The younger man demanded that everyone in the truck move aside. But of course Dad was most terrified about anybody turning against him because it really screwed with the illusion that he had created. She died in a tragic car accident only weeks before her mother, Marceline Mae Baldwin Jones, gave birth to her brother, Stephan Gandhi Jones. Jordan Vilchezs parents were Berkeley progressives in the 1960s her father African-American, her mother Scotch-Irish. 'There were often thoughts of taking him out but I know I wasnt capable of that kind of thing. In this Nov. 13, 2008 file photo, Stephan Jones, son of Rev. "I mellowed out." 'She gives us the order that were supposed to kill ourselves,' Vilchez recalled. As we rode onto the black gravel, jungle-bordered runway, a small six-passenger Cessna was parked to one side of the corrugated metal shack which served as the airport terminal. [November 2008], View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro, Kristi Jones View their profile including current address, phone number 415-785-XXXX, background check reports, and property record on Whitepages, the most trusted online directory. He remarried three decades ago, and he and his wife Erin raised three sons with two now coaching basketball at the high school and college level. On Nov. 18, the day Rep. Leo Ryan and four others were shot to death on the airstrip at Port Caituma, Guyana, Stephan Jones and his teammates went to the movies in Georgetown. The 40th anniversary is offering Americans an opportunity to deal with this neglected sore, with the story receiving treatment in both book and documentary form, a story of a trajectory from charismatic preacher and leader to head of a murderous cult. He's 61 now. He says his daughters have seen him gnash his teeth when he talks. }); Use of this web site constitutes acceptance of the Terms Of Use and Privacy Policy | User published content is licensed under a Creative Commons License. " Pause for effect. " Garry (2007) and The Real Story (2002). They have three children. They would survive and both return home to California. I try not to speak in terms of what I couldve done because I see no value in that.. The minister was famous for his faith healings, which expelled bloody growths from the bodies of the ailing; it was not for many years that Stephan Jones learned about the sleight of hand with raw chicken giblets. But the entertainers stayed in Jonestown to entertain Ryan. Stephan Jones did not drink. Gandhi is an Indian word meaning Pharmacist. . The years have shaped another lesson for Stephan Jones, but it makes him uneasy to talk about it. People ask, How can you ever be proud of your father? he said. Do not sell or share my personal information. Where the machine shop once stood, there was only rusty equipment. At 16, she was put on the Planning Commission where the meetings were a strange mix of church business, sex talk and adulation for Jones. Outside of his career, he has discussed how he is spiritual in his personal life in interviews, like a 2007 one with Canada's The Globe and Mail though his beliefs are different than the fringe Christian ones his father once preached about. Though he waved and smiled at Peoples Temple services, seemingly enraptured like the rest, Stephan Gandhi Jones says he always had his doubts. Stephan Jones was born on 06/01/1959 and is 63 years old. More than 300 Jonestown victims were children. It appeared in the Examiner on Nov. 20, 1978, two days after the tragedy: San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman (left)was wounded in the airstrip shooting. He led the Peoples Temple, a new religious movement, between 1955 and 1978. Wiki User. "I think I'd probably be pretty messed up if I hadn't lost everybody I had and hadn't gone through the prison experience," Stephan Jones says. When that was pointed out to Ryan, Layton contended he already had been frisked. This return to the cult of Jim Jones is part of a re-examination of dangerous cults and movements in Americas past, like the Osho cult, which had a similar murderous potential. To me, the ends justified the means, he said. target_type: 'mix' Everyone participated in it and because of that, it went as far as it did, she said. Jim Jr. would lose 15 immediate relatives in Jonestown, including his pregnant wife, Yvette Muldrow. But before we could start out, we heard angry shouts. . It won't work.' For moreEntertainment,Celebrity BabiesfolloweCelebrityMirror. The only surviving child of Jim Jones, Stephan was born on June 1, 1959, in Indiana, USA. | The church provided free drug rehabilitation, medical care, food. Jonestown: It was the bodies that photographers favored most. Some scowling faces appeared in the windows that rainy afternoon, watching the defectors leave, some with trunks and others with little more than the clothes on their backs. Some have come to acknowledge that they helped enable Jim Jones to seize control over people drawn to his interracial church, socialist preaching and religious hucksterism. Jones himself, after some artfully applied pressure to the mayor's office, was appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority, where once-tedious meetings about public housing suddenly erupted into vigorous cheering sessions, with temple members applauding the pronouncements of Commissioner Jones. In a recent interview, he revealed that he was sober. According to former members, Jones would not tolerate defections from the mission project and many of the church members considered those who leave to be traitors. He was a genius, and he was unique. 'If anything, we felt pity for him,' he said, 'and it grew into a dislike, maybe hate.'