we needed to be totally committed to this cause, period. and you can t be part way. you can t do it part way. it was told over and over again that we were going to be everybody was going to be killed. suicide drills and beatings became as much a part of the temple s internal life as social service was to its public face. devotion to jones had to be total. one of the very powerful things in the church was that you weren t really allowed to express how you really felt. it was like, i would be there and i would look around and i would think, am i the only one that feels this is bizarre or different or weird? everyone knew what the truth was. they knew that certain beatings were wrong. they knew that the suicide drills were nuts. and, yet, everybody made decisions, which they wouldn t have if they hadn t been part of it.
all the papers i signed and all the blank papers i signed, he couldn t believe it. i mean, he screamed at me, how could you do something so stupid? i said, you want to tell me you d be in a room with 120 peers around you, and you were told everybody is going to sign a piece of paper, that you re not going to sign it? would you do that? that you would know you would not leave that room beaten and/or dead? i would like to kill grace stoen and tim stoen. i d go back and do it right now. grace and tim stoen topped the temple s enemy list. what d he say? tie a rope around grace s titty and hang her down in the water until she drowned. some other people could think of things like this. but he s 6 years old, he s this imaginative. she wouldn t like that. the stoens joined the group calling themselves concerned relatives. before long, its members would
in the states you didn t get that kind of food, necessarily. well, unbeknownst to me, they had to buy all that fruit. and i found out later there would be pictures of jim with his hand up holding, supposedly, like these are bananas. he was literally holding those bananas up there. they weren t growing on that tree. if jonestown was not yet a tropical paradise, jones was determined to one day make it the socialist utopia he dreamed and preached about. but for now home was san francisco. and by 1976, jones had made peoples temple a major player in local politics. if any movement in san francisco needed 100 bodies to show up for a demonstration, they d just call peoples temple and the temple would send 500 people. peoples temple raced into the community with badly needed social services. all free.
of the five people killed on the airstrip, patricia parks is the only defecting temple member. the rest of her family had escaped into the bush. do you still have your family? did everybody make it out okay? no. they shot my mom s brains out. she s the only one in the family that didn t make it. you didn t see that? i didn t see her get shot, but i saw her brains in the plane and i saw her laying out on the ground.
with the secret revelations he gathered in the summer of 1977, reporter marshall kilduth had the makings of a full blown expose. here i am with a new look at the church. ex-members had rough things to say about how the church treated its finances, how they recruited members. i went back and said i got a whole new story here. here s the deal. guy said, nope, i m not interested. jones is doing good work. he doesn t need this kind of attacking. the truth of the matter is that the leadership of san francisco at the time wasn t going to touch it with a ten-foot pole because jim jones had become one of them. he was sitting on an explosive story with nowhere to tell it, until new west magazine grabbed hold of it. the article would shine fierce light into the temple s darkest shadows, and jones knew it.