Ashes over the Atlantic

Jim Jones is cremated, but macabre questions remain

A silver hearse carried his body from Dover, Del., to a crematorium in New Jersey. His ashes will eventually be scattered over the Atlantic. Thus were the Rev. Jim Jones' remains to be disposed of, one month after his body was found among 912 others at the grisly death scene he created in Guyana.

Less easily disposed of were some nagging questions about the episode, ranging from the whereabouts of millions of dollars amassed by Jones' cult to the exact causes of all those deaths. In the case of Jones, said Baltimore Pathologist Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker last week after examining the bullet wound in the cult leader's head, "it looks like a suicide."

The other deaths were the subject of a coroner's inquiry in Matthews Ridge, Guyana. The chief medical examiner noted that some victims bore needle marks on their arms and concluded that they had been murdered with cyanide injections. Another inquiry witness, Cult Survivor Stanley Clayton, said that many who drank the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid did so only after Jones had pulled them "up from their seats saying they must go." A number of the dead, moreover, were small children or infirm older people who were probably unaware of what they were drinking. There is also a question that no autopsy can answer: Should those who swallowed the poison without resistance, out of a deluded devotion to a mad messiah, properly be classified as suicides?

At another hearing in Guyana last week, Larry Layton, the cult member who pretended he wanted to return home with Congressman Leo Ryan and ended up taking part in the shooting at the airstrip, was charged with the Congressman's murder. Another cult survivor testified at Layton's pretrial hearing that Jones himself had talked about the need for Ryan's death and predicted that his plane would "fall out of the sky." Survivors returning to the U.S. have told the FBI that the cult's basketball team, to which Jones' natural son Stephan (who is still alive in Guyana) belonged, was actually a "hit squad" designed to seek out defectors. One former temple member, Terri Buford, says a person in San Francisco, Sandra Bradshaw, is in charge of carrying out a program to murder cult defectors, as well as such political figures as Senators Barry Goldwater and John Stennis.

Still unresolved is the question of who should get the cult's money, more than $10 million of which has been discovered in Panama alone. Jones apparently hoped to give $7 million to the Soviet Union. Three couriers say that they were sent by Jones from the mass death scene with more than $300,000 in cash and letters informing the Soviet embassy in Guyana of the bequest, but abandoned the suitcase of money in the jungle because it got too heavy. The Guyanese government recovered the cash, and the cult's accounts in Panama were frozen. The Justice Department requested that the banks not allow anyone to withdraw the money. Buford's attorney Mark Lane, who once represented the cult, says he also made such a request. Lane denied reports, however, that while he was in Europe last week he tried to collect some of the money.

The Justice Department may seek to recover from the cult's assets the $3.5 million or so that it cost the U.S. to remove the bodies. But to do this, says a department spokesman, raises "some very strong statutory and constitutional problems." The question may have to be settled in Panamanian courts.

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