Some who escaped the Jonestown massacre shed new light on the tragic mystery of how a megalomaniac leader — inspiring both faith and fear turned his own humanitarian vision into an orgy of suicide and murder.
Why did they die?
Perhaps no explanation will ever satisfy completely. But to review the massacre months later through the eyes of those most deeply involved is to discover a dozen different clues in the deadly dynamics of Guyana, from faith to fear to murder.
We know now through firsthand witnesses that once Jim Jones learned of the Port Kaituma killings of a Congressman, three journalists and a “defector,” events moved quickly. Jones called his followers to the main pavilion.
According to reports of a tape recording of the commune's last hour, he began by telling them: “I tried to give you a good life. In spite of all I tried to do, a handful of our people who are alive” — presumably meaning other defectors — “have made our lives impossible.” Then, referring to the earlier airstrip killings, he continued: “There's no way to detach ourselves from what's happened today. We are sitting on a powder keg. If we can't live in peace, let's die in peace.”
Continue reading the main storyFor some — their identities irrevocably intertwined with Jones — his suggestion sufficed. As Odell Rhodes, a survivor who escaped while the killings took place, put it, “Some of these people were with Jim Jones for 10 or 20 years. They wouldn't know what to do with themselves without him.” Another voice on the tape: “Dad has brought us this far; my vote is to go with Dad.”
Christine Miller, an elderly woman, asked why they couldn't flee instead to Russia. Jones answered calmly that the Russians wouldn't want them now because they had been disgraced by the killings at Port Kaituma. “I want my babies first,” he then commanded. “Take my babies and children first.”
Stanley Clayton, another eyewitness escapee, testified at the Guyana inquest that many in the commune seemed at first to think it was just another drill. In calling for “babies first,” Jones surely knew that mothers duped into killing their children would want to take their own lives.
Clayton testified that, in some cases, “nurses took babies right out of their mothers’ arms. The mothers were frozen with shock, scared out of their wits.” The nurses then squirted the deadly liquid down the children's throats, sending them into convulsions.
“After you watched your child die,” Paula Adams — a Jones follower who survived because she was in Georgetown that Saturday — speculated later, “you'd think, ‘What's there to live for. may as well die.’ “
When most of the babies were dead or dying, Clayton testified, “people began realizing this was really taking place.”
The crowd grew restive. Jones took another tack. “He kept telling them, ‘I love you I love you. It is nothing but a deep sleep,’ ” Clayton recalled. “‘It won't hurt you. It's just like closing your eyes and drifting into a deep sleep.’”
Then, Clayton said, Jones stepped into the crowd and began guiding people toward the vat of fruit drink and cyanide. Jones's wife, Marceline, also walked among the followers, embracing them and saying, “I'll see you in the next life.”
Jones himself did not believe in reincarnation, but he knew that many of his followers did. “We'll all fall tonight,” one communard said, stepping forward for his cup of poison, “but he'll raise us tomorrow.”
According to Rhodes, Jones told the group that if they didn't drink the potion, they would be tortured and the men castrated by the Guyanese Army. “Troops will come in here,” Rhodes quoted Jones as saying. “They will torture our babies. They will kill everybody. It's better that we die with dignity.” The many who shared his paranoia about a C.I.A.‐Treasury DepartmentGuyana Defense Forces conspiracy to destroy the Temple undoubtedly believed him.
Jones “made them feel that in a couple of hours the army was going to be there and take them and put them in concentration camps,” Stephan Jones said later. Stephan, the cult leader's natural son, escaped the carnage. As a member of the Jonestown basketball team, he had gone to Georgetown for a game.
To those who felt death inevitable, Jones's repeated entreaties to “die with dignity” would have proved powerfully persuasive, former followers agreed. “If I was down there,” said Grace Stoen, “I would say I'd rather go down bravely than be shot in the back. That's the choice they had.”
