Chapter 1Lynn

Foreword

I have spent my working life in locked rooms. The cryptographers, the intercept clerks, the analysts who read other people's traffic by lamplight — those were my subjects, first for television and then in books, and the shape of the work was always the same: a closed institution, a record it did not intend to leave, and the slow business of reading that record honestly after everyone in the room was gone. So when I told colleagues I was writing a book about Jonestown, the reaction was polite bafflement. A jungle commune in Guyana. An American preacher. A story owned, as far as anyone could tell, by the true-crime shelf and a phrase about Kool-Aid. Not, they meant, my subject.

They were wrong, and the reason they were wrong is the reason this book exists. Jonestown is the most extensively recorded closed institution I have ever encountered. Nearly a thousand audio tapes came out of that clearing — sermons, telephone traffic, school lessons, band performances, and one recording of the end itself — alongside tens of thousands of pages of investigative files, financial records, and witness statements, most of it now public. A historian of signals intelligence recognizes this material at once. It is traffic. It is the raw product of a surveillance culture so total that even the men running it spoke to each other in code. And it sat, for decades, substantially unread.

What drew me in first, I confess, was the anatomy of failure. My trade has a standard question — the warnings existed; why did no one act? — and Jonestown answers it with terrible completeness. The defectors' affidavits existed. The press allegations existed. The embassy visits happened and saw nothing, in the manner of inspections designed to see nothing. Every institution that might have intervened had the information it needed, and every institution declined to pay the cost of using it. I expected to write a study of that failure, with Jim Jones at its center: one more portrait of a man in a locked room, holding the only key.

The record would not permit it. The deeper I went into the tapes and the files, the smaller Jones became and the larger everyone else grew. The traffic I had come to analyze kept resolving into voices — children doing spelling drills, a band playing soul music to sustained applause, a woman on the final tape asking, calmly and alone, why anyone had to die. I had spent my career honoring the people who listen. Here was an archive that had been preserved, cataloged, digitized, made available to anyone, and the listening had simply never been done at scale. The country that inherited these voices turned them into a punchline instead.

So this became a different book from the one I planned. It is not a biography of Jim Jones, though he is in it, as the mechanism must be. It is a biography of a community: the 918 people who died on November 18, 1978, most of them Black, most of them poor, a third of them children who could consent to nothing. I have worked from the public record throughout — the released investigative files and tapes, the survivors' published accounts, the court and congressional and press archives — and I have tried to read that record the way I was trained to read any traffic: for what it actually says, not for what the received narrative requires it to say.

What it actually says is harder than the myth, and it is the reason Jonestown is worth a book rather than an idiom. The quiet figures I have written about all my life shaped history from inside rooms no one could enter. The people of Jonestown were shut inside such a room, and they left us the tapes, and the tapes are their voices. This book is my attempt, late and from another country, to listen properly.

— Frederick Saxby, London

Chapter 1 · Lynn

James Warren Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in Crete, Indiana, a crossroads settlement of fewer than thirty people a short distance north of Lynn, the slightly larger town where he spent most of his childhood. His father, James Thurman Jones (known around Lynn as Big Jim and, later, as Old Jim) was a World War I veteran who had come home from France with damaged lungs. He had been caught in a German gas attack on the front lines, one of roughly seventy thousand Americans the army classified as gas casualties. The Veterans Administration spent decades disputing the extent of his disability. He worked intermittently in road construction and at a railroad clerical job when his body allowed, and collected a modest disability check when it did not. By the time the family settled into a frame house on Grant Street in Lynn, his voice had been reduced to a raspy croak. He spent his mornings shuffling downtown to the pool hall and his afternoons sitting on the porch, smoking continuously, sometimes raising a hand to wave at children who passed. Years later his son would describe him as a "mean old redneck racist," a characterization Jim Jones reportedly arrived at, according to the journalist Ethan Feinsod, only after discovering, sometime after his father's death, that Old Jim had once been a member of the local Ku Klux Klan. Membership in the Indiana Klan during the 1920s was, as Feinsod and others have noted, common rather than aberrant in rural Randolph County. The discovery was nonetheless a wound the son carried for the rest of his life.

