Marked for Death: My War with Jim Jones the Devil of Jonestown
Timothy Oliver Stoen, 2015

Summary: Emerging from Black Panther headquarters on August 17, 1969, to drive away in his Porsche, Timothy Oliver Stoen became angry over racism and turned radical. On January 1, 1970, Stoen self-recruited into a utopian movement, Peoples Temple, to pursue a Biblical ethic: “And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” He became attorney for its leader, James Warren Jones.

On November 18, 1977, Stoen went to war against Jones, internationally, for custody of Stoen’s son, John Victor Stoen. On November 18, 1998, Jones, enjoying absolute power in Jonestown, Guyana, committed unspeakable evil: he killed 907 people by cyanide, including 6-year-old John Victor and orchestrated the deaths of five people by gunfire, including a U.S. congressman. Marked for Death traces Jim Jones’s development from utopian to devil. It is Stoen’s firsthand account of his experiences as Jones’s attorney, enemy and postmortem target.

Excerpt: “ ‘Some in our group,’ said James Warren Jones to someone who had tried to keep him inside the legal rails for seven years, ‘think you might be a CIA agent.’

Only three weeks before, I had been happily ensconced in the lacquered city of San Francisco as its head of special prosecutions. Now, I found myself in a rainforest on the northeast shoulder of another continent, in a country most people in the United States had never heard of, in order to honor a solemn paternity promise to the person who had just made so terrible an insinuation. I, a member of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, an agency that went around assassinating people for seeking freedom from colonial oppression! ‘You mean, after all I’ve done for this group, you are going to accuse me of being a CIA agent?’ ”

Despite Jones’s quickly responding that he did not feel that way himself, he would not have said it at all unless he thought it himself.”