Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime.
Speaker 5: Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mind of a Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 6: We're joined today by author Candice Fleming, here to talk
to us about Death in the Jungle, Murder betrayal, and
the Lost dream of Jonestown.
Speaker 3: Candy. Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 5: I am thrilled to be here. Kristin, Thanks, This has.
Speaker 3: Been a while in the making. I have been trying
to get you on the show.
Speaker 6: Since October, so I'm so glad that we have finally
managed to do this today because your books are really
wonderful and my students love them too. So shout out
to all of my students who have been reading your books,
and thank you for taking the time to work with
my students and answer their questions.
Speaker 3: They really appreciated it.
Speaker 5: Oh they're durable.
Speaker 3: So start by telling us about your life as a writer.
You write for a wide range of age and grade levels,
so just run for cannon real quick.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do really quick. I write everything from preschool
to young adult. Actually write for adults once in a while,
because I do write for The New York Times maybe
every six weeks or so. I write fiction, I write nonfiction.
So I write across the board, and it's those things
that interest me. I'm as interested in we've been talking
about true crime. I'm as interested as that, or cults
as I am honestly about talking bulldozers. Depends on my audience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Bulldozer's more for the youngest crowd.
Speaker 7: And then well, yeah, I think Bill that you look
like a guy who would really like stories about talking
bull closers. But yes, yes, and you What's great is
that while I'm working on a book, say like my
Jonestown book, which was a hard place.
Speaker 5: To be in for four years, pretty dark. I ended
up yeah, really dark, and so I ended up writing
a lot of preschool stuff just because I needed that
happier side. I'd go to my office some days and go, oh,
I just need some preschool today, and talking bulldozers. There
you go.
Speaker 2: Does your agent say we need more of this and
less of that, or is it just where your own
creative instinct takes you.
Speaker 5: No, I am really lucky. I don't have anyone that
says you need to write this or you should only
be writing this other. I have author friends whose editors
or their agents constantly tell them that they need to
stay doing this one thing, that you no one will
know who you are if you don't keep doing the
same thing. But I'm unbelievably lucky. I have an amazing agent,
and I have an amazing editor that pretty much trust
me to do what I want to do. I cannot
imagine doing the same thing day in and day out.
A lot of curiosities. I have a lot of interests.
I like readers of all ages, so I would really
hate being stuck pigeonholed into one type of writing. So
I think I'm really lucky they let me do what
I want to do.
Speaker 6: So you've written two true crime books now we're among friends,
about the Leopolden Lobcase, which I loved, and then this
most recent one, Death in the Jungle, about Jim Jones
and the People's Temple. Of all the true crime cases
that are out there, and we know there are hundreds,
why did you.
Speaker 3: Choose to focus on these two in particular?
Speaker 5: Because I was going to write them for teenagers, so
I was writing, it's their young adult And here's my
thinking when I write a piece of history when it's
true crime, and I read a lot of true crime,
but I'm always thinking to myself, what else do I
have to say with this piece of history to young
readers of the twenty first century. I'm always saying that
if a nonfiction book is only what it appears to
be about, then somehow the author has failed. While all
the book about Jonestown is certainly a book about people's
tuple from nineteen fifty five to nineteen seventy eight, it's
also about destructive groups. Wh Are those destructive groups in
your community? Can you dislocate them? Where are they online
who influences you every day? And everybody's subject influence, so
who are your influencers? Murder among friends? I again had
to say something more than just a story that I
have to tell you. It's my first true crime story
that I encountered. I think I was twelve years old.
I live in Chicago, so it is our urban crime story, right,
and so I thought I knew a lot about it,
but when I got in there, I discovered as always
that I did it. But what I loved about telling
that story for your adults was that there was so
much more to that story, and really a story about
the criminal justice system. And it's a story about mitigating
circumstances which we did not have. We never went in
and could never go into the judge and go, somebody
did this crime but they are mentally ill or there.
We didn't. We just didn't do that at the time.
And you have the amazing Clared Staro that comes up
with that literally comes up with that idea of that concept.
And so Illinois becomes the first state, at least in
Stake Coourt to have mitigating factors. And it's the first
time that American parents look at their own teenage kids
and say to themselves, am I doing all I can
to keep my kid from being a Nathan Leopold or
a Richard Lobe. So it has so many echoes from
then to now, and we're still asking that question, right,
is genetics? What is that we are always asking which
the same questions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for those people that might not be familiar with
Jim Jones and the People's Temple because it's been some time,
been a while, tell us the basics of the story.
I know that can be a little hard to capitalize. Yeah,
why do we care about the People's Temple and this
man named Jones.
