One Family’s Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre

“Dear Folks,” the letter begins, “I think of you when I hear a Beethoven symphony or the words of a childhood hero repeated and more beautiful as I approach my forties. The strength and principles you planted into me at an early age, though inconsistent with the larger culture I grew up in, is now flowering in fertile soil. I see your faces in my mind and remember the courage both of you demonstrated during the McCarthy period when you were alone. How fortunate that Gail and David can grow up in a community that supports their ideals — it shows — they are so strong and independent, you would be proud. I work hard. I’m the administrator of the medical system in Jonestown. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. There is a song we sing that begins, “It feels good to rise with the morning sun,’ and ends, “It feels good to see all the work we’ve done and to know the future is now,’ it sums up my feelings about my life here. I am thousands of miles from you, the electronic communications are limited between us, but I am more your daughter than I’ve ever been before.”

The letter, signed simply “Phyllis,” is written to her parents, Herbert and Freda Alexander, who raised their only child in the hills above the Silver Lake reservoir. It is dated April 15, 1978, when Phyllis Chaikin was 39 years old, her husband, Gene, 45, and their children, Gail and David, 17 and 15. Six months later, on the night of November 18, 1978, Phyllis, Gene, Gail and David would die — along with more than 900 others — in the most infamous religious mass suicide in American history.

Phyllis and her family were dead for more than a decade by the time her elderly parents moved out of their house in Silver Lake in 1992. Architectural real estate agents had to bring the exquisite midcentury modern on Micheltorena Street back from the brink of decrepitude before selling it to my wife, Jenny, and me. Handing over the keys, they told us that, according to neighborhood folklore, the Alexanders might have left behind a concealed suitcase containing correspondence from their long-dead daughter and grandchildren. We looked but found nothing, and having been made aware of the circumstances of this family’s demise, we felt reluctant to intrude on an almost unimaginable grief. But this past February, 10 years after we started to raise a family of our own where the Alexanders had raised theirs, a handyman working on our house emerged from the basement carrying a dusty vinyl briefcase. Inside was an extensive collection of press clippings, evidence of an almost obsessive attempt by the Alexanders to make sense of their daughter’s fatal acts of bad judgment.

In a separate envelope were letters written by Phyllis from San Francisco and later from Jonestown, Guyana, where she and her husband had moved with their children in 1975. There were fond letters to their grandparents from Gail and David. The most moving document in the cache was a carbon copy of a painful valediction from Dr. Alexander to Phyllis, written on an old manual typewriter on September 21, 1977. Tenderly, but with eloquent firmness, he reprimands her, perplexed and offended by her embrace of Jim Jones, the deviant cuckoo who had flown into the Alexanders’ nest and whom Phyllis and her fellow Peoples Temple members called “Dad”:

Now, something like four months have passed, and we have received no communication whatsoever from you. We do not know where you [are] and what you are doing. From what we have read in S.F. Chronicle, the Peoples Temple is in trouble. Indirectly we hear that David is in Guyana. Now if you choose not to communicate any more with us, let us know. If Rev. Jones and the Peoples Temple are against the commandment “Honor thy father and mother’ unless they are members of the Peoples Temple, it is your choice whether to break off all contacts with your kin forever. However, it is our right to know of this alienation. Your refusal to reply to this letter will be evidence enough that you have abandoned us.

– Article continues after this advertisement –

After reading the entire contents of the briefcase, I decided to learn what I could about Jim Jones, his Peoples Temple movement and Jonestown, so that I might understand how a middle-class Silver Lake family not unlike ours had fallen down a rabbit hole. I trawled the Web for long-out-of-print books and made contact with survivors, temple defectors and victims’ families. I showed the letters to Peoples Temple scholars Fielding McGehee and Rebecca Moore. Dr. Moore, a professor of religious studies at San Diego State University, lost both of her sisters in Jonestown: Annie Moore was Jones’ nurse, and Carolyn Moore Layton was his lover and most devoted lieutenant. McGehee and Moore told me that Phyllis and Gene Chaikin had been prominent within the church hierarchy, and they presented me with a copy of the long-withheld FBI evidence files on Peoples Temple. The files contained additional correspondence relating to the Chaikins, which was both more shocking and more revealing than anything to come out of the briefcase.

On the three FBI disks were two quite intimate letters, written independently of each other by Phyllis and Gene and addressed to Jim Jones at a moment when both the Jonestown community and the Chaikins’ relationship were beginning to unravel in the jungles of Guyana. These letters witness the moral destruction of a married couple shortly before Jones brought about their physical annihilation. Above all, they reveal two very different responses to his influence, as half of this couple advocates genocide and the other attempts in vain to defy the minister at the eleventh hour and to save their children’s lives.
[…entire article…]
– Source: Barry Isaacson, From Silver Lake to Suicide: One Family’s Secret History of the Jonestown Massacre, LA Weekly, Oct. 22, 2008

• More about the Peoples Temple