The perfect storm that led to the Jonestown massacre

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The Jonestown massacre remains one of the largest mass murders in American history. In a single day, 901 Americans and 8 Guyanese died from Jim Jones’ actions. Met with criticism rather than compassion, victims and survivors of the 1978 tragedy were often blamed and seen as “crazy” for joining the movement.

The truth is that Jonestown’s leader, preacher Jim Jones, was successful in drawing in followers in the United States because his message resonated in an era of frustration and upheaval—and his views were legitimized by other civil rights leaders. In Guyana, Jones offered a utopia where followers could enact their vision of an equal, self-sufficient society.

Wildly charismatic, Jones preached what so many Americans longed to hear. Young radicals, disillusioned by establishment politics and the Vietnam War, applauded the socialist principles he promoted at his church, Peoples Temple. Black members were also drawn in, at one point making up 80 to 90 percent of the congregation. Not only did much of Jones’ work take on civil rights issues, he also modeled traditional Black worship styles, touted his adopted Black and Korean children, and even claimed he himself was Black.

Considering the months and years that led up to the massacre, it’s clear the folks who joined Jonestown weren’t “crazy” or “cultists.” Instead, they were simply people looking to build a fairer, better world—and Jonestown gave them a way to see their community realized.

Jones capitalized on a societal storm

Jim Jones opened what would become Peoples Temple in Indiana in 1954. The Peoples Temple drew from socialism, communism, and Christianity to promote equality and attract a multi-racial congregation. Jones proselytized with a showman’s panache and used faith-healing to attract followers.

Black Americans made up a significant share of church membership. Peoples Temple’s commitment to racial equality, and its incorporation of Black American religious traditions, meant that it was what scholar Rebecca Moore called “a culturally as well as racially Black movement.”

“The first time that I got there I was greeted by a rainbow coalition of people, and this was the first time I had been in an atmosphere where it’s one church, multiracial and multigenerational as well,” Former Peoples Temple member Yulanda Williams remembers. “When I heard Jim Jones, he spoke about how much he respected the civil rights movement and how important it was that we continued to live out Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream.”

Jones’s charisma and vision attracted the attention of some of the country’s most visible activists, including actor Jane Fonda and Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther movement. Jones also won the support of the political establishment in San FranciscoCalifornia, where he moved his church in 1965. There, he met Rosalynn Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter, who was so enthralled with Jones she went on to speak from his pulpit.; the two also had dinner together and exchanged letters. Harvey Milk fawned over Jones’s work, and politicians courting voters often turned up at Peoples Temple.

Why Jonestown was built in Guyana

After a series of reports debunked Jones’ faith healing and accused him of abuse, Jones started believing these were signs that America was out to get Peoples Temple––and him. Drug use only fueled his paranoia that the U.S. government would target the church or turn fascist. These fears convinced Jones and other church leaders that the future of their movement lay outside America’s borders.

hundreds of passports on a table with three people in the room looking at them. — Jones confiscated the passports of his followers in Jonestown. Hundreds were found after the massacre.PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTHEW NAYTONS, GETTY IMAGES

In 1974, Peoples Temple acquired land in the jungle of Guyana. Since A conveniently English speaking country, Guyana also’s population included a mixture of people of African, Asian, and Amerindian descent, and Jones believed it would be perfect for a multiracial utopia. The church planned to construct an agricultural commune where members could live out their values.

A big wave of Peoples Temple members, including Jim Jones, came in the summer of 1977. As Rebecca Moore wrote in her book Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple, these “members believed they were not just deserting something worse but also moving to something better. They set the goal of creating a community without racism, in which all children would be free and equal.”

What it was like to be first on the scene after the Jonestown massacre

By November 1978, U.S. Air Force Special Operations sergeant David Netterville had served for nearly seven years and had completed a tour in Vietnam. But nothing could’ve prepared him for what he saw in Jonestown, a commune led by Jim Jones in the forests of Guyana.

“It was unprecedented,” says Netterville, who gave his first ever broadcast interview for the National Geographic docuseries Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown. “I was just totally shocked at the number of bodies that were laying on the ground.”

(Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown will premiere June 17 on Hulu and August 14 on National Geographic)

The victims had been members of Peoples Temple, a religious movement Jones founded in the United States. In the 1970s, Jones had led them from California to Guyana, where they built Jonestown. Jones promised it would become a utopia. Instead, Jones gave them death.

Military personnel during the recovery in and surrounding an open air building with a roof. dead bodies at the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana — U.S. military recovers hundreds of American dead at Jonestown. Over 400 unclaimed bodies were interred in a mass grave in Oakland, California.PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN, GETTY IMAGES

Arriving at Jonestown on November 20, Washington Post reporter Charles Krause did not immediately register the mass of colors on the ground below as an unfathomable number of human bodies. “It just looked like confetti that had been thrown around it,” he says. “But each of those pieces of confetti was the shirt or dress or something of a dead person.”

Just two days before, on November 18, 1978, Jones compelled many in his congregation to consume a cyanide cocktail and end their lives. Though he had trained the community to prepare for their deaths, there is evidence that some people may have been forced to consume the poison unwillingly or had it injected into them.

