{"id":64894,"date":"2015-10-29T17:45:15","date_gmt":"2015-10-29T17:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=64894"},"modified":"2021-06-26T13:51:05","modified_gmt":"2021-06-26T20:51:05","slug":"how-did-this-happen-and-how-did-i-not-see-it-coming","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=64894","title":{"rendered":"\u2018How Did This Happen, and How Did I Not See It Coming?\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Editor\u2019s note: This <\/em>article<\/em><\/a> was originally published by <\/em>Hazlitt<\/em><\/a>, an online magazine published by Penguin Random House, and is reprinted with permission.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Over 900 members of Jim Jones\u2019 Peoples Temple died on November 18, 1978. Here, in their own words, are some of the people who made it out alive.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor god sakes let\u2019s get on with it. We\u2019ve lived, we\u2019ve lived as no other people have lived and loved, we\u2019ve had as much of this world as you\u2019re going to get. Let\u2019s just be done with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Convinced that the agricultural commune he\u2019d established in a remote plot of Guyanese jungle was under attack, the Reverend Jim Jones decided on November 18, 1978, that it was time for everyone to die.<\/p>\n

Encouraged to commit \u201crevolutionary suicide<\/a>,\u201d the residents of what had become known as Jonestown lined up to drink from a large metal vat filled with grape Flavor-Aid that Jones and his disciples had spiked with poison. The first to drink the lethal tonic were Ruletta Paul and her one-year-old son, Robert. According to a\u00a0coroner\u2019s statement<\/a>, Paul squirted a few drops of Flavor-Aid into Robert\u2019s mouth with a syringe before taking some herself. Jones was found on the ground,\u00a0killed<\/a>\u00a0by a gunshot wound to the head. Whether it was suicide or murder remains a mystery.<\/p>\n

Jones founded the Peoples Temple in 1955, in Indianapolis, expounding a gospel that fused the exuberant intensity of evangelical Christianity with messages promoting racial integration and social equality. He designed it to be as much a movement as a church, with himself the charismatic figure at its head. Invoking the spectre of an imminent nuclear war, in 1965 Jones relocated operations to Ukiah, California, chosen for its proximity to the town of Eureka, which\u00a0Esquire magazine had identified<\/a>\u00a0as one of the nine safest places in the world to be in the event of a radiological attack. About a hundred of Jones\u2019s followers went with him.<\/p>\n

In the early 1970s, Jones opened a new headquarters for the temple in San Francisco. There, the church continued to gain members, especially among refugees of the counterculture and black Americans. (Jones and his wife adopted six mixed-race kids, and had one biological son of their own.) Jones soon expanded south to Los Angeles, and began mounting nationwide tours under the banner of \u201cHealing Services,\u201d wherein participants were reputedly \u201ccured\u201d of their ailments. Though reports of faked healings and coercive behaviour within the temple were bringing it under increasing scrutiny, several prominent politicians publicly lent it their support, including San Francisco mayor George Moscone, assemblyman Harvey Milk, and California governor Jerry Brown. At the peak of the Temple\u2019s popularity, it had as many as 7,500 members,\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to sociologist John R. Hall\u2019s 1987 book,\u00a0Gone From the Promised Land<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Further media investigations yielded more stories of abuse and financial chicanery. When\u00a0New West\u00a0magazine\u00a0published an expos\u00e9<\/a>\u00a0in August 1977, Jones packed up and left for Guyana, where construction of the \u201cPeoples Temple Agricultural Project,\u201d later renamed Jonestown, was already underway.<\/p>\n

In all,\u00a0918 people died<\/a> \u201cat Jonestown.\u201d Of them, 909 died on the actual compound, some forced to drink the cyanide concoction even after they had refused. Five more people were shot by Temple security at a nearby airstrip trying to flee, and a mother killed herself and her three children at the Temple\u2019s house in the capital of Georgetown. Though the Jonestown massacre marked the largest single-day loss of American civilians until the attacks on 9\/11, it has over the years primarily been a subject of either sensational or arcane interest. The story is distant to most by now, having ended on that terrible day, 36 years ago. But sometimes there are echoes, such as earlier this year, when the\u00a0unclaimed remains<\/a>\u00a0of nine Jonestown victims turned up in a shuttered Delaware funeral home.<\/p>\n

