Jonestown

We all know what happened at Jonestown, but who was Jim Jones before the tragedy at the People's Temple?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
If you're going to Send Francisco or Seattle, you should
come to our live shows.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
That's right, well done, Chuck. We are still selling tickets
to our live shows on January twenty fourth and twenty
six On January twenty fourth in Seattle at the Paramount
Theater and on January twenty sixth in San Francisco at
Sydney Goldstein Theater. Tickets are still available to come see us.
Hats off to Portland for selling out our show at
Revolution Hall already, and sorry to everybody who got shut out.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
That's right. So where can they get tickets at our website?

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Right?

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Stuff? Youshould do dot com.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah or linktree slash sysk.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
We'll see everybody.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Then.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. The Three Amigos, the TWA Musketeers,
the Trace Lay Chase, all that back together again in
a brand new year four.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
That's right in our time. This is our first recording
after our increasingly long Christmas break, which is just wonderful.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Yeah, I feel like Jerry sucked us in that first
week quite a bit. It was like a quasi work
week that we weren't supposed to have, which I'm still
a little mad about.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, but not recording. So it's a nice long break.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
But I always feel like we have to kick or
at least I have to kick the rust off a
little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. I think we're gonna
do great though, because it doesn't feel rusty. I'm sure
we'll be rusty, but it didn't feel like we're going
to be Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
Oh can I say a quick thing too, Yeah, this
is something that it didn't occur to me until we
were on the break. Like we always like to thank
people around the holidays for support and stuff, but I
think we should specifically thank people who operate as our
back getters and our quasi quality control people because all

(02:08):
the time where we get letters from people that say
like or emails that say, like, hey, you misspelled this
word in the podcast release, but this one came out twice,
or this ad is really offensive, so maybe you guys
want to double check that, right, that kind of thing,
Like it just feels good. People are always really kind
and alert us to things that we should be paying

(02:30):
attention to because sometimes things slip through, and I just
want to say thanks for everyone looking out for us.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Man, when did that occur to you? How long have
you been hanging on to that one? Not?

Speaker 3 (02:40):
I mean it was over the break when I think
we got a couple of things about either an ad
or something, and I was like, you know what, we
should thank people for getting our back and letting us
alerting us to stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
So that's what triggered at some emails. You didn't just
like sit bowl up right in the middle of the
nine I think, oh god, no, well that was nice.
If you check. Yeah, we'll start adopting that at the
end of the year the holidays or something like that.
How about that.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Nope, that's the only time we'll ever do it.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Oh okay, cool, I'm fine with that too. So we're
talking today about something I've been avoiding for a while.
I started to look into this and start researching it,
and I was going to suggest it a couple of
years ago, and I was like, this is one of
the bleakest things that's ever happened outside of war in history.

(03:32):
It's up there for sure, and it really sucks you
in in the grimmest possible way when you have to
like really dive into research because we're talking about Jonestown,
and for anybody who's even everyone is at least passingly
familiar with the word Jonestown, the name Jonestown. Yeah, or
you might have heard, you know, the phrase drinking the
kool aid, like you've really bought into something. You might

(03:54):
even be brainwashed that came out of Jonestown, true or not.
And when you talk about it though, it's not something
you can talk about flip Ley, it's not something you
can just kind of breeze through, Like you really have
to get in there and understand what the heck was
going on because it's such a bizarre, horrible event. Yeah,
that it just really kind of sucks you in, and

(04:16):
when you get in there, it really it's grim. It's
a grim. It was a grim research event for me.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
I mean it's so grim that a band named themselves
after it with a pithy pun attached.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah. One of the great band names of all time,
Brian jonesown Massacre Out.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Did you think that is?

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Oh? Yeah, I think it's a great I.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Have a hard time with pun band names, especially the
sort of beginning middle end ones.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Like Kathleen Turner Overdrive.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, I don't know, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
I'm with you. I'm with you on the Kathleen Turner Overdrive.
It's clever, but it's one of those ones you hear
once and you're like, that's funny. I think the difference
between those two bands, though, is the Brian jonesown Massacre
act actually like hardcore musicians. Yeah, that have like a
bleak enough outlook that they could take that that name

(05:09):
and it's not just a like an elbow U in
the ribs kind of joke.

Speaker 3 (05:14):
Yeah, and Brian Jones like another classic musician, whereas Kathleen Turner.
I love Kathleen Turner, but I don't know, it just
seemed a little extra pick.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
You can't even play the spoons.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
Oh you kidding, She's a great spooner.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
Not only did Brian Jones saw Massacre name themselves that,
they also have a song called the Ballad of Jim Jones.
If you heard that, Oh no, it's it's they got harmonica.
It's real kind of Bob dillany interesting. Uh, Yeah, it's
really something. It's something to go check out. I don't
know if everybody's gonna like them, yeah, but some people
probably won't.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
Yeah, and we should also point out this is a
you know, this is the stuff you should know, forty
five ish minute overview, like this could be way way
longer and multi episodes long if we really got into
all the sort of ups and downs of Jim Jones
through his odd life.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah, that's a good idea. I wonder if anyone's ever
done a multi part of podcast time.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Okay, I thought you were a big serious.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yeah, no, totally, I mean yeah, but I'm glad you
said that because it is true, Like, there's a lot
a lot about this and we'll try to get everything
we talk about right though.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
Right, that's right, And thanks to the grabster for the
help on this one.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yeah, for sure, way to go, Grabster. And we should
probably say just a I don't even know if we
need to give an overview of what happened, We could
probably just jump in and start and talk about Jim Jones,
the guy at the center of this whole thing.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
Right, Well, I think people get mad when we do that,
assuming that people know. Okay, so maybe just the quickest
of spoilers is that on November eighteenth, nineteen seventy eight,
more than nine hundred people died in Guyana at the
hands of a sadistic cult leader named Jim Jones.

