What You Might Not Know About Jim Jones' Wife

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

Jim and Marceline were married in 1949, and over the next three decades, they went on to have one child together and adopt six others. In 1961, they became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a Black child. Their biological son Stephan was the only one of their children who survived Jim Jones' doomsday religion. He wrote a heartfelt memoir of his mother for San Diego State University's Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple project in 2013. Stephan remembered his mother as "the most loving, gentle, and giving person" he has ever known. He also described her as a person who realized tragically too late the terrible nature of the thing in which she had ensnared herself, calling her situation a "nightmare."

That's why she had to help Stephan get out. She imagined a completely different life for her biological son. "While Dad pushed a path of self-sacrifice and doom," wrote Stephan, "Mom spoke to me of universities and family and future ... ESCAPE." She gave Stephan a passport and a passbook to a bank account containing $100,000, but his adopted brothers discovered the plan and told their father before he could leave. Still, Marceline was able to convince Jim to let Stephan go to Georgetown, Guyana, before the Jonestown massacre, ultimately saving his life. It appears that like the other unfortunate members of the Peoples Temple, Marceline Jones only figured out what she'd gotten herself into far too late to get out of it.

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