Jonestown

• 1. Introduction

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  Jonestown, formally the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, was a remote jungle settlement in Guyana, and its name now stands for a single day in November 1978. On the 18th of November, 918 people died in three places: the settlement itself, an airstrip at Port Kaituma, and a Temple-run building in Georgetown, Guyana's capital. The settlement belonged to the Peoples Temple, an American religious group led by a preacher named Jim Jones. Few places have ever been reduced so quickly to a single word.

  How does a congregation that began in the American Midwest end up clearing land in a South American jungle? Who lived at the settlement, and what did each day there ask of them? Why did a visit from a United States congressman matter so much? And why do writers still disagree about what to call what happened?

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• 2. Apostolic Socialism

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  In 1955, in Indianapolis, Indiana, Jim Jones formed the Peoples Temple. The group described its creed as "apostolic socialism." It preached that people "drugged with the opiate of religion" had to be led toward enlightenment, which it defined as socialism. Jones admired Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, and he later praised Stalin and Vladimir Lenin as heroes. He was also angered by the persecution of the Communist Party USA.

  In the early 1960s, Jones visited Guyana, then a British colony, on his way to opening a short-lived Temple mission in Brazil. Criticism of his integrationist views in Indiana pushed the Temple to Redwood Valley, California, in 1965. Branches opened in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 1970s. The headquarters eventually moved to San Francisco.

  In 1975, the Temple's efforts proved instrumental in George Moscone winning the San Francisco mayoral election. Moscone repaid the favor by appointing Jones chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority. That public support gave Jones access to high-ranking figures, including vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale and First Lady Rosalynn Carter. A large testimonial dinner in 1976 drew Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally and Assemblyman Willie Brown, among others.

  In the fall of 1973, critical newspaper articles by Lester Kinsolving and the defection of eight Temple members had alarmed Jones. With the Temple attorney Timothy Stoen, he drew up an "immediate action" plan for answering a police or media crackdown. The options included fleeing to Canada or to a "Caribbean missionary post" such as Barbados or Trinidad. The Temple researched Guyana's economy and its extradition treaties with the United States. In October 1973, its directors passed a resolution to establish an agricultural mission there.

  Former member Tim Carter explained the choice in racial and political terms. The Temple saw racism and powerful multinational corporations as dominant in the American government. It concluded that an English-speaking socialist country with prominent black leaders would give black members a peaceful place to live. Jones had a calculation of his own. He thought Guyana was small, poor and independent enough for him to win influence and official protection.

  He also made a clever pitch to the Guyanese government. An American presence near Guyana's disputed border with Venezuela, he argued, would be a benefit. That idea appealed to the government of Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, which feared a Venezuelan military incursion. Burnham later suggested that Jones may have wanted to use cooperatives as a basis for socialism, and that a commune fit that idea.

  In 1974, Jones toured northwestern Guyana with Guyanese officials and negotiated a lease of more than 3,800 acres of jungle. The land lay 150 miles west of Georgetown, close to the Venezuelan border. Guyana approved the lease in 1976, retroactive to April 1974. The soil was of low fertility, and the nearest water was seven miles away along muddy roads.

  In 1976, Temple member Michael Prokes asked Burnham to receive Jones as a foreign dignitary. Jones then traveled to Guyana with Dymally, who afterward wrote to Burnham that Jones was "one of the finest human beings." Another member, Paula Adams, became romantically involved with Laurence "Bonny" Mann, Guyana's ambassador to the United States. Jones boasted about other women he called "public relations women."

  To secure a mass migration, Jones told officials that his followers were "skilled and progressive." He showed off an envelope he said held $500,000 and promised to invest most of the group's assets in Guyana. The influx overwhelmed a small but strict immigration system. Procedures were bent to hinder departures by Temple defectors and to curtail visas for Temple opponents.

  Burnham later said Guyana tolerated the Temple on the word of Moscone, Mondale and Rosalynn Carter. In September 1977, Deputy Minister Ptolemy Reid was in Washington, D.C. to sign the Panama Canal Treaties. By Burnham's account, Vice President Mondale asked him, "How's Jim?" Reid took the question as a sign that Mondale cared personally about Jones.

