Interview: Graham Kislingbury

My dad, Graham Kislingbury, lost his sister Sharon to the Jonestown mass murder-suicide. Sharon joined the Peoples Temple in the mid-1970s and eventually moved to Jonestown, Guyana in the spring of 1978. During that time, my dad and his family followed whatever news they could grasp about the Peoples Temple out of concern for Sharon. My dad has extensive knowledge about the Peoples Temple and its news coverage because of this personal connection. He and his family did their best to correspond with Sharon after she suddenly moved to South America and his dad, a PR practitioner, used his networking skills to glean any information he could about Jones and the Peoples Temple.

After the mass-suicide, my dad collected every story he could find about the Peoples Temple and its members’ deaths. He met lots of reporters who covered the Peoples Temple and learned everything he could about the group and its media coverage so that he could give cult talks wherever people would listen to him.

My dad is the online editor of my hometown newspaper. During his career, he has written articles about Sharon and the Peoples Temple several times.

• When did Sharon get involved with the Peoples Temple? It was in 1975, when she was 19. She had gone to College of the Redwoods from 1974-1975. She stopped going after the first year. Her friends from Burlingame, like Kim Brewster, got her involved. Tim Carter, too. He became one of Jim Jones’ lieutenants. Everybody was concerned about Sharon. She’d come home and have contact with the family but we had questions about the group. They seemed to be doing good things but it was too good to be true. They did “cancer healings.” It was slight of hand. I was up in Oregon so I didn’t see her that often. In 1976, there were a couple times I saw her. She had never totally put us out of the picture but this (Peoples Temple) became her life.

• What had you heard about the Peoples Temple and Jim Jones in the media at the time Sharon got involved? I hadn’t heard of it–– I was a bit separated because I was living in Oregon. She (Sharon) thought it was better than Glide Memorial Methodist, a popular church at the time. There was nothing in the papers, especially outside of the Bay Area. Sharon talked about how fabulous the church was. We (my parents, sister and I) never went to a service. I didn’t want to. I didn’t believe it. Sharon wanted me to come but just never wanted to get sucked into that.

• Did your family look to the media for understanding once Sharon became increasingly active in the Temple? Were you concerned? What did you find? Of course. But I don’t remember much of it until the summer of 1977. I relied on what I was hearing through word of mouth in the Burlingame community. Sharon would piss me off whenever she talked about the Temple. It wasn’t until the summer of 1977 when I was getting concerned. Well, really concerned. The stories were not negative until 1977. The New West article... I remember being really troubled after that... thinking she was in a really dangerous group. It was the first investigative report. Jones did a lot of manipulation to everyone... including the media. No one knew the extent. They (Peoples Temple) did good things. They donated $50,000 to the basic mission finance of Disciples of Christ. But there was also nasty stuff going on. Then, Jones goes to Guyana. He’s left others to deal with the media.
November 18th. That’s when we we’re all paying attention. I came back from a play. My parents called to say Leo Ryan had been shot and was dead. Everybody was very freaked out. We just waited. That was a Saturday night. My dad held out hope she (Sharon) had run into the jungle. The body count kept growing. There were only so many passports and more and more bodies. I went down to California that Tuesday. We woke up and all watched CBS. There were aerial views from a helicopter. By Monday and Tuesday, all the major media were down there and swarming in. They rented whatever they needed to get there and got there. They used short wave radio and telephones to send in stories. There was a bar, a tavern, and Tim Reiterman (a San Francisco Chronicle reporter) and others got calls through from there.

• How was this coverage significant to media history? It’s the largest mass suicide that’s been covered and had significant follow-up coverage. The media took a big hit in this. There had been nothing like this. Bob Brown’s camera kept going even when he was shot and dead. Greg Robinson... SF photographer... an NBC interviewer... Leo Ryan, one of the defectors... they all died. Reiterman took pictures of the aftermath. Before, unless it was provided by the Temple, there was no media coverage. Then came Time and News Week with cover stories after the suicide. New West, too. “Diary of a Madman” or something. John Horgan wrote about the San Mateo connection. In San Francisco it was everywhere. There were funerals going on for weeks. 409 people were unidentified and buried in Oakland. It was almost surreal. But you couldn’t not watch it. You wanted to know what was happening. You wanted to see what the rest of the world was seeing... And then, it was forgotten. You won’t see it in the history books. I think it’s like the Holocaust, on a much smaller level–– it needs to be told. We need to know about the people who use fraud, exploitation and abuse to gain their ends.


• How were the Peoples Temple members described in media coverage before and after the mass suicide? After Jonestown, there was a lot of worry in San Francisco that there would be hit squads. There was nothing like that. It was very sad to see these people (remaining Temple members). I went to the Temple and saw people who just stood outside the gates. They were just lost. They had to deal with everything, including taunts from relatives. They had to take it all. There was nothing after the 18th. It disbanded. It ceased to exist.

• What did you think of the media coverage after the mass murder-suicide? They did a pretty good job. Time and Newsweek had pretty good analysis pieces. The early books were questionable. Tim Reiterman (Raven)–– I don’t think there’s been anything better written. Starting with the Peoples Temple, they took a more critical eye at the Unification Church and post-Vietnam groups that seemed to flourish in that era when people were looking for meaning in their lives. There was just more media coverage of this stuff after Jonestown. Jonestown was kind of the model cult –– except that most cults at the time were mostly white this one was mostly black.

• As a journalist, what have you written about Sharon, the Peoples Temple and more recent cults? Over Christmas of 1978 I wrote a column on the editorial page. I wrote several things in Cottage Grove and two in Albany. “Letters From Jonestown” was the biggest. I wrote one thing once about a cult talk and a hearing in Salem. I wrote some personal stuff that I don’t think I ‘d write now. I wrote about Pat Ryan (Leo Ryan’s daughter) in 1986. Her sister got involved in another cult, Rash Neesh, in the 1980s.
Mom and I visited Rash Neesh in Eastern Oregon out of curiosity after Jonestown and I wrote some personal reflection on that. Then, in 2001 I wrote about Young Life–– their Wildhorse Canyon camp is headquartered where Rash Neesh used to be. I compared it (Wildhorse Canyon) to my experiences there in 1984 when it was a cult.
This year is the 30th anniversary. I want to write a Disciples World article and reflect on Jonestown. Jones was an ordained Disciple of Christ minister and Jonestown had huge repercussions for the denomination.

During the rest of our interview, my dad and I discussed how Sharon got hooked into the Peoples Temple. My dad described how Sharon’s behavior changed after she joined. He reflected on how gullible she was as a young person and described other young people he knew who got involved with the cult. We went on to talk about Sharon’s correspondence with the family and the radio system set up between Jonestown and the San Francisco Temple. My grandpa and grandma talked to Sharon over the radio on her 22nd and last birthday in October of 1978. The radio frequencies made most correspondence private but Jones often broadcast his sermons and random ramblings.

Our interview focused a lot on how the New West exposé altered the course of media coverage of the Peoples Temple. That’s when all the family members started to freak out about their loved ones. There was little media coverage coming from Jonestown but lots of scandals arouse when Temple defectors opened up to reporters in San Francisco. My dad talked a lot about Leo Ryan’s delegation of media representatives, government officials and concerned family members. Lots of Bay Area family members of people in Jonestown, including my dad, were relieved that the media were going to investigate Jones the Temple’s happenings. They were crushed when Ryan and other delegation members were killed and beside themselves when Temple members took their lives by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid.

My dad expressed his profound respect for fellow journalist, Tim Reiterman.