Erma Miriam Winfrey: Memories of a Sweet and Beautiful Soul
(Author’s note: I have asked the editors of this site if I might remain anonymous in the writing of this article. My goal is to document and share the unique perspective that I have, but family considerations preclude me from identifying myself. It is my hope that researchers and others who have been associated with the nightmare of Jonestown, even in passing, will understand.)
My family first met Erma Winfrey when she was a member of a religious group called the WKFL Fountain of the World, located in Simi Valley, California. What makes Erma’s story and association with Peoples Temple even more tragic and unusual is that she personally knew what it meant to witness a communal group end in violence.
The leader of the WKFL Fountain group, who called himself “Krishna Venta” or simply “Master,” was murdered along with 10 other members in a violent bombing on the grounds of The Fountain of The World in 1958. This horrific suicide bombing was committed by two former members of the group who, among other accusations, claimed that Venta was having inappropriate relations with their wives. Erma was present the night the bombing occurred and valiantly tried to rescue several children from the nearby dormitory, suffering burns in the process. The experience gave her a deep personal knowledge of the nightmare that can happen in a commune, even one such as the Fountain that was dedicated to peace, love, and spiritual enlightenment.
I have fond memories of Erma, although I was fairly young and didn’t get to know the specifics of her background well. She always greeted me with a beaming smile, and radiated a warmth that you could almost feel. I remember her as one of those people who lit up a room when she entered it. She always gave me a big hug and never failed to ask how I was doing, or to include me in the conversations with the “grown-ups.” It seemed like nothing could ever get her down or defeat her optimistic view of life. I never heard her say a bad word about anyone or engage in mean-spirited gossip or anything of that sort. She seemed to always seek out positivity and reject negativity. And not in a phony, superficial way, but a genuine way.
Above all, I would describe her as a “seeker.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a seeker of truth, of concepts, of wanting to sort out the mysteries of life or the universe. In that sense, she was very unusual, in that she wasn’t happy merely to exist. She wanted her life to truly count for something. In her own way, she was a very deep thinker. Unfortunately, her desire for knowledge, for wisdom, and for truth, led her into dangerous waters. She wanted to “believe.” She wanted to re-create within her life what she had previously found at the Fountain of the World, and that’s where Jim Jones fulfilled and re-ignited some of those dreams and hopes.
For some reason, she gravitated to my parents, and they to her, probably because my parents liked people who were nice, who were warm, who seemed genuine and courteous. Erma definitely met those criteria! She was also a reliable person, a hard worker who didn’t shirk her duties. Whatever group or organization she belonged to, whatever job she held, she would give it her all. She had a work ethic and did what was asked of her, if she felt the overall goals of a group were in line with her personal needs and desires. Certainly, her bravery and selflessness without regard for her own safety during the Fountain bombing, speaks volumes about who she was. At her heart, she wanted to serve and be of service to others. That was her true driving force and motivation in life.
The Fountain, just as with Peoples Temple, emphasized that all races, all backgrounds, were welcome, and certainly that’s one of the elements that drew Erma to both groups. Unlike Peoples Temple, however, the Fountain was 99% white and over the years only had a handful of black members. As far as we knew, that wasn’t a problem for Erma, nor did I ever have the feeling that she had any racial issues or resentments. My family is white, and nearly all of her Fountain friends were white. The Fountain was not a political group and therefore didn’t seek out or recruit anyone of any particular race. The door was open to anyone who wanted to participate.
Erma was clearly an adventurous person who was willing and able to “think outside the box” in ways that most people in their lifetimes never do. Or are too afraid to try. From the earliest days, she probably broke away from her own family traditions when she joined the Fountain of the World. I have to respect the fact that she didn’t worry about what other people might think of her for doing so. At that time, she became a full member, wearing a robe, walking barefoot, and immersing herself in the communal religious life. And yet, she was very down to earth, didn’t put on airs, and was almost like a grandmotherly type of person. If it makes any sense, I would say she exuded pure love. I do not say that about many people I’ve met, but I say it about Erma. She was ready to do whatever task was assigned to her in a group, whether it was menial, working in the kitchen, or anything else. And it’s precisely those types of people who make any group run, the ones who are the glue who hold it together.
Over the years, she and my family maintained some ties and a mail correspondence as well as phone calls and personal visits. It wasn’t always easy to do, as we all moved various times over the years, and life could get hectic. But it seemed to have been important to her and to us to not break our bonds. I think this is proof of how likeable she was as a person. She truly wanted to be the best person she could be by living what she thought was the spiritual or religious values that were important.