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• 3. Life in Jonestown

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  In the summer of 1977, Jones left San Francisco on the same night that a New West magazine editor read him an article by Marshall Kilduff. The article detailed allegations of abuse by former Temple members. Several hundred followers joined Jones in Guyana, where about five hundred members had already begun building the settlement. The population grew overcrowded and stood slightly under 900 at its peak in 1978.

  Jones described Jonestown as both a "socialist paradise" and a "sanctuary" from media scrutiny. He declared, "I believe we're the purest communists there are." His wife Marceline called it a place "dedicated to live for socialism, total economic and racial and social equality." Nobody could leave without Jones's express prior permission.

  Many members had believed Jones's promise of a utopia, but life changed after he arrived. Movies from Georgetown were mostly replaced by Soviet propaganda shorts and documentaries on American social problems. Buildings fell into disrepair, and weeds crept into the fields. School study and nighttime lectures for adults turned into Jones's talks about revolution and enemies.

  For the first several months, members worked six days a week, from about 6:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with an hour for lunch. In mid-1978, Jones's health worsened and Marceline took over more of the daily operations. The work week shrank to eight hours a day, five days a week. Evenings still brought hours of activities in the central pavilion, including classes on socialism. Jones compared the routine to North Korea's system of eight hours of work followed by eight of study.

  Radio Moscow and Radio Havana supplied much of the news that Jones read aloud. His recorded readings played over the tower speakers, so members heard them day and night. They portrayed the United States as a "capitalist" and "imperialist" villain and cast leaders such as Kim Il-sung, Stalin and Robert Mugabe in a positive light.

  Films became lessons as well. Jones repeatedly screened political thrillers, including The Parallax View (1974), The Day of the Jackal (1973), State of Siege (1972) and Z (1969), and analyzed them minutely. Recordings of meetings show him livid when listeners found the films dull or missed his message. Jonestown had a closed-circuit television system, yet nobody could watch anything without a Temple staffer present to "interpret" it.

  A shortwave radio linked Jonestown to San Francisco and Georgetown, carrying everything from supply orders to confidential Temple business. The Federal Communications Commission cited the Temple for technical violations and for using amateur frequencies for commercial purposes. The Temple feared that threats to revoke its operators' licenses endangered the settlement, because the radio was its only effective link besides the mail.

  Because of its poor soil, Jonestown could not feed itself and imported large quantities of goods such as wheat. Residents lived in small communal houses, some with walls woven from Troolie palm. Meals were reportedly nothing more than rice, beans and greens on some days, with meat, sauce and eggs only occasionally. Jones also lived in a tiny communal house, with fewer occupants than others, though he had access to an estimated $26 million by late 1978. In February 1978, severe diarrhea and high fevers struck half the community.

  Jonestown had no dedicated prison, yet punishment was harsh. One method was confinement in a plywood box measuring 6 by 4 by 3 feet. Children could be forced to spend a night at the bottom of a well, sometimes upside-down. Local Guyanese gossiped about this "torture hole" and about beatings. Members who tried to escape were given sedating drugs in an "extended care unit," and armed guards patrolled day and night.

  Children were generally placed in communal care and at times saw their parents only briefly at night. Adults and children alike called Jones "Father" or "Dad." The settlement had a nursery where thirty-three infants were born.

  For a year, the commune appears to have run mainly on Social Security checks. Up to $65,000 a month in welfare payments to residents was signed over to the Temple. In 1978, officials from the American embassy in Georgetown interviewed recipients several times to check that nobody was held against their will. None of the seventy-five people interviewed said they were captive, that they had been forced to sign over checks, or that they wanted to leave.

  African Americans made up roughly 70 percent of the population. Black women alone accounted for about 45 percent of all residents.

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• 4. White Nights

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  When Jones called "Alert, Alert, Alert" over the tower speakers, Jonestown dropped everything and gathered in the pavilion. Guards armed with guns and crossbows surrounded the building. Jones called these emergencies "White Nights." On several occasions he offered his followers four choices: attempt to flee to the Soviet Union, commit "revolutionary suicide," stay and fight the supposed attackers, or flee into the jungle.

  Jones's paranoia and drug abuse deepened as he feared a government raid. He told members that American intelligence agencies were conspiring with "capitalist pigs" to destroy the settlement. He studied Adolf Hitler and Father Divine to learn how to manipulate followers. Divine personally told him to "find an enemy" and make sure everyone knew who it was, because that would unify the group and make it subservient.