Speaker 5: It's a fascinating story. I think it's a cautionary tale
as well. So you have a lot of people that
think they know the story don't realize that People's Temples
started in nineteen fifty five. Jim Jones formed it or
started it, created his own church in Indianapolis, and it
was based on social and economic equality, and so it
was the first desegregated church in Indianapolis. And he welcomed
African Americans, all people of color, everyone should come to
People's Temple and they would work together. And he's sincerely
in this idea of equality. They also had amazing outreach,
so they would help. The church would help all kinds
of people, no matter what color they were. If they
were needy, the church helped them. In Indianapolis, they tried
to desegregate other churches in Indianapolis by attending other church
services restaurants in Indianapolis so they would go too. He
would take his black members to a white's only restaurant
in Indianapolis and then convince the owner that his people's
temple congregation it would come to the guy's restaurant. He
wasn't going to lose business, He'd probably gained business. So
Jim Jones started out with a really great idea and
it appealed to a lot of people who wanted to
live that way. And they were not we'd love to
talk about. They were not brainwashed and they were not coerced.
The many survivors that I spoke to would tell you
that they had complete free will. They made individual choices,
even when they knew that some of those choices were
probably the wrong choices. But after twenty years, what happens
is that people's temple, how do I want to put this,
they become this community they're almost like a family. In
many cases, they are family because they all marry each other,
They adopt each other's children, they raise other people's children.
They become a communal society. And this is grow slowly
from fifty five to seventy eight, and eventually they begin
to move towards move away from the United States because
they don't believe capitalism is a way that will work
for them. They want to have their own community in Guyana,
but many of them stay because of the community. This
is their family, these are their people. These are people
with the common goal, a good goal, right altruistic goal,
and so they ignore largely all the very terrible things
that are going on with Jim Jones. And Jim Jones
has an evolution too, starting out from a guy who
begins with really great intentions, ends up a drug addict,
ends up paraloid, delusional, controlling, manipulative, you name it. He was, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: When I started reading the book, I was, I guess
I've expected to hate Jim Jones on site, but everything
that you said it sounds like a really laudable approach
desegregation and everything like it. It's I was like, this
guy doesn't sound too bad. And at some point though
he does reach that tipping point where this guy's not good,
this is nothing good is going to happen here. It's
very interesting to watch him devol throughout the book.
Speaker 3: That was fascinating.
Speaker 5: It's like he onlines and he had this it was
there in his nature too unwind Anyway, even as a kid,
he was always trying to get intention. He was really
being like a pastor. Really appealed to him because he
loved the idea that people set up when he told
him to and sat down when they told him to,
and he could get them to pray. And he of
course grew his congregation based on lies of manipulations because
he claimed that he could do faith healings, which of
course he could not, and he faked those. But he
also had this inner circle of people. A lot of
times we want to go Jim Jones, the one and only,
the evil one, right, the mastermind, But he had a
group of people, very close, inner circle of people that
did a lot of the dirty work for him at
his suggestion or his request. And these people are the
people many of those people that I spoke to, including
Jim Joe's son Steven, that they would all say that
there was a part of them that went, I shouldn't
do this. This is not the action to take. But
my community, my leader of my community, really needs me
to do this, and so they would somehow find a
way to make it work. Right, little cognitive dissonance never
hurt anybody, Oh until it does. Well.
Speaker 2: Now, so far, you haven't used the word cult.
Speaker 5: I don't use it very often.
Speaker 2: And tell us why. Because most people when they talk
about Jim Jones, the word cult appears within the first
couple of sentences of their description. And you've studiously avoided it.
Tell us why it's not a cult?
Speaker 5: Yeah, all the time. I studious it. Here's why. If
you want to use cult, go ahead and use the
word cult. But I don't. And the reason I don't
is I think cult stops a conversation. It's meant it's
almost like an insult. Oh they're a cult. Oh she's
an a cult. My partner jokes that I have a
running studio that I love and I've become friends with
everyone there. Now we do social things, and he's, oh,
you go into the cult today.
Speaker 2: I go every day.
Speaker 5: That's where it's become. So it's either not serious or
it's men as an insult, and it really stops conversation.
It stops discussion because it's become pejorative the word and
easy to fling around what does it really mean? So
I prefer destructive group because I think it opens up
conversation because we all have groups that are in our lives.
We all have groups that were passionate about, obsessed with whatever.
And if they're not a destructive group, good for you.
But there are some groups that are destructive groups that
wield influence in ways that will be destructive in some way,
but a destructive it will hurt you in some way
in a bad way.
Speaker 6: One of the things that was really interesting to me
is that he did eventually shift away from talking about God,
like it became less of a church and more of
sost ideology. Why is it the people who came to
people's temple because they wanted a church, why did they
stay even when he stopped mentioning God?
Speaker 5: Isn't that interesting? Because I really I thought that was
really interesting too. Okay, so a lot of the people
that came because he was churchy, he was Pentecostal. He
really used the whole Pentecostal shtick. And I used that intentionally,
that word because he actually borrowed. If you want to
use the mannerisms of black pastors, he used. One of
the survivors told me that if you closed your eyes,
you would have thought Jim Jones was a black pastor,
and he just up basically took that. Now. He did
that intentionally. It was to appeal to so many African Americans.
