Jonestown: 918 Dead in the Jungle

In May 1978, a Peoples Temple doctor in the Guyanese jungle wrote a memo to his leader asking permission to test cyanide on the settlement's pigs. The pigs' metabolism, the memo noted, was close to that of human beings. Six months later, 909 people died inside the settlement, all but two from cyanide poisoning, a third of them children.

The Peoples Temple was founded by Jim Jones in Indianapolis in 1955 as a racially integrated congregation that preached what Jones called "apostolic socialism." After hostility in Indiana over its integrationist stance, the Temple moved to Redwood Valley, California, in 1965, opened branches in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 1970s, and made San Francisco its headquarters. Jones cultivated political muscle there. After the Temple turned out volunteers for George Moscone's 1975 mayoral campaign, Moscone appointed Jones chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority. A 1976 testimonial dinner for Jones drew Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, and Assemblyman Willie Brown. Vice Presidential candidate Walter Mondale and First Lady Rosalynn Carter both met privately with Jones.

The pivot to Guyana began in October 1973, when Temple directors voted to establish an agricultural mission abroad. Guyana was English-speaking, socialist under Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, and had no extradition treaty with the United States. In 1974 Jones leased over 3,800 acres in the northwestern jungle, 150 miles from Georgetown, near the disputed border with Venezuela — a location Jones sold to Burnham as a buffer against Venezuelan incursion. The land had poor soil and the nearest water was seven miles away by muddy road.

Mass migration began in summer 1977, after Jones learned that New West magazine was preparing an exposé by reporter Marshall Kilduff. He left San Francisco the same night and several hundred members followed him to Jonestown, which would peak at just under 900 residents in 1978. Inside, work ran six days a week, 6:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and after-hours classes covered Jones's discussions of revolution and what he called the conspiracy. Around 70 percent of residents were African American; 45 percent were Black women. Jonestown spoke to the outside world over a single shortwave radio. Discipline included confinement in a 6-by-4-by-3-foot plywood box and forcing children to spend nights at the bottom of a well. For escape attempts, an "extended care unit" administered Thorazine, sodium pentothal, chloral hydrate, Demerol, and Valium.

The cyanide arrived years before the deaths. In 1976 Jones obtained a jeweler's license to purchase potassium cyanide, ostensibly to clean gold, and the Temple began receiving monthly half-pound shipments. Jones rehearsed mass death long before he ordered it. He called the rehearsals "White Nights." A guard would shout "Alert, Alert, Alert" over the tower speakers; the community gathered in the central pavilion, ringed by armed guards with guns and crossbows. On at least two White Nights, members were lined up, given a small glass of red liquid, told it contained poison, and told they would die in 45 minutes. After the deadline passed, Jones told them it had been a loyalty test, and that the real moment was coming.

In September 1977, Tim and Grace Stoen — former Temple members — went to a Georgetown court seeking custody of their five-year-old son John, who was in Jonestown. Jones responded by faking a sniper attack on himself and triggering the "Six-Day Siege," six days of armed encirclement during which he claimed mercenaries were closing in. Jones broadcast that the community would die unless granted asylum. Marceline Jones spent hours on the shortwave radio talking him down. Deputy Prime Minister Ptolemy Reid eventually assured her the Guyana Defence Force would not invade. The Stoens then organized other relatives of Jonestown residents into the Concerned Relatives, who in April 1978 distributed an "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones" to Congress and the press. That June, Deborah Layton — who had defected — gave the group an affidavit detailing the loyalty drills and the conditions inside Jonestown.

Jones, meanwhile, courted the Soviet Union. Temple representatives met repeatedly with the embassies of the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, and Yugoslavia. On October 2, 1978, Soviet consul Feodor Timofeyev visited Jonestown and gave a speech describing the settlement as "this first socialist and communist community of the United States of America." Jones told the crowd, "the Soviet Union was our spiritual motherland." The Temple drafted internal memoranda about places in the USSR where they might resettle. Jones also paid Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist Mark Lane $6,000 a month to publicly allege that the CIA, the FBI, and even the U.S. Postal Service were conducting a "massive conspiracy" against the Temple.

Jones's body was failing. By 1978 he claimed to have lung cancer — almost certainly false, a play for sympathy — and audio tapes from that year record him slurring through high blood pressure, small strokes, weight loss of 30 to 40 pounds in two weeks, temporary blindness, and convulsions. He was abusing injectable Valium, Quaaludes, stimulants, and barbiturates. His former friend Tim Reiterman, the San Francisco Examiner reporter, was struck on November 17, 1978 by Jones's "glazed eyes and festering paranoia."

Congressman Leo Ryan of California's 11th district had personal reasons to investigate. A friend's son, Bob Houston, had been a Temple member whose mutilated body was found near train tracks on October 5, 1976, three days after a phone call discussing leaving the Temple. On November 14, 1978, Ryan flew to Georgetown with his legal adviser Jackie Speier, NBC reporter Don Harris and his crew, Washington Post reporter Charles Krause, San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman, and several Concerned Relatives. They reached the Port Kaituma airstrip — six miles from Jonestown — on November 17 and were initially blocked by Temple attorneys Mark Lane and Charles Garry; only Ryan, Speier, and the lawyers were allowed in that afternoon, with the rest admitted after sunset.