  On at least two occasions, a vote for "revolutionary suicide" was followed by a rehearsal. Defector Deborah Layton described one in an affidavit. Everyone, including children, lined up and was handed "a small glass of red liquid." They were told it was poison that would kill them within 45 minutes. When no one died, Jones explained that they had just taken a "loyalty test" and warned that the time was near when they would have to die by their own hands.

  One drill lasted six days and became known as the "Six-Day Siege." It followed a Georgetown court battle in September 1977, in which Tim and Grace Stoen sought the return of their five-year-old son, John. A second order called for John to be taken into protective custody. Fearing contempt of court, Jones staged a false sniper attack on himself and began the siege.

  Frightened settlers ringed the commune with machetes and crude tools. Jones claimed that mercenaries were closing in to murder them and to kidnap John Victor Stoen. Marceline and others outside the commune spent endless hours on the shortwave radio, urging Jones not to order a mass suicide. At one point he ordered a hasty evacuation, loading dozens of settlers onto boats on the George River for a supposed escape to Cuba. Several people fell into the water and were injured. At last Jones gave way and the drill ended.

  The activists Angela Davis and Huey Newton spoke to the settlers by radio-telephone, urging them to hold firm against the "conspiracy." Jones broadcast that "we will die unless we are granted freedom from harassment and asylum." Reid finally assured Marceline that the Guyana Defence Force would not invade. Veterans of the siege were held in high regard, and Jones tearfully praised their courage on the "front line."

  Cyanide was already on hand. Since 1976, the Temple had received half-pound shipments every month, after Jones obtained a jeweler's license supposedly to clean gold. In May 1978, a Temple doctor sent Jones a memo asking permission to test cyanide on the settlement's pigs. Their metabolism, he noted, was close to that of human beings.

  After the siege, Jones no longer trusted the Guyanese, whatever Reid had promised. He directed members to write to more than a dozen foreign governments about immigration rules. He also wrote to the State Department about North Korea and Albania. In Georgetown, the Temple met often with the embassies of the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea and Yugoslavia, and the talks with the Soviets covered possible resettlement. The Temple drafted memoranda on places in the Soviet Union where it might settle.

  Sharon Amos, Michael Prokes, Matthew Blunt, Timothy Regan and others took active roles in the "Guyana-Korea Friendship Society," which sponsored two seminars on the ideas of Kim Il-sung. In April 1978, a high-ranking correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS and his wife visited Jones. On the 2nd of October 1978, the Soviet consul in Georgetown, Feodor Timofeyev, visited Jonestown for two days and gave a speech. Jones introduced him by calling the Soviet Union the Temple's "spiritual motherland."

  Timofeyev greeted what he called the "first socialist and communist community of the United States of America." Both speeches drew cheers and applause. Temple members then met with Timofeyev almost weekly to discuss a possible Soviet exodus. Eventually Jones changed his mind and said he preferred to remain within Guyana's borders for the sovereignty they offered. Far away in California, a group of relatives had been pushing in the opposite direction.

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• 5. Concerned Relatives

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  In late 1977 and early 1978, Tim and Grace Stoen met with other relatives of Jonestown residents at the home of Jeannie Mills, another Temple defector. They called themselves the "Concerned Relatives." Tim Stoen wrote letters to the American Secretary of State and the Guyanese government, and he traveled to Washington, D.C. to lobby for an official investigation. In January 1978, he sent Congress a white paper asking members to write to Burnham. Ninety-one congressmen did so, Leo Ryan among them.

  On the 17th of February 1978, Jones agreed to an interview with San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman. Reiterman's story about the Stoen custody fight brought an immediate threat of a lawsuit from the Temple. The damage to the Temple's reputation was severe, and most former supporters grew doubtful of its claim to be the victim of a "rightist vendetta." Some stayed loyal. The day after the story ran, Harvey Milk, a supervisor supported by the Temple, wrote to President Jimmy Carter defending Jones as "a man of the highest character."

  On the 11th of April 1978, the Concerned Relatives sent the Temple, the press and members of Congress a packet of letters and affidavits titled "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones." In June, Layton added an affidavit describing alleged crimes and poor living conditions in Jonestown. Stoen represented three relatives in lawsuits filed in May and June against Jones and other members, seeking more than $56 million. On the 10th of July 1978, the Temple's attorney Charles Garry filed a countersuit seeking $150 million.

