Teri Buford’s Complicated Quest for Acceptance

(Cole Waterman is a Michigan-based crime reporter with a long-held interest in Peoples Temple and Jonestown who has submitted numerous primary source transcripts from the FBI’s FOIA files to the site beginning in the fall of 2023. His other contribution to this edition of the jonestown report is Shirlee Miller Fields: From Michigan to Jonestown He can be reached at colewaterman27@gmail.com.)

I never met Teresa “Teri” Buford. But over the past five months, I’ve been living in her decades-old thoughts. Reading letters, notes, and dispatches she wrote a half-century ago. Transcribing missives she penned for different eyes, sifting through the mercurial motivations that compelled her to write. Compiled by FBI investigators following the tragic collapse of Jonestown, the documents span the entirety of Teri’s time with Peoples Temple, from the early 1970s, when she found a community that gave her the purpose and stability she had long sought, to her final days in the movement as she scrambled to defect and employed subterfuge to cover her tracks. What emerged was a portrait of a woman in her twenties struggling to overcome trauma in search of a cause, seeking validation for her existence. A woman whose yearning soured into destructive tendencies, a darkness she managed to resist when the time to act arrived.

Teri’s moods and opinions vacillated through the years, at times shockingly so, but what stayed consistent were her passion and insecurity. It is as though these aspects grew in tandem and warred within her, the shrapnel spilling onto the page. Often beset by hopelessness and a near cloying diffidence, she just as frequently wrote with the verve of a committed revolutionary. At different times, she advocated or threatened violence in the starkest terms, both against Peoples Temple enemies and current members, expressed love for her foster son, implicated herself in bogus crimes, and groveled for forgiveness. Before Teri finally quit Peoples Temple in October 1978, just three weeks ahead of Jonestown’s destruction, she had tried to leave several times. Yet she always came back, unable to escape the Rev. Jim Jones’ sway. The final time she left narrowly saved her life.

It is perhaps the documents from those last few weeks, written by Teri and Temple members reacting to her sudden departure, that are the most fascinating, not only for what pertains to Teri, but for what glimpses they give within the Temple as it prepared for, and tried preventing, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan’s ill-fated visit to Jonestown.

Teri left Jonestown in mid-September 1978 for Peoples Temple’s San Francisco headquarters, later claiming she planned to leave the organization altogether as she’d grown to hate Jones and consider him “at best a sick tyrant” [Lane, 101]. It would take her another month, until the wee hours of October 27 to be precise, before she left the organization, sliding a four-page letter addressed to Jones under the door of fellow PT member Jean Brown. She then disappeared into the ether, aided by Temple attorney Mark Lane who concealed his involvement from PT leadership.

In those last fateful weeks, Teri’s innate savviness, something that had helped her rise in Temple hierarchy, allowed her to run a shell game that ensured her survival.

Teri left at a crucial moment. Tensions between the Temple and Concerned Relatives, a group of Temple members’ kin and defectors calling for investigations into the organization, were at an all-time high and on the cusp of erupting. Congressman Ryan’s looming visit to Jonestown — perceived as a boon for Concerned Relatives and a bane for PT — was in its preliminary discussions, fueling the fire. As reports from PT convey, Teri’s defection was a muddied affair, leaving both sides searching for answers. Was Teri still a Temple loyalist who was going rogue to a hunt down her former boss and now prominent enemy, PT attorney Tim Stoen and infiltrate the opposition, as she professed in a letter to Jones? The fact she signed affidavits implicating herself and Stoen in criminal acts and left them with the Temple as ammo against her is certainly baffling. Was she a “traitor,” as Jones proclaimed the day after she departed? Or was she walking a tightrope, accurately forecasting something bad was coming down and figuring her best option was getting out of its way?

As Teri’s was the last major defection before November 18, these documents offer a compelling narrative of the heightening stress within Peoples Temple’s twilight moments.