State officials, the story said, had enlisted the help of Jonestown survivors in identifying them and tracking down relatives. In reading it, I became curious about the\u00a035 people<\/a> who managed to escape from Jonestown that day, and so I located a few of them through the Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University and got in touch, not knowing what to expect. I discovered that, like the nine people whose ashes sat forgotten in an abandoned building for more than three decades, many Jonestown survivors were also lost upon returning home.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Vernon Gosney<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"gosney\"<\/a>Jim Jones\u2019s ultimate decision to instigate a mass suicide of his followers was precipitated by the visit of California congressman Leo Ryan to the settlement, who was there to investigate complaints of coercion and abuse made by Temple members\u2019 families back home.<\/p>\n

While the colony treated Ryan to a musical reception, staged to put it in a good light, Vernon Gosney got the attention of a member of the congressman\u2019s entourage indicating that he and fellow Temple member Monica Bagby wanted to escape.<\/p>\n

\u201cI managed to pass a note\u2026 asking Congressman Ryan to please help me and Monica get out of Jonestown,\u201d says Gosney, who was 25 years old at the time. \u201cHe came to talk to me that night, and said that we had the first two seats on the plane leaving the next day. I tried to convey to him the extreme danger he was in, but he felt that he had the \u2018Congressional shield of protection\u2019 on him and wouldn\u2019t be harmed.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a lethal miscalculation. The next afternoon, Ryan planned to fly home from a nearby jungle airstrip with Gosney, Bagby, and 14 other member-defectors. A six-passenger Cessna and a 19-passenger Twin Otter were chartered for the trip.<\/p>\n

Gosney and Bagby boarded the smaller plane, along with temple member Larry Layton, another professed defector. Bagby sat next to the pilot, Gosney took a seat in the second row, and Layton sat next to him. Behind them sat defector Dale Parks and his younger sister.<\/p>\n

Before the Cessna could take off, Layton pulled a gun from under his shirt. Then a farm tractor hauling a trailer filled with members of Jones\u2019s security team drove across the runway and stopped, blocking the planes. The security team, known as the Red Brigade, opened fire on the Twin Otter.<\/p>\n

\u201cI looked out the window and said, \u2018They\u2019re killing everybody!\u2019\u201d says Gosney. \u201cI turned around, and Larry Layton\u2014someone I had known for many years\u2014shot me three times. Twice in the abdomen and once in the leg.\u201d<\/p>\n

After wounding Gosney, Layton shot Monica Bagby twice in the back before taking aim at Parks. He pointed the barrel at Parks\u2019s face and squeezed the trigger, but the gun jammed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank god for tropical dampness, I guess.\u201d<\/p>\n

The attack killed Ryan and four others.\u00a0Bullets had perforated Gosney\u2019s diaphragm and stomach<\/a>, destroyed his spleen, and collapsed a lung. He had left Mark, his five-year-old son, behind at the colony, planning to come back for him later. Backed into a corner, Jones ordered his followers to commit suicide a short time later. Mark Gosney died of cyanide poisoning, along with 304 other children.<\/p>\n

The elder Gosney, meanwhile, lay wounded in the surrounding jungle until Guyana Defense Force soldiers arrived and rescued him the next day. After being airlifted to a U.S. military base in Puerto Rico, he was sent onward on to a hospital in Santa Rosa, California, where his father and brothers\u2014all of them armed\u2014protected him from the \u201cangels\u201d he believed the late Jones would send to finally finish him.<\/p>\n

Once out of the hospital, the sudden plunge back into the now unfamiliar world of mainstream American life spooked Gosney. He recalls his mindset as one of panic, terror, and disorientation: Though he knew Jones was dead, the sight of a white man with long black hair might trigger panic attacks and a crippling fear that his former leader was still alive.<\/p>\n

