Interview: Laura Johnston Kohl discusses the 25th anniversary of the Jonestown, Guyana, mass murder/suicide

November 17, 2003

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

And I'm Melissa Block.

Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of the mass suicide and murder in Jonestown, Guyana. More than 900 followers of Reverend Jim Jones were killed after they swallowed a fruit drink mixed with cyanide--men, women and nearly 300 children. Jim Jones had moved the People's Temple from its base in California to Guyana the year before. The idea was to create an agricultural utopia free from racism, based on communist principles and focused, in isolation in the jungle, on Jim Jones. He told his followers to think of him as the incarnation of Christ and God.

(Soundbite of speech)

Reverend JIM JONES: I'm a god and I'm going to stay a god until you recognize that you're a god, and when you recognize that you're a god I shall go back into principle and will not appear as a personality.

(Recorded) You are God.

But until I see all of you knowing who you are, I'm going to be very much what I am: God Almighty God.

(Soundbite of applause and cheering)

BLOCK: By 1978, Jim Jones' paranoia had reached a fever pitch. On November 18th, California Congressman Leo Ryan was shot and killed by members of the People's Temple at an airstrip in Guyana along with four others. He'd gone to Jonestown to investigate complaints of abuse, and he was taking defectors with him. The Jonestown massacre began later that day.

One People's Temple member who survived is Laura Johnston Kohl. She was in the Guyanese capital, Georgetown, that day. Kohl joined People's Temple in 1970 at the age of 23. She saw it as a way to improve the world, and, she says, the Guyanese jungle was the perfect place for integrated communal living to thrive.

Ms. LAURA JOHNSTON KOHL (Former People's Temple Member): I loved Guyana. I loved it that it was mixed race; it was half black, half East Indian. When I went to Guyana, I really, really thought I'd come to heaven. I never intended to leave it.

BLOCK: And the message at this time that you're hearing from Jim Jones seems to be getting darker, seems to be getting more paranoid. He's recording what he's telling his followers in the jungle, and a lot of it has to do with what he's calling fascists who may be coming to get them. What were you thinking when he was telling you this?

Ms. KOHL: Well, you know, I had grown up and when I was in college, I had been involved with the Black Panthers, I had been involved with the peace movement, and I had been teargassed by the police in New York City and things. And so it didn't take too much selling for me to realize that there was somebody who wouldn't like our group down there. And so I think what he did is he--you know, just to set it up a little bit more--in the jungle, the only people who had any contact with the outside would be Jim and the people who worked closely with him. So I never had any contact to just a radio station. Everything that we were told was through Jim's eyes, and as he got more and more insane, it did get darker and darker.

BLOCK: He started instituting something in Guyana called White Nights. These would be essentially suicide drills in the jungle. As I understand it, people would line up and drink something that, in the end, did not turn out to be poisonous but could have been. Do you have to take part in these drills?

Ms. KOHL: Yeah. I did take part in them. We also had them a few times in San Francisco in the United States. And I think--what Jim had always talked about where they were kind of loyalty drills and that people needed to put their complete trust in him. And you know, it seems really strange looking back at it because I have such a different perspective on it now. You know, now my--the lights would go on and I'd realize that, you know, something was really amiss. At that point, you know, it was absolutely unfathomable that he would--we would actually be drinking poison. It's not like we said, `Well, you know, we're really going to do this someday.' It never had that flavor to it. It just seemed like theatrics.

BLOCK: I want to play you a bit of tape. This is recorded in Jonestown at some point before the final suicide in November. What we're hearing here is members of the group who are speaking to Jim Jones. This was all recorded. Let's hear a little bit about--this has to do with the notion of whether people were prepared to die in his name. Let's listen to a little bit of this tape.

Ms. KOHL: OK.

(Soundbite of speech)

Unidentified Man: You have saved my life so many times that now I don't have no life of my own. I'm living on your time. I would die for you right now, Dad. Thank you, Dad.

Unidentified Woman: Since I've been here, all I've seen is the beauty of socialism, and I feel that my life is fulfilled and if death come, it's no big deal to me because I've already lived my life just being here with the family. Thank you, Dad.

(Soundbite of applause)

Mr. JONES: Thank you. We were trying to bless others; not just us.

Unidentified Child: I'm prepared to die for this family if I have to for freedom. Thank you, Dad.

(Soundbite of applause)

BLOCK: Ms. Kohl, we're hearing a very young child, it sounds like, at the end of that tape, along with a man and a woman. What goes though your mind as you listen to that now?