In February 2024, I began transcribing the FBI’s 266-page file on Teri, codified as RYMUR 89-4286-BB-7. Arranged haphazardly when it came to chronology, the documents dated from 1972 through her defection in late October 1978. In the earliest letter, a two-sentence note from November ’72, Teri voiced her support for sending Temple missionaries abroad. Teri, or “Terri” as she spelled her name then, had been in the Temple for a year. At age 19 in ’71, Teri left her home state of Pennsylvania and hitched a ride to California after her schizophrenic mother physically assaulted her. As a military brat, Teri was used to floating from place to place and not putting down roots. She wound up in Redwood Valley in the home of Peoples Temple members Elmer and Deanna Mertle (later to be known as Al and Jeannie Mills following their own defection) and began attending services with them [Guinn, 188].

Though initially unimpressed with Jones, she soon fell under his spell after he displayed seeming supernatural knowledge of her background. What Teri didn’t know at the time was the Mertles had been intercepting her mail and feeding its contents to Jones. And while the group’s religious veil and dalliances in Christian theology didn’t appeal to Teri, she had already fashioned herself a socialist and became enthralled with Jones’ apostolic version of it.

In short order, Teri was working full-time for the Temple, serving as attorney Tim Stoen’s secretary. It was a prestigious position wirthin the congregation. With its accompanying lodging, meals, clothing, and college tuition, Teri achieved a level of stability that had previously eluded her. The coming years would see Teri’s role expand. She joined the Planning Commission, the Temple’s governing board, and advanced into the inner-circle staff as the organization’s financial secretary. And in due time, she became one of Jones’ lovers.

Yet her time in the Temple was tumultuous. Her writings show she had an ironclad belief in the organization’s socialistic principles, to the point that her criticisms of the leadership were that it had not gone far enough in actualizing them. She wrote resignation letters in ’72 and ’74 [BB-7-AA76b and BB-7-AA57] but reiterated an affinity for and gratitude to Jones. In letters to her friend Carolyn Layton from the fall of ‘74, she described Jones as “a good pastor” who offered her help and counseling despite her “having quit the church” [BB-7-AA56]. In roughly that same period, Teri directed hostility toward Jones and the Temple, threatening in one letter to implicate them in her suicide, which she would stage as a murder [BB-7-AA54].

When back in the fold, Teri wrote with an increased flair for self-destructive tableaus. In an undated letter apparently penned before Jonestown was viable, Teri bemoaned being unable to live as a true socialist in America. “I think that if we want to try to live a socialist life we should try to get to China or completely isolate ourselves or else we should make a stand here that will open everyone’s eyes to the worldwide capitalist cruelty,” she wrote [BB-7-W1]. The stand, as she envisioned it, was a mass suicide in protest of American injustice, with Temple members writing letters in advance for distribution around the world. Her tone – that of being beleaguered by external forces preventing them from living their ideal – was common among loyalists. At the same time, she exempted Jones himself from her proposal, saying she expected him as “the only real revolutionary in the world” to survive, a role she did not envy. “I think it would be beautiful if this whole group would make a nonviolent death stand against this government … on Christmas Day,” she wrote.

Around 1977, her rhetoric grew more outwardly violent. Speculating on what should be done to maintain the movement if Jones were to suddenly die, Teri proposed a retaliation plot [BB-7-AA18-AA20] that included a hit squad of eight loyalists. They would publicly feign defection, then perpetrate murder-suicide against eight opponents. Her suggested targets included Tim and Grace Stoen and the Mertles, the couple that had once taken her in. (In one of the grim ironies that pepper the Peoples Temple-Jonestown story, Teri wrote in the same letter how PT members in the States were growing despondent over not being able to get to Jonestown fast enough. “A wave of depression struck the place,” Teri wrote. “People are begging now to go and demanding to know why they can’t go.”)

Perhaps Teri genuinely believed in the plans for death she espoused. Maybe she was writing what was expected of her, a common practice for those under Jones’ thrall. Possibly she was writing with such radical fervor to overcompensate for what her peers might have perceived as prior disloyalty; paranoia and backbiting were familiar elements in the Temple by then.

A particularly harrowing event Teri documented, likely in October 1977, might have planted the seed for her to defect, though it took another year for her to act on it. The incident involved Jones threatening to kill himself and the 600-strong population of Jonestown if he didn’t get in contact with Guyana Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy Reid quick enough [BB-7-J; BB-7-K; and BB-7-H]. Teri was in San Francisco at the time, receiving instructions via the radio from Jonestown. Included in Jones’ demands were a press conference with a final statement written by PT scribe Dick Tropp, then also in San Francisco.

