EPISODE 52 - Jonestown Massacre - PART ONE

Well , my update is about the Al Kendrick Johnson episode and I just wanted to say a big thank you to Colleen because she although initially when I saw her comment I thought brilliant , that's nice , and it kind of upset me a little bit and I thought , okay , regroup , but she's been great actually .

She sent us a really detailed email and she was like I understand there's a lot of controversy about this case . There's a lot of information coming from like all different sources , so it is super confusing , but she's sent us so much information and it's so good .

So I will be doing another episode on Kendrick Johnson when I have got a head full of all this other information , because there was a lot in there that I thought , ah well , that could possibly sway it from that side and that would make people think that you know it was a murder or you know it would make people think it was an accident or whatever .

And we've heard from people that have felt like I did in the episode you know where they thought it was initially an accident and then thought , hmm , that's suspicious . There is a lot of suspicious as well , isn't there ?

Yeah , so , thank you , Colleen , I've really if you're still listening I still I super appreciate all the information that you've sent me and I will absolutely be reading through that .

We get all information from valid sources . So if you've got information .

Yeah , so it looks like we're all going to go on this journey together . So , yeah , if you've got any information or views or opinions or whatever it is , please , please , please , let me know , because I'm going to be looking into it more and we will do another episode when we're better involved . That's it from me . Morning , morning , my voice went in .

I didn't understand what the lemon was for , because it did nothing to dissuade the taste of the tequila .

But actually a lot of cult members have kind of tried religion and they've tried going down those different routes and it hasn't fit with them . So the cult that I'm discussing today was exactly the same . That's what made it so fascinating when I was reading through . It's nothing about religion at all .

Not only we're in a compound situation , not only are there those who have left and committed the betrayal of the century , it's come soaring children from others that they're in pursuit right now to kill them because they've sold their children . And we are sitting here waiting on a powder cake . I don't think this is what we want to do with our babies .

I don't think that's what we had in mind to do with our babies . It was stepped by the greatest of prophets from time immemorial no man lay takes my life from me . I lay my life down .

Their relatives actually purchased a shack for them to live in nearby in the town of Lynn , and the new home where Jones grew up it lacked plumbing and electricity and they often had no money for food and they would forage in the surrounding forest for food .

And Jones said that he would sleep on a just like a rotten old mattress , with the ceiling above all caved in and it dripping water . And so he described himself as a very poverty stricken child . His father had been captured in the war previously and he'd suffered lasting effects from inhaling mustard gas , so he'd been left with damage to his lungs .

So he was often very , very weak and was unable to work . So his mother , lynetta she was a very strong , willed woman and she spent pretty much all of her time and energy working endless jobs to support the family .

So this left little Jim alone for the majority of his younger years , and an older neighbour often took pity on him and she said that she noticed that the family didn't go to church and she didn't think that it was right that a boy of Jim's age I think he was about seven or eight at the time that he didn't go to church .

So she often took him with her to the local Pentecostal church and it was there that Jim said that he finally felt accepted and he felt welcomed and he felt like he had a family . So around age 10 , jim began a quest for seeking out different churches in the area .

He would go by himself to all the different churches and he quickly learned and he began taking in all the differences that there was between all of these churches and he learned how to preach to people . He was described by the neighbourhood kids as strange and weird because Jim had an obsession with religion and death .

He would preach to his classmates and he would take the neighbour children into the family's barn and hold ceremonies to preach to them the ways of the church and he would only let them go when the service was over . So he would kind of lock the barn doors and lock them in there . You will listen to me , you will listen In these services .

Jim would often claim that he had unique abilities , such as the ability to fly , which he was very happy to demonstrate . He leapt off the roof of the barn , fell and broke his arm . But despite his failure , his confidence never faltered and he would vehemently defend his unique abilities .

He knew that he was special and he knew he just believed in himself so much . I don't know whether he believed in himself or whether he believed that he could convince other people . I don't know what it was , but throughout his entire life he believed he had something that other people didn't . He would also hold funerals for dead animals .

One of the neighbourhood kids said that he actually believed Jim was going out and killing these animals just so that he could hold funerals for them . So he would go also and pick up like roadkill and then have a funeral for it .

