out mosquitoes, started their trek through the jungle again the next day in
pouring rain, marking their path with strips torn from Lane's underwear.
"About 4 o'clock," Garry says, "we were within a quarter mile of
the guardhouse at the exit from Jonestown. Lane didn't want me to check it out.
He said, 'You'd be endangering our lives!' But I had no patience left and as a
combat scout in World War III knew how to get around without being seen. I
picked up a big piece of timber—it must have been 15 feet long. I had been a
javelin thrower in high school, and I told Mark, 'If the guy inside has a
weapon and attacks me, I will throw it at him and kill him.' When I got up to
the place it was empty. I called Mark to come, and from there we headed
straight to Port Kaituma."
Perhaps the greatest wonder of Garry's story is that he has not ended his dealings with the Peoples Temple; he continues to represent the tenuously surviving faction in San Francisco and, however improbably, to praise Jim Jones' vision. "He just flipped out," explains Garry. "He was very sick. But I saw for myself what a beautiful place Jonestown was. It was filled with dedicated, hard-working people—not cultists or lunatics." Like the hundreds who followed Jones to his grave, Garry apparently only saw what he was looking for.
Perhaps the greatest wonder of Garry's story is that he has not ended his dealings with the Peoples Temple; he continues to represent the tenuously surviving faction in San Francisco and, however improbably, to praise Jim Jones' vision. "He just flipped out," explains Garry. "He was very sick. But I saw for myself what a beautiful place Jonestown was. It was filled with dedicated, hard-working people—not cultists or lunatics." Like the hundreds who followed Jones to his grave, Garry apparently only saw what he was looking for.
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December 25, 1978, People Magazine, Reverend Jim Jones: One Pilgrim's Progress: from Church to Camp to Abattoir
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad—Euripides
Jim Jones' grisly downfall began when he committed the hustler's biggest mistake: He started believing his own con. Who can say when he lost the simple faith that first called him to the ministry? But in its place came the dizzying hint that down the glory road lay not just mere salvation—if indeed that at all—but fame, riches, power, sex. And those rewards were claimable now, not in some hereafter.
Jones had gone off in the 1950s to examine the style of the old mojo man, Father Divine. When he returned to his simple church in Indiana from Father's heaven on earth, it was not for long: Jones set out to build his own in California. Faith healing, raising the dead (43 parishioners brought back to life, Jones bragged, and many followers accepted the lie), magic potions, talismans against misfortunes from auto accidents to burglary and fire—the preacher said he could work the miracle. From a church, his "Peoples Temple" became a tawdry burlesque, then a product, a money machine yielding millions. Jones invented a new self too—mascaraed and macabre as the psychosis that fueled it. He proclaimed he was no less a personage than God himself, creator of earth and heaven; again, there were people willing to accept this new gospel.
Church and self and godhood, too, became terrible burdens. The awful truths kept leaking out: beatings, slavery, blackmail, sexual humiliation, child abuse and at least one suspicious death. Nonetheless, when Dad Jones—he reveled in the name—moved from California to Guyana with his wife, Marcie, and a child he claimed he sired out of wedlock, the shepherd did not lack for sheep. "I still follow you," wrote one subject, "because you have the gift to protect me. I like to look strong, but I know I'm weak."
To outsiders, in this bewildering era of Moonies, Children of God, Hare Krishnas, Synanon and Scientology, Jim Jones may have seemed just one more plastic messiah. Those on the inside wanted to believe and did. "I have found it, the meaning, the way," rejoiced one resident of Jonestown.
When Congressman Leo Ryan and a party of newsmen threatened Jones' kingdom, the minister had gone so far into madness that their murder seemed the only solution. The unconverted world was left to ponder how Jones could have led anyone to the vat of cyanide and Kool-Aid, what unspeakable urges provoked parents to kill their own children. One who was meant to take the obscene communion with Jones that day, but regained sense and fled, had an answer: "They wouldn't know what to do without him." It was the echo of Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, who says of religious zealots, "Too, too well, they know the value of complete submission."
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Jan 15, 1979, People Magazine, Bob Hope's Marriage, Money and Reputation? His Answers Aren't Always One-Liners
Feb 26, 1979, People Magazine, Is Dr. Heinz Kohut Beside Himself? Rarely, but His Ideas on Fragmented Personality Revolutionized Psychiatry, by Giovanna Breu,
May 7, 1979, People Magazine, 'Kids Are Being Warehoused for Profit,' Says Kenneth Wooden, Crusading for Foster Children,
Nov 12, 1979, People Magazine, The Legacy of Jonestown: a Year of Nightmares and Unanswered Questions
One year ago next week, in the mosquito-infested outpost known as Jonestown, Guyana, 913 men, women and children died at the behest of their megalomaniacal leader, the Rev. Jim Jones. The slaughter was precipitated by the visit of a U.S. congressman, Leo Ryan of California, to investigate reports of abuse and coercion. Apparently sensing that his tyrannical hold on the Peoples Temple was doomed, Jones, godlike to the end in his anger, ordered the murder of Ryan and his party, then brought death down upon himself. As the anniversary of those savage moments approached, survivors of the Jonestown tragedy were interviewed by the following PEOPLE correspondents: Clare Crawford-Mason and Dolly Langdon, Washington; Melba Beats, Nancy Faber and Diana Waggoner, San Francisco; Connie Singer, Chicago; Davis Bushnell, Boston; Karen Jackovich, Los Angeles; and Richard K. Rein, Princeton, N.J.
Mrs. Jim Jones' parents recall her torment
A month before her death, Marceline Jones returned to the modest white frame house in Richmond, Ind. where she had been born and raised. She came to take her elderly parents, Walter and Charlotte Baldwin, to see the brave new world that her husband, Jim, had carved out of the Guyana wilderness. On the night before they departed for Jonestown, Charlotte Baldwin turned to her daughter and blurted, "Marceline, I wish you had left Jim years ago." "Mother, don't say that after I have suffered so much," Marceline replied. "But I want you to know this. This has been my decision. Never blame yourself."
The words still echo in the Baldwins' memories. Two days after the couple returned home from Jonestown, their son-in-law's empire collapsed in an orgy of death, and Marceline, 51, was a victim. "I had no feeling—just shock," Mrs. Baldwin says. During their three weeks in Guyana, the Baldwins saw nothing to cast doubt on Madeline's cheerful reports of life in the Peoples Temple. In their 15-minute encounter with Jim Jones, they had no intimation of the carnage to come.
When their daughter married the young United Church of Christ minister in 1949, the Baldwins, who are devout Methodists, were delighted. "I loved Jim very dearly," says Mrs. Baldwin. "He suffered so much in Indianapolis for his stand for the Negro person." But by 1968 the Baldwins began to worry. "Our real sorrow started then, when Jim began showing he was not himself," Mrs. Baldwin says. Adds her husband: "From that time on, he was not a religious man. He deviated from Christian attitudes." According to family friends, it was then that Jim Jones told Marceline of his affairs with other women. When she tried to leave him, he threatened their children—and she stayed. Mrs. Baldwin says of Jones' church: "It was a beautiful thing in the beginning, but Jim lost his way. He became a dictator."
Last April Jim Jones' ashes (colored white and weighing 10 pounds) were enclosed in a water-soluble envelope and dropped from a light plane into the Atlantic. Funeral director Bill Torbert of Dover, Del. also shipped back to Indiana the bodies of Marceline and her two adopted children—Lew, 22, and Agnes, 36—who died with her. The surviving Jones children—their natural son, Stephan, 20, and Tim, 20, Jim, 19, and Suzanne, 27, all adopted—are living in San Francisco. The Baldwins' grandchildren—and prayer—are their consolations. "We found Christ when we were young and raised our girls that way," Charlotte Baldwin says. "Our faith has sustained us through our terrible grief."
Clark and Louie escaped—but not from the memories
With uncanny timing, Richard Clark launched his long-planned escape from Jonestown on the morning of the massacre. "I can't say I'm psychic, but I can always feel danger," says Clark, 43, now a presser for a San Francisco dry cleaner. Quietly he told his companion, Diane Louie, that "something definite is going to happen, and I want to be out of here when it does." Diane passed the word to seven others. Hacking through the jungle with a machete, the little group—including four children—found the path to the railroad. Then, by foot and train, they made their way to Matthew's Ridge some 30 miles away. That was where they learned of the tragedy they had so narrowly escaped.
Before they came to Guyana, Clark and Louie had envisioned Jonestown as a tropical paradise. Their disillusionment began during the 24-hour boat trip from Georgetown to the Peoples Temple community in May 1978. Hot and overcrowded, the fishing boat was crawling with "huge roaches with eyes as big as mine," Clark remembers. Adds Louie, 26: "It was the first time I had an idea of what a slave ship must have been like." Both were chilled to hear Jones' voice greeting them on the loudspeaker when they arrived. "It sounded like Boris Karloff welcoming us to his castle," Clark recalls. "There was no longer the love."
Even today Clark, who joined the Temple in San Francisco in 1972 and left his wife at the leader's order, believes Jones had supernatural healing and mind-reading powers. But the grim reality of Jonestown shook his faith. "You could see people starving, hungry, sick," he says. "But they couldn't face the fact that Jones was doing it." Soon after his arrival, Clark began to plan his departure. To shield himself from Jones' propaganda, he took a job on the pig farm, out of earshot of the maniacal broadcasts—then volunteered to clear the jungle so he could hunt for escape routes. And he prepared himself mentally. "I began to program myself to hate Jones," he says, "because this was the only way that you could fight him."
Still together, Clark and Louie are troubled by memories of lost friends. Clark also grieves for two stepchildren who refused to accompany him and died in Jonestown. Although the couple and other survivors entered group therapy back in the U.S., they soon gave it up. "The tape-recorded sessions reminded me of the Peoples Temple," Louie says. "I got more help and sympathy talking to my family and friends." She is once again working as a surgical technician, but failed in an attempt to study nursing. "I couldn't concentrate," she says. Clark is bothered by high blood pressure and bad dreams. "I feel like I'm getting better," he says. "But I don't think anyone who's been in a concentration camp will ever get over it."
Ryan's family and aides want a full investigation
"By and large, the kids have taken it magnificently," says Peg Ryan, the divorced wife of Rep. Leo Ryan and mother of his five grown children. "Some times have been hard, of course. For our daughter Pat, it was when everybody in her office tried to ignore the obvious—that her father had died. Eventually she just broke down and said, 'You don't care.' Of course they did. They just didn't know what to say." Mrs. Ryan pauses. "But time heals all things," she says quietly. "You think it won't, but it does."
The Ryans' three daughters and two sons agree—to a point. But all are angry about lawsuits against their father's estate, filed by survivors of the victims at Jonestown, charging him with negligently "causing 900 deaths." They and their father's former chief aide, Joe Holsinger, 57, also blame the U.S. government for failing to dig to the roots of the tragedy. "There wasn't a great public outcry, so Congress thought a real investigation would cost too much money," Holsinger says. Part of the reason, he believes, is public acceptance that the mass deaths were suicides. "Yet it came out later," he maintains, "that at least 70 of those people were injected from behind. It wasn't suicide; it was murder. It's important to know how it happened and why."
