Have you ever? This is so far beyond the pale of legal, medical, or journalistic professionalism, that questions of good judgement and good taste become laughable....I don't think I've ever seen the likes of it before. It is rather Stalinesque, but then Stalin was put in a glass-roofed coffin to become an object of veneration by his surviving Marshalls, or a troika, or something like that---not by the UPI or AP.
This image, whatever it truly wants to seem to be purporting to be, was published in the Boston Globe on November 21, 1978, in an article, ‘'They just kept shooting', by Bruce Drake and Jerome Cahill. The Globe is a morning newspaper isn't it? This does seem to be rather a precipitous presentation, with the procedure done less than 24 hours prior to its image going global. I'm sure photos like this are maintained in news files everywhere but never before have I seen an autopsy photograph published in a newspaper. Other than necrophiliac web sites like Ogrish, which weren't around back in 1978, I can't see what the intended purpose of this was. Poor Autumn may she never live so long. And no wonder Leo Ryan's daughters were driven to opposite extremes in the cult wars.
But the obvious meaning of this is clear to me---somebody really had something to prove to go this far. Leo Ryan was dead and in his grave, like John Brown. mouldering. Too bad his funeral was publicized as being closed casket, cluck, cluck...with official sources reporting Ryan either had the back of his head blown off, or else he took a shotgun blast directly to the face. Was he circumcised? They really should show us the penis.Then, possibly, we might could tell.
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November 19, 1978, Boston Globe, page A65, US rep. is shot on mission to Guyana, 298 words
November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, A10, 'I was helpless', by Charles Krause, 1,487 words
November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, 300-400 found dead in camp of cult that killed lawmaker, 246 words
November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, Rep. Ryan among 5 fatally shot, by Charles Krause, 1,018 words
November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A8, Temple as a force in California politics, by Fred Mann, 642 words
November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, Ryan: He intended ‘to find out’, by Michael Kenny, Globe Staff, 503 words
November 19, 1978, Boston Globe, page A11, US rep. is shot on mission to Guyana, 298 words
November 20, 1978, Boston Globe - AP, page A11, Slain newsmen won many awards, 313 words
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November 19, 1978, Boston Globe, page A65, US rep. is shot on mission to Guyana, 298 words
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November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, 300-400 found dead in camp of cult that killed lawmaker, 246 words
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November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, A10, 'I was helpless', by Charles Krause, 1,487 words
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November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, Ryan: He intended ‘to find out’, by Michael Kenny, Globe Staff, 503 words
November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, Rep. Ryan among 5 fatally shot, by Charles Krause, 1,018 words
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November 20, 1978, Boston Globe, page A8, Temple as a force in California politics, by Fred Mann, 642 words
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November 20, 1978, Boston Globe - AP, page A11, Slain newsmen won many awards, 313 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, Banner Headline: They lined up to take poison, 923 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe – Knight Ridder, page A-1, Mark Lane sensed ‘something wrong’, by Don Bohning, 923 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, Cyanide mixed in soft drink, by Charles Krause, 813 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, They lined up to take poison, by Don Bohning, 923 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A2, Carters shocked by deaths in Guyana, 136 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe - AP, page A2, Prominent Americans gave Jones references, 217 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A2, They were not strangers, nor friends, by Karen DeYoung, 718 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A6, Cult often rehearsed for a mass suicide, by Larry Kramer, 485 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A7, FBI told cult had kidnap plot, 256 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A8, Cult felt persecuted by US, 327 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A8, 409 cult members found dead in camp,
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe - AP, page A8, Jones was seriously ill and possibly had cancer, 132 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, Ryan was aware of perils, US says, 415 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, ‘They just kept shooting', by Bruce Drake and Jerome Cahill, 1,009 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, Followers in US react 'stoically' to Jones' death, 161 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, Editorial, page A18, Fanaticism and death in Guyana, 633 words
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November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, Banner Headline: They lined up to take poison, 923 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe – Knight Ridder, page A-1, Mark Lane sensed ‘something wrong’, by Don Bohning, 923 words
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November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, Cyanide mixed in soft drink, by Charles Krause, 813 words
"When Rev. Jim Jones learned Saturday that Rep. Leo J. Ryan had been killed but that some members of the congressman's party had survived, Jones called his followers together and told them that the time had come to commit the mass suicide they had rehearsed several times before."Well, if the intent was to kill the entire travel party then the gunmen made a rather feeble go at it. After five or so minutes of what witnesses said appeared to be highly targeted gunfire, the shooters departed in the same sudden "ambush" form in which they'd arrived. Likewise, Larry Layton's little drama, which took place in a separate aircraft at the far end of the small airfield, seems a strange combination of impossible stealth and luck in setting up the situation (getting a handgun onboard even while he was under scrutiny, with a total bungling of his operative intent once he flew into action.
