Private Lives: No longer a prisoner of paradise

Twenty years after Jonestown, a survivor speaks out.

When Deborah Layton followed the Reverend Jim Jones out to his jungle community in Guyana, she fervently hoped it would be "everything I'd ever dreamed of". What she found was a kind of hell on earth.

The man she had looked up to as a role model and surrogate father became increasingly frightening to her as he ran Jonestown, his little kingdom, with increasing brutality and paranoia. Layton had been part of the People's Temple for seven years and was one of Jones's most trusted confidantes. But the relentless misery of Jonestown, the system of thought control, the beatings and the rehearsals for mass suicide slowly hardened her resolve to get out. In May 1978, with a decision that was to save as well as change her tormented life, she did just that.

Taking advantage of a mission to Georgetown, the Guyanese capital, she managed to escape the attentions of her fellow sect members just long enough to secure herself an emergency passport and arrange her air passage out. As she recounts in grimly compulsive detail in her memoir Seductive Poison, just published here, her escape came perilously close to failure as she shuttled between the US Consulate, the PanAm office, a Georgetown hotel and the airport over a nail-biting 24 hours.

Once safely back in the US, she came face to face with the heavy consequences of her defection. She left her cancer-ridden mother behind in Jonestown and never saw or spoke to her again. She failed to make contact with her brother Larry, a fellow Temple member, before he was ordered to Jonestown from San Francisco - effectively consigning to him the fate that would have awaited her had she stayed.

Perhaps most devastatingly, her escape became one of the links in the deadly chain that caused the entire community of Jonestown - 913 men, women and children - to commit mass suicide six months later. Her sworn testimony about conditions in the jungle prompted Leo Ryan, a Californian congressman, to investigate the sect and visit Jonestown; Ryan's effort to bring 20 "defectors" home with him led Jim Jones to order his security guards to open fire on the departing delegation, killing Ryan and four others; their deaths, in turn, precipitated the final, terrible order to the assembled People's Temple members to embrace death with cyanide- laced Flavorade. Lisa Layton, Debbie's mother, was not among the suicide victims - she had died, in terrible agony, a week before (Jim Jones hogged the community's painkiller supply for himself). Larry, meanwhile, was one of the gunmen who ambushed Congressman Ryan's party. Although he did not kill anyone, he was subsequently extradited to the US to serve a life sentence in prison.

Debbie Layton is astonishingly, refreshingly sane. For 17 years, before she quit to write her book, she worked as a financial trader in San Francisco, building up a network of new friends and renewing ties to her father and two older siblings. She now has a 13-year-old daughter, a steady partner and a beautiful, welcoming home in Piedmont on the east side of San Francisco Bay.

Not only has she come to terms with the terrible legacy of the People's Temple and her place within it, but she has written about her experiences with a searing honesty. She describes the disconcertingly plausible way in which a young girl from a well-educated background could come to be sucked into the universe of a monomaniac and charlatan like Jim Jones. "It's all about finding a niche for yourself in a world where everything is black and white," she says. "Where what the leader says is good and everything else is bad. It's much simpler to see the world that way. By the time you figure out what's wrong it's often too late to extricate yourself." Seductive Poison describes the allure of Jim Jones when he was setting up in northern California in the early 1970s and traces his rise to political respectibility (he became so thick with the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, that he was appointed head of the city Housing Commission).

It describes the mental games Jones played to explain away the mounting suspicions surrounding his activities and shows how hundreds of people were deceived into thinking that an almost inaccessible corner of the Guyanese jungle would be a little paradise. But behind Layton's story lies another, equally compelling one: the story of how she gathered the strength to write the book in the first place. For years, all she craved was anonymity.

After the initial blaze of publicity, she retreated into her new life, avoiding all reference to the past. "It was so painful when it came to that point in a relationship where I needed to say `I'm not who you think I am'," she recounted. "But almost nobody walked away"

When her daughter Lauren was born, she was anxious to protect her from the truth. Once, when a documentary on Jonestown was on TV, Lauren was with her father and exclaimed: "Daddy, that looked like Mummy!" Her father hastily changed channels. But it was Lauren, with her ever more persistent questions, that caused Layton to address the past. Another turning point was the Branch Davidian sect siege in Waco, Texas, in 1994: she realised that if survivors like her did not speak up and try to explain the mindset of sect members, further calamities could easily occur. "I heard about Waco while driving across the Bay Bridge and I remember thinking that if the car flipped over and I died there and then, I would be remembered only as an escapee from Jonestown," she said. "The book became an attempt to lend dignity to my experience." Writing the book was a painful, two- year experience and even when it was finished, anxiety did not subside. "I was afraid people would find me truly vile," she said.

In the event, the book received glowing reviews praising not only Layton's courage but also her gift for narrative - reviews that she read not so much with excitement as relief. The relief was evidently felt by other Jonestown survivors, some of whom contacted Layton and found strength to confront their own demons. But much residual pain remains.

Larry Layton has little prospect of parole, and their father is critically ill. "He cried through every chapter of my book," Debbie said. "He is haunted by what happened, why a man he never met should try to ruin him. Ultimately there is no answer to the question, for him or anyone else."