Episode 21: Liar’s Communion
(Q357) Jessie Mae Long: “Peace and love, everybody.”
Voice in Congregation: “Peace, darlin’.”
Long: “This is Sister Jessie Mae Long, and I’m one of them out of the hundreds that died. I fell dead right there.”
Voice in Congregation: “Yes she did!”
Long: “And I don’t know what you all think about– I wished I had time, but I don’t have but a minute to– to tell ya, oh, what this man has done for me. When I died and got to that place, I saw a man standing. His hair was black as raven. And I looked up at him in this place. And his face outshined the sun. His face lit up that place. He looked like a city to me, I don’t know what it was, a city, but that’s the way it looked. And I said to him, Father, I don’t want to stay here now, take me back with you. And he looked up and smiling’ and reached his hands to me and told me, my child, stand on your feet. So, nobody gotta tell me about who he is, because I know who he is. But I just wanted to let y’all know, I died, but I’m alive.”
Welcome back to Transmissions from Jonestown. This is Episode 21: Sunday Service- Liar’s Communion.
Children gathered around, squinting up at the sky, eyes fixed on the edge of the garage roof. Something weird and dangerous was about to happen. The din of excitement quieted as Jim Jones approached the edge of the roof clad in a makeshift cape. The nervous giggles down below did nothing to diminish his confidence as he announced that the Holy Ghost had given him the ability to fly. As Jim Jones took that great leap and plummeted to the ground, I wonder if his young mind had a crisis of faith. That inevitable realization that gravity is a force to be reckoned with, and I think therefore I am, doesn't apply to physics.
As he hit the ground, the children heard the crack of his arm breaking. Little Jimba managed to maintain his composure. He rose and dusted himself off proclaiming that he did in fact have supernatural powers. One day you'll see. Gravity had won the battle, but not the war.
Q932 Jim Jones: “And you’ll not find anyone with the para-psychological, extra-dimensional, the paranormal, the ESP, whatever you wish to call it, the pre-cognitive, the extra-terrestrial or paranormal, it makes no difference what you name it, para-psychological, as I said, or the gifts of the Spirit. You’ll find no one that has them developed on this continent to this intensity. And you’ve got a lot of things about the knowledge that you’ve heard, metaphysically about karma and reincarnation and so forth and so on, but how do you know it’s true? You don’t know a thing is true. Only what you’ve been told. Maybe we could take you out of your drab existence and free you.”
Voltaire said, “Someone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God-given understanding of our mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist the demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, all other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world.”
Jim Jones had a gift for recognizing and cultivating a person's capacity for magical thinking, or the belief that unrelated events are connected by invisible supernatural threads. The fake healings and discernments convinced many that he was in communication with or embodying the divine. For skeptics, many of whom made up his inner circle, the invisible influence was a massive conspiracy targeting leftists- intent on sending American citizens of color to concentration camps. Atheists believed Jim Jones was a savior, luring people away from the fascist systems of religion and government and saving them from themselves. Those who followed Jim Jones surrendered their will, believing that whatever Father was planning, he had the power and knowledge to guide them to the right place.
Q988 Jim Jones: “But I started as an atheist, not believing in anything, and I started it all to bring the masses to enlightenment because the labor movement would not have me, there was no place to find a platform to present communism, so I went in the church and I invaded it, and I prayed when I didn’t believe in nothing, and I acted religion when I didn’t believe in anything. Anything to get to the heart of the masses. But don’t ever believe I believed one goddamn bit of the bullshit, I never have believed it and I never will.
And anyone that ever heard one of my sermons knew it. I’d heal ‘em, taken them out of a wheelchair and do all these extraordinary things, and denounce the whole business in the next breath. It’s a wonder we kept as many healings as we did. ‘Cause I’d tear up every goddamn thing I did. Tell you not to believe in anything. And knock God every service, said there was no meaning to the universe, it was all disorder and chaos. If there was anybody up there ruling anything, it had to be a demon.”
Loose lips sink dictatorships.
As the Temples Hierarchy grew and evolved, the Planning Commission formed committees to oversee specific tasks. The Temple provided legal services to its members. The Publications Department distributed Temple literature and sculpted the Temple’s public image. The Diversions Committee wrote anonymous letters to politicians, harassed critics of the Temple, and eventually spied on the Guyanese Government. The Temple attracted many young leaders just getting started in their field as well as seasoned professionals happy to put their skills towards more than just a paycheck.
As the administrative branches of the Temple grew, Jim Jones also added to his personal staff. Staff were responsible for helping Jones design his elaborate illusions and had the highest level of security clearance. They helped orchestrate the fake healings and miracles, handled the money, ran secret missions, and coordinated Jones' schedule. Jim Jones had a lot to hide and depended on his inner circle to protect him and his secrets. He preached about conspiracies against the Temple and concentration camps being built for the poor, but behind closed doors, Jones spoke often about the enemy amongst them: the future defector.
Q994 Jim Jones: “You don't know who you're talking to. A person you are talking to may have been sent there by me. You don't know a thing of what you're doing. You don't know how many I'm watching now. Do we understand each other clearly? So don't think that the old man is asleep. You go by and you, you look out at his side of your eye to see if he watches you. He ain't missing a thing. He knows where you are all the time. I'd like to say to you, if you've caused me any difficulty at all, you'd better talk more. You better stay away from other people that have caused trouble. And you better get yourself up here in the front lines so I can watch you and you better not object to that. because some of you motherfuckers nearly destroyed this organization. You nearly caused a thousand deaths. So, goddammit, you deserve to let your life be tested.”
As Jim Jones drew his people closer and increased the size of the Planning Commission, the image he projected of a revolutionary saint with movie star charisma faded like a mirage. Up close his bloodshot eyes never quite seemed to focus as they searched the faces of loyal congregants for apostates. As he rambled about conspiracies, he talked for hours about his hedonistic vices and prompted members to reveal theirs so that he could use that information to punish and blackmail them later. Dad wanted to know everyone's secrets so that he could exploit their fears and put their egos on trial. He rewarded members who tattled on those who might defect or break the rules by giving them more power and authority. Edith Roller wasn't the only Temple member keeping detailed records of Temple Life.
Temple leaders were encouraged to record everything for posterity. Controlling the rapidly growing inner circle’s flow of information became problematic. An index card or chicken liver left behind could sow the seeds of dissension if the wrong people found out and lead to all-out mutiny. Jim Jones utilized a great deal of his resources to spy on his own people and intimidate them into keeping anything they knew about the inner workings of the Temple to themselves. Contemplating cracks in the Temple's facade was a thought crime. Using meticulously kept records, cataloging the details of his followers’ lives. Jim Jones convinced some of them that he could read their minds. Jones had found a way to weaponize his divine gifts using his discernment techniques to build an invisible barbed wire fence.
The late Laura Johnston Kohl had been a loyal member of the Planning Commission. One of her many responsibilities was recording the testimonies just after people were healed, even though she was a part of the illusion, she didn't realize it at the time.
Laura Johnston Kohl: “Well, Jim pulled in some of the faithful to be involved in that, even if they were not his mistresses. It was a very tight-knit group, and people did not talk about it. I've seen some of the tapes since everything happened and several years ago, I saw people I recognized as Temple Zealots, kind of like I was, who were involved in the healing, who dressed up to look disabled and everything. So, I would say the inner circles probably planned those along with Jim and they knew about them, but I don't think it was widely known. I did not know that they were phony until much after November 18th. Many times, Jim did things that were outrageous, and I wrote it off as Jim being dramatical to kind of make a point to the group. Anyway, Jim was grooming us, but I wasn't familiar with that concept. I didn't really see it that way. I just saw that Jim was trying to be dramatic to make us rededicate ourselves to doing the most work we could, the best we could do, the most focused. And so, I didn't see it as grooming, although absolutely looking back, it's as clear as it could possibly be.”
Jim Jones cast himself as a multipurpose personal Jesus. A role he both relished and resented. He had to constantly manage people's perceptions of him as a deity while inventing new tricks to keep the true believers engaged. An exhausting feat for a man attempting to control both church and state. Jim Jones took inspiration from the Bible by referencing events during the life of Jesus Christ.
The miracles performed by Jesus in the Bible are well known. They've been taught to children and discussed by scholars for 2000 years. Jim Jones didn't have to waste any time explaining the significance of turning water into wine. The Bible had already conditioned his audience to expect nothing less from a Messiah.
Q923 Jim Jones: “I want you to drink something, one of the uh– one of the people there? Do you have a glass of water? Just– just the water, let’s see what’s happening to water?”
Congregation: Scattered cries
Unknown female voice: “Wine.”
Jones: “What are you drinking?”
Unknown female voice: “He asked you what…”
Jones: “What did it taste like to you?”
Elva: “Wine. Sour wine.”
Jones: “Sour wine.”
Elva: “Yes.”
Jones: “Yes. That’s what it is. The wine of the Holy Spirit.”
Congregation: Celebrates
Jones: “But when I lift my hand, and I gave it to the brother and the sister, and they held it, it was water. You saw it, when it left my hand, it was water. All things are possible. Keep it. There’ll be more of it. There’ll be more of it today. There’ll even be more that’s in that pitcher. For I can produce it without even having to touch it. I want you to continue, as I minister today to give them the wine of life. And we shall see if we run out.”
Mike Wood: “Faith healing, you have to remember is second-rate magic. If you are a magician, you can't make it in Vegas, Reno, or Atlantic City, you become a faith healer. I don't know if Jim had like a bottle of white wine behind the pulpit or some such shit, but that would've counted for the water. I vaguely remember that, but I remember not being too impressed with it because it was so obviously fake. Then he apparently created all this fried chicken and that's when Chuck Beikman got in trouble because Chuck had actually seen them coming in with these Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets. And so, somebody was claiming this to be this big example of Jim's metaphysical power. Chuck apparently smirked and made some comment to somebody about the fact that he saw him bring it in a little earlier. There were all these Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets. Making that comment out loud was unwise because they drugged him with something or other. He was forced to go through almost some sort of public discipline right there. He was made to sit up in front of the church on the chair, and he fell unconscious. Then after about an hour, he woke up and begged Jim's forgiveness.”
Q945 Jones:”. There’s many ways to receive healing and protection. You’ll never know how many times I’ll be protecting you through the spirit. It’s– be important that you be on our mailing list, it’s important that you get the oil, and the pictures– we’ve had thousands of pictures turn to blood, literally. How many have seen them, over and over, and have them, over and over? Turned to blood. And all kinds of miracles. Keep our hands clasped again.”
Former associate Pastor David Wise was tasked with increasing the Temple's membership in Los Angeles. He observed that the Los Angeles Temple had many Catholic visitors. Jim Jones designed a performance sure to bring them into the fold.
David Wise: “And so it was, I was unable to populate the church with Spanish members even though we were right in a Spanish neighborhood. I remember one time Jim had these little gel capsules that they had used hypodermic and squirted blood into the gel capsules. Jim would hold a gel capsule in his hand and break it open and pretend that blood- I was amazed that he did this. I mean, first of all, I didn't believe one thing or another about it. I just watched what he did in the early days of Los Angeles, and he squeezed it with one little finger there acting like he's stopping the bleeding with that finger over the holes that appeared in his hand. Of course, the real story of Jesus turns out that they put the nails in the wrist. Stigmata. And so, this Spanish kid, he was a nice, humble Spanish kid. He came in the church, and I was being nice to him and telling him about human service programs and things like that to the best of my ability since I don't speak Spanish really adeptly. But I was doing my best. So, Jim came down off the stage and boy, when that child, when that young man left out of there, he had blood all over his face where Jim had smeared this blood all around, all over his face.
