Shocking new facts about the Jonestown Massacre

Investigative journalist Jeff Guinn sheds new light on Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

On 18 November 1978, almost a thousand people – most of them American – in a remote commune in Jonestown, Guyana, died of apparent cyanide poisoning. They were all members of the Peoples Temple, a religious organisation led by Jim Jones that has since been referred to as a cult. The deaths at the commune were viewed as a mass suicide, though survivors consider it to be mass murder.

In his new book The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, award-winning investigative journalist Jeff Guinn shares insight and little known facts about Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre – the largest murder-suicide in American history.

‘One of the purposes of writing this book was to break new ground because there’s so much more to the Jim Jones story than most people realise’, Guinn says.

The sign at the front gate to Jonestown. The wording on the sign changed according to Jones’s attitude toward individual visitors.

Jim Jones was one of the nation’s most influential civil rights leaders

In The Road to Jonestown, Guinn uncovers the previously untold story of how Jim Jones was, for a time, rightfully ranked among the nation’s most influential – and successful – civil rights leaders.

‘People forgot because of the horror of Jonestown that Jim Jones and Peoples Temple accomplished all sorts of great and wonderful things’, Guinn says.

As a young preacher in Indianapolis, Jones imposed his will on segregationists, wearing them down with logic, winning them over by demonstrating how integration was good for them as well as black citizens, and discreetly threatening the kind of protest marches that had never previously been held there.

‘What Jones accomplished in Indianapolis is staggering’, Guinn says. ‘He actually opened that city up for blacks as well as whites and this was 10 years before any of the civil rights legislation of the sixties made it mandatory.’

The ‘Rainbow Family’ posing at an Indiana airport. Clockwise they are Jim Jones, Marceline Jones, Suzanne, Jim Jr., Stephan and Lew. Oldest child Agnes is not pictured.

Peoples Temple was not a cult

‘Because the word “cult” has such negative connotations, I’m reluctant to apply it to Peoples Temple.’ Guinn says the sole goal of the Peoples Temple members (if not, eventually, for its leader) was to set such a perfect socialist example of equality and respect for all that the rest of the world would eventually follow suit.

‘If by “cult” you mean religious fanatics out to either destroy all who don’t agree with their warped belief, or else deranged enough to believe that they alone are fit to rule the Earth or sit on God’s right hand, then Peoples Temple was not one . . . I do not in any way condone or excuse the despicable things Jim Jones did, but I also don’t deny the decent, even admirable, intentions of most of his followers.’

On the night of November 17, 1978, Jim Jones introduced John Victor Stoen to the American newsmen who had been allowed into Jonestown. The next day, the child would die by Jones’s order.

People did not drink Kool-Aid

Guinn’s masterful account of the final days of Jonestown draws on new interviews and documents, as he tells of the chilling events surrounding the fatal day in November 1978 when more than nine hundred people – including almost three hundred infants and children – perished after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink, wrongfully called ‘Kool-Aid’.

‘Initially, most news outlets correctly reported that the Jonestown settlers died by ingesting cyanide that was stirred into a vat of Flavor Aid, an inexpensive powdered drink. But some reports mentioned Kool-Aid. As a familiar brand, “Kool-Aid” proved more memorable to the public than “Flavor Aid”,’ Guinn says.

‘To many, “Jonestown” and “Kool-Aid” represent the willingness of fools to follow obviously deranged leaders. I hope this book goes some way toward changing that understandable, but entirely incorrect, impression.’

Jonestown infants and children had poison squirted into their mouths with syringes. Most of the other settlers drank cups of poison from a vat. Those who resisted were held down by guards and forcibly injected.

Drawing on a host of new, often exclusive interviews and sources, Guinn delivers the most authoritative and comprehensive account yet of one of the most notorious figures in American history and answers the question, how could this tragedy have happened?

‘Hopefully, even for people who think “oh I know everything there is to know about Jim Jones”, you’ll find something new on almost every page and I think you’ll see there is so much more dimension to this story than has previously been understood.’

Jonestown after the suicides/murder. Some corpses were so decomposed that U.S. military crews had to use snow shovels to scrape them into body bags.

In the wake of the 18 November suicides and murders, it took several days to learn the total number of Jonestown dead. Guyanese officials were especially anxious to charge someone still living with at least some of the murders, and loyal Jones disciple Chuck Beikman was an obvious candidate.

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple (Simon & Schuster, $35) sheds new light on a subject we thought we knew: Jim Jones, the man responsible for the deaths of more than nine hundred people at Jonestown in Guyana. Available to purchase at QBD.