All I could think was I am not going to make Grandma live through my funeral. That was the last moment I remember with any real clarity before I surrendered my body to the medical staff. [16] Then in October 1994, four individuals robbed a jewelry store in Palm Bay, Florida. The robbers drew what police at the time believed were firearms, and restrained the store owner. We heard that the church had weapons, and that Jones was paranoid and possibly on drugs. 2023 Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple, Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple is a, The Campaign to Release Larry Layton from Federal Prison, to petition then-President Clinton to commute Larrys sentence. ", "I thought, what a waste. He was acquitted after presenting a defense of brainwashing. But he ordered them separated before they had consummated the marriage, and Mr. Blakey eventually left California to join the party establishing the cult's Guyana settlement. ''This is a criminal case against Larry Layton,'' he said. Her childhood playmates included cousins and friends from some of the bestknown families of Germany's Jewish aristocracy, such as the Berensons and Rothschilds. [27] Lawton says he regrets his time spent in prison, because he missed out on seeing his children grow up; his grandmother died, and his father became afflicted with Alzheimer's disease while he was inside. [8] In 1983, having earned his GED, he left the Coast Guard and began engaging in criminal activity, mostly loan sharking and bookmaking. According to trial testimony, as the attack began, Layton pulled a gun inside the plane and wounded two temple defectors. Wed have to make multiple trips in the truck. Twenty years ago this month, Jones and 912 of his followers committed mass suicide at the jungle compound. See the article in its original context from. [10] While in prison, Lawton earned a paralegal qualification and became a gang mediator. The suit was later dismissed. Mr. Jones also apparently widened the rift between Larry Layton and his father. I was almost one of them. Her startling introduction to life there quickly allowed Layton to see the cracks in the facade. How could I not like the good things they were doing?. Nevertheless, in 1991, a parole board ruled that Larry would have to serve 20 years, and set his release date for 2006. The article dissected Joness rise, revealing his practices of manipulation, public humiliation and fake faith healings, called out the Temples corrupt financial structure, and included ex-members testimonies of sexual assault and brutal beatings by Jones or at his command. And, I thought of them like Mormons. Mrs. Layton got a large share of the proceeds, as well as money from the sale of stock they had owned Jointly; this also was given to the cult. It was just a matter of time. There is abundant evidence that Mr. Jones used such tactics to divide families and break up marriages. Within minutes, Ryan and four others were shot dead. Vernon Gosney and Monica Bagby, it read. It wasnt unusual for Temple members to be awakened at dawn over the loudspeaker and summoned to the pavilion for one of his increasingly unhinged sermons. I just needed to hang on. But I was one of very few women who held senior staff positions in Congress at the time, and I was concerned that if I gave in to my reluctance and let a male colleague go in my place, Id be setting back women in politics. The other, Carolyn, became one of Mr. Jones's mistresses and also his principal fnancial adviser; it is not known whether she is alive. "[10], Lawton also founded the Reality Check Foundation, which is a 501(C)(3) charity that includes a mentoring program, and an annual golf outing. In the summer of 1978, Lisa Philips Layton died of cancer in Jonestown, Guyana, three months before the Rev. The hundreds of elderly were told that if they attempted escape, they would be left to die prolonged deaths alone in the depths of the jungle. After graduating from the University of California campus at Davis in 1968 with a degree in social science, Layton and his wife moved to the Ukiah area and soon met up with the temple. All of those people I had been standing beside, speaking to, sharing a cabin with. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Hours after Mr. Ryan and four others were shot to death at the airstrip near Jonestown, which was the headquarters of the cult, the cult's leader, the Rev. ", Crimes for which children went to the well included "stealing food from the kitchen, expressing homesickness, failing a socialism exam, or even natural childish rebelliousness.". [10], Lawton executed his first robbery when he was 28, an inside job to collect insurance money. [38][5][9] In 2013, the Brevard County Jail re-introduced chain gangs as a pilot project with the goal of deterring crime. Mrs. Layton saw Mr. Jones strip Larry of two wives. Is the Stanley Quencher tumbler worth its TikTok hype? I was beaten once a month. Anyone can read what you share. Hurrying out of bed, Layton would race toward Jones "in my mud-caked boots, past the tin-roofed cabins, past the wooden outdoor showers where we're allowed our two-minute wash at the end of our 11-hour days in the field." While on the phone listening to the allegations that would soon be made public, Jones scribbled a note to his aides: We leave tonight.. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. By the time I returned, more than 900 people died. I felt my stomach knot. Then, as a group of men dug the truck out of the mud, we heard a loud commotion from the pavilion. At 16, Im not sure I understood what a state assemblyman did, but when my parents received a solicitation from Leo Ryans reelection campaign in 1966, I mailed back a note: Im in high school. Not long after she left, her parents were rounded up with other Jews and placed on a train to a death camp. Tony Tamburello, the defense attorney, told jurors in his closing arguments that the prosecutors had sensationalized the case against Mr. Layton in the three-week trial in Federal District Court. Anyone can read what you share. The next year, his church relocated to Redwood Valley, a small community in northern California. [15][18] Local police believed there was a connection between this robbery and a robbery that took place in May 1994 in Daytona Beach, and contacted the FBI. Deborah watched at close hand her brother's mental deterioration under Mr. Jones's oppressiveness: Larry had been very hung upon Carolyn, he loved her, and Jim took her away from him and gave him Karen, but then he took Karen away, too. He is also charged with conspiring to harm Richard Dwyer, a United States diplomat who was wounded in the ambush. One night, when Mr. Jones was conducting an hourslong lecture to the commune, she arranged to be placed on duty helping to operate a shortwave radio that transmitted Mr. Jones's directives to cult members in San Francisco. Excerpt from UNDAUNTED: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back by Jackie Speier, reprinted under a license arrangement originating with Amazon Publishing. An uncle, Dr. James Franck, won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1935. We landed in Georgetown, Guyanas capital, on November 14, 1978. [30] The Lake St. Louis police chief praised Larry's message about the consequences of going to prison and said it is not a scared straight program, noting that Lawton said "fear doesn't have a lasting impact. Philip Wogaman, President and Mrs. Clintons pastor in Washington, D.C. made additional pleas for commutation of Larrys sentence. Don put it in his pocket and took a few more steps before carefully unfolding it. In August 1979, he joined the Coast Guard[9] and took part in the Mariel boatlift. the attorney said. After Larry and Carolyn Layton joined the cult, Larry stopped writing to his parents and would not accept phone calls from them. Larry Layton was convicted in 1986 by a federal jury in San Francisco of conspiring in the 1978 murder of California congressman Leo Ryan and aiding and abetting in the attempted murder of Richard Dwyer, a U.S. diplomat wounded in the attack. By that time, darker elements had seeped into Jones sermons. Lawton gained notoriety for committing a string of jewelry store robberies along the Atlantic Seaboard prior to his arrest in 1996. After spending 18 years in Guyana jails and U.S. federal prisons, Larry Layton, the only man convicted on criminal charges arising from the events of November 18, 1978, was released in April 2002. They all swore that Jonestown was the one and only place they could ever consider home. By the following year, Jones was making a reputation for himself in. As one of his top aides, I accompanied the delegation, venturing out on the ice floes where the clubbing took place. Layton's mother, Lisa, had died of cancer 10 days before the mass suicide. Five bullets had ripped through me, devastating the right side of my body. | AP/San Francisco Examiner. Charismatic and tall with salt-and-pepper hair, he commanded a room. 1978 CULT FIGURE GETS LIFE TERM IN CONGRESSMAN'S JUNGLE SLAYING, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/04/us/1978-cult-figure-gets-life-term-in-congressman-s-jungle-slaying.html. After a year or so Dr. Layton and his wife heard from Carolyn's father that the couple had been divorced. Youll see what a wonderful place it is. He took us on a tour highlighting the most favorable aspects of the commune. In 1978, I went to Guyana on a fact-finding mission. I heard screams and the rapid pounding of gunfire. Tom Layton, Larry's older brother, reported to his father that Larry had complained repeatedly of what a awful father the scientist had been. Later, Jones also became enamoured of the new Mrs. Layton and soon added her, too, to his growing harem of temple members. 