Gosney was only 19 when he joined the Peoples Temple, hoping to stave off a burgeoning addiction to drugs and alcohol. He moved to Jonestown in March 1978, inspired by Jones\u2019s vision of a colour-blind, socialist utopia in the Guyanese jungle. But if he expected some sort of communal nirvana, he instead found armed temple members patrolling the isolated settlement. Within months, he says, he was subjected to food and sleep deprivation, social isolation, and mental and physical abuse.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere had also been a lot of indoctrination regarding capitalism, socialism, society in the U.S. I had a head full of stuff that was no longer relevant to the world we lived in,\u201d says Gosney, now 61. \u201cPeople were not reticent about telling me how stupid I was. Jonestown jokes were really a shock to me. Plus, I had just lost my son.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gosney relapsed. \u201cI drank every day and took pills and took everything I could until I was unconscious,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was just too painful to face myself, to face the loss of my son, my guilt, my remorse, the mistakes I had made. Nobody could\u2019ve fucked up my life more than I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1982, Gosney moved to Hawaii, a place he describes as having \u201ca lot of different healing modalities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just getting sober from alcohol and had stopped anesthetizing myself, and it was very difficult to deal with my issues,\u201d he says. \u201cI had to start dealing with my life, my son\u2019s death, and I hooked up with these folks that were in the healing arts who were starting an ashram in Maui. I got involved with a woman, and I left my boyfriend and ran off with her. We got married and moved to Maui with about 25 other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The group established a commune and three businesses to support themselves: a restaurant, and two retail stores selling tourist souvenirs. When the community folded three years later, Gosney heard a recruitment commercial for the Maui Police Department. Improbably, he decided to apply, viewing it as a personal challenge despite having \u201cnever really been a gun person before.\u201d Gosney had recently learned he was HIV positive, and his doctor doubted he would get past the physical. Nonetheless, he passed the entrance exam. Jonestown never came up.<\/p>\n

Gosney worked as an undercover narcotics investigator for two years before being assigned to a beat patrol in uniform. He stayed with the force for 27 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know becoming a police officer might seem like an unusual choice for someone like me,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I was always someone who joined groups and was involved in group situations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, Gosney\u2019s health deteriorated, forcing him to reveal his HIV status to the department. He bounced between relationships, divorcing his wife, then married two men, one of whom died of AIDS.<\/p>\n

But no one knew of his Jonestown connection until 1987, when he was subpoenaed to testify in Larry Layton\u2019s trial.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe police department didn\u2019t know quite what to make of me,\u201d he says. \u201cThat was kind of a recurring thing with me\u2014like, \u2018Okay he\u2019s gay. Okay, now he\u2019s HIV-positive. Wait, now he\u2019s a Jonestown survivor.\u2019 I kind of went against type.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gosney retired a year and a half ago, and last winter \u201cmet the most beautiful woman in the world that I\u2019m madly in love with.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe loves me to pieces, and I love her, and life goes on, ob-la-di, ob-la-da,\u201d he says. \u201cI mean, I\u2019m still gay, but I\u2019m in love with her. That\u2019s sort of what happens to me in life: I sometimes fall in love with beautiful women. And beautiful men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gosney says retirement agrees with him; only now does he realize how much stress he was under while working for the police. He lunches once a month with his old cop buddies, and does occasional work for a private investigator. But he says he savours the \u201cincredible lightness of being, of not having to deal with people who are beat up or crying or suffering, first thing in the morning, eight hours a day, five days a week.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spirituality continues to play a big role in Gosney\u2019s life, though he emphasizes that \u201creligion\u201d doesn\u2019t. He doesn\u2019t go to church, and tends toward Buddhist and pagan beliefs. For the past 25 years he\u2019s been seeing what he calls a spiritual counsellor.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith a person like me, there\u2019s a lot of maintenance and care and healing that needed to be done to get to the place that I\u2019m at. It\u2019s been a lot of work, and I spent a lot of years being kind of out there and lost before I could find my way again. And it\u2019s really no simple thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Laura Johnston Kohl<\/strong><\/p>\n

As terrified and broken as he was, escaping Jonestown of his own volition gave Vernon Gosney an important advantage.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you choose to leave, at least you feel like you have some control over your life, that you are mastering the situation,\u201d says Marc Galanter, a professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine and author of the book\u00a0Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion<\/em>. \u201cIf you are forced to leave and you are still a devotee, it\u2019s like everybody in your entire family has just died. On top of everything else, you\u2019re made to feel like a malfeasant, if not a criminal. The finger is pointed at you, that you are in some way responsible for something terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"laura\"<\/a>Laura Johnston Kohl never wanted to leave.<\/p>\n

