An adventure tour group is planning to begin taking visitors on morbid tours of the site of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, and Bay Area family members of victims, and one of the near-victims herself, former Congresswoman Jackie Speier, are saying "hell no."

Charismatic preacher turned cult leader Jim Jones took his San Francisco congregation of Peoples Temple members to Guyana to live at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in mid 1977 in order to escape growing negative media attention in SF. Jones had entertained a paranoid sense of persecution by the government and media over several years, which had led to the establishment of the Guyana settlement as a contingency plan. The group leased 3,800 acres of mostly infertile, jungle land about 150 miles west of the capital of Georgetown, and 500 Temple members had gone down there to begin construction around 1974.

In November 1978, Peninsula Congressman Leo Ryan took a couple of staff members and an NBC camera crew down to Jonestown, at the urging of constituents who worried about family members there. The visit prompted Jones to enact a mass death plan, sending gunmen to shoot Ryan and his entourage as they were boarding a plane on the local airstrip the next day. Ryan's aide, Jackie Speier, was shot multiple times but survived, and later was elected to his seat in Congress.

A total of 918 Peoples Temple members died that day, drinking poisoned Flavor-Aid, giving the poison to their children first. Members who attempted to escape were shot at, though some managed not to ingest any poison, and others succeeded in escaping or had assignments from Jones that took them elsewhere.

Temple members, who were majority Black, hailed largely from the Bay Area, and there are multiple memorials for them here, including one at East Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery.

As NBC News now reports, a group called Wanderlust Adventures, based in South America, has already sold tickets for a January trip to Jonestown for $650. The founder of the group, Roselyn Sewcharran, has characterized the tourism effort as arising from the same curiosity people have about visiting the sites of other tragedies and atrocities, like Chernobyl and Nazi concentration camps.

"The thing is, Jonestown remains a tragic part of Guyana’s history, but it is also an event of global significance," Sewcharran says to NBC. "It offers critical lessons about cult psychology, manipulation and abuse of power."

And, Sewcharran adds, "These sites attract visitors, not to dwell on tragedy, but to understand the events ... honor those affected and ensure that such histories are neither repeated nor forgotten."

Speier and others are now trying to urge the Guyanese government to shut this tour down, with spear telling KTVU this week, "I was horrified because [Jonestown] doesn't deserve to be a tourist attraction. And for a company to think this is adventure tourism is missing the mark."

Speier adds, "This is a very remote area of Guyana, in the middle of the jungle deep, in a jungle with a remote airstrip." She suggests that if a memorial were to be set up in Guyana, it should be in Georgetown.

Jordan Vilchez, 67, who went to Jonestown with her family at age 14 but was in Georgetown on the day of the mass suicide, tells the Guardian she has mixed feelings about a tour group visiting the site.

"I just missed dying by one day," Vilchez says. Her two sisters and two nephews were among the victims.

She says Guyana, which has very little tourism, has every right to profit from people's desire to go there, but, "on the other hand, I just feel like any situation where people were manipulated into their deaths should be treated with respect."

Jynona Norwood, who lost 27 family members in Jonestown, tells KTVU, "We heal, but you never forget it." And, Norwood says of the tour group, "I would not support them making money and not doing anything good with the money that they make off the tourist attraction, if they're charging. It would be shameful."

Guyana's tourism minister tells KTVU that he is aware of the pushback, but it doesn't sound like they will be changing their minds. Brush-clearing has already taken place a the site, and tour-goers will be taken by boat from Georgetown to the Port Kaituma airstrip where Congressman Ryan and others lost their lives, for an overnight stay in the jungle.

Previously: Memorial for 45th Anniversary of Jonestown in East Oakland Saturday Remembers Victims, Honors Survivors

Top image: Dead bodies lie around the compound of the People's Temple cult November 18, 1978 after the over 900 members of the cult, led by Reverend Jim Jones, died from drinking cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid; they were victims of the largest mass suicide in modern history. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

On the solemn 45th anniversary of the Jonestown tragedy, remembrance events at Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery brought survivors, families, and community members together to honor the nearly thousand lives lost in the horrifying incident.

