The sight which greeted the first people to
enter Jonestown on the morning of November 19, 1978, beggared description. The TV news images that went out later that
day were horrifying and were unlike anything else the American public had ever
seen up until that point. The emotional
impact for those seeing it first and in person must have been beyond
overwhelming.
Encountering the Jonestown horrors was the
culmination of two days’ turmoil in Guyana, in the jungle and in Georgetown. Congressman Leo Ryan lay dead at the Port
Kaituma airstrip, cut down by Peoples Temple gunmen. Several others, including NBC News cameraman Bob
Brown, were also dead. The survivors,
including Ryan aide Jackie Speier, were badly wounded.
After Jim Jones had declared that it was time
to commit “revolutionary suicide,” a handful of Jonestown residents managed to
evade security and go into the surrounding forest while a small party excused themselves
earlier in the day to go on a picnic.
Others, including Tim Carter and Mike Prokes, were sent away on Temple
business. Lawyers Charles Garry and Mark
Lane, bitter rivals, managed to set aside their differences as they too waited
out Jonestown’s demise huddled in the undergrowth on its fringes. Hyacinth Thrash, some stories go, slept
through the whole thing.
In Georgetown, Stephan Jones, convinced his
father had had a mental breakdown, ignored his mother’s pleas to return to
Jonestown opting to stay on with the Temple basketball team. Sharon Amos, a devoted follower to the end, took
her own life and those of her children at the Temple’s capital residence.
The first priority was evacuating the injured
survivors. For Guyanese and U.S.
authorities, this was the easy part. By
contrast. processing the remains of the deceased was a near-insurmountable
task. Decency dictates that individual
human remains be treated respectfully.
When people die one at a time, this is practicable. In a mass casualty scenario with almost a
thousand dead in a remote location in a tropical climate, this is impossible.
Even as the authorities arrived in Jonestown
scant hours after the deaths the stink of decomposition permeated the atmosphere. The aggregate weight of the bodies
was probably between 70 and 75 tons.
Guyanese law mandated autopsies in the event of unnatural death; this
was logistically overwhelming even in a developed country. The Guyanese chief pathologist, Leslie
Mootoo, got this requirement waived so that the remains could be expeditiously
repatriated. However, causes of death
had to be determined. U.S. officials
ultimately chose seven individuals for examination.
The body of Jim Jones was of course one of the
seven. The autopsy of so few victims
naturally upset loved ones back home who wanted answers. Rebecca Moore, professor of religious studies
at San Diego State University and expert on Peoples Temple, has written of
their emotional trauma. Dr. Moore’s
interest is personal; her sisters Carolyn Moore Layton and Annie Moore died at
Jonestown, as did her nephew Kimo Prokes.
The sisters’ remains were among the seven.
The medical examiners’ conclusions were
ambiguous. The bodies, already in poor
condition when found, had been embalmed in Georgetown before being sent to
Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. This
hindered complete findings of cause. A few things were known. All
but Jones had taken cyanide. Jones had
died of a gunshot to the head, as had Annie Moore even though she also had a
lethal concentration of cyanide in her system.
Who administered the gunshots to whom was unclear. Extrapolating the autopsies along with the
evidence at the scene led to a conclusion of mass poisoning.
Back in San Francisco, the early reports from
South America were ominous and confusing.
The city’s remaining Temple contingent got word by shortwave radio of
Leo Ryan’s murder and the tumble of events afterwards. Associate pastor Hue Fortson, whom Jones had
sent back to California shorty before Ryan’s visit, has remarked upon the
devastating impact of the first reports in interviews. As information filtered to the local and national
news media, even the wildest rumors surrounding Jonestown paled in comparison
to the revelations coming out of Guyana in the ensuing days and weeks.
The resulting story was one-sided. It is difficult to defend a mass murder /
suicide, but there were few voices from active Temple members in California in
the media discourse in the closing weeks of 1978. By contrast, the Concerned Relatives were
taking a victory lap. The deaths of a congressman and a few
bystanders and those of 909 settlers were bad, but we told you so. It was inevitable. They drank the Kool Aid.
Attorneys Garry and Lane made their media appearances where they praised the efforts of attorneys Garry and Lane on
behalf of Peoples Temple, and wasn’t it a tragedy so many died? Few of the Temple leadership survived the
tragedy and so there really wasn’t any effective rebuttal to the narrative that
the people in Jonestown were mere sheep.
The Jonestown disaster was punctuated a few
months later in a budget motel room in Modesto, California. Mike Prokes had been a local television
reporter in the sleepy San Joaquin Valley town before meeting a charismatic
preacher named Jim Jones. The public
relations man and Planning Commission member was sent out of Jonestown with the
settlement’s monetary assets on November 18th, with instructions to
hand them over to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. As recriminations hung in the air in the
early months of 1979, Prokes called a press conference.
The invitation had eight takers. Mike Prokes read them a prepared statement urging
further examination of the so-called “death tape” in addition to the hundreds
of other recordings of Jim Jones as a partial explanation for what
happened. He accused the State
Department of setting the events leading to the mass suicide into motion by
not objecting to Leo Ryan’s visit because Jones sought to move his people to
the Soviet Union. He emphasized the
ideals of Peoples Temple and asked that the dead be remembered favorably for them.
After reading the statement, Prokes excused
himself to the bathroom. He then shot
himself in the head. He was found with a
note emphasizing that he took his life not out of despair but in an effort to
refocus the discussion away from the thought terminating cliché of Peoples
Temple as a death cult. Charles Garry
got a note of his own from Prokes, as did Herb Caen at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Mike Prokes’ end in a shabby little room was
anticlimactic, a tree falling in the forest with no aural witnesses. The narrative was established early and for
the long term. The world had made up its
mind about Peoples Temple.
© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar
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