Others may have felt that they had tun out of alternatives. Virtual prisoners in a jungle outpost 150 miles from a major airport, lacking money, resources or passports, many must have believed they had come too far, repudiated too much, to turn back.
“In San Francisco, they'd have run,” said Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist who is president of the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences. “And once a few ran, it would have changed the whole dynamic and power of the group. But where the hell were they going to rtm to in Guyana?”
For some, a return to the United States was psychologically out of the question, as Dr. Hardat Sukhdeo, a Guyaneseborn cult specialist now working in New Jersey, observed. “They were people in Jonestown,” he said of the survivors he interviewed in Georgetown. “For the first time in their lives they were persons.” Michael Carter, one of three who escaped with a suitcase containing more than half a million dollars, offered another version of the same thought. “A lot of the people,” he said, “had nothing else but the People's Temple and Jonestown.”
One more factor in their acquiescence was Jones's call for “revolutionary suicide”; the belief, as Michael Carter reconstructed it, that “we're going to show how a force of so many people can do so much to shape the world.” Two who apparently shared this belief were the guards sent to warn (or possibly to kill) the two visiting Temple attorneys, Charles Garry and Mark Lane.
“It's a great moment — we all die,” Mr. Garry later reported one of the guards saying. “They had this smile on their faces. They said they were going to die, that it was a pleasure to die for revolutionary suicide, that this is the way it's got to be done as an expression against racism and fascism.”
The group need was also critical. For many, the anxiety of being separated from the group — which even at the last moment represented love and security — perhaps outweighed fear of death. Odell Rhodes related that, as he was escaping, he came upon a dormitory full of elderly members. They all said they wanted to join in the suicides. Some asked him to escort them to the pavilion. Others, who could walk, picked themselves up and made their own way.
When 74‐year old Hyacinth Thrash awoke the next morning, after sleeping through the holocaust, she panicked. “I thought everybody had run off,” she explained after she was rescued. “I started crying and wailing, ‘Why did they leave me? Why did they leave me?'”
“It may be a less sick thing,” Dr. Gaylin said of suicide, “when it's done as part of the group than when it's done individually, because of the immensity of group pressure on insecure people.”
The haste inherent in the event, giving the communards little time to think things over, also helps account for the cornphance. “If I was one of the first,” Michael Carter admitit willingly. I think as things went on, I would have tried to rebel. I can't imagine no one tried to rebel, [at least] 30 or 40. I know a majority followed him willingly.” But, given time, Carter said, “there was definitely a minority in Jonestown of at least 30 people who would have rebelled, with a hundred more in the closet.”
Some did rebel. In addition to Rhodes and Clayton, 79year‐old Grover Davis simply walked away from the pavilion and hid in a ditch. “I didn't want to die,” he said later.
There is evidence that others also didn't want to die. Mr. Clayton testified that Jones, backed by security guards, pulled some people from their seats and propelled them forcibly toward the vats of poison.
A report by Dr. Leslie Mootoo, the Guyana Government's chief medical examiner, noted that several of the 39 bodies he examined showed punctures “consistent” with injections. He and police estimated that at least 70 persons might have received injections. Mr. Rhodes said he saw some people injected when the poison they took orally failed to kill them.
them. By one reckoning — counting the 70 “rebels” as murdered, as well as 260 children and five elderly women who may have mistaken the poison for routine medication — perhaps a third of those who died at Jonestown were not suicides at all. But by almost any other reckoning, murder and suicide became so hopelessly intermingled that it was impossible to tell which was which.
The signs were there for some time.
Grace Stoen, one of Jim Jones's closest aides, remembers that, in September 1972 Lester of Kinsolving wrote a series of skeptical newspaper articles detailing Jones's claims as faith healer and prophet. “That bad press just freaked Jones out and he got even more paranoid.”
even more paranoid.” A year later, by her recollection, Jones expounded the idea of mass suicide. “We've got to go down in history,” she recalls him saying in September 1973. “ ‘We've got to be in the history books.’ And he said, ‘Everyone will die, except me of course. I've got to stay back and explain why we did it: for our belief in integration.’”