“These past few days have been worse than my worst imagination,” Teri wrote. “This is the first time I have ever seen Dick Tropp break down and literally sob. Getting that final statement together tore him apart. He kept saying, ‘They can’t do it. They can’t do it. They can’t throw twenty years away.’ … Dick stayed loyal through the whole thing but emotionally I have never seen him so shattered at the idea of having to do a press conference with you all dead—or half-dead—or perhaps vegetables. The thought was horrible.”

Jones gave a two-and-a-half-hour deadline for someone to reach Reid. Teri and other members in California manned the phones in a frantic bid to reach the Guyanese politician and avert catastrophe.

“I don’t know if you know the horror I felt when you said you would be dead in two and a half hours,” Teri wrote to Jones.  “We had police in three cities working on it. Indiana, Washington [D.C.], and Chicago refused. It was the most horrible ultimatum I have ever been given in my life.”

Despite her professed horror, Teri maintained her fealty to Jones.

“Please know that I was with you all the way,” she wrote, adding two days later, “Whatever happened, I have total and complete faith in your commitment. No one in the history of the world has lived the philosophy that they believe in as do you.”

Also evident in this thread is that, regardless of Teri’s seeming diehard loyalty, she feared Jones. She had been overheard criticizing Jones with problematic PT member Eugene Chaikin. Worried that word of this would reach Jones, she took a bold move by preemptively writing to Jones denying she and Chaikin had questioned his leadership or psychological wellness. Chaikin, notably, had recently written an 11-page letter to Jones criticizing his handling of the Six-Day Siege, a grueling White Night crisis drill in September ‘77. In her note, Teri denied ever thinking, let alone saying, Jones was “crazy” while laying the blame at Chaikin’s feet. Cautioning Jones that Chaikin would undermine him, she went a step further by casting suspicion on Tropp.

“Chaikin and Dick [Tropp] by the way see eye to eye on a lot of things so we might take heed of Chaikin’s actions as being Dick’s actions sometime in the future. The two of them think a lot alike,” Teri wrote, a mere day after depicting Tropp as beside himself at the idea of having to craft a “final statement” on the Temple’s behalf.

After spending months in Jonestown, Teri was eager to return to the U.S. by the spring of ’78. About that time, she wrote Jones a note offering to head back to California to help lower his blood pressure. Jones acquiesced in September. He dispatched Teri to San Francisco with orders to slowly drug fellow PT member Sandy Bradshaw so she could in turn be sent to Jonestown.

As Teri would later tell Mark Lane, she had already made up her mind to permanently leave PT while still in Jonestown. She hoped to bide her time in San Francisco until December, when she could “get lost in the Christmas rush traffic” [Lane, 102]. Fearing her plans were being detected, she did as she had with Chaikin and Tropp — deflected by casting suspicion elsewhere. Finger-pointing among Temple members to distract Jones’ attention was nothing new, nor was it unique to Teri. Employing the tactic this time, Teri zeroed in on an odd target: head of security James “Mac” McElvane.

“I am still of the very[,] very strong opinion that Mac is an informant and the leak in the inner core here,” Teri wrote in an October 14, 1978, note to Jones [BB-7-N4]. At the time, McElvane was in San Francisco and, along with Jones, was a defendant in a lawsuit filed by a former PT members Wade and Mabel Medlock. The Medlocks had alleged they had been threatened into selling their property and giving the proceeds to the Temple. Representing the Medlocks in their fight against Jones? Attorney Tim Stoen. A criminal investigation was also underway into Jones and McElvane’s alleged extortion of the Medlocks. The rising pressure would lead Jones to summon McElvane to Guyana in mid-November ’78, just a few days before Jonestown’s fall [Moore, 96]. McElvane’s late arrival to Jonestown did not quell his devotion, for as the community crumbled in real time as heard on “The Death Tape” [Q042], he espoused his support for revolutionary suicide, leading the opposition to Christine Miller, the lone dissenter on November 18 who she pressed Jones for other options. Considering all this, why Teri would accuse such a stalwart believer of being a mole is baffling. Did Jones recognize her insinuation of McElvane’s treachery was absurd and deduce it was a bait-and-switch? Had Teri overplayed her hand?

