Another Anniversary of Jim Jones' mass murder of his black parishioners in Guyana was recorded on November 8th, but if it was noted anywhere I didn't see it. Usually the grisly event is squeezed by the media for the gold in its horror content with, as always, the media asking fatuous rhetorical questions like, “How Could It Have Happened?”
How could it not have happened in the media vacuum of the Northcoast, as willfully unseeing then as they are now. Jones should have been media-ambushed way back when he was beating children and looting the Mendocino County Welfare Department, way back when he was first picking up a financial head of steam in Redwood Valley via the cash cow care homes he established in no-questions-asked Mendocino County, maybe all the way back to Boonville where Jones taught the 5th grade for two years at the Anderson Valley Elementary School.
Presenting himself as a warm, wonderful human being doing what he could for healthy race relations in what he claimed was Ukiah's inland sea of roiling racism, Jones not only seduced the fuzzy warms — a pat on the head and an announcement that you are whatever you say you are will do it — he had the Rotary Club and the liberals singing choruses of mea culpas.
The man could hustle. He knew the race card would always come up trumps. Hell, maybe before he got into the speed he really was a good guy, but speed kills as the reverend established like no other tweaker before or since.
When Jones and his white inner circle persuaded their black co-religionists to join them for cyanide cocktails in the Guyana jungle, bureaucrats and judges back in Ukiah ran for their plausible deniabilties. They'd signed a lot of those dead black kids over to Jones, and they'd looked on as Jones, with Temple social workers waving the Temple on through, put his church on welfare benefits they didn't have coming.
And everyone in local authority ignored the persistent rumors of major craziness out at the alleged church in Redwood Valley, including faith healings, beatings, forced public sex and, my favorite, the gun tower. Jones erected beside his church where he'd occasionally post a couple of guys with rifles marching around. He'd tell the media saps that the tower guards were necessary because the “rednecks” were about to bum rush Sunday services, while the rednecks rightly assumed that the Jones gang was just another bunch of weirdos, not much different than other collectives of newly arrived oddballs then appearing everywhere in the county.
Looking back at the major unpunished crimes of Mendocino County — the Fort Bragg Fires, the bombing of Judi Bari, to name two —the common thread is zero pressure from the media to get the responsible people into court. Well, almost zero. The mighty AVA complained about the Fires and the travesty of the Bari case, but we're not the Press Democrat or KZYX, singly or in tandem as the two of them often occur. (The Fort Bragg Fires occurred before Mendocino County Public Radio so we can't blame KZYX's dependably cringing news service for that one.)
But KZYX, from its inception an echo chamber of correct opinion, managed to keep the false version of Bari events front and center for years, thus protecting the killer and financially benefiting the small claque of cult brains surrounding Bari in her last years.
Whenever bad things are allowed to happen blame the media first, then the DA, then the cops, then public education for removing the critical abilities of the past four generations of Americans.
I was new to Mendocino County when Jones was in Redwood Valley. I was, looking back on it, also a rather spectacular intra-racial show myself by rural standards, me with a house full of ethnic minorities. Jones must have heard about us and thought we were a natch for the People's Temple. He sent a delegation to Boonville to scope us out. We played a game of flag football with a People's Temple team. They probably beat us because they were heavy into sports. So were we but they had discipline.
The People's Temple recruiting team was led by a pretty young woman named Maria Katsaris. At Jonestown she would be described as Jones' mistress, as if she and Jones had stepped out of Anna Karenina. Miss Katsaris was Jones's dead mistress by then. She'd been right up on stage urging the church to drink their last Kool-Aid and check on out for an eternity with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Maria's father, Steve Katsaris, ran the large-scale children's institution in Ukiah called Trinity School, formerly an orphanage presided over by Catholic nuns. Katsaris was a Greek Orthodox priest. Maria later told the press he'd molested her, blaming dad for her escape to the lethal embrace of Jones. Maria was ahead of the recovered memory bullshit that came along a few years later as thousands of adult neurotics claimed dear old dad had fouled them, laying off their adult craziness on the old man. Was it Tolstoy who said that children over the age of thirty who are still blaming their parents are simply snivelers and hopeless dings?