Because of her morals and values, for her to have been so enthralled with Jim Jones and his style of preaching – with his use of foul language and sexual remarks – is quite perplexing. This was an upstanding woman who never used a cuss word or foul language or any sort of low or unseemly attitude or behavior. She wasn’t from the ‘hood. She didn’t grow up in a rough urban environment.
I vividly recall the last time we saw her. She had invited us to her apartment in downtown Los Angeles in the early 70’s. By then, she had not lived on the grounds of the Fountain of the World for some time. She was making her way in life as a retired person as best she could. Her little apartment was neat, tidy, clean and quiet. It had a nice front window that let in a lot of sunshine, a bedroom, small living area, and a cute kitchen and dining area. I remember thinking that my family had lived in worse places over the years, as had Erma herself during her years in the Fountain, where there was no indoor plumbing and only one main bathroom for all the residents, no heating, and a generally below par living situation.
We were thrilled for her and felt that at last, she was settled, safe, happy and well. She made us a delicious dinner of spaghetti and meatballs and garlic bread, for which she was constantly apologetic, as if she felt it wasn’t good enough for us. It sure tasted good to us. But that was her way. We told her again and again, how wonderful it was and how much we enjoyed seeing her, chatting over old times, and catching up about shared friends. I don’t know if she was in the early phases of associating with Peoples Temple Los Angeles, but she never mentioned anything about it. I wish I knew more of the exact timeline but can only piece it together a bit.
I think it’s important to understand that she wasn’t a homeless person when she joined Peoples Temple. She wasn’t living in a slum. She had a perfectly nice place to live. And I’m sure the County of Los Angeles was available to help her out with any financial or medical assistance she might have needed. Yes, many of those who joined Peoples Temple were down and out, but Erma was truly not one of those. She was on Social Security at that time, to qualify for that apartment. It was probably a 65+ apartment, or she qualified as low income and was able to rent that way.
The area she was living was predominantly black, and we are white, but she knew that we weren’t the type of people to avoid seeing her for any racial reason. We didn’t view her as “black,” and I’d like to think she didn’t view us as “white” or any other label – only as friends who cared about one another and wanted the best for each other.
We had seen her a few years earlier when she was working as a nanny and housekeeper for an affluent family in Ventura County, California. She invited us to meet them and see where she was living and working. They were lovely people, and we felt so happy for her that she had such a nice place to live, and such stable employment in a beautiful area. If she’d wanted, I’m sure they would have loved to have her live with them forever. Erma was a resourceful person who always seemed to seek out a beneficial environment for herself. She was not a helpless person by any means, nor someone who couldn’t fend for herself.
The most important thing to understand about Erma’s personality is that she wasn’t content with sitting in her apartment or playing Bingo with other senior citizens. That just wasn’t her mindset at all. Looking back on it, even though she didn’t outwardly show her feelings in her apartment when we visited her, I’m sure she was miserable, unhappy, unfulfilled, and lonely. Laughing and smiling on the outside (as she always did) but crying on the inside. And sadly, it’s precisely this type of person who was the perfect target for Jim Jones. In my opinion, the key to Erma was that she was desperately trying to recreate her days at the Fountain of the World, the sense of accomplishing something for humanity, of being with others of like mind, all of it centered around a charismatic leader who fit her notion of a higher “being.” When she lived at the Fountain, Krishna Venta was her “Jesus.” When she joined Peoples Temple, Jim Jones became her new “Jesus.” She’d gotten a taste of it, and she liked it.
During the years between the Fountain and Peoples Temple, Erma made contact with this group and that group, seeking – ever seeking – but nothing hitting that sweet spot for her to the point where she wanted to go commit her heart and soul again. It took a few years until somehow or somewhere, someone told her that this person, Jim Jones, might be what she was searching for. Unfortunately for her, he was.
One of the most striking memories I have about Erma after she joined Peoples Temple is that on several occasions, she asked my parents to come to a Jim Jones service in Los Angeles. She issued the invitation several times, both over the phone and in letters. Maybe putting on a bit of subtle pressure? She often enclosed fliers, brochures and other documents about Peoples Temple in her correspondence with my family. Other than that information, we knew nothing about Jim Jones and assumed Peoples Temple was a more or less “Christian” church devoted to humanitarian outreach and service. Little did we know what sort of person he actually was.
