918 Died — No One Yet Convicted
San Francisco Chronicle - November
16, 1979
by Ron Javers
A year after 918 Americans died at
Jonestown in the largest mass murder-suicide in history, no one
has been convicted of any crime.
Nor have a host of government investigators
been able to determine whether the killings of San Mateo Representative
Leo Ryan, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson and
three others at the Port Kaituma airstrip on Guyana were planned.
Here in the Bay Area, where Jim Jones
manipulated, praised, punished and awed his more that 1000 followers
before taking many of them to the South American jungle and their
deaths, the Peoples Temple story is still being played out.
Survivors remain in hiding, some of them
still expressing allegiance for their dead "father."
Despite the enormity of the events in
Guyana, only two people have been charged with crimes, possibly
millions of dollars remain unaccounted for, bodies remain unclaimed
and government agencies show little interest in investigating
what happened or why it happened.
"It's ridiculous," said Robert
Bockelman, a San Francisco attorney representing five former
cultists who escaped Jonestown before the killings.
"All of my clients who were in the
camp were sure the morning before Ryan visited that he wouldn't
be allowed out alive. That's why they wanted to escape so desperately.
They were certain something big was going to happen."
The late congressman's aide, Jackie Speier,
herself severely wounded at the airstrip, has joined with another
former Ryan aide, Joseph Holsinger, and Ryan's successor in Congress,
Bill Royer, in calling for further investigation of the events
at Jonestown.
"Based upon the facts as I know
them, it is inconceivable to me that no one else who was affiliated
with the Peoples Temple has been charged with criminal behavior,"
Royer wrote in requesting that congressional committees conduct
hearings into the stalled investigation.
Just two men, Larry Layton, 33, and Charles
Beikman, 45, both former members of the Peoples Temple, are being
held by Guyanese authorities in connection with the murders.
Layton is charged with the murder of
Ryan and the attempted murders of two defecting cult members.
Beikman is accused of slashing the throats of another woman cultist
and her three children at the temple's Georgetown house just
hours after hearing by short-wave radio that the murder-suicide
ritual had begun in Jonestown.
"The Justice Department and the
State Department have indicated that their investigations are
closed," Royer told The Chronicle yesterday. "But no
one has been arrested in the United States. I leave it to your
judgment just how thorough those investigations must have been."
A spokesman for the State Department
defended his agency's investigation of the Jonestown slayings.
Spokesman David Nall yesterday said the State Department stood
by its earlier statements saying the department had conducted
a complete probe of the killings.
Royer said he was seeking full reports
from both the State and Justice Departments on how they conducted
their inquiries.
Still unanswered, for example, is the
question of exactly how much money Jim Jones had accumulated
in various bank accounts and other financial instruments in several
countries.
Whatever the assets eventually amount
to, they won't go unclaimed as so many of the bodies have. There
are nearly 700 legal claims, amounting to nearly $1.8 billion,
filed against the temple.
In addition to the State Department's
probe, a host of other government investigations have produced
little or nothing.
The House of Representatives has completed
a costly, months-long inquiry and issued a lengthy, unsurprising
report.
A Guyanese government probe of the killings,
announced with much panopoly last January, has not yet begun.
In San Francisco, a federal grand jury
investigation is still under way, although sources predict only
a slim chance that any indictments of the more than 80 individuals
who survived the massacre or of other ex-temple members in California
will be handed down.
The FBI is seeking to establish whether
there was any conspiracy to kill Leo Ryan. The murder of a congressman
is a federal crime.
Home