Port Kaituma Airstrip
shootings
As members of the delegation boarded two planes at the
airstrip, Jones's armed guards, called the "Red
Brigade" arrived on a tractor and trailer and began shooting at them.
The gunmen killed Ryan and four others near a Guyana Airways Twin Otter aircraft. At the same time, one of the supposed
defectors, Larry Layton, drew a
weapon and began firing on members of the party who had already boarded a small
Cessna. An NBC cameraman
was able to capture footage of the first few seconds of the shooting at the Otter.
The five killed at the airstrip were Ryan; NBC reporter Don Harris; NBC cameraman Bob Brown; San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg
Robinson; and Temple member Patricia
Parks. Surviving the attack were future Congresswoman Jackie Speier,
then a staff member for Ryan; Richard
Dwyer, the Deputy Chief of Mission from the U.S. Embassy at Georgetown; Bob
Flick, a producer for NBC; Steve
Sung, an NBC sound engineer; Tim
Reiterman, a San Francisco Examiner reporter; Ron Javers, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter; Charles Krause, a Washington Post reporter;
and several defecting Temple
members.
Mass murder in
Jonestown
Later that same day, 909 inhabitants of Jonestown, 304 of them children, died of apparent cyanide
poisoning, mostly in and around the settlement's main pavilion. This resulted
in the greatest single loss of American civilian
life (murder + suicide, though not on American
soil) in a deliberate act until the September 11 attacks. The FBI
later recovered a 45-minute audio recording of the suicide in progress.
On that tape, Jones tells Temple members that the Soviet
Union, with whom the Temple had
been negotiating a potential exodus for months, would not take them after the
airstrip murders. The reason given by Jones to commit suicide was consistent
with his previously stated conspiracy theories of intelligence organizations
allegedly conspiring against the Temple, those men would "parachute in here
on us", "shoot some of our
innocent babies" and "they'll
torture our children, they'll torture some of our people here, they'll torture
our seniors". Parroting Jones's prior statements that hostile forces
would convert captured children to fascism, one Temple member states "the
ones that they take captured, they're gonna just let them grow up and be
dummies".
With that reasoning, Jones and several members argued that
the group should commit "revolutionary
suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced grape-flavored Flavor Aid. Later-released Temple
films show Jones opening a storage container full of Kool-Aid in large quantities. However, empty packets of grape Flavor Aid found on the scene show that
this is what was used to mix the solution, along with a sedative. One member, Christine Miller, dissents toward the
beginning of the tape.
When members apparently cried, Jones counseled, "Stop these hysterics. This is not the
way for people who are socialists or communists to die. No way for us to die.
We must die with some dignity." Jones can be heard saying, "Don't be afraid to die", that
death is "just stepping over into another plane" and that it's "a friend". At the end of the
tape, Jones concludes: "We didn't
commit suicide; we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the
conditions of an inhumane world."
According to escaping Temple
members, children were given the drink first by their own parents, families
were told to lie down together. Mass suicide had been previously discussed in
simulated events called "White
Nights" on a regular basis. During at least one such prior White Night, members drank a liquid that
Jones falsely told them it was poison.
Death
Following the mass murder-suicide, Jones was found dead on
the floor; he was resting on a pillow near his deck chair, with a gunshot wound
to his head which Guyanese coroner Cyrill Mootoo said was consistent with
suicide. His body was later dragged
outside for examination and embalming. The official autopsy conducted in
December 1978 also confirms his death as a suicide. Jones's son Stephan
believes his father may have directed someone else to shoot him, but that is
speculation. An autopsy of Jones's body
also showed levels of the barbiturate pentobarbital, which may have been lethal
to humans who had not developed physiological tolerance. A sign could be seen hanging above Jones's
deck chair. Jones had borrowed a quote from George Santayana: "Those
who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Sexuality
Jones married Marceline
Baldwin in 1949. He began his first affair in 1968 with a woman named Carolyn Layton whom he was with until
the end. Another woman he became closest to was Maria Katsaris. Their relationship began in 1974 and she was also
one of his mistresses until the end. He also had many other mistresses during
the 1970s, both before the move to Jonestown
and while living in Jonestown.
The book The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn states: "Jones had occasional sex with male followers" but "never as often as he did with
women." It states he was most likely bisexual, but his main physical
and sexual attraction was towards women.
On December 13, 1973, Jones was arrested and charged with lewd
conduct for masturbating in a movie theater restroom near MacArthur Park in Los
Angeles. The decoy was an undercover LAPD vice officer. Jones is on record
as later telling his followers he was "the
only true heterosexual."