\u201cI fell in love with the Peoples Temple from the minute I walked in in 1970,\u201d Kohl tells me. \u201cJim had contact with\u00a0Angela Davis<\/a>, and all these people who were my heroes and heroines. I thought we could become voices for the voiceless. I completely bought his message, to the point that I would see things that I knew were wrong, but I\u2019d say, \u2018Yeah, but that\u2019s just a little part of something bigger that\u2019s really great.\u2019 l sold out the inner voice of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kohl was long committed to social justice issues before hooking up with the Peoples Temple. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., she had worked with the Black Panthers and been tear-gassed in an anti-Vietnam War demonstration before graduating from college. By 1977, Kohl says she couldn\u2019t turn away from the rampant inequality she saw all around her and moved to Jonestown, where she was in charge of an agriculture crew by day, taught Spanish by night, and helped out in the legal office into the early hours of the morning.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved it there, it was my home,\u201d Kohl says, now 67 years old. \u201cIf people asked, I never had any disparaging remarks about Jim. And he knew that if he gave the instruction that everybody commit suicide, I would do it without question.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Jones did give the instruction, Kohl happened to be at the Temple\u2019s office in Georgetown, 240 kilometres away. (A trusted member of the temple\u2019s Planning Commission, Kohl spent periods working in the city as a \u201cprocurer,\u201d soliciting donations door-to-door and buying supplies.) With her was Jones\u2019s 19-year-old son, Stephan, in the city for a basketball tournament. When Stephan was informed of his father\u2019s plan, he refused to go along with it, and managed to convince those at the office to follow him\u2014except for Sharon Amos, who sequestered herself in a bathroom and slit her three children\u2019s throats before ending her own life.<\/p>\n

Recalls Kohl: \u201cA bunch of us in the house went out to a political rally, and when we came back, the police were there, taking out Sharon and her kids in body bags.\u201d<\/p>\n

It took a few weeks for authorities to arrange transportation home for the survivors, who were scheduled to be\u00a0interrogated by the FBI<\/a>\u00a0when they got back to the United States. Kohl was escorted to New York City by air marshals, her plane greeted by reporters and angry family members of Jonestown victims. One woman who lost her son at Jonestown began screaming at Kohl when she entered the terminal, asking why Kohl had survived and her son hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow that I\u2019m a mother, I can understand that,\u201d Kohl tells me. \u201cThe thing that followed all of us survivors is that Jim died. I think that people want to have a person or an image right in front of them that they can blame. I think that we have all stood in that place and been blamed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kohl eventually moved to San Francisco, where she lived with other Jonestown exes at the Temple\u2019s headquarters until it was seized by the government. Kohl, unable to face the stigma and shame associated with Jonestown, \u201ckind of ran for the closet and hid away.\u201d<\/p>\n

She couldn\u2019t go far. The U.S. government had slapped a $500 lien against her passport for repatriation expenses. Broke, directionless, and angry, Kohl registered with a temp agency and found secretarial work, saving money to get her passport back. Frequently, she found herself at loose ends.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would sit at my typewriter and cry all day,\u201d she says. \u201cThen I\u2019d go home, and I\u2019d be in tears all night. I was just barely making it\u2014things weren\u2019t working for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Desperate for communal life again, Kohl, who was not a drug user, checked into Synanon, a Santa Monica-based rehab centre that later, somewhat controversially, became the Church of Synanon.<\/p>\n