One small point of contention arose as some survivors and family members expressed their discontent over Jim Jones, the cult leader, being memorialized alongside the victims on plaques at Evergreen Cemetery, near the Eastmount neighborhood in Oakland. The names are listed in alphabetical order on the four plaques, including all the 918 members of the Peoples Temple members who died 45 years ago, per Oaklandside.

Indiana preacher Jim Jones started the Peoples Temple church initially in the 1950s, moving it from the Midwest to San Francisco and advocating for racial equality. Jones descended into drug use and paranoia and brought his followers to the “promised land,” a remote jungle of Guyana, where he compelled members, a third of whom were children, to participate in a mass murder-suicide from gunshots and poisoned juice on Nov. 18, 1978.

One survivor, John Cobb, had reportedly raised money for the plaques with his stepbrother Jim Jones Jr. and another survivor Fielding McGehee in 2011. He was in attendance at the Saturday memorial event, and reportedly wanted to make sure that people in attendance understood that the victims “were a group of people who wanted to create a better place to live,” he told Oaklandside.

Of the inclusion of Jones’ name on the memorial, Cobb told KPIX that “we can erase all the evil people's names out of the book if you want to, it doesn't change history," and said he still wanted to make sure none of the victims were forgotten.

Jynona Norwood, who lost 27 family members, told KPIX that Jones was a mass murderer and that the listing of his name on the memorial was "insensitive" and "ludicrous."

Despite the discord over Jones' inclusion, both sides emphasized the memorializing a painful history while grappling with the complexities of healing and learning lessons from the tragic incident from those directly affected by the Jonestown massacre.

Image of Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland via Google Street View.

"It's time for me to come home, time for me to be more than a weekend wife, mother and friend," said longtime Bay Area Congresswoman Jackie Speier. At age 71, the San Mateo County representative says she will not be seeking reelection in 2022, opening up a new House race on the Peninsula.

Speier's career in American politics began fatefully, after being shot on the tarmac near Jonestown in Guyana on November 18, 1978. Speier was an aide at the time to Rep. Leo Ryan, who represented this same district in San Mateo, and Ryan had led a convoy, including reporters from NBC News, to the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana to investigate reports from families that Bay Area residents were being held there against their will.

Ryan was murdered that day, while Speier lay with her injuries for 22 hours before rescuers arrived — unsure if the gunmen directed by Jim Jones would return to finish the job. She says that, lying there with five bullet wounds, "I vowed that if I survived I would dedicate my life to public service."

"I lived, and I served," Speier said, in her video announcement.

As the Chronicle recounts today, Speier first became a San Mateo County supervisor, then a state assemblymember and state senator, and she's been a member of Congress since 2008.

Speier's district, California's 14th, covers most of San Mateo County and also includes a small section of San Francisco in the southwest corner of the city.

In the California legislature, she was an early advocate for women and the movement to stop sexual harassment in the workplace, and in Congress she has fought for women's reproductive rights, and against sexual assault in the military.

In 2019, Speier became one of the first sitting members of Congress to publicly discuss having had an abortion — which she did in protest of several states' increasing efforts to limit and ban abortions.

"Twenty-five percent of the women in this country have had abortions, under what have to have been traumatic times and experiences," Speier said at the time. “There’s over 100 women in the House, and in all likelihood there’s maybe as many as 25 that have had abortions. It’s always a painful and complicated experience, it’s not anything anyone wants to do, but it’s a right that we have and it’s not going to be taken away."

Also, along with Bay Area Rep. Zoe Lofgren on the Judiciary Committee, Speier played a key role in the impeachment of Donald Trump while serving on the House Intelligence Committee.

Speier closed her announcement by saying, "As I leave, I want to convey my deepest appreciation to you and urge you to protect our precious democracy. It is fragile and vulnerable."

"One word sums up Jackie Speier and that is ‘fearless’," said San Mateo County Board of Supervisors President David Canepa, speaking to KTVU. "She is truly a hero for the ages. She endured tragedy after tragedy as a human and never wavered, never gave up on herself, her family or the constituents she serves. Her name is almost synonymous with San Mateo County and her legacy will forever endure in my mind."

