November 15, 1998, The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Led To Darkness: The Saga of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple Still Resonates in the Bay Area and Beyond, by Bob Klose, Staff Writer,

 

People's Temple: The Road to Jonestown

 

Congressman Leo Ryan chatted with his family 20 years ago this month as he prepared to leave his San Mateo County home for a fact- finding mission to Jonestown, the Peoples Temple jungle colony in Guyana.

 

"I distinctly remember him sitting in our kitchen, talking about his trip," said his daughter, Patricia Ryan who was 25 years old in 1978.

 

"He was trying to downplay it. He didn't want us to be concerned," she said. "But we were aware that he was getting involved in something bizarre."

 

There was reason for concern. Former Temple members who had fled Jonestown said Peoples Temple's charismatic leader Rev. Jim Jones was insane and was holding nearly 1,000 Americans in the jungle against their will and under armed guard. Jones' critics said he had pledged to lead his members through a ritual mass suicide if anyone attempted to interfere with his church.

 

Temple members denied the charges in shortwave radio transmissions from the settlement, but Ryan decided to visit nevertheless- and 20 years later, his daughter remembers the unease that clouded the family discussion as her father prepared to leave.

 

"When he was walking out the door I said to him: Don't let anybody shoot you. I said it in jest, but it was a nervous comment and showed, I think, that we were nervous about the trip."

 

That was the last time Patricia Ryan saw her father alive. A few days later, on a Saturday, Nov. 18, she heard on her car radio that there had been a shooting at Jonestown.

 

Ryan drove home and with her family waited for word all night, watching reports on TV and listening to the radio, until their worst fears were realized.

 

"We heard about his death about 5 a.m. on the radio," she said.

 

The report said Ryan, the Democratic congressman from San Mateo, was dead along with two NBC news men, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and Patty Parks, a Peoples Temple member who had attempted to leave Jonestown with Ryan and return to her Ukiah home in Mendocino County.

 

The congressman's party was ambushed at a remote airstrip and the bloodshed would ignite the madness and paranoia that had seized Jim Jones and the leaders of his church. When Guyanese investigators arrived the next day, they found the bodies of Peoples Temple members who died from poisoned fruit punch.

 

The first day, they counted 400 dead. The next day, the toll more than doubled. The final count showed 912 souls -- including more than 200 children and infants -- died in the jungle that day. This week relatives of the dead will celebrate and mourn the victims of Jonestown, the largest mass murder-suicide in modern history.

 

A time to remember

 

For Patricia Ryan, now 45 and a Sacramento health care lobbyist, the 20th anniversary of her father's death will be marked by a week of services, workshops and meetings. It is an effort to find some measure of understanding of religious movements that become cults.

 

Ryan spoke last week from a Chicago hotel where she was addressing the American Family Foundation, a cult research and educational foundation. She returns to the Bay Area today where hundreds of other relatives and friends, clergy and academicians are expected at large group services as well as small, private family gatherings.

 

The main events will be 7 p.m. Tuesday at the the San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption on Gough Street and 11 a.m. Wednesday at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, where the remains of 406 Jonestown victims are interred.

 

For Ryan and others whose lives have been permanently marred by Jonestown, this week's celebration and each annual celebration represent their commitment to remember, understand, and prevent similar tragedies.

 

It is a mission that, ironically, Jones himself drove home to his Peoples Temple members with the inscription -- in block letters on a sheet of plywood nailed to a timber rafter in the Jonestown dining room -- of American philosopher George Santayana's warning: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

 

"I hope people are always learning from it. Kids are growing up every day who don't know anything about Jones and Jonestown. If these yearly events help, then it is worth it and why I participate," Ryan said.

 

Idealistic beginnings

 

The Peoples Temple has been a preoccupation of nearly 30 years for John Moore, who lost two daughters and a grandchild in Jonestown.

 

Moore, a Methodist minister now retired in Davis, was an activist religious leader during the socially turbulent years of the 1960s and '70s. With his wife and children, he lived in the Bay Area, supported the farmworker organizing efforts of Caesar Chavez, worked on behalf of racial equality, opposed the war in Vietnam and provided comfort to military draft resisters, and was campus minister to students at UC Davis.

 

In the process, the Rev. Moore and his wife, Barbara, raised children who championed their parents' drive for social justice. Two daughters, Carolyn and Annie, found in Jones' Peoples Temple the perfect vehicle for helping poor people, encouraging racial equality, and delivering religious salvation.