He had so many elderly African Americans that had come
from the Jim Crow South. Pentecostalism was the religion that
they were comfortable with. It's one of the reasons that
he did a lot of fake faith healing, that sort
of thing. They believed that they expected it, that comes
straight out of their own cultural history, and so he
would keep up the act enough, just enough, and some
of them were a little bit afraid. I thinking about
a particular woman named Hyacinth Thrash who joined the church
early member, joined in nineteen fifty five because she said
he'd done faith healing miracles on her first service. She
was impressed by that, but she said the real miracle
was when she left the church and he was saying
goodbye to everybody who had everybody in the congregation, and
that he actually took her hand in both of hers
and really looked at her, told her he was so
happy that she was there, and she said, for the
very first time in her life, she was in her
sixties at this point she felt seen by a white man,
and so later on she believed that he healed her
breast cancer. She was never going to leave him, and
even when she did, her sister Zipra firmly believed that
he was and he was telling people by this point
he was actually God. And in her head, Hyacinth is
saying to herself, blasphemy. He's not God, you know how.
But she's still on moved to move away from the church.
I would also say that Zippy's there, her sister, so
she didn't want to leave her. But I would also
say that by the time you get to the seventies,
seventy four, seventy five, if these people even had wanted
to leave, they couldn't have. Hyacinth had sold her house,
given all of the proceeds to the house to the church. Wow,
she gave her social Security checks. Everybody did, so it
made leaving even more difficult. So you've got a group
that's your family, that you've intermarried with, you're communally raising children.
You love each other, you know you love each other.
But additionally, you have no resources beyond people's temple.
Speaker 2: This is far beyond tithing, the tradition of giving typically
ten percent of your income, which could be a lot.
This is way beyond that. And you're just giving a
portion of your earnings. You're actually giving substantial amounts of
your economic security. And some of these people their house
might have been the single most valuable thing they owned.
Here they are giving it to the church. This is
beyond a typical level of commitment to a religious or
social organization.
Speaker 5: They were committed, I would say most of them gave
it freely, willingly, happily. They turned it over and knew
that the temple would take care of them, and the
temple did certainly not in the way they might have
taken care of themselves. Food they ate cheaper food, They
ate that together. They bought jeans and t shirts and bulks,
so they did it as cheaply as they possibly could.
But they were indeed taking care of everyone. And if
you think about some folks, like by the time they
moved from Indiana to California, and they expanded into Los
Angeles and San Francisco. They expanded into some really poverty
ridden neighborhoods. Now, think about so you're a single mom
and you've got three kids in a crime written neighborhood.
Your job barely supports them. They don't go to a
very great school. What do they do after school while
you're at work. You have no medical care, right, no
medical insurance. But the Temple will give all of that
to you, so your kids have a place to go
that's safe after school. They picked specific schools Jim Jones did,
and sent the kids to them good schools. In fact,
they were interested in educating your child and sending your
kid to college. They sent kids to college. They were doctors, lawyers, dentists.
It was amazing in many ways. Right, if you're an
elderly woman and you have no family, and you're living
on your two hundred dollars a month social Security check,
this is nineteen seventy five, you worry all the time.
Now you don't have to. You give you two hundred
dollars a month. But now you have an apartment provided
for by the Temple. You have food, you have friends,
you have somebody that comes and checks your blood pressure
every week if that's what's needed, or takes you to
your doctor's appointment, pays for your doctor's appointment. They really
did this. So I think that's part of the story
that no one ever talks about. When they talk about
people's temple, they just go, oh, why did these people
let this terrible man lead them to this terrible death.
There was a lot more going on than that. A
lot of those people were older. The large percentage were
African Americans who needed the church either financially or believed
that he was this great Pentecostal leader. But you had
fully a lot of college educated people who came not
because it was a church, but because they liked the
talk about socialism and about communal living and about racial
and economic equality. So Jones was a bit of a chameleon.
He could be everything for everybody and he did a
really good job of that.
Speaker 6: What eventually prompted people to start leaving? Because there were people,
not many, but there were people who decided to defect
and leave, whether that was here in the US or
later in Guyana. What was it that eventually prompted people
to leave? And how did Jim Jones treat the people
who decided to defect.
Speaker 5: I love you use the word defect, isn't it the
silliest word? I mean, they used it, so we use
it now. Defect like they were leaving their like Russia
or something. I know. But here's what I discovered, and
it's when I did research on destructive groups in general.
