Ex-cultist describes

a sadistic

Jim Jones

New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO An unpublished book by a California woman whose family lived for six years inside the Peoples Temple says that the Rev. Jim Jones dispensed both physical punishment and his own brand of psychological cruelty to establish control over his followers, ultimately leading hundreds of them to take their own lives and those of their children at his command.

In the book and in interviews with its author, 39-year-old Jeannie Mills, Jones emerges as a sadistic man consummately skilled in playing on the fears and insecurities of poor blacks and middle-class whites.

Before they joined the church in 1969, Mrs. Mills, her husband, Al, and their five daughters had lived in Berkeley. Impressed with Jones, Al Mills quit his job and moved his family to Jones's headquarters, then in Redwood Valley, in northern California.

As described in Mrs. Mills's manuscript, on which she has been working for two years, their participation began with deep commitment to Jones's professed goal of building an integrated community with utopian socialist overtones. What followed was gradual disillusionment with some of his aims and methods, and, at the end, there was horror and a desperation to escape. Although fearful of retribution, the couple withdrew from the church

in the fall of 1975, two years before Jones moved to Guyana.

As portrayed by Mrs. Mills, Jim Jones was a paradox, a puritanical figure who banned drinking, smoking and sex and then humiliated his members by forcing them to take part in public sex acts, a man who exhorted his followers not to swat flies but who giggled as he directed the public floggings of

errants.

Mrs. Mills said she received one whipping, three blows decreed by Jones after a small boy reported that she had drunk wine.

But others, she said, were regularly beaten severely. Her daughter, Linda, then 16 years old, was beaten after Jones saw her hugging a girl he considered a traitor.

According to Mrs. Mills, Linda was held by two men in front of the congregation and hit 75 times by a woman wielding a twofoot-long wooden paddle.. “She screamed bloody murder," Mrs. Mills said, and the screams were amplified with a microphone held in front of her.

Afterward, he ordered Mr. and Mrs. Mills to sign a release, and, still under the cult leader's spell, they did. Linda Mills, who is 19 and who left the Temple about a year after her parents, said she still suffered "a lot of back problems" because of the beating.

Though the severity and manner of punishment varied with age and offense, few Jones fol:lowers escaped entirely. Mem-

bers who could not swim were

Associated Press

Peoples Temple founder, Jim Jones talks with newsmen in Jonestown shortly before the murder of Rep. Leo J. Ryan that touched off the mass suicide-murders.

thrown, hands tied behind them, into a swimming pool, though no one was left to drown, she said.

Other" transgressors were forced to face à succession of opponents in nonstop boxing matches. A white woman accused of making a racist remark was pummeled by a score of black women in boxing gloves, she said.

Yet she also said that once Jones staged a tableau in which whites donned sheets and hoods and pretended to hang a black

man.

The strong sense of fear was reinforced, Mrs. Mills said, by a network of informers and by the frequent threats of Jones to shoot members who fell asleep at meetings.

Jones also applied psychological torture centered on sex and apparently designed to break down relationships between members, she said.

Although Jones had forbidden sexual intercourse even for married couples, Mrs. Mills said, he once distributed a questionnaire that asked, "Do you find your leader sexually attractive?" and "Do you want to have sex with your pastor?" A secretary was to make appointments for those answering the affirmative.

in

Many of Jones's long Sunday sermons, Mrs. Mills said, were devoted to the subject of sex,

treated in "gutter language.” Women were questioned at length about their enjoyment of sex, usually with the husband listening. In the same way, Jones would browbeat men into saying, usually in front of their wives, that they were homosexual, she said.

Members were held to the church, she said, partly by written "confessions" that Jones insisted they sign, confessions of incest or other offenses. Also, since most members had signed over all, or nearly all, of their property to the Temple, Mrs. Mills said, the longer they remained in the Temple the more difficult it became to leave.

Before the Millses began to grow disenchanted with Jones, they transferred to him a $100,000 investment in a tract of homes that they never recovered. When the couple left the commune, two of their daughters with them, they changed their name from Mertle to Mills because they were afraid of retribution. It was, the couple agreed, the brutal beatings more than anything else that finally drove them out.

They said they had gained the impression that Jones was becoming concerned about losing his hold over his flock. If he could only get them to Guyana, he had told Al Mills. "I'll be able to keep them in line. When they're in the jungle, there won't be any place for them to go."