  During July and August of 1978, Jones hired Mark Lane and Donald Freed, both theorists about the Kennedy assassination, to argue that intelligence agencies were mounting a "grand conspiracy" against the Temple. Jones told Lane he wanted to "pull an Eldridge Cleaver," meaning return to the United States after repairing his reputation. In September, Lane spoke to the residents of Jonestown and compared Jones to Martin Luther King Jr. At press conferences, Lane described a "massive conspiracy" involving the CIA, the FBI and even the Postal Service. Jones was paying him $6,000 a month.

  Jones's health meanwhile declined. After hearing of a possible lung infection in 1978, he told followers he had lung cancer, a ploy to win sympathy and strengthen support. He was said to be abusing injectable Valium, Quaaludes, stimulants and barbiturates. Tapes of 1978 meetings capture him complaining of high blood pressure, small strokes, temporary blindness and convulsions. He reported losing thirty to forty pounds in two weeks, and in his last month his extremities swelled grotesquely. His once-sharp voice slurred, and he sometimes left sentences unfinished even while reading typed reports over the speakers.

  Reiterman saw the change for himself in Jonestown on the 17th of November 1978, after covering Jones for eighteen months. He called it "shocking to see his glazed eyes and festering paranoia face to face." He realized that "nearly a thousand lives, ours included, were in his hands."

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• 6. The Congressman Arrives

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  Leo Ryan's interest in the Temple had a personal edge, tied to a body found near train tracks on the 5th of October 1976. The dead man was Bob Houston, a Temple member and the son of a friend of Ryan, who represented California's 11th congressional district. Three days before, a taped phone conversation between Houston and his ex-wife had touched on leaving the Temple. The claims of Stoen, Layton and the Concerned Relatives sharpened Ryan's interest in the following months.

  On the 14th of November 1978, Ryan flew to Georgetown with a large delegation. It included his legal adviser Jackie Speier, Neville Annibourne of Guyana's Ministry of Information and Richard Dwyer, Deputy Chief of Mission at the American embassy. Journalists from the San Francisco Examiner, NBC, the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle came along, including Reiterman and NBC reporter Don Harris. Concerned Relatives representatives, among them Tim and Grace Stoen, completed the group.

  Mark Lane and Charles Garry at first refused the delegation access to Jonestown. By the morning of the 17th of November, they warned Jones that Ryan would likely go that afternoon whether he agreed or not. The party reached the airstrip at Port Kaituma, six miles from the settlement, some hours later. The plane had little room, so only four relatives went along: Anthony Katsaris, Beverly Oliver, Jim Cobb and Carol Boyd. The Stoens stayed behind because their presence might antagonize Jones. Sherwin Harris also stayed in Georgetown, hoping to spend time with his daughter Liane.

  At first only Ryan, Speier, Lane and Garry were accepted into Jonestown. The rest of the party was allowed in after sunset and attended a musical reception in the pavilion. The visitors were received warmly, though Jones said he felt like a dying man and ranted about government conspiracies and martyrdom. Audio tapes later showed that Jones had rehearsed residents on how to convince the delegation that everyone was happy.

  That night, two Temple members, Vernon Gosney and Monica Bagby, made the first move to defect. 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." A nearby child saw it and alerted other members. Harris took two notes to Ryan and Speier. Speier said in 2006 that the notes made her realize "something was very, very wrong."

  Early on the 18th of November, eleven Temple members felt enough danger to walk out of Jonestown to the town of Matthew's Ridge, in the opposite direction from the airstrip. Among them were the wife and son of Joe Wilson, the head of security. That afternoon, the Parks and Bogue families stepped forward and asked to leave with Ryan's party. Jones's adopted son Johnny tried to talk Jerry Parks out of it. Parks answered, "No way, it's nothing but a communist prison camp."

  Jones gave the two families, along with Gosney and Bagby, permission to leave. Before Gosney went, he was made to sign a statement saying he left his four-year-old son behind of his own free will. When Harris handed Gosney's note to Jones during an interview, Jones called the defectors liars who wanted to destroy Jonestown. After a sudden violent rainstorm, emotional scenes unfolded between relatives. Al Simon tried to take two of his children out, but his wife Bonnie, summoned over the speakers, loudly denounced him.

