Timothy Stoen
Timothy Oliver Stoen is an American attorney best known for his central role as a member of the Peoples Temple, and as an opponent of the group during a multi-year custody battle over his six-year-old son, John. The custody battle triggered a chain of events which led to U.S. Representative Leo Ryan's investigation into the Temple's remote settlement of Jonestown in northern Guyana, which became internationally notorious in 1978 after 918 peopleincluding Stoen's sondied in the settlement and on a nearby airstrip. Stoen continued to work as a deputy district attorney in Mendocino County, California, where he was assigned to the District Attorney's Fort Bragg office. Stoen later joined the Mendocino County Public Defenders. He is now in the private practice of law.
Early life
Timothy Stoen was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the child of religious middle-class parents from Littleton, Colorado. Throughout high school and college he was a scholar, athlete and devout Christian. Stoen graduated from Wheaton College with a B.A. in political science. He graduated from Stanford Law School in 1964 and was admitted to the California bar in 1965.Stoen worked for a year in an Oakland real estate office before joining the Mendocino County District Attorney's Office in Ukiah as a deputy district attorney. In 1967, Stoen left this position with the intention of doing work for flower children and similar hippie groups in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and also worked as a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County. Though he represented black militants and supported an ecological platform, he briefly considered running for office as a Republican.
In 1970, Stoen married Grace Lucy Grech, whom he had met at a march at the San Francisco Civic Center against overpopulation and pollution. Their son, John Victor Stoen, was born on January 25, 1972.
Temple beginnings
Introduction to Peoples Temple
Stoen first encountered the Peoples Temple when it was suggested that he ask the group to help renovate the Mendocino County legal aid offices. Two dozen Temple volunteers showed up the following Sunday, and Stoen began sending people to the Temple for drug and marriage counseling. He became impressed with the purported character and good deeds of the Temple's leader, Reverend Jim Jones, especially when he saw Jones scrubbing toilets in the Temple's Ukiah headquarters. By the end of 1969, when violence erupted in Berkeley over People's Park and Third World students' rights, Stoen began to integrate his personal life with the Temple.In 1970, Stoen moved to the Temple's headquarters, where he worked as a deputy district attorney and head of Mendocino County's civil division. He began providing legal aid for the Temple and politically converted to the Temple's socialist ideology.
San Francisco Assistant District Attorney
Despite still referring to its Ukiah facility as its "mother church", the Peoples Temple moved its headquarters to San Francisco around 1972. Following the 1975 mayoral election, former San Francisco District Attorney Joseph Freitas named Stoen to lead a special unit to investigate election fraud charges. Shortly thereafter, Freitas hired Stoen as an assistant district attorney in the consumer frauds division.Stoen found no evidence of election fraud, but Temple members later alleged that the Temple arranged for "busloads" of members to be transported from Redwood Valley to San Francisco to vote in that election under threats of physical violence. When asked how Jones could know for whom they voted, one member responded, "You don't understand, we wanted to do what he told us to." Stoen later claimed that he was not aware at the time of election fraud, despite being in charge of the special unit investigating that specific crime, but that it could have happened without his knowledge because, "Jim Jones kept a lot of things from me."
Defection from the Peoples Temple
On February 6, 1972, just two weeks after his son John was born, Stoen signed an affidavit in which he stated that Jones was the child's biological father. The single-page document eventually became the most important piece of paper in the Temple's history. Stoen's affidavit not only seemed to contradict his putative paternity, but also "bound the child to Jones and the church for life." In the years to follow, Jones would cite the affidavit countless times to demonstrate his paternity of the child, to denigrate Grace's worthiness to be a mother, and to dismiss Stoen's claims of custody rights.Grace, meanwhile, had grown to greatly dislike the Temple. Not only had she been forced to give up John by signing the affidavit, but she had also been berated and threatened sometimes by Jones himself in Temple meetings for denying Jones' paternity of the child, watched the child be publicly paddled, listened to Jones portray Stoen as a homosexual, and witnessed the beating of a 40-year-old woman who had claimed the Temple turned members into robots. Grace and Temple member Walter "Smitty" Jones agreed to leave together. In July 1976, Grace and Smitty fled to Lake Tahoe.