He would invite the neighbourhood children to these services and even if nobody else attended , jim would still have this service for this dead animal . And I keep saying the term neighbourhood children , because friends is a term that doesn't really fit . Jim didn't have friends . They were the neighbourhood kids . Jim was wildly unpopular .

His fellow classmates found his overpowering zest for religion strange . He didn't fit in with what they were doing as children . They might have gone to church on Sundays , but he wasn't all consuming .

Jim didn't take part in things that all the other kids did , so he felt that it was sinful to dance with other children or to be singing and things , so he didn't take part in anything that the other children were doing . Jones , instead , would spend hours at the community library .

He was an avid reader and he studied different political systems , which , as a kind of teen around this time , I was going to say how old was he ?

Yeah , kind of into his teens , probably about 11 , maybe because it was at the start of the Second World War and he became obsessed with certain figures of authority , so almost dictators Joseph Stalin , karl Max , mahatma Gandhi and then especially Adolf Hitler , so all of the kids in the neighbourhood .

When the Second World War started , they started playing armies and they were the Americans yeah , they were the . Americans defeating the Germans . Jim , however , turned that into he was going to be the dictator .

He was going to be the dictator that instructed all of these children what to do and he would gather them up and then sort of preach to them and order them around . And he would order them to goose step around , like around the barn or around the area , and goose stepping if people don't know he's a military march .

So he would order them to do this military march and if people said no , or if people didn't do it how Jim wanted it done , he would dish out punishments to those children . Goodness , and one of the children actually said that Jim had been at the end of the world , of the war .

Jim had been especially impressed with Hitler's decision to commit suicide in order to evade capture . He was very impressed by that decision . So from Jim's own account , he said that by the third grade he was ready to kill . And this is a direct quote from Jim himself . And he says I was ready to kill by the end of the third grade .

I mean , I was so aggressive and hostile I was ready to kill . Nobody gave me love , any understanding . So the gym describes himself as an outsider , like an outcast and he said that he what based on how the people of the neighborhood treated him . He felt like an outsider .

But I think it was for the reasons that I've already mentioned that he was treated that way . He wasn't born into being an outsider . He kind of outcast himself by his behavior and parents in the neighborhood forbade their children to play with gym . And yeah , by the start of high school he was pretty much despised by all the local residents .

In high school Jim made it a point to stand out from his peers . You know I said he's got this quality , this quality in him that he believed he was better than everybody else . So he thought he was above them . He would carry a Bible with him everywhere .

He would wear his Sunday , his best Sunday church clothes every day to high school and he would often debate topics with teachers . So he would just get into debates with them . He was very , very , very smart , he was very well read and if teachers said something to him he often started a debate , because that's what he was good at .

And he also had a bad habit of he wouldn't speak in a conversation unless he'd started it . So if one of his or one of the high school children come up to him and said you know , hey , jim , blah , blah , blah blah , jim wouldn't converse because he had not started that conversation .

So I think that influence at an early age you know you're better , you're going to be somebody , you're going to be better than everybody Did that have an effect and did that plant in his mind this seed that he was better than everybody .

He would interrupt these social events because he felt that they were sinful , and then he would stand there you know , you can imagine him at like a house party , interrupt it with his Bible and he would preach to people what you're doing is wrong , you shouldn't be this way . And he would insist that they read the Bible .

The one thing that Jim had going for him was his passion for integrating people . So , in a time where black people were treated with indifference and they weren't allowed to participate in things , jim vehemently preached for equality and he befriended anyone of a different race .

And he even set up and coached children's baseball team to allow for a racially mixed team to play . However , jim , he was dismissed from his coaching of this baseball team because he'd killed a dog in front of his team by dropping from a window . I don't know what he was trying to prove . So he had he had .

The one redeeming factor was this need for equality . Jim's parents divorced in 1945 . And himself and his mother , lynetta . They moved to Richmond where he continued his in his high school there and he eventually graduated with honors in 1948 . He also had a job at the Richmond Reed Hospital where he worked as an orderly .