This seems to be what happens is some one event
is the event. They could have been there for years,
they could have done all sorts of things that they
would have never thought, they would have never mentioned they
could have done, and there's one event, for really, one
event that tips them over the edge. I remember when
I was doing my research, there was a woman that
was a flat earth and no amount of science could
convince her that not the old joke about if it
was flat earth everything would been knocked off by the
cats that didn't. But she just was adamant. No amount
of science would convince her. And then suddenly somebody mentioned
a fact, a flatter fact. I put that in air
quotes because it's not and she says to herself, that's
not true. I learned something else in fourth grade, and
all of a sudden, she's not a fltter earther anymore.
And that's the same thing I found with People's Temple
on a bigger level. I'll give you an example. Mike Cartmel,
my dear friend, Mike Kurtmel, was a People's Temple member
from the time he was a child until his twenties.
He was married to Jim Jones's daughter, Susannah. He was
had gone to school on the People's Temple Dime, had
become an attorney, was expected to be the heir to
People's Temple after they thought Jim Jones would retire, but
he was the appointed heir and they were like a
royal couple in People's Temple. So it's nineteen seventy four
and they are having a Catharsis session People's Temple behind
the closed doors. Members would have what they called Catharsis sessions,
which were punishment sessions. So if you did something that
Jim Jones or somebody else felt was again it's the rules,
you would get punished. And I'm not talking about like
you were told to say twenty prayers and apologize. It
was brutal punishing, pounding kids with boxing gloves and hitting
them with boards and not a good thing. So Mike
Cartmill is now an attorney, and he's been charged with
creating a form that parents will sign before children are
punished in this Catharsis session, so that if by chance
it should come up some legal issue, they will have
had the parents sign that form. And so if by
chance something happened, like the police came or the parents left,
and then charge of a form, a legal form drawn
up by Mark Mike, the attorney, that would say I
gave them my permission to do this, meaning their parents
would always have the fault. So he's filling out this,
he's working on these forms, and there happens to be
this child, little kid who's being and he's screaming and
they're holding a micro phone to his mouth so everybody
can hear how awful he hear it. And he said
he stood there and it was just like, what am
I doing? This is absolutely horrible and I feel reprehensible.
I feel ashamed. I don't want any part of this.
And he said it was seriously like someone just pulled
a blanket off his head, and suddenly he could see
what was going on in ways he'd never seen before,
and so he decided to leave. But he had to
plan it. Very carefully, because if they had known he
was going to defect, there are people that said that
Jim Jones would have had them killed. I don't know
in seventy four if that's true. We certainly know in
seventy eight it would have been, but I'm not sure
about that time. But there was enough fear that they
believed it. And so here is the son in law
of Jim Jones, and he can't tell anyone that he's
going to leave. When he finally does leave, he pretends
he's going off to work, because they did work outside
of the temple, gave their salaries to the church, and
he never came back. And where he ended up living
was in a senior citizen community for a while, so
that he was well hidden. The irony, of course, is
that Suzanne also left. He did just a few days later,
so the whole time he was planning to go, she
was planning to go. But they could not tell each other.
And there's the people's temple think, right, the group think.
So he knew that if he told Suzanne that she
would tell someone Jim Jones that he was leaving, and
so he'd be trapped before he got out, and he
would have expected her said to me, I would have
expected her to tell that, And he said, if she
had told me, I would have told on her, and
she would have expected me to do that. So there
were community rules that they lived by that they stuck to.
Speaker 2: Even though both of them were thinking of leaving, and
clearly their eyes were somewhat opened to problems like the
Catharsis sessions. Even though both of them thought about, I
need to get out of this thing, they were in
a dynamic in their own relationship where they couldn't share
what they were thinking and feeling about this isn't the
right place for us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you sound like I did. The first time he
told me the story. It was like say what what?
We can't do? What? All?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 5: Yes? And that dynamic was common. They did not tell
you have married couples that. They did not tell each
other that they were planning to leave. They did not
share their own thoughts. They may have thought that a
Catharsis session was a bad thing. They may have felt
that Jim Jones when he was slurring, they might have
come up with the idea that he actually was on drugs,
even though he pretended no one knew. But they would
never ever have said it to anyone, because anyone the community.
One of the values within the community was the fact
that you were completely loyal to the community, not the individual,
the community, and so it was your obligation to the
community to tell, even if you had to tell on
your very best friend, even if you had to tell
on your wife. And they are endless stories of that
where people just stayed very quiet and then would discover
later on that they both felt things were bad, that
things were crazy, that it wasn't right, but they all
stayed quiet.
Speaker 6: It's interesting because I don't think that a lot of
people outside of academics like yourself, who are working on
books and things like this, I don't think a lot
of people give a lot of thought to the power
of that group think ideology oh destructive a whole entire
group can be to the way an individual perceives the
whole entire rest of their life. So this is fascinating
to learn. Now when they ended up in Guyana, and
I am going to ask you how did they eventually
get from the US to Guyana, because that's a whole other, strange,
big saga that bid to keep everybody inside the compound
and to be loyal to the group really intensified even more.
