Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (22 page)

Even before they left for the Jonestown site, the People’s Temple members were subjects of local scandal in the news.
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Jim Jones claimed these exposés were attacks on their newly-found religion, and used them as an excuse to move most of the members to Guyana.
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But disturbing reports continued to surround Jones, and soon came to the attention of Congressional members like Leo Ryan. Stories of beatings, kidnapping, sexual abuse and mysterious deaths leaked out in the press.
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Ryan decided to go to Guyana and investigate the situation for himself. The nightmare began.
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Isolated on the tiny airstrip at Port Kaituma, Ryan and several reporters in his group were murdered. Then came the almost unbelievable “White Night,” a mass suicide pact of the Jonestown camp. A community made up mostly of Blacks and women drank cyanide from paper cups of Kool-Aid, adults and children alike died and fell around the main pavilion, Jones himself was shot in the head, an apparent suicide. For days, the body count mounted, from 400 to nearly 1,000. The bodies were flown to the United States and later cremated or buried in mass graves.
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Temple member Larry Layton faced charges of conspiracy in Ryan’s murder. Ryan was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor, and was the first Congress member to die in the line of duty.
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Pete Hamill called the corpses “all the loose change of the sixties.”
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The effect was electric. Any alternative to the current system was seen as futile, if not deadly. Protest only led to police riots and political assassination. Alternative lifestyles and drugs led to “creepy-crawly communes and violent murders.
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And religious experiments led to cults and suicide. Social Utopias were dreams that turned into nightmares. The television urged us to go back to the “Happy Days” of the apolitical 50s. The message was, get a job, and go back to church.
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The nuclear threat generated only nihilism and hopelessness. There was no answer but death, no exit from the grisly future. The new ethic was personal success, aerobics, material consumption, a return to “American values,” and the “moral majority,” white Christian world. The official message was very clear.

The headlines the day of the massacre read: “Cult Dies in South American Jungle: 400 Die in Mass Suicide, 700 Flee into Jungle.”
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By all accounts in the press, as well as People’s Temple statements, there were at least 1,100 people at Jonestown.
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There were 809 adult passports found there, and reports of 300 children (276 found among the dead, and 210 never identified). The headline figures from the first day add to the same number: 1,100.
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The original body count done by the Guyanese, which was the final count, was given almost a week later by American military authorities as 913.
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A total of 167 survivors were reported to have returned to the U.S.
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Where were the others?

At their first press conference, the Americans claimed that the Guyanese “could not count.” These local people had carried out the gruesome job of counting the bodies, and later assisted American troops in the process of poking holes in the flesh lest they explode from the gasses of decay.
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Then the Americans proposed another theory — they had missed seeing a pile of bodies at the back of the pavilion. The structure was the size of a small house, and they had been at the scene for days. Finally, we were given the official reason for the discrepancy — bodies had fallen on top of other bodies, adults covering children.
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It was simple, if morbid, arithmetic that led to the first suspicions. The 408 bodies discovered at first count would have to be able to cover 505 bodies for a total of 913. In addition, those who first worked on the bodies would have been unlikely to miss bodies lying beneath each other, since each body had to be punctured. Eighty-two of the bodies first found were those of children, reducing the number that could have been hidden below others.
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A search of nearly 150 photographs, aerial and close-up, fails to show even one body lying under another, much less 500.
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It seemed the first reports were true, 400 had died, and 700 had fled to the jungle. The American authorities claimed to have searched for people who had escaped, but found no evidence of any in the surrounding area.
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At least a hundred Guyanese troops were among the first to arrive, and they were ordered to search the jungle for survivors.
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In the area, at the same time, British Black Watch troops were on “training exercises,” with nearly 600 of their best-trained commandos. Soon, American Green Berets were on site as well.
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The presence of these soldiers, specially trained in covert killing operations, may explain the increasing numbers of bodies that appeared.