The decision to join another communal group that had all the appearances of a cult was unpopular with Kohl\u2019s friends and family. No matter, said Kohl\u2014it was something she simply had to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I told people that I was going to move into another community they screamed at me, \u2018Don\u2019t do it, don\u2019t do it!\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cBut they didn\u2019t understand\u2014I just knew I wasn\u2019t going to make it the way I was going.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kohl describes Synanon, with which she stayed for 10 years, as a transformative experience. Though she spent much of her first three years there in tears, she says its confrontational, arguably abusive therapeutic process allowed her to \u201cexorcise [her] thinking process and evolve in my perspective of what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1990, the IRS shut down Synanon for tax evasion. By then, Kohl had married and adopted a son, gone back to college, become a Quaker, and begun teaching in the San Diego public school system. She started writing and speaking publicly about her time at Jonestown, and in 2010, published a book,\u00a0Jonestown Survivor: An Insider’s Look<\/em><\/a>. She coordinates a yearly Peoples Temple reunion, and helps other survivors compile oral histories of their experiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I found Jim Jones, I thought he was going to be my protector,\u201d Kohl says. \u201cBut I didn\u2019t spend enough time watching him carefully enough. So, I had to figure out what the fuck happened on my watch. How did this happen, and how did I not even see it coming?\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Tim Carter<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Tim<\/a>
Tim Carter – Photo courtesy of California Historical Society<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tim Carter was one of the few eyewitnesses to survive the day of the massacre at the Jonestown settlement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Peoples Temple represented the very best and the very worst of humanity at the same time,\u201d Carter tells me from his home in Oregon, where he has lived and worked as a travel agent for more than 30 years. Though it called itself a church, Carter saw the temple as a kind of political movement. \u201cWas it cultish? Absolutely. Could I make a case that it wasn\u2019t a cult? Absolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prior to joining the Peoples Temple, Carter spent three years with the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam. He got out in 1968, three days before the Tet Offensive. Following gurus was rather stylish at the time, and so after Carter finished reading\u00a0Autobiography of a Yogi, he went looking for one. \u201c[I] did a lot of kicking around, focusing on the gurus who were big back then, looking for a teacher or a master,\u201d he says, though they all left him \u201ccold.\u201d When he encountered Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, he felt something different. There was an immediate camaraderie with the other members, and a shared sense of purpose in helping fulfill Jones\u2019s dream. And Jonestown was a place where Carter, the Temple\u2019s public relations head, could raise his son far from what he considered an oppressive and racist U.S. system.<\/p>\n

Carter\u2019s wife, sister, brother-in-law, niece, nephew, and 15-month-old son, Malcolm, didn\u2019t get out of Jonestown alive. After watching his sister and son in front of him, Carter \u201cmade the choice to live,\u201d and fled to safety by running into the surrounding jungle.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t suicide, it was murder,\u201d says Carter. \u201cThere was no choice that day. People say, \u2018Why didn\u2019t anyone try to get away?\u2019 Well, I had to go and identify bodies two days later, and I know that people tried to get away. The first body I saw, the guy had been injected in the temple. There was a huge abscess. I saw abscesses on necks, arms, thighs. So many that I didn\u2019t bother to count. If you had asked people, \u2018Do you want to die right now for Jim Jones?\u2019 I guaran-fuckin-tee you wouldn\u2019t have had 918 dead.\u201d (The 918 number Carter refers to is the total who died on November 18, 1978\u2014909 in Jonestown proper, Leo Ryan and four others at the airstrip, and Sharon Amos and her three kids at the Temple\u2019s Georgetown house.)<\/p>\n

After the massacre, authorities sent Carter to a hotel in Georgetown where he and 46 others waited to be escorted home. Carter and his brother Michael, also a Temple member, called their father\u2014the only family they had left. Once the logistics were worked out, they travelled back to the United States as Laura Johnston Kohl and the others did\u2014that is, on a commercial flight, under armed guard.<\/p>\n

When the plane landed at JFK, the brothers were ordered to stay seated until all the regular passengers had disembarked, after which federal agents escorted them into the old Pan Am terminal. The walkways were lined with people banging on the glass, screaming at Carter and his brother. He remembers the scene as \u201cvery ugly, and kind of terrifying. They wanted to kick the shit out of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The government of Guyana forbade the burying of Jonestown\u2019s dead in the country, and Carter recalls how cemetery after cemetery in the U.S. also refused them. The corpses sat at a military base in Dover, Delaware, for five months, before Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, thanks to mounting political pressure from a group of pastors in the Bay Area, finally agreed to accept them.<\/p>\n