Ms. KOHL: You know, I--I think that a lot of people really did feel that if they couldn't live in Guyana they were not interested in coming back here and trying to figure out how to survive. I understand why senior citizens would say, `You know what? If we can't live here the way we're living here, I'm not going to--I don't want to go back.' Now children, you know, I think that just like, you know, my own child--he'll mouth what he hears me say. You know, children are--they're following the lead of the adults around them. And so I think that just like to say a child committed suicide when in fact it was the child's parent who made that decision--and I think that many people in Jonestown did not want it to end, did not want to come back. I mean, I just loved being in Guyana. I mean, I can't even tell you--I mean, every day, you know, waking up like in the rain forest and, you know, all the things that were in Guyana--I really loved it.

BLOCK: I have to tell you it's hard to reconcile those two things: your love for this place and this time...

Ms. KOHL: Yes.

BLOCK: ...with the knowledge of what happened, which was both suicide and murder. Lots of people killed against their will; made to drink poison.

Ms. KOHL: You're absolutely right.

BLOCK: And I wonder if you struggle with that.

Ms. KOHL: I struggled with it a lot. I don't know if there's any way to reconcile it. You know, if I had any kind of choice or had any way to put it into effect, I would have moved Jim out of the position of making any decisions for people and have the other leadership in Jonestown continue the project.

BLOCK: You were not in Jonestown on November 18th of 1978, the day of...

Ms. KOHL: Right.

BLOCK: ...the mass suicide and murder. You were in the capital, Georgetown.

Ms. KOHL: That's right.

BLOCK: When you heard what happened, were you surprised, or did you know that something like this eventually would come?

Ms. KOHL: You know, I was absolutely floored. I came home and there were police at the house in Georgetown. And they took out, you know, four body bags out of the house.

BLOCK: Of people whom you were living with at the time.

Ms. KOHL: Uh-huh, who had gotten the message from Jonestown and who had killed though--a woman who'd killed herself and her three children.

BLOCK: She slit their throats, I think.

Ms. KOHL: Uh-huh.

BLOCK: The question that comes down through history, not just in this case but in other tragedies, is how much responsibility is borne by followers--not just the leader but the people who followed along in lockstep. And if you look at the transcript that was made of the tapes of that last awful day in Jonestown, it's horrifying. And you realize that there are many people who are forcing babies, children to drink poison. It's not just Jim Jones. It's a lot of people. And there are screams of people resisting. How do you make sense of that?

Ms. KOHL: You don't. I don't think there's any way to make sense of it. I mean, I don't know that there--there's not any way to clean it up. There's not any way to say it didn't happen. There's not any way to say it. I think that all of us who survived feel a responsibility with what happened.

BLOCK: In what way?

Ms. KOHL: Well, because, you know, I would like to have thought, well, if I were there I could have done something to change it. But I mean, I don't know that that's true, and I don't know, you know, what would have been going on in my mind at that time. So I can't judge that. I mean, I think--I feel a horrible sorrow...

BLOCK: Mm-hmm.

Ms. KOHL: (Crying) I'm so sorry that these people died. And I'm so sorry that we couldn't, you know, keep our community where so many people were happy. I mean, I'm sorry about so many parts of it. And I, you know, don't know how to--there's not any way to fix it at this time. It's not helped by me being sorry. All I can do is talk a little bit about how you can never have one person guide you or tell you what you need to do or how you need to think or how to interpret things that are going on in the world. You have to internalize your own belief system and not have somebody take that part of you away.

BLOCK: I wonder if there may be people listening to this who would say the time for that knowledge would have been well before November 18th, 1978; that it was very clear where this was headed.

Ms. KOHL: Well, you know, I just don't know. I don't know that it was that simple. I think that when you have a collective of a thousand people who really want a better world and it's hard to bring it about and you don't get much support from the outside, it's just hard to know what is insanity and what is keeping people together in a community that can break new ground. I don't know 95 percent of the stuff that went on was like a normal, aggressive community creating a wonderful utopia and 5 percent was absolute insanity. And then, you know, I think the percentages changed gradually so that it was more and more insanity while the community was going. And so it wasn't like there was a day that we crossed the line.

BLOCK: When you mark this anniversary, 25 years, for you, what are you marking exactly?

Ms. KOHL: Well, I'm actually marking primarily the loss of people that I loved so much and the community that I loved so much. I guess it's time for me to treasure the memories I have of the friends that I made and those who survived and those who didn't survive.

BLOCK: Ms. Kohl, thanks very much for talking with us.

Ms. KOHL: Thank you very much.

BLOCK: Laura Johnston Kohl, a former member of Jim Jones' People's Temple, remembering the mass suicide and murder in Jonestown 25 years ago tomorrow. You can hear a documentary about Jonestown from the NPR archives at our Web site, npr.org.

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