Jim Jones VIII

Jones drifted from preaching non-violence to adopting militant trappings. Reiterman writes:

By the mid-1970s, all the military elements were in place. The church had stockpiled almost two hundred guns; a security squad of a few dozen people had been trained; Jones traveled everywhere with bodyguards; there were procedures for searching all who entered Temple services, and Temple buses had armed escorts.

Jones faked a series of attempts on his life.

Most curious was the phantomlike ability of would-be assassins to vanish, of alleged bullets to penetrate a plywood anti-assassin screen without making holes, of Jones to know as though on cue exactly when the shots would ring out.

The first hostile press treatment that Jones received was after some healing services in Indianapolis. "CHURCH FILLED TO SEE "CURES" BY SELF-PROCLAIMED "PROPHET OF GOD"," read the 1971 headline in the Indianapolis Star. The reporter observed that "The people who were called upon in the evening [service] had a striking resemblance to some who were called upon earlier in the day." The Indiana State Psychology Board began to investigate Jones' claims of healing through "parapsychology." Indiana was becoming too hot and Jones sold off church holdings there. Meanwhile, an Indianapolis Star reporter contacted the San Francisco Examiner. A visit from Kingsolving (the SFE's religion editor) and a photographer showed that the People's Temple in Redwood Valley had become an armed camp. Kingsolving wrote a multi-part investigative series on the People's Temple. The People's Temple repeatedly picketed and tried to strong-arm the Examiner.

Jones was trying to recover lost ground. He was not ready to go public with the title "Prophet Jones," because it broke down the dual identity he had tried to maintain. Inside the church, or on fund-raising tours, he could bill himself that way for purposes of control and stature to attract crowds and money. But to the Establishment in Ukiah, and even more so in the big city of San Francisco, where he was cutting a toehold, he needed to uphold a purely humanitarian image.

Kingsolving's investigative series was seven articles long, but only the first four were published. The Temple was threatening to sue, and the final installments made accusations of criminal conduct and "were not well substantiated."

Kingsolving's unpublished articles delved into Temple internal affairs in a way that no other stories would until 1977. But though he had collected pieces of the mosaic, he had failed to form a coherent picture. He had put his finger on Jones's claims to be the reincarnation of Christ, on his predictions of nuclear doom and the secret cave, his visits to Father Divine, on Temple tithing, catharsis, socialist readings, survival training for children, on Temple political power in Ukiah and more.

The SFE ran a question and answer with Jones, with an insufficiently respectful introduction. That same day, acting city editor John Todd was besieged by phone calls at home.

And so the Examiner quit the story. A nobody named Jim Jones had worn down a big San Francisco daily. It would be almost five years before the Examiner embarked on a major effort to entangle the Peoples Temple story. By then, the stakes would be much higher and the target more elusive.

The People's Temple started a campaign against Kingsolving. They burglarized his home, taking copies of his newspaper articles and check stubs. Their letter-writing campaign to the newspapers that syndicated Kingsolving led to his being dropped by most of the newspapers that had previously carried his column.

By early 1973, no law enforcement agencies and no newspapers were investigating the Temple. The only people doing anything about the Temple were members of an informal Christian prayer group in Ukiah, a group run, appropriately enough, by Ross Case, Jones's onetime associate in Indiana.