Two days later, the defection of eight Temple teen‐agers ushered in a new era at the Temple. “We hated those eight with such a passion because we knew any day they were going to try bombing us.” Neva Sly, a former member recalled recently. “I mean Jim Jones had us totally convinced of this.”
The defections, following so rapidly the first mention of “revolutionary suicide,” may also have persuaded Jones to set the notion aside — at least temporarily. For it was not until about three years later, according to Mrs. Stoen, that the idea came up again. On New Year's Day, 1976, Jones told about 30 inner‐circle followers that he loved them so much he would lift his abstinency rule and allow them each a glass of wine. When all had drunk, he informed them that they would be dead within an hour. Mrs. Stoen says that while she didn't believe him, others did. She recalls Walter Jones, who was attending his first meeting as a member of the Planning Commission, standing up and saying that he just wanted to know “why we're dying. All I've been doing is working on bus engines ever since I got here and I want to know that I'm dying for something more than being a mechanic working on all these buses.’”
Mrs. Sly, whose husband. Don, threatened Representative Leo J. Ryan with a knife at Jonestown, also believed Jones that evening. She remembers Jones telling the assemblage that the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. was closing in and would kill everyone. “I had so much going through my mind that the 30 minutes was like 20 hours.” After a while, Mrs. Sly reported, “Jones smiled and said, ‘Well, it was a good lesson. I see you're not dead.’ He made it sound like we needed the 30 minutes to do very strong, introspective kind of thinking. We all felt strongly dedicated, proud of ourselves.”
Today Mrs. Sly, whose son died at Jonestown, says she had not been afraid of death that evening. After all, she says, Jones “taught that it would be a privilege to die for what you believed in, which is exactly what I would have been doing.”
Deborah Layton Blakey has an equally chilling memory of the same evening. She said that Jones took her and a handful of other trusted aides into a room and asked their advice about how to kill off the entire Planning Commission. He suggested sending the group on an airplane trip, she said. Once aloft, “one of us would shoot [the pilot] and the whole plane would go down. And that way he'd have the whole P.C. dead. Then he thought of taking all the buses and running them off the Golden Gate Bridge.
“His big concern,” Mrs. Blakey continued, “was that people were starting to leave his church, P.C. people. He got scared and thought the best thing to do was just kill them off.”
Those gathered on the Golden Gate Bridge for a Memorial Day service for those who jumped from the landmark, might also have heard intimations of things to come. Jones, an invited speaker, departed from his prepared text to extemporize about the depressing effect a New West magazine article, by San Francisco reporters Marshall Kilduff and Philip Tracy, was having on him and his congregation.
“These past few days,” Jones said, “we as a congregation of several thousand have undergone a considerable amount of pressure. It seems that there are elements in society, very wrongfully, who want to use us as an embarrassment to this administration. So I can empathize [with suicide victims].
“This week my son said to me,” he continued,” ‘For the first time, Dad, I felt like committing suicide ... Maybe it might cause people to care if I jumped off the bridge while you were speaking.’ We worked our way through that, but I think that perhaps we all should identify closely with that kind of personal experience. Because at one time or another we have all felt the alienation and the despair. I think the despair got to me yesterday. If it hadn't been for an Academy Award‐winning actress joining our church ... I think I would have been in a suicidal mood myself today for perhaps the first time in my life.” (Jones was mistaken; Jane Fonda, the “Academy Award‐winning actress,” visited but did not join the People's Temple.)
Less than a year later, in March 1978, Jones would write a letter to United States Senators and Representatives. “We at People's Temple,” he said, “have been the subject of harassment by several agencies of the U.S. Government and are rapidly reaching the point at which our patience is exhausted. . . I can say without hesitation that we are devoted to a decision that it is better even to die than to be constantly harassed from one continent to the next.”