Speaker 1 (06:55):
And now we can start right.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Well, the big twist to all that is he didn't
personally kill them physically, he used his power to get
them to kill themselves. It's as weird and twisted as that.
So Jim Jones is the kind of person, or he
was the kind of person who could actually make something

(07:20):
like that happen. He was a very very rare individual.
I've seen him diagnosed retroactively as psychopathic, and then I
think his personality disorders got a little more nuanced. I've
seen much more recently that he was a malignant narcissist.
There was something wrong with that guy. Something was wrong

(07:41):
with Jim Jones from start to finish, but it seems
to have gotten way way worse over time. But one
thing that he showed a real penchant for early on
in life was preaching, not religion. He was not, it
turns out, a religious person. He doesn't seem to have
believed in much of any of the stuff he was preaching,

(08:03):
but preaching was his way of like funneling attention, adoration,
money important to himself. He figured out very early.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
On Yeah, he was on record that he was not
so into religion, even though he was tied to various
churches over the years, including the one he started, the
People's Temple, which we'll talk about in greater detail later.
But one thing he was which is I didn't know
a ton about the guy, sort of pre jonestown, and

(08:34):
I was surprised to learn that he was a sort
of a socialist slash communist, anti segregationist who actually did
a lot of you know, I hate to characterize it
as good work, but it was good work because it's
you know, it's hard. He was such an awful human,

(08:57):
but he led a lot of deep segregated his causes
in Indiana very successfully for a number of years.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
I saw someone on Reddit say that had he died
on the way to California, we would remember him today
as one of the early civil rights leaders.

Speaker 1 (09:12):
Yeah, I mean that's true.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
It is true, And I get what you're saying, your
reticence to like praise him in any way, shape or form,
But yeah, he definitely did walk the walk, like he
fought for integration at a time when white people were
not doing that. Jim Jones was white, we should say,
but he mostly learned that he was best preaching generally

(09:36):
toward black congregants mm hmm. And that that kind of
just drove his desire to to integrate even further, so
much so that as he got a little more power,
one of the first things he did was become the
kind of the civil rights zar for Indianapolis. And he
actually it wasn't like just a label that he went

(09:57):
around and introduced himself as he went to work and
started integrating places in like penalizing places that hadn't integrated
yet in Indianapolis.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
Yeah, absolutely, Initially he was. He was involved with the
Methodist Church. He was involved with them, even though they
were not necessarily anti segregationists did not necessarily want their
congregations to be of mixed race, but they were apparently
supportive of his sort of socialist communist leanings. And this

(10:29):
was in the very early nineteen fifties. And we should
point out he was married by this point. He got
married in nineteen forty nine to a woman named Marceline Baldwin,
who was a hospital orderly and love bomber apparently, and
a couple of years later they moved to Indianapolis, where
that's when he got involved with a Methodist and you know,

(10:51):
started sort of spreading his anti segregationist word.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yeah. So after I don't know what happened with the Methodist,
but eventually they got sick of him and pushed him
out of the church, and he moved over to evangelicalism. Yeah,
what he called apostolic socialism. Because one of the things
about him, not only did he figure out that preaching

(11:18):
was a way to like attract people, he figured out
that that religion was a way, it was like a
trojan horse to get people to start thinking about socialism, right,
because there's so many like parallels between you know, ideal
socialism and Christian teaching. Ideal Christian teaching, I should say that,

(11:42):
like it's it's pretty easy to get people who are
already predisposed toward following Jesus and his Christian teachings to
start thinking about taking care of your you know, fellow
downtrodden humans too.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
And he would eventually get involved in like you were
talking about, the evangelicism.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
Is that the word evangelicism, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
And he would fall into fall into the camp of
the Pentecostals, and even more so that was a group
of I just call it, I guess Pentecostal Plus, which
was the Latter Rain movement, and that was like they off,
they spun it off from the Pentecostal Church because they
were even more sort of out there than the Pentecostals

(12:29):
were as far as like, hey, we get prophecies directly
from God. Some of us have supernatural powers. They would
use sort of sometimes good old fashioned traveling show vaudeville
medicine man style stage magic to you know, look like
they knew what they were talking about, and it was

(12:52):
pretty out there. But he found that that was a
pretty good audience for himself. And what he called I
mean he basically said, you know, through the manifested Sons
of God, which is a doctrine in the Latterine movement, like, hey,
God picks out certain special people that he gives like
basically the powers of Jesus Christ, and I'm one of them.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Right, Yeah, this group of elites will prepare the world
at end times for Jesus's return and they are essentially
Jesus just divided up into different human forms. And Jim
Jones is like, I'm one of those guys too, check
me out. So that was like a weird, a weird
way to go, but it was also sensible if you
look at him from the lens of strictly a huckster

(13:35):
who was taking advantage of people. Of course he's going
to go into like I'm Jesus by the way, It's
just it's just such a lazy way to take advantage
of people.

Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, you know, like he was able to do that
because like most cult leaders, he was very charismatic. He
was also a strange person. Ed dug up this one
story that I had never heard that at one point
in his life he was like, you know what, I'm
not gonna take place in a conversation with anyone unless
I initiated. So literally, people would come up and address

(14:04):
him and talk to him and he just wouldn't answer back.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Yeah, if they were really persistent, to be like, I
can't hear you.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
Right.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
It's a very strange thing, but just sort of an
example of what an odd duck he was. A lot
of people did find him sort of creepy and off putting,
but he did have that charisma. You don't get cult
followers unless you're a charismatic dude, and he was that.
He you know, he had that jet black hair and sideburns.
He had a sort of elvas sea look. Yeah, we'll

(14:34):
put yep, which, by the way, is still a thing.
I went to Memphis, which is, you know, where my
mom grew up and where I used to go as
a child with my mom and Emily and Ruby, and
there are still those dudes walking around Memphis that are
like in their seventies now and have these big sideburns
and pompadors, like these sort of Memphis Mafia looking guys. Yeah,

(14:57):
it's really interesting. I was like, oh, wow, of course
Memphis still has those guys, for sure.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Where else are they going to go? What else are
they going to do? Nothing? That's what they do. That's
what you can do in Memphis.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah. So, anyway, he was one of those guys you know,
later in life he was very well known for wearing
those steel rim sort of squarish I guess there were
sunglasses or were they also reading glasses.

Speaker 2 (15:21):
I think they were like early transitions lenses. It looks
like almost they were just constantly in the in between state.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
Well, listen, we could debate Jim Jones's eye diagnosis all
day long.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
I'm guessing they were reading glasses. Because I've read an
account of him looking over them at in the room,
so it probably was reading glasses.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
Which is also an intimidating move, I think for sure.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
I get also the impression that he was wearing those
kind of in between sunglasses, because at some point in
the sixties he started taking drugs. Maybe even earlier than that,
but definitely by the sixties he was taking speed and
then later on like sedatives and co eludes and stuff,
and as the seventies started to wear on, he was

(16:10):
really getting into those. So he probably needed those glasses
on some days so that you couldn't see what his
eyes looked like in the middle of the afternoon.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
You know, there's a lot of elvis in this story.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Actually, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
Should we take a break?

Speaker 2 (16:24):
For sure?

Speaker 1 (16:25):
All right, We'll be right back, everybody, all right.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
So Jim Jones has been sort of involved in several
different denominations and churches, worn out as welcome in most
of them, and eventually is like, you know what, I'm
going to start my own church, which is step one
if you're gonna form a cult. Actually that's not true.
There are plenty of cults without churches, but that was
his route and so he started the People's Temple in

(17:12):
nineteen fifty five and was really successful with it. He had,
you know, no trouble recruiting members, and by the early
nineteen sixties he was so popular and he had such
a following that he was able to continue his work
desegregating businesses and you know other you know, this wasn't

(17:34):
like a national movement. He kind of was one of
those think local guys. M And like you mentioned earlier,
in nineteen sixty, the mayor of Indianapolis said, all right,
you're the director of our Human Rights Commission, right, And like.

Speaker 2 (17:49):
I said, he took that and ran with it and
started to really kind of rack up more and more interest.
And I'm not exactly clear on some of the document.
And you see about like his rise to power and influence.
The early stuff takes places in like a traditional church.
It looks like a church. You can tell it's a church.

(18:10):
It's just you know, what do they call it. I
guess charismatic churches where people are like dancing and everything
and clapping and he's healing people. I'm not sure at
what point it started. It could have been Indianapolis, it
probably was, but he started to just say more and
more like bizarre stuff over time. And one of the

(18:31):
first bizarre things that he said that had a really
big impact on the history of the People's Temple was
that there was going to be a thermonuclear war on
July fifteenth, nineteen sixty seven. The bombs were going to drop,
I think, is how he put it. And he apparently
got the six and the seven transposed, because what he
meant was July fifteenth, nineteen seventy six, the bomb was

(18:54):
going to drop. But he convinced his congregation, or a
lot of his congregation I think at least a hundred
families from Indianapolis to move to rural north northern California
to basically set up a safe haven, a little kind
of commune for the People's Temple. It was a It

(19:14):
was his first really truly big show of power over
other people's lives because just take just think about it
for a second. You go to church, right and you
go and you like listen to the sermon and everything,
and you have probably like some friends at church or whatever,
and then you come home and church is done for

(19:36):
the week. For a lot of people, maybe you go
one other day. That's about it. Imagine being so into
church that you move your family across the country because
your preacher is telling you there's going to be a
thermonuclear war and we all need to go to northern California.
That takes a real level of like intuitness that from congregants,

(19:59):
And it was a real show of like faith in
a test of faith for people, and he was very
successful with it. And I think that did nothing but
just embolden him further.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
Absolutely, And by this time we should point out too
that he had started quite a large family with Marceline
at her suggestion, and apparently he was super into it
as well. She wanted to have a rainbow family, so
they adopted quite a few kids of all different you know,
nationalities and ethnicities. They had one Native American child, they

(20:29):
adopted several Korean kids, a black child. I believe one
of his adopted daughters was killed by a drunk driver
in fifty nine, and then they adopted her younger sister,
which you know, is pretty amazing. And then they also
had their sole biological child in nineteen fifty nine, Stephan

(20:52):
Gandhi Jones, who you would if you look him up,
you will see lots of he's very active in his
you know, I was about to say his father's legacy today,
but you know, not obviously supporting his dad's legacy. But
like he you know, during the twenty eighteen commemoration of
the Jonestown massacre, I guess, is it a massacre or

(21:15):
just massive deaths?

Speaker 1 (21:16):
What would you even call that?

Speaker 2 (21:18):
It just depends on your perspective, But yeah, I think
you could get away calling it a massacre for sure.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
Yeah, but he led that ceremony and also acknowledged that,
you know, hey, listen, it's a can of worms that
I'm doing this to begin with, and people have things
to say about me or don't agree with certain things
I say, then like let's please have that conversation.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
But he's he's pretty vocal and public to this day.

Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, he wasn't just a kid at the time, like
toward the end of the People's Temple, he was the
head of the security force. Yeah, at the time when
they were in Guyana, which we'll talk about soon. Yeah,
he's in a really strange way, very brave for like
showing his face in public as you know who he is.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
Yeah, another interesting thing happened that's pretty key to the
story before he said, hey, everybody, let's move to California.
He moved his just his family to Rio dationan Aire,
Brazil because of this supposed impending nuclear disaster. And on
the way there, he stopped in a country in South
America called Guyana and just got a little taste of

(22:24):
what life was like there, and that definitely planted a seed.
So he's, I believe, in nineteen sixty four he's planning
this move a couple of hours north of San Francisco
to Yukia, California, and at that point he has already
at least visited and preached in Guyana.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Right, that's a great setup. So when he gets to Brazil,
he's basically like left and taken his family, like you said,
to get away from thermon nuclear war. But he's been like,
but you guys, you know, you stay back here and
keep the keep the temple going. Yeah, And apparently there
was no one there with his strength or charisma, because

(23:04):
the temple fell apart almost immediately, or it started to
it threatened to. So just after even a couple of months,
he had to go back and like get everything back
in line and back in order, and ended up staying there,
staying in California again for a while, I don't, I
guess for several more years, I think. Do you remember
when it was he moved to Brazil at first.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
He moved to Brazil in nineteen sixty three.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Oh okay, so yeah, he came back. He came back
to Indianapolis, I guess is what it was. This would
have been pre California.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah, And in California he found, you know, obviously northern California.
He would find in the nineteen sixties quite a few
people in that area that were into his message of socialism,
pretty ripe for recruiting. And he would eventually move into
San Francisco itself and did pretty well there, like so
well that he had a lot of followers who had

(23:58):
a lot of and had a lot of way or them.
So local politicians started saying, hey, we need to get
in line with this guy because he has a lot
of influence at the voting booth. Like Harvey Milk and
Mayor George Moscone were you know, like actively courting him.
I think they named him, or at least the mayor
named him chairman of the San Francisco's Housing Authority Commission.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah, because he he basically took credit for Moscone's win
as mayor. He barely eked out a victory, and Jim
Jones had delivered several hundred, if not a couple thousand
votes toward toward Moscone, and he said, you owe me.
And he became the public housing director or a member

(24:42):
of the board, and apparently just to kind of show
his his influence in his cloud and how great he
was at those housing meetings, his followers would come, members
of the People's Temple would come and cheer him on
and clap an applaud sometimes give him a standing over
a when he would give a little speech about public

(25:02):
housing or something like that. Was really weird. But by
this time in San Francisco, late sixties, early seventies, like
people like that were a diamond dozen.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
He was politically connected to people who are like this guy,
like you said, he can deliver the goods. Yeah, yeah,
so much so that whenever there was like unfavorable press
about him, and we'll talk about some of the stuff
they were writing about him in a second, he could
actually get it stifled. He had the connections to be like,
this article's going to come out on me, can you

(25:35):
make sure it doesn't come out, so he could stifle
like dissent and oppress any outsiders who were criticizing him.
So he was very powerful in San Francisco, and that
was actually the reason he moved everybody to San Francisco.
They went Indianapolis, to Yukaya, California, and northern California. He
figured out that was like Hicksville, USA, and he couldn't
actually develop any real power down there, so he moved

(25:59):
the whole thing to San Francisco, set up the People's
Temple in San Francisco, and essentially had what was a
Pentecostal black congregation that so emphasized civil rights that they
were just also bringing in tons of liberal, younger, middle

(26:20):
class white people too who wanted to support that cause,
who might have never been in a Pentecostal service in
their life, and now all of a sudden, they're like
singing and clapping and dancing. So he had all these
different streams of people that he was just bringing in,
bringing in, and eventually trapping in his church, the People's Temple.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Yeah, he's like, I love the grateful dead, but I've
never handled a rattlesnake. This is amazing exactly so things
are also you know, as this is going along, things
are just becoming more and more culty. It was sort
of a slow burn toward you know, fully fledged cult.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
But by this time he was, you know, right out
of the playbook.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
He was.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
And we have a you know a lot of cult
content in our history, one on cults, one on deprogramming.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
I think we cover some other cults as well.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, specifically have surely, but I into mind.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
I mean Manson of course. Oh, but he is right
out of the cult leader playbook. He's starting to isolate
members from friends and family. He's starting to say, you know,
when you join my church, you got to turn over
all your possessions to us. They ended up having a
lot of money. I saw one point towards the end
they had like eleven million bucks in a bank account.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, that's like nineteen seventy eight money.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
Right, Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (27:41):
And he started, you know, doing that thing where you're saying,
you know, outside people are going to want to pull
you out of here, they're going to want you to defect.
Your family might even he would spread lies about them.
He would say he's getting prophecies that if you disobeyed
and tried to defect, then you would suffer some kind
of tragedy. So things are getting more and more and
that's when, like you said, he started getting some press coverage,

(28:05):
which I mean, what's really like one of the most
astounding things about all this is so many cults you
hear about after the fact, but this was actively going
on and being reported on by the press like while
it was happening.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
Yeah, because he was getting like wild and bizarre and
abusive enough toward his congregation that there were defectors. There
were people who are like the what is this, I'm
getting out of here, and they would go start to
talk publicly about this. But yeah, he had enough clout
to like get any real, real unfavorable coverage or any

(28:40):
widespread unfavorable coverage stamped out. But one of the things
you mentioned that I think he really started to ratchet
up around this time was isolating his congregation by creating
US versus them mentality, Yeah, and creating a siege mentality
among the people who remember of the People's Temple, especially

(29:01):
the hardest core members, that the US government wanted them
shut down. People were spreading lies about them, Like if
an article did get out, he could point to how
this is like lies and propaganda against the People's Temple
and use it as evidence about how there really was
was a siege and at some point the People's Temple
in San Francisco actually burned down. I saw that they

(29:24):
think it was white supremacists. Jim Jones blamed it on
the Nation of Islam. Somebody burned the temple down, and
all that did was fee that paranoid sensibility that just
isolated the members of the People's Temple even further and
pushed them even closer toward Jim Jones, who just used
stuff like that to his advantage at every turn.