While Jones banned sex among Temple members outside marriage, he voraciously engaged in sexual
relations with both male and female Temple
members. Jones, however, claimed that he
detested engaging in homosexual activity and did so only for the male temple
adherents' own good, purportedly to connect them symbolically with him (Jones).
The International
Peace Mission movement leader Father
Divine was one of Jones's sources of inspiration.
Family aftermath
Marceline
On the final morning of Ryan's visit, Jones's wife Marceline
took reporters on a tour of Jonestown.
Later in the day, she was found dead at
the pavilion, having been poisoned.
Surviving sons
Stephan, Jim Jr.,
and Tim Jones did not take part in
the mass suicide because they were playing with the Peoples Temple basketball team against the Guyanese national team in Georgetown.
At the time of events in Jonestown, Stephan and Tim were both
nineteen and Jim Jones Jr. was
eighteen. Tim's biological family, the
Tuppers, which consisted of his three biological sisters, biological brother, and
biological mother, all died at Jonestown.
Three days before the tragedy, Stephan
Jones refused, over the radio, to comply with an order by his father to
return the team to Jonestown for
Ryan's visit.
During the events at
Jonestown, Stephan, Tim, and Jim Jones Jr. drove to the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown in an attempt to receive help. The Guyanese soldiers guarding the embassy refused to let them in after
hearing about the shootings at the Port
Kaituma airstrip. Later, the three
returned to the Temple's
headquarters in Georgetown to find
the bodies of Sharon Amos and her
three children. Guyanese soldiers
kept the Jones brothers under house arrest for five days, interrogating them
about the deaths in Georgetown.
Stephan Jones was
accused of being involved in the Georgetown
deaths, and was placed in a Guyanese prison
for three months. Tim Jones and Johnny Cobb,
another member of the Peoples Temple
basketball team were asked to go to Jonestown
and help identify the bodies of people who had died. After returning to the United States, Jim Jones Jr.
was placed under police surveillance for several months while he lived with his
older sister, Suzanne, who had
previously turned against the Temple.
Chaeoke Jones, Lew
Jones, and Terry Carter Jones.
Father, mother, and child all died in the mass suicide.
When Jonestown
was first being established, Stephan had originally avoided two attempts by his
father to relocate to the settlement. He eventually moved to Jonestown after a third and final
attempt. He has since said that he gave in to his father's wishes to move to Jonestown because of his mother. Stephan
Jones is now a businessman and married with three daughters. He appeared
in the documentary Jonestown: Paradise
Lost which aired on the History
Channel and Discovery Channel. He
stated he will not watch the documentary and has never grieved for his father. One year later, he appeared in the documentary
Witness to Jonestown where he
responds to rare footage shot inside the Peoples
Temple.
Jim Jones Jr.,
who lost his wife and unborn child at Jonestown,
returned to San Francisco. He
remarried and has three sons from this marriage, including Rob Jones, a high-school basketball star who went on to play for
the University of San Diego before
transferring to Saint Mary's College of
California.
Lew, Agnes, and
Suzanne Jones
Lew and Agnes Jones
both died at Jonestown. Agnes Jones was thirty-five years old
at the time of her death. Her husband
and four children all died at Jonestown.
Lew Jones, who was twenty-one years
old at the time of his death, died alongside his wife Terry and son Chaeoke. Stephanie
Jones had died at age five in a car accident in May 1959.
Suzanne Jones
married Mike Cartmell; they both
turned against the Temple and were
not in Jonestown on November 18,
1978. After this decision to abandon the Temple,
Jones referred to Suzanne openly as "my
damned, no good for nothing daughter" and said she was not to be
trusted. In a signed note found at the
time of her death, Marceline Jones
directed that the Joneses' funds were to be given to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and specified: "I especially request that none of
these are allowed to get into the hands of my adopted daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell." Cartmell had two children and died of colon
cancer in November 2006.
John Stoen and Kimo
Specific references to Tim
Stoen, the father of John Stoen,
including the logistics of possibly murdering him, are made on the Temple's final "death tape", as well as a discussion over whether the Temple should include John Stoen among those committing "revolutionary suicide". At
Jonestown, John Stoen was found
poisoned in Jim Jones's cabin.
Jim Jon (Kimo)
and his mother, Carolyn Louise Moore
Layton, both died during the events at Jonestown.