By mid-October ’78, Teri and others at the San Francisco Temple churned out near-daily administrative reports. Teri wrote of the minutiae of stateside dealings, from organizing media interviews, discussions with attorneys, finances, and updates on members. In both these and confidential notes to Jones, she gave no indication she was considering defection. In a deferential tone, she spilled gossip on other members and worried over his health.

“Please do take care,” Buford wrote [BB-7-N9]. “In spite of all my and our faults I believe firmly in the collective and have deepest of respect for you as always.” It was possibly the penultimate letter she wrote to Jones.

About the middle of the month, a development prompted Teri to leave PT ahead of her projected Christmas outdate. Upon returning to San Francisco from Jonestown, Teri’s colleague Jean Brown shared how Jones had begun a sexual relationship with married 19-year-old Shanda James Oliver. When Shanda sought to end the association, Jones had her drugged and relegated to Jonestown’s Extended Care Unit [Reiterman, 454].

“I just wanted to leave and leave fast,” Teri would later tell Lane [Lane, 102]. “I wanted no part of contributing to the kind of degenerate behavior that [Brown] was talking about.” In letters Teri wrote to Jones and Carolyn Layton, likely between October 23-25, she referenced some knowledge of Shanda’s predicament, albeit while minimizing her opinion of it. “I also heard from Jean about Shanda and that is tragic all the way around,” she wrote to Jones [BB-7-N9]. In her letter to Layton, Teri included a note to Shanda in which she said she missed her but did not directly refer to the mistreatment she was enduring. Teri signed off by asking Shanda to give her own foster son, 4-year-old Marlon Deitrich Porter, a hug for her.

In a similar brief note to the boy, Teri wrote she had a photo of him and several other Jonestown children playing on a walkway and that she would be returning to him soon. “Dad [Jones] told me that you were being good and that he loved you a lot, so I know you are doing good,” she wrote. “See you later Detrick.”  She ended her letter with a drawing of a smiling flower.

Unfortunately, Teri would not see the child again, and the letter would amount to her farewell to him.

The morning of October 27, Teri finally left PT behind for good. She slid a typed letter addressed to Jim Jones under Jean Brown’s door. She then headed for the office of PT attorney Charles Garry, where she had also worked as an assistant, and retrieved a small briefcase of clothing she had stashed there. From there, she hopped on a plane for New York, where she met up with PT attorney Mark Lane [Lane, 101]. Lane had for some time had an infatuation with Teri, which she now used to her advantage.

Teri’s missive to Jones [BB-7-D6] was not a typical resignation letter. She continued professing her loyalty to the Temple and its social justice principles while emphasizing her concern over Jones’ failing health. She expressed frustration over PT’s inability to expose “the other side” — Concerned Relatives. She offered to be a scapegoat for the organization’s troubles and stated she was going to try infiltrating CR, her goal being to bring down Tim Stoen.

At least, that’s what she wanted Jones to think. Anticipating Jones and the PT upper echelon wouldn’t buy her story of turning double-agent, Teri included several affidavits implicating her and Stoen in financial crimes.

“This is to show you that I am leaving my life in your hands. I don’t know what else to do to prove my intentions,” Teri wrote. She acknowledged others would always consider her a traitor but felt that was a burden she could bear for the Cause. She was taking on a mission Jones was too merciful to order, “never tell[ing] anyone to take risks.” She went so far as to threaten suicide if Jones tried to stop her. After again fretting over Jones’ “terrible state” and asking him to keep an eye on her foster son, she signed off: “The only way I will ever feel trusted in the organization again is if I succeed in this so please don’t interfere.”

The letter’s repercussions were dramatic and immediate. Teri’s ardent attempt to appear as a self-sacrificing loyalist did not fool Jones.

An audibly angered Jones took to Jonestown’s PA on October 28 to announce Teri’s defection and label her a traitor [Q170]. He concealed her name and instructed residents not to speculate on the latest defector’s identity. News of the treason caused him to have a heart attack that left him dead for three minutes, he claimed. Swift retaliation would be meted out against her and all PT’s enemies, he vowed.

“I’ll get every last damn one of them, I want to tell you, every last damn one of them will die,” Jones railed. “They will die. I declare unto you, I will not stop until every last one of them is dead, and I’m a long way from death, even though I was three minutes dead, I’m a long way from dead.”