  Most of the party left for the airstrip on a large dump truck, while Ryan and Dwyer stayed to process more defectors. Just before the truck left, Temple loyalist Larry Layton, the brother of Deborah Layton, demanded to come along. Several defectors voiced suspicion about his motives. Then Don "Ujara" Sly grabbed Ryan with a knife. Others wrestled Sly down and Ryan was unhurt, but Dwyer urged him to leave while he filed a complaint. The truck stopped, took Ryan aboard and continued.

  A nineteen-passenger Twin Otter from Guyana Airways had been scheduled to fly the group out. Because of the defectors, the embassy arranged a second plane, a six-passenger Cessna. The group reached the airstrip between 4:30 p.m. and 4:45 p.m., but the planes arrived only at about 5:10 p.m. Larry Layton boarded the Cessna, the first to prepare for takeoff. At the far end of the airstrip, he pulled out a handgun and began shooting. He wounded Bagby and Gosney and tried to kill Dale Parks, who disarmed him after the gun misfired.

  Meanwhile, a tractor towing a trailer, driven by members of the Temple's Red Brigade security squad, approached the Twin Otter. Roughly 30 feet from Ryan's party, and about the time of the Cessna shooting, the Red Brigade opened fire with handguns, shotguns and rifles. At least two shooters circled the plane on foot. Perhaps nine men fired, and most sources agree that Wilson, Stanley Gieg, Thomas Kice Sr. and Ronnie Dennis were among them. Jones had instructed both Layton and the tractor crew that no one from Ryan's party, and none of the defectors, should leave Jonestown.

  NBC cameraman Bob Brown recorded the first few seconds of the shooting on videotape. Brown died in the few minutes of gunfire, along with Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, Harris and defector Patricia Parks. Ryan was shot more than twenty times and also died. Nine others were wounded: Speier, Reiterman, Katsaris, Steve Sung, Dwyer, Charles Krause, Ron Javers, Carolyn Houston Boyd and Beverly Oliver. The Cessna pilot Tom Fernandez and the Twin Otter crew, Captain Guy Spence and First Officer Astil Rodwell Paul, flew to Georgetown in the Cessna with the wounded Bagby. The damaged Twin Otter and the other injured members of the delegation remained on the airstrip.

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• 7. The Last Evening

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  Ryan's final words to Garry before leaving Jonestown were generous. He said his report would describe the settlement "in basically good terms." None of the sixty relatives he had hoped to interview wanted to leave, he said, and the fourteen defectors were a tiny share of the residents. Any sense of imprisonment, he suggested, came from peer pressure and a lack of transport. Even if 200 of more than 900 wanted to go, he said, "I'd still say you have a beautiful place here." Garry relayed this to Jones, who answered, "I have failed," and insisted "all is lost."

  After Ryan's truck left, Marceline Jones announced over the speakers that everything was fine and asked settlers to return to their homes. Meanwhile, aides filled a large metal tub with grape Flavor Aid mixed with several tranquilizers and other drugs, and cyanide. Settlement doctor Larry Schacht helped prepare it. Schacht was a former methamphetamine addict who had gotten sober with Jones's help, and Jones had paid for his medical education. He had been researching the best ways for a person to die in anticipation of the planned mass suicide.

  About thirty minutes after Marceline's announcement, Jones called everyone to the pavilion. A forty-four-minute cassette, known as the "death tape," records part of the meeting in the early evening. Jones predicted that someone on the departing plane would shoot the pilot and bring it down in the jungle. He feared an assault by parachute and insisted that no children be left alive when it was over. He urged members to commit "revolutionary suicide," an idea he had floated since the Temple's San Francisco years.

  Christine Miller argued for an airlift to the Soviet Union instead. Jim McElvane, a former therapist who had arrived only two days earlier, argued against her and said, "Let's make it a beautiful day." Jones insisted a Soviet exodus was impossible, and other members turned on Miller until she backed down. She may have stopped when Jones confirmed that "the congressman has been murdered" after the airstrip shooters returned. Tim Carter recalled the Red Brigade men coming back with the "thousand-yard stare" of weary soldiers. After that, no dissent is heard on the tape, and armed guards had taken positions around the pavilion.