For another of Ryan's aides, Jacqueline Speier, 29, the nightmare was even more personal. She went with Ryan to Jonestown, then was shot at the airport and left for dead. Still recovering, she enumerates her wounds matter-of-factly. "I have an eight-by-eight-inch chunk gone from my right thigh, one hole in my right forearm and another in my upper arm," she says. "I also have a bullet in my pelvis they don't intend to take out, so I hold my breath going through metal detectors at airports." Only last month Speier found a lump under her right arm. Her doctor, fearing cancer, took X-rays. "I happened to see the results before he did," she says, "and I realized a bullet was in there. It was as if I had been dropped right back on that airstrip. I started to cry. It's like it's never going to end."
Yet Speier has fought stubbornly to put her life back together. Turning down a marriage proposal ("I had a lot to deal with, and I realized I probably wouldn't if I ran to the shelter of this man who wanted to protect me"), she returned to her home in Burlingame and ran unsuccessfully for Ryan's congressional seat (as did Holsinger). The defeat was disappointing, but not shattering. Next month she will open her own law office. "When I started to pack my things last July in Washington," she says, "I realized they belonged to a different person. I decided it was time to leave this chapter of my life alone and move on to other things."
Grace Stoen's fight for her son triggered the tragedy
Many of the men, women and children who made the name Jonestown a synonym for death left families to mourn them and question their fate. Reacting with rage, grief, bitterness or numbed resignation, the bereaved survivors of Jim Jones' victims have struggled to rebuild their lives. Perhaps none is as haunted as Grace Stoen, 29, mother of 6-year-old John Victor Stoen, an innocent catalyst of the disaster.
Today John is buried in a mass grave in an Oakland cemetery along with 200 other unidentified victims of Jonestown—most of them children like himself. When the boy was only 2 years old, his father, Tim Stoen, once an assistant district attorney in San Francisco and Jim Jones' legal adviser, stood up at a Peoples Temple Commission meeting. He announced that his son had been "acting up"—John was not fully toilet-trained—and proposed that he be removed from his home and turned over to another family. Intimidated, Grace reluctantly agreed. Eventually she, and later her husband, broke with the Peoples Temple, but Jones refused to surrender the child. When the Stoens sought custody through the Guyanese courts, Jones publicly threatened the mass suicides he later commanded. The Stoens flew to Guyana with Congressman Ryan, and were waiting in Georgetown when the final violence began.
Haggard with grief—she has lost 21 pounds in the past three years—Grace Stoen is living in San Francisco now, working as a secretary and undergoing psychotherapy. She vividly remembers the last time she saw her son, when Jones allowed her to visit the boy in L.A. in 1976. "He said, 'Mom, please take me with you,' but there were all these hostile people around me, and I said, 'John, I can't.' " Two months later he was sent to Guyana. It is a memory Grace can barely tolerate. "Sometimes I dream that John is alive," she says softly. "Then sometimes I dream I'm dying myself, because it's just too painful to live."
There were times, she admits, when death would have been welcome, but she resisted, knowing that her suicide would be Jim Jones' last triumph. Estranged from her husband, Grace lives with another Peoples Temple defector and plans to marry him as soon as she can. She is forcing herself to survive. "I jog three miles a day," she says. "It's good, but it hurts. I keep saying to myself, 'You're okay. You're a winner,' and I think I'm getting better. It's like I was frozen for 10 years."
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November 12, 1979, Vol. 12, No. 20, People Magazine, The Legacy of Jonestown: a Year of Nightmares and Unanswered Questions, by Clare Crawford-Mason, Dolly Langdon, Melba Beals, Nancy Faber, Diana Waggoner, Connie Singer, Davis Bushnell, Karen Jackovich, Richard K. Rein,
Jan 15, 1979, People Magazine, Bob Hope's Marriage, Money and Reputation? His Answers Aren't Always One-Liners
Are there any taboos?
Of course. You can't joke about people being killed. The Peoples Temple you can't touch. "Amin just killed 1,000 people. It's called keeping up with the Joneses" is only for the locker room. You can't do it.
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Feb 26, 1979, People Magazine, Is Dr. Heinz Kohut Beside Himself? Rarely, but His Ideas on Fragmented Personality Revolutionized Psychiatry, by Giovanna Breu,
'The first new ideas added to psychoanalysis since Freud,' a disciple says
On a bright June day in Vienna in 1938 a young medical student and a friend went to the railroad station, hoping to see Sigmund Freud. The Nazis had allowed the famed psychoanalyst, a Jew, to emigrate and, as he settled into his compartment, he looked out and spotted the two well-wishers.
"There was nobody else," says Dr. Heinz Kohut, now 65 and himself a psychoanalytic trailblazer. "The train began to move very slowly. I took off my fedora. He took off his cap, puzzled as to who was saying goodbye. But he greeted me back."
Kohut never did meet Freud but the moment inspired him. "The tipping of Freud's cap," he says, "was symbolic. The culture in which I had grown up had crumbled. The moment at the railroad station became a germinal point for my scientific future."
Yet that future was to embrace a break with Freudian doctrine. Kohut has made his reputation by studying "narcissism," named for the character in Greek mythology who fell in love with his reflection. Kohut's reputation now attracts doctors from all over the world to work with him at his current base, the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Asserts one colleague, Dr. Ernest Wolf: "Kohut has added the first new ideas to psychoanalysis since Freud."
Kohut theorizes that the basic disorder of modern man is lack of self-esteem—a fragmentation of self—and not the sexually based inner conflict stressed by Freudians. "The emptiness of life troubles people," he says. "It is not because they can't have their mommies and daddies now. It is because nobody was really close or responded to them then.
"A baby is affectionate and affection-seeking," states Kohut, and learns to be an independent "self-object" through being " 'mirrored' by the gleam in the mother's eye, by the real warmth of acceptance and closeness. Someone has to say, 'Bravo, you are here and it is worthwhile that you are!' " Those emotionally rejected in childhood, Kohut argues, go through life constantly seeking the approval of others but never get enough. "Some say these people are narcissistic," Kohut observes, "but actually they are not narcissistic enough. They need food for their self-esteem all the time."
Kohut blames the modern family as a major contributor to fragmented personalities. "Parents," he notes, "are away a lot. Daddies are not around, or they don't feel any pride in themselves. Children feel abandoned and depressed. They try to bring their sense of self together in some artificial way."
Nations and whole groups can also suffer fragmentation, Kohut notes. "Hitler and Mussolini could gain power because people were terribly hungry for something that gave them self-esteem," he points out. Similarly, followers of the Rev. Jim Jones' Peoples Temple were given "a sense of being somebody, of uniting with a godlike figure. They became like babies in the arms of a father figure who could do with them what he wanted."
Kohut's own father was away in the Austrian army five of the first six years of Heinz's life. "I was deprived of a young, vigorous father," Kohut says. "He was replaced by an old man, a grandfather, and that was not the same. So, my male teachers had a tremendous role in my formation."
At 26 Kohut fled Austria shortly after Freud left, heading for England, then Chicago, where he did postgraduate work in neurology. He has one child, Thomas, 28, a psychohistorian, by his 30-year marriage to Betty Meyer, 65, a U of Chicago social worker. As a father, Kohut says, "I have no techniques except being direct and open. It doesn't count what parents do but what they really are.
"Children who get all the necessary calories and vitamins, but no picking up and no care, will die," he points out. "We need maternal and paternal responsiveness to know we are in the world. We need it from our first breath to our last."
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May 7, 1979, People Magazine, 'Kids Are Being Warehoused for Profit,' Says Kenneth Wooden, Crusading for Foster Children,
Growing up in Burlington, N.J., Kenneth Wooden was a truant and a vandal who was once arrested at gunpoint for stealing a car. He avoided reform school only when his working-class parents pleaded his case before a sympathetic juvenile judge. When he graduated from high school, his reading and writing skills were so minimal he was unable to get a job at a local soap factory. "I couldn't get past the guard shack," Wooden says, "because I couldn't fill out the employment application." Drafted into the Army (which, incredibly, assigned him to the typing pool), Wooden embarked on a self-improvement regimen. Tutored by his wife, nurse Martha Braun, he graduated with honors from Glassboro State College at age 26 and returned to teach history at his old high school. His study of the reading levels of juveniles in the New Jersey prison system (they averaged from third to fifth grade) led to his first book, Weeping in the Playtime of Others: America's Incarcerated Children (McGraw-Hill, 1976). Now living in Morrisville, Pa. with his wife and their four children, aged 7 to 18, Wooden is director of the National Coalition for Children's Justice. He is currently completing an investigation of child care abuse by the late Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple in Guyana. He talked with Richard K. Rein for PEOPLE about the plight of children who populate the nation's reform schools, foster homes, orphanages and other child care facilities.
How many foster children died at the Peoples Temple in Jonestown?
Of some 300 kids who died in Guyana, I believe more than 50 were foster children. Among the 248 bodies still unidentified, 64 are in three-and-a-half-foot coffins. Those babies were murdered. They didn't take that poison voluntarily.
How did the Peoples Temple acquire foster children?
Jim Jones encouraged members to set up foster homes. In California you can get six kids to live in your house, and for each you get a minimum of about $150 a month. Jones also received thousands of dollars for Happy Acres, an institution run by temple members for 14 "developmental damaged" children and adults. These little streams of dollars fed a river of millions to the Peoples Temple.
Was the Peoples Temple unique in cashing in on child care?
No, Jim Jones used the system just like all the other bastards have in warehousing kids. We have a large industry that feeds off kids in trouble. The captains of this industry shrewdly foresaw a large market created by government programs that aren't properly monitored.
Where does the money come from?
Local, state and federal agencies. There's money for the educationally handicapped, for learning disabilities, for the physically handicapped, for vocational education. If you're hustling the money, you know where all the pockets are. Some private child care facilities charge $2,000 per month per kid, and the cost is usually picked up by the state or federal government.
How does that work?
I recently approached the Milwaukee County Welfare Department to find out how much it would cost to place a child at Eau Claire Academy, a private facility that charges $2,317 per month. I told them I was not poor—I made over $40,000 a year. They did some checking and told me I would have to pay only $4 a day; federal and state funds would handle the rest.
Where do the kids in such facilities come from?
Juvenile judges commit most kids. But in some cases parents can place their children without a hearing.
Why are kids cut loose from parents?
All the usual things: divorce, delinquency, the breakdown of the family, lack of government services for the family. What intensifies the situation is the tendency of the courts to move in and grab the kids with little family counseling.
Do parents view juvenile courts as a convenient dumping ground?