The Temple was always denouncing people as perverts, a clear case of projection by Jones who was an amphetamine-driven pervert himself, once having been arrested for soliciting a cop in a public restroom.
When the perv accusations didn't work, they'd send a goon squad of young tough guys to knock on your door and woof in your face.
Most people around here at the time didn't know what to think about it all, but most people, especially liberals, have always been easily intimidated by unhappy persons of color, and totally blinded by happy persons of color, hence, eventually, Obama.
Maria Katsaris wanted to know if we cared to attend services in Redwood Valley. You had to be invited, you see, and she was extending the required invitation. Although houses of God are locked tight and have security cameras and tax exemptions, we'd never heard of one that was RSVP. And we weren't interested anyhow. We were more in tune with that great American deist, Daniel Webster, who built an entire theology on the idea of the acknowledgment of a supreme force without a dependent hierarchy of old men creeping around in black robes mumbling in Latin, nevermind the snake handlers and speakers in tongues and Jim Jones' we get at the more primitive levels of American worship. Webster was driven clear out of the country for his sensible opinions.
A homicidal social worker named Sharon Amos also invited us to the People's Temple. She would cut the throats of her three children, then slash her own jugular in Guyana where she functioned as Jones' gatekeeper in the capital of Georgetown. Ms. Amos, three years before she departed for Jonestown, told us that Jones delivered “amazing sermons” that could last five, seven, even eight hours. We simply must come to Redwood Valley to see and hear for ourselves.
We'd known people in San Francisco who could talk for two days. They were called speed freaks who, when they finally crashed, were often in a state of chemically induced paranoia that came to be known as “amphetamine psychosis.” Today's speed freaks are known as crankers or tweakers. They often tweak themselves into comparable states of amphetamine psychosis that certainly helped propel Jones to his last stand.
When the massacre went down in the jungles of Guyana, Guyana was recalled among the left as the country where the CIA had put a lot of money into overthrowing the socialist government of a man named Chedi Jagan. Jones always called himself a socialist, a fact ignored by Ukiah Rotary and the John Birch Society of inland Mendocino County who, among well-placed others, got Jones appointed foreman of the Mendocino County Grand Jury in 1967 by Judge Winslow, a liberal judge who was himself removed from the bench by conservative local voters unhappy with him for what they perceived as his liberal rulings. (When I asked at the Ukiah Library for that '67 Grand Jury report I was told it had been stolen long ago. it was long ago when I inquired so there may be a latter day copy available.)
By the time People's Temple got to Guyana the country was run by a straight up crook named Forbes Burnham who Jones bribed so the People's Temple could establish itself as an ag outpost on Guyanese rain forest land nobody wanted except the Indians who lived there.
Also at the time of the Jonestown murders, and Ukiah being a smaller, somehow more cohesive town than it is now, all of us who shopped over the hill noticed that people were missing — the produce guy at Safeway, intake clerks at the welfare office, a county road man, the lady at the Ward's Department store on South State Street. They were either dead or in hiding.
People haven't changed. Mendocino County hasn't changed. (In its way, Mendocino County is even wackier, I'd say.) The media haven't changed. They're in the prone position, down from bended knee. Something like Jones could happen again. The internet has made us even more gullible, and the local echo chamber of cool-o opinion is ever larger, and Mendocino County is still the place where history starts all over again every day and you are whatever you say you are. Jones knew that the day he got here.
A brief word for Tim Stoen. People tell me all the time that Tim Stoen, once an Assistant DA for the County and before that, County Counsel, is hiding big secrets. He isn't. Stoen was also victim of Jones, a triple victim you could say, because Jones first appropriated Stoen's wife, then he appropriated Stoen's son, and then he murdered Stoen's son. Tim Stoen has known more tragedy than most of us, and he's always deserved to be left alone.
