Seductive Poison (3 page)

Then I felt a powerful jolt and a terrible sting. A bullet had struck my hip. Thoughts of my family and friends rushed through my mind. Bullets were still coming. I could hear them. I could feel the dirt. I was going to die.

There was a lull. Then three more shots, spaced maybe thirty seconds apart. Very close. Very loud.
Bang. Bang. Bang!

Then silence.

A minute passed. Maybe two. I heard the plane’s engine begin to rumble.

I opened my eyes without moving my head or body. I could see down the flat expanse of runway. The tractor and the gunmen were moving toward the end of the airstrip, slowly retreating in the same direction from which they had come. My only thought was that if the plane was going to leave, I was going to try to get on it.

I jumped up, not knowing if I could walk. I wobbled a bit. But as painful as it was, the bullet had only grazed my hip and I could manage. I ran around to the door and threw myself aboard the plane. But it couldn’t move; one of the engines had been damaged by the gunfire.

Only then did I realize the enormity of what had happened. Lying on the airstrip were seven bodies. Congressman Leo J. Ryan. Dead. NBC correspondent Don Harris. Dead. NBC cameraman Bob Brown. Dead.
San Francisco Examiner
photographer Greg Robinson. Dead. Patricia Parks, one of the “defectors.” Dead. Anthony Katsaris, one of the concerned relatives. Badly wounded. And Steve Sung, the NBC soundman. Badly wounded.

Inside the other plane, there were two more seriously wounded people; both were defectors shot by a third Temple member posing as a defector. Ironically, that third “defector” was Larry Layton, Debbie Layton’s brother.

In all, four of the congressman’s original party were dead, and twelve wounded, including myself; after the shooting, the Guyanese pilots secretly gathered in the smaller of the two planes, which had not been damaged, and flew back to Georgetown without telling us.

As night fell, we knew there would be no way out until at least the next morning; we treated the wounded as best we could and tried to find protection for ourselves, fearful the gunmen might return. It was a nightmare.

But what we didn’t know then was that another nightmare was just beginning five miles away. In the early evening hours of Saturday, November 18, 1978, after the gunmen returned from the airstrip and reported that the congressman had been killed, Jones called his followers to the Pavilion. The Temple was under attack, he told them, the Temple had been betrayed. It was time for all loyal members of the Peoples Temple to commit the revolutionary suicide they had practiced so many times before.

There was some resistance, but not much. After a rambling harangue, Jones urged his followers to “die with dignity.” The fatal liquid, Flavour-aide mixed with cyanide, was then poured from a washtub into small cups and distributed. One after another, some nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple, many of them parents with children in their arms, drank the poison. Then they huddled together around the Pavilion, writhing in pain, waiting to die. Those who resisted were forced to drink the poison at gunpoint. Jones, however, chose to die in a different way: he shot himself, or was shot, at pointblank range on the floor of the Pavilion, surrounded by his wife, Marceline, and other members of the Temple’s inner circle.

By the time I got there thirty-six hours later, the first journalist to reach Jonestown after the suicide-murder, hundreds of bloated bodies, mosquito-infested and rotting in the hot tropical sun, were piled two, three, sometimes even four deep, in the area around the Pavilion. Jones’s corpse lay at the center.

Guyanese soldiers had secured the compound but otherwise had done very little. The vat, half-full of the deadly purplish liquid, was still there.

The only survivors were several members of the armed “security squad,” whose job it had been to force others to drink the poison. They were then supposed to drink it themselves. But somehow they had survived, and their eyewitness accounts provided the first information of what had happened.

“They started with the babies” was what I was told by the security squad. And that’s how I began my report in the next day’s
Washington Post.

Even the dogs had been poisoned.

Debbie Layton survived Jonestown by escaping, and
Seductive Poison
is her account, twenty years later, of how she got involved with Jones and joined the Peoples Temple, and what it was that kept her there for nearly seven years: the psychological and sexual manipulation, the terror and violence used to prevent otherwise sane people from leaving, the strange mixture of idealism, religion, “miracles,” and political gobbledygook that Jones concocted to attract a following and then to keep it.

More important,
Seductive Poison
is the story of why Debbie became disillusioned, how and why she began to question the premises, and see through Jones’s hypocrisy and lies. It is a personal story that is fascinating in and of itself. But it is also a story that should serve as a guide, a warning, and an inspiration to millions of others throughout the world who find themselves in similar circumstances, taken in by false prophets of a religious—or political—kind.

As a foreign correspondent, I would remain familiar with Jonestown territory. Over the years, I have observed, and reported on, the abuse of power by regimes of both the left and right, from the Communists in Poland and Cuba, to the pro-West military juntas in Argentina and Chile, to the fundamentalist Islamic regimes of the Middle East. Each offered—or offers—something to its people. Like Jim Jones, not even Saddam Hussein in Iraq remains in power by force alone.