Local political columnist Joe Garofoli speculated to KTVU about who may be interested in running for Speier's seat next year — which is in no danger of flipping Republican. He suggests it will likely be state Sen. Josh Becker, Assemblymembers Ash Kalra, Alex Lee, or Evan Low, and/or someone from the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors.

Oscar-winner and meme star Leonardo DiCaprio is reportedly in final-stage talks to play evangelist cult leader Jim Jones — and with the families of Jonestown victims still alive all across the Bay Area, this could be cause for some fresh heartache and controversy.

The script of the film, titled Jim Jones, was penned by screenwriter Scott Rosenberg, who is also serving as executive producer, as Deadline first reported. Rosenberg's writing credits include Beautiful Girls, Con Air, High Fidelity, Gone in 60 Seconds, Venom, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and Jumanji: The Next Level.

MGM has reportedly secured a deal to make the film from DiCaprio's production company, Appian Way.

As you may know via the excellent 2006 documentary that aired on PBS, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, Jones began his ministerial career in Indianapolis, founding Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ there in 1955. The Reverend Jones built his brand of Christianity around socialist ideals and emphasized racial equality, and Peoples Temple attracted followers in large part because of these ideals. He relocated with some followers to northern California in the 1960s, and ultimately set up a significant congregation in San Francisco — becoming a political force in the city in the process, in part because Jones could mobilize 2,000 followers to show up for any political event.

Peoples Temple also had a significant presence in Los Angeles, and for a period in the early 70s, Jones led weekly bus caravans of 10 to 15 buses around the state with an aim of riasing money and recruiting for the church.

It wasn't until the mid-70s, following an expose in the San Francisco Examiner and increasing scrutiny of the church's tax-exempt status — as Jones began openly admitting he was an atheist, and was using religion to recruit people into a socialist movement — that Jones established Jonestown in Guyana, and convinced around 1,000 followers to move there permanently, away from the prying eyes of the U.S. government.

It was here, in November 1978, after a Bay Area delegation that included Rep. Leo Ryan and his then aide, current Rep. Jackie Speier, and NBC news cameras arrived to investigate claims of human-rights abuses, that Jones ordered a firing squad to shoot up the delegation as they tried to leave. And then he ordered all 918 followers present to commit mass suicide using cyanide-laced Flavor Aid.

There is a Jonestown Memorial at Evergreen Cemetery in East Oakland, which is the final resting place of the 412 unclaimed remains from the Jonestown massacre, many of whom had moved from the Bay Area.

The upcoming film, Jim Jones, only has DiCaprio attached so far, and it's not clear how much of the scope of Jones's life and ministry will be covered in it. The film reportedly sold to MGM in a seven-figure deal.

As Deadline notes, DiCaprio will star next in Netflix’s Don’t Look Up opposite Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep and Ariana Grande among others — directed by Oscar-winner Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice). DiCaprio is also appearing in Martin Scorsese’s Western crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon for Apple Originals Films, which just wrapped shooting last month.

Top Images: DiCaprio at COP26 in Scotland last week, Photo by Owen Humphreys-WPA Pool/Getty Images; Jim Jones photo via Getty Images

'Cult' is a word that gets thrown around casually a lot to describe everything from Mormonism to Soul Cycle. But here in the Bay Area there's been a special affinity for cultism, and cult-like organizations, this being one of the nation's epicenters of hippie-dom, freedom of expression, and the various after-effects of the 1960s that took on an air of religiosity. In some cases, these have been somewhat benign — if weird — groups that help lend our region some of its beloved, ingrained kookiness. In other cases, they've led to violence and mass death. Let's dig in, shall we?