Speaker 5: Tell us a.
Speaker 6: Little bit about why Guyana in the first place, and
then how did that sort of group think solidify that
control that he had over them once they reached Guyana.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at
mindover Murder.
Speaker 5: I honestly have to tell you, I know that Jim
Jones he visited Ghana really early back in the sixties
and had put it in the back of his mind
as maybe a place to take the church. So back
around comes the seventies again and he decides that they're
going to build this mission in South America. He picks
it because they speak English, but it's also a black
run The British had just left, so it was a
government that was run by black officials, and so that
sort of went along with their ideas of equality. He
also picks it because they can get a bunch of
land in the middle of the jungle, basically up against
Venezuela's border, for almost next to nothing. The Gainese are
really happy to let them have it because it's up
against the border of Venezuela, who they're having a border
issue with. So nothing better than to have a thousand
Americans on that border to keep anybody from attacking because
they have the US government that wouldn't supposedly let those
citizens be hurt. So he picks this and his first
idea is really the initial idea was to have or
a place for a like a summer almost a summer camp,
or a place that he fully intended for People's Temple
to continue in the United States, particularly in San Francisco
and in Los Angeles. The idea was that people would
come and go to Jonestown and then back to San Francisco.
They would come and go, maybe they would come for
a summer, maybe they would come for a year. Troublemakers,
those that might be a problem within the community, or
kids that needed some sort of lesson would get sent
there as well. But it was really this idea of
having a mission. It wasn't intended to be a place
for them to escape. But what happens is that there
is a magazine expos that is done on People's Temple
and on Jim Jones. It is not a nice portrayal
of People's Temple. In fact, they got it pretty right.
In fact, did they actually talk to a bunch of
people who have actually defected from People's temple, So they
get a lot of those horror stories about Catharsis sessions
and that sort of thing. So those are all printed.
He feels he needs to leave and he needs to
take everybody with him. So at first it was going
to be maybe one hundred people. There were fifty founders.
They were called the Founders, and they went and literally
made Doug. It's astonishing. They actually built a community in
the middle of the jungle. They had to learn how
to take down those trees. They had to build a
road first to their property, and then they had to
cut down all that property, and then they had to
grow crops, and then they had to build homes, and
then they had to build furniture. And they did it
all by hand. And I think that's astonishing. They loved
being there because Jones wasn't he was back in the States.
Speaker 2: Oh, now, who was running it? I always thought he
was there.
Speaker 5: No, he's not there. It's for years he's not there.
So he pops in sometimes and he comes in over
to make a promotional film for the congregation back home
at one point, they take a kind of a congregational
group trip, so the hierarchy of the church come over
and take a look at what's happening. But initially he
had fifty founding members, so he sent over particular people
start Jonestown to build, to literally build a road and
build a community in the middle of the jungle. And
these were people that were not raftsmen and engineers and
carpenters and plumbers and whatever, and yet they figure it out.
The Touchetes were one of those. I talked to Michael
Touchet who went over when he was a teenager with
his brother and his parents who were the leaders of
the Founders, and he loved every minute of it. He
loved that he learned to drive a bulldozer, He had freedom,
that he was building things with his hands, and he
felt like he was really doing something for his community.
He was building this utopia. And then this expose comes
out about People's Temple, and particularly about Jim Jones, and
he leaves the country. But even before he knows that
the exposee is coming, he knows he's being investigated, and
so he basically says, how many people can I bring
to Jonestown and they're like, how many. He says to
the leaders, the founders, how many can I bring? And
they're like, how many are you talking about? And he's everybody,
And then there's no way. We don't have enough buildings
to house them. We don't have enough showers, we don't
have enough facilities for cooking, we don't have bathrooms, we
don't have enough food. Bottom line, we don't have We're
just figuring out how to grow crops here. We do
not have enough food. And he's too bad, we're doing it.
And so what they refer to is the exodus again
Jim Jones speaking to those cultural African American routs the
know a story that they were deeply, deeply attached to.
He begins to send them over. But here's what he does.
He sends them secretly. They go off from different airports
at night. They leave from San Francisco or Los Angeles,
and then they take flights from all different from New
York and Atlanta and wherever they're flying to Georgetown. Jianna,
I don't know, but they actually do this. And so
people are like, there's a knock on the door and
there's a small group of people that have been chosen
to do this job. They knock on the door and
they say you're going today. You're leaving tonight on the
bus and the people are like what, and they're like,
we will help you pack, no worry, And so they
help them pack. They get their stuff together, they get
rid of the other stuff, they sell it and of
course keep the money for the church. They find homes
for pets. They don't bring their pets, so they find
homes for pets. They send letters to. If they're employed,
they send employer letters to the employer. They also all
got passports previously to this, and so then they're put
on a busk in the whisked away and they are
told that they will be allowed to return. If they
don't like it, they can come home, and they have
been told that it is paradise, like food drops from
the trees and it's a wonderful place to be. They're
also told they can come home. So they get there
and they learn pretty quickly that it is not paradise,
and their passports are taken. So they learn pretty quickly
that they are not going to be allowed to go
home when they want to. And the few people that
actually ask publicly are punished pretty severely publicly. So yeah,
that's how it happens. And of course, not everybody in
People's temple got there what I refer to as the
massacre in seventy eight. Not everybody got there. There's lots
of members still back in the United States.
