The Horror Lives On

A search for answers to the questions of Jonestown

The grisly remains of Jonestown's dead had been brought to the U.S. and stacked tidily in coffin-like aluminum transfer cases in a huge gray hangar at Delaware's Dover Air Force Base. The shacks and other buildings at the Jonestown commune in Guyana were shuttered and silent. Most of the 80 Jonestown survivors waited restlessly at the Victorian Park Hotel in Georgetown, pending a decision by Guyanese authorities on whether they would be allowed to leave or be held as witnesses, and in some cases defendants, in future murder trials.

The tragic saga of Jonestown was far from over. At Dover, teams of military pathologists, FBI technicians and civilian embalmers worked to identify the 911 corpses (the count now seemed official and final) and prepare them for burial or cremation. Yet the condition of the remains and the lack of fingerprint records for many victims meant the process was slow--and in many cases would prove futile. Autopsies were to be conducted on seven bodies: Cult Leader Jim Jones, Cult Physician Larry Schacht and five others selected at random. Officials decided that trying to pin down the precise cause of death for all victims would be impractical and pointless.

The Government had not yet decided what to do with the remains. Residents of Dover feared that unidentified or unclaimed bodies might be buried near their small town (pop. 28,500) in massive numbers and become a macabre shrine of sorts. Predicted Dover Mayor Charles A. Legates: "You could expect martyrdom, hordes of people making an annual pilgrimage on the anniversary of Jonestown. We just couldn't handle that."

Many of the victims' relatives hoped that the bodies that can be identified would be flown home for burial. But representatives of the relatives complained that many of them cannot afford the $275 that Government officials estimate as the cost of moving each coffin from Delaware to burial sites on the West Coast.

The task of removing the bodies from Guyana and embalming them was expensive, but the Government would not yet predict the total costs. The fact that U.S. taxpayers were bearing the cost upset at least two Congressmen, Illinois Republican Philip Crane and Rhode Island Democrat Edward Beard. They publicly protested the use of federal funds (unofficial estimates of the cost have run as high as $8 million) to transport and process the decayed remains. Said Crane: "Although the entire situation is deplorable, the responsibility to bring the loved ones back to the United States rests with the families, not the Federal Government." Crane demanded to know who in the State Department had authorized the operation (it was the decision of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance).

Law-enforcement agencies pressed on with their investigations. The FBI is trying to determine if there was a plan to kill Congressman Leo Ryan even before he went to Jonestown. In addition, the bureau was investigating the possibility that there are assassination squads made up of surviving cultists and a hit list left behind by Jones, as some defectors from the temple feared. The Secret Service, assuming that the President or Vice President might be on such a list, if one exists, joined the probe. Since some members of the temple in San Francisco refused to cooperate with FBI interviewers, a federal grand jury will likely be convened to question them under oath.

The apprehensions about hit squads were fueled partly by statements from master self-publicist Mark Lane, who has made a career out of pushing assassination conspiracy theories and was one of the cult's lawyers. After being hired by Jones, Lane protested in a press release: "It makes me almost weep to see such an incredible experiment, with such vast potential for the human spirit and the soul of this country, to be cruelly assaulted by the intelligence operations." After the cultists gunned down Ryan and his four American companions, and then engaged in their act of self-destruction, Lane claimed he had known all along that Jones was unstable and that the temple members had rehearsed mass suicide. But he never warned Ryan and the others about the cult's potential for violence.

Last week Lane grabbed more headlines by claiming that he knew there was an $11 million Peoples Temple fund set aside to assassinate defecting cultists, public officials and reporters who had somehow offended Jones. Lane said he even knew the numbers of the foreign bank accounts in which most of the funds were kept. He claimed that he had given this information to the FBI. That agency was checking out a variety of such reports but had not confirmed them.

Yet to be determined by investigators in the U.S. and Guyana was just how much cash, property and other assets still belonged to the cult and whether any of them could be seized as repayment for the costs the ritual of death had incurred. The temple's longtime lawyer, Charles Garry, said assets in Guyana might be used for this purpose but not those in the U.S. Said he: "I don't intend to let them get away with that. It's an ongoing church. Temple money is not subject to government interference."

Just what will happen to those who survived Jonestown, some only because they were luckily away from the commune at the fatal moments, is not at all clear. Eight of the more elderly survivors returned to the U.S. last week, after being released by police in Georgetown because they had committed no crimes and witnessed nothing that would help Guyanese authorities in their investigations. Grover Davis, 79, said he had jumped into a ditch when the suicides were ordered by Jones and pretended to be dead until everyone had left. Why? "Because I didn't want to die," he said. Hyacinth Thrash, 76, recalled that she had felt ill and had slept through the entire poison-taking ritual. When she awoke and saw no movement, she said, "I thought everybody had run off. I started crying and wailing, 'Why did they leave me? Why did they leave me?' " And then she found out why.

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