  According to the escaped member Odell Rhodes, the first to take the poison were Ruletta Paul and her one-year-old infant. Stanley Clayton also saw mothers with babies approach the tub first. Clayton said Jones moved among people urging them to drink, and that once adults saw the poison working, "they showed a reluctance to die." Death came within five minutes for children, sooner for babies, and in an estimated twenty to thirty minutes for adults. Those who had drunk were escorted down a wooden walkway out of the pavilion. It is unclear whether some thought it was another White Night rehearsal.

  Rhodes described hysteria and confusion as parents watched their children die. Most people, he said, "quietly waited their own turn to die," and many walked as if in a trance. Jones counseled the crowd, "Die with a degree of dignity." He also said, "death is a million times preferable to 10 more days of this life." Survivor Tim Carter later suggested that lunch that day, grilled cheese sandwiches, may have been laced with sedatives. The armed guards left members a choice between poison and a guard's hand. As more people died, the guards themselves were called in to drink.

  In all, 909 people died in the settlement itself. All but two apparently died from cyanide poisoning, and many were injected against their will. Seventy or more were injected, and a third of the victims were minors. Jones was found dead beside his chair in the pavilion, between two other bodies, with a pillow under his head. The Guyanese Chief Medical Examiner, Leslie Mootoo, said the gunshot wound to his left temple was consistent with being self-inflicted.

  Three high-ranking members said they were given a task and so escaped. Tim Carter, aged 30, his brother Mike, aged 20, and Mike Prokes, aged 31, received luggage holding $550,000 in American currency and $130,000 in Guyanese currency. They also carried an envelope to deliver to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. It held two passports and three letters, the first addressed to Timofeyev. The letters listed accounts with balances above $7.3 million to be transferred to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  The brothers had been given the task before the deaths began, and they abandoned it when they realized what was about to happen. Tim Carter searched for his wife and son, found his son in time to see him poisoned, and saw his wife kill herself in despair. He suffered a nervous breakdown and his brother pulled him away. The three men soon ditched most of the money and were caught heading for a Temple boat at Port Kaituma.

  Others escaped in other ways. Grover Davis, aged 79 and hard of hearing, missed the loudspeaker call and lay in a ditch pretending to be dead. Hyacinth Thrash, aged 76, crawled under her bed, then walked out once the poisoning was over. Garry and Lane were told that the community was angry with them and were escorted to a guest house. They talked past two armed guards and reached the jungle, where they heard gunshots. Clayton, who had fled into the jungle earlier, heard the same sounds as he crept back for his passport.

  Jones's sons Stephan, Jim Jr. and Tim were in Georgetown with Jonestown's basketball team, there to play the Guyanese national team. Just before the pavilion meeting, Jones contacted Stephan and ordered him to "get revenge" on the Temple's enemies and then die. Stephan refused. He then contacted the Temple's San Francisco headquarters and told them to do nothing without his permission.

  At the Georgetown headquarters, Sharon Amos received a radio message in the early evening telling members to take revenge on the Temple's enemies and then commit revolutionary suicide. After police arrived, Amos took her children Liane, 21, Christa, 11, and Martin, 10, into a bathroom. Using a kitchen knife, she killed Christa and Martin. Liane then helped Amos cut her own throat before killing herself. Jones's sons later found the bodies.

  Found near Marceline Jones's body was a typewritten note dated the 18th of November 1978. Signed by Marceline and witnessed by Annie Moore and Maria Katsaris, it left her bank assets to the Communist Party of the USSR. It specifically asked that nothing reach her adopted daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell. Carolyn Layton left a similar handwritten will. Moore also left a note, calling Jonestown "the most peaceful, loving community that ever existed." Its last line, in different ink, read, "We died because you would not let us live in peace."

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• 8. Aftermath and Memory

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  Of the dead, 914, including Jones, were collected by the American military in Guyana and flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The base had earlier handled the dead from the Tenerife airport disaster. The last shipment arrived early on the 27th of November. The base mortuary was overwhelmed, and many of the people who moved or identified the bodies later suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Cremation of many remains was handed to funeral homes around Dover.

  Guyanese authorities waived their requirement for autopsies after unnatural deaths. Mootoo, the only physician to examine the scene at first, looked over more than 200 bodies and told a coroner's jury he saw needle marks on at least seventy. No one determined whether injections started the poisoning or were meant to hasten death for people already convulsing. He and the American pathologist Lynn Crook found cyanide in some bodies, and the vat held tranquilizers, potassium cyanide and potassium chloride. Doctors in the United States performed autopsies on only seven bodies, including those of Jones, Moore, Schacht and Carolyn Layton. The Moore family, including Annie's sister Rebecca Moore, urged that Moore and Layton be among them.

