Since news of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide broke, I’ve seen all sorts of experts on TV talking about why people join cults. There are no simple answers. These people aren’t necessarily from dysfunctional families. My loving parents gave me everything in the world, and I was a successful assistant district attorney. People join cults in moments of weakness–when they’re angry about something in their personal life or in the world around them. For many in our throwaway, hedonistic society, life has become empty. Anything that involves a family–which is what a cult is–can be very appealing. People want simplicity; a cult provides ready-made answers.
I learned that lesson the hard way. The five months I spent in Jonestown were wonderful. Here were people of all backgrounds–professionals and drug addicts, janitors and secretaries, blacks, whites, Native Americans–creating a new world. I did diplomatic work with the government of Guyana, along with working in the sawmill, pushing crabwood boards into a planer in the tropical sun. In the afternoons, I taught reading and writing to my son and the other children.
But when I returned to California for a brief visit in July 1977, my wife, Grace–who had been a counselor at the People’s Temple in the United States–forced me to see how Jones’s utopia had rotted. She told me about Jones’s increasing paranoia and his threats against her. She said he forced the children to beat each other. Suddenly I realized that Jones recognized only power. I had trusted his ideology so much that I had left John Victor in Jonestown during my visit home. When I tried to get him out, Jones refused. Grace and I spent months filing lawsuits and traveling to Guyana to free our boy. In November 1978, we accompanied Rep. Leo Ryan on his mission to Guyana to investigate alleged human-rights abuses. When Jones heard we were with Ryan, he specifically forbade us to travel to the compound. That’s why I’m alive today. While waiting in our hotel, we heard that Ryan and his four companions had been killed on the Jonestown airstrip. We realized immediately there would be a collective suicide. We knew our son, along with the other 915 people in the compound, would die. We couldn’t do a damn thing. It was the most horrible night of my life.
This will be a difficult time for the families of those who died in Rancho Santa Fe. Remember that almost anybody can get swept away. Think of the good things your children did. This kind of horror can be overcome. Jones taped himself during the collective suicide. Among the things he said: “We win when we go down. Tim Stoen will destroy himself.” That did not happen. In May 1991 I became a Christian. I must accept responsibility for protecting Jones all those years, but because of God’s forgiveness I am at peace. I hope the victims’ families find their paths to that peace.