It's all reminiscent of the poseur knife attack made in the direction of Rep. Ryan's dress shirt back at the commune. For a collective of people who it was claimed were so passionate about things, at face value they were completely hapless here.
So get this: Charles Krause was supposed to be one of the ten or so "wounded" from the airstrip encounter (in a gunfight you get hurt by bullets presumably) yet he was the sole journalist allowed back into the Peoples Temple compound on Monday, Nov. 30th. Along with a single photographer, who was also employed at the Washington Post, they represented the entire reporter's "pool" through whom all information coming from the site would flow.
Krauses' wounds didn't impair his ability to sign contracts for his book which was published just 12 days later (I know, it was a WaPo team effort, but it was Krause's book rights which were sold in order to make the first made-for-T.V. movie, which was an enormous success all around.
Keeping the narrative under tight control, Krause believes that his informant, Odell Rhodes, was "the only known survivor of Jonestown who witnessed a part of the suicide rite before managing to escape." This would be an enormously grandiose conceit for a normal journalist to make for publication. How could Krause know such a thing? Did the police and military authorities treat him as an information overlord---the keeper of a state of knowledge and non knowledge?
Especially given the incoherent and implausible details being floated in this early stage of the story's unfoldment, you'd think Krause would couch things more modestly.
On the one hand, an unverified source, Odell Rhodes is telling Krause, who repeats it around the world, that "armed guards ringed the central pavilion where the rite was carried out," and they "turned back" anyone who tried to escape, following which non-submissives were "forced" to drink the deadly cyanide potion. On the other hand, "[a]n estimated 500 to 900"...men, women and children..already "had fled" into the jungle. We don't know the circumstances of that departure--whether a figurative noose hadn't tightened yet to secure the masses, since no corral with actual gates existed. Despite the vaunted group ideology, there is always the risk for backsliding, so when facing an impending group denouement it isn't hard to imaging a bum's rush of hundreds of terrified disobedient humans breaking through a widely spaced phalanx consisting of no more than two-score security personnel (remember, the core membership of the elite group tasked with keeping order in the community happened to be at an "away game," at that moment, and weren't expected back anytime soon.
Looking at the aerial shots of that vast open-air picnic shed under which a community of 1,200 could claim to assemble, how did Odell have a situational awareness of what was taking place at various points around the structure, let alone the overall site complex. Clearly, it was just his bad luck to have gotten cornered by the hardasses the way he did, forced to witness, if not participate in, the final endgame, given that hundreds upon hundreds of his fellow communards had performed some variation on the verb "to leave."
Odell Rhodes has no information to share about any other type of escape experience than his own. Like the last man left standing in a Zombie movie who's cornered the garlic market, he can share in and expound upon the conceit that he's the "only known surviving witness to part[s] of the suicide ritual." It could be said that he was the only survivor damn fool enough to come back to such a scene of carnage. Skeptics would ask if he wasn't like a German concentration guard changing into a prisoner's uniform as the Russians advanced. But in this story all the perpetrators have already been dealt death, if not justice.
So it was casually instead of causally that he was intimately experienced in the logistics of the administered death to his community. The doctor; the nurses; the mothers with their babies and the logic boomerang behind, 'the babies went first'--their parents had nothing to live for! All the five-minute convulsions and "family hugs" of a close-in spectacle of horror (he doesn't mention any death rattles, or whether the smell of shit suffused the air as several hundred sphincters relaxed in quick succession.)
Universally, the Jonestown survivors lack an iota of recognizable human emotion or genuine feeling. Nearly 50 residents of an eight-bedroom "villa" in Georgetown could feign unawareness as three children and an 105-pound publicist could be literally slaughtered by knife in an adjoining bathroom. Afterward, while under oath in a court of law, Stephan Jones could jokingly take responsibility for slitting their throats, resting in an assurance that the normal rules didn't apply to him, and he was right. The FBI and the Washington Post bent over backward in their inventive storytelling to extricate him from the hole he had dug.