As for the bigshot Democrats seduced by Jones, Willie Brown's solipsistic look-back in a Sunday Chronicle on an anniversary of the murders: “It's that time of year again,” Brown began. “The anniversary stories are rolling out, and one word says it all: 'Jonestown.' Jim Jones and Jonestown were a real tragedy for George Moscone, for me, for John and Phil Burton, for all of us. We had all gone over to Jones' church on Geary Boulevard. George even put him on the Housing Authority. Jones did have an incredible following at the Peoples Temple and was a real pastor for diversity and for poor people. What happened in Guyana was just horrible for us. We were obviously embarrassed at our lapse of judgment, our lapse of objectivity, our lapse of due diligence. We had no explanation for how stupid we were. We couldn't even be responsible to all these relatives whose folks had died. For San Francisco, and those of us on the elected side, it was a very, very tough time.”
Boo-hoo. Jonestown as a tragedy for Willie Brown and the Democrats. Brown's narcissistic perspective is almost as crazy as Jones was.
The three best books on Jones are Journey To Nowhere by Shiva Naipul; The Life and Death of Jim Jones by James Reston Jr.; and Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People by John Jacobs and Tim Reiterman.
Several deputies knew what a terrible person Jones was but no one would listen to them. They were aware of Jones’s breaking up families to gain donations. Property was given to Jones with only one spouse agreeing to do so. These cases were civil not criminal so there was little or nothing deputies could do. Jones also promised local politicians the vote of 100% of his congregation to keep them in line. He had employees in social services, banks, the DA’s office, and the sheriff’s office to gather information for him. Early on Tim Stoen was in fact a true believer, but recanted later on. Jones had one of his members drive past the Redwood Valley church firing a pistol in the air, at night, so he could convince his sheep they were under attack. He did so much bull shit like this but still the politicians still supported him.
No amount of “Sound proofing” can cover the sound of people- dozens?- being raped and tortured. John Wayne Gacys’ nabes heard the screams emanating from his garage in that weird little blob of unincorporated land within Chicago. Gacy was an operative in the local Democratic Party. Just like Jim Jones…
“A homicidal social worker named Sharon Amos also invited us to the People’s Temple. She would cut the throats of her three children, then slash her own jugular in Guyana where she functioned as Jones’ gatekeeper in the capital of Georgetown.”
Bruce Anderson has made this claim at least a dozen times in these pages and at least twice he has admitted and I paraphrase: “Armstrong is right, No one knows for sure what happened in Amos’ apartment in Georgetown.”
Going further this time, he slanders her by calling her “homicidal,” inferring that he knew this to be part of her psychological makeup ever since she tweaked him in earlier engagements.
When you think a journalist may be deliberately printing inaccurate information, you may take some of his other views with a grain of salt.
When you know he is doing so, you doubt them all.
As a matter of confirmed fact, Ms. Amos was a former social worker for Mendocino County and chief Jones lieutenant at Jones’ Georgetown office where she screened would be visitors to the Jonestown jungle compound. On the fatal day Amos murdered her own children by cutting their throats and then her own. Any book on the mass murder details Amos’s last day.
“Confirmed fact” is quite a claim.
Are citations more than “any book” available?
You need more? Odd that you continually defend one of Jones’ primary enablers.
Tomorrow.
When I started at the then Welfare Department’s children’s service unit in 1970, Linda Amos and I had adjacent desks and shared a telephone for about two years.
Actually, she was an adult services social worker and I have never understood why she came calling on you on that fateful day you wrote about and have reprinted so many times.
Sharing such close quarters over such a long time left few aspects of either of our professional and personal lives very secret. We became friends as well as coworkers.
She was dedicated to her job, her children and to the Peoples Temple. Exhaustion was her standard state.
Of course, there were several other Temple members employed there in quite varied jobs.
A good friend of mine, one even better acquainted with several Temple members, and I were invited to Sunday services and attended most of one the famous all day mindboggling productions. Suffice it to say, it seems more like yesterday than fifty years ago.
To the point, Linda was an amazing, exceptional, flawed angel, with very strong beliefs commitments.
