Author: Timothy Oliver Stoen

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017-03-09

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9781537478777

-Love Them to Death- is a memoir of my experiences as the attorney, enemy, and postmortem target of James Warren Jones who, on November 18, 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana, unleashed-in the name of -love--terror and death. It tells how this ordinary man, Jim Jones, having captured the souls of kind and decent people, got them to assassinate a US congressman and, incredibly, got them-by the hundreds-to kill themselves and their children. -The mass suicides and murders in Jonestown, Guyana, - said pollster George Gallup, -was the most widely followed event of 1978.- By then Jim Jones had become a -Molotov cocktail.- The container was Jones's absolute power, the flammable liquid was Jones's malignant narcissism. The wick was Jones's genius for mind control. -The CIA would have had to acknowledge, - said Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, -that Jones succeeded where their MK-Ultra program failed in the ultimate control of the human mind.- -Love Them to Death- is the same book as -Marked for Death, - published in 2015, but with a new title, new cover, amplifications, and new photographs. My journey began in Redwood Valley, California, in 1970, when I self-recruited into a utopian movement called Peoples Temple, in order to pursue -Biblical socialism- (Acts 2). I became the pro bono lawyer for Jones for 7 years. Jim Jones eventually became what the -Washington Post- called a -West Coast Power, - with a remarkable gift for wining over the most sophisticated people in politics. On November 18, 1977, I testified in court and went to war against Jones. By then, he had moved to Jonestown. I turned on Jones because I'd learned he was denigrating to a five-year-old child, John Victor Stoen then in Jonestown, his mother, Grace. Even though I believed then that Jones was the biological father, and had promised to protect his paternal access, he was violating the moral law to -honor thy mother, - which superseded my promise. I later came to realize that I was the biological father of the child. During that one-year war for John Victor, I made two trips to the then -wired- country of Guyana, and in California I braced, every time the doorbell rang, for a pistol or shotgun shot to the chest. Finally, on that November 18th, the journey took a petrifying turn. Jim Jones went for the Orwellian kill. He killed 907 of his people by cyanide, and orchestrated the deaths, by gunfire at the nearby airstrip, of US congressman Leo Ryan and four others. Among those he took out by the poison was six-year-old John Victor Stoen. Structurally, this book traces the -development- of Jim Jones, as I experienced it from 1967 through 1979, through fourteen stages. Based thereon, it includes a letter I wrote to the FBI to try and stop the 1993 Koresh bloodbath and mass suicide in Waco, Texas. On the day he died, Jim Jones exhorted his followers to -see that Stoen does not get by with this infamy.- His agents proceeded to accuse me--falsely--of manipulating the 1975 San Francisco mayoral election, won by George Moscone over John Barbagelata, and then arranging to become special voter fraud prosecutor to cover up my crime. That same day Jones made a prophecy: -Tim Stoen...he'll destroy himself.- It took nine years to undermine that curse. I have three reasons for writing this book. The first is to encourage healthy suspicion of authoritarian power. I want to show how leader are corrupted by absolute power, and how they use charisma and demagogic oratory to acquire that power. The second reason is to encourage realistic approaches to fighting evil. I want to give evidence for M. Scott Peck's position that evil people can be dealt with only by -raw power.- My third reason is to give hope to people who, like me, have made huge mistakes in their lives. Recovery is possible. After all of my unbelievable mistakes, it is a miracle that I should now find myself alive, sane, and vital. It is unquestionably due to something outside my control.