Throughout the history of Peoples Temple – and continuing through the Jonestown years – members were required to affix their signatures at the bottom of otherwise-blank pieces of paper. Some members ended up signing a dozen or more pages, with the result being hundreds of sheets of paper with a single signature. Most of these pages are located in the main archive of Temple materials at Stanford University, but some appear among the thousands of pages in the RYMUR flles released by the FBI under the Freedom of information Act.
There were several reasons for this practice. The main one is that it was a loyalty test asked of members against the possibility of their future disloyalty. If a member defected – especially someone who had had some responsibility in the group – the blank sheets could be used as a threat to discourage that defector from speaking out against the church. After all, if someone like Deanna Mertle or Tim Stoen or Debbie Layton or Terri Buford left, they would understand that, if they caused trouble, a Bay Area or Los Angeles newspaper might receive a typed letter signed by that person confessing to a crime or moral turpitude. And who would believe a child rapist who alleges financial misdeeds committed by the group he or she recently left?
There was a second reason, however. Documents recovered from Jonestown include more than 20 pages signed by some community residents, but also by members of the Temple leadership and of Jim Jones’ family, including Jim Jones Jr., Stephan Jones, Marceline Jones, and Jim Jones himself. It is likely that these pages were kept for a different kind of insurance value: if circumstances arose that an outside entity of authority – a ministry of the Guyana government, the U.S. Embassy, a Guyana bank – needed a signed letter from a Temple leader who was unable to do so, there would already be a piece of paper ready to go.
One example of this latter use of pages involves Annie McGowan, a Black woman from Mississippi who was 70 years old on the day of her death in Jonestown. A number of blank pages with her signature survives, but so does a number of letters that manage several bank accounts in Georgetown.
The most important of these McGowan letters were those given to three men – Tim and Mike Carter, and Mike Prokes – on Jonestown’s last day. The letters list the bank accounts in her name, and direct bank officials to turn over the assets “to the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” It is unlikely that Annie McGowan was aware of either the existence of the accounts or the transfer of their proceeds to the Soviet Union.