Speaker 3 (29:45):
Yeah, he was also like things got a little more
violent and militaristic.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
You know.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
He got his inner most circle together and named them
the Planning Commission. They were his sort of in turn
old security team and things. You know, he would start saying, Okay,
you congregants have to have sex with each other. You
congregants are getting married to one another. There were starvation
diets that was forced to labor.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
Sometimes.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
You know, if a congregation member stepped out of line,
they might be stripped and marched around in front of
the other temple members. So things are full on swinging
cults at this point when he is being written about
in the press and like you said, getting most of
it stamped out. But something happened in nineteen seventy three
that like where the walls really started to close in

(30:37):
on them, and that was a I mean, I guess
sort of a sting operation. He was bisexual, that was
not out, and in fact, later on in like sort
of the the not the last days, but sort of
while he was in Guyana and living there, which we'll
get to, he told all the congregation, you're all homosexual,

(31:00):
and I'm the only heterosexual here.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
So he made a big deal about that.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
But he was definitely bisexual because he would abuse both
men and women within the temple, some accusations that they
were under age, of course. And in late nineteen seventy three,
in December, he was at a movie theater in Los
Angeles and an undercover cop I read the police report,

(31:26):
apparently Jones signaled to him like, hey, meet me up
in the balcony, and the cop instead went to the
bathroom and motioned for him to come in there. And
when he got to the bathroom, Jim Jones pulled his
pants down and started to masturbate in front of him.
The cop left and had his partner come in there

(31:46):
and arrest him, and he got out of it.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
He apparently I didn't see this anywhere, but Ed said
that he found that his defense was that he was
jumping up and down massaging his prostate, which was hurting
him at the time.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah, he had a doctor's letter, dude.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
I also saw that he just he uses political connections
to get him out of it.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
Well, it's hard to tell what happened because the judge
and I don't know, this seems weird. Maybe that kind
of thing happened a lot though. The judge ordered the
arrest records destroyed and then the file was sealed, So
I don't think a lot of people really know exactly
why he was released. But he had a doctor's note,

(32:32):
and the doctor went to bat for him and said, yeah,
I mean, this is what it might look like when
he's trying to work up a urination in the bathroom.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
Right, just really just stay with me here, it said
in the note.

Speaker 1 (32:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
So that was a big turning point, Like you said,
that was December of nineteen seventy three, and Jim Jones
started to get the message that the direction he was
taking his congregation in was too bizarre for San Francisco,
maybe even too bizarre for the United States. And he
remembered Guyana at the time and sent some people down

(33:11):
there to start scouting out and setting up a compound,
a place, I guess, an additional place for the People's
Temple outside of the oversight of the United States government
and the United States press and all that. And while
they were off doing that, there was something he did
back in San Francisco that was enormously important, and I say,

(33:36):
maybe we take a break and we'll come back and
talk about.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
It our first cliffhanger of the year. That's right, we'll
be right back.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
So nineteen seventy four he's sent some people down to Guyana, Guyana,
to start setting up a new compound for the People's
Temple down there.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
Socialist country, by the way, at the time.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah, which makes sense because by this time Jim Jones
has been identifying himself to his congregation as their socialist God.
Over time, he slowly stripped away the concept that Jesus
is God or that he was Jesus, and replaced himself
to his followers as God. Like they started towards the end,
following him as God, they called him Father, They called

(34:41):
him Dad. He was very much like their religious figure
on earth, way more than just their reverend or their
pastor or even the head of their cult. Like he
was a supernatural religious figure in the most ardent of believer's.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
Eyes, Elvis exactly.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
So he tries something with him that proved to be
the first of a couple of attempts, or a couple
of practice runs for what happened in Guyana in San Francisco.
At the People's Temple, he handed out cups and he said, Hey,
I know we all steer clear of alcohol me, but

(35:23):
one of our vineyards has produced a really great wine
and I want everybody to try it. So he passed
out cups, made sure everybody tried the wine. He circulated
among everyone as they were drinking it, and then after
everyone had finished, he went back to the polepit and
he said that was poisoned. You're all going to die
in about the next ten minutes or something. We're all

(35:44):
going to die together. And he gauged their reaction, and
apparently the reaction was a combination between stunned silence and
acquiescence like okay that there wasn't people screaming, people weren't
running for the doors, nobody tried to beat him up
or kill him. That was just he saw they would

(36:06):
actually do this, like I think if I actually asked
them to do it and didn't just trick them into it.
And he said, I'm this is all just a test
of your loyalty. You all passed way to go. But
that was not the only time that he did that
to those poor people.

Speaker 3 (36:20):
Yeah, he started, Well, let's back up a set, because
in seventy four is when about fifty temple members went
to Guyana to start setting it up. And they did
that for about three years, and a magazine article came
out in New West magazine in nineteen seventy seven that
really exposed him for what he was and he was like, okay,

(36:41):
like the jig is up, I have to get out
of here now. So he moved with his family to
Guyana and apparently the facilities could only support about two
hundred people. In May of seventy seven, six hundred more came,
and then the ensuing months, another four hundred people came.

