The survivors describe the dementia of Jim Jones
He would force a child to eat his own vomit. He banned sexual activity between Peoples Temple members but was voraciously bisexual himself and obsessed with bragging about the size of his penis. He was addicted to drugs and had nurses bleed him and provide him with oxygen for imagined illnesses.
These examples of the Rev. Jim Jones' paranoia and delusions surfaced last week in a 215-page manuscript that was made public by former temple member Jeannie Mills in San Francisco and in further interviews in Guyana with stunned survivors of the mass suicide at Jonestown.
After he moved his church from Indiana to California in 1965, Jones' mental condition seemed to deteriorate rapidly. In 1973, eight members fled the commune because of his ban against sex between cult members. Calling 30 associates to his home, Jones declared: "Something terrible has happened. Eight people have defected. In order to keep our apostolic socialism, we should all kill ourselves and leave a note saying that because of harassment, a socialist group cannot exist at this time." He did not go ahead with the plan, but from that time on, Jones periodically conducted fake suicide rituals.
The ban on sex did not apply to Jones; he would brag about his own conquests, male and female. He once boasted that he had sex with 14 women and two men on the same day. He claimed that he detested homosexual activity and was only doing it for the male temple adherents' own good—to connect them symbolically with himself. Some indeed shared his view: the cult's doctor in Guyana, Larry Schacht, used to brag about having intercourse with Jones. Jones took pleasure in forcing female followers to ridicule their husbands' sexual ability.
Temple Attorney Charles Garry says Jones was obsessed with a custody fight for a boy he claimed was his own. The child, John, was born in 1972 to Grace Stoen, who with her husband Timothy was one of Jones' top associates. At Jones' behest, Timothy Stoen signed an affidavit declaring that he had personally requested that the child be sired by "the most compassionate, honest and courageous human being the world contains." The Stoens now deny that Jones was the father and won legal custody of the child last year after a court fight. But Jones refused to let him leave Guyana. Just before Jones' death he told a newsman that the fear of losing the child prevented him from returning home. After the suicides, the child was found dead next to Jones' body.
Jones first visited Guyana in 1962 on his way to Brazil, where he lived for two years. When his paranoia, fueled by unfavorable press reports, led him to move his community from San Francisco in 1977, Guyana was a logical choice. Its socialism matched what he conceived to be his own communal-agrarian ideals. Prime Minister Forbes Burnham told TIME last week: "I feel what may have attracted him was that we had said we wanted to use cooperatives as the basis for the establishment of socialism, and maybe his idea of setting up a commune meshed with that." Guyana had its own motives in making the commune welcome: it wanted immigrants to develop its hinterland and fortify its border with Venezuela. For the Americans, Guyana offered the additional advantage of being an English-speaking country.