He briefly had an ambition to become a doctor Because he wanted to help people , he really wanted to do something to change the world . And all through reading this , I think he sets out with such a great ambition . He sets out to integrate the world and he wants to make changes and he wants to do all these good things .

Yeah , but he's also killing dogs , so yeah , I mean I didn't say I liked the man , but yeah , he briefly had an ambition to become a doctor because he wanted to help people , but that didn't last long . He was quite easily swayed back to the churches .

But while he was at this hospital he met Marceline Baldwin and the pair started a relationship and were eventually married in 1949 . From the start , jim's new wife was the subject of much psychological and emotional abuse .

He was you've said it yourself , he was very controlling , so much so that he would often tell her that a close relative had died , and then he would spend time comforting her and consoling her and then he'd go . Oh no , actually that wasn't true .

So I think it's a very emotional connection because he's said that horrible thing but he's given them so much love and he's given them so much compassion and caring that those people wanted that . And then he's gonna by the way , I'm lying , but people don't focus on that . They focused on the good , not really , not really jokes .

They focused on the good , that great feeling that he's given them

. There was a very controlling , abusive relationship that he's got with Marceline and it was in his early twenties that Jim began to express views on communism and other radical political views .

He was , like I say , very passionate about anti-racism and he wanted everybody to be equal and him and his wife moved from where they were in Richmond and they moved back to Indianapolis in 1951 . And he began to attend Communist Party gatherings .

But Jones wanted to start integrating his beliefs into the church and in 1952 , he told his wife that he wanted to become a Methodist Church minister .

So he had very , very strong communistic beliefs and he really loved the Pentecostal Church , which is a very kind of preachy church , but he thought that he could go into a Methodist Church and put his communist beliefs across there .

And Jim started working as a student pastor in a Methodist Church and he put into place a plan for a children's play area that would be open to all children of all different races . Because that wasn't a thing . There was no integrated children's play areas or anything there . So he went into this Methodist Church and he opened one .

But in 1954 , he'd been working at this church for a few years he was dismissed from this church for stealing church funds . But Jim denied that he was stealing church funds and he said that that was a cover up and that he'd actually been dismissed for trying to integrate the black community into the church .

But by this time Jim had started what he called his rainbow family and him and his wife adopted their first child , who was originally from Native American descent . They then went on to adopt three Korean American children . They had one biological child together and then they were also the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child .

That was a massive talking point and I'll say it again Jim was extremely passionate about racial integration . He would go to churches and he would find black people sitting at the very , very back of the church or standing at the doors because they weren't allowed in , and he would take these people and he would take them up to the very front of the church .

At one point he made a statement to this church and he got all of the black people to stand on the stage and listen to the service . So he did all of these views . Whether he did it for shock factor and to get his name out there , whether he did it because he genuinely felt that was the right thing to do , I don't know .

So he moved back there on purpose and he adopted his rainbow family and his wife begged him to allow them to move from Indiana because she would get absolutely ridiculed going down the street with her rainbow family , she would be spat at and he would refuse to move them because , yeah , Do you think it's like ?

But after Jim left the Methodist Church he became fascinated in the healing revival and the later reign movement which was formed by the Pentecostal Church and the later reign movement . It saw itself as non-denominational and it sought to bring all other denominations under its umbrella and then it wanted to reconstitute as a universal church .

So you can see where that feed in with Jim's ideology of equality and almost a communistic lifestyle . So he began preaching at different conventions and different churches under this later reign movement and he began his own healing ritual services .

And these healing ritual services were targeted mostly towards African American people because what he preached was equality and that's what they wanted . So he got people on his side very quickly and he soon had enough followers to develop his own church . So in October 1955 , wings of healing was officially established but would later be renamed .

Jim's new church started with around 20 members and these were people that had followed him from these different healing services or church services and they believed in what he believed in . So they followed him wherever he went , but 20 members wasn't enough to financially sustain his church .

He was renting out a space and that obviously costed money , and at one point he went door to door selling monkeys to fund this church . Yeah , and it was . You know . He also had people then , because he would knock on their door Do you want to buy a monkey ? No , or listen to this , and he would begin preaching to them .

So he did everything that he could to gain followers .