'A Tremendous Amount of Guilt'. The temple sent Layton to school for training as an X-ray technician. The defense rested its case without presenting witnesses. Mr. Layton cried as his attorney described conditions at Jonestown and said that many prosecution witnesses must feel guilty for leaving loved ones behind to die. Jones had become increasingly paranoid, convinced that the CIA, the FBI and the media were out to destroy him. We didnt want a group to present a canned response or any individual to look to others for their answers. Among them were Sams teenaged granddaughters. He was born in the mountains of West Virginia, between White Sulphur Springs and Charleston, to a family that had helped settle Virginia 225 years earlier and claimed ancestors datmg from the Mayflower. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. White Night!" . With the camp surrounded by his armed guards, he told his followers to give the medicinegrape FlavorAid and Kool-Aid laced with cyanide and tranquilizersto the children and the elderly first. They had passed. [30] In 2009, the Brevard County Sheriff's Office spent $4500 on 500 DVDs from the Reality Check program. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. None of the Temple members showed any interest in receiving correspondence from home. There were piles of used syringes at the scene. Traumatizing family rifts erupted on the spot, with mothers and fathers engaged in literal tug-of-wars over their children. She died of cancer in Guyana three weeks before the death ritual. But Lisa escaped from Hamburg, and in 1938, stunned by the antiSemitism she had seen, she arrived in New York with a determination never to reveal to anyone that she was Jewish. Mr. Tamburello accused prosecutors of going too far in describing the ambush on the Ryan party, which went to Guyana to investigate assertions that some members of the cult were being mistreated and were being held in Guyana against their wills. After Jones moved to Jonestown, and with Layton still in California, Layton's sister, a power in the hierarchy of the temple, defected and began to tell of atrocities at the jungle agricultural project. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Biography submission guide. In a book written by his brother, Thomas, after Ryan's death, Larry is quoted as saying he believed in the goals of the community, even though life was not always Utopian. He treasured it. At the compound, Don wandered off to smoke a cigarette. ''I submit they were presented to inflame you, to arouse your passions, to prejudice you. "When I joined Peoples Temple, I was 17 and it was like joining the Peace Corps," she says. Lawton filed a lawsuit against the prison and staff alleging that they violated his rights. She is known by many of her relationships - longtime lover of Jim Jones, mother of Jones' child Jim Jon (Kimo) Prokes, sister of Annie Moore, former wife of Larry Layton, former sister-in-law of Debby Layton - as well as the sometimes-mysterious roles she played within the Peoples Temple hierarchy. "[33] Lawton and the police chief later appeared before United States Congress in recognition of the program. They called it Jonestown. They were married in 1966 and a year later Larry, who as a Quaker had obtained a draft deferment as a consciencious objector, moved with his new wife to Ukiah in northern California to serve in lieu of military duty as a medical technician at the Mendocino State Hospital. The daughter of Hugo and Anita Philips, Lisa Philips Layton was born in Germany in 1915 into a family that had engaged in banking for at least 200 years. [26] He was incarcerated in many prisons during his sentence, which included Jesup in Georgia, Riker's Island in New York, Edgefield in South Carolina, and Yazoo City in Mississippi. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. He is serving a life sentence in the federal prison at Lompoc. He was not paroled from an American prison until 2002. To the stretchers. Besides, when had a congressman ever been assassinated on foreign soil while on a congressional delegation trip? In the weeks leading up to the White House decision on the petition, a number of former congressmen and religious leaders including Rev. Mr. Jones, they said, could cure cancer. Within a year, a few Jonestown defectors had managed to return to the Bay Areamost notably, Debbie Layton Blakey, whod been Jones trusted aide and worked as the Temples financial secretary. It looked staged. [41], In 2017, he appeared in a middle school in Havelock, North Carolina to explain his prison experiences. Much later, Layton writes, she would find them "on the bookshelf in Father's house with the many other prescription drugs taken from Temple members.". He was born June 30, 1940 in Long Branch NJ to William and Edna (Keller) Layton. The months passed, and suddenly I finished a book and looked up, and no one was here., I walked up and down the street and looked at the stars and, wondered what I had done wrong, I think she felt was not as affectionate as I might have been, he said. With its bell-ringing calls for social justice -- this was in the fractious 1960s and early '70s -- the little-known church near Ukiah catered to the closet revolutionary in Deborah Layton. '', See the article in its original context from. Wiki Bio of Larry Layton net worth is updated in 2023. 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