Eerie Echoes, Missing Money

Jonestown's lingering ghosts

"Mothers, you must keep your children under control! They must die with dignity!" Over the shrieks of the young and the sound of gunshots boomed the baritone voice of Jim Jones, exhorting his followers to spray cyanide deep into the throats of infants and any adults who resisted his order to die. This haunting echo of the Jonestown horror was discovered last week on one of hundreds of tape recordings discovered by the FBI and Guyanese officials at the Peoples Temple compound in Guyana. The tape was on a recording machine that had apparently been turned on just as the mass suicides began, to provide a grisly final accounting for the cult of death.

The officials also found several cartons of memos, directives, letters and other documents that detail the community's history, and as much as $2.5 million in U.S. and Guyanese currency. The cash is part of a tantalizing mystery: How much money did the Peoples Temple have, where is it all, and who has rights to it?

Timothy Stoen, who was chief legal adviser to the cult until shortly before Jones moved to Guyana, told TIME that money in Peoples Temple bank accounts around the world could total $20 million. Stoen himself set up two dummy corporations in 1975 for the Peoples Temple in Panama. One of them, called Briget, S.A., now has $2.5 million in a secret account, according to an American investigator. Said Stoen: "Jones wanted funds close by in case he had to quickly leave Guyana." U.S. investigators say Stoen and other top Jones aides also set up many personal accounts, and that the ones opened by Stoen totaled more than $500,000.

According to Stoen, the key to the mystery of the money is Terri Buford, a former mistress of Jones' who left Jonestown and returned to the U.S. about three weeks before the suicides. Buford has been kept in hiding by her attorney, Conspiracy Theorist Mark Lane. Former cult members say that Jones frequently sent Buford overseas to set up dummy corporations and bank accounts. Buford is negotiating with the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco for immunity from prosecution in return for information on the foreign bank accounts. Lane denies that he too is negotiating for immunity.

The ex-cultists report that the temple's income last year averaged $250,000 a month, including $60,000 from elderly adherents' Social Security checks. Before Jones and his followers went to Guyana, he had elderly members bused each month to a bank in San Francisco that at his request opened at 7 a.m. to receive the checks. In addition, San Francisco real estate records show that many members transferred ownership of their houses to the cult, which then sold them when it needed cash.

Attorney Charles Garry, who has represented Jones and the temple since last year, filed papers in San Francisco Superior Court last week to dissolve the temple so that its assets could be used to bury the 911 victims. By Lane's account, however, all of the temple's cash may never be recovered. He told the New York Times that before Buford left Guyana, the bank accounts were transferred to the name of an unidentified elderly woman who later died in the mass suicide.

The House International Relations Committee meanwhile began looking into the possibility that the Government can be reimbursed from the cult's assets for the cost of flying the victims' bodies back to the U.S. and preparing them for burial. In an attempt to determine roughly how much money is at stake, the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco has subpoenaed bank records and summoned 17 Peoples Temple survivors for questioning by a grand jury.

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