Carter would experience similar difficulty finding acceptance. To many in Burlingame, the town in northern California where he had lived prior to Jonestown, he was the reason their own kids had joined the Temple. Carter claims that The San Francisco Chronicle\u00a0<\/em>once called him the Temple\u2019s \u201cchief enforcer for the Bay Area,\u201d a description he disputes. \u201cI never even worked Temple security.\u201d Nonetheless, he knew his return would be unwelcome.<\/p>\n

He decided to head to Boise; he\u2019d grown up there, and his father was willing to take him in. On arriving, Carter gathered all the local newspapers he could, and realized he had been on the front page 29 out of the past 30 days. His name, he says, \u201chad been trashed.\u201d He claims he was under intense surveillance\u2014his phone line tapped, Secret Service paying the occasional house call, his neighbours vigilantly suspicious.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had been back for a couple of days, and I just had to get out of the house,\u201d says Carter. \u201cSo I went to a local restaurant-bar to play some pool. The looks on people\u2019s faces there\u2014it was either hatred or loathing or fear. I mean, I was hated. At the same time, if all I knew about the story was only what I had read in the papers, I\u2019m sure I would be feeling the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Gosney, Carter says he lived in fear of Jim Jones\u2019s supposed hit squads. Yet Carter\u2019s attorneys forbade him from seeing a counsellor with whom he might discuss anything Jonestown-related, fearing authorities could subpoena those he spoke with force and them to reveal what he\u2019d said.<\/p>\n

Hoping to go back to work, Carter registered with a temp agency. He was 30 years old, and aside from his stint in the military, his only work experience was with the Temple, which he duly included on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9. After a couple weeks, a local travel agency hired him to handle accounts receivable on the night shift.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy first day, the head of the department turned her desk around to face the wall because she was sure the \u2018cultists\u2019 were going to come in and slaughter everybody,\u201d Carter says. \u201cShe quit the next day. Somebody actually quit their job because I was working there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carter says the FBI called his boss once a week to check up on him, believing he might be part of a Temple hit squad waiting to be activated. Nevertheless, Carter made a good enough impression on the agency\u2019s owner, who decided to hire him on full-time. Carter made a nice career for himself, but never achieved the same sort of success in his personal life. He has twice attempted suicide and says old friends\u2014even decades later\u2014have refused any contact. His best friend from childhood won\u2019t talk to him. Despite attempts to rekindle their relationship, the answer is always the same: \u201cDon\u2019t call us anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have no idea who I am as a person, but they think they know who the fuck I am based on articles they\u2019ve read,\u201d Carter says. \u201cI mean, in the last two weeks, I\u2019ve gotten four requests for interviews\u2014one of them, from the History Channel, will be all about cults. Peoples Temple, Heaven\u2019s Gate, Charles Manson. You\u2019re lumping me in with Charles Manson? Uh, I don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recently, Carter\u2019s son recently became a father, and Carter is noticeably emotional when he tells me his grandson\u2019s name: Malcolm. It seems especially poignant to Carter\u2014an earnest homage to anything Jonestown-related, he says, is a rarity for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll be watching\u00a0Law & Order: SVU\u00a0or\u00a0SportsCenter\u00a0or something,\u201d he says, \u201cand all of a sudden there\u2019s some mocking reference to \u2018Drinking the Kool-Aid.\u2019 Well, my son, my sister, and four other members of my family were all murdered, in my opinion, and now I\u2019ve got to hear people talking about it like it ain\u2019t shit?\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Sadie and Pearl Willis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some only narrowly survived Jonestown, while others got out well before the shit really hit the fan. But even though Sadie Willis didn\u2019t die in Jonestown, the psychological damage inflicted upon her during the year she spent in the Peoples Temple ensured she never had much of a life again.<\/p>\n

Growing up in Louisiana, the heart of the Bible belt, church was a way of life for the young Sadie. It was the same when she later moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and a cousin introduced her to the Peoples Temple. According to her niece, Lela Howard, the Temple\u2019s cult-like aspects were not yet apparent to Sadie; she embraced it with the same fervour as she did the church of her youth. And like any devout worshipper, Sadie believed wholeheartedly in her pastor, Jim Jones.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t long before that faith was tested. What was once an extremely significant aspect of Sadie\u2019s life soon became an oppressive and menacing presence. When she Temple officials were tailing her around town, Sadie decided she had had enough. And so, about a year after joining the Peoples Temple, she cut ties.<\/p>\n