Her letter was a distraction, Teri would tell Lane. She hoped it would cause PT members to waste a few days searching for her around San Francisco while she fled to New York. In this respect, her letter was effective. While Jones may have made her for a traitor, leaders in the Bay Area were not so quick to consider Teri a lost cause. However unlikely, could she be on an ill-advised spy mission? Might she be legitimately trying to hunt down Stoen? Success on this front, in whatever erratic form it took, could backfire and further harm the Temple.

If there was confusion over Teri’s motives, there was agreement in the need to find her. She had years’ worth of institutional knowledge. How would she use it? Where and when would she surface? Would she go public and give interviews to the media and Congressman Leo Ryan, describing the abuses she witnessed and was victim to, as Debbie Blakey had done after defecting in May ’78? Was she fleeing in genuine fear of what PT members would do to her? If so, could she be expected to stay underground, a loose thread but one unlikely to cause immediate damage? It was too big of a gamble for Jones to take. He tasked PT member Tim Carter, then in Idaho visiting his father and having dental work done, to head to the Bay Area to infiltrate Concerned Relatives and, hopefully, find the vanished Teri [Reiterman, 465]. Meanwhile, Jean Brown wrote numerous administrative reports for Jonestown detailing their efforts to locate her.

“Talked to Carrie’s mom and sister,” Brown wrote in her first report since the disappearance, adopting a codename for Teri [BB-7-A12]. “Both took message verbatim without question. The sister … said she had heard from Carrie, and expected to again. The mother had not heard from her since she left Pennsylvania. The mother was slow taking the message, but kindly. She asked if I were Deitrich’s mother. I said I was local, was just passing a message.”

Brown mentioned that Mark Lane had called them that day, saying he was concerned for Teri. He did not let on he had met with Teri two days prior in New York City, or that she had told him she had quit the Temple. He apparently also neglected to mention Teri had confirmed reports from the media and Debbie Blakey regarding abuse within the Temple. In his own account, Lane claimed Brown told him the Temple would do anything to find Teri [Lane, 100]. Brown further wrote she and Bradshaw had spoken with attorney Charles Garry and his assistant, Pat Richartz, regarding Teri, and that they had concluded Teri was disturbed, unhappy, and more a danger to herself than to Peoples Temple. They cautioned the Temple not to overreact, saying Teri had not defected but was merely sick. Should Teri turn out to be a traitor, the affidavits she supplied could be useful, Garry told Brown. Richartz, meanwhile, “reiterated her intense distrust of Lane and in a way blamed Carrie’s actions on him” [BB-7-A14].

Two days later, November 2, Brown updated that she had again spoken to Lane, who was still feigning ignorance. When Brown indicated Teri — under a second codename of “Darren” — had some attraction for Lane, he shrugged it off. “He keeps reiterating I should not do anything to risk her safety,” Brown wrote [BB-7-A10]. “I think he is worried from the standpoint that something could happen to her. He agrees it is crazy.”

By then, Tim Carter was in San Francisco and collaborating with Garry and Richartz on how to infiltrate Concerned Relatives. The plan was originally discussed in Jonestown but was now slightly altered to focus on reeling Teri back in. Referred to by the codename “Brite,” Carter told Brown he was hurt by Teri’s departure, as he had been when a woman codenamed “Olive” — likely Debbie Blakey — quit PT months earlier. Brown replied by telling Carter she thought Teri was infatuated with Lane and Don Freed, a screenwriter and author who had been working with Lane on publicity favorable to the Temple. In her previous report, Brown mentioned an instance of Teri and Freed sharing a “passionate kiss,” something Freed denied while admitting he had asked her out on a date, which she declined.

Lane ran interference for Teri in the coming days, misleading Brown with erroneous information to get the Temple off the trail. Famed as a conspiracy theorist, it seemed Lane wasn’t happy unless he was actively creating a conspiracy of his own. In her November 4 report, Brown wrote of Lane’s assertion that Teri had called him but would not specify her location or what she was doing, only saying it was the government she feared. He told Brown he encouraged Teri to return to “the collective” and work on its behalf. He read her a note from Jones, informing her how her departure had taken a nasty toll on his health.