Stephan Jones was a featured narrator in the opening stages of the media blitz (see the front page of the November 22, 1978 Boston Globe. here, for the 19-year-old's sallow, slack-jawed visage illustrating "The son who disagreed," as if anyone should care. He was useless when he could have influence events, and he's put to only a fraudulent use in the aftermath.) Bizarrely, after he became irreversibly stained with the blood of Sharon Amos and her children, he continued to be utilized as a mouthpiece of the "survivors" and he's stayed as such for the past 30 plus years---this as the survivor ranks have been thinned by murder, actual suicides, and life-time incarcerations for just cause.
In addition to being one of the sociopaths lacking in human feeling, Odell Rhodes was also not much in the intellect department obviously, as evidenced by the trite mechanism of his personal salvation. He tells us that when the doctor announced within earshot that he needed a stethoscope, Odell volunteered to go fetch one--along with a nurse companion, that is. Apparently this over-staffing speaks to some sort of suicide-pact buddy system rather than the heavy lifting involved. Not surprisingly, Odell availed himself of the chance to slip away and it wouldn't be surprising if the nurse did too. What's not clear is why the doctor would need to listen to anyone's heart sounds given the agenda at hand. Even if, supposing, someone was proving difficult to do in, would a heart murmur advise the doc to double the dose? And if so, why was this coming about in the mid-to-late stages of the game?
This kind of tone-deaf quality extends throughout the hack-written script. Krause writes:
"Near the end, (near the end of what? Larry Schact's pressing need for a stethoscope?) Rhodes said, Jones began chanting, 'mother, mother, mother' --an apparent referencing to his wife who lay dead not far from the altar."
This chant of "mother, mother, mother" is recorded in a number of different sources, from Mark Lane's and Charles Garry's accounts (where Mark Lane also said he heard 70 or so gunshots. Retracted the next day.) to the purported audio recording of the final hour of the death ritual (although there is some evidence that that tape was recorded in part the following Sunday-so don't quote me on timing.) Charles Krause seems to be unaware of the fact that Jim Jones' mother had died only a few weeks prior to Nov. 18. Nor does Krause seem acquainted with the care of the terminally ill. If he had been, he'd know it's quite common for the still barely sentient to carry on conversations with angels, or their departed loved ones. "Mother, mother, mother" surely speaks to Jones' actual mother, and not his contracted fish-wife business associate Marceline, who could have just stepped out for a pack of cigarettes instead of going down the tunnel toward the light. Also, it's reductive and derivative for Jones to freeload on the experience of dying with terminal auditory manifestations when he hadn't taken poison and was waiting for a gunshot behind his ear. Maybe he was getting a contact high off all the dying but this sounds like a faked orgasism to me.
Not that any of this is true beyond the poor imaginations of the chronically empowered.
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, They lined up to take poison, by Don Bohning, 923 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A2, Carters shocked by deaths in Guyana, 136 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe - AP, page A2, Prominent Americans gave Jones references, 217 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A2, They were not strangers, nor friends, by Karen DeYoung, 718 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A6, Cult often rehearsed for a mass suicide, by Larry Kramer, 485 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A7, FBI told cult had kidnap plot, 256 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A8, Cult felt persecuted by US, 327 words
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November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A8, 409 cult members found dead in camp,
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November 21, 1978, Boston Globe - AP, page A8, Jones was seriously ill and possibly had cancer, 132 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, Ryan was aware of perils, US says, 415 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, ‘They just kept shooting', by Bruce Drake and Jerome Cahill, 1,009 words
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November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, Followers in US react 'stoically' to Jones' death, 161 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, Editorial, page A18, Fanaticism and death in Guyana, 633 words
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Not that any of this is true beyond the poor imaginations of the chronically empowered.
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A1, They lined up to take poison, by Don Bohning, 923 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A2, Carters shocked by deaths in Guyana, 136 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe - AP, page A2, Prominent Americans gave Jones references, 217 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A2, They were not strangers, nor friends, by Karen DeYoung, 718 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A6, Cult often rehearsed for a mass suicide, by Larry Kramer, 485 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A7, FBI told cult had kidnap plot, 256 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A8, Cult felt persecuted by US, 327 words
__________________________________________________________________________________November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A8, 409 cult members found dead in camp,
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November 21, 1978, Boston Globe - AP, page A8, Jones was seriously ill and possibly had cancer, 132 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, Ryan was aware of perils, US says, 415 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, ‘They just kept shooting', by Bruce Drake and Jerome Cahill, 1,009 words
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November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, page A9, Followers in US react 'stoically' to Jones' death, 161 words
November 21, 1978, Boston Globe, Editorial, page A18, Fanaticism and death in Guyana, 633 words
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