. He seems to have a tragic life after what had happened with his family. A few of us jumped from the truck and ran over there. Of those 25 percent that drank the poison, most of those people were just defeated and didnt know where else to turn and didnt want to run out on the others. When he was 10 years old he listened as Jim Jones had sex with a mistress in the next room. No one now living saw Jim Jones die, so there is some dispute about whether he also performed what he had taught his followers to call "revolutionary suicide." Stephan Jones and some other team members believe they might have changed history if they were there. But even Stephan Jones never imagined that death would come the way it did, so redolent of madness and evil, so savage that a kind of panic still crawls into his voice when he talks about it. Then he decides it is time, and he falters, and he tells them they may not believe what he is about to say. Stephan escaped death with the Jonestown basketball team, Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple. When more than 900 people were killed at Jonestown by consuming punch laced with cyanide on Nov. 18, 1978, Stephan was not at the settlement founded by his father. People do things for him. Save this record and choose the information you want to add to your family tree. Be aware of this message that was prevalent in the temple: The end justifies the means. And I see that throughout society. Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple. I just wish people could understand what was attractive about him. The reality was we were folks who could be counted on to stand up, he said. Jim Jones radioed his son with orders to return to Jonestown, Stephan Jones refused to cut short the trip. "My experience in Jonestown was this: when I first got there I was happy and I was really enjoying myself. Jim Jones was cultivating his growing celebrity--elected officials visited the San Francisco temple, Mayor George Moscone had used temple members as campaign workers, and much was made of the 1976 photo that showed Jim Jones and Rosalynn Carter together during the Democratic Central Committee meeting in San Francisco. The rest was jungle, damp and hot and so thick with growth that Stephan Jones would stand among the massive trees and feel the 20th century fall away. And he faked getting shot in Redwood Valley [California] when I was still pretty young, and we felt like we were in danger much of the time. And Smiths wife, son and mother died. So grew the young Stephan: the quiet witness steeped in rage. During the bouncy ride out, former temple members said that one of the supposed defectors, Larry Layton, was a Jones loyalist and had been depressed. He remarried three decades ago, and he and his wife, Erin, raised three sons. I would argue that even a lot of the good works that he wanted to do early on were an attempt to impress my mother and her family'. "I say, 'Mom,' " Stephan Jones says, recalling a desperate mother-son huddle toward the end, " 'We're talking about a man who think's he's God. He does not know. JONESTOWN 40 YEARS LATER: Mass suicide shocked world, Amanda Knox to host new true crime podcast: 'I tend not to be a fan of the genre'. How do you explain the renewed interest in the Peoples Temple? Like why would they follow such a madman and to such a crazy final act, and we probably know by now that it wasnt a mass suicide, but thats how it has been portrayed.. Jim Jones had years earlier conceived his South American settlement as a distant haven where Peoples Temple members could live in communal isolation, protected from unfriendly reporters and all the other enemies Jones denounced through his congregation. So in my view, even the good works and things he championed were in some way not as pure as folks want to think. }); window._taboola = window._taboola || []; "It's like you went to a vacation in Europe and found out the United States had sunk," he says. _taboola.push({ Four decades later, Americans often use this phrase in political and business contexts without knowing its origin. It was Harris who had been contacted by the first two groups of temple members expressing a desire to leave. Stephanie was born in 1954 and died at a very early age of five in a car accident in May 1959. "I'd go back in a minute. By the fall of that year, almost 1,000 Temple members emigrated to Jonestown, but for Stephan Jones, the pleasure crumbled when his father arrived. 'They're in deep trouble now,' observed one of the relatives who had accompanied us. They don't normally believe it at first. ', 'I argued with my Dad,' he said. That he was just this crazy zealot this entire time. None of it makes sense. He said reporters would make the situation worse. They have altogether three daughters. A number of Jonestown survivors have spoken out about the mass suicides and murders that killed the only life they ever knew and how they have managed to build new ones in the four decades since the tragedy. Published: 01:29 EST, 14 November 2018 | Updated: 12:15 EST, 14 November 2018. Listen, not long before, we went to play basketball. I know Ive reached a better place and I dont fear lapsing back into the darkest times, but its a daily process and one that Im grateful to have.. He would rise before dawn, pick his way into the bush, and sit without moving as the quiet around him split slowly into bird cries and insect buzzing and the scuffling and calling of creatures he could not see. But in 1973, John's oldest brother and a sister, along with six other California college students, quit the church and became its enemies. File photo: Peoples Temple compound, led by Jim Jones, after bodies were removed, in Jonestown, Guyana, November 1978. After the slaughter, Stephan Jones was arrested on suspicion of abetting the mass murder and spent three months in a Guyanese prison. OAKLAND, Calif. Jonestown was the highlight of Mike Touchettes life for a time. 'Like everyone else, he died there,' his son said. Dozens of Peoples Temple members in Guyana survived the mass suicides and murders of more than 900 because they had slipped out of Jonestown or happened to be away Nov. 18, 1978. The temple was the only life he knew but says he always had his doubts. 