“He told her he knew the kind of work she was doing and it was a bad mistake,” Brown wrote of what Lane told her [BB-7-A15]. “Said everyone thought it was a bad mistake, not just him. … He said he reiterated that people were worried about her. She reiterated for them not to worry. He did not get the impression that she intended to change her plans. Though she was concerned by a message from – one of many code names for Jones – and was obviously thinking about it because she was quiet and serious, he got no indication she was coming back in. The conversation ended with her saying she would be in touch.”

Unaware of Lane’s duplicity, Brown thanked him for his help, and stressed Teri’s safety and Jones’ health were their biggest worries.

For the next several days, Brown omitted mentioning Teri. Other matters had taken priority as Jonestown barreled toward calamity. Primary now among the Temple’s many concerns was Congressman Leo Ryan’s impending visit, fast moving from a potential to an actuality.

In a separate report from November 4, Brown wrote how Lane had spoken with NBC News reporter Don Harris, who said he’d been assigned to cover Ryan’s visit. Harris had heard decent things about Jones from people like First Lady Rosalynn Carter, California Gov. Jerry Brown, and Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally. While his story would be critical of Peoples Temple, he wanted it to be balanced. Lane also had calls with Ryan’s office, saying the congressman was not welcome in Jonestown without him. As a result, they would have to schedule a date that worked for all parties, but it would not be within two weeks, Brown wrote [BB-7-A32]. When a Ryan staffer said they would be arriving on November 14, Lane said the date wouldn’t work for him.

“So they dickered about the date some and the assistant asked point blank: ‘Are you saying they are refusing to let Mr. Ryan come?’” Brown reported. “Mark kept at it and reemphasized that we were simply trying to work out the best time for us to have them come. Said we have nothing to hide.”

Carter’s infiltration of Concerned Relatives further confirmed Ryan’s visit. His double-agent work also explains Brown’s abrupt end of updates on the Teri situation: she was not among the relatives she had claimed to be infiltrating [Reiterman, 466]. She had fled Peoples Temple.

Those who clung to the faint hope Teri was an overzealous loyalist who had gone off half-cocked had to accept she had truly defected. Unfortunately, Brown’s reports do not detail how those in San Francisco processed Teri’s defection now being so clear-cut. They contain only one more mention of her before they end altogether. On November 8, Brown noted Lane asked for a letter from Peoples Temple clearing him to represent Teri without it being a conflict of interest. After that, Teri, in all her codenames, disappeared from Brown’s reports. Lane, though, remained a constant figure as he continued brokering a visitation deal with Ryan’s entourage and working to stymie negative publicity for the Temple.

In the final days, Brown wrote of the numerous spinning plates the Temple was struggling to keep balanced. Frustrations kept piling up: How to get PT member Joyce Parks into Venezuela to acquire medical supplies for Jonestown. Temple members in California were dealing with licensing and financial issues with the Redwood Valley Ranch, a headache Brown asked Jones to solve [BB-7-A28-31]. Citations from the Federal Communications Commission were turning into a serious matter. Concerns of renewed inquiry into the 1975 death of John Head, a PT member who fell from a warehouse roof a day after telling his parents he was planning to quit. Occasional suggestions on how to discredit Tim and Grace Stoen. The warring egos of Lane and Charles Garry on who was the Temple’s official spokesman. Bad press in the form of a National Enquirer piece that Lane was trying to thwart via a catch-and-kill scheme.

The Temple would have some luck with a few of these items. With Parks, the effort to get her into Venezuela would not only prove successful but would ultimately save her life, placing her outside Guyana on November 18. And Lane succeeded in preventing the Enquirer from publishing journalist Gordon Lindsay’s piece on the Temple. As Brown wrote, Lane paid someone with access to the publication $7,500 for an advanced copy of article. Brown copied the article, which she estimated was 100 pages long [BB-7-A18]. For whatever reason, the article never hit newsstands.

Still paramount was the effort to block Ryan’s visit and the fluctuating details surrounding it. On November 8, Brown related the delegation was expected in Guyana on November 14 despite Lane’s efforts at delay. She gave Jones guarded reassurance that Ryan was likely to travel only with his staff, that is, without defectors or Concerned Relatives. When Brown and others told attorney Garry no media would be welcome in Jonestown, he grew angry and argued they had to let the press accompany Ryan inside.