Most of the photographs show the bodies in neat rows, face down. There are few exceptions. Close shots indicate drag marks, as though the bodies were positioned by someone after death.
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Is it possible that the 700 who fled were rounded up by these troops, brought back to Jonestown and added to the body count?
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If so, the bodies would indicate the cause of death. A new word was coined by the media, “suicide-murder.” But which was it?
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Autopsies and forensic science are a developing art. The detectives of death use a variety of scientific methods and clues to determine how people die, when they expire, and the specific cause of death. Dr. Mootoo, the top Guyanese pathologist, was at Jonestown within hours after the massacre. Refusing the assistance of U.S. pathologists, he accompanied the teams that counted the dead, examined the bodies, and worked to identify the deceased. While the American press screamed about the “Kool-Aid Suicides,” Dr. Mootoo was reaching a much different opinion.
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There are certain signs that show the types of poisons that lead to the end of life. Cyanide blocks the messages from the brain to the muscles by changing body chemistry in the central nervous system. Even the “involuntary” functions like breathing and heartbeat get mixed neural signals. It is a painful death, breath coming in spurts. The other muscles spasm, limbs twist and contort. The facial muscles draw back into a deadly grin, called “cyanide rictus.”
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All these telling signs were absent in the Jonestown dead. Limbs were limp and relaxed, and the few visible faces showed no sign of distortion.
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Instead, Dr. Mootoo found fresh needle marks at the back of the left shoulder blades of 80-90% of the victims. Others had been shot or strangled. One survivor reported that those who resisted were forced by armed guards.
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The gun that reportedly shot Jim Jones was lying nearly 200 feet from his body, not a likely suicide weapon.
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As Chief Medical Examiner, Mootoo’s testimony to the Guyanese grand jury investigating Jonestown led to their conclusion that all but three of the people were murdered by “persons unknown.” Only two had committed suicide, they said.
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Several pictures show the gunshot wounds on the bodies as well.
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The U.S. Army spokesman, Lt. Col. Schuier, said, “No autopsies are needed. The cause of death is not an issue here.” The forensic doctors who later did autopsies at Dover, Delaware, were never made aware of Dr. Mootoo’s findings.
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There are other indications that the Guyanese government participated with American authorities in a cover-up of the real story, despite their own findings. One good example was Guyanese Police Chief Lloyd Barker, who interfered with investigations, helped “recover” $2.5 million for the Guyanese government, and was often the first to officially announce the cover stories relating to suicide, body counts and survivors.
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Among the first to the scene were the wife of Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham and his Deputy Prime Minister, Ptolemy Reid. They returned from the massacre site with nearly $1 million in cash, gold and jewelry taken from the buildings and from the dead. Inexplicably, one of Burnham’s political party secretaries had visited the site of the massacre only hours before it occurred.
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When Shirley Field Ridley, Guyanese Minister of Information, announced the change in the body count to the shocked Guyanese Parliament, she refused to answer further questions. Other representatives began to point a finger of shame at Ridley and the Burnham government, and the local press dubbed the scandal “Templegate,” all accused them of taking a ghoulish payoff.
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Perhaps more significantly, the Americans brought in 16 huge C-131 cargo planes, but claimed they could only carry 36 caskets in each one. These aircraft can carry tanks, trucks, troops and ammunition all in one load.
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At the scene, bodies were stripped of identification, including the medical wrist tags visible in many early photos.
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Dust-off operations during Vietnam clearly demonstrated that the military is capable of moving hundreds of bodies in a short period.
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Instead, they took nearly a week to bring back the Jonestown dead, bringing in the majority at the end of the period.
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The corpses, rotting in the heat, made autopsy impossible.
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At one point, the remains of 183 people arrived in 82 caskets. Although the Guyanese had identified 174 bodies at the site, only 17 were tentatively identified at the massive military mortuary in Dover, Delaware.
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Isolated there, hundreds of miles from their families who might have visited the bodies at a similar mortuary in Oakland that was used during Vietnam, many of the dead were eventually cremated.
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Press was excluded, and even family members had difficulty getting access to the remains.
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Officials in New Jersey began to complain that state coroners were excluded, and that the military coroners appointed were illegally performing cremations.
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One of the top forensic body identification experts, who later was brought in to work on the Iranian raid casualties, was denied repeated requests to assist.
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In December, the President of the National Association of Medical Examiners complained in an open letter to the U.S. military that they “badly botched” procedures, and that a simple fluid autopsy was never performed at the point of discovery. Decomposition, embalming and cremation made further forensic work impossible.
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The unorthodox method of identification attempted to remove the skin from the fingertip and slip it over a gloved finger, would not have stood up in court.
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The long delay made it impossible to reconstruct the event. As noted, these military doctors were unaware of Dr. Mootoo’s conclusions. Several civilian pathology experts said they “shuddered at the ineptness” of the military, and that their autopsy method was “doing it backwards.” But in official statements, the U.S. attempted to discredit the Guyanese grand jury findings, saying they had uncovered “few facts.”
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