His mother, Lynetta Putnam Jones, was a different species entirely. She was a factory worker (first at a glass plant in Winchester, later on the assembly line of an auto-parts plant in Richmond) and the family's primary earner for most of Jim's childhood. She was also, as Jeff Guinn's The Road to Jonestown establishes from her own dictated memoir and from extensive interviews with surviving Lynn contemporaries, a woman whose imagination ran well past the boundaries her circumstances could contain. She believed in spirits and reincarnation. She told her son she had been a great woman in previous lives and would be again. She claimed Indian ancestry for which there was no documentary evidence, and as Jimmy grew older he claimed it too. She told him, repeatedly and with conviction, that he had been placed on earth for a purpose. The exact content of the purpose shifted (sometimes religious, sometimes political, sometimes simply grandiose) but the underlying message never varied: you are not like other people. According to Guinn, drawing on Lynetta's own writing, Jimmy's two earliest and most enduring lessons from his mother were that there was always a Them out to get you, and that reality was whatever you believed.

Lynn, Indiana, was a town of some nine hundred and fifty people. It sat in Randolph County, in the flat agricultural eastern part of the state, closer to Ohio than to Indianapolis. The economy was farming and the factories that served farming. The social infrastructure was churches: Methodist, Disciples of Christ, Nazarene, and a small Friends meeting. The town had been a Quaker settlement originally, and the pacifist tradition had left traces in the local culture even as it gave way to the harder-edged Protestantism that dominated rural Indiana by the twentieth century. Lynn was overwhelmingly white. There were three small Black enclaves elsewhere in Randolph County (clusters of homes too small to incorporate as towns) and a few hundred African American farmhands who came into Lynn and Winchester on Saturdays to trade. Black children did not attend the Lynn school. White mothers, Guinn writes, "would never dream of inviting 'colored' kids over to play with their children." Race in Lynn was not the absence its segregation suggested. It was a structure of careful daily distance.

Old Jim and Lynetta were widely regarded as the town's two most peculiar adults: eccentric in different directions but united in their refusal to attend any of the Lynn churches at all, an omission their neighbors found more troubling than any of their other oddities. Lynetta wore pants instead of dresses, smoked in public, swore in front of grocers, and never invited other women into the bare-bones Grant Street house. The home itself had a forbidding atmosphere. Children who came to play with Jimmy left quickly.

It is tempting to read the adult Jim Jones backward into the Lynn childhood, to find Jonestown in the details of a Depression-era household. The temptation should be resisted, mostly. Thousands of children grew up in similar households and became insurance adjusters and schoolteachers. What can be said is that the raw materials were present: a father who had been broken by a war and could no longer be a father in the way the town expected, a mother who modeled grandiosity as love, and a town too small and too poor to offer any competing narrative.

He was, by the consistent testimony of childhood contemporaries Guinn interviewed, a strange kid. He was intelligent (no one disputed this) and socially adept in a way that unsettled adults. He had a talent for mimicry that extended beyond impersonation into something closer to method acting. He cussed continuously and, Guinn writes, "just grinned and enjoyed how his swearing made the rest of the kids uncomfortable." He cried easily, which the other Lynn boys held against him. He was afraid of fighting and ran from any roughhousing. He stole candy bars from the town stores; Lynetta paid for them on Saturdays rather than discipline him. Other Lynn mothers found this remarkable.

He staged funerals for animals. The Lynn dossier on this is unusually rich because Guinn interviewed multiple eyewitnesses. Jimmy would find a dead bird, a roadkilled squirrel, an occasional dog or cat, and call the other children together to perform what Guinn describes as "elaborate funeral services, praying over the animal corpses, sermonizing about how God loved all his creations equally and then burying the things in matchboxes or bigger cardboard boxes, depending on their size." The first time the neighborhood children found it entertaining. Soon they refused. Jimmy then recruited younger children, "many of whom were flattered that someone older wanted them to play. When they found out reverent obedience was required rather than playing, they wanted to leave, but Jimmy usually scared them into staying." When he could not assemble a congregation, he conducted the services alone, even at recess in the schoolyard. The other children watched in silence, because they had no choice.

There was a casket warehouse in Lynn. Like everyone else, the owners did not lock the doors. Jimmy led a group of children into it one night and instructed them to climb into the caskets and lie there, so that they might find out what it felt like to be dead. The other children quickly grew bored or frightened. Jimmy, Guinn reports, "kept going back, but had trouble getting anyone else to come."