Speaker 1 (37:00):
A lot of these were kids.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
A lot of these people were elderly, or infirmed, and
so there weren't enough people there to work and sustain it. Really,
they worked twelve hours a day. The people that could work,
it was brutal. When they weren't working, they were listening
to his sermons and his lectures, they were watching Russian
communist propaganda films, and abuse allegations started to come out,

(37:23):
and he got super paranoid, and that's when he started
leading more and more of those dry runs. He called
them white Knights, where he would have these trial runs
for mass suicide. Sometimes they would meet in the pavilion
and his security team would like fire guns from the
jungle over their heads. One of them lasted for six days.

(37:44):
It was called the six day Siege. And they were
just all these dry runs for killing themselves. And I
think they just routinely got used to it.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
Yeah, but every time it was just a test of
their loyalty. It was a drill to practice for when
the United States military inevitably invaded, because that siege mentality
had gotten even more paranoid. Apparently he was just off
his rocker on speed. Would give hours and hours and
hours long marathon sermons into the night. And you mentioned

(38:16):
that the bulk of the building of Jonestown fell on
the shoulders of like a not like a minority, but
far fewer people than there were to support. So those
people were working day and night and eating black black

(38:36):
eyed peas and rice and bananas, and it is nice,
but if that's all you're eating, and you're working hard
labor hours and hours a day, and then when you
get off of hard labor, you go sit and listen
to an hour's long sermon till two am or three am.
Then you have to get up at five or six

(38:56):
the next morning and start all over again. Even the
people who who were at Jonestown, who weren't like I
would kill myself for Jim Jones believers were too tired
and sleep deprived to give any kind of problems to
Jim Jones in the direction he was taking everybody. So
that was actually like part of the plan apparently, or
at the very least it was a happy byproduct for

(39:18):
Jim Jones that the people were either totally committed to
him or they were so overworked and underslept that they
just couldn't put up any kind of protest.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
Yeah, for sure. So things are happening in Guyana at Jonestown. Finally,
a you know press is still writing about this stuff
back in the States, and in late nineteen seventy eight,
a California Congressman named Leo Ryan, who had been following
this story, and this is one of the more remarkable
parts of this whole story. A congressman flew to Guyana

(39:53):
with a small group like some NBC camera people and
reporters and journalists and stuff on a fact finding mission.
They actually went to the camp at Jonestown and met
in the pavilion. While they were there, a temple member
named Vernon Gosni passed a note to a reporter that
was meant for Leo Ryan that said, please help me

(40:15):
and my wife leave. They got out of there and
took fifteen temple members that were defecting with them, and
Jim Jones was like, they can go. It's fine. People
are free to go if they want to. There was
some brief incident with Ryan where he was held at
nine point or there was an attempted stabbing. Things got
pretty chaotic and they got the heck out of there

(40:36):
and went to this airstrip. While they were waiting on
their couple of planes to get ready, and the Red Brigade,
which was the new name of his security team by
this point, who were really really militaristic this point, showed
up at the airfield and just opened fire on him.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, and just to kind of rewind for one second,
when Leo Ryan showed up, he was showing up to
investigate this cult that he'd heard nothing about, bad things about.
But his reception and like the banquet that was thrown
for him and the music that was played in the
services that he witnessed were so enthusiastic and upbeat that

(41:15):
he actually gave a speech to them saying like, it's
very clear that for most of you, this is the
greatest thing that's ever happened to you. And the place
just erupts and like cheers. They've like won this guy over,
like maybe they'll be left alone from now on, And
it was like a jubilant You can tell Congressman Ryan
is like into it too, He's like, this is great.

(41:38):
And it goes from that to all of a sudden,
the truth of the matter is just kind of exposed,
like a little rotten core of an apple that you
thought was just totally bright and shiny, and it must
have been stomach turning to have your perceptions just turned
on end like that. When that note was handed to

(41:58):
that cameraman Leo O. Ryan was like, oh, these people
are totally brainwashed, and I was almost duped, and then
it became tense. Then he was held at nine point
and then he ended up dying on the airstrip.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
Yeah. Actually we did one on brainwashing too.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
We totally did. We also did one on roundabouts people
who like roundabouts.

Speaker 3 (42:20):
So remarkably part of this exists on film. The NBC
camera person Bob Brown was filming some b roll there
when this shootout breaks out, and it wasn't much because
he actually was shot and killed and his camera was
shot up as well, so he only had a few
seconds of this attack. But Ryan was killed, that cameraman

(42:44):
Bob Brown was killed, NBC reporter Don Harris was killed.
There was a photographer from the Examiner in San Francisco
named Greg Robinson that was killed, and one of the defectors,
Patricia Parks, was killed. And in the second airplane, this
was a little cessna, so there weren't even that many
people on it. There was a defector there that was,

(43:04):
you know, pretending to defect, pulls out a gun inside
that tiny plane and opens fire somehow doesn't kill anyone,
he wounds three of them, and the people that survive
like just you know, booked it into the jungle, and
it is I mean, this is the beginning of a
very quick end.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yeah. Two of the people who were attacked on the
airstrip survived by pretending they were dead. Jackie Spear, who
was Leo Ryan's assistant, and Steve Sung, who was a
sound guy. I think for NBC, they pretended they were dead,
and I think Jackie Spear said she was shot point blank,
like they came up to make sure she was dead
and didn't manage to kill her. I read, Chuck, this

(43:42):
is really important. I read that they laid there that
Jackie Spear reported laying there for twenty two hours before
help came. Okay, so she's laying there pretending she's dead
on the tarmac for twenty two hours and just put
that in your bonnet and save it for like, yeah, absolutely,
twenty two hours after the attack, helped finally came for

(44:05):
Jackie Spears.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
Back at the temple, Jim Jones, he knows this is it.
Like the walls have fully closed in, they've committed multiple
murders here, and he knows there's no way out, so
he's like, the military is going to be coming for us,
the US military. Revolutionary suicide is the only way out.
And there is a recording that's very disturbing, I mean,

(44:32):
big trigger warnings.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
I'm not going to get too involved in it.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
It's called the Death Tape, but you can listen to
the revolutionary suicide process unfold on this tape.