In some cases, yes. When a friend died 20 years ago, she left five children. The father told New Jersey he couldn't take care of them anymore. The state willingly took them. He in turn remarried and started a new family. No one said, "Hey, mister, they're your kids and you raise them, or we'll nail you for neglect." The kids still suffer the consequences.
How many juveniles are there in the child welfare system?
We're talking about a floating crap game of at least two million.
Are they primarily juvenile delinquents?
No. Only about 200,000 kids have actually committed crimes. Another 500,000 are dependent and neglected children, whose parents could not or would not support them. Another 500,000 have some sort of mental handicap. Some 500,000 are "educationally handicapped," a new term for kids who become problems in school because they don't have basic skills. Finally, there are about 300,000 "status offenders."
Who are status offenders?
They are kids who hang out in unruly crowds, who drink too much, are having sex, are generally out of control. They are frequently truants or runaways, but they have not been convicted of any crime.
Should all two million of these kids be institutionalized?
In some cases families are disasters; incest is real. These children should be taken away. But I have seen surveys which maintain that one-third of all children in foster care should go home. Another third could go home with adequate family counseling. The last third can never go home.
Should youthful criminals be treated differently from adults?
I'm not a bleeding heart. If a teenager commits rape or murder or armed robbery, then that little SOB ought to be locked up. I don't want him in my neighborhood. On the other hand, with the same intensity, I don't want a kid who is a truant or a runaway to be kept with the criminal kids.
Should kids have the same rights as adults?
No. Kids are immature and they do stupid things; they need some kind of protection. But let's give them the most basic human rights.
What rights are denied foster children?
In many cases they are denied due process. Their mail is censored. They can make no phone calls. The physical abuse is incredible—from quack medicine to drugs to beatings. Pregnant girls are put in solitary confinement because they won't take abortion medication.
What's the future for such kids?
I once wrote Charlie Manson in prison to get information on his childhood in Indiana, where he spent four years in institutions. He wrote back, "You have seen me in the eyes of 10-year-olds. I was just an early warning." He's right. I've seen the hate in these kids' eyes.
Are we, as a nation, growing weary of children? Is that why they are mistreated?
No, it's not because we dislike children. It's because these are kids who have no power. They can't communicate, they can't organize, they aren't a political constituency. In this, the International Year of the Child, President Carter is proposing to cut juvenile delinquency funds by 50 percent. It's a political liability to be seen as a coddler of criminal kids.
Has there been any progress?
Yes, the federal Runaway Act passed in 1974 is excellent. It provides shelters in several cities, staffed by people trained to work with runaways. But that bill went no place until they found 27 bodies in Texas—all runaways who had been sexually assaulted and murdered.
What other legislation is pending?
Two bills before Congress now would be a fitting memorial to the children killed in Guyana. One would require the review of the placement of children in foster care every six months. The other would authorize the Justice Department to intervene for young people where there is a clear pattern of denial of basic human rights. Both bills were killed last session.
What still must be done?
We will not have reform in juvenile justice until two things happen: The doors of these institutions must be open 24 hours a day to the press and anyone else, and the financial books must also be opened. What's been missed until now is the economics behind the incarceration of neglected children.
If your children were orphaned, would you want them in an institution?
Interestingly, I asked that same question at a recent meeting of the National Association of Private Homes for Children. I asked members individually if they would ever place their own children in their own institutions. The answer was always, "God, no!"
________________________________________________________________________________Nov 12, 1979, People Magazine, The Legacy of Jonestown: a Year of Nightmares and Unanswered Questions
One year ago next week, in the mosquito-infested outpost known as Jonestown, Guyana, 913 men, women and children died at the behest of their megalomaniacal leader, the Rev. Jim Jones. The slaughter was precipitated by the visit of a U.S. congressman, Leo Ryan of California, to investigate reports of abuse and coercion. Apparently sensing that his tyrannical hold on the Peoples Temple was doomed, Jones, godlike to the end in his anger, ordered the murder of Ryan and his party, then brought death down upon himself. As the anniversary of those savage moments approached, survivors of the Jonestown tragedy were interviewed by the following PEOPLE correspondents: Clare Crawford-Mason and Dolly Langdon, Washington; Melba Beats, Nancy Faber and Diana Waggoner, San Francisco; Connie Singer, Chicago; Davis Bushnell, Boston; Karen Jackovich, Los Angeles; and Richard K. Rein, Princeton, N.J.
Mrs. Jim Jones' parents recall her torment
A month before her death, Marceline Jones returned to the modest white frame house in Richmond, Ind. where she had been born and raised. She came to take her elderly parents, Walter and Charlotte Baldwin, to see the brave new world that her husband, Jim, had carved out of the Guyana wilderness. On the night before they departed for Jonestown, Charlotte Baldwin turned to her daughter and blurted, "Marceline, I wish you had left Jim years ago." "Mother, don't say that after I have suffered so much," Marceline replied. "But I want you to know this. This has been my decision. Never blame yourself."
The words still echo in the Baldwins' memories. Two days after the couple returned home from Jonestown, their son-in-law's empire collapsed in an orgy of death, and Marceline, 51, was a victim. "I had no feeling—just shock," Mrs. Baldwin says. During their three weeks in Guyana, the Baldwins saw nothing to cast doubt on Madeline's cheerful reports of life in the Peoples Temple. In their 15-minute encounter with Jim Jones, they had no intimation of the carnage to come.
When their daughter married the young United Church of Christ minister in 1949, the Baldwins, who are devout Methodists, were delighted. "I loved Jim very dearly," says Mrs. Baldwin. "He suffered so much in Indianapolis for his stand for the Negro person." But by 1968 the Baldwins began to worry. "Our real sorrow started then, when Jim began showing he was not himself," Mrs. Baldwin says. Adds her husband: "From that time on, he was not a religious man. He deviated from Christian attitudes." According to family friends, it was then that Jim Jones told Marceline of his affairs with other women. When she tried to leave him, he threatened their children—and she stayed. Mrs. Baldwin says of Jones' church: "It was a beautiful thing in the beginning, but Jim lost his way. He became a dictator."
Last April Jim Jones' ashes (colored white and weighing 10 pounds) were enclosed in a water-soluble envelope and dropped from a light plane into the Atlantic. Funeral director Bill Torbert of Dover, Del. also shipped back to Indiana the bodies of Marceline and her two adopted children—Lew, 22, and Agnes, 36—who died with her. The surviving Jones children—their natural son, Stephan, 20, and Tim, 20, Jim, 19, and Suzanne, 27, all adopted—are living in San Francisco. The Baldwins' grandchildren—and prayer—are their consolations. "We found Christ when we were young and raised our girls that way," Charlotte Baldwin says. "Our faith has sustained us through our terrible grief."
Clark and Louie escaped—but not from the memories
With uncanny timing, Richard Clark launched his long-planned escape from Jonestown on the morning of the massacre. "I can't say I'm psychic, but I can always feel danger," says Clark, 43, now a presser for a San Francisco dry cleaner. Quietly he told his companion, Diane Louie, that "something definite is going to happen, and I want to be out of here when it does." Diane passed the word to seven others. Hacking through the jungle with a machete, the little group—including four children—found the path to the railroad. Then, by foot and train, they made their way to Matthew's Ridge some 30 miles away. That was where they learned of the tragedy they had so narrowly escaped.
Before they came to Guyana, Clark and Louie had envisioned Jonestown as a tropical paradise. Their disillusionment began during the 24-hour boat trip from Georgetown to the Peoples Temple community in May 1978. Hot and overcrowded, the fishing boat was crawling with "huge roaches with eyes as big as mine," Clark remembers. Adds Louie, 26: "It was the first time I had an idea of what a slave ship must have been like." Both were chilled to hear Jones' voice greeting them on the loudspeaker when they arrived. "It sounded like Boris Karloff welcoming us to his castle," Clark recalls. "There was no longer the love."
Even today Clark, who joined the Temple in San Francisco in 1972 and left his wife at the leader's order, believes Jones had supernatural healing and mind-reading powers. But the grim reality of Jonestown shook his faith. "You could see people starving, hungry, sick," he says. "But they couldn't face the fact that Jones was doing it." Soon after his arrival, Clark began to plan his departure. To shield himself from Jones' propaganda, he took a job on the pig farm, out of earshot of the maniacal broadcasts—then volunteered to clear the jungle so he could hunt for escape routes. And he prepared himself mentally. "I began to program myself to hate Jones," he says, "because this was the only way that you could fight him."
Still together, Clark and Louie are troubled by memories of lost friends. Clark also grieves for two stepchildren who refused to accompany him and died in Jonestown. Although the couple and other survivors entered group therapy back in the U.S., they soon gave it up. "The tape-recorded sessions reminded me of the Peoples Temple," Louie says. "I got more help and sympathy talking to my family and friends." She is once again working as a surgical technician, but failed in an attempt to study nursing. "I couldn't concentrate," she says. Clark is bothered by high blood pressure and bad dreams. "I feel like I'm getting better," he says. "But I don't think anyone who's been in a concentration camp will ever get over it."
Ryan's family and aides want a full investigation
"By and large, the kids have taken it magnificently," says Peg Ryan, the divorced wife of Rep. Leo Ryan and mother of his five grown children. "Some times have been hard, of course. For our daughter Pat, it was when everybody in her office tried to ignore the obvious—that her father had died. Eventually she just broke down and said, 'You don't care.' Of course they did. They just didn't know what to say." Mrs. Ryan pauses. "But time heals all things," she says quietly. "You think it won't, but it does."
The Ryans' three daughters and two sons agree—to a point. But all are angry about lawsuits against their father's estate, filed by survivors of the victims at Jonestown, charging him with negligently "causing 900 deaths." They and their father's former chief aide, Joe Holsinger, 57, also blame the U.S. government for failing to dig to the roots of the tragedy. "There wasn't a great public outcry, so Congress thought a real investigation would cost too much money," Holsinger says. Part of the reason, he believes, is public acceptance that the mass deaths were suicides. "Yet it came out later," he maintains, "that at least 70 of those people were injected from behind. It wasn't suicide; it was murder. It's important to know how it happened and why."
For another of Ryan's aides, Jacqueline Speier, 29, the nightmare was even more personal. She went with Ryan to Jonestown, then was shot at the airport and left for dead. Still recovering, she enumerates her wounds matter-of-factly. "I have an eight-by-eight-inch chunk gone from my right thigh, one hole in my right forearm and another in my upper arm," she says. "I also have a bullet in my pelvis they don't intend to take out, so I hold my breath going through metal detectors at airports." Only last month Speier found a lump under her right arm. Her doctor, fearing cancer, took X-rays. "I happened to see the results before he did," she says, "and I realized a bullet was in there. It was as if I had been dropped right back on that airstrip. I started to cry. It's like it's never going to end."