 

Carolyn Moore joined Jones' church in 1968. Carolyn had married Larry Layton, a Quaker from Berkeley, the year before, and the couple moved to Redwood Valley, eight miles north of Ukiah. Carolyn taught high school French, and they joined the People's Temple.

 

Mendocino county base

 

At that time, Jones was just three years in Northern California but already a formidable religious and political force.

 

A charismatic preacher from Indianapolis, Jones moved to Mendocino County in 1965, bringing 145 members of his Indiana flock with him. Jones set up a small church, first in Ukiah and then in Redwood Valley, and then began a program of empowerment and growth by a ministry based on faith healings, social and racial justice programs and involvement in the political structure.

 

Jones became foreman of the Mendocino County grand jury and strengthened his ties with local elected leaders with a jury report supportive of county government. He was elected vice president of the
Legal Services Foundation in the county and became a member of the Juvenile Justice Commission.

 

Jones became a powerful political presence. He could produce busloads of church members in support of political or social events and causes, and his church membership became a potent voter bloc. He would perfect the process in San Francisco, where he became a similar source of influence after moving his Peoples Temple headquarters into a building on Geary Boulevard in 1971.

 

He amassed a fortune from Social Security income signed over to the church by parishioners. Other members deeded their family property to the Temple. According to retired UC Berkeley psychology Professor Margaret Singer, a cult expert, Jones had raised some $10 million by 1975.

 

At his church on East Road in Redwood Valley, Jones built a following which included many inner-city black Americans weary with the state of race relations in America. He exploited racial fears. He instilled a group paranoia through staged shootings during services and then offered the Temple and himself as a salvation and a haven.

 

'Struggle for justice'

 

It was into this climate that Carolyn Moore Layton and her husband stepped in 1968. Later, Annie Moore would join her sister in Redwood Valley, join the church and become educated as a nurse at Santa Rosa Junior College.

 

"My daughters were idealistic young people. Their whole lives were identified with struggle for justice and we were engaged in compassionate ministries. Peoples Temple was doing these kinds of things. The group was predominantly black and Jim Jones was charismatic," Moore said.

 

But Moore was troubled immediately upon hearing about the Temple from Carolyn.

 

"She said Jim Jones said this, Jim Jones said that and I wrote her and said I would rather know what she thought. But that was what Peoples Temple was about. Jim Jones was the authority and the people were subordinate to Jones' views. That was a clue very early on," Moore said.

 

There was no turning back for his daughters. Carolyn had a son, Kimo, by Jones even though Jones remained married to his wife, Marceline. Carolyn and Larry divorced but remained entrenched leaders in the Temple to the very end, Larry married to another woman and Carolyn as one of Jones' multiple mates. Annie would become Jones' personal nurse, and, it is believed, the last person to see Jones alive.

 

Roots of challenge

 

Jones' influence and power would rise dramatically in the 1970s, but at the same time the eventual challenges to his leadership and church would take root within his innermost circle, as well as in the press, where reports on church activity began to surface.

 

Tim Stoen had met Jones in 1967 when he was establishing a legal services office in Ukiah. Within several years, Stoen had become assistant district attorney. Privately, he was Jones' chief legal and political adviser. His wife, Grace Stoen, also held a position in Jones' hierarchy. She was a recordkeeper and treasurer of thousands of dollars in church funds, and also served as a counselor and enforcer, passing along to Jones names of Temple members who had broken church rules.

 

Jones and the Stoens would eventually be placed on a collision course after the birth of a son to Grace Stoen in 1972 at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. Although the birth certificate shows Tim Stoen as the father, within 10 days of the child's birth Stoen signed a document declaring that Jones was the boy's father.

 

Stoen would later claim paternity, but years later -- after Grace Stoen had left the church and her husband -- the issue would remain unresolved and would become a flash point in the final collapse of Jones' cult.

 

Meanwhile, the Peoples Temple underwent huge growth in the 1970s. It opened its San Francisco headquarters and a branch in Los Angeles. The church leased 3,842 acres in the Guyana jungle near the Venezuelan border, where a small group of Temple members began building a utopian agricultural project.

 

In San Francisco, Jones warmed to the political establishment. He was appointed chairman of the Housing Authority after helping George Moscone win his race for mayor. His lieutenant, Tim Stoen, became an assistant district attorney.

 

Jones and his Peoples Temple were at their peak when the press began to expose church excesses, use of armed guards, and phony healings. Jones and other leaders moved to Guyana in 1977 as the now-defunct New West Magazine prepared an expose in which former members, including Grace Stoen, reported irregularities in the transfer of personal property to the church and beatings of church members.