That night, Temple member Vernon Gosney mistook NBC's Don Harris for Ryan and slipped him a note: "Dear Congressman, Vernon Gosney and Monica Bagby. Please help us get out of Jonestown." Speier later said reading it confirmed "something was very, very wrong." On the morning of November 18, eleven Temple members slipped out and walked toward Matthew's Ridge in the opposite direction from the airstrip — including the wife and son of the head of Jonestown security. By afternoon, two more families — the Parks and the Bogues — asked to leave with Ryan. Jones gave permission. Gosney was forced to sign a statement that he was leaving his four-year-old son behind voluntarily. As Ryan prepared to follow, a Temple member named Don "Ujara" Sly grabbed him with a knife; others wrestled Sly to the ground, but Ryan was hurried out.

The defectors and Ryan's party reached the Port Kaituma airstrip around 4:30 p.m. on November 18 and waited until two aircraft landed at 5:10 p.m. — a 19-passenger Twin Otter from Guyana Airways, and a six-passenger Cessna sent to handle the extra defectors. Temple loyalist Larry Layton — Deborah Layton's brother — boarded the Cessna. After it taxied to the far end of the strip, he produced a handgun, shot Monica Bagby and Vernon Gosney, and tried to kill Dale Parks before his gun misfired and Parks disarmed him. Almost simultaneously, a tractor and trailer driven by members of the Temple's "Red Brigade" security squad rolled up to the Twin Otter. About nine shooters opened fire with handguns, shotguns, and rifles. NBC cameraman Bob Brown captured the first seconds of the attack on U-Matic videotape before he was killed. Don Harris, photographer Greg Robinson, and defector Patricia Parks were also killed. Ryan was shot more than 20 times. Eleven others were wounded.

Back in Jonestown, the Red Brigade returned and reported the killings. Jones called the community to the pavilion. Aides prepared a large metal tub containing grape Flavor Aid laced with cyanide, potassium chloride, diphenhydramine, promethazine, chlorpromazine, chloroquine, diazepam, and chloral hydrate. The mixture was prepared with the help of Larry Schacht, the Temple's in-house doctor — a former methamphetamine addict whose medical school Jones had paid for, and who had been researching the most effective methods of mass suicide. Jones told the gathering one of the people on Ryan's plane was about to shoot the pilot and bring the plane down on the settlement.

A 44-minute cassette recording of the meeting, FBI tape Q 042, is known as the death tape. On it, Jones urges members to commit "revolutionary suicide." A Temple member named Christine Miller argues for an airlift to the Soviet Union instead. Jim McElvane, a former therapist who had arrived two days earlier, spoke against her. Jones declared a Soviet exodus impossible. Miller backed down. According to escapee Odell Rhodes, the first to die were Ruletta Paul and her one-year-old infant — a needleless syringe used to squirt poison into the baby's mouth, then her own. Stanley Clayton, who escaped, said mothers with babies were brought to the tub first; once people saw the poison taking effect, they began to resist. The poison killed children in five minutes, infants in less, adults in 20 to 30. Armed guards surrounded the pavilion. Tim Carter, a Vietnam veteran among the survivors, said the Red Brigade returned with the thousand-yard stare of soldiers. As more died, Jones counseled, "Die with a degree of dignity. Lay down your life with dignity; don't lay down with tears and agony." Eventually the guards themselves were called in to drink. Jones was found in the pavilion with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his left temple, his head on a pillow.

Three Temple loyalists — Tim Carter, his brother Mike, and Mike Prokes — were sent away before the deaths with $550,000 in U.S. currency, $130,000 in Guyanese currency, and a letter to Soviet consul Timofeyev assigning more than $7.3 million in Temple bank accounts to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They abandoned most of the money and were apprehended at Port Kaituma. Mike Prokes died by suicide on March 14, 1979, during a press conference. In Georgetown, Temple member Sharon Amos received a radio order from Jonestown to take revenge on Temple enemies and then commit revolutionary suicide; she killed her three children — Christa, 11; Martin, 10; and 21-year-old Liane assisted her — then cut her own throat. Two Jonestown residents survived only because they hid: 79-year-old Grover Davis, hard-of-hearing, missed the announcement and lay in a ditch; 76-year-old Hyacinth Thrash crawled under her bed and walked out after the deaths.

The U.S. military collected 914 of the 918 dead and flew them to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The base mortuary was overwhelmed; many service members involved in identification later showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In August 2014, the never-claimed cremated remains of nine Jonestown victims were found in a former Dover funeral home; five remained unclaimed by family and were interred at the Jonestown Memorial at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, where over 400 of the dead are buried. Larry Layton, who fired into the Cessna, was acquitted in Guyana under a "brainwashing" defense, then deported and prosecuted in the U.S. for conspiracy and aiding and abetting the murder of Ryan and the attempted murder of Deputy Chief of Mission Richard Dwyer. Paroled in 2002, he is the only person ever held criminally responsible for the events at Jonestown.