There are further clues to the tragedy in the life histories of the people themselves.
Long before threats of suicide had appeared in letters to Congressmen, the People's Temple had helped drug addicts break their addictions, offered food and shelter to the destitute, run schools and senior‐citizen centers, reformed prostitutes and found jobs for the uneducated. It helped an illiterate black woman become a nurse and a heavy drug‐user become a doctor. Although the reality never matched the Temple's stated egalitarian aims, and although some racial friction always existed, blacks and whites worked together in considerable harmony.
Neva Sly remembers that, at her first visit to the Temple in 1967, “a force of love just slapped you in the face.” Within a month, she and her husband had moved to Ukiah, Calif., to work full time “for the cause. It was the greatest feeling to me, that I was really giving my all to something.” “When we first joined, it was beautiful, interracial humanitarianism,” Jeannie Mills, another defector, recalls. “When you walked into the church, everybody greeted you with hugs. I had never experienced this kind of love before.”
“I went into this group to serve mankind by building a tightly knit utopian society which would be a model,” said Grace Stoen's husband, Tim, a lawyer who was Jones's most trusted adviser until he defected in April 1977 and became his most hated traitor. “I wanted utopia so damn bad I could die. In fact, I fully expected to die. I really took to heart that verse in Ecclesiastes: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’ ” Mr. Stoen, then an assistant district attorney, gave the Temple his house, turned over his salary, sold his Porsche sports car, and began buying his suits at the Salvation Army.
At the center of the tragic scene, holding it all together, was Jim Jones — darkly handsome, spellbindingly loquacious and, by the evidence available to most members, committed to the ideals he espoused.
“Jim Jones was warm, friendly, outgoing,” recalls Harold Cordell, who joined the “church” at the age of 18 in 1956 and stayed for 20 years. “There were outings for young people. He made young people feel they were part of something. He was meeting the needs of senior citizens. There were programs for the poor. It looked like a good thing. I saw a place I could relate to and feel like I was a part of something. I wanted to feel I was contributing to society. I wanted to do good works.”
“Jones was a master mythmaker,” adds Steen. “I've never seen anybody who could weave the tapestry of a utopian dream so beautifully.”
IBM the tapestry never appealed to a broad constituency. In his first four months as a new member, Stoen brought some 35 lawyer friends to hear Jones speak, fully expecting each to be quickly converted, as he had been. To his surprise, not one returned a second time.
Stoen estimates that, in 10 years, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people came to hear Jones speak. But, he says, despite Jones's boasts of 20,000 members, the actual membership never exceeded 3,000.
In the main, the Temple attracted two kinds of people: white, upper‐middle‐class idealists and uneducated, disenfranchised blacks. The latter outnumbered the former by about 4 to 1; but whites, notably white women, held most of the leadership positions. Jones once referred to his rank‐and‐file members as “the refuse of America.”
“I remember some black mothers would tell you they had seven sons and five were in prison,” says Tim Stoen. “Nobody else had ever taken them and looked them in the eye and said, ‘I love ‘you,’ which Jim would do. When I saw Jim kiss old black ladies on the cheek and their eyes would light up, I would cry, I touched.”
In the “self‐analysis” letters that Jones asked his Jonestown followers to write to him last July, feelings of guilt and worthlessness run rampant.
“Historically , I have been very insecure,” wrote Tom Grubbs, the Jonestown highschool principal. “Had a very strong inferiority complex all my life, felt frightfully inadequate. ... I want to work every damn minute I'm not asleep, largely so I don't have to face my feelings of unworthiness, inadequacy, insecurity.”
Agreeing to do whatever the leader asks in exchange for relief from feelings of worthlessness and guilt is a familiar pattern, says Dr. Stanley Cath, a psychiatrist and student of cults at Tufts University. “Anyone in a group like this says. ‘My God, if I'm thrown back on myself, and have to put up with what I put up with before ....’ Then he says of the leader: ‘You converted me, you snapped something, you gave me the light and I didn't feel that way anymore. You stopped the pain.’ “
The self‐analysis letters, rich in avowals of redemption and gratitude, support Dr. Goth's thesis.