Speaker 2: So how does Congressman Leo Ryan get involved, because he's
obviously a catalyst for some of what happened. How does
Ryan as a congressman get involved with the temple.
Speaker 5: Ryan is from California, He's a representative in the San
Francisco area. Many of the families, the concerned relatives they
call themselves, are really worried about what's happening in Guiana.
They're really worried about what's going on in Jonestown. Many
of them have defected themselves, so they understand the level
of cruelty that's happening, and they know that level of
cruelty has really ratcheted up. They also know that Jim
Jones is like completely out of his mind out he's
completely drug drug adult, he's paranoid, he's confused, he's just
completely out of his mind. They're very worried. They don't
get mail back when they do get mailed back. They
can tell that their relatives didn't write it. Some of
them discover I'm thinking about one gentleman who's not a
member of the temple, but his wife is and kids are,
and he comes home from work and they're all gone.
There's no idea where they've gone. He heads over to
the church in San Francisco, went over to the temple
in San Francisco, and nobody will tell him where his
family is. And on top of it, she's taken her
things to South America with the kids, and then the
rest of his stuff, their belongings have Bob had already sold,
oh my god, the church, so they left a mattress
on top of it. But more so, he had no
idea where his family was. And he finally realizes they've
gone to Jonestown and he wants them to come home.
They can't get a hold of anybody. No one will
help them. So they write a lot of government officials,
a lot of government officials, including President Carter at the time,
no one will pay any attention to them. And so finally,
and it long last, Congressman Leo Ryan decides that he
will go down and he will take a look and
he will bring letters from them, and he will also
give anybody who wants to come home the opportunity to
come home with him, as he calls under the protection
of the US Congress. So he goes down was a
handful of the relatives who are most deeply concerned about
what's happening with their sons, their daughters, their grandchildren, and
that's how he ends up down there.
Speaker 6: We don't want to spoil the big climactic bit of
events that comes, because it reads beautifully, and I think
it reads almost like a screenplay, like I'm sitting there
like churning through the.
Speaker 3: Pages, going, oh my god, I know what's going to happen.
I know what's going to happen.
Speaker 6: But it was amazing to watch it on school a
couple of minutes ago. When you were talking, you referenced
what happened at Jurnstown as a massacre, and I think
most people, like culturally think of it as a mass suicide.
But the way that you wrote it, you can to
me that it actually is much more of a mass
murder than it was a mass suicide. Can you explain
for people who think what happened at Jonestown was a
mass suicide.
Speaker 3: Explain to them why. I actually, no, it's more of
a murder than anything else.
Speaker 5: Oh, I think it's a definite murder. Okay, so I'll go.
I'll run through my numbers. There are like nine hundred
and eighteen people that die in November of nineteen seventy.
I'll come close with my numbers. I'm not a math person,
but I know them generally. So you have two hundred
and sixty children under the ages of sixteen. They are
not given a choice, they don't many of them or
babies don't even know what's going on, and they are
forced to take sin i'd mixed with grape flavored. It
is flavor aid, not kool aid, and it is forced
down their throats. I cannot think that we, any of us,
would call that suicide. We have an, yes, murder. We
have eighty senior citizens who were unable to come to
the pavilion because they were not physically able to get
down there, and so temple nurses and yes, the Temple
did have nurses. Temple nurses go down to their dormitories
and they inject them with the sinide, so they're not
suicides either. Then we have about one hundred and twenty people.
I think that after everyone had died, we have the
Guyanese forensic pathologist comes down and he finds at least
one hundred and twenty people that have been stabbed in
the back with a hypodermic needle, meaning somebody came to
them from the back and stabbed them. I would suggest
that is not murder. If somebody injects you is cyanide
in the back, it implies they were running. And then
you have adults other adults now, but it's mostly younger adults.
But they're in a pavilion, and for the first time
of all their meetings in the pavilion, they are surrounded
by guards who have rifles or guns, and they are
told that they have a choice. They can either take
that cyanide or they can be shot, which do you prefer.
Many of them chose to I don't have a choice.
I'm going to go with my family. I'm going to
go well, to drink it and go. Did they think
more peacefully, I don't know. But they made that choice instead,
and you have I don't know. What does that leave me?
