Timothy Stoen

Timothy Oliver Stoen (born January 16, 1938) 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.

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.

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 married Grace Lucy Grech, whom he had met at a march at the San Francisco Civic Center against overpopulation and pollution.

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.

Their son, John Victor Stoen, was born on January 25, 1972.

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.

Despite still referring to its Ukiah facility as its "mother church", the Peoples Temple moved its headquarters to San Francisco around 1972.

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 (no relation to Jim Jones) agreed to leave together.

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."

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, distrusting Temple members were secretly spying on Stoen and examining the contents of his briefcase.

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 people – including Stoen's son – died 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.

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.