“After meeting you I found out that I didn't no anything about love,” wrote Ode! Blackwell to Jones, “because you are all love. ... I love you & Mother, and what you say do I will do it, because I no what ever you tell me to do, I can do it if I try.”
“Jim Jones was the best friend I ever had,” said Bea Orsot Grubbs, a survivor. “When I couldn't pay the rent once, he paid the rent. Nobody else ever did that, including my rich relatives.”
Returning to the United States on an airplane two weeks after the massacre, Mrs. Grubbs, 52 years old, tried to explain why the year she spent in Jonestown was “the happiest of my life.” “I never had the feeling of being treated different because I was a black woman,” she said. “I was respected for my mind and what I could offer people as a whole. We lived in a cooperative community. We shared with each other, caring for people other than yourself. That was very fulfilling.”
Last July, Mrs. Grubbs had written to Jones that “I would never betray you, no matter what. ... I shall not beg for mercy either in that last moment. I shall proudly die for a proud reason.” But Mrs. Grubbs was not called upon to put her loyalty to the ultimate test. She was 150 miles away, in Georgetown to keep a dental appointment, during the mass suicides.
As Jim Jones's message of love turned gradually to one of hate and fear, Grace and Tim Stoen, Alfred Cordell, Deborah Layton Blakey, Neva Sly and others grew disillusioned. But because they were committed followers who had entrusted their identities, as well as their financial resources, to his care — who had sacrificed homes, possessions, husbands and wives to their belief in a higher calling — breaking away was a complicated, painful process.
“Once people have made the commitment,” Dr. Gaylin observes, “they've invested in the truth of that decision. They become frightened to go back on it. It's terrifying to go back.”
“We always blamed ourselves for things that didn't seem right,” Neva Sly remembered. “I think we suffered from a lack of confidence.”
Jones seemed to have an answer for everything. His endjustifies‐the‐means philosophy accommodated most doubts. “He had a vision in his mind of a perfect world,” Tim Stoen said, that “will come about only when people destroy their own egos from within and replace them with a collective ego. And in order to get people to do that you sometimes have to play tricks. . . . He may have to set you up and embarrass you: Have your spouse attack you in front of everybody so that you can think less of yourself. And after a while, because you think less of yourself, the instinct for selfpreservation is more and more destroyed.”
Jones dismissed protests against family separations on the grounds that personal alliances diminish concern for the oppressed. He explained his requests for self‐incriminating documents as simple tests of loyalty; tests most were willing to take. “Oh, heavens, yes, I'd totally incriminate myself on anything,” Mrs. Sly remembered. “I was loyal. I was dedicated. I believed. I totally believed in this cause. Why wouldn't I go through a loyalty test?”
Mr. Stoen said he agreed to sign a paper certifying that Jones had fathered his child because “I loved the man and I thought, O.K., his reason for asking me to do so was that if I ever defect from the organization, it would cause me embarrassment.”
“You didn't know how to get away,” said Grace Stoen. “You didn't know where to go. You didn't know who could help you. You always thought you would be found. And there were always these threats that you would be killed.”
“Even though everyone is making good reports and making good fronts,” a prophetic communard wrote last July, “we could be sliding downhill to sink.” The slide would be rapid.
In the beginning, Jones had little trouble persuading his people to go to Jonestown. As Neva Sly recalls, “To me, my God, it was the greatest privilege in the world to get to go to Guyana. Gee whiz, to be able to work to build paradise! Whooo!”
Tim Stoen also remembers Jonestown with something like fondness. “Everything would run pretty happily when Jim was not around,” he says of the three months he spent there in 1977. Deborah Layton Blakey also recalls working in the fields in the summer of 1977 and thinking, “Jonestown would be nice if Jim Jones weren't here.”
