A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (18 page)

The Nazis hated the Temple. They sent notes, on their letterhead, with ugly messages, such as: “What we did to the Jews is nothing compared with what we’ll do to you niggers and nigger lovers.” Now, somehow, Stennis had turned the Nazis loose on the temple.

The connections were made: Stennis, Nazi reporters, the Treasury Department. Now, an even more sinister force was against Jones. A group of Temple defectors were telling “lies,” speaking to the “Nazi” reporters, and for publication.

Klineman provided research material for another “Nazi”
reporter, Marshall Kilduff, who, along with Phil Tracy, wrote a blistering exposé of the Temple in the August 1, 1977, issue of
New West
magazine. Various defectors told stories of false healings, humiliations, beatings, and financial improprieties. The article contained a sidebar arguing that the temple should be investigated. Jones used all the political clout at his disposal in a vain effort to kill the story. He fled to Guyana shortly before it was published.

The phenomenon of
folie à deux
was noted in medical literature as early as 1877. It is a “psychosis of association,” most often paranoid in nature, occurring frequently among people who live together intimately and in isolation
. Folie imposée
is a kind of
folie à deux
in which the delusions of a dominant individual infect
one or more submissive and suggestible individuals who are dependent on and have a close emotional attachment to the infector
.

In the isolation of the jungle, in the intimacy of the pavilion, Jim Jones raged against the defectors. They were organized now, and the traitors called themselves the Concerned Relatives. They were plotting against him, smearing him in the media, and in league with the shadow forces arrayed against him.

One of the defectors, Grace Stoen, had a six-year-old son, John Victor, living in Jonestown. Jones claimed he had sired the boy and that he would never give him up. Stoen hired a lawyer to start custody proceedings. For Jones, it was just another measure of how far they would go. Traitors were playing with children’s lives, using a six-year-old as a pawn in their plan to bring down the Temple. They would take a boy away from his Father.

He was Father to all of them. He had taken the junkies and prostitutes off the street. He took in lonely old folks and fed the hungry. The young idealists had been floundering, unsure of how to make a better world. And he showed them. Without him there was nothing. Without him they would be back on the streets or lying on a slab in the morgue. The community was totally dependent on him. Without him they were nothing, and he told them so. It frightened them to realize he was ill.

Jones told the community he had cancer, a kidney disorder, diabetes, hypertension, and hypoglycemia. He was God, “God manifested a hundredfold,” the only God they’d ever known. The God of the Bible had been used to oppress people for centuries. He was building a socialist utopia, providing economic and social equality to the oppressed and scorned. And now traitors were killing him with their plots. One top aide saw him “crying hysterically, as if his whole life was a failure.”

His hate and fear were contagious. Elderly women united to kill the defectors. He held his hands up for the people to see, and they were running with blood. “I’m bleeding for the people,” he said. (“Ground glass,” a surviving Jonestown nurse told me later.)

Sometimes during Peoples Forum, when members spoke of being homesick or wanting to leave, Jones would have a “heart attack.” The community could see what it was doing to Father, and they’d turn on the speaker in a fury. It wasn’t just people leaving. That might be acceptable. But no one ever left and remained neutral. They sold out. They told lies. They joined the traitors. Perhaps those who spoke of leaving were infiltrators. Everyone could see what their words did to Father. He had to protect himself. “No one leaves Jonestown unless they’re dead,” Jones said.

I
n May, Deborah Blakey, one of Jones’s top aides, left the Georgetown temple headquarters, obtained a temporary passport from the American embassy, and fled to the United States. The day was May thirteenth, Jones’s birthday. When Father heard of the betrayal, he called a “white night,” a crisis alert, and the community sat stunned in the pavilion as he raged. They were betrayed. Wasn’t it better to die? He challenged anyone in the community to speak for life. When they did, he battered them with arguments. He said he was “the alpha and the omega,” the beginning and the end. He said it over and over again. The white night lasted twenty-eight hours. No one was allowed to go to the bathroom without an armed guard. Anyone who tried to run, he said, would be shot. Meals were brought into the pavilion. Finally, everyone in Jonestown voted to die.

Harold Cordell told me most of the details of this meeting. I asked him if he too had voted to die. He nodded glumly and said, “I figured if we just quit arguing with him, we could get some sleep.”

T
he Temple hired Mark Lane, a lawyer and conspiracy theorist, in the hope that he could help unravel the mystifying web of harassment. But by early November, it seemed as if it was already too late. The shadow forces were squeezing the lifeblood out of Jonestown.

The
National Enquirer
was preparing an article. It would be another smear, like the one in
New West
, full of lies. Jones became more isolated, and his dependence on drugs increased.

On November first, Leo Ryan wired Jones and informed him he would be visiting Jonestown on a fact-finding mission. Ryan had been talking to traitors all summer.

Shortly after the wire arrived, Terri Buford, Jones’s most trusted aide, left the Temple. She had been working in San Francisco and told Jones, by shortwave radio, that she “had some conflicts.” Jones had often said that Terri was “the smartest person in the organization, besides me.” It was three days before he could bring himself to talk about it, and then all he said was, “Someone left.” All the survivors I talked to, from those in leadership positions to dissenters, agreed that Buford’s defection had a devastating effect on Jim Jones.

The conspiracy came to a head on Saturday, November eighteenth, during Ryan’s visit. Some Temple members had deserted in the morning, when security was concentrating on the Ryan party. Now others were saying they wanted to leave with Ryan. Whole families—the Parkses, the Bogues—had turned traitor. They had lied on the floor, lied in front of the entire community when they confronted a father or mother or child. They were more concerned with blood relations than with the cause and Father. Jones looked beaten, defeated. A man named Don Sly flew into a rage and menaced Ryan with a knife, but he was subdued. Newsmen were present. There’d be more smears. Ryan
would report to Congress, and the full weight of the United States government would fall on Jonestown.

