Jonestown stays with her
Laura Johnston Kohl survived the massacre 40 years ago but still struggles with loss.
Laura Kohl survived cult massacre but still struggles with loss.
SAN DIEGO — Forty years later, even after the way it ended, there’s a part of Laura Johnston Kohl that still misses Jonestown.
She’s standing in the living room of her San Marcos, Calif., home, holding a framed photo that usually hangs on a bedroom wall. It’s an aerial shot of the compound where she and other followers of the Rev. Jim Jones had turned a jungle in Guyana into what they hoped would be a utopia of respect, justice and fulfillment.
“Look how much we accomplished in just two years,” the retired 71-yearold schoolteacher said, pointing at the rows of dormitories and cottages. This is where more than 900 people lived. And where they died. It remains among the 20th century’s signature horrors and one of the most chilling massacres in the history of religious movements. Men, women and children followed the orders of their messiah and drank cyanidelaced punch.
Kohl would have been among them if she hadn’t been working with other Peoples Temple members 150 miles away in Georgetown, securing food and supplies for the group.
The photo of the compound held her attention for a few more seconds and then she set it down on a couch.
“I was a total zealot who did not see it coming,” she said.
Now she’s made it her mission to help others avoid that mistake.
She regularly gives talks at schools and libraries, urging people to think critically and pay attention to the hidden agendas of those in power.
She writes articles for a website, sponsored by San Diego State, that’s dedicated to the proposition that “the story of Jonestown did not start or end on 18 November 1978.”
She’s donated boxes of documents, photos and letters to a university in Indiana, the state where Jim Jones was born and raised.
Her willingness to “come out of the Peoples Temple closet” made her one of the featured speakers last week at an annual Jonestown remembrance in Oakland, where the remains of more than 400 unidentified and unclaimed victims are buried.
She talked about her long journey to embrace the messiness of her story — how her time in Peoples Temple was one of the highlights of her life, and also the source of her deepest sorrows.
“I thought that I was making the commitment to building a different world, based on principles I believed in — equality, dignity for all, integrity,” she said. “I was foolish and naive.”
She used to be angry, but not any more.
“My existence in and survival from Jonestown and Peoples Temple is part of my core,” she said. “I somehow survived. I can’t waste my life now, even 40 years later.”
As an atheist, Kohl wasn’t drawn to Peoples Temple for the religion. She went for the civil rights.
She grew up near Washington, D.C., where her politically active single mother often hosted activists in town for protests and rallies.
In college in Connecticut, she studied philosophy and was involved with campus groups that pushed 1960s progressive causes, including the fight against racism.
Tired of the East Coast college life, she dropped out and moved in early 1970 to San Francisco. She was 22. Before long, she’d heard about Jones and his church north of the city.
She found a diverse group of people — young and old, rich and poor, black and white, college-educated and illiterate — dedicated to a more just society and pursuing it with boots-on-theground charity: convalescent homes, drug rehabilitation, foster care.
Religious scholars have spent decades studying and writing about Jones, and if there’s one thing many of them agree on, it’s that he had a gift for reading people. Many con artists do.
“He told you what you wanted to hear,” Kohl said.
In her case, he dropped the names of civil rights leaders who were heroes of hers — Cesar Chavez, Angela Davis, Dennis Banks. Here, she thought, was someone who could give voice to her activism.
While working a day job for the state welfare department, Kohl became more and more involved with the temple. She was part of Jones’ planning committee and drove buses on crosscountry recruiting trips.
When Jones took the group to Guyana to “create heaven on Earth,” Kohl followed, arriving in 1977. She worked in Georgetown and lived in a house the temple owned there. She bought food, equipment and other supplies. She helped with the paperwork of new arrivals.
She loved it there, loved the people and the culture, but after she violated a temple rule, she was ordered to the compound. Jones scolded her in front of the group. She was put on a work crew before he sent her back to Georgetown, in October 1978 — one month before the massacre.
When she looks back on it now, she sees all the “red flags” that should have told her Jones was losing his grip on sanity, she said. How he stif led dissent. How so much of what he did was about control, not teaching. But she didn’t see it then. “I would have done it [taken the poison] too,” she said. “That was my family.”
In 1998, feeling like her life was more in order, she attended the 20th-anniversary remembrance of the mass killings, in Oakland. She reconnected with other survivors.
“That is when my healing really began,” she said.
In 2010, she self-published a memoir about her experience, “Jonestown Survivor: An Insider’s Look.”
“I speak only for myself,” she wrote in the introduction. “My reflections about and understanding of my experiences continue to evolve.”
She was never going to go back. In her mind, there was no way to separate Guyana from what had happened at Jonestown, and all that death still felt too fresh, too horrific.
About six years ago, though, she began thinking it might be a good idea. And in March she went, flying into Georgetown with her family, a few friends, and Jordan Vilchez, another survivor.
They went the next morning to what is left of Jonestown. The original sign marking the compound is long gone. The road is overgrown and unrecognizable. Kohl’s group followed guides along a narrow, slippery path until they came to what used to be the pavilion.
In a clearing there was a large tombstone, dedicated to “the victims of the Jonestown tragedy.”
While the other visitors went off to see what else might be nearby, Kohl stayed by the tombstone. It felt to her like a reunion — a reunion of her past self and her present one.
A month later, back in San Marcos, she noticed lumps on her arm and went to the doctor. The diagnosis was soft-tissue sarcoma, the prescription radiation and then chemotherapy.
As last week’s Jonestown remembrance approached, Kohl worried that her cancer treatment might keep her from Oakland. She asked her doctor if it was OK to go.
“Live your life,” he told her.
She is, she said. After 40 years, she is.
‘I thought that I was making the commitment to building a different world, based on principles I believed in — equality, dignity for all, integrity. I was foolish and naive.’
— Laura Johnston Kohl, Jonestown survivor