The hounding continued. Temple officials threatened to take away Sadie\u2019s children unless she returned to the fold, Howard says. They harassed her by phone, and when she stopped taking their calls, they showed up at her L.A. home. Feeling harassed and more than a little intimidated, Sadie left Southern California altogether and resettled in Oakland. When enforcers from the Temple began contacting Sadie\u2019s relatives in an effort to track her down, she disappeared, forced underground.<\/p>\n

Sadie stayed anywhere she could, as long as she could do so anonymously; Howard later discovered that this usually meant homeless shelters, but her precise location was always a secret. In the meantime, Sadie\u2019s kids lived with other family members around the Bay Area. For Howard, this remains the most obvious sign that Sadie genuinely feared for her safety.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo separate herself from her kids, she had to have been so afraid in order to do that,\u201d says Howard. \u201cBecause if you knew her, you knew her kids were her everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

But as Sadie was running as far away from Jim Jones as she could, her sister Pearl was falling hard for his equality gospel. She was blind to Jones\u2019s abuse, and the threats that Sadie faced.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one had never heard a non-minority talking about the troubles of being black in America before,\u201d Howard explains. \u201cThis was really something new. They heard about the miracles Jim Jones supposedly performed, which everyone knows now was just a trick. But they still had that awe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Mary<\/a>
Mary Pearl Willis – Photo courtesy California Historical Society<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There was something else Pearl hoped to get from her membership in the Peoples Temple aside from spiritual fulfillment: she wanted a baby. Howard says Pearl was promised she\u2019d be able to adopt one if she moved to Jonestown. To Howard, it was a given that Aunt Pearl would eventually come back to the U.S. with her new child\u2014it was simply a matter of when. Pearl left for Jonestown in August 1978.<\/p>\n

Three months later, she was dead.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy aunt was listed as #71-E on the body bag,\u201d Howard says. \u201cBut I knew her as Mary Pearl Willis, who made the best strawberry shortcake, who gave the best hugs, who had the most buttery-soft voice that would just wrap you up in it. She loved so hard, she\u2019s so much more deserving than 71-E. There\u2019s a person behind that number.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadie reconnected with her family on the morning of November 19, 1978, the day after her sister\u2014and Jones and hundreds of others\u2014had died. The way Howard thinks of it now, however, a part of Sadie never made it back from those early days and her time on the run.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer mind was gone,\u201d Howard says. \u201cIt was described to me as a nervous breakdown.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadie was put on medication to manage her symptoms, but soon stopped taking it. Once carefree and affectionate, Howard says, she now seemed constantly on the verge of tears.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone was pointing fingers after Aunt Pearl died\u2014they just couldn\u2019t believe this had happened. I remember my mom saying that even though Aunt Sadie knew what went on in the Peoples Temple, it wasn\u2019t Aunt Sadie\u2019s fault that Pearl was gone. It was no one\u2019s fault, no one could have told Aunt Pearl anything\u2014she truly wanted that child.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pearl was buried in an unmarked grave in her hometown of Monroe, Louisiana. No one knew quite where Pearl was laid to rest until Howard, after a long search, finally tracked her down and placed a headstone on the grave in 2007. Sadie went to visit once, but couldn\u2019t bring herself to get out of the car. It was an agonizing end to 30 years of internal torment, during which Sadie, terrified of contact with anyone connected with the Peoples Temple, lived on the margins of society, unemployed and relying on public assistance to survive.<\/p>\n