 

The temple denied the charges, but Jones ordered a mass exodus to Guyana. About 900 people obeyed.

 

'It was paradise'

 

Tim Stoen moved to Guyana in February 1977, six months after his wife, Grace, left him and the church.

 

"It was one of those wonderful kind of experiences," he said of the first few months of his stay in the jungle.

 

"I worked in the sawmill during the days, pushing logs through a planer. Then in the afternoons I'd help my son, John John, with his lessons, and at night we'd play. It was paradise," he said.

 

"Then Jim Jones arrived and it was hell," he said.

 

Although Stoen insists he is his son's natural father, he left the boy behind with Jones when he took an authorized leave from Jonestown after five months.

 

In Colorado, he met his former wife, Grace, who was then engaged in a custody fight with Jones for the child. Stoen said he decided then to leave the church and join the effort to get the boy out.

 

Over the next year, rigid lines would be drawn between temple supporters in California and Guyana and relatives of temple members who feared for their family members in South America.

 

A group called Concerned Relatives was formed to lobby the Peoples Temple in San Francisco and government officials to answer questions into conditions in Guyana. They charged that Jones was holding their family members hostage and under guard, and that Jones was prepared to lead his congregation into mass suicide.

 

Telling the world

 

Their concerns were given credence when Deborah Layton, the 25- year-old little sister of longtime Jones lieutenant Larry Layton, escaped from Guyana in June 1978 and declared that Jonestown was an armed camp.

 

Deborah Layton, now living in Piedmont, in the East Bay, ended 20 years of silence on her involvement with Jones with the publication last week of "Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple." As one of Jones' key secretaries, she helped take care of millions of dollars he had deposited in Swiss bank accounts. Although she said "inner voices" told her to quit the church, she remained a member for seven years, and with her mother joined the migration to Guyana.

 

"The minute my mother and I arrived, I decided I had to leave. Jim had gone mad from paranoia and drugs. Everybody was afraid in Jonestown," she said.

 

Six weeks later, while on an official trip to the Guyanese capital of Georgetown, 250 miles away, Layton escaped. In San Francisco and later at the State Department in Washington, Deborah Layton warned officials and the press that Jones was staging terrifying nighttime suicide drills in the event the outside world invaded Jonestown.

 

Ryan's mission

 

During his 1978 re-election campaign, Rep. Leo Ryan had received numerous calls for help by members of Concerned Relatives. He promised to conduct a factfinding mission after the election, and on the second week of November Ryan led a small group of aides, press and relatives to Guyana.

 

At Jonestown, the congressman was feted with dinner and music with the temple members. It was a show, and the warm welcome melted when 16 Temple members -- including members of the Parks family of Ukiah -- asked to leave with Ryan.

 

While boarding two small aircraft at a nearby airstrip, the party was ambushed by Jonestown gunmen who killed Ryan and four others, sparking the mass murder and suicide at Jonestown.

 

Loudspeakers ordered the congregation to the dining room, and there they voluntarily drank fruit punch laced with cyanide. Those who refused were forced or shot. In some cases the punch was injected into the children. Within hours, 912 Peoples Temple members were dead, including Carolyn Moore Layton and her son Kimo, and Grace and Tim Stoen's son, John Victor.

 

Jones spared himself suicide by poison and instead was shot to death by Anne Moore, who then shot herself to death.

 

There was not a living soul left when authorities arrived the next day.

 

Twenty years later, opinions are mixed on whether the tragedy of Jonestown could have been avoided.

 

Deborah Layton is critical of the government for failing to believe her when she warned them about Jones' intentions and "let Leo Ryan go down to the insanity there."

 

John R. Hall, a sociologist and cult expert at UC Davis, said the Jonestown murder and suicide was the consequence of escalating conflict by opposing sides who exaggerated their positions so that there was no middle ground, a situation similar to the fiery end to the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, in which 80 people perished.

 

For John Moore, Jonestown was a colossal tragedy.

 

"The media was doing its job. Congressman Ryan felt he was doing his job. Our family felt we were doing what was best. Concerned Relatives thought they were doing what was best. And everybody lost. I don't think it could have been prevented," said Moore -- except if Jim Jones had never been.

 

"Jim Jones was center stage. He was the lead actor. Without Jim Jones there would have been no Peoples Temple and no cataclysmic end."