The Manson Family
August 2019 will mark the 50th Anniversary of the infamous Manson Family Murders, a drug-fuled, three-day spree in Los Angeles that left seven dead and basically ended the 1960s counterculture movement. A bunch of other people (up to 35 individuals) died thanks to Charles Manson and his cult of hippies but all anyone seems to care about are the Tate/LiBianca Murders of August 1969. A great long-form article detailing the Manson Family can be found in LA Magazine (recommended over the book Helter Skelter, even). Anyway, Charles Manson lived at 636 Cole Street in the Upper Haight for a time — during the Summer of Love, in fact — and famously rounded up a rag-tag collection of local street kids on a beat up school bus to relocate to the wilds Los Angeles. Manson Family member and murderer Susan Atkins was one of those kids, and worked for a time as a stripper in North Beach. When Manson didn't become a famous rock star in LA, he channeled his energies into brainwashing his young followers with drugs, orgies, and endless lectures in the desert. Eventually he incited them to kill a collection of people, including some they'd had dealings with and others, like Sharon Tate, at random, under the auspices of starting a much-needed race war. Tate, the actress and stunningly beautiful wife of director Roman Polanski, was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed to death during the second scariest home invasion I've ever heard of (this is the first). Abigail Folger, a coffee heiress, was killed alongside her as was Wojciech Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Steve Parent. Two nights later, the cult went to the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, tied them up, and stabbed them. On the walls at both crime scenes, Manson's followers wrote words like "Pig" and "Helter Skelter" in the victims' blood, ostensibly to incite a race war. Manson Family members went on to do nuts things like try and kill then-President Gerald Ford, shave their heads for court (official cult activity), and carve swastikas into their foreheads. Most of Manson's followers were in their late teens and early 20s and most those involved in the murders remain in jail to this day or, in the case of Atkins, dead. Every so often they come up for parole, and even if a parole board recommends it, all CA governors up to now have denied it, as was the case last month with both Bruce Davis and Patricia Krenwinkel. — Beth Spotswood

Peoples Temple
What began as an idealistic, multi-racial, utopian community and religious movement bent on equality morphed over two decades into the evil grandaddy of all Bay Area cult stories. It was called The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, and charismatic leader the Rev. Jim Jones started it in 1955 in Indiana before relocating his flock to Northern California and ultimately establishing his church in San Francisco. He had anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 parishioners at its peak, preaching about love, socialism, and racial equality, and serving in his parishioners' eyes as a healing force after the tumult and racial violence of the 1960s. But by the early 1970s, Jones had almost entirely shed Christianity and began referring to himself as a god, and under the sway of a barbiturate addiction and intense paranoia about the government shutting down his church, he established what he said would be a utopian community beyond the federal government's reach in Guyana, dubbed Jonestown. (The best telling of the story may be this 2006 PBS documentary that you can watch in full on YouTube.) The most die-hard of Peoples Temple members (though defectors from the church were treated to intense manhunts and intimidation) gave up their possessions and followed him there, over a thousand of them, much to the dismay of some of their families here in the Bay Area. And on November 18, 1978, the day after Bay Area Congressman Leo Ryan and his aide Jackie Speier arrived in Jonestown with an NBC News crew to investigate what was going on, Jones led what would become the largest mass suicide in US history, with 909 Peoples Temple members and their children dead after drinking cyanide- and Valium-laced Flavor Aid — not Kool-Aid, as the popular phrase would have it. Speier, who survived a shooting that same day that killed Ryan, has continued to rail against the way the Jonestown story has been popularly understood. "There was nothing about it that was a suicide," Speier has said. "They were killed, they were murdered, they were massacred. You can’t tell me that an infant or a two-year-old child that was injected with cyanide does so voluntarily. And that horrible phrase now that is part of our language ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ is always one that sends me into orbit because I think people so misunderstand what took place there."

Spiritual Rights Foundation
Unlike most of the organizations described on this list, the hypnotism-based Spiritual Rights Foundation appears to still be up and running — albeit under aliases like Academy for Psychic Studies, the International Spiritual Hypnosis Institute, and Health and Wealth Incorporated. The foundation’s formula of hardcore Christianity, hypnotism, and New Age mysticism has not landed them in any legal hot water in the last 15 years. But there was a period in the late 1990’s when (now deceased) multiple wife-toting leader and 1-900 psychic hotline proprietor Rev. Bill Drury and the Spiritual Rights Foundation were facing allegations of hypnotizing young children, multiple custody lawsuits from parents whose children were being kept on the Berkeley property, and at least one statutory rape charge, earning them cult status from multiple media outlets. — Joe Kukura