29. Harris, a Los Angeles-based NBC investigative reporter who covered the fall of Saigon and the Nicaragua rebellion, had been killed. But we never felt he would go through with it because we saw him as such a coward.. Of course, even if he wanted to forget Jonestown, his name was an ever-present reminder. This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. The reports were wrong, they say. He has taken a lead role in a 40th Jonestown anniversary memorial to be held Sunday at Oaklands Evergreen Cemetery, where remains of unclaimed and unidentified victims are buried. He dreams he is arguing with his father, arguing passionately, and although he knows his arguments are better, his father always wins. I certainly felt there was an outside threat, even when I knew my father was full of it and I was at odds with him in Jonestown. I guess I wanted to believe that, as a child.". Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. Manipulative tendencies. By the time Stephan Jones was 16, his father had moved the family to the big temple building in a black neighborhood of San Francisco, where politicians and black leaders had begun paying considerable attention to Jim Jones' racially mixed congregation and fervently preached exhortations to adjust society under a socialist god. He was cleared of any complicity--another Peoples Temple member served a prison sentence for his role in the deaths--but Stephan Jones has come to believe that surviving Guyanese prison somehow braced him for his own re-entry to the world. " This answer is: Study guides. Jones, 44, is the only biological son of Jim Jones and his wife Marceline Baldwin who founded the cult behind Jonestown. . The pilot had radioed for help after the shooting, but during the night the only thing we heard were more rumors about the imminent arrival of Guyanese troops and medical evacuation planes. Each day's news bulletins compounded the already unimaginable: There were 400 bodies; there were 900 bodies; there were, in the precise wording of the American military men sent to investigate, "smaller bodies under larger bodies and children under those." They were at a basketball tournament five years ago, in November 1978 when the congressman and the reporters came to Jonestown. "There was always that guilt fed to you by my father that kept you in check, kept you thinking, 'Maybe I'm wrong'--the guilt for being selfish and questioning this.". John Victor Stoen. 29. Finally, attorneys for both Ryan and the temple decreed that the courtroom was the proper place to decide the custody issue. Stephan Gandhi Jones was 19. But the boy was still a child of the Temple. I dove headlong into the three-foot-tall grass. But the reality is that it was far from a mass suicide. He apparently was searching for his wife, who had carried away their child that morning, hoping to escape the settlement. At the far end of the strip sat a yellow government plane. . There, as part of Jones personal security detail, Cobb saw the once captivating minister strung out on drugs, afraid to venture anywhere for fear of his legal problems. 'Little Jimmy' became part of their 'Rainbow Family' of white, black, Korean-American and Native American children. And the temple was his life first in Indiana, later in California. 'What we were calling the cause really was Jim,' she said. In code, his father told him everyone was going to die in 'revolutionary suicide. I would have been doing more than just leaving a family. Stephan Jones was 6 years old, the only biological child of James and Marceline Baldwin Jones, when his father moved from Indiana to northern California with his family and 140 of the parishioners who had come to believe there was something extraordinary about the Rev. When I left at 21, I left a part of myself there, she said. Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved. " He smiles, imitates the sudden mask of disbelief. " And I say, 'My name is Jones.' The picture, he recalls, was about hit men. The temple really became my family, she said. He imagines the guards with guns, and the sky clouding over, and the air suddenly wild with fear, and the sight of the children. Mud made the truck bed slick, so everyone clung to the sideboards. It was all about survival in his domain. Yesterday morning 100 Guyanee troops came by train from Matthews Ridge, walking the last several miles as a precaution against sabotage or attack. Now 58, he owns a modular office furniture business in the East Bay and is married with a daughter. At first it was spanking of children. He is still elated by it. Jim Jones. mode: 'thumbnails-a', In an hour, that promise was broken.. Among the hundreds of corpses, only one was different; he had died from a bullet to the head. Forty years ago this week, a California congressman and a group of journalists traveled to Guyana, South America, to see Jonestown, a remote settlement created by an American church, and investigate reports of abuses of members. It was he who dreamed up Jonestown, he who willed it into being, and he who brought it down: First, with the assassination of U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan and four others by temple members on a nearby airstrip on November 18, 1978, then with the mass murders and suicides of hundreds, a horror that remains nearly unimaginable 40 years later. Despite his unconventional upbringing and the horrific tragedy brought about by his father's religious group, the Peoples Temple, Stephan speaks candidly about his experience in the documentary. Some of those leaving the temple eyed the vehicles with suspicion. 'He hit Monica and Vern. "It's not--such a bad experience," he says. My companion, Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, would be murdered in an ambush. 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