Speaker 1 (44:45):
Did you listen to it?

Speaker 2 (44:46):
Yeah? I listened to the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
I had to.

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Scrub through some of it because it's really hard to
listen to. There are parts where people are standing up
and saying, no, this is not what we want. There
are people that are just unsure. There are and this
is very triggering, obviously, but there were the sounds of
children crying all over the place in the background, and

(45:10):
a woman saying they're not in pain, it's just a
bitter taste in their mouth, that no one's feeling any pain.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
And it's just.

Speaker 3 (45:18):
Incredibly disturbing and remarkable that this exists in the world
and that you can listen to this. But then you know,
at like the forty two minute mark, it just goes
quiet and it's haunting.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
Yeah, I think from what I understand, it's really easy
to take it like that's the end of Jones Town.
But I believe what the death tape covers is the
beginning of the whole thing. Yeah, the killing of the children.
That's why you're hearing the children screaming. They're dying from
being forced to drink cyanide, and they as it gets quiet,

(45:53):
that's because the kids have died. It's just as eerie.
That doesn't make it any less eerie. But apparently after
that the tape runs out, is when the adults really
started drinking. Because at the end he's like bringing the
bring in the vat with the flavor ad in it
so that the adults can start drinking. That's toward the

(46:13):
end of the tape. But you mentioned somebody standing up.
A woman named Christy Miller was the sole person who
challenged Jim Jones directly. She went to the mic and
was like, yeah, isn't there isn't there any other way,
like you told us Soviet Union would take us. Is
it too late for that? You know? As long, I think,
she said, as long as there's life, there's hope, Like

(46:33):
we shouldn't do this, and then she also said, I
think the children would want to live, they should be
able to live, and she ended up getting shouted down
by other members, but she tried really hard, and apparently
she was one of the people who was found at
Jonestown later on with a puncture mark in her arm,
and that she was probably killed, that she was murdered.

(46:56):
She didn't she didn't drink the kool aid or the
flavor aid herself. She was probably injected with cyanide, and
that's almost certainly how she died. But she was extremely
brave for trying to save all those people, and it
was useless because Jim Jones knew there was no other
way out for him. He was going to kill himself,

(47:19):
and that he couldn't very well leave these people alive
without him. And he specifically says, you're gonna do this,
you want to do this. There's no life without me,
and I'm gonna die, so we all need to die together,
and he's encouraging them outright, encouraging them Chuck. On this tape,
you can hear him how he gets them to take

(47:39):
their own lives and kill their own children. It's like
that's it went from like bleak research to just like,
I can't believe this actually happened, Like my brain kept
like repelling from wrapping itself around it.

Speaker 3 (47:54):
Yeah, it was, like I said, I couldn't even listen
to it all the way through. I had to kind
of just skip ahead. But you did mention, and this is,
you know, this is the fact that most people know
by now, because usually that guy at every party likes
to point out that it was not actually kool aid drink.
The kool aid has become a euphemism. But it was
great flavor aid in fact, and it had a bunch

(48:17):
of stuff in it. It had one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven different you know, various sedatives and antipsychotics, and there
was one malaria medication in there for some reason.

Speaker 1 (48:28):
I'm not sure why.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
Valium, but cyanide was ultimately what you know, did everyone
in And like you said, they killed the children first
by putting it in a syringe and shooting it in
their mouth, and then other people took it willingly, and
then like you said, in the case of Christine Miller,
that she was injected like other people were, obviously against

(48:54):
her will. And a lot of people thought it was
another White Night rehearsal, so they went along with it,
maybe not knowing that they were really gonna die. And
in the end, nine hundred and eighteen people died in Guyana,
nine hundred and seven from the poisoning. Then Annie Moore
and Jim Jones either killed themselves with their own gun

(49:17):
or had one of the Red Brigade do it. Three
I'm sorry. Two hundred and seventy six of these victims
were kids, and then there were people that went out
into the jungle. Other people died later. There was this
really sort of sad, bizarre story of this woman named
Sharon Amos, who was a temple member who was in Georgetown, Guyana,

(49:40):
who got the message that you need to kill yourself,
and so she killed her two young kids and then
her third, her twenty one year old daughter, Leanne Harris.
Apparently they looked at each other and either slit each
other's throats or their own throats. There were two other
people in the bathroom, ten year old named Stephanie Brown

(50:01):
and a forty three year old man named Charles Beekman.
He was charged with her attempted murder because he cut her,
but he told her, hey, I have to Apparently he
was trying to help her live, and he said, I
have to cut you to make it look real. And
he got off on five years because she corroborated that
story in court, so he didn't, you know, get a

