{"id":68711,"date":"2017-01-22T10:09:44","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T18:09:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=68711"},"modified":"2021-06-27T14:37:15","modified_gmt":"2021-06-27T21:37:15","slug":"exit-redux","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=68711","title":{"rendered":"Exit Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mark-lane\"<\/a>Mark Lane \u2014 Jonestown survivor, activist lawyer, and conspiratorial gadfly \u2014 died of a heart attack on May 10, 2016. He was 89.<\/p>\n

Lane was directly relevant to Peoples Temple as he was one of the fortunate few who walked out of Guyana alive after the 1978 Flavor Aid finale. Earlier that year he\u2019d worked himself into Jones\u2019 orbit \u2014 and was getting a monthly stipend of $6,000 \u2014 to represent The Temple against potential litigation<\/a> against Uncle Sam. He\u2019d even visited Jonestown a month before The Morbid Meltdown to give an ingratiating oration for the congregation that compared Jim Jones to Martin Luther King. Lane then swung a redux visit with Congressman Ryan and crew That Fatal Day. By his own account, he was the one who prevented Don \u201cUjara\u201d Sly from slicing Ryan into a past-tense Representative, and later (again: his retrospective testimony) used his silver tongue to grease egress from The \u2019Town once The Vat with the C stencil<\/em> got brought out for public consumption. Thanks to some quick thinking and shredded underwear \u2014 Lane claimed \u2014 he was able to escape the fatalities and make his way to safety. According to an FBI interview with him nine days later, Lane had already written his account of The Event in a 49-page manuscript, and \u201c[w]hile many adjectives are used in the statement and while Lane pictures himself as \u2018a hero,\u2019 it is nonetheless apparent that in many instances he has accurately portrayed the events as they occurred.\u201d<\/p>\n

That draft manuscript served as the outline for his autobiographical saga of Jonestown events, called The Strongest Poison<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, The Strongest Poison<\/em> was hardly the only tome Lane ever penned, of course. Ten years previous he hit the NY Times<\/em> best seller top-slot with his self-styled expos\u00e9 on the Kennedy assassination: Rush To Judgment<\/em>. Lane had actually given testimony to The Warren Commission, though in the final Report Uncle Sam<\/em> chose to ignore his opinions in favor of what witnesses actually said. Obviously, this did not deter Mr. Lane. If one wants to be generous, feel free to concede that Rush To Judgment<\/em> was his Just Asking Questions.<\/p>\n

When not pondering JFK, Lane represented MLK assassin James Earl Ray during the 1978 House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations investigation hearings, as well as defending American Indian Movement survivors after the Wounded Knee shootout.<\/p>\n

Love him or loathe him, one must at least acknowledge Lane had led an interesting life. In 1960 he was (successfully) elected to the New York state legislature; in 1968 he was (unsuccessfully) a candidate for Vice President on the Peace and Freedom Party\u2019s ballot. His ticket got about 50,000 votes.<\/p>\n

There is photographic evidence of Lane rubbing elbows with the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Bertrand Russell, and \u2014 ironically \u2014 JFK. Per his autobiography<\/a>, he once had an intimate dinner with W.E.B. DuBois. Lane also claimed that he had a cozy sit-down with \"07-lane-mccartney\"<\/a>Paul McCartney. Sadly, the restaurant menu which The Walrus Himself supposedly\/spontaneously autographed as \u201cPaul McCartney, friend of Mark Lane\u201d has yet to appear anywhere beyond Lane\u2019s memoir.<\/p>\n

In Lane\u2019s later years, he formed his own publishing company (The Lane Group, LLC) where he seemingly regurgitated earlier works with updated copyrights but \u2014 unfortunately \u2014 substandard proofreading<\/a>. His last work-in-progress seemed to be an \u201cupdate\u201d of suspicions concerning JFK\u2019s demise. It (as of this printing) is unpublished, so it is unclear how much \u201cnew\u201d material is included. Rather mercifully, the Interwebz \/Clogosphere remains (again as of this printing) bereft of conspiracy theories that Lane had finally come too close<\/em> to The Truth™ and had to be silenced<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lane\u2019s life was actually turned into a movie, Citizen Lane<\/a>, a documentary directed by Pauley Perrette (most famous as \u201cAbby\u201d on NCIS<\/a>) that mixes archival footage with contemporary interviews. Jonestown gets, ohhh<\/em>, maybe one or two moments in it, and that\u2019s stock footage.<\/p>\n

Whatever the case, there is<\/em> one final Lane\/Jonestown legacy that seems to be conspicuously missing from all his own biographies plus most other r\u00e9sum\u00e9 profiles. Debatably during \u2014 and certainly after \u2014 J\u2019Town, he and Temple defector Terri Buford had romantic relationship that resulted in the birth of a daughter, Vita\u2026 the paternity of whom Lane finally acknowledged a year before his death.<\/p>\n

(Matthew Thomas Farrell is a regular contributor to this website. His other article in this edition of <\/em>the jonestown report is Marked for Death: A (jumping over the) Cliffs Notes review<\/a>. His earlier writings for this site are collected <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>. He can be contacted at <\/em>saint@extremezone.com<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Lane \u2014 Jonestown survivor, activist lawyer, and conspiratorial gadfly \u2014 died of a heart attack on May 10, 2016. He was 89. Lane was directly relevant to Peoples Temple as he was one of the fortunate few who walked out of Guyana alive after the 1978 Flavor Aid finale. Earlier that year he\u2019d worked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":67614,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-68711","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/68711","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=68711"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/68711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110391,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/68711\/revisions\/110391"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/67614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}