But what Jim decided to do to gain more followers was to hold a healing revival convention , and he enlisted the help of William Branham , and William Branham was a healing evangelist and a Pentecostal leader in the global healing revival . These are all things I had no idea existed .

No , ok , there was a global healing revival , and you can imagine what I mean by a healing revival , but I'll go through it in more detail anyways . But the convention took place over four days and it was from June 11th to June 15th 1956 . And it gathered more than 11,000 people .

So it went from Wings of Healing and he renamed it to the People's Temple , full Gospel Church , sorry . So that again the People's Temple , full Gospel Church , right , ok , so he named it the Full Gospel Church because he wanted it to attract African Americans , and but it was the People's Temple . You know , nobody wants to go .

You know , when you go to the pub and it's got a really long name , you shorten it , yeah , yeah , so it was called People's Temple and attendees to the church rose from its original 20 members to over a thousand members per service .

Yes , and with his new mass following , jim was named the leader of the Local Human Rights Commission , and him and the People's Church . They actually made some great changes in Indiana at the time they were at , they were responsible this is , this is fact .

Ok , they were responsible for racially integrating all the local churches , restaurants , the telephone company , the Indianapolis Police Department , a theater and an amusement park Jeez . So they've done some great things . They made some real changes and just took a left turn , didn't they ?

So he would go through these neighborhoods and just sit with them and talk to them and take that time and care . And he set up soup kitchens to feed the hungry . He gave out free clothing to people that needed it and food groceries . You know that him and the people's church done some great things .

You know , he's this very incredibly special person , and people wanted to eradicate him .

That's how he felt , so he openly moved his family to Brazil , as it had been named one of the safest places to avoid a nuclear attack , and he left his church and his followers to kind of just run itself , but he used money from the church and his followers to fund his move .

In 1965 , jim moved his church and over a hundred of his followers to Redwood Valley near the city of Ucaya in California , and he warned his followers of the impeding nuclear attack that would happen and he saw to move them to a safer place . And that's how he got a hundred of his followers to come and live with him at this place in Redwood Valley .

You know , it was kind of like a complex , I guess , for all of its followers . But it just so happened that this move coincided with a time that Jim's healing practices were being looked into and questioned .

The new church in California was a self-sustaining complex for its followers and people lived on the community and they worked from sun up to sun down at every job they needed doing and Jim started healing rituals again to build up his followers and soon the people's church was absolutely thriving . He had a whole new audience in California .

Now he had a whole new lot of people to preach to and these new healing rituals were like nothing you've ever seen . There's a video of one of them and people gather there in their thousands and they're desperate people .

You don't go to a healing ritual unless there's something that you need healing , so these people were desperate people and they were willing to hand over everything that they had to be healed or to heal their loved ones . He would show people a bag of these disgusting cancerous tumors that he'd removed from people and he would pick people out of the audience .

Oftentimes there was an elderly woman in a wheelchair and he would do this healing on her and it was this really extravagant , grandiose show of this healing and she would very slowly get up out of her chair , very , very slowly , and she would take like this unsteady step , like this first step that she's taken in ages .

And the crowd were absolutely mind blown and they were you can hear them in the video like absolutely amazed , like how on earth could she ? Yeah , which ?

They were all healthy individuals and the bag of cancerous tumors that he'd said that he'd removed from people were actually just like chicken innards . Yeah , in trials he once drugged a woman until she fell unconscious and literally fell unconscious , and he bustled her backstage . Nobody knew that she was drugged . She was in the crowd .

There's someone that handed her a drink . One of the people's temple members handed her a drink and it had something in it I don't think it was just yet and she literally fell unconscious , fell over .

So everybody bustled her backstage and they put a cast on her leg and she was told that she'd broken her leg in the fall and days later , when she came back to attend the healing ritual again , she was asked to come up on the stage so that she could be healed . And Jim Dunn is a miraculous healing , you know he he done this show .

Yeah , heal All this yeah , yeah , devil be gone .

And before some of these healing rituals he would just walk among the crowds and he would listen to people and stuff . So some people , like you know that they were wearing glasses and he would heal them and give them their sight back . To some people that was that was genuine .