(50:24):
full conviction.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Yeah, there's a lot of really weird, bizarre stories about
you know, what people did when faced with this, you know.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
One of the things from that tape. One more thing
about the tape that really got me was there somebody
like people were testifying. People were coming up and getting
the mic and thanking Dad, thanking Jim Jones. For one
guy goes, thank you, you know, Dad for giving me life,
and then you know, as an afterthought, he's like and death.
Like they were thanking him for this. Right. So one

(50:56):
person came up to the mic and said, all you
people along the way wall crying over there, this is
not a time to be sad. This is this is
something to be happy for. And the fact that there
were people crying along the wall, to me, those were
the people who who knew they didn't have any way out,
not because you know, the US military was coming to

(51:18):
kill everyone and torture the children, but because they the
Jim Jones's people were not going to let them leave.
It was either try to get away and be killed shot,
or drink the kool aid yourself and be part of
the revolutionary suicide. And they were scared to death. They
didn't want to die. They were literally grieving their own
death right before they died. And that was the choice,

(51:40):
like you couldn't you weren't allowed to leave, you had
to drink the flavorrate. But a couple of people did
get away, these survivors who literally escaped the tent that
the people were killing themselves in and got away and
snuck off into the jungle. And those people are like
really important sources of information for what happened because they

(52:02):
saw people dying. They didn't leave right before they left,
like during this whole thing, at the height of it,
and they came back and they did all sorts of
terrible things. They had to identify bodies, they had to
they had to explain what was going on. They one
guy is named Charles Clayton. He was a really important

(52:24):
source for a lot of the documentaries. You'll see he
slipped away and got away unnoticed, and that whole identifying
the bodies thing. I know, I sound like I'm rambling
but there's just so much to talk about, but we
probably should should go to that part about the aftermath,
because I mentioned that Jackie Spears was alone on the

(52:46):
airstrip a couple miles away from Jonestown for twenty two hours,
and the people of Jonestown killed themselves within an hour
and a half maybe two hours of the fascination of
Leo Ryan and those people. So that meant that that
it was just as totally quiet, eerie village of the

(53:10):
dead for a good twenty hours before any outsiders came
in and saw what had happened.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
Terrible.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
Can you imagine?

Speaker 1 (53:21):
It was horrifying?

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Yeah, still is so one more kind of like little
add on. That was the worst civilian casualty of American
civilians in history, and it's remained that way until nine
to eleven. But the first responders who came, who had

(53:43):
who were responsible for getting these Americans their bodies back
home so that their families could claim them over the
course of like a terrible week in the heat, in
the storms and all that they were largely from the
Air Force, and the Air Force conducted a study on
how that experience impacted them, and it turned out to

(54:04):
be the first study of how something like that, how
first responders are affected by the things they see and
have to do from you know, mass casualty events in history.
And it really kind of created that whole field of
study essentially, Oh wow, yeah, something else, you got anything else?

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Yeah, there's one more odd little fact that you dug
up that is fairly remarkable because the congress person Ryan
who was sadly killed.

Speaker 1 (54:34):
That day, didn't his daughter end up in a cult.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
Not just a cult, the cult that was featured in
Wild Wild Country, that Netflix documentary. She was a member
of that cult and ended up being married by that
guru in the ranch in Oregon a couple of years
after her father died. And they actually had a bottle
of champagne that said the guru, I can't remember the
guru's name, can turn even grape kool aid into wine.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
So they even made a joke about it at the wedding. Yeah,
it's nuts, man, I just thought that I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Yeah, that's a fantastic nugget to end on.

Speaker 2 (55:14):
Thanks a lot, Well, sin Chuck said that was a
fantastic nugget. Of course, everybody. That means it's time for
listener mail.

Speaker 3 (55:22):
All right, this is about the Christian heavy metal band Striper.
Of course, what a better way to finish out this episode.
Hey guys, grew up in the middle of the Canadian
Prairies in the seventies and eighties and was fourteen when
Striper's Soldiers under Command came out and fifteen when to
Hell with the Devil hit me like a ton of
bricks on this rock was built much of who I

(55:44):
still am. I learned how to play drums along with
Robert Sweet, but unlike Chuck, never had the opportunity to
see them live, as they rarely played Canada. They broke
up in the early nineties, and that I thought was that,
even though they got back together in two thousand and five,
I never managed to catch them live the few times
they snuck across the border until that is this summer

(56:06):
when I was down in Vancouver visiting the in laws
and they were playing Seattle, and I drove the three
hours to see them. It was an amazing show. They're
no longer playing the giant stadiums, of course, but.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
I don't know if they ever played giant stadiums.

Speaker 3 (56:20):
But being able to stand ten feet from guitarist Oz Fox,
who can still shred after all these years, was an
amazing experience. They still got all the hair and vocalist
Michael Sweet can still hit those high notes, though not
as many as he used to. But after forty years,
they are very very good at making music. They're doing
an acoustic tour this year twenty twenty four, called to

(56:43):
Hell with the Amps and they're kicking off, kicking it
off down in Georgia playing Mad Life in Woodstock. I
haven't heard of that venue, and this is a May thirtieth,
and I bet Chuck would have a hell.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
Of a time.

Speaker 3 (56:56):
Who knows, they might even play a couple of songs
he recognizes.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
That is from Trent. You gonna go and I don't know,
only if you go with me?

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Oh boy, I wasn't expecting that. We'll see. We'll talk
about it offline. That was Trent.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
Huh, that's Trent.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
Thanks a lot, Trent. That was a great email. Appreciate
the update on Striper And if you have one on
the guy who did Life as a Highway, it turns
out to be Tom Cochrane. I don't remember if you
said that in the episode or not. We would see
the right I would If you want to be like Trent,
you can get in touch with us at stuff podcast

(57:36):
at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.