Word: tapes
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Someone in the schizophrenic California-based cult, which hacked a spare living out of the Guyana soil while banking millions in secret Swiss accounts, had recorded the final 43 minutes of the colony's existence. The tape was found by a U.S. consular employee in Guyana and turned over to the FBI. Guyanese officials were given a copy. While both Guyana and the U.S. Justice Department refused to release the tape, copies somehow proliferated. The one obtained by TIME last week discloses that Jones' death decree was met with stubborn resistance as well as fatal acquiescence...
...tape ends in a long period of silence broken only by mournful music that is made more eerie as the tape recorder's batteries seem to run down. The sound stops before the crack of the pistol shot that killed Jim Jones, presumably fired by his own hand...
...called the press conference, he said, to charge that the U.S. Government was withholding a tape recording that would show that no one had coerced the members of the Peoples Temple colony in Guyana into killing themselves. On the contrary, contended Michael Prokes, 32, who had been one of Jim Jones's top aides, the tape would prove that "they chose to die because it was an act of courage and a commitment to their beliefs...
...press conference, Prokes spoke for 25 minutes, defending Jones and insisting that the tape would show that the followers had gone serenely to their deaths. Then he walked into an adjoining bathroom, closed the door, placed a Smith & Wesson .38 against his right temple and killed himself...
Next day, when NBC-TV broadcast portions of the tape, it became clear that the mass suicides were not entirely voluntary. If Prokes had known that the tapes were about to become public, said his tearful mother, "he would, at the least, have waited" before joining his fellow cultists in death...