To some people they believed that they'd got their sight back but that it's a psychological phenomenon , with the healing revivals that actually it's the endorphins that are created in that environment . It tricks your mind to believe that that's what happened . It's almost like a while those pills that you take , the got nothing in them . What's it called ?

The seabose or placebo ? Yeah , it's almost like a placebo effect . You believe it's going to happen , you believe you've been healed and you convinced yourself of that . So to some people it was absolutely genuine and the people's temple was still committed to doing great work for the community . They've moved to California .

So now they were doing it there and Jim had set up homes for the elderly Like an old people's complex almost , where the elderly would go and people would look after their every need .

But they had to sign everything over to the people's temple and this meant any money that they were getting , social security checks and things like that all went to the people's temple . And this elderly people's complex relied heavily on the followers to volunteer , with most people spending 20 hours a day volunteering .

People quit their jobs you know they'd already up and moved their homes and they quit their jobs to volunteer at these things . And I say volunteer , but that's because they're giving up their time . They were actually paid , but they had to give the money back to the temple .

Yeah , so they were given a paycheck that they then had to turn over to the people's temple and they in order to receive a place to sleep , food , healthcare , everything like that , and then they were given an allowance of $5 each a week .

Goodness , and it was often a matter of pride among the followers about who worked the most , who'd volunteered the most hours , who had slept the least . It was deemed selfish to put sleep above the work that needed doing at the people's temple . The work that they would do in prioritised everything .

They trusted Jim so that they didn't think they had to think for themselves and they relied on Jim to do that for them because Jim was leading them in the right direction . And people said that they came to the People's Church because of the people .

It was a community that , like I said , they'd sold off their property , their belongings , they handed everything over to Jim or the People's Temple in order for them to be a part of this community , and it was . I want to say it was like you know , sister Act , when they do the great songs and the , you know it was such a great environment .

When you watch it , you want to be there . It was such a great environment . These services , they were gospel choir services and they were upbeat and the members there were so incredibly happy and it was a giant family , I think gospel churches are incredible . Oh , absolutely Like it makes you want to just lift your spirits , isn't it ?

Yeah , and it's someone sort of standing there droning on monotone . You know , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , and that's all you hear as a child or a teenager . But gospel churches look awesome and they're so passionate as well .

But when there came a time for them to be like I don't want to be part of this anymore , they were tied in .

Jim was pocketing around $20,000 a week from his followers , jesus , and he soon started turning to drugs . So 20 grand a week , yeah , so not only you know , he was getting a lot of money from the government as well . For the elderly complex , for every person that they cared for , he was getting a lot of money .

He had , like I say , everybody that sold their property handed that money over to Jim when they were doing the services . It raised a lot of funds for the church and Jim and his inner circle would fudge the numbers to make it look like they hadn't done well . So he was pocketing all that money .

So he had a lot of money coming in and he went down a bad route . And if he wasn't paranoid enough about people wanting him dead or the nuclear attacks and things like that , these drugs that he were on made him even more paranoid .

Brilliant , jim said that he took these drugs to help him stay awake , so that he could stay awake longer , to do more work , to do more good , but he told his followers that there were people out to assassinate him , and this was at a time where political leaders were being assassinated , right .

So it wasn't particularly far-fetched , but Jim felt that he was as important as these political figures , that he would be a target . He would be a target . Yeah , Absolutely , I almost . Jim went so far as to stage different attacks on his life in order to reinforce the loyalty of his followers .

So , going back to this controlling behaviour that he'd done for his wife and I said that there was a pattern of it this is one of them . During a service , people heard gunfire and when they looked up on stage at Jim , this bright red started to spread across his chest and people were like , oh my God , oh my God , oh my God , and they fled .

Churchmen just fled to the stage and they you know Jim had collapsed on the floor and they carried his little limp body away out of the people's like where the ceremony was being held , and they laid him to rest somewhere and then they ran off in hysterics back to the service . You know what do we do ? What do we do ?

Jim has been shot and they were adamant that he was dead . But 20 minutes later Jim appeared through the entrance of the church doors in a blood free white shirt , claiming to have healed the bullet wound .