For some reason, she seemed to think that our family would be a great fit for whatever Jim Jones was providing, and finally, my parents decided to find out what all her enthusiasm for this man was all about. I was busy elsewhere, so I didn’t go. When they returned from L.A., they told me that they never went into the auditorium where he was speaking because they got a lot of “bad vibes” after seeing the huge battalion of buses arriving at the venue. That was their one and only brush with the infamous Jim Jones.
Looking back, I realize their instincts not to stick around were spot on. I presume they made a polite excuse to Erma as to why they couldn’t go to see her beloved “Jim.” In her letters, Erma had emphasized that this was a church for “black and white” and for “all” people. But what my parents saw was not an inclusive church, but a church composed of mainly one race – black. I think they felt somewhat misled by Erma in that regard, when she claimed that this was a church that welcomed “all,” yet “all” didn’t seem to be there. As much as they cared about her, they weren’t going to participate in something that felt off kilter to them. I think they suspected, even then, that this was more of a social revolution or political group, and not a religious or spiritual group regardless of Erma sometimes calling it a “Christian” church.
My final and most horrifying memory: I will never forget the day we turned on the T.V. in 1978 and saw hundreds of bodies in piles, the network news reporting that there had been a “massacre” in Jonestown, Guyana. We had no idea what this meant, but knew most likely Erma was among the dead. Shock doesn’t really describe the feelings and emotions. As the days wore on, we wondered if there were any relatives or immediate family who could claim her body. For a brief moment, my parents thought about going to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to identify her body, but ultimately decided against it. The stress, the travel expenses involved, and just the overall insanity of the whole thing persuaded them that whatever happened with Erma’s body would have to happen. We didn’t know if she would even be identified.
I was certainly glad they decided not to go, because this had been Erma’s decision and hers alone. My parents certainly were not obligated to go into a huge morgue full of rotting corpses and try to identify someone, if that would even have been possible. She was identified via fingerprints and Social Security records, so there was never truly any need for them to get involved with that side of it. She was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland with many other Jonestown victims, something I only found out years later when the internet made more resources and information available.
Recently, I saw a photo online of Erma taken by someone in Jonestown. It looks like a candid photo, not taken while she was posing for it or knew it was being taken. It shows her sitting at a table, reading over some letters. She doesn’t look like a happy person. It’s not the Erma I remember, who nearly always smiled, beamed with joy and sweetness and seemed to infuse her personal surroundings with good feelings. The Erma of the Jonestown photo is anything but that. It made me very, very sad to see. It certainly indicates that all was not well in her world there.
Like all people who lost someone in the horror of Jonestown, I’ve tormented myself with wondering what her last moments were like. Did she fight back? Did she go willingly? Did she realize that she’d made the most colossal mistake of her life? Or did she feel justified and at peace with her choice? These mysteries will never be answered, as there are no eyewitnesses that I’ve ever discovered who can speak to what her final moments were like. Perhaps it’s best that I never ever know. I’ve also wondered what she thought as she stepped off the plane in hot, muggy, humid Guyana for the first time – I have to wonder if that tidy nice apartment we saw her in during our last face-to-face visit in L.A. might have looked mighty fine compared to what she encountered at Jonestown. Maybe it put things in perspective for her. A little extra sugar for your tea? A little item from the local drugstore that you take for granted in the U.S.? We in this country do take a lot for granted and I think she was too quick to forget that before making the move into an isolated jungle with no phone, little or no mail service, and no way to get out. She foolishly thought Jonestown was going to be her perfect tropical resort retirement location, complete with nursing care, lots of friends, wonderful abundant food, fruit hanging from every tree, and beautiful sunny tropical weather. It was all a lie. Instead, what she got was a version of a concentration camp
For some reason that is hard to fathom, she tolerated the “bad boy” behavior that Jim Jones utilized as part of his revolutionary crusading persona. On the surface, it’s so unlike her own polite and caring personality. However, I’ve had to admit that maybe she secretly found his behavior rather exciting. Perhaps she could vicariously enjoy his shaking up of the “Establishment” without doing it herself. It’s easy to explain certain behaviors as “brainwashing,” but I have never thought it was that simple. People may have elements within their personality that are hidden but that emerge when the right buttons are pushed. There’s a synergistic interaction between the “Leader” and the “follower.” Both play their part in the dance. Perhaps she decided that the “ends justified the means,” which is what many of the Jonestown people unfortunately thought. But as the saying goes, if you are the “end” that justifies someone else’s “means,” it won’t feel so good.