  In August 2014, the unclaimed cremated remains of nine people from Jonestown turned up in a former funeral home in Dover. By September, four had been returned to next of kin. The other five were publicly named in hope that family would come forward, but none did. They were buried at the Jonestown Memorial at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, where the bodies of more than 400 victims lie in a mass grave. A memorial there was erected in 2011.

  The words used for the deaths have shifted over time. Many early news accounts called them a mass suicide. Later sources use terms such as mass murder-suicide, massacre or mass murder. Larry Layton was initially found not guilty of attempted murder in a Guyanese court after arguing that he was "brainwashed." He was deported and arrested in San Francisco by the U.S. Marshals Service. Because he could not be tried in the United States for the attempted murders on Guyanese soil, he was tried under a federal law covering the assassination of members of Congress. He was convicted of conspiracy and of aiding the murder of Ryan and the attempted murder of Dwyer. Paroled in 2002, he is the only person ever held criminally responsible for Jonestown.

  In February 1979-98 percent of Americans polled said they had heard of the tragedy. George Gallup observed that few events in the history of the Gallup Poll had been known to so high a share of the public. Time and Newsweek labeled the Peoples Temple a "cult of death." The House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the State Department itself criticized the department's handling of the Temple. In Guyana, the political opposition set up an inquest that concluded Burnham was responsible for the deaths.

  The Cult Awareness Network formed soon after, and its members included Ryan's daughter Patricia. It fought legal and social battles with groups from The Family International and Scientology to David Koresh's Branch Davidians. Its influence on law enforcement concerns about children shaped the response to the Waco siege in 1993. After legal and financial troubles, the network went bankrupt in 1996.

  Violence trailed Jonestown for years. Mike Prokes died by suicide during a press conference on the 14th of March 1979. In late February 1980, Al and Jeannie Mills, founders of the Concerned Relatives, and their daughter Daphene were shot dead at their home in Berkeley, California. The case remains unsolved. In 1984, former member Tyrone Mitchell, who had lost both parents and five siblings at Jonestown, fired on a Los Angeles elementary school, killing two people and wounding twelve before killing himself.

  Conspiracy theories multiplied. The scale of the event, Jones's socialism, doubts about death counts and classified documents led some to blame the CIA. In 1979, Ryan's former aide Joseph Hollinger called Jonestown a CIA "mass mind control experiment." A 1980 column by Jack Anderson also alleged CIA involvement. That year, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence found no evidence of any CIA activity at Jonestown. In 1987, a Soviet book claimed CIA agents and mercenaries assassinated the residents. Political scientist Janos Radvanyi cited it as an example of Soviet disinformation. Others have suggested KGB involvement, based on the Soviet diplomats' visits and Jones's overtures to the USSR.

  Jones used Flavor Aid, though the drink mix is commonly and mistakenly called Kool-Aid. That slip gave English the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid," describing someone who holds a belief without examining it critically.

  After the deaths, the Guyanese government first tended the compound. It then allowed Hmong refugees from Laos to live there for a few years in the early 1980s. Local people looted the buildings, but nobody settled the site permanently because of its link to the killings. A fire in the mid-1980s destroyed most structures, and the jungle reclaimed the ruins.

  In 1998, Jim Jones Jr. visited with a crew from the ABC news show 20/20 and found a rusting oil drum near the former entrance to the pavilion. He recognized it as the drum used for drink mixtures during White Night exercises. In 2003, a television crew filming for the 25th anniversary returned with pilot Gerry Gouveia, who had helped with the cleanup. Under dense vegetation they found a standing cassava mill, the remains of a tractor, a generator, a filing cabinet, a truck and a fuel pump. At the pavilion site they found a steel drum, an organ and a bed of daisies growing where the bodies once lay.

  In December 2024, Guyana announced plans to open the old site to tourists, with the first visitors due in January 2025 at $650 each. The government supports the scheme. University of Guyana lecturer Neville Bissember and Kit Nascimento, the government spokesperson at the time of the deaths, both oppose it.

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