A handful basically of people, including his most dedicated people.
So the people in the inner circle, which would include
those guards, those people that actually went up and they
took it willingly, and a few of them if it
was all taped, so the few of them even turn
around to go thank you father, which is what they
called Jim father d thank you father, they said before
they took it. And you'd say, oh, there's your suicides,
but I would say not, because they took that poison
based on information that they had been given from Jim Jones.
They had been told that there were mercenary soldiers that
were already in the jungle coming to attack the community,
and that community would be killed, the women would be raped,
the children to be tortured. They were on their way.
There was nothing else that they could do but to
kill themselves and not to give themselves up to the
capitalist mercenaries. Right, this is the kind of stuff that
they were being told. And because they were isolated, they
had no other information, only from Jim Jones. So they
were told that and they made a decision based on
information that was not true. They made a decision based
on a big lie. Is that suicide. I don't think so, because.
Speaker 2: Almost all of them are actually murdered.
Speaker 5: They really are all murdered. Even Jim Jones doesn't kill himself,
he can't take the sinide. His friend, his son, Stephen,
told me that his dad was a coward and he
probably saw how terrible and death by seanide really was,
didn't like how it looked. He could do it take
it himself, and so he had someone shoot him, and
so that's how he died. So even Hey didn't commit suicide,
it really was this small group of mostly women, and
some of those guards the inner circle. And in fact,
I would say that it is the inner circle that
has more liability for what happened, if that's the word,
because Jim Jones was so drug addled by this point
that most of the time he couldn't stand up to
go to the bathroom. People had to hold him up.
His sons would talk about how very drug addicted he was.
So he had this inner circle of young women that
did his bidding for him. It was they who figured
out how to kill nine hundred people. That circle of
people that figured out how to do it and had
the vats of sign I had made, and then organized
the people to go forward and take them or force
it down kids' throats, or however they were administering it
at the time. Jim Jones, certainly he sat there and
in his they were for tu as his throne, and
he talked to them about needing to do it. But
I do not believe if he hadn't had the help
of the Inner Circle, I don't think he probably would
have pulled it off. People would have just left, did
argue they didn't want to do it, And we have
some of them on tape, some of them we think
they probably argued, but Jim Jones would turn the tape
on and off so that those opposing voices I think
we have one. Christine's is the only one whose voice
we know thoroughly opposed it.
Speaker 2: And you mentioned Stephen, his son who was there. Now
he survived, he did?
Speaker 5: He did?
Speaker 2: How did it happen that Stephen, who was there and
remember was there later to tell the tale, not end
up dead like the others.
Speaker 5: This is the weirdest This might be the weirdest thing
that I learned. And here's the thing. Basketball. Seriously, basketball,
say somebody sent a basketball accidentally from the church, they
would send supplies over. Somebody accidentally sent a basketball to Jonestown.
Now Steven and his brothers were all big basketball players.
Some were the other boys here they're eighteen, nineteen, eighteen, nineteen,
twenty years old. They get this basketball and all of
a sudden they decide they're going to they create a
basketball hoop and they use a court that was actually
supposed to was the bottom of what was supposed to
be a building, but they take it and use it
for a basketball court. And at first, Jim Jones is like,
why would you waste your time on something frivolous? Get
to work and it's Marceline Jones, his wife, Steven's mother,
that sort of convinces him that the kids need to
blow off a little steam. And the community loves them,
so they love watching them train, they love watching them
play basketball. They're good players. They were playing in high
school before they got taken to Jonestown, so they're good
basketball players. And weirdly, the Guineas invite them to play
a series of games in Georgetown, and just before Congressman
Ryan's arrival in Jonestown, the basketball team, along with their coach,
leaves Jonestown and goes to Georgetown to play this series
of games. They get there and what Stephen told me
was that they got there and they were like away
from the rules of Jonestown. They're away from listening ears
that might tell on them, and they slowly begin to
tell each other that they think things in Jonestown are
not good and that they think things need to change.
They're also enjoying freedom in a way they've never had before.
They had a van, people's tumble had a van, and
he said they drove around town and they went to movies,
and Steven stole some money from his dad, so they
had some cash to do stuff and they were really
loving it. And they actually decided that when they got
home back to Jonestown that they were actually going to
as Steven said, this is his quote, they were going
to topple his dad. They just felt it was time
for a change of leadership and that they were going
to do that. And of course that came too late.
And so they were in Georgetown when they found out
what had happened in Jonestown, and needless to say, they
were absolutely Dova stated, that was their family, their community,
the people they loved most, and they felt like, at
least Stephen did. He felt like if they had been
there that it would not have happened. Yeah, But then
On the other hand, he said to me, I don't know, Candy,
if everybody else was taking it in the community, I
might have done it too. Taken that one minute.
Speaker 3: How willing were the Jonestown survivors to talk to you.