Booking photo of Winnfred Everett Wright: Marin County Sheriff's Department

Winnfred Everett Wright's 'The Family'
Near the rolling hills of Lucas Valley lies Marinwood, an unincorporated area of the county that for years was the home of a pseudo-religious vegetarian sect led by Winnfred Everett Wright called "The Family." From the late 1980s to early 2000s, Wright fathered more than 19 children with multiple women, four of whom ended up sharing a home with him and at least 13 kids. According to an SF Chronicle report from 2003, Wright subjected the kids "to a catalog of beatings, forced fasts and psychological abuse outlined in a 'book of rules.'" An investigation into the family began in 2001, after the starvation death of 19-month-old Ndigo Campisi-Nyah-Wright, leading to revelations that another infant Wright had fathered had in 1990 died at a home in San Francisco's 18th Avenue and was left there, rotting, for days. That same Sunset District home was where Wright made some of his early recruits, subjecting them to "a mishmash of Rastafarianism and karma and white guilt, telling women brought to the home that they "had to work off the white mistreatment of black people. It was their responsibility to work off their karma." In court to face charges in Ndigo's death, Wright follower Deirdre Hart Wilson testified "I was terrorized into hating my parents, trusting no one... and not respecting the rules of society." Wright received a 16-year, eight-month sentence in 2003 for his crimes in 2003, but was released on parole in 2010 and at last report was living in Ventura County. — Eve Batey

Newsweek magazine's cover from their March 29, 1976 issue

The Symbionese Liberation Army
The United Federated Forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) is most famous for kidnapping 19-year-old heiress Patty Hearst and keeping her in a closet until she was brainwashed enough to help them rob banks and extort money from her parents to feed the poor. The SLA was an early 1970s extremist organization of young people who were aggressively feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist. Before kidnapping Hearst from her Berkeley home, two members of the SLA killed Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster because they thought Foster was going to introduce ID cards into Oakland schools, a plan Foster was actually opposed to. So when two of the organization's members were arrested for Foster's murder, the SLA decided to kidnap Hearst in an attempt to trade her for their captured comrades. The whole story is really fascinating and complicated, but basically, Hearst is kept in a NoPa apartment closet, renamed Tania, and forced to record audio messages calling her parents fascists until she dons a beret and helps rob banks, including one on Noriega Street in which two civilians were killed. Hearst was arrested in San Francisco and sentenced to seven years in prison. Her sentence was later commuted by President Jimmy Carter and she was eventually pardoned by Bill Clinton. She now appears in John Waters movies occasionally and shows her prized dogs, including one named "GCH Hallmark Jolei Rocket Power" in dog shows. The SLA went on to engage in a violent shootout with Los Angeles police before returning to the Bay Area where the robbed another bank before being (mostly) arrested. One must read Patty Hearst: Her Own Story to fully bask in the 1970s insanity of her experience. American Heiress is another fantastic book about the SLA and Patty. And (here goes your whole afternoon,) you can watch a 2-and-a-half hour documentary about Hearst's kidnapping on YouTube. — Beth Spotswood

'Purple People' and OneTaste
Technically called Lafayette Morehouse, the East Bay group nicknamed the 'Purple People' is based on a commune in Lafayette, and has been a "sex cult" over the years after taking shape in 1968. It was founded by Victor Baranco, a self-described doctor who may have also gotten his start as a collector for the mob. Baranco famously hosted a public event in 1976 in which he brought a woman to orgasm multiple times, and his Morehouses around the Bay Area became known as "intentional communities" where people gathered and lived for "orgasmic meditation. (The remaining Lafayette Morehouse compound with its purple doors remains the object of dares by local high schoolers, who regularly drive on to the property for kicks, and it's been run by Baranco's second wife since his 2002 death.) As early as 1971, Rolling Stone exposed Baranco as a con artist who lured burnouts and lost hippies to his communes in SF Victorians, made them work for free to fix them up, and then sold them for profit. A former student of Baranco's, Nicole Daedone, embraced his profit-making motives and sexual evangelizing, and she founded her own company based on similar principals called OneTaste, which had many an article written about it and its orgasm workshops in the early 2010s. The workshops, which cost five figures to participate in, reportedly put a lot of people in debt — there were also claims of prostitution and coersion by former employees — and it was possibly this Bloomberg exposé in 2018 that prompted the FBI to look into OneTaste's business. The company's web presence has since disappeared, and it appears defunct. — Jay Barmann

'THX 1138', Warner Bros.