To her credit, she apparently did express fears directly to Jim Jones before officially joining Peoples Temple, based on her past tragic experience with the Fountain bombing. But Jones somehow overcame those fears and openly announced to the congregation that he was very proud of her for not giving in to them, not letting them stop her from getting involved with his church. I guess she was a feather in his cap, a notch in his cult belt. And probably she felt flattered that he told her story to the congregation at large. He knew how to flatter people to get what he wanted out of them. At her age she probably hadn’t been flattered that way in a long time, and I’m sure it meant a lot to her. She probably missed feeling that she mattered, or that someone took notice of her. But she was worried and afraid initially.
It’s too bad she didn’t heed her own fleeting common sense that was struggling to express itself. Jones, with his charisma and charm (which I’m quite sure Erma was drawn to), overcame her very valid worries. She, of all people, knew what could happen if things spun out of control in a communal group – if the “leader” did things he shouldn’t do, ethically or morally. And yet, she was so powerfully drawn to Jones that she shut down the rational part of her mind and continued forward into death.
Even though Erma never expressed any hidden resentments to us about the United States or white people or injustice to blacks, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t feeling these resentments. Perhaps we would have been shocked at just how angry she was inside and thus felt that whatever nasty or negative behavior shown by Jim Jones was perfectly justified. Even before she left for Guyana, she had to have seen or heard some weird stuff at Peoples Temple. I suspect she put those feelings in a box, set off to one side, that she didn’t want to deal with. If this lovely lady had any failings, I’d have to say she had a pattern at both the Fountain and Peoples Temple, of ignoring red flags that “all is not right,” and shutting down the common sense part of her mind that could have saved her life.
She was so utterly blinded by what she saw as the positives about Peoples Temple, she could no longer look at the situation in a rational way. I don’t know where or why or how Erma developed this need to follow cult leaders. Both of them – Krishna Venta and Jim Jones – were men who proclaimed themselves as “godlike” or beyond. I have analyzed this in my mind a million times, and I’m sure I’ll never know the answer. I can’t crawl inside Erma’s brain and dissect her thought processes or what led her to this type of personality again and again. I can ask “why?” a million times and there will never be an answer. Erma certainly had a tragic “knack” for following leaders who took their groups into the valley of death. Of all the people who died at Jonestown, Erma, without a doubt, stands alone in a bizarre category all her own – she joined not ONE but TWO cults during her lifetime, both of which were destroyed by violence. She was severely injured in the first cult, narrowly escaping with her life, and then died in the second cult by poison. Does lightning strike twice? In her case, it did. What are the odds of that happening? As they say, real life can be stranger than fiction.
After my mom passed away, I found all the letters from Erma that she had saved in a box. Reading them, I was utterly heartbroken at the obvious ways she had been tricked and fooled by Jones, with his faked claims of “miracle healings,” and all the rest of the nonsense and devious lies he told gullible – or hopeful – people like her who wanted to believe. Many times, I just sat and cried and shook my head in disbelief. Erma did not seem like a silly woman or a gullible lady. She didn’t seem stupid or foolish. But her story has taught me that what one sees on the outside, isn’t the whole story.
I have transcribed Erma’s letters so that they are more easily readable, and have submitted them to this site, along with some extra commentary, so that visitors can read them and ponder their meaning. I certainly realize their importance to researchers and to anyone wanting to learn more about the mindset of someone who joined Peoples Temple or died at Jonestown. I have always had a great respect for history and for saving history for future generations.
If Erma wanted her life to count for something, I feel her surviving letters are her legacy because we can learn what to avoid and learn from her mistakes. Her letters also personalize her. She was a real person, not just a forgotten name or a “victim.” It could save someone’s life, because in future, there will be another Jim Jones. They might not be precisely the same type of person, but the same elements will repeat, unfortunately. By making her letters available for others to read, her life definitely counts for everything she ever wanted it to count for, which was to make a positive contribution to a vulnerable humanity and the human condition. And above all to the TRUTH, even if the truth wasn’t always something she wanted to face head-on about Jim Jones. I think she would be proud for her letters to be revealed (even if she might be momentarily annoyed). She had a sense of humor, and she loved life.
Her letters survived for a reason, and I’m a firm believer in the concept that everything does, indeed, happen for a reason.
Rest in peace, Erma. We love you.