When Ryan and his collection of traitors left for Port Kaituma, gunmen followed. The shadow forces had won.

A
n alert was called and the community rushed to the pavilion. Jones told them the congressman’s plane would “fall from the sky.” He could do things like that. Hadn’t he killed the man who put a curse on him simply by burning a passport? At Port Kaituma, a Jones loyalist named Larry Layton, who left with Ryan, pulled a gun. Although Layton later denied it—saying it was his idea to go after the congressman’s plane—Jones may have instructed him to shoot the pilot when the plane was airborne. But the party was too large and they were going to take two planes. Layton wounded two, leveled the gun at Dale Parks’s chest and fired. Dale fell back, thinking he had been shot, but the gun had jammed. He jumped Layton, and, with the help of another man, wrestled the gun away.

Meanwhile, gunmen arrived from Jonestown and began firing at the other plane. Ryan, Patty Parks, and newsmen Bob Brown, Don Harris, and Greg Robinson were killed. Others were wounded. The gunmen retreated to Jonestown.

“Those people won’t reach the States,” Jones told the community. Then he said it was time for all of them to die. He asked if there was any dissent. An older woman rose and said she didn’t think it was the only alternative. Couldn’t the temple members escape to Russia or Cuba? The old woman continued to plead with Jones. She had the right to choose how she wanted to live, she said, and how she wanted to die. The community shouted her down. She had no such right. She was a traitor. But she held her ground, an elderly woman, all alone.

“Too late,” Jones said. He instructed Larry Schact, the
town doctor, to prepare the poison. Medical personnel brought the equipment into a tent that had been used as a school and library. There were large syringes, without the needles, and small plastic containers full of a milky white liquid.

Jones told the community that the Guyanese Defense Force would be there in forty-five minutes. They’d shoot first and ask questions later. Those captured alive, he said, would be castrated. It was time to die with dignity. The children would be first.

A woman in her late twenties stepped out of the crowd. She was carrying her baby. The doctor estimated the child’s weight and measured an amount of the milky liquid into a syringe. A nurse pumped the solution into the baby’s mouth. The potassium cyanide was bitter to the tongue, and so the nurse gave the baby a sip of punch to wash it down. Then the mother drank her potion.

Death came in less than five minutes. The baby went into convulsions, and Jones—very calm, very deliberate—kept repeating, “We must take care of the babies first.” Some mothers brought their own children up to the killing trough. Others took children from reluctant mothers. Some of the parents and grandparents became hysterical, and they screamed and sobbed as their children died.

“We must die with dignity,” Jones said. “Hurry, hurry, hurry.” One thirteen-year-old girl refused her poison. She spit it out time after time and they finally held her and forced her to take it. Many people in the pavilion, especially the older ones, just watched, waiting. Others walked around, hugging old friends. Others screamed and sobbed.

Jones stepped off his throne and walked into the audience. “We must hurry,” he said. He grabbed people by the arm and pulled them to the poison. Some struggled, weakly. One girl put up a fight and she had to be injected.

After an individual took the poison, two others would escort him, one on each arm, to a clearing and lay him on the ground, face down. It wouldn’t do to have bodies piled up around the poison, slowing things down.

Stanley Clayton watched as “one of the brothers came
into the pavilion. He was running. When he came in, he started stumbling. He turned and flipped over and was just lying there. He was suffering. He was shaking and carrying on, spitting up his last spit, eyes turning up in his head. All of them were suffering. I was terrified and looked for a way to get out.” Security men with crossbows circled the pavilion. Men with guns guarded the periphery.

Odell Rhodes made himself inconspicuous. He even held his students, the ones who called him Daddy, as they died. And he saw that the only people who were allowed through the circle of crossbows were medical personnel. He heard the doctor ask a nurse to get his stethoscope. Odell fell into step beside her. The guards stopped them, but the nurse said, “We’re going to the medical office.” As they stepped beyond the crossbows, Odell realized he would have to kill the nurse. Fortunately, she instructed him to look in one building while she searched the other. Odell entered the nursing office and made his way to the back of the building, where there was a senior center; most of the people there were bedridden.

“Are you the man who is going to take us up there?” an old woman asked.

“You know what they’re doing up there?” Odell asked.

“We know.”

“I’m not the man to take you.”

Stanley too decided to risk arrows or bullets rather than take poison. He sorted through the bodies, pretending to look for people who might still be alive. There were only one hundred people left alive when he saw his chance and took it. He was lucky. It will never be known how many people were murdered, how many saw there was no escape and chose poison to arrows or bullets.

The security men were found with the rest. They, certainly, must have died voluntarily. In the end, it appears as if Jim Jones put a pistol under his right ear and ended his own life.

I
missed the flight back to Miami and ended up spending a night in Curaçao. There was a television in the hotel room, and I found that, after staring into the face of horror for two weeks, all I could do was sit there and watch Popeye cartoons in Spanish while my mind spun and slipped gears.

Jones was a contradiction of everything he stood for. He denigrated sex, but he slept with any woman who pleased him.

He brought homosexuals to the floor for beatings, but had sex with men.

He stood for social equality, and ate platters full of meat while others ate rice.

He preached racial equality, and yet the leadership of his primarily black organization was mostly white.

He railed against slavery, but he forced his followers to work twelve hours a day in the fields. He fed them maggoty rice and they called him Father instead of Massa.

He feared oppression but became an oppressor.