Yet Speier has fought stubbornly to put her life back together. Turning down a marriage proposal ("I had a lot to deal with, and I realized I probably wouldn't if I ran to the shelter of this man who wanted to protect me"), she returned to her home in Burlingame and ran unsuccessfully for Ryan's congressional seat (as did Holsinger). The defeat was disappointing, but not shattering. Next month she will open her own law office. "When I started to pack my things last July in Washington," she says, "I realized they belonged to a different person. I decided it was time to leave this chapter of my life alone and move on to other things."
Grace Stoen's fight for her son triggered the tragedy
Many of the men, women and children who made the name Jonestown a synonym for death left families to mourn them and question their fate. Reacting with rage, grief, bitterness or numbed resignation, the bereaved survivors of Jim Jones' victims have struggled to rebuild their lives. Perhaps none is as haunted as Grace Stoen, 29, mother of 6-year-old John Victor Stoen, an innocent catalyst of the disaster.
Today John is buried in a mass grave in an Oakland cemetery along with 200 other unidentified victims of Jonestown—most of them children like himself. When the boy was only 2 years old, his father, Tim Stoen, once an assistant district attorney in San Francisco and Jim Jones' legal adviser, stood up at a Peoples Temple Commission meeting. He announced that his son had been "acting up"—John was not fully toilet-trained—and proposed that he be removed from his home and turned over to another family. Intimidated, Grace reluctantly agreed. Eventually she, and later her husband, broke with the Peoples Temple, but Jones refused to surrender the child. When the Stoens sought custody through the Guyanese courts, Jones publicly threatened the mass suicides he later commanded. The Stoens flew to Guyana with Congressman Ryan, and were waiting in Georgetown when the final violence began.
Haggard with grief—she has lost 21 pounds in the past three years—Grace Stoen is living in San Francisco now, working as a secretary and undergoing psychotherapy. She vividly remembers the last time she saw her son, when Jones allowed her to visit the boy in L.A. in 1976. "He said, 'Mom, please take me with you,' but there were all these hostile people around me, and I said, 'John, I can't.' " Two months later he was sent to Guyana. It is a memory Grace can barely tolerate. "Sometimes I dream that John is alive," she says softly. "Then sometimes I dream I'm dying myself, because it's just too painful to live."
There were times, she admits, when death would have been welcome, but she resisted, knowing that her suicide would be Jim Jones' last triumph. Estranged from her husband, Grace lives with another Peoples Temple defector and plans to marry him as soon as she can. She is forcing herself to survive. "I jog three miles a day," she says. "It's good, but it hurts. I keep saying to myself, 'You're okay. You're a winner,' and I think I'm getting better. It's like I was frozen for 10 years."
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November 12, 1979, Vol. 12, No. 20, People Magazine, The Legacy of Jonestown: a Year of Nightmares and Unanswered Questions, by Clare Crawford-Mason, Dolly Langdon, Melba Beals, Nancy Faber, Diana Waggoner, Connie Singer, Davis Bushnell, Karen Jackovich, Richard K. Rein,
One year ago next week, in the mosquito-infested outpost known as Jonestown, Guyana, 913 men, women and children died at the behest of their megalomaniacal leader, the Rev. Jim Jones. The slaughter was precipitated by the visit of a U.S. congressman, Leo Ryan of California, to investigate reports of abuse and coercion. Apparently sensing that his tyrannical hold on the Peoples Temple was doomed, Jones, godlike to the end in his anger, ordered the murder of Ryan and his party, then brought death down upon himself. As the anniversary of those savage moments approached, survivors of the Jonestown tragedy were interviewed by the following PEOPLE correspondents: Clare Crawford-Mason and Dolly Langdon, Washington; Melba Beats, Nancy Faber and Diana Waggoner, San Francisco; Connie Singer, Chicago; Davis Bushnell, Boston; Karen Jackovich, Los Angeles; and Richard K. Rein, Princeton, N.J.
Mrs. Jim Jones' parents recall her torment
A month before her death, Marceline Jones returned to the modest white frame house in Richmond, Ind. where she had been born and raised. She came to take her elderly parents, Walter and Charlotte Baldwin, to see the brave new world that her husband, Jim, had carved out of the Guyana wilderness. On the night before they departed for Jonestown, Charlotte Baldwin turned to her daughter and blurted, "Marceline, I wish you had left Jim years ago." "Mother, don't say that after I have suffered so much," Marceline replied. "But I want you to know this. This has been my decision. Never blame yourself."
The words still echo in the Baldwins' memories. Two days after the couple returned home from Jonestown, their son-in-law's empire collapsed in an orgy of death, and Marceline, 51, was a victim. "I had no feeling—just shock," Mrs. Baldwin says. During their three weeks in Guyana, the Baldwins saw nothing to cast doubt on Madeline's cheerful reports of life in the Peoples Temple. In their 15-minute encounter with Jim Jones, they had no intimation of the carnage to come.
When their daughter married the young United Church of Christ minister in 1949, the Baldwins, who are devout Methodists, were delighted. "I loved Jim very dearly," says Mrs. Baldwin. "He suffered so much in Indianapolis for his stand for the Negro person." But by 1968 the Baldwins began to worry. "Our real sorrow started then, when Jim began showing he was not himself," Mrs. Baldwin says. Adds her husband: "From that time on, he was not a religious man. He deviated from Christian attitudes." According to family friends, it was then that Jim Jones told Marceline of his affairs with other women. When she tried to leave him, he threatened their children—and she stayed. Mrs. Baldwin says of Jones' church: "It was a beautiful thing in the beginning, but Jim lost his way. He became a dictator."
Last April Jim Jones' ashes (colored white and weighing 10 pounds) were enclosed in a water-soluble envelope and dropped from a light plane into the Atlantic. Funeral director Bill Torbert of Dover, Del. also shipped back to Indiana the bodies of Marceline and her two adopted children—Lew, 22, and Agnes, 36—who died with her. The surviving Jones children—their natural son, Stephan, 20, and Tim, 20, Jim, 19, and Suzanne, 27, all adopted—are living in San Francisco. The Baldwins' grandchildren—and prayer—are their consolations. "We found Christ when we were young and raised our girls that way," Charlotte Baldwin says. "Our faith has sustained us through our terrible grief."
Clark and Louie escaped—but not from the memories
With uncanny timing, Richard Clark launched his long-planned escape from Jonestown on the morning of the massacre. "I can't say I'm psychic, but I can always feel danger," says Clark, 43, now a presser for a San Francisco dry cleaner. Quietly he told his companion, Diane Louie, that "something definite is going to happen, and I want to be out of here when it does." Diane passed the word to seven others. Hacking through the jungle with a machete, the little group—including four children—found the path to the railroad. Then, by foot and train, they made their way to Matthew's Ridge some 30 miles away. That was where they learned of the tragedy they had so narrowly escaped.
Before they came to Guyana, Clark and Louie had envisioned Jonestown as a tropical paradise. Their disillusionment began during the 24-hour boat trip from Georgetown to the Peoples Temple community in May 1978. Hot and overcrowded, the fishing boat was crawling with "huge roaches with eyes as big as mine," Clark remembers. Adds Louie, 26: "It was the first time I had an idea of what a slave ship must have been like." Both were chilled to hear Jones' voice greeting them on the loudspeaker when they arrived. "It sounded like Boris Karloff welcoming us to his castle," Clark recalls. "There was no longer the love."
Even today Clark, who joined the Temple in San Francisco in 1972 and left his wife at the leader's order, believes Jones had supernatural healing and mind-reading powers. But the grim reality of Jonestown shook his faith. "You could see people starving, hungry, sick," he says. "But they couldn't face the fact that Jones was doing it." Soon after his arrival, Clark began to plan his departure. To shield himself from Jones' propaganda, he took a job on the pig farm, out of earshot of the maniacal broadcasts—then volunteered to clear the jungle so he could hunt for escape routes. And he prepared himself mentally. "I began to program myself to hate Jones," he says, "because this was the only way that you could fight him."
Still together, Clark and Louie are troubled by memories of lost friends. Clark also grieves for two stepchildren who refused to accompany him and died in Jonestown. Although the couple and other survivors entered group therapy back in the U.S., they soon gave it up. "The tape-recorded sessions reminded me of the Peoples Temple," Louie says. "I got more help and sympathy talking to my family and friends." She is once again working as a surgical technician, but failed in an attempt to study nursing. "I couldn't concentrate," she says. Clark is bothered by high blood pressure and bad dreams. "I feel like I'm getting better," he says. "But I don't think anyone who's been in a concentration camp will ever get over it."
Ryan's family and aides want a full investigation
"By and large, the kids have taken it magnificently," says Peg Ryan, the divorced wife of Rep. Leo Ryan and mother of his five grown children. "Some times have been hard, of course. For our daughter Pat, it was when everybody in her office tried to ignore the obvious—that her father had died. Eventually she just broke down and said, 'You don't care.' Of course they did. They just didn't know what to say." Mrs. Ryan pauses. "But time heals all things," she says quietly. "You think it won't, but it does."
The Ryans' three daughters and two sons agree—to a point. But all are angry about lawsuits against their father's estate, filed by survivors of the victims at Jonestown, charging him with negligently "causing 900 deaths." They and their father's former chief aide, Joe Holsinger, 57, also blame the U.S. government for failing to dig to the roots of the tragedy. "There wasn't a great public outcry, so Congress thought a real investigation would cost too much money," Holsinger says. Part of the reason, he believes, is public acceptance that the mass deaths were suicides. "Yet it came out later," he maintains, "that at least 70 of those people were injected from behind. It wasn't suicide; it was murder. It's important to know how it happened and why."
For another of Ryan's aides, Jacqueline Speier, 29, the nightmare was even more personal. She went with Ryan to Jonestown, then was shot at the airport and left for dead. Still recovering, she enumerates her wounds matter-of-factly. "I have an eight-by-eight-inch chunk gone from my right thigh, one hole in my right forearm and another in my upper arm," she says. "I also have a bullet in my pelvis they don't intend to take out, so I hold my breath going through metal detectors at airports." Only last month Speier found a lump under her right arm. Her doctor, fearing cancer, took X-rays. "I happened to see the results before he did," she says, "and I realized a bullet was in there. It was as if I had been dropped right back on that airstrip. I started to cry. It's like it's never going to end."
Yet Speier has fought stubbornly to put her life back together. Turning down a marriage proposal ("I had a lot to deal with, and I realized I probably wouldn't if I ran to the shelter of this man who wanted to protect me"), she returned to her home in Burlingame and ran unsuccessfully for Ryan's congressional seat (as did Holsinger). The defeat was disappointing, but not shattering. Next month she will open her own law office. "When I started to pack my things last July in Washington," she says, "I realized they belonged to a different person. I decided it was time to leave this chapter of my life alone and move on to other things."
Grace Stoen's fight for her son triggered the tragedy
Many of the men, women and children who made the name Jonestown a synonym for death left families to mourn them and question their fate. Reacting with rage, grief, bitterness or numbed resignation, the bereaved survivors of Jim Jones' victims have struggled to rebuild their lives. Perhaps none is as haunted as Grace Stoen, 29, mother of 6-year-old John Victor Stoen, an innocent catalyst of the disaster.
Today John is buried in a mass grave in an Oakland cemetery along with 200 other unidentified victims of Jonestown—most of them children like himself. When the boy was only 2 years old, his father, Tim Stoen, once an assistant district attorney in San Francisco and Jim Jones' legal adviser, stood up at a Peoples Temple Commission meeting. He announced that his son had been "acting up"—John was not fully toilet-trained—and proposed that he be removed from his home and turned over to another family. Intimidated, Grace reluctantly agreed. Eventually she, and later her husband, broke with the Peoples Temple, but Jones refused to surrender the child. When the Stoens sought custody through the Guyanese courts, Jones publicly threatened the mass suicides he later commanded. The Stoens flew to Guyana with Congressman Ryan, and were waiting in Georgetown when the final violence began.
Haggard with grief—she has lost 21 pounds in the past three years—Grace Stoen is living in San Francisco now, working as a secretary and undergoing psychotherapy. She vividly remembers the last time she saw her son, when Jones allowed her to visit the boy in L.A. in 1976. "He said, 'Mom, please take me with you,' but there were all these hostile people around me, and I said, 'John, I can't.' " Two months later he was sent to Guyana. It is a memory Grace can barely tolerate. "Sometimes I dream that John is alive," she says softly. "Then sometimes I dream I'm dying myself, because it's just too painful to live."
There were times, she admits, when death would have been welcome, but she resisted, knowing that her suicide would be Jim Jones' last triumph. Estranged from her husband, Grace lives with another Peoples Temple defector and plans to marry him as soon as she can. She is forcing herself to survive. "I jog three miles a day," she says. "It's good, but it hurts. I keep saying to myself, 'You're okay. You're a winner,' and I think I'm getting better. It's like I was frozen for 10 years."
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Jonestown
I deeply appreciated your sensitive portrayal of Marceline Jones' parents, Walter and Charlotte Baldwin, and their efforts to warn her of the madness of her husband, Jim Jones. As a cult researcher and lecturer, I have been asked by hundreds of parents, "How can I help my adult child who is being brainwashed and mind-controlled by a cult leader?" I advise them first to pray. They should explain their concerns to their child, and, most important, assure him/her that whatever their decision they are always welcome to come back home. This is what the Baldwins did. Marceline knew she had a place of refuge if she wanted to escape.
Jeannie Mills
Berkeley, Calif.
Jeannie and Al Mills and their five children lost many friends at Jonestown, including six youngsters who lived with them during their years as members of the Peoples Temple. Mrs. Mills' recently published book, Six Years with God, is a chilling account of life with Jim Jones.—ED.
Jim Jones was never a minister in the United Church of Christ. He was an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
Rev. Everett C. Parker
United Church of Christ
New York City
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Mar 17, 1980, People Magazine, Table of Contents
On the Cover 96
Mackenzie Phillips leaves her co-stars Bonnie Franklin (center) and Valerie Bertinelli and One Day at a Time amid a bitter controversy over drugs
Mar 17, 1980, People Magazine, The Mills Family Murders: Could It Be Jim Jones' Last Revenge?, by Clare Crawford-Mason and Nancy Faber,
Jonestown
I deeply appreciated your sensitive portrayal of Marceline Jones' parents, Walter and Charlotte Baldwin, and their efforts to warn her of the madness of her husband, Jim Jones. As a cult researcher and lecturer, I have been asked by hundreds of parents, "How can I help my adult child who is being brainwashed and mind-controlled by a cult leader?" I advise them first to pray. They should explain their concerns to their child, and, most important, assure him/her that whatever their decision they are always welcome to come back home. This is what the Baldwins did. Marceline knew she had a place of refuge if she wanted to escape.
Jeannie Mills
Berkeley, Calif.
Jeannie and Al Mills and their five children lost many friends at Jonestown, including six youngsters who lived with them during their years as members of the Peoples Temple. Mrs. Mills' recently published book, Six Years with God, is a chilling account of life with Jim Jones.—ED.
Jim Jones was never a minister in the United Church of Christ. He was an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
Rev. Everett C. Parker
United Church of Christ
New York City
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Mar 17, 1980, People Magazine, Table of Contents
On the Cover 96
Mackenzie Phillips leaves her co-stars Bonnie Franklin (center) and Valerie Bertinelli and One Day at a Time amid a bitter controversy over drugs
Mar 17, 1980, People Magazine, The Mills Family Murders: Could It Be Jim Jones' Last Revenge?, by Clare Crawford-Mason and Nancy Faber,
In the last moments of the mass suicide at Jonestown, its maniacal leader, Jim Jones, exhorted his surviving minions to visit revenge on those who had deserted him. "Remember Deanna and Elmer Mertle," he said on a tape. "The people in San Francisco will not take our death in vain."
By then Deanna and Elmer Mertle had become Jeannie and Al Mills. After six years with Jones, they left with their five children in 1975 and changed their names to void the power of attorney they had given him. But to Jones and his followers in the Bay Area, the Millses were far from anonymous. Once free of Jones' perverse spell, they had worked tirelessly to expose him. Last year Jeannie published a devastating memoir, Six Years with God: Life inside Rev. Jim Jones's Peoples Temple. She and Al helped to establish a center in Berkeley dedicated to deprogramming ex-cultists, and they brought Jonestown to the attention of California Rep. Leo Ryan, whose murder during a fact-finding mission to Guyana touched off the mass suicide.
In the wake of that massacre, the FBI could find no evidence of a Peoples Temple execution squad. The Mills family, which had holed up with other defectors in the protective custody of a police SWAT team, decided to resume normal life. "You can't live like that forever," Jeannie said last fall. "We promised to be careful."
Two weeks ago Al and Jeannie Mills were found murdered execution-style in their Berkeley home. Jeannie's daughter Daphene, 16, who had also been shot in the head with exploding bullets, died two days later. Investigators could not be certain the killings were cult-related, but there was no forced entry, and burglary was quickly ruled out as a motive. Police were questioning Jeannie's 17-year-old son Eddie, a troubled high school dropout whose best friends died in Jonestown. Eddie reportedly told police he had been watching TV in the tiny house at the time of the shooting, and had heard nothing.
It was an appallingly ironic end for Al, 51, and Jeannie, 40. They had been led to the Peoples Temple a year after their marriage hoping for answers to the problems of racism and social disorder in general—and, specifically, to the problems of discipline they saw emerging in their own family. Each had children from previous marriages. Jeannie first visited Jones' Redwood Valley commune in 1969, and recalled: "The children were so respectful of their seniors. The members seemed to be the happiest, most wholesome people we had ever seen."
Later that year they moved in. Their five children adapted uneasily to life in the commune, but Al and Jeannie became trusted members of Jones' inner circle. By 1973 his madness was becoming intolerable, and they began to despair. In 1974 Al's daughter Linda was brutally beaten with a wooden paddle for having a friend Jones suspected was a traitor. Yet even so it took them another year to break free. Back in the Bay Area they tried with mixed success to reunite the family—and to put out the word on Jones. When they cooperated with a New West magazine exposé that helped drive Jones to Guyana, Jeannie felt it was "like signing our own death warrant." Police protection after the massacre came as a welcome relief from fear: "That was the first time I felt no one could kill us."
By last month they seemed more optimistic than ever, although there were still problems. Daphene, who Jeannie had said was "most affected" by the separation from her parents at the commune, was still struggling. But son Eddie was working with his stepfather remodeling old homes as student rentals, and Al's two daughters had moved out and found jobs nearby. Al and Jeannie were still lecturing on their years in the Jones cult, and they had lost their fear of telling the story. But they also seemed ready for a new challenge, and for some closure to that grim episode of their lives. As Jeannie put it to a gathering of students at Dominican College in San Rafael, Calif. just three weeks ago: "I've pretty much put all that behind me now. I'm tired of being an ex-member of the Peoples Temple. I really want to get on with the business of living."
By then Deanna and Elmer Mertle had become Jeannie and Al Mills. After six years with Jones, they left with their five children in 1975 and changed their names to void the power of attorney they had given him. But to Jones and his followers in the Bay Area, the Millses were far from anonymous. Once free of Jones' perverse spell, they had worked tirelessly to expose him. Last year Jeannie published a devastating memoir, Six Years with God: Life inside Rev. Jim Jones's Peoples Temple. She and Al helped to establish a center in Berkeley dedicated to deprogramming ex-cultists, and they brought Jonestown to the attention of California Rep. Leo Ryan, whose murder during a fact-finding mission to Guyana touched off the mass suicide.
In the wake of that massacre, the FBI could find no evidence of a Peoples Temple execution squad. The Mills family, which had holed up with other defectors in the protective custody of a police SWAT team, decided to resume normal life. "You can't live like that forever," Jeannie said last fall. "We promised to be careful."
Two weeks ago Al and Jeannie Mills were found murdered execution-style in their Berkeley home. Jeannie's daughter Daphene, 16, who had also been shot in the head with exploding bullets, died two days later. Investigators could not be certain the killings were cult-related, but there was no forced entry, and burglary was quickly ruled out as a motive. Police were questioning Jeannie's 17-year-old son Eddie, a troubled high school dropout whose best friends died in Jonestown. Eddie reportedly told police he had been watching TV in the tiny house at the time of the shooting, and had heard nothing.
It was an appallingly ironic end for Al, 51, and Jeannie, 40. They had been led to the Peoples Temple a year after their marriage hoping for answers to the problems of racism and social disorder in general—and, specifically, to the problems of discipline they saw emerging in their own family. Each had children from previous marriages. Jeannie first visited Jones' Redwood Valley commune in 1969, and recalled: "The children were so respectful of their seniors. The members seemed to be the happiest, most wholesome people we had ever seen."
Later that year they moved in. Their five children adapted uneasily to life in the commune, but Al and Jeannie became trusted members of Jones' inner circle. By 1973 his madness was becoming intolerable, and they began to despair. In 1974 Al's daughter Linda was brutally beaten with a wooden paddle for having a friend Jones suspected was a traitor. Yet even so it took them another year to break free. Back in the Bay Area they tried with mixed success to reunite the family—and to put out the word on Jones. When they cooperated with a New West magazine exposé that helped drive Jones to Guyana, Jeannie felt it was "like signing our own death warrant." Police protection after the massacre came as a welcome relief from fear: "That was the first time I felt no one could kill us."
By last month they seemed more optimistic than ever, although there were still problems. Daphene, who Jeannie had said was "most affected" by the separation from her parents at the commune, was still struggling. But son Eddie was working with his stepfather remodeling old homes as student rentals, and Al's two daughters had moved out and found jobs nearby. Al and Jeannie were still lecturing on their years in the Jones cult, and they had lost their fear of telling the story. But they also seemed ready for a new challenge, and for some closure to that grim episode of their lives. As Jeannie put it to a gathering of students at Dominican College in San Rafael, Calif. just three weeks ago: "I've pretty much put all that behind me now. I'm tired of being an ex-member of the Peoples Temple. I really want to get on with the business of living."
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Mar 31, 1980, People Magazine, Patty Hearst Has Found Sanctuary in Her Year-Old Marriage to Bernard Shaw, by Nancy Faber,
The well-kept block is like scores of others in the San Francisco suburbs. The two-story stucco tract house with its tiny yard is indistinguishable from its neighbor. The young couple who live in it are quiet. The husband has a steady job, and when he goes off to work every day he often leaves his wife puttering in their small garden. The only people who would consider the house remarkable are those who recognize the woman as Patty Hearst.
It was a year ago that Hearst, now 26, and San Francisco police officer Bernard Shaw, 34, walked down the aisle of the redwood-walled chapel on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. This year, to celebrate their April 1 anniversary, they returned to their honeymoon site, the isolated Panamanian island of Contadora. (It's currently home to another sanctuary seeker, the deposed Shah of Iran.)
Nowhere, of course, can the Shaws entirely escape reverberations of the events set in motion Feb. 4, 1974 when radicals calling themselves the "Symbionese Liberation Army" dragged Patty out of the Berkeley apartment she shared with then-fiancé Steven Weed. Patty won't talk about the kidnapping anymore. But the Shaws' house has an elaborate alarm system backed up by Arrow, Patty's longtime pet who is also a 95-pound German shepherd attack dog. And Bernie gently reminds his wife, "You had nightmares for a while when you first came out."
"Out" is for out of prison. Earlier this month Hearst's lawyer, George Martinez, appealed the bank robbery conviction that sent Hearst to jail in 1976 and prompted debate over whether she had been "brainwashed" by her captors into committing crimes. (Her sentence was commuted in 1979 by President Carter, but the original conviction stands.) She served 22½ months—"Newspapers always say I served less than two years of a seven-year sentence," she complains, "as if I hadn't served any time at all." Now, to help clear her name, she is charging that attorney F. Lee Bailey conducted a "disastrous" defense and was involved in a conflict of interest because he had signed a $225,000 contract to write a book about her case. (The book never materialized.)
Until last February 1, one year after she obtained her freedom, Patty had to check in with the chief federal probation officer in San Francisco each month. Or he checked in with her. "Nobody wants me to come to the office," she says. "There are so many weirdos and there's always the potential for violence."
She is still on probation in California for her part in the 1974 shootout at Mel's Sporting Goods store in Los Angeles. Hearst considers her restrictions—she needs court permission to travel outside the state—"silly." But she readily adheres to them because if she didn't, "I could be sitting in prison," she grimaces, "with Emily Harris." (Harris, one of the "Symbionese" leaders, is now in a California state prison serving a 10-years-to-life sentence for kidnapping.)
Last year Hearst worked briefly as a dog trainer, teaching beagles how to sniff out termites. Now, on the probation form she sends in monthly, where it asks, "Are you working?" she checks "no." "The form asks why," relates Patty, "and I say, 'Because I don't want to' or 'I don't have to.' I'm really busy as it is." Most mornings she rides on her 10-year-old gelding, Ol' Paint. "It really clears my mind," says Patty. "I get up early and get back by noon." Her wealthy publisher dad, Randolph Hearst, was legally separated from her mother, Catherine, last year, but lives only three hours away and may buy a horse so he can ride with his daughter. Patty often visits her mother in her new home in Beverly Hills.
The rest of Patty's time is divided between housekeeping and volunteer work as the fund-raising co-chairman of a child-care center for kids with working mothers in South San Francisco. It is staffed by the elderly and dedicated to the late Rep. Leo J. Ryan. He was an early supporter of the drive to free Patty from prison, and his murder in Guyana by Peoples Temple fanatics may have sped her release. "It wasn't until the Jonestown massacre that people really began believing in brainwashing," explains Bernie.
The congenial Shaw, a Bay Area fireman's son, is in his 11th year as a San Francisco cop and expects a promotion to sergeant later this spring. The divorced father of two (his children live nearby and he and Patty see them regularly), he will get his B.A. next year and may teach criminology in junior college. Patty wears a replica of Bernie's police badge around her neck, plus his Army dog tags, now gold-plated. On her left hand is a 3.4-carat diamond wedding ring that "I just finished paying for," laughs her husband.
They met the day after Patty was released on $1.5 million bail in November 1976. She was celebrating her freedom at San Francisco's Top of the Mark with her friend, former U.S. marshal Janey Jimenez. Shaw was just one of a squad of moonlighting off-duty policemen hired by the Hearst family to protect Patty. They began dating the following year. She had found it impossible to discuss her traumatic experiences with other men. "They didn't understand," she said. "Bernie did."
They tried to keep the romance secret but failed to reckon with Arrow. "That stupid dog almost gave the whole thing away," remembers Shaw. "He'd come up and lick my hand and no one could understand it." Arrow's point got across when Hearst and Shaw became engaged on Valentine's Day 1978.
Since they married, they've been renovating another small house he bought in the redwoods close to the Pacific. They also escape to pursue Bernie's newest passion, hunting. Patty goes along as "driver and eagle-eyed gun-bearer," reports Bernie. He recently shot a 550-pound wild pig and is having the head mounted. "He wants to take down my portrait in the living room," Patty teases, "and replace it with that."
There are no immediate plans to turn one of the three extra bedrooms in the main Shaw house into a nursery, "but we hope to have children in the future," notes Bernie. When the time comes, Shaw may reconsider a promise he made when the President commuted Patty's sentence. "Our first son," joked Shaw, "is going to be named Jimmy Carter Shaw." Patty favors Reagan (although, as a convicted felon, she can't vote).
Patty—who, surprisingly, prefers to use her maiden name—says the biggest adjustment to married life has been getting used to "being called Mrs. Shaw. It sounds really strange," she says. When the Shaws entertain, it's usually for family and close friends like Father Ted Dumke, the Episcopal priest who led the "Free Patty" movement.
Patty, who worked in the kitchen at Pleasanton (Calif.) prison, is a "fabulous cook," according to Bernie, who says she routinely prepares dinner for 12 people—goose with wild boar stuffing for Christmas. "I don't see how she does it," says Shaw, then reflects: "I guess after all she's been through, that kind of event is nothing."
It was a year ago that Hearst, now 26, and San Francisco police officer Bernard Shaw, 34, walked down the aisle of the redwood-walled chapel on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. This year, to celebrate their April 1 anniversary, they returned to their honeymoon site, the isolated Panamanian island of Contadora. (It's currently home to another sanctuary seeker, the deposed Shah of Iran.)
Nowhere, of course, can the Shaws entirely escape reverberations of the events set in motion Feb. 4, 1974 when radicals calling themselves the "Symbionese Liberation Army" dragged Patty out of the Berkeley apartment she shared with then-fiancé Steven Weed. Patty won't talk about the kidnapping anymore. But the Shaws' house has an elaborate alarm system backed up by Arrow, Patty's longtime pet who is also a 95-pound German shepherd attack dog. And Bernie gently reminds his wife, "You had nightmares for a while when you first came out."
"Out" is for out of prison. Earlier this month Hearst's lawyer, George Martinez, appealed the bank robbery conviction that sent Hearst to jail in 1976 and prompted debate over whether she had been "brainwashed" by her captors into committing crimes. (Her sentence was commuted in 1979 by President Carter, but the original conviction stands.) She served 22½ months—"Newspapers always say I served less than two years of a seven-year sentence," she complains, "as if I hadn't served any time at all." Now, to help clear her name, she is charging that attorney F. Lee Bailey conducted a "disastrous" defense and was involved in a conflict of interest because he had signed a $225,000 contract to write a book about her case. (The book never materialized.)
Until last February 1, one year after she obtained her freedom, Patty had to check in with the chief federal probation officer in San Francisco each month. Or he checked in with her. "Nobody wants me to come to the office," she says. "There are so many weirdos and there's always the potential for violence."
She is still on probation in California for her part in the 1974 shootout at Mel's Sporting Goods store in Los Angeles. Hearst considers her restrictions—she needs court permission to travel outside the state—"silly." But she readily adheres to them because if she didn't, "I could be sitting in prison," she grimaces, "with Emily Harris." (Harris, one of the "Symbionese" leaders, is now in a California state prison serving a 10-years-to-life sentence for kidnapping.)
Last year Hearst worked briefly as a dog trainer, teaching beagles how to sniff out termites. Now, on the probation form she sends in monthly, where it asks, "Are you working?" she checks "no." "The form asks why," relates Patty, "and I say, 'Because I don't want to' or 'I don't have to.' I'm really busy as it is." Most mornings she rides on her 10-year-old gelding, Ol' Paint. "It really clears my mind," says Patty. "I get up early and get back by noon." Her wealthy publisher dad, Randolph Hearst, was legally separated from her mother, Catherine, last year, but lives only three hours away and may buy a horse so he can ride with his daughter. Patty often visits her mother in her new home in Beverly Hills.
The rest of Patty's time is divided between housekeeping and volunteer work as the fund-raising co-chairman of a child-care center for kids with working mothers in South San Francisco. It is staffed by the elderly and dedicated to the late Rep. Leo J. Ryan. He was an early supporter of the drive to free Patty from prison, and his murder in Guyana by Peoples Temple fanatics may have sped her release. "It wasn't until the Jonestown massacre that people really began believing in brainwashing," explains Bernie.
The congenial Shaw, a Bay Area fireman's son, is in his 11th year as a San Francisco cop and expects a promotion to sergeant later this spring. The divorced father of two (his children live nearby and he and Patty see them regularly), he will get his B.A. next year and may teach criminology in junior college. Patty wears a replica of Bernie's police badge around her neck, plus his Army dog tags, now gold-plated. On her left hand is a 3.4-carat diamond wedding ring that "I just finished paying for," laughs her husband.
They met the day after Patty was released on $1.5 million bail in November 1976. She was celebrating her freedom at San Francisco's Top of the Mark with her friend, former U.S. marshal Janey Jimenez. Shaw was just one of a squad of moonlighting off-duty policemen hired by the Hearst family to protect Patty. They began dating the following year. She had found it impossible to discuss her traumatic experiences with other men. "They didn't understand," she said. "Bernie did."
They tried to keep the romance secret but failed to reckon with Arrow. "That stupid dog almost gave the whole thing away," remembers Shaw. "He'd come up and lick my hand and no one could understand it." Arrow's point got across when Hearst and Shaw became engaged on Valentine's Day 1978.
Since they married, they've been renovating another small house he bought in the redwoods close to the Pacific. They also escape to pursue Bernie's newest passion, hunting. Patty goes along as "driver and eagle-eyed gun-bearer," reports Bernie. He recently shot a 550-pound wild pig and is having the head mounted. "He wants to take down my portrait in the living room," Patty teases, "and replace it with that."
