The first formal Jonestown body count, completed on Monday, increased the number of dead to 408, still not even half of the settlement population. On Tuesday the GDF was replaced by American troops, who discovered that the name tags placed on bodies identified earlier were illegible because rain had washed away most of the ink. They started over, and to their astonishment, the bodies they inspected proved to be only a top layer. There was another underneath, and another beneath that. The bottom layer was mostly comprised of infants and children, who apparently had been the first to die. The
...more