Speaker 5: I think they were a little reticent first. Yeah, Stephen
was terrific. I remember when I first talked to him.
I had this list of questions, right, all these questions
about his father that I wanted to ask, but they
weren't very nice questions in retrospects, right, And I get
the real man on the phone, and all of a sudden,
I think to myself, oh, this is his dad, and
so I have this I like felt so foolish, And
finally I said to mister Jones, I said, you have
to I'm really sorry, but I said, I don't know
how to ask you these questions because this is your father.
And he's completely silent for a moment, and he goes
two things, Candy, don't call me mister Jones. And the
second thing is, you can't ask me anything I haven't
already thought of. And so he was unbelievably honest, not
only about who he thought his father was, and the
terrible things that his father had done, but also about
those parts of his father that we might forget about
about his He said, one of the things that was
almost impossible to explain was his father could walk into
a room and the place would like light up. That
he could take a woman, a little old woman in
his arms, and it was a real and true emotion
coming from his father. It wasn't like a manipulation for
this single woman. It was a real, true and he said,
that's one of the hardest things to get across. Then
it was the was that so did he.
Speaker 6: Ever use the term so to see a path through
second path narcissists to describe his father?
Speaker 3: Did you ever or is jim Jo's beyond those terms?
Speaker 5: He did it? He would say that things like his
dad was a real attention seeker. His dad learned to
be manipulative early that he had to survive. He was
a child that was completely, you know what, a neglected child.
His mother's working, his dad's basically an invalid, and the
poor child's walking around seriously around town naked. His mother's
left him a b loney sandwich for the day and
he's four years old. So he learned really quickly as
a child to be something for everybody, the ladies in
the town, so that he got fed, he got clothed,
he got taken to church, he got to spend the
night at Missus Kennedy's across the street. She loved him
like a son. But he learned really early on how
to be pleasing to get what he wanted. And it
was Stephen that really pointed that out to me. But
he didn't use any psychological terms, and I don't either
in the book. Have my own opinions, but I can't
really make a diagnosis. One sure a psychiatrist, and two
I don't really know him. But yeah, I narcissism, yeah, grandiosity, Yeah, yeah,
I know. Just yeah.
Speaker 2: It's a fascinating conversation, Kenny.
Speaker 6: It's an amazing book about incredibly dark and difficult material.
How is telling the story of Jonestown and the People's
Temple affected you after four years of working in such
really deep and dark material.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I have a lot of new friends, lovely friends
that I hear from. Mike Cartmell I just heard from yesterday,
day before yesterday. He's the one that one day called
me after many conversations we had, he called me up
and he goes. One more thing. Don't forget to tell
them that we had fun, but they did. You don't
go people's temple and fun doesn't seem like they belong together.
But they did dance and have pot lucks and basketball teams.
They'd have fun. So I have a lot of friends.
Here's the thing I came to care, and I had
not expected this. I came to care very deeply about
the People's Temple, both the living and the dead, and
I found that writing this book. I started off just
writing this book, and then I got to meet these
people or I would learn about their lives, people that
are gone, and I suddenly had this unbelievable pressure to
get it right because I so wanted to push back
against that brainwashed narrative. I so wanted people to really
understand that they weren't people that were missing things in
their life. They weren't mentally ill, they weren't easily led.
There are people like you and I and can easily
fall into these sorts of groups, and that I think
has changed a lot for me. I did not expect
to become so deeply. I feel like I'm deeply entwined
with the story. It got to the point, even like
when the FBI scooped up all their photographs and all
that stuff that they scooped up after the murder of
the congressman. They went to Jonestown and they took every scrap,
and and people's tumple kept every scrap. They archived their
history pretty well. So they had all these photographs of
people that they didn't know who they were, and so
they all went to the Chicago Historical Society and they're
simply labeled boy looking at camera. And I come across
to it, I'm like, that's not a boy looking at
a camera. That's the little amous boy. I know who
that kid is. And suddenly I remember sitting there thinking,
I feel like I'm looking at my own family photograph album.
And that, I think is what I found most astonishing
about this project. And it was painful. There were times
like the end was unbelievably painful trying to write that.
I don't know how many times I got there and
I had to lay my head down on my desk
because I came to love, really loved those people. I
love Christine, Yeah, I love Hyacinth, I love Zippy. Marcelene
Marcelene Jones was an amazing woman.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah for my two cent, you got it right.
Speaker 5: Oh, thank you job.
Speaker 6: I love this book and my students who have read
it loved it, and I know that it is receiving
lots of accolades and lots of praise, all of it
well deserved. The book is Death in the Jungle, Murder, Betrayal,
and the Lost Stream of Jonestown by Candace Fleming.
Speaker 3: Candace, thank you so much for joining us today. We
really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Thanks Bill, It's fun that is going to do it.
Speaker 3: For this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so
much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder