A Paradise on Earth: Part 5 - Endgame

Jim Jones had a complicated personal life. 

He was raised in a time in which the nuclear family of dad, mom, and kids was the norm to the exclusion of any other arrangement.  But Jones built his life and reputation around challenging the status quo.  He and his wife Marceline adopted several non-white children whom they raised alongside their one child together.  Rev. Jim was a white minister who led a multiracial congregation in the postwar Midwest.  He was an iconoclast in a professional milieu that treasured metaphorical icons.

It would be Jones’ tangled love life and parental ties real or concocted that would do him in and Peoples Temple along with it.  By the time the congregation had settled in Jonestown, Jim Jones had involved himself in a confusing tangle of relationships.  Jones had the pick of his followers.  He proclaimed himself the only true heterosexual whilst everyone else were repressed homosexuals.  (Associate pastor Hue Fortson has said that Jones’ sexual dominance grew to the point where the men were even forbidden to pee standing up.)  As far back as Ukiah Jones was sexually involved with numerous Temple members, several of whom are listed in the Gang of Eight’s letter listing the reasons they were leaving the church.

The parentage of several Peoples Temple’s young children was in doubt.  Jones routinely had Temple members sign affidavits attesting to dubious claims.  One of these concerned little John Victor Stoen.  The boy’s probable father was Timothy Stoen, who with his wife Grace were members of Jones’ inner circle.  However, Jones had Stoen sign a paper saying Jones was in fact the biological father.  Conversely, Jim Jon Prokes, Jones’ biological son with Carolyn Moore Layton, another close aide, was named after the Temple’s PR man Mike Prokes. 

Identity was sometimes a slippery thing in Peoples Temple, particularly among the children and the Temple’s later adherents.  Some individuals had one or more monikers, nicknames, or had chosen a name preferable to that given them by their folks.  Jim Jon Prokes was called Kimo, for instance.  Cudjoe’s captain and security team member Don Sly took the name Ujara.  It was hardly a surprise, then, that outsiders were confused by who was whom (or was with whom). 

Grace and Tim Stoen were not confused.  Grace had been responsible for the Temple’s finances and Tim had been its legal counsel in addition to serving as one of Rev. Jim’s associate pastors.  Grace had defected from Peoples Temple in the summer of 1976 with another Temple member having become dismayed by Jones’ increasingly erratic ways.  Tim was placed under surveillance and left soon after.  Although their marriage was over Grace and Tim wanted their son back, their statement of Jones’ paternity aside. 

By this point John Victor was with Jim Jones in Guyana, nearly 5,000 miles from California.  But the Stoens were not alone.  The Concerned Relatives organization which had collected around Al and Jeannie Mills (formerly Elmer and Deanna Mertle, early defectors) was growing in prominence and getting a lot of media coverage in the Bay Area.  After Jones’ flight to Guyana many of the local and state politicians who had praised him fell silent. 

One Bay Area politician who never seemed to have fallen sway to Jim Jones’ charm offensive was Rep. Leo Ryan.  Representing a district in San Mateo County, south of the city, Ryan was a different sort of politico.  A former schoolteacher, Ryan had worked his way up the ladder as a mayor and state legislator.  Once, in the latter capacity, Ryan spent several days living in Folsom Prison to investigate conditions.  Ryan has been described as a charismatic man who would not shrink from a challenge.

Even before his contacts with the Concerned Relatives, Peoples Temple had aroused Leo Ryan’s curiosity.  Ryan was acquainted with the father of a would-be Temple defector named Bob Houston.  Bob’s body was found near train tracks in the fall of 1976.   It was one of several suspicious deaths of Temple members or associates in California dating from the end of the 1960s onward.

The allegations put forth by the Concerned Relatives naturally concerned Ryan.  The problem was jurisdiction.  The Stoen custody case could only be pressed if the Guyanese courts chose to accept it.  The alleged Social Security fraud committed by Peoples Temple needed substantiation, and the evidence strongly suggested that the Jonestown residents who had assigned their benefits to Peoples Temple had done so willingly.  The trip Ryan scheduled for November 1978 was thus a Hail Mary play.  He and the Concerned Relatives could go to Guyana, but Jim Jones would decide whether they would set foot in Jonestown.

The visit did not begin auspiciously.  The party was lodged at the Hotel Pegasus in Georgetown while negotiations with Jones dragged on.  One reporter was briefly detained by Guyanese immigration officials.  Although Ryan was traveling in an official capacity as chair of a House subcommittee whose ambit included the welfare of U.S. citizens abroad, he received scant cooperation from the Guyanese government.  At home things had progressed just as awkwardly; the State Department afforded little assistance.

At one point, Ryan tried the direct approach and went to the Peoples Temple headquarters in Georgetown.  A tense meeting between Ryan and Jones’ representative Sharon Amos led nowhere.  A standoff of sorts ensued as Ryan kept up pressure on Jones and the Guyanese over the next few days.

Rev. Jim for his part had lawyered up with the best.  Both Charles Garry and Mark Lane had shown up to rep him.  Garry was a prominent attorney who championed progressive causes.  Lane did as well, but was probably best known for his conspiracy theories surrounding the John F. Kennedy assassination and his best-selling tomes on the subject. 

Both attorneys assiduously courted publicity, which is undoubtedly why Jones brought them in.  Both had outsized egos and clashed repeatedly during Ryan’s visit, to the possible detriment of their client.  If a letter written by camp nurse Annie Moore around this time is any indication, Lane played heavily to Jones’ paranoia over conspiracies.  Garry was displeased by Lane’s self-serving press conferences.  At one point, Lane had hinted in a letter to Ryan that Jones would apply for asylum in the Soviet Union, further provoking Garry’s ire.

Ryan played hardball.  Having flatly told Garry and Lane that he would not be prevented from visiting Jonestown the attorneys then advised Jones it would be best to drop his opposition to Ryan’s presence.  A flight was arranged for Ryan, his staff, selected Concerned Relatives, and a group of print and TV reporters.  A Guyanese official and a State Department representative also came along.

Even after the party arrived at the Port Kaituma airstrip, it took further negotiation to get them admitted to Jonestown.  Once there, however, Ryan was treated to the best Jonestown could offer.  Thanks to the TV news crew accompanying Ryan’s group, we know that first evening was a joyous gathering with food and music and dancing at the Jonestown pavilion.  Asked to address the group, Ryan said that whatever others might say Jonestown was the best thing that had ever happened to them.  The loud applause and the happy expressions on the audience’s faces were genuine. 

The next morning, however, the cracks in the façade became evident.  Jackie Speier, a Ryan aide who now holds his congressional seat, has said there was a sense of unease among the visitors as they lay sleepless during the previous night.  As everyone gathered on the pavilion that morning, Vernon Gosney tried to slip a note into the hands of a newsman he mistook for one of Ryan’s staff.  Gosney and another resident wanted out of Jonestown and the congressman’s visit presented an opportunity.  The note fell to the floor, which was seen by a boy who yelled that a note had been passed. 

It fell apart from there.  Ryan naturally wanted to know if Gosney and his friend Monica Bagby were serious, and more importantly did anyone else wish to leave.  It so happened others did want to leave.  It wasn’t a large number, but it was enough to tip Rev. Jim over the edge.  As Jackie Speier questioned the residents who wanted to go, Jones gave the reporters an emotional, rambling monologue accusing the Temple’s enemies of spreading lies. 

Ryan asked Jones if the party could stay in Jonestown another night; Jones said no.  It was probably a good thing; as Ryan tried to reason with upset family members of the departees Ryan was assaulted with a knife by Don Ujara Sly.  Sly was quickly pulled away and Ryan suffered only scratches but the incident was an omen.

Ryan, his party, and the departing Temple members left for the airstrip in a tractor-pulled trailer.  It was now late afternoon.  There were two Guyana Airways planes waiting, a Cessna and a Twin Otter.  The Cessna had been sent as Ryan’s party had gotten larger with the defectors.  Both were small aircraft, but they were sufficient.  The surviving defectors later reported a sense of mounting unease and anxiety as minutes passed.  Defectors who shared their fears with Ryan were met with a reassurance that they were covered by a Congressional "shield of protection.” 

Jim Jones recognized no such protection.  As the Cessna started its engines, another tractor pulling a flatbed trailer approached the airstrip.  NBC cameraman Bob Brown trained his camera on the approaching vehicle.

Meanwhile, as the Cessna taxied into takeoff position, an alleged defector, Larry Layton, pulled a gun and began shooting at his fellow passengers.  He managed to wound Vern Gosley and Monica Bagby, the residents who first approached Ryan about leaving Jonestown, before Dale Parks wrested the weapon from Layton.  The Cessna hastily took off for Georgetown for what had to have been a very tense flight. 

The tractor got closer.  A number of armed men on the trailer leveled their rifles and shot into the group of passengers boarding the Twin Otter.  Bob Brown continued recording for several seconds before he was cut down.  Reporters Don Harris and Greg Robinson were also felled.  Jackie Speier, journalists Tim Reiterman and Steve Sung, and State Department official Richard Dwyer were among the wounded.  Leo Ryan was dead, struck by approximately twenty rounds.  To make sure, one of the shooters gave Ryan the coup de grace.  The wounded were left on the airstrip as the shooters left.

Back at Jonestown, Jim Jones gathered everyone at the pavilion.  He had had a vision, a prophecy that Congressman Ryan would die in a plane crash.  Peoples Temple now faced a threat worse than death.  Tomorrow, the Guyanese Defence Force and U.S. troops would descend upon their jungle utopia.  It was now time to take “the medicine.”

Jones had approached the camp physician, Larry Schacht, about the most effective way to commit mass suicide months earlier.  Dr. Schacht was an interesting product of Peoples Temple in a collection of interesting characters.  He grew up near Houston in a leftist Jewish family at the height of the 1950s Red Scare.  Overshadowed somewhat by an accomplished older brother Larry slipped through society’s cracks, as did many youth who came of age in the late Sixties.  He drifted, his mind clouded by a methamphetamine addiction. 

Like many of his contemporaries, Larry found his way to California.  Arriving in Redwood Valley, he found his way to Jim Jones.  Larry got clean.  He got his equivalency diploma and started taking classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, where a number of Temple adherents studied nursing and other healthcare disciplines.  Pastor Jones had decreed that Larry Schacht was destined to become a doctor.  And so Larry went on to complete medical school.

Schacht was several weeks into an internship at San Francisco General Hospital when he was told it was time for him to emigrate to Jonestown.  He did not give notice.  He didn’t even to bother to clean out his locker. 

It appears Larry Schacht’s medical skills were below par, based on observations of those who worked with him at the camp clinic.  His social skills were also poor.  He was a bit “off.”  Nurse Annie Moore wrote to Jones that Schacht was hitting on her; she evidently found him repulsive.  Schacht colluded with Jones in an unusual publicity stunt.  Schacht reached out to a group of doctors who were part of a ham radio network to ask them to talk him through a difficult labor and delivery involving a Jonestown resident.  The mom-to-be was purely fictional, but the fabricated feat did get Jonestown some positive media attention back in the States.

From what we know, it’s no surprise that Schacht tackled the mass suicide project with enthusiasm.  After some research and animal experimentation, he settled on cyanide poisoning. 

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