Still, terror is terror. And absolute power is absolute power, whether it’s wielded by generals with well-equipped armies, ayatollahs with all-powerful secret police, or Jim Jones with only a makeshift goon squad to enforce his perverted will. The abuse of power and the use of repression to subjugate people, whether by Jim Jones in Guyana or Augusto Pinochet in Chile or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, remains a danger to all of us.

There is much that should have been learned (but, unfortunately, was not) from Jonestown about religion, about religion and politics, about the First Amendment, and about the appropriate role of the state in monitoring and regulating groups that claim to be churches.

Just as there are limits on violent or seditious political activity, it may be appropriate, even in a free society, to somehow define the limits of what churches and groups that claim to be religious can and cannot do. Certainly, citizens should be protected from shamans like Jim Jones who conduct fake healings with the help of chicken gizzards or who, in the name of Christ the Lord, or Muhammed, insinuate themselves into politics by providing politicians with armies of their followers. Or money.

In the Pavilion, there was a crude hand-lettered sign, which said THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT.

Above all else, that is why I believe
Seductive Poison
is so important, and why I encouraged Debbie to continue with it after she sent me the first chapters—and after we finally met—two years ago.

Hopefully,
Seductive Poison
will both provide a warning and serve as a reminder that Jonestown was more than a freakish aberration, just as the affidavit Debbie wrote after she escaped from Jonestown warned Congressman Ryan that he should investigate—and proved tragically accurate in warning of the events that would follow.

Since then, “another Jonestown” has become shorthand for similar tragedies like Waco and Heaven’s Gate, where mind control, religious fervor, and/or misplaced belief come together in an explosive mix. Parents should read this book, as should their children, because it recounts the experience of someone who was taken in—but who also had the presence of mind to get out.

Legislators, law enforcement officials, and those interested in religion and public policy should also read this book because Debbie Layton’s insights and experience provide valuable lessons that should serve to open an important national discussion on religion, politics, and the First Amendment; otherwise, another Jonestown, or something like it, will surely happen again.

Prologue

Driving over the San Francisco Bay Bridge at four-thirty in the morning, preparing, as I have for the past ten years, for another hectic day on the trading floor of a brokerage firm, I listen to the radio. I hear people talking about a strange cult called Branch Davidians that has been surrounded by the FBI. My mind and heart begin to race as I recognize ignorance in the questions and comments about the group. Authorities are misguidedly speculating about why the cult members have walled themselves off against the world and are provoking a dangerous standoff. I wonder: Are they really provoking it or are they being forced into an impasse? I am sure that it is the latter. My head fills with the voices I’ve tried to silence. Mothers whispering, babies crying, a grandmother weeping softly. People are running, I can smell the dust as it is scattered into the air by the chaos. Father is calling …

I can barely hear the radio any longer. Someone is saying the authorities are blasting music into the Davidian compound, floodlights are being focused directly on buildings to frighten and force the inhabitants out, perhaps they’ll use tear gas.

Entrapped, imprisoned, alone, frightened … I can hear their thoughts. I feel their pain. I understand what keeps them inside and afraid to surrender. I have been in their shoes. I am one of them.

Old tapes are running in my head. Memories pole-vault me backward into fear and insanity, back into the darkness, into Jonestown. I see the Pavilion in the center of a compound cut into the heart of the jungle. People are running, I hear their anxious voices. Father is calling us …

Father’s voice is filled with emotion. He’s shouting over the loudspeakers, broadcasting through the camp. Danger is near. I can hear a siren in the background, “Security alert! White Night! White Night! Quickly, wake up. We must get to the safety of the Pavilion. Run, mothers! Hurry, children! We must make it to the safety of the Pavilion.”

I sit up, slightly disoriented, awakened from a heavy and abysmally dreamless sleep. Jumping down from the bunk, I grope about on the wooden planks, unable to find my boots. I fight with my pant legs to allow my feet entrance.

Christ, it must be past midnight. Goddamnit, I don’t want to die without my boots on! I don’t want to fight the enemy in my socks. Fumbling around in the dark, I am frantic that I’ll arrive late at the Pavilion and be confronted and punished for taking too long.

My shirt smells of sweat from days of field work. Finally, I grab my worn and tattered boots, crusty with mud from the torrential rain last night. I scramble to the outside stairs where the moonlight is bright.

I see other residents rushing, pulling on shirts, zipping up pants, stumbling out of their cabins, some with babies in their arms, most alone, running to what we are told is safety, the Pavilion, our sanctuary, where Father will protect us.

I can hear gunfire in the jungle surrounding us. Father warned us that mercenaries are out there. Every day, he warns us about the enemy, the “others” out there who are against us. I can hear by the gunshots that they are coming closer. He has told, and told, and told us that they will harm us. With each blast of the siren, our existence in Jonestown becomes more tenuous. I am frightened. I don’t want to be murdered. I’ve done nothing wrong. These poor black grandmothers have done nothing wrong. Please, why must they hurt the children? The children were brought here by their parents, young adults, who thought they were giving their babies a better life, a life free of racism and oppression. Here in Guyana, the Promised Land, we would have a chance to live life to its fullest, because Father had promised it would be so.