In popular culture
Documentaries
Jonestown: Mystery of
a Massacre (1998)
Jonestown: The Life
and Death of Peoples Temple (2006)
Jonestown: Paradise
Lost (2007)
CNN Presents: Escape
From Jonestown (2008)
Seconds From Disaster,
episode "Jonestown Cult Suicide"
(06x01) (2012)
Witness to Jonestown
(2013)
Jonestown: The Women
Behind the Massacre (2018)
Jonestown: Terror in
the Jungle (2018)
605 Adults 304
Children (2019), a short documentary filmed entirely by The Peoples Temple at
Jonestown
Television
Guyana Tragedy: The
Story of Jim Jones (1980), fact-based miniseries. Powers Boothe won an Emmy for
his portrayal of Jim Jones.
American Horror Story:
Cult (2017)
Jonestown: Terror in
the Jungle (2018), a forthcoming documentary produced for Sundance TV.
"Very Scary
People", 'Jim Jones: Unholy Massacre' (01x06) (2019)
Film
Guyana: Crime of the
Century aka Guyana: Cult of the Damned (1979), fictionalized exploitation
film (depicted here as "Reverend
James Johnson")
Eaten Alive! (Italian:
Mangiati vivi!) is a 1980 Italian horror film (depicted here as "Jonas," leading a cult in the
jungles of Sri Lanka instead of Guyana).
The Sacrament
(2013), a found-footage horror film (depicted here simply as "Father"; in addition, Jonestown has been renamed "Eden Parish")
Jonestown (2013), an independent short
film which dramatizes the last 24 hours in the lives of Jim Jones (played here by Leandro
Cano) and The Peoples Temple Church
through the eyes of a reporter.
The Veil (2016), a
supernatural horror film (depicted as "Jim
Jacobs")
Fiction
We Agreed to Meet Just
Here, by Scott Blackwood.
Kalamazoo, Michigan: West Michigan University Press, 2009.
Children of Paradise,
by Fred D'Aguiar. New York:
HarperCollins, 2014.
Jonestown, by Wilson Harris. London: Faber and Faber,
1996.
Before White Night,
by Joseph Hartmann. Richmond,
Virginia: Belle Isle Books, 2014.
White Nights, Black
Paradise, by Sikivu Hutchinson.
Infidel Books, 2015.
Beautiful
Revolutionary, by Laura Elizabeth
Woollett. Scribe, London. 2018.
Music
Ballad of Jim Jones
by the Brian Jonestown Massacre,
available on Thank God for Mental Illness (1996)
Carnage in the Temple
of the Damned, by Deicide, available
on Deicide (1990)
Guyana (Cult of the
Damned) by Manowar, available on
Sign of the Hammer (1984)
"A Lilac Harry Quinn"
by Half Man Half Biscuit (1981)
Hypnotized, by Heathen,
available on Victims of Deception
(1991)
Jimmie Jones, by The Vapors
Jonestown, by The Acacia Strain, available on
Wormwood (2010)
Sects by French band Trust, also covered by American thrash metal band Anthrax
Jonestown, by Concrete Blonde, available on Mexican Moon (1993)
Jonestown, by Frank Zappa, available on Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger
(1984)
Koolaid by Accept,
available on The Rise of Chaos (2017)
Last Call in Jonestown,
by Polkadot Cadaver, available on Last Call in Jonestown (2013)
Reverend by Church of
Misery, available on Early Works
Compilation (2011)
Ultraviolence (song)
by Lana Del Rey
La Dee Da by Foo Fighters from the album "Concrete and Gold" (2017)
1998 TRUMAN by Brockhampton from the single "1998 TRUMAN" (2018)
Jonestown
(interlude) by Post Malone from the
album Beerbongs and Bentleys (2018)
Leaders (feat. NAV) by Lil Uzi Vert from the album Eternal
Atake (2020)
Poetry
Bill of Rights, by Fred
D'Aguiar. London: Chatto and Windus, 1998.
The Jonestown Arcane,
by Jack Hirschman. Los Angeles:
Parentheses Writing Series, 1991.
Jonestown Lullaby, by Teri
Buford O'Shea. Bloomington, Ind.: iUniverse, 2011.
Jonestown and Other
Madness, by Pat Parker. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1985.
I. at Jonestown, by Lucille Clifton. Next. Brockport: BOA, 1989.
Theater
The Peoples Temple.
Written by Leigh Fondakowski, with Greg Pierotti, Stephen Wangh, and Margo
Hall. Premiered in 2005.