So the idea of Jim acting like he was bleeding at the hands of a stigmata opening where a nail had been in Christ's hand and going through the crowd, especially wearing a white robe with red hanging around the collar while doing this- created this really dramatic looking deal where he's like touching his finger at a spot of blood on different people. Well, that boy, he just smeared it all over his face. And so, the boy left. I can't remember if it was before the sermon was over or before the display was finished, but he left outta there. His eyes were just so full of fear because, to him, I'm sure it looked like a devil ceremony. And I thought to myself, how in an otherwise Spanish neighborhood where we've got all the Black folk coming in on buses by the tons, how in this particular area am I going to populate? How am I gonna populate the church with Spanish members, if you're going to scare the living hell out of 'em and rub blood all over their face.”
Q596A Jim Jones: Laughing “The Lord is moving. You just don’t understand! Anyway, I was talkin’ to those people about civil rights, and they “Amen, Amen, Amen.” I noticed they were covering me over just totally, not hearing a word. So, I thought, I’ll try these sonsabitches. And I said “Satan is good! The devil is wonderful! Hell is a good pl–“ Amen.”
Crowd: (Laughs)
Jones: “I kept it up for ten minutes, I kept that shit up for ten minutes. Were you there? Remember that shit? Ten minutes. Chri– it’s in the Church of God in Christ convention, and I kept that shit up for ten minutes, then I said, “You people ought to feel ashamed of yourself.” They didn’t listen to a thing I was sayin’. I was just shoutin’ out anything, I just shout’ out all kinds of nonsense. And they got us into emotionalism, religion, emotionalism, jumpin’ up and down, you get into this music, you don’t get the seriousness of it and the communist purpose behind it, you get into the same thing. That’s why you got to have some seriousness mixed in with the rhythm because it’s easy to get caught up in emotionalism. Carried away.”
David Wise: “He claimed in a PC meeting; he never admitted the gel caps. No one ever brought that up. Not a word about it. But he claimed that he took whatever was handy and poked a hole in his hand in order to do that. He said he was so dedicated and so selfless and so unafraid, and he took whatever was handy, a pen or whatever was handy, and gouged a hole in his hand in order to do this.”
Q928: Choir singing.
Jones: Say. Mmmm. Yes? Yes? But to please reverence, perhaps you need to hear. Sometimes I think you need to hear what I hear. Clasp your hands. Then you’d know just a little bit maybe, of what I have to deal with. Spirit that is speaking to me, I energize you. I give you energy now, to speak with an audible voice what I’m hearing in my ear. As you spoke in the original- to Paul, a voice came. As you appeared upon the Mount of Transfiguration, I say, Spirit, that’s in that lost world, speak with an audible voice.”
Distant singing.
Jones: “Louder, my dear.”
Distant singing.
Jones: “Louder. Louder.”
Distant singing, approaching.
Crowd: Stirs, scattered applause.
Jones: “Shh.”
Like an underground theater troupe, members of the inner circle came together to create unforgettable experiences for the audience. They dressed up in costumes and improvised their choreography, acting out whatever scenarios the occasion required. Listening to Jim Jones speak to a disembodied spirit, it's as if all the Temple was a stage.
Mike Wood: “So, one night, this was a Wednesday night, Jim had a kind of an intervention, I guess, with a ghost. Now that was a scary fucking thing. I couldn't figure out how he pulled it off, so I figured maybe there was a ghost. I remember the hair on my back standing up. It was so fricking frightening. This damn ghost seemed to move around through the churches in Redwood Valley. It spoke, just gobbley gook. Jim claimed it was Russian. And so, he had this conversation with the ghost. The ghost was begging for forgiveness for failing to support the revolution in 1918 and whatnot, and Jim magnanimously forgave the ghost, and the ghost went on about his way. I was very impressed and believed it to be real.
I still wanted- even though I was having some doubts at this point, I didn't give much credence to my doubts because I really wanted to believe. I'd had such an incredible history with Jim and was devoted to the church. I tried to close my mind to the fraud that I knew was going on. I thought this was one example of a real demonstration of Jim's metaphysical power until maybe a week or so later. I happened to be hanging out with Stephan and Tim and Jimmy, and we were just bullshitting around and Tim unwisely made some comment, “Hey, how about Patricia? She pulled it off pretty well. It must be really hot up there because she was sweating when we brought her down from the enclosure at the top of the room.” And of course, that's where all the heating ducts were kept and that's where she was. She had a microphone up there, and that's how she did that. I thought, oh my God, you mean that was Patricia? So, I thought, I wanna find out. Patricia and I always had a really good relationship. We were very close. So, I just commented to her one day. I forget exactly what I said, but I said something like, well, that was really brave of you to do that Patricia, she said, “Well, you know, I didn't really like doing it. It was hot and sweaty, and it was kind of scary being up there. It's what they wanted me to do.” She said, “How do you know about that? Nobody's supposed to know about that?” I said, “I know”, and I just let it drop. And so, I never heard anything about it, but that's how I learned Patricia actually- the way he would pull that shit off. It was just second-rate magic. Any decent magician can do the same thing and be even more impressive. But you know, when you're dealing with religious people, you don't need to be terribly impressive.”
Q928 Distant singing.
Jones: “You can open your eyes.”
Singing.
Jones: (To spirit) “You’re speaking in Russian. You’re saying, forgive me. Be not angry. I forgive you. S- You’re in America in this incarnation. We’re in America. Speak English.”
Distant singing.
Jones: “Help me.”
Distant singing.
Jones: “Lenin? Yes. I understand.”
Distant singing.
Jones: “Look around, if you wish. Have mercy. Just reverence. Have mercy. You’re a betrayer of mine. You betrayed me.”
Distant singing.
Jones: “When did you betray me?”
Distant singing.
Jones: “What?”
Distant singing.
Jones: “In Galilee?”
Distant singing.
Jones: “I’m not sure it was distinguishable to them, but you’re saying you betrayed me in 1917?”
Distant singing.
Jones: “Yes. What do you wish me to do for you, child?”
Distant singing.
Jones: “You need a body.”
Distant singing.
Jones: “Clasp your hands. As it was on the day when I gave a double portion of the Elisha spirit, a part of the spirit, there’s someone here that this soul belongs to. You’re not integrated, and that’s why you’re having trouble in your mind. I’ll not call you out. Close your eyes now, I ask you. I speak the word, and perhaps when it comes- that spirit comes out of the ether plain, and comes into its body and integrates, there will be no doubt some gasping. So be very quiet. As I, Lenin, Jesus, Buddha, the Baab, God Almighty, I free that spirit from the loneliness of that netherworld and integrate it in its body here.”
One voice: “Hallelujah.”
Linda Swaney: (Screams)
Jones: “It’s integrated. You may be seated.”
Crowd: Stirs. Scattered calls of “Thank you.”
Just to clarify things, Mike is not talking about his mother Patty. She had debilitating claustrophobia and couldn't have crawled through the vents in order to create the spooky 3D sound of a disembodied spirit. The loyalist in the rafters was Mike's little sister, Patricia. Just like her brother, Patricia was moving up in the organization and had proven she would risk falling through the ceiling to keep the show on the road. Some families were carefully separated and reorganized, but others, those of similar talents, were kept close. Patty had been with Jones from the beginning, and she helped him create his paranormal ministry. Without her, the Temple would have been a far less magical place.
“They’re coming to get you, Barbara…”
Q1054 part 3 Jim Jones: “How many in this room have died and I’ve restored to life, just today? Not–nearly all of our congregation, how many? There’s a pastor’s wife there, she was dead, there’s a woman back there that they said couldn’t live without a pacemaker, she had died, last week!”
Nearby Woman: “Oh yeah, my God.”
Jones: “There, over there, see all these hands? They were dead. All of the room, some are in the aisles, one of the sisters bringing you the pictures, that are so blessed, that’s why she does it. She’s crippled. She died, that’s why she gave– takes to you now, walks all around, her heart was supposed to be so bad she couldn’t do that. She fell dead, and I restored her to life. There. There she is. She was dead, brought to life. I’m telling you, dead, I mean dead. You can say what you want to, read in a few d– a few weeks, you’re gonna see it in a national paper, it’s gonna go from magazine all over this United States, it’s gonna show a picture of a woman, and it gonna say, Prophet Jones raised ‘em from the dead. You’re gonna see it, the prophet that raises the dead. It’s gonna be all over the United States. You hear it, you hear what I say!
There is one in Redwood Valley that thought they were dead, yet shall they live!”
Darkness falls across the land.
The midnight hour is close at hand.
And if I die for goodness’ sake
I pray Jim Jones my soul to wake.
Possibly the most ambitious and definitely the most garish of the divine gifts Jones claimed to possess was the ability to raise the dead. A stunt that’s incredibly hard to fake, unless you are the initial cause of death.
Q962 Jim Jones: “This old concept of God, people say, I want to go to heaven. I notice nobody’s trying to get there. Last night, I said, anybody wants to go to heaven – I was preaching a harder sermon than today – I said, stand up, I’ll send you there, right now.”
Congregation: Laughter and applause
Jones: “There wasn’t one. Not a soul stood up. I couldn’t beg them up. I said I’ll send you right there. You’ll leave your body. Just stand up. I said, please. There wasn’t nobody wanted to go.”
Congregation: Laughter
Jones: “‘Cause I’ve got the power to do it. You’ve seen them fall in the aisles, and I’ve resurrected them. Even when they were mean and nasty. One white young man, nasty as he could be, but I brought him back. Dramatization of this truth. I brought him back. But after he’d learned a lesson, and it shook and writhed like a snake, and frothed at the mouth, because he’d been a smart-aleck, and not appreciated the Black congregation like he ought to.
One dropped dead when he was not supposed to touch this altar. He dropped dead. You were here. How many was here? Oh, it’s happened over and over and over and over and over again. They’ve fallen dead, they’ve been carried up with bowel movement caked on their legs, and I’ve brought them back when they didn’t look like it was possible to put them together. They looked like Ezekiel’s dry bones. They looked like their bones was separated from their skin. Their eyes were sunk in their head, their bowel movement cleared out, caked on their legs, but I put ‘em back together again. There’s nobody in the universe that can work like I can.”
Voices in Congregation: “That’s right.”
Jones: “Now hear me, ‘cause you’ll not go through this every week. There’ll be very, very rare times that there’ll be this long a service. I’ve given you all my truth in one package, if you’ve had an ear to hear, what the body of spirit and truth has had to say to the church. (glossolalia) This is the body that’ll bring you salvation.”
Former associate pastor Hue Fortson recalls seeing this eerie event firsthand.
Hue Fortson: “Oh, you'll love this one, Dr. Richard Tropp. Professor Tropp was a brainy guy, but he was like Gene Chaikin, he could hold a comment about anything worldwide. But Richard, let's go down to the corner, make a right, make a left, go down a little further, go in the grocery store, buy three packs of noodles and come out. He couldn't do it. Very intelligent man. Well, this was in LA. Richard had some papers in his hand, and at this time, you know what Jones used to do to make this mystery- he would go into Revelation, not meditation, not prophesying, but Revelation and you were to interpret that revelation meant that he was getting this from God or that he was God. So, you make the choice of what? Right?
Richard came to the bottom of this pulpit area. Now, mind you, when Jones got ready to go into Revelation, he would ask all of the ministers who was up there with him, which was usually maybe two to four, he would ask them to leave the stage. In the meantime, it used to be Christine, she used to always come out as one little nurse with like a life magazine size type magazine, and she would place it on his podium. Now, mind you, that he always had signs on it. So, I guess if you were, say, like in a balcony area, if we were down at the Embassy auditorium, you could see papers, but you couldn't see what he was into. So, then he would all of a sudden go into this revelation and he would call certain persons out where they lived at, who lives at this address- he'd go on and go on and just add to it by these 3X5 cards he was reading from.
Richard was very adamant about whatever this piece of paper was, he wanted to get to Jim. And Jim kept saying, “No, no, not now. Not now.” By this time, he got to about the second step, and I would say the distance is maybe a good 25-30 feet. Jones turned around again and said, “No, no. Don't come up. Don't come up.” And so next thing you know, Tropp makes this dash, and he starts goin, and when he's about halfway Jones said, “Don't come up, you'll drop dead!” Wouldn't you know it right after he spoke that this guy hit the floor, boom! Like a sack of potatoes and everybody takes a deep breath. Then he starts fussing, “I told him not to come up. I told him this. He could have held onto that. I told him not to come up.” So, everybody's scared, they don't know if this guy's dead or faking. All of a sudden he said, “But that's all right. I have the power to raise the dead.” Now, he walks over t to Richard and he kind of points his hand in the position toward him and says, “Rise.” Now, he did not say, rise in the name of Jesus. He said, “I command you to rise.” Richard starts moving around and then when he comes up, he's got his eyes plucked and he's looking at Jim like he just saw God. And that was supposed to be one of his resurrections.
He claimed that Pop Jackson, the older gentleman who was a Baptist preacher that joined him and his wife years ago there in Los Angeles. They were coming on a trip in the back of one of the buses. Now the claim was that Pop had died. So, they stopped the buses, told Jim about it, and he walks back there and lays hands on him and he comes back to life. And so pop, that was his testimony- he raised me from the dead and I'm strong as a bull and I'm so strong that my wife tells Jones I need to take some of that power away from me 'cause she's working me to death in the bedroom. 92 years old. (Laughter) I'm serious. I'm serious. So naturally, once again, the mystique, the mysterious. See the things that you can't prove are not proved 'cause you really don't know. But hearing Pop say it, I mean you, you almost got the sense like maybe something did happen with him. Richard, uh uh, you know, I've always looked at that one. Like, nah, I didn't get the real feeling in my inside and I wasn't there when Pops was supposedly raised either. But that's the only two I can recall off the top of my head that really stand out.”
David Wise: “I was so scared. I was right new to the church- there at the picnic tables. They were all lined up in Redwood Valley in the church there, and I was sitting there and then I remember he told Reva (Rheaviana Beam) to drop dead and then he raised them back up. Kind of an amazing circus act as you could see.”
David Wise emphasizes during many of our conversations that the people who helped Jim Jones fake healings and raise the dead believed at the time in the methods he utilized to bring people to divine socialism. Jim Jones, on the other hand, was more interested in manipulating people so he could deprive them of their worldly goods and create a dependency on him and the church. The dramatic illusions were smoke and mirrors designed to distract the audience while Jim Jones picked their pockets.
David Wise: “Well, it goes back to interesting beginnings with Father Divine and so, Jim was just borrowing religion everywhere he could, and the greatest claim of all, of course, is raising the dead. The most powerful claim that you could defraud people with. On faith healing all kinds of things can happen. It's not necessarily fraudulent. Where Jim Jones went wrong is he actually did too much fakery and didn't have to. If you're building up faith, you don't do it by being mealy-mouthed. In any course of human undertaking, even Universalists need to hear that there is design behind life. You're not going to lose if you just put your faith in there and do something good, it'll come back to you. Put your faith in there and do the right thing, and so, a faith healing might be a lot more dynamic. Is there anything wrong with it though really? No. There's just wrong with all the fakery. I'm saying up front that I don't approve of any fakery.
Jeff Carey when he dropped dead, which is a version of raising the dead, killing somebody like- by drop dead in the name of God. It doesn't sound right. It's like a cult fear tactic. And so, you could see his chest moving, you could see he was breathing. But the dynamics were really good. Jim was really good at the dynamics. He was good at making everybody feel like it had just happened.”
1031A Jim Jones: “Listen, I used to have to excavate in graves. I was poor, and so when I was nine years of age, I had to go out and help dig up graveyards. They were telling me how– whatever’s going to be on resurrection morning, all those folk going to rise? I’ll tell you, they’re going to have to work at it because the gopher had some of them over fifty feet over here and some of them have been drug, they’re– they’re over here and they all– the bones over here. I never had such a time in my life. We finally give up. We couldn’t get all those bones together, cause the bones all mixed up, and the hair, all there was a little bit of hair, and some old rotten fingernails. And now I know you know better in your life, nothing going to come out of that old rotten casket. Stinking gophers down there.
I’d like to stop it altogether. And if anybody can, it will be me. So, you stick around. But I’m not going to be satisfied. Let me tell you, somebody can spit up a cancer, if we can see a woman like last night just come right out of her crutches, just running down here. Had been crippled for four years, hopelessly crippled, and just dropped them. Another brother left his crutches and went up the aisle, and we saw six people healed of blindness in yesterday’s service.
Now, if that can happen, why on earth can’t we raise the dead? Why can’t we stop death? Why can’t we stop the death from taking place? Jesus said, “He that liveth and keeps my sayings shall never die.”
Jones: “(Cries out) I don’t expect to die.”
Congregation: Stirs
Jones: “Thus, if I don’t expect to die, I have fun. Who can have any fun thinking about dying?”
Congregation: Stirs
Jones: “Everybody’s used to about getting ready to die, getting ready to die. Every time we come to church. I got so I wouldn’t go to church. Every time I was a child, telling me, get ready to die. They said you’re gonna die and meet Jesus, and then as I said, they’re going to come out of the graveyard. I learned that lie when I was nine years old, and I saw all those folk couldn’t get their pelvic bones, couldn’t find their ribs, we just had to– we just dump– dump it in the box, in a sack, make the folk thought that there– that was their remains because there wasn’t no more, we couldn’t no more find– skulls would be carried clear away. And though you’d find something with just a spine, you’d find a few bones, heads’d be taken away by these gophers and other uh, the– the vermin, the varmints that were down to the ground. They’d be carried away. You couldn’t find– I wonder how in the world you think that somebody gonna rip out of a graveyard when you can’t find their skull.”
David Wise witnessed the alleged resurrection of Neva Sly, and Rheaviana Beam at a picnic in Redwood Valley. According to Dave, the Beams had recently purchased a dishwasher, a luxurious indulgence that Jones considered too bourgeois and materialistic. Death was Jones’ choice of punishment, but not for long.
David Wise: “She was in trouble for buying a dishwasher. I was eating green beans. I tell you; I had trouble eating my green beans. I was new around there. I didn't know that these things were being staged. I didn't know what the hell was going on because she was sitting right over beside me. So, he has her stand up and he uses that real serious voice. He says, “You've crossed the line. You've gone too far. Drop dead.” He told her to drop dead and she fell on the floor and she's laying there, and then he calls out somebody else's name. They stand up. He does the whole damn scary routine again.
I'm eating green beans. I'm about to choke on the green beans. I'm thinking, what the living fuck? How is this work being done? What's going on? I have to figure this out. Were those people just poisoned? Did someone just shoot 'em with a dart? Does Jim Jones really have the power to tell people to drop dead? I'm looking down, I'm thinking, oh, hey, she's breathing a little bit. She's breathing a little bit. I'm right by her. I'm thinking, what bullshit! There's some bullshit here. But in the meanwhile, he called out the other guy and then he falls over on the floor and it's Carey (Jeff). Now he's in trouble. Now it so happens, I'm thinking, well, Carey lives with the Beams. It's kind of a conspiracy developing here. They all got together and planned to drop dead together. Ain’t that about nuts? Then I'm thinking, I can see him breathing too. I thought, now all these poor old Black ladies sitting in these chairs can't see that. They can't see that, and they're scared to look anyway. I mean, even after I thought I saw them breathing a little bit, it was as if that didn't matter. I thought, wow, he can be a scary motherfucker. I'm not talking about any kind of scary, I'm talking about wow if he's being authoritative, he can be very convincing.”
1059-1 Jim Jones: “It’s perfectly astonishing the things I do. I astonish myself on what I meditate. You know sincerity. You know truth. You’re recording it now. You can weigh it. I’ve been able to touch people when they call on me, like the one laying on the bed with the bullet through his brain, the sister here that testifies her own son, and he got right up and walked. I been able through my picture just to lay it upon a body, and they’d raise up in a morgue. I been able to go to people when they drug one in here– here in this San Francisco meeting, they brought him in, he wouldn’t give his money, he wouldn’t give properly, and he was arrogant, and he fell dead outside. And they carried him in down the aisle and bowel movement caked on his legs, and he lay dead twenty minutes. Now if I’d looked in the natural mind, I said, oh, this is impossible. But I’ve learned I’m something else than natural. I’m something else.”
David Wise (imitating Jim Jones): “Jeff Carey was the one who laid down on the floor as I was pretending to have her drop dead. I spoke the words, “And you went and you bought a dishwasher when other people here had to wash their dishes by hand. Drop dead! Reva drop dead!” And so, she dropped dead. And to prove it, Jeff Carey, who was staying with the Beams, was already to take action, and action he did take. I made him drop dead next.”
David developed the uncanny ability to mimic voices in his youth. At first, I didn't understand why Dave was sending me messages as if he was Jim Jones, but then I realized Dave was interviewing himself.
David Wise (imitating Jim Jones’ voice-interviewing himself as Jim Jones): “And oh, it worked so very good that I had Jeff Carey to fall over as if he dropped dead again there in Los Angeles where Dave was watching. And he shook his head and rolled his eyes. And I said, “Why?”
And Dave said, “Well, you can see him. His chest is going up and down. You ought to find people that know what they're doing.”
How about you, Dave? Do you have any ideas on it?
Well, in my opinion, we should have, like, had you drop dead. Then you could have tried it yourself, and that would've really made people feel guilty, which had become your main means of control. After all, Jim, you could have raised yourself up from the spirit world of death and darkness and come back to life. How about that?”
If Jim Jones commanding people to drop dead and then reanimating them isn't spooky enough for you, there is an even darker side to blind faith: no longer believing in science or trusting modern medicine. Jim Jones realized that because of his powers, members of the congregation might feel they no longer needed their doctors. He carefully addresses this, urging them to continue using modern medicines. He'd created a dangerous precedent. No one in Father's presence is allowed to die unless he wills it. For a Messiah whose congregation is predominantly elderly, naturally, this created a conundrum.
Q1028A Jim Jones: “Last Sunday, this sister had a stroke, a massive stroke that paralyzed her all over her body, she couldn’t move anything, and I called her back from the stroke by saying how much I needed her, and commanding her to awake, and she came out of it. I had instructed– that’s why you need to listen to every word I say–”
Crowd: Scattered murmurs
Jones: “–I said before the congregation, thousands that were there, I said, “Do not go out in the street today.” I said, “There’ll be trouble in the street. Don’t go out.” But people forgot it and at the end, I said, “Don’t call an ambulance. I don’t like the attitude of this ambulance crew here.” I said, “Don’t call an ambulance,” but someone slipped up and called an ambulance. And I said we can just have her checked with an ordinary doctor, and let’s take her, but nurses being precautious, they got an ambulance. The ambulance came, these two white attendants, and they were as mean as they could be, you can tell by the way she’s looking there. They’ve treated her like she was a sack of wheat or barley and unkindly, unkind way, it’s indescribable. They refused to let her down, they didn’t want to dirty their stretcher, they made her walk out and they booted her into the ambulance, and made her sit there. And we said that she wanted off, she didn’t want on there.
Anyway, we got our– we got our sister off of the ambulance. (Laughs) They looked around– They looked around and said "Where's the patient?”
Crowd: Laughs
Jones: “‘Cause while we were tasseling, somebody else went over there, got her, and got her off–“ (Laughs)
Crowd: Laughs
Jones: “We weren’t gonna let one of our sisters go to a– with a bunch of beasts like that. She was protesting, so they looked back and said that– Now all this– one of the policemen, he had a sense of humor, he said all this fightin’ and he said the patient’s gone.” (Laugh)
Crowd: Laughs
David Wise: “His ability to inspire faith cannot be understated as a possible healing modality. Since he didn't have a real healing for her, he didn't want her to die there because he bragged that no one, there'll be no dying here, that no one would ever die in his presence. The nurses came back, they said, “This woman's probably gonna die.” They say, “I want to know how fast you can get her on a gurney and get her outside of this building so it can be blamed on someone else.” Suddenly there's an ambulance that shows up on a real emergency, 'cause she's been passed out here for a minute. So-called nurses. They run back there, and they come back up to the stage and they say, “She's gonna die probably.” And he said, “Call the paramedics, get them here immediately. Go back there and keep everybody away from her. I don't want 'em to be declared dead, no diagnostics till she's out of here.” He said, “Tell 'em it’ll incite a riot.” So, then the cops show up whenever they call the ambulance. They know all about the church. So, the cops come down and it's a battle of wills. We're willing for civil rights and they're willing for you ain't got no rights. The next thing that happens is Jim works up such a fever, like a sociopath who depends on other people to do his bad doings.
1028A Jim Jones: “And so Brother Brown here, young man who works for a city agency here, never been arrested, Brother Cleveland Jackson here who works for a federal agency, never been arrested in his life, protested it, and that man said dirty M.F. nigger, get yourself away from here and so forth and so on, and took his flashlight and started whipping at us, and the next thing we knew the police came on from everywhere.”
Voice in crowd: “That’s right.”
Jones: “Everywhere. Helicopters over our heads, police out there with billy clubs. Sister Jones protested, Sister [Tish] LeRoy, they grabbed her by the neck and pulled her over the fence and my son, little– littlest twelve-year-old son [Jim Jones, Jr.] put up his hand for his mother, and they poked him in the belly, and he fell down for a moment.”
Voice in crowd: “That’s right.”
Jones: “I’m telling you the truth. Yeah. How many people saw this mess?
Scattered: Cheers and applause
Jones: “It was a mess, this was a– this was a hellish mess that went on.”
David Wise: “Jim, because these sociopaths drum up all of this fever like he had drummed up all this fever in Jonestown. He's suggesting Don Sly, he's a good marine, needs to prove his dedication if he's gonna do anything for Jim and pick up a knife and yet that's gonna get everybody killed. So anyway, it's the same type of deal. So, Johnny Brown says when he sees a cop, tell the people to be more gentle with the woman that was with the paramedics. I believed Johnny Brown when he said that they were being rough. That they almost spilled her off the gurney. He has his pastor's robe on, and he goes out. He should be treated with a little bit of respect. The cops came over and said, “You need to get back” just because he is Black, in my opinion. Then I went in to tell Jim Jones that a fight had ensued, and so Jim Jones ran out there, and the cop came on and got his nose broken by Johnny Brown because of all of the building up the us versus them fever. Jim Jones went out there and got an obstruction charge. They took Jim Jones to jail along with Johnny Brown. So, we bonded him out.”
Q968 Jim Jones: “One of my brothers had a gun. I’ve told him not to have guns on them, but he had a gun. And I had a– The man said, “Ah, you’ve got a gun.” And then in the next second, the gun was gone.”
Congregation: Calls and applause
Jones: “These are documented facts. If you don’t believe this, you can go check the records in the police department and see, they’re still looking for that gun. They grabbed him, but the moment they grabbed him, my spirit grabbed that gun.”
Congregation: Cheers and applause
Jones: “Well, they took him down there, and they arrested my good wife [Marceline Jones] who couldn’t even join the Muslims, though she’s mixed too in her racial background, but she’s got light skin and light hair, she can’t join the Muslims. But she went down there, she got a hold of one of those policemen, they said you can’t touch me, and she touched him anyway.”
Congregation: Laughter
Jones: “And they took her away from my Black son, and took her away in chains. Took away Brother Jackson, another government worker. Never been arrested before. Brother Brown, never been arrested before. My wife, in all of her years, never been arrested before, and they took her to jail, and I went down to get them, and the moment I got there, they arrested me.”
Congregation: Laughter
Jones: “They put me in handcuffs and sent me back there and says, “Ah, you– you– we’ll see what we can do with you people.” Put me in the jail, and they put the handcuffs on me, and then they put a thing on my leg and chained me to the bar. I– they musta believed I was a little bit God–“
Congregation: Laughter
Jones: “And said, “Now what’re you gonna do about that?” I said, “I don’t know what I’m gonna– what you’re gonna do about it, but I’m gonna go to sleep.” I lay down, I had– they fixed it all up too, they had blood on the cell, you know, they’d just beaten some poor person. They thought they’d scare me with that blood. I laid right down in the middle of it.
This one officer said, “I’d read you of your rights.” I said, “I know my rights.” He said, “You can get out if you’ve never been arrested, on your own recognizance.” I said, “Oh no.” I said, “Black and Indian people never get out on their own. They always have to bail.” I said, “Even though I’ve got the means to get out and the wherewithal, and I have a name, and I’ve been a government leader, I’m not coming out.”
Well, it wasn’t long, he brought back somebody else, and he said, “Now–“ he said, “you mean you’re staying in here?” He said, “We’ve had many people who wanted to get out, but we’ve never had anybody wanted to stay in.” I said, “I’m staying in until every one of my people are free.”
The officer said, “Will you tell me one thing? Where did that old woman go?”
Congregation: Laughter
Jones: “Well, I said to him, I said, that old woman is younger than she looks, she’s a fast runner.”
Congregation: Laughter
Jones: (Laughs) “I just played with them, and so a little bit later, back comes the head of the police. He said, “Now Reverend, you know, we’ve made a mistake here.” I said, “Yes, you have.” I said, “I want all these charges dropped.” Oh, he said, “couldn’t do that.” I said that– “I want ‘em all dropped.” And what happened?
Scattered: “They were all dropped.”
Jones: “They all got dropped, and they let us all go, and my name’s not even on the record.”
Congregation: Applause
Jones: “They didn’t even arrest me. They didn’t even get my fingerprints. They put me in chains, they were so scared of me, they put me in chains before they got my fingerprints.”
Jim Jones told the story to illustrate the scope of his paranormal power and how with the faith and unity of his followers, they could stand together against the tyranny of racist institutions. He was untouchable, immune to prosecution or captivity, and so were his people.
Q960 Jim Jones: Jones: “You gotta love freedom, and you gotta let them know that you’re not going to let your freedom be taken away. You gotta let them know if they take the freedom of one, they’ve got to take the freedom of all. You got to go on record right now, we must go on record so that the whole nation and all of Los Angeles County will hear us. If you come in here to take one of us to a concentration camp, you better come to take us all.”
Congregation: Cheers.
This wasn't Jim's only run-in with the Ramparts Police Department. Jim Jones was arrested after allegedly soliciting an undercover police officer for sex in the restroom of a Los Angeles theater. He managed to get the charges dropped, and using his divine gifts of influence made the police report disappear. His story about being detained and let go for rioting may have been a convenient cover story. It explained his presence at the Ramparts jail at the time of his arrest for indecent exposure and solicitation.
Mike Wood: “That was something that, I mean, that was very upsetting for me- that was hard for me to rationalize. He loved movies and he was in a downtown Los Angeles theater. I don't know if he exposed himself to the cop, but did something that made it pretty clear to the cop that he was being solicited. Now, what's interesting about that isn't the fact that that happened in and of itself, but consider this, if the cop was there, it's because there'd been a lot of complaints about homosexual behavior in that theater, and Jim was in that theater. So, he probably had a number of sexual contacts before that, but of course, we knew nothing about that. So anyway, yeah, he was busted by that guy. And then I came to find out about these things just in little dribs and drabs, but I learned that he had given the police foundation $5,000 and I guess had some big politico that he had greased. He talked to the police department. It was the Ramparts police station, by the way. Then there was an incident at church where some lady had passed out or something, and they were trying to put her in one of these EMT vans or ambulances and take her to a hospital. Jim said, “Don't let them do that.” And of course, we went to try to stop it. And guess what? A bunch of police show up after that and the Temple members just pile out and there is a riot. We're trying to keep this thing down as much as we can. But it was a riot, and Jim inspired that- he knew exactly what he was doing. I think his motivation, he never said this to me, but I'm pretty sure that his motivation was, I'll show these people who they're dealing with.”
Jim Jones tested the boundaries of his inner circles’ loyalty by creating more dangerous situations with a wink and a smile. Jones reassured those in on the hijinks that he was in total control. The deception and manipulation were vital to his plans.
David Wise: “Mother Mason. This wonderfully spunky, dedicated example of spirit. She was like on the front row and giving all of her money. I had to make sure that she didn't give so much that she didn't have any for groceries. She was given some kind of a knockout drug and some water. So, then what they did is they put a cast on Mother Mason's arm. And then when she woke up, they told her they had taken her to the emergency room- that she had fallen in the tub and broke her arm.
I watched them take the cast off that day and had her move her arm around and show that it was perfect. And then Mother Mason came to me afterward and complained. She's been alive for quite a while, and her mind was strong and she knows what's right and what's wrong. And she did not fall in the bathtub. She did not fall in the bathtub and break her arm without knowing it and that she was never taken to a hospital. I thought, unbelievable how you have such dedication out of a woman- who believes in you and will die for you almost. You see, and you can actually blow that.
Jones had already begun to misbehave a long time ago. It's like you don't know what they might find. He was having others do the cruel things or do the wrong things. He wasn't doing it himself. He was exercising sort of a Mansonian type of a power where you don't really do the wrong things, you just get others to do it. I mean, I already saw him fake a healing with Ms. Mason, who always sat on the front row. So excited, so dedicated, so bold, stand up, shake her fist, and move around to the music. I went over to her house. I had looked in her cupboards before and her cupboard didn't have much in them, but she was donating every dime she had. I told her, Ms. Mason, you got to come over to the church kitchen and get a bunch of food and take it over here if you're gonna not have enough money to buy some. Then I would watch as Mother Mason would have no food in her cupboards and then would give the last amount of money that she had from her old age security check to the offering. So, I wanted that money to actually go towards some stated goal. I didn't want just stating a goal to be a glorious thing.”
1059-3 Jim Jones: “And I don’t trick you. I’ve told you. I said, to you that wish to receive me, I am a man. If you wish to believe that I am God, so I am, because I certainly do more than any God you ever saw. You prayed to your God in the sky, and he never came and fed you when you were hungry.”
As more and more followers discovered the truth behind Jim Jones' paranormal ministry, many began to plan their escape. His web of deception was spiraling out of control and Jones' greed and inhumanity was getting harder to ignore. Losing even one core member could change everything.
Mike Wood: “Jim was able to attain that level of dictatorship because of his apparent paranormal abilities. I mean, there were many, many, many, many, many, many, many progressive groups in California back in the sixties and seventies, so we were one of them. So why did ours succeed? Why were our people so loyal to it? Well, it's because we believed we had this supernatural support if you will, as evidenced by Jim's paranormal ability. So, Jim could pick and choose whom he wanted to be in the inner circle. If the inner circle left, he would have chosen another inner circle. The inner circle didn't really matter except in terms of getting things done, because remember, Jim was the leader, but he was not a doer. One of his talents was selecting people who are doers to get things done, and he had a lot of those people.
My mother was a doer, for example, I was a doer, for example. And there are many, many other people who really worked hard and really accomplished things. Jim used their agency essentially to promote himself. So if somebody left, you would find somebody else to do what they had been doing. The problem is when somebody who’s really good left, it's fucking hard to replace them. For example, Jack Junior, Jack Arnold, was just a phenomenal musician and a terrific choir director. When Jack left, the creative spark was gone. So that was the problem of the church. You could see it beginning to decline because so many talented people were leaving. For example, and here's a family you don't hear of very much: the Puifoys. They were builders, basically, and contractors. They're the people who rebuilt the San Francisco Church after it burned down. When they left who's gonna take that over? I mean, hell, I can barely pound a nail.”
Q962 Jim Jones: “And I said I combusted. I set up from the dirt, I arose. Out of the earth, I came. And I shape myself into a God-likeness so that you’d have a way, a pattern, you’d have a sign son to follow. I’ve given you a perfect copy that you will be able to get to the ninth dimension into the first heaven, to that beautiful planet. Ask him some night to show you how beautiful it is when it radiates through the sky. Say, Father, if I follow you, I’ll have to throw away everything I’ve learned. What’ve you got to lose?”
Jim Jones jealously guarded his power and secrets. Everyone he grew to depend on was a weak link in the chains he wrapped around his congregation. In Jonestown Jones said he wished he had never shared with anyone how his divine gifts worked or enlisted helpers. If he'd continued doing his illusions on his own and kept his methods secret, he might have avoided public scrutiny. The more people who knew how the sausage was made, the harder it was to keep up the charade. In reality, his illusions wouldn't have been possible without helpers. Had he been satisfied with the small church they'd built in Redwood Valley and a life of public service preaching to hundreds instead of thousands, he could have managed people's perceptions of him. But Jim Jones had a passion for outreach and expansion, and he just couldn't help himself.
Q1057-5 Jim Jones: “How many heard of it by word of mouth of how great this miracle ministry was, and how great it (final word drowned out)
Congregation: Cheers
Jones: “Somebody told you. You see what we need to do, and you know what was told to us, to witness to 20 people a day about these miracles, 20 people a day about the radio broadcast on Sunday night, 10:30, and bring them in that way. Bring them in that way. If you are bringing someone, though, and you’re attesting for them, try to bring them with you. But do not forget that that is the way to overcome death. The key to immortality is to tell 20 people a day of this great witness. Our hands clasped again.”
Former Temple member and Jonestown survivor, Vernon Gosney recently passed away. Before he died, he shared with me what he believed to be Jim Jones' true motivations as a religious leader, faith healer, and apostolic revolutionary. Vern was nearly killed during the Port Kaituma airstrip shooting. He understood firsthand the lengths Jim Jones was willing to go to keep his secrets and punish apostates. What had drawn Vern to the Temple as a young man turned out to be something entirely different.
Vern Gosney: “I think initially I thought it was much more spiritual than it was because it was basically a political organization with a religious front. In the beginning, he would cloak some of his teachings. He would teach about socialism and apostolic socialism, and he would teach about what was going on in the world and what was going on in the United States, and about freedom for all people, equality for all people, and what progressive movements were happening in the United States. He would definitely preach about any efforts from the government to suppress movements for freedom. Everything was cloaked in religious terms or not everything, but things were cloaked in religious terms. He did teach about, sort of in a Christian sense, Jesus was a socialist. It was a cross-section of people.
There were accusations after the whole thing went down that Jim Jones stole people from the churches. So, everyone had a different level of religiosity or none. And so, some people were there only for the political reasons, some people were religious, and they were slowly kind of reprogrammed to basically- he was the God, he was the leader. He was ultimately changing people's energies towards more socialism, more the cause of socialism following Jim Jones. So, and he felt like he was, he was God. He talked about Karl Marx and religion as the opiate of the people. The only thing the Bible was good for was to wipe your ass with toilet paper.
I was 19 years old, and I believed absolutely everything, everything he said. He used to give out these red cloths, little red cloths, and they were healing cloths. And so, he might tell you something about your life or something. But mine was really comical. He just called me out and my advice was to stay out of dark alleys.” (laughs)
Did you believe the healings and prophecies were real?
Vern Gosney: “Yes, I did because I saw these healings and I thought they were genuine and true. He used it to manipulate people and enslave people. There was one time when he had a service where they orchestrated this thing where he had people drop dead in front of him, and it was very well orchestrated and all this stuff. So basically he had the ability to take people out of their bodies. Actually, I was, it wasn't terrifying. It was very captivating and mesmerizing. Everything was measured against how committed you were to the cause of socialism and the sacrifices. So either politically, or religiously, some people were sexually exploited. But, yeah, breaking down the family units, having people turn on each other. He was sadistic. He did it for his own means and his own whatever level of mental illness he had where he couldn't stand anyone to leave him.”
Q951 Jim Jones: “I would say tonight, sisters, it’s not always that we speak in some emphatic and declarative tense. The imperative, the absolute tense of God, the first person, is now addressing you. If you cannot stand the heaviness of this holy doctrine, I would slip out. I’d slip out. Because to touch this, would be like touching the Ark of the Covenant from the days of the major prophets. Anyone who did dropped dead. To touch this holy revelation now would bring death to you. If you prove what you say, then in the empirical school of scientific evidence in the study you are to accept that which is proven. God, the infinite mind, is aware of the fall of the hairs on your head.”
David Wise: “He thought, I'll just pull this thing where I'm a man of the people, but he had a monster power lust, so to him everything belonged to him. We didn't even care if what he's saying is crazy. Maybe this is what comes with being a psychic and being a healer. It’s eccentric people who wind up being able to raise somebody from the dead, or are these things real? Can people actually do these things? We've heard about miracles and healings before. Now we're seeing proof of it. Jim Jones, does he really know the thoughts of our mind? I remember he was claiming that kind of thing. Well, I just sat right there beside him saying shithead, and he would just look over and like smile or something. I knew there's no way- I could just tell. There's no way he could read my goddamn mind. Trying to scam people up like that is worse than regular materialism. Power is what materialism is about anyway.”
Mike Wood: “I think most of us pretty well knew that most of the healings were fake, but we really wanted to believe that there was some core of truth to it. You certainly couldn't discuss your doubts with each other because of the risk of being reported and having to deal with some heavy-duty criticism or worse. You kept your doubts to yourself. But I think most of us knew that most of the healings were fake. We just hoped, forlornly, that some of them were real. Some people had experiences that seemed sufficiently real in terms of prophecies that their belief was in some way substantiated or confirmed. I think those stories are- they're just wishful thinking and memories.”
Something I found interesting while interviewing former members about the paranormal ministry was the almost nonchalant confessions of just how obvious some of the fakery was and how many people were keenly aware of bad actors giving the plot away. Temple members were conditioned to accept the illusion as a part of the tapestry their lives were woven into.
Q964 Jim Jones: “Some leading scientists say, we have to have euthanasia. Oh no. Oh no. Who's going to decide who and when a person is going to die? We must never allow that because this is the kind of thing that ushers in the terror of a Hitler's Germany. We must not allow these kinds of things to enter our consciousness.”
Laura Johnston Kohl: “We were at a Planning Commission meeting at Benjamin Franklin High School in San Francisco, and Jim handed juice out or some kind of drink out to everybody who was sitting there on the stage at the Planning Commission. Then there were people in the audience who dropped off their chairs as if they were dying or dead. Jim came in and he said, “You've all been poisoned because we have to do this act of revolutionary suicide.” And then a couple of people, at least one, ran out of the room and he said, “So today this was just an exercise. It's not true. I wasn't poisoning you, but I needed to see who was going to be running out and who realized that this was the only thing we had to do to go forward since I set it up that way.” In other words, if you could listen to Jim and take his word for it, that was our option.
Many times, Jim did things that were outrageous and I wrote it off as Jim being dramatical. To kind of make a point to the group. And so, when we had the juice and I looked around and I saw the people who looked dead, they just, they didn't look dead. They looked like they had fallen out of their chairs, but they had made sure that they were kind of comfortable on the floor. I don't know, somehow it didn't ring true to me. Jim was grooming us, but I wasn't familiar with that concept. I didn't really see it that way. I just saw that Jim was trying to be dramatic to make us rededicate ourselves to doing the most work we could, the best we could do, the most focused. At the time, I didn't see it. And so, a lot of what he did when he talked about a revolutionary suicide was introduce it, talk it up, everything. It was all grooming for us. So, at the time, way too much of the time. I gave Jim credit for trying to be kind of a drama queen, kind of dramatizing things to get our attention, to bring out our best, I mean, in a way, to make us paranoid of the alternative or of the monitoring. So it was all really- of what he was trying to do was kind of screw around with our brains.”
Laurie Efrein: “Well, Jim had monitors pass out the juice. The juice they passed was just on a tray and there were paper cups. So, pass out the juice. Did everybody drink their juice? Okay. And after he was assured that everybody had drunk the juice, he said you've all drunk a poison. It will work more quickly for some than others. A few people started falling down. A couple people went wacko, phony, crazy- Andy Silver And, oh, Patty Cartmell started acting crazy. I said, “There's something wrong here. Patty Cartmell wouldn't be acting crazy like that over this. She'd do anything Jim wanted her to do.” So, it felt very, very, very surreal.”
Q1035 Jim Jones: “You want a little— a little of this?”
Congregation: Slight laughter
Jones: “Take it— take it down there, some of them sisters think I’m getting high here. Take it down there—"
Congregation: Laughter
Jones: “Oh you, they wouldn’t believe you. Go and take it down there, and give her— give her— give some of them a drink. Give it to Mother [Marceline] LeTourneau, and give her a swig, what’d she think it is?”
Congregation: Laughter
Jones: “It’s not grape juice (Laughs).”
Mike Wood: “I was never in on the planning of loyalty tests. I think that those were all the things that staff was doing. They were the ones who were sort of putting all the secretive kind of nastier stuff- that's being done by staff. I think there were probably eight or nine people on staff, and they were sort of like the dirty tricksters, not sort of, they were. They were probably the ones who were putting together the loyalty tests. They enjoyed the honor of having had sex with Jim. That was one of the prerequisites for the women in the group. Then Tim Stoen would've been loosely associated with staff- but he was never really part of it, because Jim had always valued Tim's legal opinions.
The first memory I have is we had to write letters and sign them saying all the bad shit we would do to people- like we were contemplating assassinating the president or the senator or chief of police or some such individual and then sign it and then turn that over to the church. So, if we ever betrayed the church, they could use that against us. Then it went from there to having us sign four blank pages each, so the church could write in whatever it wanted to write in. And then I think various individuals came up with their own loyalty tests. Now, how did that degenerate or transcend itself into suicide drills? Well, suicide drills were just another loyalty test.”
Deborah Layton: “Everyone stood in a line, went up and drank this red, it was, kind of a tasted like, um, what's this, that thing, the drink, little children drink, but you have to put a lot of sugar in it first? Kool-Aid.”
As the architect of the shared delusion, Jim Jones counted on his follower skepticism and complacency as he planned their deaths. He conditioned them for years trying out new methods, wearing down their defenses until the final solution crystallized in Jonestown. Jim also took advantage of the public's distrust of former cultists.
Deborah Layton escaped Jonestown and exposed the macabre suicide loyalty test to the world, urging the State Department, Congress, and the public to do something before it was too late. After she escaped Jonestown in May of 1978, she gave a detailed description of how the community had practiced mass suicide. Her story, a chilling preview of what was to come only seven months later, was apparently too incredible to be believed.
Deborah Layton: “You know, it had a horrible taste initially, and you think- well, maybe there is something in that. He said it'll take 45 minutes, and he assigned several people to faint or to pretend they were dead.”
Don Harris: “How many people would you say were there then?”
Deborah Layton: “11. Well, between 11 and 1200 people.”
Don Harris: “You're telling me this man took 1100 people and gathered them together…”
Deborah Layton: “Well, that’s what he does every day. Yeah.”
Don Harris: “And said and said, drink this poison, and they drank it.”
Deborah Layton: “That's right.”
Don Harris: “You drank it.”
Deborah Layton: “Yeah.”
Jeannie Mills, otherwise known as Deanna Mertle, left the Temple and founded the Human Freedom Center, a sanctuary for former members of coercive religious groups. She had been out of the Temple since 1974. When Jeannie was interviewed just one day after the tragedy on November 19th, 1978, while the Guyana Defense Force was still searching for Jonestown survivors in the jungle- Jeannie didn't have to wait for the news to report that they had found the remains of the missing 500 Jonestown residents. Jeannie didn't have to wait for a forensic report to know how they died. She had lived a thousand deaths for the Temple and knew exactly how their story was going to end.
Jeannie Mills/Deanna Mertle: “Well, I would imagine that the disenchanted people probably are hiding in the jungle right now. But I also know the effect of brainwashing on people, and I know that many of these people would rather die than face society as they view it from their very limited view that Jim Jones has presented to them. I know because this is how we were programmed. I know that they are out to kill any person who has hurt Jim Jones in any way and then kill themselves.”
Reporter: “There have been some reports that some of the people apparently were not, were shot instead of committing suicide by poisoning. Do you think that? What do you think happened there?”
Jeannie Mills/Deanna Mertle: “Okay. The original plans as they were being conducted down there, according to a notarized statement from Debbie Blakey (Layton) who did escape, was that the people would all be fed poison and then they would be shot. So, I would imagine that this was probably started to be carried out.”
Before her mysterious, unsolved murder in 1980, Jeannie Mills warned the public about the suicide drills and the violence taking hold of the Temple's inner core. You can hear it in her voice the day after the Jonestown tragedy. This was a story she had told many times before. Only now that it was too late, she had the room's attention.
Reporter: “But what were these suicide drills we hear about?”
Jeannie Mills/Deanna Mertle: “Okay. Jim Jones wanted to test you all the time, so he would have fake suicides to see if you were really dedicated enough to be willing to die for the cause. He would tell you that you were being poisoned, or he might give you the poison first or the liquid first and then say that you'd been poisoned just to see what your reaction would be. Then afterward he'd say, “Now this has been a test.” We never did actually take poison the first time, but what happened? We met- it was an outside meeting and he said, “Eight people have left and they're out there and they're going to discredit our group and we've got to go down in history as a socialist revolutionary group. So, we are going to all kill ourselves and we will leave a note that this is a demonstration because we can't deal with society as it exists today. We've been oppressed by the government, and this is the only way that we feel we can deal with society, is by making this demonstration.” At that time, one of the counselors, Mike (Wood) stood up and said “Jim, I think that this would look more like we were a group of crazy people because they would come up here and find all these dead bodies and they would just think we were crazy.” After that, he evaluated it and he agreed at that point that it wouldn't be, it would be a crazy plan.”
Mike Wood: “Jeannie mentions that we were in Jim's garage. Jim was asking about suicide, and apparently, she named me. I tried to remember why I would have said something like that. Because Jim was clearly looking for confirmation of his belief that suicide might be an appropriate exit strategy if you will. Why would I have come up against him like that? I have a reason now and the reason is this, at that point, I really thought that we were interested in each other's true opinions, or Jim was interested in our real thoughts and our expressing those real thoughts and not trying to hide or cover them up or play games, but just really say what we thought and that he would value that. It was very soon after that that I came to realize that that was not the case and that if you wanted to survive in the Temple and avoid the denigrating kind of confrontations that we always had in those PC (Planning Commission) meetings, and you wanted not to be whispered about and gossiped about that you really had to lie. I recall being so cautious about being truthful for so long that I didn't remember that there was a time when I was bluntly honest about things that I really felt strongly about.
So, the second time was 1975. This is, I guess, the most storied example of suicide loyalty tests. That's the one where we're in San Francisco, passes out the wine and then tells us we'll be dead in 30 minutes and what's our reaction? He always had other shit- I got people on the outside who will take care of all of our enemies- it will be known that we died as committed socialists because we couldn't make the changes we wanted to make and we'll be heroes, blah, blah, blah.
I thought, well, this is bullshit. By that point, I knew that no matter what, you really couldn't be honest because anything you said would be reflected on by Jim and Carolyn and whoever else you might give it to, and that you would be judged accordingly. So, I wouldn't have said anything in there that suggested that I thought this was pure idiocy, even though that's what I thought. I just sat back and watched other people get up and talk and then supposedly dropped dead.
Rose Shelton has as her job making sure that anyone that Jim had quote “cured”- seemed to like to cure stomach cancer a lot, they would go back to the restroom and then she would have them, I guess have a bowel movement or attempt to have a bowel movement. Of course, there wasn't anything, there were no feces there. It's just that she would have these chicken guts or something or other, and this little ball of foil and she would tell the person that's what they had passed, and then she would walk around and would have a couple of guards walking in front of her so that people wouldn't take it. So that was her role in the church. Well, anyway, on the night of the suicide drill, I actually got up and kind of walked around the room just a little bit, and off to the side, I was standing behind her and she got up to say how wonderful it'd been to be with Jim and all this, and that she was happy to die for the cause and one thing or another.
She was so emotional about what she was saying she had begun to weep. I guess her role in this was to fall down dead. Well, I happened to notice that even though she had allegedly died, she was still shedding tears and was heaving. You know, the kind of heaving that people do when they're crying. So, I thought, aha, just another bullshit loyalty test, that's all this is. I kind of suspected it anyway, but she really confirmed it. Within about 30 seconds, I knew it was just one more loyalty test. Then of course, when I went over to stand behind Rose Shelton, I really had to work hard not to roll my eyes and look serious. I had my act down by that point. It did amuse me that poor Rose was so worked up that she couldn't stop crying when she was supposed to be dead. I thought, you know, this is because we would, he would pull stunts like that from time to time. And then of course, at that point, I knew that all the healings were fake.
So, if he was gonna fake the healings, he certainly can fake people's deaths. So anyway, a couple of other people did the same thing. And I guess on Wanda Kice’s side of the fence, somebody got up and, oh Andy Silver, Andy gets up apparently and says something. And of course, his part of it is to be beaten up by other people like Jack Beam and go down and to make it all real, have blood coming out of his mouth and all this. Well, apparently he had a blood packet or a ketchup packet in his mouth or something. So instead of chomping down on it, he missed and wound up spitting the goddamn blood packet out of his mouth right in front of Wanda (Johnson Kice). I didn't see that, but when Wanda said it, I thought, oh man, can anything go right? I remember Andy going down, but I didn't think much of it since I knew the whole thing was a fucking game. I wasn't really worried about it, but it just caused me concern because I thought they're playing these games, so is it just a loyalty test or are we practicing for something worse? What?
At that same moment, my mother (Patty Cartmell) jumps up and screams something like I don't want to die and starts running up the stairs or the side of the room and Mike Prokes pulls out a revolver. It was a silver revolver as I recall, probably pearl handle, no doubt, and shoots my mom. She falls over dead. I thought, well, that's interesting because I really heard the gun go off. I knew that it had been fired. And mom's lying there like, she's dead. I thought, how does this fit into the loyalty test that this obviously is, that Mike must have shot a blank at my mom. That's the only thing that makes sense because Jim sure as hell wouldn't kill my mom if he wasn't gonna kill everybody else. I thought I wanna figure this out. As soon as the test was over and Jim said everybody's okay and blah, blah blah, and went on to his usual crap I walked over to my mom when she was talking to Mike Prokes and I just kind of stood there and listened in on a conversation. What I learned was that in fact Mike had shot a blank and he was profusely apologetic to my mom about having hurt her because she actually was wounded. It was a slight, it wasn't bleeding heavily or anything like that, but he certainly punctured the skin of her stomach. I learned then a blank really is a cartridge that has some gunpowder in it. Instead of a bullet, a real bullet, I guess it's just a cardboard wad but when you shoot it, that cardboard wad comes outta there with some power. Certainly, powerful enough that if somebody's within five feet or so of you, if they get hit, they're probably gonna be injured. So, that's what happened to my mom. But she was actually quite happy about it because she had the glory of having been wounded for Father. So, my mother, I mean, and let's face it, dying a nice slow death on stage is the culmination of any actor's career. Mom would not have missed the opportunity for anything. In fact, she'd have been really upset if somebody else had got to play the role. I'm not kidding.”
What went through your mind those 30 seconds you thought it might actually be real and you had been poisoned?
Mike Wood: “I didn't know if it was serious or not, and frankly, I was so fucking tired. I mean, I really remember just being nonplussed about it. Just saying, oh, whatever. We're so fucking fatigued. I didn't give a shit. I mean, I'm honestly telling you I thought, it had gotten to that level because you're just tired. You know, facing a Planning Commission meeting would be worse than facing death. It's like, oh, well, at least I can get outta the Planning Commission meeting.”
Q636 Jim Jones: “I make Martin Luther— I make Martin Luth— Luther King in the statement on death, and there ought to be some quote. Anybody know a quote off-hand on Martin Luther King? Martin Luther King saying, he expected to die? Ah, so, so people to familiarize that Martin Luther King, and anybody that knows Senator, St— St— ah, Kennedy? And Patrick Henry said, Give me liberty or give me death. That mother fucker was- that’s hundreds a years ago.”
Single voice: “Right.”
Jones: “And we voted to do so. Our people voted to do so. We’re a participatory democracy.”
Crowd: “Right.”
Jones: “We, we, we, we will not be as the Jews of marching submissively to the ga— I wouldn’t mention Jews. Those who marched submissively to the gas ovens, valiant— but we will be like the valiant heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto before we give our li— uh, li— liberty.”
Crowd: “Right.”
Jones: “I wouldn’t use Jews. I wouldn’t say— I would not be like those— I don’t put a racial contact on the— the contact on those who uh, went to, who marched submissively to the gas ovens, would be a good way to put it, but we would be rather like the valiant heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. And if anybody remembers who they were— I doubt it, at this point in history. If you cannot understand that willingness to die if necessary, rather than compromise the right to exist free from harassment, then you will never understand the integrity, honesty, and bravery of Peoples Temple.”
Mike Wood: “Why didn't I say, why didn't I do anything? Why didn't that prompt me to leave? Well, here's why. That's the question I asked myself a lot about hundreds of things. Because you feel it's that old notion of the ends justifying the means. You know, the cause of socialism is so important that you believe you have to do these things, which you would ordinarily know to be immoral and fraudulent in order to accomplish your great goal. Now, that is a very, very dangerous slope to be on.
Sometimes it's true, if you're in a war, for example, that kind of thing then it makes sense. The goal of safety is certainly worth the shooting of the individual or doing something you otherwise wouldn't do. But clever individuals who are malignant narcissists like Jim and like Donald Trump, they will use that all the time. They're like, oh yeah, we know we have to do things that aren't great, but we do it because we have to accomplish this great goal. You come to believe that, and I believe that. But after a while, so many of these things happen that you wind up saying, well wait a minute, what is the purpose of this?
In addition to that, Garry Lambrev who had left was somebody that I maintained my friendship with. Garry and I met a couple of times to talk about the Temple even though he’d left and I hadn’t. We actually got to talk about this very subject and I mentioned the end justifying the means, which is a phrase Jim used a lot, and is what I like to call, the liar's maxim. Garry said, “Mike that's just such bullshit. This whole ends and means thing. Ends and means are just two words, and to the extent that they really have any meaning, they're a continuum. Anytime you engage in a corrupt means, you are necessarily corrupting whatever end you think you have in mind, and that end then becomes just another corrupted means to whatever end the person who's promoting this has in mind and you will never know what that real end is, but it has nothing to do with what they're saying.” That stuck with me. That was as much a reason why I became so disgusted with being in the church as all the shit that I saw.”
A former Temple member Jordan Vilchez experienced the same event from a different vantage point at the time. She had no reason to doubt the authenticity of Patty's performance or the poison in her drink.
Jordan Vilchez: “Frankly, I don't remember being afraid or anything. I just remember feeling relaxed because I hadn't had wine before, you know? And it was like, Ooh, this, if we're going out this way, it's like, I don't feel so bad. But I think that by that time, the influence over me was so strong that I don't recall feeling any kind of fear.”
Did you have a sense that this had been a planned scenario or that it was fake?
Jordan Vilchez: “Yeah, I don't know. I just, maybe, part of me knew that it wasn't, because I think that when it comes down to survival, that's like the keenest instinct. And so, when someone's lying to you about something like that, you're gonna know it. So maybe it was that- and Patty was always funny anyway, she was an interesting person. But I wonder what happened on that final day because of her reaction during that time. Patty didn't wanna die.”
Q638 Jones: “We’ve had a lot of youth and seniors — not many, not a lot, no, that’s not fair, very few — other— other time when we thought we were going to have to take poison, we’re prepared to it. I don’t think one person acted up, did they? Or two? Maybe two?”
The grape juice-filled dixie cups passed around during suicide rehearsals should have prepared the Planning Commission for what was coming. But every time Father poisoned the wine, it was just another loyalty test. A sacrifice required by a jealous God who at the penultimate moment, pulls you back from the brink of the abyss and bathes you in the light of his grace. This unholy communion gave people a false sense of security and desensitized their fight-or-flight responses. They were systematically groomed to doubt their perceptions of reality and fear no mortal consequences.
Q998 Jones: “Well, I’m uh– I’m talking about planning your death, I don’t uh, I don’t care how you plan it, you may not plan it the way I plan it or you may not plan it the way that ni– your comrade plans it, then– In other words, you have planned (pause) your death at times. You’ve planned your death for an operation, and uh, some kind of operation the best– the way you’d like to plan it would be to b– put your body in a million pieces.”
Ponts: “Yes, blow up something with it.”
Jones: “That’s a–that’s a very realistic plan. How many planned their death?”
Laurie Efrein, loyal to the end, survived the tragedy because she was at Temple headquarters in San Francisco. When Jones asked her to plan her death during a suicide drill, she contemplated what would become of those who hadn't made it to the Promised Land. Clearly, some members of the Planning Commission planned for life after Temple death.
Laurie Efrein: “I wrote Jim a note afterward and he sent Teri around to everybody to find out what was their reaction. He wanted to gauge the reaction of everyone in PC, which was I'd say, a mid-level leadership group. It wasn't the closest leadership group. I don't remember what I said in that interview, but I wrote him a letter and I said, “If this ever happens, it will not be in the States, it will be in Guyana, and only if our backs are up against the wall militarily.” Which I think was the reality in the end, that our backs were because the military was gonna invade. I said, “But you have to realize that we'll be divided then into a family of death and a family of life. And the family of life largely in the state will be left in deep grief and up against the hostile world.” I was very sure about that- a hostile world, not a sympathetic world, a hostile world, and what are your plans for that? And he sent Teri to me. She was sort of like the messenger bunny all over the place. He sent her to me, and she said, “Jim said that now you're really thinking.” Because we never even got a goodbye note from Jim Jones. We didn't get anything in the States. It was a total shock to us. But I thought that since he acknowledged any thought- that something I'd said was constructive and of course he didn't put me in any leadership, inner leadership sessions- I thought since, he thought it was constructive that maybe if he ever contemplated that there'd be some kind of planning for the people who would be left. At least. I guess I was sort of like telling them mass poisoning was a terrible idea. But I didn't put it that way. I said, you have to consider that half of the group will be left alive and they'll be left totally grief-stricken, facing a hostile world. And what kind of planning are you doing for that? And there wasn't any planning for that.”
How long had Jim Jones been contemplating the annihilation of his flock? During a Peoples Temple meeting in Redwood Valley, Jones talked about one day escaping to a place where he could finally be alone with his people isolated behind a giant electric fence. Jonestown wouldn't be built for two more years, but as you can hear on this tape recorded in Redwood Valley in 1972, Jim Jones was making big plans.
Q1021 Jim Jones: “You face the living-long lives. Some of you are young, you’ve got lives ahead of you. I face things like having to have the cyanide in the right place. Not even trusting my own energy, ‘cause I don’t know how to use my own energy to destruct myself. I’m a healer. I wouldn’t know how to kill myself. Wouldn’t know how to use my energy to do that. But if you drain me dry before I’d let my body be incapacitated here, I would destruct myself. So, it looks like, if I’m willing to not have a day ahead, not one living day ahead, I— (Pause) (clicks tongue)”
There is an even earlier reference to a suicide rehearsal that took place in the mid-sixties buried deep in the FBI serials. An eyewitness whose name was redacted from serial 1205, told the FBI that they were a member of the Temple in Indiana, but never went out to California. At a Temple meeting in Indianapolis, Jim Jones asked his followers to lie on the floor as if they were dead. As Jones looked over the sea of people lying prone as if in silent prayer, he took his place among them, lying on his chest and feigning death. He lay there for a while letting the rush of the immaculate fix- the power of death wash over him.
Q636 Jim Jones: “Take the blood pressure because it’s still rising. Gonna have to take some of these — I don’t dare be too tranquilized, however. We have less than two hours, so get your shit together. I gotta worry about all this. You assholes that can’t even fuck. I could fuck 15 times a day, and I gotta worry about all this shit. Only fuck I want right now is the orgasm of the great— fuck in the grave. But nonetheless, it’s ridiculous, you people carry on this bullshit over relationships, take up our damn time—"
When Jim Jones was a child, he would sneak into a casket factory after hours. According to a childhood friend, Jones led a group of kids into the factory one night and talked them into lying down inside the coffins. He wanted to know what death felt like and he wanted his friends to share the experience.
I face things like having to have the cyanide in the right place.
By the time David Wise left Peoples Temple, he had found chicken livers in a trunk above his room. He saw a woman drugged and fitted with a cast and witnessed a fake stigmata as Jones worked his way through Christ's playbook. Dave wondered, was martyrdom an inevitability?
Q1015 Jim Jones: “But I would still rather suffer affliction with the children of promise, with the children of principle, with the children of God than to enjoy all of Babylon America. I don’t want anything that Mr. [Richard] Nixon’s America has. I’d rather go this way, even if I had to die on a scaffold, die being lynched on a tree or to be crucified. I would rather go this way than to enjoy the pleasures of sin, sick, capitalist America.”
David Wise: “I told everyone to get away from him and they did not listen. One of the main reasons that they did not listen is that he was probably one of the most talented, say a circus type of an act where you see a dynamic healing, and even if you know that it's real or that it's fake, it doesn't matter that it's just a performance that's really amazing. There are a lot of great personalities and great minds and great people that many times he took credit for what should have been attributed to them. That they actually did hard work. The hardest working group you could ever imagine. His ability to inspire that kind of faith was remarkable. So, he had a certain talent and if you were in a meeting, it didn't matter what you thought about the healings or anything else, you felt high as a kite when it was over.”
Q962 Jim Jones: “America, 1973, Christian America, Jehovah’s America, Bible America, 1973. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by following me. Why don’t you deny yourself? Why don’t you deny yourself? Why don’t you say yes to this cause and no to that slave system? I thank you. I thank you. I thank you, because my words are spirit, and my words are life. This is a revolution that will heal you, this is a Father that will save you, this is one that will shepherd you through every storm.”
In Jonestown, the Temple's paranormal ministry fell into ruin and Jim Jones right along with it. After all, you can't fake crop reports or fill Jonestown’s pantry by supernatural means. People depended on Jones for their survival and looked to him for leadership, but all he could offer them was a projection of what they wanted to see. A spiritual leader may not have been the only role Jones had tried to play throughout his life, but the old robes and the holy shoes of a preacher had always been the costume that fit him best.
As the illusion disappeared in a puff of smoke revealing nothing in its place, Jim Jones attempted to play dictator. He escaped reality as often as he could, isolated in his cabin in a drugged-out stupor. When he emerged and addressed his people, it was to lay down the law and heighten their growing sense of panic and doom. Extolling the virtues of his paranormal ministry to children wrapped in chains as punishment for running away you can hear the hopeless tone in Jim Jones’ voice. There are no words of hope or wisdom. Only the pain of a man ready to be crucified.
Q757 Jim Jones: “That’s what I live in, is a glass house, a fishbowl. And so I feel for you children, I hate to see you tied, my heart’s crying out to you, why don’t you let Dad help you, so you won’t have to be tied anymore? They’re not doing this to you, to mistreat you. The teacher’s not picking on you, you don’t think the teachers are picking on you, do you?”
Voice of young boy: “No.”
Jones: “Well, son, everybody else listens and stays out of Learning, and they— they’re not good. Nobody’s perfect. But they’re not on Learning like you, and they’re not leaping out of windows to run away. Now how many understood what I said to you about the benefits that I’ve given you? The benefits of communism? Not to mention the benefit of a paranormal dimension that the Soviet Union’s spending a million dollars a day, two million now, to try to understand my paranormal faculty? And right now, you can say, well, Dad, I don’t believe in you. Then ask me, because I’m so sure of my principles and my goodness and my honesty and my introspection and my soul-searching analysis, that I can answer any question you’ve got to ask. I think it would be much easier living here and working if you could fully see my goodness and know what pain I go through, then whatever little pain you have, or how much you could endure much better,
Or you want to think I’m a different kind of man. He heals, he raises the dead, so he don’t feel like I do. I have more pain than you do. I have more depression, I have more suicidal feelings than you do, in that I never know when I haven’t (Laughs bitterly) had one, since I was a child and saw a little dog die, due to the bounce of the ball that I wish I hadn’t been playing with when it happened, but somebody else did it. I felt right then, hmm, it isn’t worth it. Seeing people die, seeing the people you love go down in the grave, and what’s worse, seeing them die slowly. Watching my best uncle, the only one that had any humanity, so sick of life, and there were no communists around to help him, that he grabbed wood alcohol and drank it, then spit his stomach out, piece by piece. Then he couldn’t die, and his stomach was practically gone. Didn’t know communism in those days. He went down, trying to find some bunch of thugs that would run the gang, the Mafia of that town — there wasn’t a real Mafia, but you know the, the, the criminal element — took him on, they threw him— they had to throw him bodily off of a bridge to kill him. Been best if he’da stayed around to try to help me, because I was having a hard time, but he never, never saw it that way. So, I made up my mind, that I would never go that way, I’d always stay around, try not to disappoint people — it’s terrible to disappoint people. It’s awful to leave people alone.”
Do you think Jim Jones ever believed he had any paranormal powers?
Mike Wood: “That is a good question. You know, that old cliche about believing your own propaganda? He was a psychopath. I don't know if he was a psychopath or a sociopath. The only real distinction I’m aware of between those two terms is that a psychopath is born that way and a sociopath grows up to be that way. So, Jim may have been a sociopath, but he lied about everything. Everything. I am still learning to this day, after all this time some of the things which without even thinking about it, I believed, and I'm only now finding out, are not true. Even if the truth would have been as beneficial as the lie in any specific situation, he would've still told the lie because he would've felt it gave him greater control. Whereas the truth is so coincidental and accidental, you never know when it's going to be on your side or not. You just have to assume that everything that he said was a lie. He lied so much; it was hard to pick them out. Everything was a lie. Everything was dishonest. And whether or not the dishonesty applied to himself. Maybe he knew he was a liar when it came to the psychic stuff, but I think he believed himself to be one of humanity's great manipulators and he justified it the way people do. And that is that I'm the only one who's really concerned about human rights, and so I have to do this in order to achieve my goal. My goal is this worldwide cause where in fact it was just his own goal of maximizing his own power. So, he believed in his own power to manipulate people. I didn't think he believed in his own psychic abilities. He would've been a fool if he had, but he certainly believed in his own power to manipulate people. And you know what? He had reason to believe that because he was very successful in manipulating people and not just the people in the Temple. We had a hell of a good reputation. That is to say, Jim had a hell of a good reputation in San Francisco itself with some very sophisticated people.
You may remember the name of Herb Caen, the journalist and columnist. He was a huge fan of Jim's and so was George Moscone. Go down the list of people who were Jim Jones fans. I mean, Harvey Milk, for example.”
It has been said that the only thing that ever motivated Jim Jones was money and power, particularly the kind of power and influence having money can buy. Mike, you were the head of the offerings crew for a time. How much money did the Temple make during an average church service??
Mike Wood: “Well, you get more than a dollar. We had five offerings every meeting you interspersed healings with the offerings, and you got quite a little pot after a while. On the weekends, we're talking 1970s dollars, in San Francisco weekends- this is when we were fully established in San Francisco and Los Angeles- We were probably bringing in $15,000-$20,000, and on the Los Angeles weekends, we were probably bringing in $25,000- $30,000. I know this because I had to count it all.”
In a conversation I had with Jim Jones' son Stephan, I asked him if his father wore sunglasses at home or in private. Stephan was incredibly gracious and answered the question, sharing with me a secret side of Jim Jones that the public never got to see. For years, I have wondered if money and power weren’t driving Jones' ambitions, what was? Stephan may have just solved that mystery for me with his answer.
Stephan Jones: “At home behind closed doors where no one else will see him, but the family? No. So you want my take on the sunglasses? I think it's a pretty educated take on the sunglasses. There were a number of influences, and I think it probably started with Dad needing to hide his eyes during services. Now, he claimed he was protecting people from his supernatural glare. What I know to be true now is that the way he would know things that he couldn't possibly know and the way that he would call people out and have information about them that seemingly he couldn't possibly know was that he had agents, he had mostly women scouring through people's things. Either their home, their garbage, or their purses as they sat next to them, gleaning information about these people, and then that would be written down on notes, pieces of paper that would be up on dad's pulpit.
So, as he was supposedly turning inward and using his gift, he was looking down reading notes. So, the sunglasses hid the fact that his eyes were turned downward reading. However, somewhere along the way, someone told him he looked good in those sunglasses. So that would be another big reason Dad would wear the sunglasses. Then as he aged, he started getting some crow's feet around his eyes, maybe a little bag under his eyes. Not to mention the fact that he was staying up all night on uppers and the only way he could sleep was on downers, and that could lead to some bloodshot eyes. So that was another reason he was wearing the sunglasses. For most of the time, he was wearing sunglasses. It was vanity. The funny side to that is I have never worn sunglasses in my life.
Dad was seeking adulation always, in my opinion. I think that he genuinely cared about the well-being of some, and I think that no, he cared more about what he perceived to be injustice because that was more personal for him. I don't know how well Dad actually felt compassion for others. I think he did on some level, and especially early on, there was a compassionate part of him that he could tap into. But what really got him going was this idea of justice and injustice, because that fed his narcissism in a way because he felt he had been unjustly treated. He felt that he hadn't been given the opportunity that others had been given. So, it was personal for him, but I think Dad was seeking adulation. Dad was forever insecure. No matter how secure he presented himself, he was forever insecure and never believed that he was what people seemed to believe he was. But it became simpler for him to just concern himself with his perception of other people's perception of him. So as long as he believed that these people believed he was all that, then he was all that- at the same time, his own true understanding of himself was at war with that. So, he was continually working on that and managing that perception and that image.
So yeah, his ideal was adulation. His baseline was acceptance.”
We would like to close this Sunday service with a final thought from the writings of Don Beck. Don was the director of the youth choir and wrote the very song that welcomed newcomers to the Temple. As I wrote about his adopted son, Danny Beck, and the miraculous restoration of his hearing, sadly, I learned that Don had passed away. Throughout the years Don wrote extensively about the Temple, sharing thoughtful remembrances and commentary. He contributed to the archive transcribing Edith Roller's journals and organizing Peoples Temple documents, ensuring that the history of the Temple would be accessible and more easily understood by future researchers. In his article, “The Healings of Jim Jones” Don examines the authenticity of the paranormal ministry, distilling his answers through personal experiences informed by the principles of the Temple's doctrine. He wrote:
“People often came to Jim initially more for the healings than for a message of helping your neighbor. He knew the healings were a way to draw people to the Temple for the first time, and some of them did stay. More and more embraced, working for building a better world, putting religious doctrine questions more on hold. Jim spoke of his power as a gift, but one that had physical limits made physical demands on his body. As we had more and more members, it was more of a drain on him to support those members and then perform for visitors. That's when the fake healings came in, and that's how those who knew of the faked healings participated in them ourselves, and how we justified the subterfuge. The power of healing was just one aspect of Peoples Temple. There was the power of providing counsel for a relative in trouble or in jail. The power of finding a job for someone needing it, the power of finding a place to live. The power of finding clothing and food when needed. It was as though we had decided to use his insights to bring people together, to do more for themselves and others, to build a community. We were working together to bring about positive changes. To put hands and feet on prayers to see what could be done by our own applied effort. To build a heaven on earth rather than expecting God to do so. If people cooperate, it is amazing what we can build. That was what we believed. That was what we found, and that was what we were acting upon. I did, and I still do believe in an overall beingness. But I would say we put aside the God debate and in doing so with less emphasis on doctrine and institution, we seem to be able to get more done. Did that make us agnostic? Did that make us atheistic? I would say it made us all a part of a living faith, less mystical, more working, contributing, doing. There was room for people of all faiths as there was for agnostics and atheists. Jim helped us put aside all the diversion and confusion and arguing about which brand of God was the correct one so we could just get on with working together. That was Jim's true power.”
Q1059-3 Jim Jones: “If you go outside, you have to get directly to the buses. Don't, don't talk outside loudly. We are not taking allowance. We, but you still SHHH!, now you move around the pool. Those are gonna help us. That'd be your best blessing to help me help others. But if you do go out, you must not smoke on these premises. You must not drink. You won't remember what happened to the last person that did. You must be quiet. Respect our neighbors and be careful when you drive your vehicles. I've got a lot of little animals that I've given homes to every kind of animal imaginable. Here running free and happy and get the seats. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Now will you clear the tables, and you have not eaten? You'll have time before the buses leave. You fill these tables over towards this side first. First tables are my right under the clock. First, don't sit down over here. Sit down over to my right towards the road. Fill these tables first, clear out…”
We would like to thank David Wise, Mike Wood, Yulanda Williams, Laura Johnston Kohl, Rebecca Moore, Vera Washington, Jack Arnold Beam, Thomas Beikman, Jordan Villchez, Thomas Ijames, Laurie Efrein, Hue Fortson, Vern Gosney, Tommy Washington, and Stephan Jones. We would also like to thank Fielding McGehee and the Jonestown Institute.
The Attention Span Recovery Project would like to thank you for participating in this Sunday service. Please be careful on your way home as you are now leaving the aura of Father's protection. Be mindful out there- when the pursuit of your ideals outweighs the consequences of your actions check your moral compass for directions. A gut feeling might just be your body's way of talking to God.
End Transmission