There were darker moments, though the record marks them as exceptions. One Lynn neighbor recounted that Jimmy killed a cat with a knife in order to hold a funeral for it. And some of the boys on his makeshift baseball team once watched him lure a puppy over the open trapdoor of his hayloft and deliberately let it fall to the hard floor below; after that, they stopped coming to play. Guinn calls the loft episode "a rare instance of animal cruelty on Jimmy's part." By every other account he seemed to love animals: he took in strays all the time, and strays followed him everywhere.

He discovered churches early. Not one church, but churches, plural. Across the street from the Joneses' Grant Street house lived Myrtle Kennedy, a tall, conscientiously religious Nazarene woman who took pity on the lonely-looking child wandering the neighborhood. Lynetta, indifferent to organized religion but glad to have her son out of the house on Sundays, allowed Mrs. Kennedy to take Jimmy to services. He memorized scripture passages within weeks. He began calling her "Mom." Then he started slipping away to the other Lynn churches as well: Methodist, Disciples of Christ, Quaker, sampling denominations the way another child might sample candy. He was drawn most strongly to a small Apostolic storefront on Highway 36, conducted on weeknights and Saturdays by a pipefitter named Mr. Stump. The Apostolics, as some of the more established Lynn churches sniffed, were "holy rollers." Jimmy sat among them, watching carefully. The pastor preached without notes. He moved his body. He shouted, then dropped to a whisper. The congregation answered him. Jimmy was learning. He was eight or nine years old.

He was still a young boy when he began preaching himself, not in a pulpit but in the woods behind his house, on a tree stump, with one hand pressed over his heart. His older friend Max Knight, who had met Jimmy years earlier and looked in on him whenever he was in Lynn, came upon him by accident one afternoon and watched undetected until Jimmy turned and saw him. The boy nearly fell off the stump in his panic. He had been caught, he thought, in a deception. Knight told him kindly: "If you want to preach, okay. Do it, if it makes you feel good." Knight "two or three times more found him in the woods doing the same thing." Years later Jones thanked him for the encouragement.

The mock funerals continued into adolescence. By the time he was a Lynn high schooler, the funerals had earned him a kind of recognition. When the Lynn Bulldogs were preparing to take on a rival school in a sporting event of particular significance, Jimmy was asked to conduct a mock funeral service for the opposing team at a pep rally. He enthusiastically complied, astonishing some, Guinn writes, with how fervently he consigned the opposing team to its mass grave. A classmate told Guinn: "He had a flair for the dramatic."

He was also, by his early teens, traveling on Saturdays to Richmond, the larger town seventeen miles away, where, Guinn writes, he would walk from the bus station to the railroad-tracks neighborhood where Black indigents congregated, find a place to stand, and preach about everyone being equal in God's eyes and how it was wrong to look down on anybody for the color of their skin. Old-timers in Richmond, decades later, remembered hearing about it. The white Lynn boy who carried a Bible everywhere had decided that his platform was racial equality. There was nothing in the Lynn social order that demanded this position; nothing, in fact, that supported it. It was, like everything else about Jimmy Jones, a combination of his mother's politics, his fascination with charismatic authority, and a genuine, unaccountable conviction that he had been chosen to do this work.

The marriage at Grant Street had been a corpse for years. In the summer of 1948, Lynetta (by then maintaining a relationship with another man who had moved to Richmond) left her husband. Jimmy, seventeen, went with her. They moved to a small apartment in Richmond, where Lynetta took an assembly-line job at an auto-parts plant and Jimmy enrolled at the Richmond high school for what would be his senior year, taking on a full-time night-shift orderly job at Reid Memorial Hospital to help pay the rent. Old Jim, alone in Lynn, took a room at the town hotel and continued to deteriorate. He died in May 1951 at the age of sixty-three, looking ninety. Lynetta was not seen at the funeral. She did, however, file a widow's claim for his army pension.

Among the small group of friends Jimmy made in Richmond was a Christian Youth Fellowship circle who debated, over late-night doughnuts, what they called "Christian communism": the idea that "from each according to ability, to each according to need" was the proper church approach. They kept their conclusions to themselves. The Cold War was in full flower. Jimmy graduated a semester early and, in 1949, married Marceline Baldwin, a Methodist nurse he had met at Reid. He was eighteen; she was twenty-two. Marceline was, in the assessment of nearly everyone who knew her, a genuinely good person: compassionate, patient, committed to social justice in a practical rather than rhetorical way. She was also, from the beginning, subordinate to Jim's vision. Not because she was weak. Because Jim Jones, at eighteen, had already developed the capacity to make his vision feel inevitable: to present his plans not as preferences but as moral imperatives that anyone with a conscience was obligated to support. Marceline believed in him. She would go on believing in him for twenty-nine years, through escalating abuse, infidelity, drug addiction, and megalomania, until November 18, 1978, when she died on the pavilion at Jonestown.

