The Road to Jonestown Read online

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  * * *

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Prologue Guyana, November 18–19, 1978

  Part One Indiana

  CHAPTER ONE Lynetta and Jim

  CHAPTER TWO Lynn

  CHAPTER THREE Jimmy

  CHAPTER FOUR Growing Up

  CHAPTER FIVE Richmond

  CHAPTER SIX Marceline

  CHAPTER SEVEN Jim and Marceline

  CHAPTER EIGHT Beginnings

  CHAPTER NINE A Church Where You Get Something Now

  CHAPTER TEN Peoples Temple

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Gaining Influence

  CHAPTER TWELVE Father Divine

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN “All Races Together”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN A Man to Be Reckoned With

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Breakdown

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Brazil

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Looking West

  Part Two California

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Redneck Valley

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Dead End

  CHAPTER TWENTY Resurrection

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Carolyn

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO A Socialist Example

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Money

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Worker Bees

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE On the Road

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Failures

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Drugs

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Sex

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Family

  CHAPTER THIRTY The Planning Commission

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Los Angeles

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO San Francisco

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Narrow Escapes

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Reaching Out

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE The Gang of Eight

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Consequences

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN The Promised Land

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Kimo

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE City Politics

  CHAPTER FORTY More Money

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Defectors

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO “Our Year of Ascendency”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE New West

  Part Three Guyana

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR Jonestown

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE Concerned Relatives and the First White Night

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX Death Will Be Painless

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN Betrayals

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT Unraveling

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE Final Days

  CHAPTER FIFTY “Some Place That Hope Runs Out”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE What Happened?

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO Aftermath

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  List of Interviews

  About the Author

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photo Credits

  For Bob Bender and Johanna Li

  PROLOGUE

  GUYANA, NOVEMBER 18–19, 1978

  During the late afternoon on Saturday, November 18, 1978, garbled radio messages began reaching Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana on the South American coast. They seemed to be panicky reports of a plane crash, probably in the dense jungle that swept from the outskirts of the city all the way northwest to the Venezuelan border. Operators at Georgetown’s Ogle Airport, who received the messages, passed them on to personnel at Guyana Defence Force headquarters; the GDF comprised the country’s sparse, underequipped military. The GDF duty officers knew of no scheduled military flights, so the crashed plane, if there was one, wasn’t theirs.

  About 6 p.m., a Cessna swooped in from the northwest and landed at Ogle, a small, secondary Georgetown airport used mostly by the military. Besides its pilot, it carried two additional passengers—the pilot of another, abandoned plane, and a wounded woman named Monica Bagby. The two pilots, sources of the earlier messages, were almost equally incoherent in person. What they did manage to relate wasn’t about a plane crash, but rather an attack at a remote airstrip. Earlier in the afternoon, the Cessna and a second craft, an Otter operated by Guyana Airways, flew to the tiny jungle outpost of Port Kaituma to pick up a large party there, including a U.S. congressman, his staff, and some others. In all, there were thirty-three people waiting at the narrow landing strip, too many to fit in the planes, which had a combined capacity of twenty-four. While the prospective passengers decided who would fly out immediately and who would have to wait for an additional plane, they were attacked by men with rifles and shotguns. The victims in the attack were unarmed, and the result was sheer slaughter. The Otter was so riddled with bullets during the barrage that one of its twin engines was destroyed, its tires were flattened, and it couldn’t fly. Its pilot fled to the Cessna, which was still operational. The Cessna pilot, feeling helpless to intervene and wanting to save his own life, taxied from the gunfire and bodies and flew away, taking with him the Otter pilot and a woman who’d been wounded when the attack began as she boarded the Cessna.

  Now, at Ogle, they described the gruesome scene at the Port Kaituma airstrip. One of the certain dead there was the congressman, and also some reporters who were with him. Other attack victims were badly wounded. Those who suffered slight injuries or seemed initially unscathed ran into the jungle. The witnesses at Ogle didn’t know whether the one-sided firefight ended then or not. There were so many men with guns, lots of fallen bodies, pools of blood.