But he insisted on hanging the bloodied shirt in the church as a visual reminder to people about how valuable his life was and how easily it can be taken away . But what no one questioned was the fact that there was no bullet hole in this shirt . Yeah , it was just red , fake blood on the shirt hanging out .

There was no bullet wound hole at all in the shirt . He also started to prophesise that anyone unfaithful to him or that didn't follow his preachings would die . They would die in a fire , they would die in a car crash , and he started to become aggressive with his services and asking his followers to become aggressive as well .

In order to recruit new followers , they needed to be aggressive .

It was Jim and his wife and his children an inner circle of close people that did I think there was a lawyer , somebody that did the books , and you know a trusted inner circle , and then the armed security guard as well .

And it was during this time in California that reports of abuse started to surface Abuse of children , abuse of his followers , mental , physical , emotional abuse . Jim told all of his members that they were homosexual . He said that all women were lesbians and that all men were gay and that he was the only heterosexual .

He told his members that they needed to abstain from sex and that sex distracted people from the church , from the goods that they were doing in the community . But what no one knew was that Jim didn't live up to his own standards , his own expectations . He was far from abstaining , he was in fact raping men and women of his church .

Oh , jim , there was a documentary that I watched and one of the survivors says that Jim went up to him just really casually . I think he'd come out of somewhere and Jim went up to him and touched him on the back of the neck and said do you want me to fuck you in the ? And this guy goes . I'm all right , thank you . And Jim goes .

Well , you know , if you ever need that , then I'm here . And when word got out that had been happening , there was amongst the followers I think somebody stood up . I don't think Jim was there , but I think somebody stood up and said who has been and they said this quite openly who has been f***ed in the f*** by Jim ?

And loads of different men's hands were raising and this guy was like well , I don't want that . Is this where it's going ? I don't want to be involved in that . You know , I've got a wife . I don't want any of this . Yeah , but Jim didn't allow people to kind of talk amongst themselves , so nobody else kind of really knew what was going on .

They were kind of they knew what was going on with them , but they didn't know what was going on with other people and they didn't know how other people felt . But Jim told people that to be fully invested in the church meant that they would have to have sex with them , right , so that would bring them closer to the church's cause .

If they were fully invested in the church's cause , then they had to do that . They had to have sex with Jim . He hated it , of course he didn't want that . He was making a sacrifice for the good of his followers . That wasn't something that he wanted .

So if people had any thoughts of leaving the church they'd just kept it to themselves . People were soon required to spy on each other and hand over anyone not living in the temples up to the temple standards . And people wanted to be close to Jim .

Jim said to them if you do this to me , if you turn over these people , this is you know in the temple's eyes you'll be getting higher up the ladder . And people wanted that . So they would actively seek out members that had more than four hours sleep , because that was selfish , or people that just weren't living up to the way of the people's temple .

And friends and family turned on each other . So any thoughts of kind of questioning Jim or going against his church were kept to themselves for fear of being turned over .

Because if they were turned over they were punished and people were given reduced food rations , harsher work schedules , public ridicule and complete humiliation and sometimes sort of physical punishments as well . You can see it .

There are over 900 tapes of different services , and some of these services include Jim pulling people out of the audience and saying so and so said that you've been doing this , and he would sometimes publicly humiliate them in front of these other church members , and he stripped a woman naked before .

He stripped a naked and got every body in the audience to comment on a part of her body . They commented on every single part of her body , and one of the members said that not only was her face red , her entire body was red from humiliation . She was just so publicly humiliated . So people didn't want that . They didn't .

They wanted to do everything by the book so that that didn't happen . Children were punished as well , quite harshly for misbehaving . There was a three year old that had been made to clean the church floor with a toothbrush for hours on end because he'd misbehaved . And Jim wasn't happy , though , with just his church in California .

It wasn't gaining as many members as he wanted and it wasn't political enough for him in California . He wanted his name to be out there , and he couldn't do that from where he was . So he began opening other churches in different areas , and eventually he moved the people's temple to San Francisco .

And then in San Francisco , things went from bad to worse , oh God . And that is where I'm going to leave part one .

I've really really got so passionate about this story and so in it that I really want to do it justice . It's just such a tragic story , so part two will be out the following week .