But Jones was there. He had arrived that June, shortly after delivering his Golden Gate Bridge suicide speech and only days before the New West magazine article he so feared was published. He fled San Francisco telling Temple members there that he would be imprisoned for life if he did not do so.
“I came here with no feeling of a future,” he later told a Guyanese interviewer. “Our movement was dead. If I didn't come here, our movement was finished. We would be destroyed in the U.S.A.”
In Jonestown, Jones gained close to total control. He confiscated all passports, and for
In the beginning, Jim Jones had little trouble persuading his people to go to Jonestown. As one former communard recalls, ‘To me, my God; it was the greatest privilege in the world to go to Guyana. Gee whiz, to be able to work to build Paradise. Whooo!’ bade the communards to leave the compound without permission. Beatings, sexual humiliations, solitary confinement—all became commonplace. By last September, according to testimony of former residents, all mail into and out of Jonestown was censored by a fourmember committee. Five armed guards patrolled the commune each night to predefections.
But it was as the only source of news in the isolated jungle compound that Jones derived his final power over men's minds. At last he was able to paint a world entirely in hues of his own choosing. For hours on end, and sometimes all night, Jones used the camp loudspeakers to amplify his nightmare vision of a “fascist, racist, imperialist” United States determined to put black people in concentration camps and to destroy Jonestown. Money his followers had spent in the United States, he told them, had financed C.I.A. killings of black babies and of socialists all over the world. He expressed admiration for Charles Manson and the kidnappers of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
Disoriented by the isolation, by low‐protein diets and little sleep, the people of Jonestown did not doubt their leader. By September 1977, the communards were starting their days by looking for mercenaries at the jungle's edge and finishing them with self‐recriminations. “I feel so guilty,” Carrie Langston wrote, “about the money I spent and the food and drinks. I sure didn't know I was helping to murder people.”
To commit suicide as an individual, Jones would say, was terrible: You would be reborn into the world of 5,000 years ago and have to live 500 lifetimes just to get back to the 20th century. But a “revolutionary death” put one on a higher plane.
“If I could die,” wrote Clifford Geig, expressing a common refrain, “I would like it to be a revolutionary death where I would take some enemies down with me. That would be the final goal of my life.”
“I'll be glad to die for Communism,” said Maryann Casanova. “I want to help make a world where no one has to be born in a capitalist system.”
Eleven‐year‐old Mark Fields wrote to Jones last July that “if the capitalists came over the hill I'd just drink the potion as fast as I could do it. I wouldn't let the capitalists get me but if they did I'd indour it. I would not say a word. I'd take the pain and when I couldn't stand it anymore I'd pass out.”
The attempt by Grace and Tim Stoen to regain custody of their 6‐year‐old son, known as John‐John, hastened the denouement. Jones's rational and irrational fears came into sharp focus. By holding JohnJohn hostage, Jones felt he could keep the Stoens quiet and punish them as well. (Mrs. Stoen says she did not take her son with her when she left the People's Temple in 1976 because she feared for his life. By the time her husband left the Temple, Jones had sent John‐John to Guyana.)
In August 1977, the Stoens obtained a ruling from a California judge granting them custody and ordering Jones's appearance in court. By then, both Jones and the boy were in Guyana where — with the help of the affidavit Stoen had signed years before as an act of loyalty — Jones claimed to be the boy's natural father.
In September, Jeffrey Haas, an attorney representing the Stoens, arrived in‐Guyana. He succeeded in obtaining a bench warrant ordering the child removed from Jonestown. According to Deborah Blakey and Charles Garry, Jones's attorney, the issuance of the bench order led Jones to issue his first threat to destroy the Jonestown commune.