There are no immediate plans to turn one of the three extra bedrooms in the main Shaw house into a nursery, "but we hope to have children in the future," notes Bernie. When the time comes, Shaw may reconsider a promise he made when the President commuted Patty's sentence. "Our first son," joked Shaw, "is going to be named Jimmy Carter Shaw." Patty favors Reagan (although, as a convicted felon, she can't vote).
Patty—who, surprisingly, prefers to use her maiden name—says the biggest adjustment to married life has been getting used to "being called Mrs. Shaw. It sounds really strange," she says. When the Shaws entertain, it's usually for family and close friends like Father Ted Dumke, the Episcopal priest who led the "Free Patty" movement.
Patty, who worked in the kitchen at Pleasanton (Calif.) prison, is a "fabulous cook," according to Bernie, who says she routinely prepares dinner for 12 people—goose with wild boar stuffing for Christmas. "I don't see how she does it," says Shaw, then reflects: "I guess after all she's been through, that kind of event is nothing."
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April 21, 1980, People Magazine, An Unknown Actor Re-Creates the Horror of Jonestown and Makes His Name: Powers Boothe,
When the Rev. Jim Jones and 913 of his Peoples Temple followers died in Guyana in 1978, unknown Texas actor Powers Boothe "felt like everyone else: I couldn't bear to watch it on the news." Eighteen months later Boothe is still a relative nobody—until this week anyway, when he gets eerily caught up again in Jonestown. In his first big starring role, Boothe, 31, is playing Jones himself in the CBS docudrama Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones. Remarkably, Boothe dominates a formidable cast, including Ned Beatty, Brad Dourif, Diane Ladd, Brenda Vaccaro, James Earl Jones, LeVar Burton and Colleen Dewhurst.
The biggest risk was really CBS' in banking on an untried actor to carry the two-night epic that was purposely scheduled in the last "official" week of the TV season. The lurid Guyana story was the network's main hope to edge out ABC in the close 1979-80 ratings race. "I'm thrilled at their faith," says Boothe, "but I'm nervous."
Director Billy Graham (no relation) first approached a more established Texas actor, but Tommy Lee Jones was busy with Coal Miner's Daughter. "We were stumped," Graham admits. Then someone suggested Boothe, whose most recent credits included some guest shots on Skag as the boyfriend of Karl Maiden's daughter. "He was Jim Jones," says Graham, "that sexy-evil combination—it's not that I think Powers is evil; he's a terrific guy."
Curiously, laughs Boothe, "It was the easiest job I ever got." Only after reading the script and watching a one-year-after TV update on Jonestown did the horror "suddenly hit me," he recalls. "I shuddered, realizing the importance of the role for the sake of the relatives of the people who died in Jonestown. We owe those people—and the world—the reality of how it happened and not some pile of bull."
Boothe interviewed former Peoples Temple members and screened all film he could find. His impersonation of the charismatic Jones was so convincing that, during its Puerto Rican location, cast members began to come to the somewhat discomfited Boothe with their personal problems. "Everyone has this vision of Jones as a maniacal ogre," Boothe explains. "Wrong. He was charming, sweet and a fabulous speaker. If someone chooses to take that power, he can lead a lot of lambs to slaughter."
Boothe himself grew up hearing fiery Church of Christ sermons in the West Texas town of Snyder, where his father was a cotton farmer and fiddler. Powers played football in high school but decided, "I'm not going to make my living out of beating my head against somebody else." To avoid the draft, he became the first member of his family to attend college and got a degree in education from LBJ's alma mater, Southwest Texas State University. He also married "pretty much" the only girl he's ever gone out with, high school sweetheart Pam Cole. He rejected teaching for a master's in acting from Southern Methodist University, which led to a job at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There he learned "You don't do classics with a Texas accent."
In 1973 the couple moved to New York, where Boothe took a gofer job with the maître d' at Sardi's. At first his parents refused to take his acting seriously, especially since one older brother had become a highway patrol officer and the other a career Army man. "They kept saying, 'When are you going to get a job?' " Finally Powers landed a two-line part on As the World Turns. "It legitimized my whole life," he chuckles. He did mainly regional theater until lucking into Lone Star/Private Wars, written by SMU pal Jim McLure, on Broadway last year.
Then the Boothes moved to Los Angeles—a gamble that cost Pam her career as a financial executive of the Carter-Wallace drug company. "He's more important," she says stoutly. "Being together is why we're married." That may be harder now that Boothe says he is "getting so many offers I don't know what to do." Next he's starring as the alcoholic husband in a CBS adaptation of Jill Schary Robinson's Bed /Time /Story (now retitled High Times). "Our lives have changed so rapidly, just maintaining our sanity has been difficult enough," he admits. To keep the past in mind, they listen to country music (he plays guitar). Pam also contemplates hosting a big Texas Independence Day bash—on Rodeo Drive yet. Powers' vision is simpler: "Land of my own in Texas. There's a place down there," he notes, "where you can get all the catfish you can eat for $5."
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November 22, 1982, People Magazine, Four Years After Surviving Jonestown's Hell, Tim Reiterman Tries to Explain How It Happened,
Tim Reiterman hid in the jungle of Guyana, his left arm ripped by bullets and bandaged with his leather belt. "The fear was raw," he recalls. "I felt the reality of death—unmistakable, irreversible, senseless." Reiterman's friend and colleague at the San Francisco Examiner, photographer Greg Robinson, lay dead beneath a crippled plane 40 yards away, shot down by a Peoples Temple death squad. Four others had been killed, including Rep. Leo Ryan, who had been on a fact-finding trip to Jonestown, the Temple's South American sanctuary. He was investigating reports of beatings and virtual imprisonment there, reports written by Reiterman.
At the same time, about six miles away in Jonestown, the encampment's mad messiah, the Rev. Jim Jones, was leading 912 of his followers to a communion of poisoned Grape Flavor Aid.
All night Reiterman and other ambush survivors guarded the four in Ryan's party who were seriously hurt, shooing flies off their fresh wounds. Then dawn came, bringing help with it, and Reiterman took out one of Robinson's cameras. With his good arm, he shot a picture of the plane and its murdered passengers. "The outside world," he said, "had to see what had happened."
That was four years ago this Nov. 18. "When everybody saw the pictures of the bodies in Guyana, they thought they knew the story of Jim Jones and Jonestown," Reiterman, 35, says today. "They didn't. I didn't know it then."
Reiterman had spent 18 months investigating Jones and the Peoples Temple before the holocaust. Since then he and fellow Examiner reporter John Jacobs have conducted 800 interviews and studied thousands of documents to try to comprehend "the incredibly raveled personality of Jim Jones."
In their epic biography of Jones, Raven (Dutton, $17.95), Reiterman and Jacobs argue that he was not, as many believed, "a good man gone bad": He was mentally disturbed from the start. They found threads of evil even in Jones' childhood in Lynn, Ind. He was sadistic. Teenaged Jim three times shot at one of the few friends he had; the adult Jim sexually abused his parishioners, male and female, and in Jonestown, he suppressed malcontents by drugging them. Yet he was eloquent. By age 16, he was preaching on street corners. With his wizardry at words he mesmerized his flock and impressed the powerful, even former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. But he was sacrilegious; at Jonestown, he ordered crates of Gideon Bibles to be used as toilet paper. He was a con man and a liar; he fostered paranoia by telling his followers of imaginary death threats against him; he staged fake faith healings, pulling chicken entrails from an invalid's body and calling it cancer. But with the evil, it seemed, was good; he fought for minorities and the poor. Jones thought he was God. But, as the massacre proved, he was a devil.
What about those who followed him? "It is so easy to dismiss these people as the great unwashed," says co-author Jacobs, who spent 10 weeks in Guyana after the tragedy. "But it just isn't true. These people were not crazy. They were essentially good people who joined the Temple with the best of intentions...people like you and me."
Reiterman first heard of Jones and his Temple in 1976, while at the Associated Press in San Francisco. Sammy Houston, an AP photographer, confided in Tim about the mysterious death of his son, a Temple member. He showed Tim a letter telling of, among other things, disciplinary beatings.
In 1977, after Reiterman moved to the Examiner, he began investigating the Temple. He met defectors who gave him "a real taste for the positive side of the church, the brotherhood." They also gave him a picture of a cruel, promiscuous, manipulative Jones. Most frightening, they recounted a 1975 loyalty test in which Jones tricked some of his members into drinking wine that he said was poisoned. It was the first of many "white nights," rehearsals for the real thing. "One woman said to me, 'There are people inside the church who would kill for Jim Jones,' " Reiterman recalls. "At the time, I honestly didn't believe it."
In November 1977 Reiterman wrote Sammy Houston's story. He doggedly pursued the Temple, writing about its new Guyanese commune, where Jones later "put people through suicide rehearsals every two or three weeks.... I don't think anyone outside Jonestown could comprehend his madness then." Rep. Leo Ryan, an old friend of Houston's, read Reiterman's first report and heard more horror stories from the frightened families of Temple members. So Ryan decided to go to Jonestown to see for himself. Reiterman invited himself along and, on Nov. 13, 1978, the Congressman's party of journalists and family members left San Francisco.
Reiterman was apprehensive, but he recalls shaking hands with Robinson on their way to Jonestown. "We were as happy as hell," he says. He was impressed with Jonestown but not with Jones. "He seemed to have to steady himself against the table. He came across as very paranoid," Tim recalls. "I felt sorry for him."
Ryan's mission was to give Temple members an escape, if they wanted it. Jones said no one would want to leave. But a day later more than a dozen defected. They were boarding planes for home when the shooting began.
"People were diving and tumbling all around me," Tim recalls. "It was a scramble of feet and bodies and gunfire." He saw a bullet explode in his left forearm and felt another hit his wrist. He ran for the bush. "I thought I might be the only person wounded," he says, "or the only person who survived."
The next day, after his rescue, Reiterman dictated his tale to the paper from his hospital bed near Washington, D.C. He soon returned to his native San Francisco to recuperate. But because of fears of a Temple squad of "avenging angels," Reiterman and his wife, Susan, were kept under police guard. They stayed in the home of his father, then an associate San Francisco schools superintendent. "We didn't know what to expect," Tim says. "The unthinkable had happened once before." But no active remnants of Peoples Temple remained.
Jonestown would not leave him. "I don't think a day passes that I don't think of it," he says. "It has become part of me. People ask, 'If you knew then what you know now about Jones' early life, about the decline of his personality, about the depravity and madness later, would you have gone to Jonestown? If you'd known your visit would trigger the deaths of 900 people, if you'd known Greg Robinson wouldn't come back, would you still have gone?' " Tim answers quietly: "Of course not. I would turn back the clock if I could."