Calling her homicidal on the basis of recent “facts” based on old conflicting information is slanderous.
I am sorry that you find that defending her “odd.”
Heressssssss, Linda!
From ‘Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People’ by Tim
Reiterman (1983)
Chapter 54, Holocaust
Pages 542 – 545.
…..With characteristic determination, Sharon Amos crossed through the living
room to the kitchen, where she searched the drawers for a large, sharp
butcher knife. Clutching it to her bosom, she walked back through the
living room and motioned for Christa and Stephanie to follow her. “Come
here, Martin,” she added. The kids followed her to the white-tiled
bathroom at the end of the long corridor. Just before she turned into the
hallway, she motioned to Chuck Beikman, Becky’s husband, to follow her. As
the person in charge at Lamaha, Amos spoke with the authority of Jim
Jones; Beikman obeyed her.
As she led her three children into the shower, Amos was shaking and
uncontrollably nervous. She turned to Beikman, saying she was going to
kill the children before the police took them. She pulled Christa to her,
and holding her by the face, she slit her throat. Christa fell screaming
to the floor, her legs kicking up spasmodically. Beikman watched
helplessly. He could not, or would not, interfere. Sharon then reached for
Martin, who began to slink away from her, but she caught up with him, held
him by his nose and mouth, and slit his throat, too. Beikman froze as she
ordered him to kill Stephanie; he administered only a superficial cut and
let her drop to the floor. Amos, meanwhile, turned to her daughter Liane
and handed her the knife. “Here,” she cried, “you’ve got to do me,” and as
Liane cut, Sharon urged, “Harder, harder.” She took Liane’s hands, and
with her own hands guiding them, managed to complete her own suicide,
murmuring, “Thank you, Father,” as she collapsed to the floor. Liane then
turned the knife on herself. With some difficulty she slashed her own
throat, before she fell convulsing to the floor.
People in the living room first heard Christa say, “Oh, Mama.” Then came
the screams.
Calvin Douglas, the forward on the basketball team, bolted from the card
table and raced down the hall. When he threw open the bathroom door,
Calvin found three bodies in a deep pool of blood. Amos’s oldest daughter
was still barely alive; her body twitched, the knife still in her hand.
There was hope for little Stephanie, with a relatively minor cut on her
neck. So Douglas snatched her up and whisked her to the living room, where
someone attended to her. The whole slaughter had taken just a couple of
minutes.
…
I’ve told this story before, but will take this opportunity to tell it again.
Jim Jones was interested in renting my parent’s summer camp near Philo for weekend “retreats”, so my father took him on a walking tour. The more they walked and talked, the more uncomfortable my father became. At the end of the tour, my father told Mr. Jones camp would not be available for the kind of rental he had in mind (I am sure dad was very tactful). Jones took the news well and departed. As far as I know, my father never heard from Jim Jones again.
Excellent story, thank you Dear Editor! This nudges Jones more firmly – if not completely- into the Homo category… There’s a dubious group called “Drug – induced Bisexuals”- think Brando and Richard Pryor with cocaine…it’s not a Good holiday so far for us gays, as it seems this “Puffy” “Diddy” person is outing himself via the courts. On the plus side, there’s a (new?) documentary out on Keith Haring which is brilliant, call him The Anti Jim Jones! – Deck the Halls from COLD San Francisco
Thanks, Bruce, for the compilation of Jones, and how gullible most of Ukiah’s leaders were back then, and for the most part, still are today. I attended a Sunday service at the Presbyterian Church in Ukiah in ’74 or ’75, when I was a senior at Ukiah High, with my parents. Jones was filling in for the pastor, who was out of town. During his sing-song sermon, he declared that he was truly convinced that he was the second coming of Christ! My dad, a WW2 vet who still had shrapnel in him from Iwo Jima, shot up like a lightning bolt, and charged twords Jones at the pulpit. Parishioners restrained him, and he never attended church again up to his death. He hated Jones! To this day, I am amazed how smoke-and-mirrors and tossing money around that came from temple “prisoners” bought and paid for most “leaders” in Ukiah!