The couple moved to Bloomington and then to Indianapolis. Jones enrolled at Indiana University and later, in night classes stretched across a decade, at Butler, which finally granted him a degree in secondary education in 1961 — the credential the Disciples of Christ required before it would fully ordain him. He worked a series of jobs: hospital orderly, door-to-door monkey salesman (this is not apocryphal; he imported and sold small monkeys as pets), and eventually student pastor at Somerset Methodist Church. The monkey business is the kind of detail biographers seize on because it seems to foreshadow the carnival-barker quality of Jones's later ministry. It probably does, but it also illustrates something more mundane: Jones was a hustler. He was willing to do whatever generated income, and he had the salesmanship to make improbable ventures work.

The move to Indianapolis was the move that mattered. Lynn was too small. Indianapolis was a city of half a million people, with a Black population of approximately 15 percent, an active civil rights community, a Pentecostal and charismatic church tradition that was both Black and white, and the kind of urban poverty that gave a young preacher with social justice convictions a cause and a congregation. Jim Jones arrived in Indianapolis as a nobody. Within six years, he would be running the most integrated church in the state of Indiana.

But before Indianapolis and the founding of Peoples Temple, before the political connections and the faith healings and the move to California and the jungle compound and the cyanide, there is the question that the proposal for this book raised at the outset and that must be raised again here: this is not a Jim Jones biography. Jim Jones is the mechanism. The subject is the 918 people who died. And yet a biography of a community that was built around one man's charisma cannot avoid the question of where the charisma came from. The answer begins in Lynn. It begins with a sick father whose neighbors quietly understood, after his death, had been a Klansman, and a working mother who told her son he was God's instrument. It begins with a boy who organized funerals for dead animals and demanded that other children mourn properly. It begins with the churches of east-central Indiana, where a man with nothing could command a room if he could preach.

The answer also begins with what Lynn was not. It was not a place where a boy with Jim Jones's intelligence and ambition could become anything legitimate. There was no path from Lynn to power that did not involve leaving. The factories paid subsistence wages. The farms were consolidating. The churches offered spiritual authority but not the kind of worldly power that Jones craved. Indianapolis offered a path, and Jones took it, and the people who would become Peoples Temple were already there, waiting for someone to address the needs that no one else was addressing.

They were waiting because America had failed them. This is the sentence that every subsequent chapter will return to, because it is the sentence that Jonestown requires. The people who joined Peoples Temple — the people who moved to Guyana, the people who died — did not join because they were stupid or gullible or weak. They joined because Peoples Temple was, for many of them, the first institution that had ever treated them as fully human. Understanding how that institution came to exist requires understanding the man who created it. Understanding the man who created it requires understanding Lynn, Indiana, in the 1930s and 1940s — a town where a bright, strange, angry boy learned that charisma was the only currency that mattered and that the people who needed saving were the people nobody else would save.

Jim Jones left Lynn. He never went back in any way that mattered, except, decades later, when he routed a Peoples Temple bus tour past Myrtle Kennedy's house in Lynn and introduced the gawky old Nazarene woman to his followers as his "second mother." Mrs. Kennedy described young Jim Jones to the visiting Temple members as "a real active boy and a mischief-maker." Afterward, she told her family, Jones asked her quietly to move to Jonestown, where, he said, everything was perfect and she would be well cared for. She declined. The invitation, she felt, was sincere.

Lynn never left him. The poverty, the emptiness, the father's hatred, the mother's grandiosity, the churches that ran on feeling rather than doctrine, the absolute conviction that he had been chosen for something. All of it traveled with him to Indianapolis, to California, to Guyana. To the pavilion. To November 18.

The 918 people who died that day had their own childhoods, their own towns, their own reasons for leaving. Their stories are the subject of this book. But Jim Jones was the gravitational center around which those stories orbited, and the gravitational center was formed in Lynn, Indiana, in a house with a dying father and a mother who believed her son was God.