  Their account was immediately relayed to the office of Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. Although the details were sketchy, they were enough to confirm where the slaughter must have been instigated: Jonestown.

  For more than four years, members of an American group called Peoples Temple had been carving out a 3,000-acre farm community in the heart of the near-impenetrable jungle. The spot was about six miles from Port Kaituma. They’d named the settlement for their leader, Jim Jones. The Guyanese government initially welcomed the newcomers. A colony of Americans in Guyana’s North West District provided a welcome barrier to intrusions by Venezuela, which claimed much of that region and sometimes threatened invasion. But Jones and his followers soon proved troublesome. They set up schools and a medical clinic without regard to the regulations of their new home country, and protested when ordered to comply with Guyanese policies. Jones had legal problems back in America that spilled over into Guyanese courts, and, most irritating of all, relatives of some Jonestown residents claimed that their family members were being held there against their will. Leo Ryan, a U.S. congressman from the Bay Area of California, inconvenienced the Guyanese government by insisting that he visit Jonestown to investigate. A few days previously, Ryan had arrived in Guyana with a TV crew and print reporters in tow, along with some of those raising the ruckus—Concerned Relatives, they called their organization. The visit was messy from the beginning. Jones said he wouldn’t let Ryan, the media, or the Concerned Relatives into Jonestown. Ryan made it obvious he’d go there anyway and demand entrance, with the press recording it all and making Guyana look foolish and primitive to the whole world. After much negotiation, Jones grudgingly agreed to let Ryan and some others in. They’d flown out of Georgetown on Friday, November 17, in the company of a staffer from the U.S. embassy who’d reported back that night that things were going well. And now, this.

  There were difficulties maintaining direct radio communication
between Georgetown and Port Kaituma. Besides the near-incoherent initial testimony from the three attack survivors in the Cessna, no one in Georgetown had access to additional information. They had to guess what might be happening, with only one thing certain: the United States government would be furious.

  Guyana was a proud, though economically struggling, socialist nation. Still, its geographic proximity as well as reluctant, pragmatic acceptance of American power made it crucial to get along with the United States. If a U.S. congressman was really dead, the American government might very well send in troops, and that violation of Guyanese sovereignty, with its potential for international humiliation, couldn’t be risked. About 7 p.m. on Saturday, Prime Minister Burnham convened a meeting in his office with John Burke, the U.S. ambassador. He also included his top ministers, and officers of the GDF and the National Service, Guyana’s military training program for teens. The National Service had a jungle camp about forty miles from Jonestown.

  Burnham told Burke what little he knew. It was impossible, the prime minister said, to do much immediately. It was virtually impossible to land a plane at Port Kaituma after dark—the narrow airstrip was gouged out of the triple-canopy growth and would have to be illuminated by lanterns. There was no way of knowing how many gunmen had converged on the airstrip earlier, or what their intent might be beyond the murder of Congressman Ryan and his party, which apparently included a number of residents who wanted to escape from Jonestown.

  Desmond Roberts, one of the Guyanese military men at the meeting, had warned the prime minister and his staff for months that Peoples Temple was probably smuggling guns into Jonestown, but Burnham refused to investigate. Now Roberts pointed out that Jones’s followers might have accumulated a considerable arsenal. How many armed men might have control of the Port Kaituma airstrip, or else lurk in the jungle outside Jonestown, awaiting fresh targets? This could be more than a single ambush. Perhaps it was a large-scale insurrection. The Jonestown settlers seemed fanatical in their loyalty to Jones. If he called for an uprising, they would surely obey.

  Over the years, Guyanese immigration officials had logged Americans as they arrived to join the Peoples Temple contingent. Now a roster of Jonestown residents was brought in and studied. It seemed that among the nine hundred or so Americans assumed to be living there, perhaps one hundred were men of fighting age, many of them possibly Vietnam veterans who knew how to handle guns in jungle firefights. The GDF couldn’t blunder in. Caution was required.