Many fathers, mothers, children, teachers, and nurses remained where they had fallen. For the first responders who arrived days after the massacre, it was a scene they would never forget.

Counting the dead

Since Jonestown’s population was primarily Americans, officials called in the U.S. military to gather information. Netterville and his team did not know what happened there—only that Congressman Leo Ryan had been gunned down near the commune.

Both Netterville and Krause remember the same thing about approaching the site: the unmistakable, horrific smell of death. The scent even invaded the helicopters high above. As Netterville explains, “A human body is the worst smell you can ever smell. Multiply a dead cow times ten.” To mask the odor as much as possible, he eventually fashioned a mask by “cut[ting] a bandana out of a pillowcase and put[ting] Old Spice lotion on it.”

The bodies, already attracting bugs, were decomposing in the heat and humidity. “The bodies were so bloated that […] it was very hard to distinguish who they were,” says Krause, who was one of the first journalists to arrive at Jonestown after the massacre.

Three kids talking to a reporter. — Tracy Parks (left), her sister Brenda, and Brenda’s boyfriend, Chris O’Neal, talk to newsmen in Georgetown. The Parks family attempted to defect from the commune and go with Rep. Leo Ryan back to the…Read MorePHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN, GETTY IMAGES

The scene was made even more horrific when the first responders noticed the children, who ranged in age from babies to teenagers. Netterville recalls, “Some of the people that died were actually holding onto their children.”

Animals weren’t spared: Netterville remembers seeing the bodies of murdered dogs. Someone had even taken the time to shoot Mr. Muggs, a chimpanzee that came with Peoples Temple from California. “I just could not believe it. Why would you kill the animals?”

Netterville remembers his team divided the land into sections and started counting corpses, one after the other. They initially calculated 450 bodies. When they radioed headquarters with the tally, Netterville remembers “they didn’t want to believe us… They had us repeat that number three times.”

As horrific as that number was, it turned out to be a massive undercount. “We didn’t know there were people underneath. They were laying on top of each other,” Netterville recalls.

With each new discovery, the death toll of the November massacre climbed higher and higher. The final total was 918 souls, 909 of whom died on site.

Jonestown, frozen in time

Now a ghost town, Jonestown eerily exhibited remnants of the commune’s final, chaotic hours––paper cups strewn across the ground, syringes scattered on tables, people holding onto each other as death came for them.

A 55-gallon drum was found containing a purplish concoction––a cocktail of cyanide, sedatives, and Flavor-Aid. Netterville remembers military personnel dumped it out on the ground.

Jim Jones’s cabin acted as a window into how he ran the Peoples Temple. “He had several pictures there of his family,” Netterville says. He had leveraged his interracial family to manipulate the press and members of the congregation while he tried to dodge allegations of abuse within the community.

Netterville used a crowbar he found to pry open a large safe in Jones’s house. “It was full of social security checks” from the senior residents who contributed their monthly payments to the commune, he remembers. It also included “boxes of passports. [Jones] took the passports so that people could not leave.”

Larry Layton in white paints and a striped button up shirt stands with guyana police in following his arrest — People’s Temple follower Larry Layton (C) stands with police following his arrest November 18, 1978 in the shooting of two people on a remote Guyana airstrip. Hours after the shooting, hundreds of people were killed on the Jonestown commune.PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID HUME KENNERLY, GETTY IMAGES

Some had managed to escape death in those final hours, however. Odell Rhodes had seen the early stages of the massacre before hiding and fleeing to a nearby village. Hyacinth Thrash was asleep in her bed when the killings started, and so she survived.

Tim Carter, another survivor, was tasked with a special mission just as the killings began on November 18. One of Jones’s mistresses asked him to take suitcases of money to the embassy of the Soviet Union in Georgetown.

The assignment enabled Carter to walk out of Jonestown alive––but not before seeing his wife and baby die. “After that, I was beyond even thinking. All I heard in my brain is, ‘You cannot die, you cannot die, you cannot die, you must live, you must live, you must live.’”

The ones who didn’t survive left Jonestown in body bags. Some were claimed by their family and privately buried. The remaining 409 were interred in a mass grave in Oakland, California.

Though the work of first responders was over, the act of witnessing Jonestown’s horror left its mark. After using Old Spice to mask the stench of death, the scent still haunts Netterville. “I don’t use [Old Spice] anymore. I can’t stand the smell of it ever again.”

Resources

nationalgeographic.com, “The perfect storm that led to the Jonestown massacre. Jim Jones leveraged upheaval surrounding civil rights and the Vietnam War to earn trust and manipulate his followers.” By Parissa DJangi; nationalgeographic.com, “What it was like to be first on the scene after the Jonestown massacre. Some of the first people to touch down in Guyana in November 1978 remember what they saw at the scene where over 900 people died.” By Parissa DJangi;

Common Sense and Ramblings In America

The perfect storm that led to the Jonestown massacre

Jones capitalized on a societal storm

Why Jonestown was built in Guyana

Counting the dead

Jonestown, frozen in time

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Jones capitalized on a societal storm

Why Jonestown was built in Guyana

Counting the dead

Jonestown, frozen in time

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