Mrs. Blakey, who was manning the People's Temple radio in San Francisco at the time, remembers that she was told by Jones “to get in touch with [Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy] Reid, who was in the United States; to call him and tell him that unless something was done in Guyana, they'd have 1,100 people dead in Jonestown. “They were all in a big circle. Jones said: ‘O.K., listen, my people are with me.’ You could near them all saying ‘Yeah!’ in the background. You could hear them all the way to San Francisco.’ “
“He freaked out,” recalls Charles Garry, who spoke to Jones by telephone at the time. “He said, ‘This child cannot go because he'll be ruined.’ He said, ‘We are all so solid that if something happens to any one of us, it's happening to all of us.’”
The Guyanese did not enforce the order for the child's removal, and Jones called off his suicide threat. Later he assured Garry that it had simply been a ploy.
But according to Mrs. Blakey, who came to Jonestown three months afterward, Jones issued similar threats on two other occasions when he felt threatened and under attack: once when Guyanese officials asked that the People's Temple doctor. Laurence E. Schacht, take his internship in a Georgetown hospital and again when the Guyanese asked to place a Guyanese teacher in the Jonestown school.
“If things didn't sound exactly the way he wanted them to be,” Mrs. Blakey said, “he'd call for a ‘black night’ “ — a term Jones converted to “white night” because he considered whites, not blacks, the enemy.
“One time, it was 3 or 4 in the morning,” she said. “people had to jump out of their bunks, grab their kids and run up to the main pavilion. They took a head count. You'd give your name to this woman and the guards would go search the cabins. You stayed there 12 hours, maybe 20. He'd discuss how the mercenaries were coming. He'd throw out maybe five variables and ask what you'd rather do: Go to Africa and help the people there fight imperialism? Go to Russia? Go to Cuba? Somebody would say, ‘No, no. let's stay here and fight it out to the death.’ You never knew if you were going to live through it or not.”
On one such night, according to Mrs. Blakey, after telling the group that the situation was hopeless, Jones told everyone to line up. They were all given small glasses containing a red liquid and told it was poison; they would be dead in 45 minutes. After the time had passed, Jones informed them that they had been through a loyalty test. Now be knew that the communards would do as they were told.
Mrs. Blakey says she had drunk the liquid that night because “the whole pavilion was surrounded by guards. You also knew that if it was not the real thing and you said. ‘No,’ and lived through it, you'd have your butt kicked severely. After a while, after you continually had these ‘white nights,’ after you'd seen your best friends beaten up and you were estranged from your family, after a while you just wanted be dead.”
Stephan Jones, the surviving son, says he spoke out against a mass suicide during a “white night” last May. “They're going to say we're fanatics,” he told the group. “It's not going to be understood. But I got shut up. I got booed down by everybody.”
He reports that his mother, Marceline Jones, also argued with Jones against a mass suicide, but only in private. “Mother would say, ‘You can't kill 914 people. There are going to be people [left] alive, braindamaged. It's going to be a horrible scene.’ ” But his father always countered that the only alternative was torture.
By all indications, Jones was deteriorating physically as well as mentally. Three months before the mass suicides, he asked Carlton B. Goodlett, a San Francisco physician, to come to Jonestown to examine him. Jones was a diabetic who had run a 103‐degree fever for a month before the examination, Dr. Goodlett said, adding that he suspected a rare, often fatal, but treatable fungal disease (progressive coccidioidomycosis). Jones promised the physician that he would enter the hospital after Representative Ryan's visit. Others, including Odell Rhodes, who knew the signs, said Jones was an amphetamine addict.
“I told myself I was looking at a man in decay,” a reporter traveling with Ryan later recounted. At one point, he said, Jones babbled almost incoherently. “Threat of extinction! I wish I wasn't born at times. I understand love and hate. They are very close. ... I do not believe in violence. I hate power. I hate money. All I want is peace. I'm not worried about my image. If we could just stop it, stop this fighting. But if we don't, I don't know what's going to happen to 1,200 lives here.”
In a matter of hours, the world found out.
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