The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

The gunmen moved forward and fired more shots into their fallen victims. There was nothing to prevent them from storming the Otter and Cessna and killing everyone left alive there, or charging into the brush to hunt down those who’d run. Instead, they returned to the truck and tractor-trailer and drove away. The four Guyanese soldiers who’d been standing guard by the disabled army plane watched from a distance. They said later that they’d been prepared to intervene, but decided against it because it was Americans shooting Americans, and they might somehow be blamed if they became involved.

Off to the side of the pavilion, Lane and Garry were being led by armed guards to a cabin. Jones had issued orders for the two lawyers to be held there. Other guards, all of them carrying rifles or shotguns, began prowling all four sides of the pavilion and the perimeters of camp. That was different. Many in the pavilion noticed, and expected Jones to momentarily take the stage and explain. But their leader was now in hushed conversation with Maria Katsaris, who whispered in Jones’s ear. Carter eavesdropped as Jones winced and asked her, “Is there a way to make it taste less bitter?” and Katsaris shook her head. Somewhere in Jonestown, human guinea pigs had sampled the deadly potion. Jones asked Katsaris, “Is it quick?” She replied, “Yeah, it’s really quick, and it’s not supposed to be painful at all.” Jones nodded and told her, “Okay, do what you can to make it taste better.” Larry Schacht had spent months perfecting the perfect blend of Flavor Aid, tranquilizers, and potassium cyanide. Even at this last moment, Jones expected his faithful physician-chemist to tinker with the mix just a little more.

Peoples Temple tape-recorded almost all of Jones’s sermons and addresses at meetings, including this one, his last. He began, “How very much I’ve tried to give you the good life.” Jones’s voice was clear, his tone resigned. There was about to be a catastrophe involving Congressman Leo Ryan’s plane, he explained. “One of those people on the plane” was “gonna shoot the pilot, and down comes that plane into the jungle.” It wouldn’t be the fault of anyone in Jonestown, Jones said—“I didn’t plan it, but I know it’s gonna happen.” But they still would be blamed. Soon, their enemies would “parachute in here on us.” Jones proposed a solution that would spare the Jonestown children from enslavement and the settlement seniors from slaughter: “My opinion is that we be kind to children and kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over quietly, because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act. We can’t go back. They won’t leave us alone. They’re now going back to tell more lies, which means more congressmen. And there’s no way, no way we can survive.”

Some of his audience felt certain that this was just Dad testing them again, leading them right up to the brink. Surely he’d back off at the last second, as he so often had before. But others weren’t certain. Don Sly, who’d been turned loose the moment that Ryan left the settlement, stood and asked, “Is there any way that if I go, that it’ll help us?” Many in the pavilion cried, “No,” and Jones said it, too: “You’re not going. I cannot live that way. I’ve lived for all, and I’ll die for all.”

While instructions were being given to the three couriers in West House, Jones moved on from verbal sparring with Christine Miller. Someone in the crowd asked if he wouldn’t at least spare John Victor, and Jones refused: “He’s no different to me than any of these children here.” Of course, the six-year-old was different to Jones—retaining custody of John Victor, and the subsequent court battles with Tim and Grace Stoen, had helped precipitate this final crisis. But Jones preferred that the child die rather than be returned to his birth mother because then Grace and Tim Stoen would, in some sense, have won.

Jones made the formal announcement: “It’s all over. The congressman has been murdered.” Schacht and the Jonestown nurses appeared at the side of the stage. They brought with them bundles of filled syringes. It was time. Jones wanted the infants, toddlers, and older children to be first. “It’s simple, it’s simple,” he promised their parents. “Just, please get it, before it’s too late. The GDF [Guyana Defence Force] will be here, I tell you. Get movin’.” Some parents didn’t move fast enough to suit Jones. He warned them, “They’ll torture some of our children here.” Some of the guards stepped up. No one was given the choice of whether to participate. Jones told the armed men to allow parents who wanted to die with their children to join them in the line: “Who wants to go with their child has a right. . . . I think it’s humane.”

There is nothing humane about death by cyanide. As a means of suicide, its only advantage is absolute lethality if taken in sufficient dosage. Cyanide robs the body’s cells of the ability to absorb oxygen in the blood. Suffocation is sure—and slow. In The Poisoner’s Handbook, Deborah Blum writes, “The last minutes of a cyanide death are brutal, marked by convulsions, a desperate gasping for air, a rising bloody froth of vomit and saliva, and finally a blessed release into unconsciousness.” As the nurses used syringes to squirt poison into the mouths of the first few infants, many parents herding their children forward hesitated, particularly when the babies began foaming at the mouth and convulsing.

Marceline knew her loss was not limited to three sons in Georgetown. Lew was there in Jonestown, and Agnes, as well as Lew’s little son, Chaeoke, and Agnes’s four children. They would die, too. Anguished, she watched as the last of more than two hundred children were administered poison from syringes. By half past five, no later than 6 p.m., almost all of the little ones were gone, and it was the turn of the adults.

During the confusion at the pavilion, Odell Rhodes and Stanley Clayton individually managed to sneak off into the jungle. Grover Davis didn’t sneak at all. As soon as the poisoning began, he walked up to a perimeter guard—it was Ray Jones, husband of Jim Jones’s daughter Agnes. Ray asked, “Where do you think you’re going?” Davis said simply, “I don’t want to die.” Ray said, “Have a good life,” and stood aside while Davis walked out to the edge of Jonestown, where he hid in a ditch. Garry and Lane also talked their way past the armed men holding them in a cabin, and circled through the brush until they found the road to Port Kaituma.

One more person escaped death, though not immediately from Jonestown. Some of the oldest settlers never came to the pavilion. They lay on cots in their dormitories; guards and settlement nurses took syringes and cups of poison and dosed the elderly men and women there. Hyacinth Thrash was asleep; they mistakenly believed that she was already dead and left her alone.

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 lower layers of dead were even more badly decomposed than the top layer.

The announced number of dead grew to 700 on Thursday, 780 on Friday, and finally, a week after the tragic event, 909. Counting Sharon Amos and her three children, plus Ryan and the other four killed in Port Kaituma, the final death count of November 18, 1978, was 918.

It’s hard to recognize the old Jonestown site now. Once again, it bristles with thick, barbed brush. Within months of the tragedy, Amerindians had carried off almost every useful scrap of material for their own dwellings. In the decades since, the jungle has reasserted itself. All that’s left are some bits of the cassava mill; a mounted, rudimentary map of what the settlement looked like; a small white monument honoring the Jonestown dead; and several metal skeletons of trucks and tractors, all of them impaled by the trunks of towering trees that have split apart the vehicles’ rusted metal ribs. The road into Jonestown has become overgrown, too, and vehicles can’t complete the six-mile trip from Port Kaituma. Those determined to reach the site have to cut the last part of their way in with machetes. Just as demagogues lead their well-intentioned followers into tragedy, so the jungle inevitably reclaims its own.