“To handle this badly will mean political death to us,” Brown wrote with that unsettling prescience pervading documents from Jonestown’s last days [BB-7-A17]. “He was thinking every sort of threat to get us to allow them in.”

In her final report of November 10, Brown described how Garry spoke with San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman, whom the Temple already considered an enemy. The lawyer told the reporter there was no chance of him getting into Jonestown. This wasn’t something he agreed with, Garry assured him, as he thought Reiterman “should go and see how wonderful Jonestown was, and he would be instantly converted” [BB-7-A21]. Of course, Reiterman did end up going to Jonestown, but a convert he did not become. Instead, he suffered two gunshot wounds when twelve PT members opened fire on the Port Kaituma airstrip, killing Ryan, defector Patricia Parks, Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and NBC reporter Harris.

Much of what Brown recorded in those dwindling days takes on an eerie quality in retrospect. The hindsight bias makes Jonestown’s approaching disintegration seem transparently obvious, too far to be preventable and past the threshold into inevitable. This is the case even with Joyce Parks, for while she survived, there is a bitter irony that she did so while obtaining medicine for children who were then being killed. Fatalistic dread is how I described reading the documents, like watching a movie where it’s clear to all but the hapless character on screen that they are about to fall victim to something horrendous.

Was this what Teri Buford recognized, and why she was desperate enough to jump from the fire of Jim Jones into the frying pan of Mark Lane? Or was her departure the culmination of a long-simmering hatred for Jones for turning his back on socialism, as she claimed? Maybe the timing was a coincidence, a stroke of luck for once. However long she planned her defection, an uncertain future with as questionable a figure as Lane, devoid of her community and found family, was preferable to what she assumed was in store for Peoples Temple. Did she anticipate things would get as bad as they did, with Jones making good on his threats of a final White Night? I doubt Teri’s fears were that specific. I’d say her survival instinct alerted her to the signals that the train was barreling ahead full-steam, and while it might not speed over the cliff, it was clearly running out of track. According to Lane, he was in Jonestown on November 18 because she convinced him to make the trip out of concern for her loved ones still there. Perhaps she didn’t have a firm idea on what form her worst-case scenario would take. Her writings from the time remain open to interpretation. She appears mentally scattered and impulsive, yet she obviously plotted her defection with precision. Prolonged flight-or-fight with calculated misdirection thrown in? Like much of the Jonestown saga, it provides a host of questions, yet seldom yields definitive answers.

When the onslaught of death occurred November 18, Teri was in Washington, D.C., hidden in a house owned by Lane. In the aftermath, the FBI sought her out, believing she had PT financial records and a hit list of enemies. They considered her the “most dangerous and most knowledgeable member of the PT Planning Commission” [RYMUR 89-4286-749]. Lane, as usual, obfuscated and kept Teri hidden in hopes of finagling her an immunity agreement. The FBI learned of her whereabouts after NBC cameramen filmed her entering Lane’s Memphis home on December 4. Lane eventually facilitated an interview, though Teri would still be subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Ryan’s assassination.

Teri Buford never faced criminal prosecution in connection with the deaths, but her survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress stayed with her throughout her life. As alluded to, Lane proved himself to be a flawed savior in the long run. He was abusive toward her as well and she eventually left him behind after their union produced a daughter. While she processed her grief and feelings of survival through her poetry and painting, she spent her professional life advocating for those with disabilities. Plagued by health issues toward the end of her life, and she died at age 66 on November 28, 2018, a little after the 40^th anniversary of Jonestown’s demise.

As I mentioned at the outset, I never met Teri. Poring over her writings from ‘72-’78, though, I get an image of the woman she was then, but it’s a hazy one. Just when I think I have Teri figured out, her rationale escapes me. She’s always shifting, her positions flitting about as if to deliberately avoid being pinned down. It’s a defining trait that saved her life. Equally intense in moments of despair or hope, the Teri of that era offers as much intrigue as she does insight. Yet despite her elusiveness, her writings offer a peek into Peoples Temple’s final days. Reading between the lines lends a unique view of one of the organization’s most dedicated higher-ups turning defector just in time to save herself. It’s a riveting drama in itself, but beyond that, it shows that 45 years on new perspectives, new angles, and new stories are waiting to be discovered within the Jonestown vortex.

Works Cited