  Ambassador Burke demanded that the GDF make every effort to get into the area as soon as possible. He was particularly concerned about those wounded at the Port Kaituma airstrip. They needed immediate protection and medical assistance. And, he insisted, whoever perpetrated this outrage must be brought to justice as soon as possible by the Guyanese government. America expected nothing less.

  Burnham promised Burke to do what he could. GDF troops would immediately be flown to an airstrip at Matthews Ridge, a community of 25,000 about thirty miles from tiny Port Kaituma. From there they would take a train partway, then night march through the jungle, reaching Port Kaituma around daylight. Then they would assess the situation and take appropriate action. Burnham asked that the ambassador urgently convey to the American government his deep personal regret regarding this incident. It should be noted, the prime minister said, that the Guyanese government had done all it could to facilitate Congressman Ryan’s visit. With that, the meeting broke up. It was about 9 p.m. If any attack survivors remained at the Port Kaituma airstrip, they were still unaided after at least four hours.

  Roberts put together a contingent of troops. There weren’t many available, perhaps a hundred. They were herded onto transport planes and flown to Matthews Ridge. They disembarked and boarded a train, rumbling into the night toward Port Kaituma. Halfway there they disembarked; to Roberts’s great displeasure, he’d been ordered to stop at the National Service camp and gather some of the teenagers there into his force. He thought that was a terrible idea—no one knew what kind of fight the troops might have to make, and kids with guns would only add to the danger. But he obeyed his superiors. Now the group totaled about 120.

  They went forward on foot—stealth was required, since gun-wielding Jonestown insurrectionists might be anywhere. Jungle marches were difficult even in daylight, and nearly impossible at night. The northwest Guyanese jungle was among the world’s most dense, and infested with poisonous snakes and aggressive, biting insects. There had been a tremendous storm in the area the previous afternoon, and with almost every step the soldiers’ boots sank into thick, gooey mud. But they slogged ahead, and reached Port Kaituma around dawn. There was no sign of opposition, armed or otherwise. Some soldiers were left to secure the airstrip and radio Georgetown that planes could fly in to evacuate the wounded and airlift bodies out. Ryan was confirmed among the five dead. There were many wounded, several seriously and in need of urgent medical care if they were to survive. Most of the soldiers cautiously continued down the red dirt road out of Port Kaituma into the wild. After four miles, they reached the narrow cutoff that led to Jonestown. The Peoples Temple farm was now just another two miles away. The soldiers lacked combat experience. They advanced slowly, certain a fight was imminent. Gunmen might be waiting for them anywhere. But no attack came.

  As the sun rose, the air grew stifling. Each breath seared the nostrils and lungs. The jungle was soggy from the previous day’s violent storm. As the soldiers finally neared Jonestown, clouds of steam wafted up from the ground, making it difficult to see. Around them they heard jungle sounds—birds squawking, monkeys howling, the rustle of unseen animals in the nearby brush—but, as they reached the settlement perimeter, the area in front of them was eerily quiet. That suggested ambush, with a well-armed squadron of Jonestown militia lurking silently in wait until the interlopers came within range. The thick ground fog made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Some of the soldiers couldn’t even see their feet; their boots were obscured by steamy morning mist.

  In whispers, officers ordered the men to spread out and surround the central area of the settlement. From previous visits by Guyanese military and government officials, it was known that a sizable pavilion dominated there. It was as good a point as any on which to converge.

  The ring of soldiers tightened, all of them waiting for the inevitable shots indicating that the Jonestown gunmen were in place and finally firing. But there was no noise at all. The tension heightened, and then the soldiers found themselves stumbling over something, maybe logs placed on the ground by Jonestown rebels to impede them. When the soldiers looked down and waved away what they could of the ground fog, some of them screamed, and a few ran howling into the jungle. Their officers came forward, peered down, and what they saw made them want to scream, too. But they maintained a shaky composure, and did what they could to regroup their men. The pavilion loomed, and they wanted to go there, but the way was blocked by what lay on the ground, in every direction. As the fog lifted and they could see better, they got on the radio and reported back to Georgetown that something terrible had happened in Jonestown, something even worse than armed insurrection and the attack at the Port Kaituma airstrip. They struggled to find the right words. What they had found in Jonestown that morning was almost beyond imagination, let alone description:

  Bodies everywhere, seemingly too many to count, innumerable heaps of the dead.

  PART ONE

  INDIANA

  CHAPTER ONE

  LYNETTA AND JIM

  The way Lynetta Putnam Jones chose to remember it, she began life in privileged circumstances, was married only once to a handicapped veteran of World War I, was terribly mistreated by him and his cruel family, gave birth to a baby boy after a near-death mystic vision, faced down Depression-era bankers and backwoods religious charlatans, reformed a state prison system, unionized mistreated plant workers, and raised the world’s greatest man, who was in fact more god than human thanks almost entirely to the constant nur
turing of his devoted mother.

  None of it was true, beginning with her name.

  Lunett Putnam was born to Jesse and Mary Putnam on April 16 in either 1902 or 1904. Her birth records can’t be found, and later in life she mentioned both birth years, occasionally throwing in 1908 as well. Even her birthplace is disputed. It’s most often assumed to be Princeton in the southwest corner of Indiana, but some researchers believe she was born in Mount Carmel, a small Ohio town outside Cincinnati. Wherever and whenever she entered the world, afterward the girl periodically tinkered with her name, becoming Lunette, then Lynette in various census reports and legal documents, before finally settling on Lynetta.

  Reminiscing late in life, Lynetta described her childhood self as “pretty as the first dawn . . . and strong as a tiger, too.” Because of her dark coloring, people often mistook her for an Indian—as an adult, Lynetta would frequently claim Indian blood, though there is no record that she had any. Her parents wanted her to act like “a china doll,” but she confounded them by constantly tramping in the woods, “investigating the animals.” If true, this was an early example of Lynetta’s lifelong trait—defying whatever was expected of her.

  In a convoluted partial memoir dictated in Jonestown, Lynetta described Lewis Parker, apparently her father’s foster father, as a powerful Indiana timber mill owner who helped raise her. Parker, she said, “was practically in control of what happened in southern Indiana.” According to Lynetta, Grandpa Parker was renowned for kindness to his many employees, paying fair wages and constantly upgrading work conditions. In particular, he always had jobs for transients. But he suffered business setbacks, due both to the decline of the timber industry and his insistence on putting the welfare of others before his own.

  Though Lynetta’s penchant for wild exaggeration makes most of her childhood and Lewis Parker tales questionable, it’s certain that in her teen years the girl found herself in tough financial straits. Clearly bright and fanatically ambitious, Lynetta was sustained in these hard times by her firm belief in spirits and reincarnation—she swore she’d been a great woman in previous lives, and would somehow be again in this one. But spiritualism couldn’t pay living expenses. Attractive young women in such circumstances had an obvious option, and in 1920 Lynetta took a traditional approach to female survival by marrying Cecil Dickson. She was either sixteen or eighteen years old. The marriage lasted about two years. Lynetta enrolled in Jonesboro Agricultural College in Arkansas, but dropped out after her divorce. Undaunted, she married Elmer Stephens a year later—that union lasted exactly three days, from March 12, 1923, through March 14, though their divorce was finalized only in August. (Nothing is known of either Dickson or Stephens.) Lynetta tried taking classes at a business school, but without a husband providing financial support she had to go to work. Despite being “good in writing, and that sort of thing, and mathematics,” the best she could do was a factory job, which in the 1920s Midwest paid perhaps a dollar a day.