He wrote the book to answer the question the world asked: Why? Ironically, it also serves a rule Jones had on a board in Jonestown. He died near that sign. It read: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
At the same time, about six miles away in Jonestown, the encampment's mad messiah, the Rev. Jim Jones, was leading 912 of his followers to a communion of poisoned Grape Flavor Aid.
All night Reiterman and other ambush survivors guarded the four in Ryan's party who were seriously hurt, shooing flies off their fresh wounds. Then dawn came, bringing help with it, and Reiterman took out one of Robinson's cameras. With his good arm, he shot a picture of the plane and its murdered passengers. "The outside world," he said, "had to see what had happened."
That was four years ago this Nov. 18. "When everybody saw the pictures of the bodies in Guyana, they thought they knew the story of Jim Jones and Jonestown," Reiterman, 35, says today. "They didn't. I didn't know it then."
Reiterman had spent 18 months investigating Jones and the Peoples Temple before the holocaust. Since then he and fellow Examiner reporter John Jacobs have conducted 800 interviews and studied thousands of documents to try to comprehend "the incredibly raveled personality of Jim Jones."
In their epic biography of Jones, Raven (Dutton, $17.95), Reiterman and Jacobs argue that he was not, as many believed, "a good man gone bad": He was mentally disturbed from the start. They found threads of evil even in Jones' childhood in Lynn, Ind. He was sadistic. Teenaged Jim three times shot at one of the few friends he had; the adult Jim sexually abused his parishioners, male and female, and in Jonestown, he suppressed malcontents by drugging them. Yet he was eloquent. By age 16, he was preaching on street corners. With his wizardry at words he mesmerized his flock and impressed the powerful, even former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. But he was sacrilegious; at Jonestown, he ordered crates of Gideon Bibles to be used as toilet paper. He was a con man and a liar; he fostered paranoia by telling his followers of imaginary death threats against him; he staged fake faith healings, pulling chicken entrails from an invalid's body and calling it cancer. But with the evil, it seemed, was good; he fought for minorities and the poor. Jones thought he was God. But, as the massacre proved, he was a devil.
What about those who followed him? "It is so easy to dismiss these people as the great unwashed," says co-author Jacobs, who spent 10 weeks in Guyana after the tragedy. "But it just isn't true. These people were not crazy. They were essentially good people who joined the Temple with the best of intentions...people like you and me."
Reiterman first heard of Jones and his Temple in 1976, while at the Associated Press in San Francisco. Sammy Houston, an AP photographer, confided in Tim about the mysterious death of his son, a Temple member. He showed Tim a letter telling of, among other things, disciplinary beatings.
In 1977, after Reiterman moved to the Examiner, he began investigating the Temple. He met defectors who gave him "a real taste for the positive side of the church, the brotherhood." They also gave him a picture of a cruel, promiscuous, manipulative Jones. Most frightening, they recounted a 1975 loyalty test in which Jones tricked some of his members into drinking wine that he said was poisoned. It was the first of many "white nights," rehearsals for the real thing. "One woman said to me, 'There are people inside the church who would kill for Jim Jones,' " Reiterman recalls. "At the time, I honestly didn't believe it."
In November 1977 Reiterman wrote Sammy Houston's story. He doggedly pursued the Temple, writing about its new Guyanese commune, where Jones later "put people through suicide rehearsals every two or three weeks.... I don't think anyone outside Jonestown could comprehend his madness then." Rep. Leo Ryan, an old friend of Houston's, read Reiterman's first report and heard more horror stories from the frightened families of Temple members. So Ryan decided to go to Jonestown to see for himself. Reiterman invited himself along and, on Nov. 13, 1978, the Congressman's party of journalists and family members left San Francisco.
Reiterman was apprehensive, but he recalls shaking hands with Robinson on their way to Jonestown. "We were as happy as hell," he says. He was impressed with Jonestown but not with Jones. "He seemed to have to steady himself against the table. He came across as very paranoid," Tim recalls. "I felt sorry for him."
Ryan's mission was to give Temple members an escape, if they wanted it. Jones said no one would want to leave. But a day later more than a dozen defected. They were boarding planes for home when the shooting began.
"People were diving and tumbling all around me," Tim recalls. "It was a scramble of feet and bodies and gunfire." He saw a bullet explode in his left forearm and felt another hit his wrist. He ran for the bush. "I thought I might be the only person wounded," he says, "or the only person who survived."
The next day, after his rescue, Reiterman dictated his tale to the paper from his hospital bed near Washington, D.C. He soon returned to his native San Francisco to recuperate. But because of fears of a Temple squad of "avenging angels," Reiterman and his wife, Susan, were kept under police guard. They stayed in the home of his father, then an associate San Francisco schools superintendent. "We didn't know what to expect," Tim says. "The unthinkable had happened once before." But no active remnants of Peoples Temple remained.
Jonestown would not leave him. "I don't think a day passes that I don't think of it," he says. "It has become part of me. People ask, 'If you knew then what you know now about Jones' early life, about the decline of his personality, about the depravity and madness later, would you have gone to Jonestown? If you'd known your visit would trigger the deaths of 900 people, if you'd known Greg Robinson wouldn't come back, would you still have gone?' " Tim answers quietly: "Of course not. I would turn back the clock if I could."
He wrote the book to answer the question the world asked: Why? Ironically, it also serves a rule Jones had on a board in Jonestown. He died near that sign. It read: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
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July 9, 1984, People Magazine, Dianne Feinstein: If the Mayor of Baghdad by the Bay Should Become Walter Mondale's Veep, She'll Leave Her Heart in San Francisco,
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March 15, 1999, People Magazine, Survivors: Jim Jones Jr. battles the ghosts of Jonestown, by Joanne Kaufman, Cynthia Sanz and Gabrielle Cosgriff,
When the call came, 18-year-old Jim Jr. was in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown, some 140 miles from the Jonestown enclave that his father, Rev. Jim Jones, had carved out of the South American jungle. Jim Jr., now 38, can still hear his father's voice on the shortwave radio that day—-Nov. 18,1978—-ranting about traitors and urging him and his brothers Stephan and Tim to join his Peoples Temple cult in a mass suicide. "He was saying, 'We have to make a stand,' " Jim Jr. recalls. "I was pleading, 'Dad, no!' He said, 'No, Jim, this is it.' "
Within hours, more than 900 of the cult's followers, including some 250 children, had either drunk a poisoned fruit punch or been shot by Jones's security force. Jones and his wife, Marceline—-who had adopted Jim Jr., an African-American, as part of their plan to have a multiracial "rainbow family" (Stephan was their only biological child)—-were dead, along with their son Lew, 20; daughter Agnes, 36; and Jim Jr.'s 19-year-old pregnant wife, Yvette. "I lost everything," says Jim Jr. He moved in with older sister Suzanne, a government worker in San Francisco who had distanced herself from her parents before their Jonestown move. There, Jim Jr. worked his way through college to become a respiratory therapist but later fell into alcohol abuse and, for years, sank into depression every November as the anniversary of the suicides neared.
Last spring, however, Jim Jr., along with Stephan, 39 and now doing temp work in San Francisco, returned to Jonestown for the first time since 1978 to confront his past. (Tim, who runs a furniture business in the Bay Area, declined an invitation to join them.) "It was cathartic for him," says Jim's wife of 12 years, Erin, 39, a nurse. "Now he can voice his memories more easily instead of keeping everything inside." The trip, financed by ABC for a 20/20 special about the anniversary, also allowed Jones to discuss the past with his three sons, Robert, 10; Ryan, 8; and Ross, 4. "It was my childhood, I wanted them to know," says Jones, now a Pacifica, Calif., pharmaceutical salesman. "More important than forgiving my father for what he did, I've finally begun forgiving myself for surviving."
He also tries to focus on his happy memories. "The 1960s, black kid in an orphanage...the statistics say I should be dead, a drug addict or in jail," says Jim Jr. "My father gave me a feeling of self-worth, a feeling that it didn't matter what color I was, I had opportunities." Even in the face of overwhelming tragedy, that optimism endures. "I look at Nov. 18, 1978, as the day I was born," says Jones. "I came back from Jonestown with nothing. God didn't give me anything to hold me back from whatever I really wanted to do."
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April 16, 2007, People Magazine, Picks and Pans Review: Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, (PBS, check local listings) This powerful documentary about charismatic madman Jim Jones plays like a real-life Apocalypse Now.
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When the call came, 18-year-old Jim Jr. was in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown, some 140 miles from the Jonestown enclave that his father, Rev. Jim Jones, had carved out of the South American jungle. Jim Jr., now 38, can still hear his father's voice on the shortwave radio that day—-Nov. 18,1978—-ranting about traitors and urging him and his brothers Stephan and Tim to join his Peoples Temple cult in a mass suicide. "He was saying, 'We have to make a stand,' " Jim Jr. recalls. "I was pleading, 'Dad, no!' He said, 'No, Jim, this is it.' "
Within hours, more than 900 of the cult's followers, including some 250 children, had either drunk a poisoned fruit punch or been shot by Jones's security force. Jones and his wife, Marceline—-who had adopted Jim Jr., an African-American, as part of their plan to have a multiracial "rainbow family" (Stephan was their only biological child)—-were dead, along with their son Lew, 20; daughter Agnes, 36; and Jim Jr.'s 19-year-old pregnant wife, Yvette. "I lost everything," says Jim Jr. He moved in with older sister Suzanne, a government worker in San Francisco who had distanced herself from her parents before their Jonestown move. There, Jim Jr. worked his way through college to become a respiratory therapist but later fell into alcohol abuse and, for years, sank into depression every November as the anniversary of the suicides neared.
Last spring, however, Jim Jr., along with Stephan, 39 and now doing temp work in San Francisco, returned to Jonestown for the first time since 1978 to confront his past. (Tim, who runs a furniture business in the Bay Area, declined an invitation to join them.) "It was cathartic for him," says Jim's wife of 12 years, Erin, 39, a nurse. "Now he can voice his memories more easily instead of keeping everything inside." The trip, financed by ABC for a 20/20 special about the anniversary, also allowed Jones to discuss the past with his three sons, Robert, 10; Ryan, 8; and Ross, 4. "It was my childhood, I wanted them to know," says Jones, now a Pacifica, Calif., pharmaceutical salesman. "More important than forgiving my father for what he did, I've finally begun forgiving myself for surviving."
He also tries to focus on his happy memories. "The 1960s, black kid in an orphanage...the statistics say I should be dead, a drug addict or in jail," says Jim Jr. "My father gave me a feeling of self-worth, a feeling that it didn't matter what color I was, I had opportunities." Even in the face of overwhelming tragedy, that optimism endures. "I look at Nov. 18, 1978, as the day I was born," says Jones. "I came back from Jonestown with nothing. God didn't give me anything to hold me back from whatever I really wanted to do."
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April 16, 2007, People Magazine, Picks and Pans Review: Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, (PBS, check local listings) This powerful documentary about charismatic madman Jim Jones plays like a real-life Apocalypse Now.
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