Grace was unable to take John with her; he had already been sent to the Temple's Jonestown settlement in Guyana, and she did not want to put his life in jeopardy along with hers. Nevertheless, Grace began to fight for custody almost immediately after her defection. In February 1977, Grace threatened to divorce Stoen. Fearing that possible legal action against Stoen would make the custody dispute public, Jones sent him to Jonestown. Stoen quit his job as assistant district attorney and began working in Guyana, both at Jonestown and at the Temple's headquarters in the capital of Georgetown. However, distrustful Temple members were secretly spying on Stoen and examining the contents of his briefcase. Within a year, Stoen also left the Temple, returned to San Francisco, and joined Grace's custody battle. Stoen subsequently became the chief antagonist to Jones, who encouraged Jonestown residents to write detailed, humiliating fantasies about murdering Stoen.
Battling the Temple
In July 1977, Jones moved several hundred Temple members to Jonestown, on the same night that an editor at New West magazine read Jones a pending article, written by Marshall Kilduff, detailing allegations of abuse by former Temple members. Two months later, a Georgetown court ordered the Temple to show cause why a final order should not be issued compelling the return of John to his mother. A few days later, the same court issued a second order for Jones' arrest.In fear of being held in contempt of the court orders, and in an attempt to further manipulate his followers, Jones staged a false sniper attack on himself and began a series of "White Night" rallies, called the "Six Day Siege", where he told Temple members about attacks from outsiders and had members surround Jonestown with guns and machetes. Angela Davis and Huey Newton communicated via radio-telephone to the Jonestown crowd, urging them to hold strong against the "conspiracy." Jones made radio broadcasts stating "we will die unless we are granted freedom from harassment and asylum." Guyanese Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy Reid finally assured Jones' wife Marceline that Guyana Defence Force would not invade Jonestown. A court clerk refused to sign the arrest warrant for Jones, and there was talk of interference in the legal process by the Guyanese government.
After this initial round of the Stoen custody dispute, Jones directed Temple members to write to over a dozen foreign governments inquiring about their immigration policies in the event that they had to flee Guyana. He also wrote the U.S. State Department inquiring about North Korea and Albania.
Concerned Relatives
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the Stoens and other relatives of Jonestown members began attending meetings at the home of Jeannie Mills. Calling themselves the "Concerned Relatives", the group began sharing details of their grievances with the Temple, interviewed Temple defectors, and reviewed shortwave radio transcripts of communications between Jonestown and the Temple's San Francisco headquarters. Temple surveillance teams, aware of these meetings, checked licence plates in front of Mills' house to determine the identity of their "enemies." Stoen's addition to the group was vital because of his knowledge of Temple operations, his letter-writing campaigns to the Secretary of State and the Guyanese government, and his trips to Washington, D.C. to lobby for a federal investigation. Stoen became the Concerned Relatives' primary legal representative and filed four court actions against the Temple and its leadership on November 18, 1978, on the group's behalf.In November 1977, an order was issued in a San Francisco court granting custody of John to his mother, Grace. The court order meant that Jones could not return to the U.S. without facing contempt proceedings for failing to turn over the child; it also meant Jones could never let the child leave Jonestown.
In January 1978, Stoen travelled to Georgetown in an unsuccessful bid to take custody of the child. A Guyanese judge recused himself from the case because his life had been threatened, and the new judge had to restart the process from the beginning. A Guyanese official approached Stoen and told him to leave immediately one week before his visa expired. While at the airport, three Temple members surrounded Stoen and threatened his life unless he dropped his legal action. Although Stoen wanted to travel to Jonestown to retrieve John, he thought "if I went back, I thought I would probably be a corpse within thirty days."
After Stoen returned to Washington in January 1978, he visited with nine members of Congress, including U.S. Representative Leo Ryan of California. The Temple, likewise, sent members to visit eight of the nine Congressman in order to discredit Stoen. Stoen also wrote a white paper to Congress that stated how Jones was illegally holding his son. The white paper claimed that any action by the Guyanese military to retrieve the child could result in harm to John or others, and insisted that members of Congress write Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham to take action. Ryan wrote such a letter on Stoen's behalf. Several other congressmen also wrote to Burnham about Stoen's concerns.
At the end of January 1978, Stoen and fellow Concerned Relative Steven Katsaris met State Department officials. They insisted that Jones' mental condition was deteriorating and that he was suffering from "paranoid megalomania". Stoen urged the State Department to request officially that Guyana "speedily enforce" the custody order that the Stoens had won.