Year: 2017

Jeff Guinn, author of the best-selling “Manson,” delves into the 1978 tragedy in Guyana, where more than 900 church members drank cyanide-laced drinks.


“The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple”

by Jeff Guinn

Simon & Schuster, 531 pp., $28


In the end, Jim Jones never drank the Kool-Aid.

Jones, the charismatic founder of Peoples Temple, famously led a fanatic group of followers to carve a compound out of the Guyana jungle in South America. In 1978, facing increasing pressure from authorities, he convinced more than 900 church members to drink cyanide-laced drinks in a horrifying act of mass suicide.

In “The Road to Jonestown,” Jeff Guinn, the author of a national best-seller on mass murderer Charles Manson, tells the fascinating story of Jones and his church. It all started innocently enough. Jones, a young minister from Indianapolis, preached a curious blend of gospel, Marxism and racial integration — all leavened with miracle “cures” and southern-tinged revivalism.

Jones taught and led his flock to serve those in need. Peoples Temple groups fed the poor, clothed the homeless and worked hard to integrate his church. He found jobs for church members and intervened to help with problems small and large. In the turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s, Jones attracted an increasing number of devoted followers who donated their salaries, personal property and even homes.
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Guinn is a master storyteller with a unique expertise in murderous psychotics. The book reads like a thriller, each page forcing your attention to the next as the Peoples Temple slowly slides from groundbreaking progressivism toward madness. As Guinn notes, “there was something unique about Jones and those who chose to follow him. Traditionally, demagogues succeed by appealing to the worst traits in others … Jim Jones attracted followers by appealing to the best in their nature, a desire for everyone to share equally.”

Jones, always a dominating figure, increasingly demanded control and warned of a coming apocalyptic confrontation with outsiders. He led more than 900 of his followers to Guyana, where they hacked a rustic compound out of the sweltering jungle and Jones exercised nearly complete control.
With parents and relatives expressing increasing concern, Congressman Leo Ryan led a delegation to investigate, accompanied by reporters and distraught relatives. Jones concluded that an invasion was imminent.

Seeking to send a message of defiance, he looked to the historical example of the Jewish fighters at the walled fortress of Masada. Surrounded by Roman legions, they famously committed mass suicide rather than submit to inevitable loss. It was, to put it mildly, an inapt comparison.

Jones brought events to a crisis on Nov. 18, 1978, by sending members to gun down Ryan and others waiting at the nearby airfield. With a self-made crisis now upon them, Jones laced Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid as was widely reported) with cyanide and urged his followers to drink it. They started with over 200 babies and children. Jones himself used a handgun.
Government investigators arrived later, stunned by the eerie silence covering hundreds of bodies, already swollen in the tropical heat. It got worse. There were two other layers of badly decomposed bodies below. Snow shovels were required to remove them all. The final death count was 918. They are all buried in a mass grave at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland. Jones’ body was cremated and his ashes deposited in the Atlantic Ocean.

The author, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, spent years traveling the country and chronicling American life, sometimes uncovering riveting tales of murder and mayhem.


“Killings”

by Calvin Trillin

Random House, 293 pp., $26


Murder is as American as apple pie and motherhood. In 2015, according to the FBI, there were more than 15,000 murders in the United States. Calvin Trillin would not be surprised.

Trillin, a longtime writer for The New Yorker magazine, traveled the U.S. for 15 years, producing a series of articles called “U.S. Journal.” The 3,000-word articles were published every three weeks. As he dryly notes, “Magazine writers asked, ‘How do you keep up that pace?” Newspaper reporters asked, “What else do you do?”

Some of those pieces are collected in “Killings.” It’s not intended as a study of killings. Instead, it’s “meant to be more about how Americans live than about how some of them die.”

Trillin writes with ironic detachment: “Reporters love murders. In a pinch, what the lawyers call ‘wrongful death’ will do, particularly if it’s sudden. Even a fatal accident for which no one is to blame has some appeal.”

First published in 1984, the book was out of print for years, forcing true Trillin aficionados to scour used-book stores in search of the volume. The newly released edition contains half a dozen additional pieces written since the original publication.
The stories, each riveting in its own way, are like passing a particularly gruesome car wreck. You know you shouldn’t slow down to look, but you just can’t help it.

“Right-of-Way” (new to this edition) tells the story of a property dispute between two strong-willed but very different women who move to Rappahannock County in the bucolic Virginia countryside. Rather than peace, they find each other. And death soon follows.

“I’ve Got Problems” (also new) tells the tragic story of a standoff in Cairo, Nebraska, between Arthur Kirk and the Nebraska State Patrol SWAT team. The heavily armed Kirk, holed up in his home and surrounded by SWAT team members bristling with firearms, hung up on negotiators, explaining with perhaps unintended understatement, “I’ve got problems!” “The Mystery of Walter Bopp” recounts the disappearance of a health-store proprietor in Tucson, Arizona, who, on close inspection, had a deeper backstory than anyone might have imagined.
But the best in this collection is the last essay, a classic by any measure. “Covering the Cops,” first published in 1986, is about Edna Buchanan, an iconic Miami Herald crime reporter and now a murder-mystery writer. As Trillin notes, there were police officers in Miami who said it wouldn’t be a homicide without her.

Her leads, always pithy, are direct and to the point. Writing about a woman set to go to trial for a murder conspiracy, Buchanan wrote, “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.”