Sadie died in 2013. Howard\u2019s mother, the last of the three sisters, died this September. When I last spoke to Howard, she was in the midst of making the funeral arrangements and seemed particularly introspective. In the end, she says, she has undergone her own religious awakening of sorts, no longer needing a spiritual go-between in her religious life.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a lesson I\u2019ve carried with me since Aunt Pearl died,\u201d Howard says. \u201cJonestown made me realize that the people up there in the pulpit are just human beings, and we should not have so much adoration for them, and worship and follow pastors. They\u2019re not god, they\u2019re just people.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Among the survivors of the Peoples Temple, who even after the massacre feared hit squads might come after them, rumours long circulated that Jim Jones had actually lived and escaped, possibly to the Soviet Union or North Korea.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe myth was that Jim Jones had taken a trunk of money and was hiding somewhere in Russia,\u201d says Howard. \u201cPeople really believed that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though many conspiracy theories have floated around the Jonestown massacre over the years, including one implicating the CIA, the idea that Jones might be in the USSR, had he survived, wasn\u2019t implausible to ex-members. According to\u00a0audio recordings<\/a> and documents<\/a> compiled by Fielding McGehee III of the Jonestown Institute, Jones had developed a relationship with the Soviets, and even considered moving<\/a> his group behind the Iron Curtain. Evidence also exists<\/a> that Jones was in regular contact with representatives of the North Korean government.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seemed to be a very similar setup to Jonestown,\u201d says Vernon Gosney, recalling a North Korean book he discovered while laid up in the Jonestown infirmary. \u201cThey called their leader \u2018father,\u2019 guilt was used to make people subservient. I could see the parallels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Jonestown experience still strikes Laura Kohl as somewhat surreal, as she describes a group of \u201cvery bright, well-intentioned people who all got pulled into this labyrinth of insanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt showed me that you can be really, really smart, really, really dedicated, have [the] best motives in world, but it doesn\u2019t really matter. If you let down your guard for one second, and stop being a critical thinker, you can be sucked into any horrific thing. Most of us could have done any of the jobs, including pulling out the vat of poison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even today, ex-members continue to face suspicion, Fielding McGehee, who himself lost several relatives at Jonestown, tells me.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust a week or so ago, a friend in New Jersey found an apartment on Craigslist,\u201d McGehee says. \u201cShe met with the people put down a deposit, and in talking, said she\u2019d be coming out to California for a gathering. So, they asked who it was, and she said it was a reunion of Peoples Temple members. The next day, her deposit was returned. The day after that, she saw the apartment back on Craigslist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were all just sort of grouped together as these \u2018crazy Jonestown people,\u2019 but these were people,\u201d says Lela Howard. \u201cSome people were shot, some were injected. They found two needle marks on Aunt Pearl\u2019s arm\u2014not everyone drank. But even if they did, they were still human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Carter can relate, telling me he\u2019s heard a variation of the same thing after almost every interview he\u2019s done about Jonestown over the past three decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always ask, \u2018What\u2019s the thing that stuck out to you the most about us?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cThere hasn\u2019t been a single time that someone didn\u2019t say, \u2018I\u2019m surprised at how intelligent everybody was.\u2019 What would make you think we were stupid in the first place? Because of the way the story has been portrayed, we will always be \u2018them,\u2019 never \u2018us.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a dream, which turned into a nightmare due to Jim Jones and his mental illness-slash-drug addiction-slash-whatever,\u201d Gosney says. \u201cIt\u2019s been a long, long journey, and I had to go so deep within myself to heal. I\u2019m sure I\u2019m a deeper person, a more compassionate person, than I would\u2019ve been otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s compassion or something else entirely, Gosney\u2019s capacity to forgive is astonishing. Larry Layton, the man who nearly killed him at the airstrip back in 1978, received a 20-year prison sentence for his crimes. He was released after 18, thanks largely to an appeal Gosney made on his behalf.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were both deceived by Jim Jones,\u201d Gosney says, \u201cand I began to see Larry as someone who was more like me, [rather] than someone who shot me. I just wanted to be free, and that was my way of doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

(<\/em>Justin Rohrlich is an Emmy Award-winning journalist. His work has appeared in <\/em>Foreign Policy, Vice, Slate, Quartz, The Telegraph, and<\/em> NK News. He lives in New York City.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Editor\u2019s note: This article was originally published by Hazlitt, an online magazine published by Penguin Random House, and is reprinted with permission.) Over 900 members of Jim Jones\u2019 Peoples Temple died on November 18, 1978. Here, in their own words, are some of the people who made it out alive. \u201cFor god sakes let\u2019s get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":64830,"menu_order":19,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-64894","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64894"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110206,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64894\/revisions\/110206"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/64830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}