Synanon
If you’ve seen George Lucas’ THX 1138, you’ve seen members of the Church of Synanon — because Lucas needed hundreds of bald extras, and many Synanon members were required to shave their heads. Though initially meant as a drug rehabilitation program, the 60s and 70s-era Synanon grew far more radical, forcing abortions and vasectomies on enrollees, and eventually attempting to murder an attorney prosecuting them with the old rattlesnake in the mailbox trick. By then the group was powerful enough to buy a giant headquarters in downtown Oakland, but a slew of criminal activities exposed by the Point Reyes Light brought the church down and won that paper a Pulitzer Prize in 1979. — Joe Kukura

Berkeley Psychic Institute
It's one modern day organization that continues on despite many public indictments of its cultiness — including this first big one by Mother Jones in 1979, and continuing more recently with multiple Yelp reviews and this 2014 piece in the Chronicle in which the writer went to get his aura "scrubbed" and ended up having his balls "drained." The Berkeley Psychic Institute bills itself as a "school for spiritual development" focused on clairvoyance, more recently conducting training programs they call Psychic Kindergarten. If you believe in psychic powers and auras, you may be less inclined to see BPI as cult-like, but Mother Jones suggested nearly 40 years ago that founder Lewis S. Bostwick had created the affiliated Church of Divine Man as a religious "cape" to protect the org's non-profit status, and the church continues to this day holding services for "psychic Christians." The BPI now has four locations in Northern California offering pricey training sessions and aura "scrubbings," and it is run by Bostwick's widow, Vr. Rt. Rev Dr. Susan Hull Bostwick. So they believe in the occult, but are they a cult? You can decide, but Listverse recently included them in a list of California's 10 Craziest Cults. — Jay Barmann

Your Black Muslim Bakery
Once known simply as a place with great vegan bean pies, Your Black Muslim Bakery, an Oakland-based bakery slash real-estate-empire, began to gain a different sort of attention when the son of its founder began racking up arrests in 2005. At first, Yusuf Bey IV's crimes seemed almost laughable: an aggressive argument with a movie theater manager here, a liquor store rampage there. By 2006, he'd allegedly tried to run down a couple bouncers who'd just thrown him out of the New Century strip club in SF, and by 2007 he stood accused of coordinating the kidnapping of two women. On August 2, 2007, Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who had been investigating the Bakery, was shot to death as he walked down an Oakland street, a hit ordered by Bey in an effort to cover up what a subsequent investigation revealed was a compound filled with guns, a pattern of sexual abuse of women and children, and assorted other crimes committed by true believers of the senior Bey's. In 2011, Bey IV was convicted in Bailey's death. Presently serving three life sentences the maximum security unit at Salinas Valley State Prison, he's reportedly now leader of an organization called "Your Black Resurrected Nation," and promised in 2012 that "there is a surprise in store for both friends and enemies." The whole story's even stranger and more intense than our space here allows, so if you want to know more, check out Thomas Peele's Killing the Messenger, which gives an exhaustive and detailed look at the rise and fall of Bey and his Bakery bad guys. — Eve Batey

Related: San Francisco's 16 Greatest Infamous Local Legends

This week marks the 36th anniversary of the deadly event we now simply call Jonestown. The horrifying tragedy was a national one, but it's one that belonged to the Bay Area, where the majority of the victims had only recently lived before following the charismatic preacher turned paranoid cult leader Jim Jones to Guyana in 1976 and 1977. Over 900 people died together in what has popularly been remembered as a mass suicide, but survivors and others have for years tried to revise the narrative, and a Bay Area native and Episcopal priest just penned an editorial in the Washington Post to mark this anniversary suggesting that everyone stop using the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" as a stand-in for cult-joining, because it's offensive and inaccurate.

The Jonestown story is part of a dark season in San Francisco history. The tragedy occurred on November 18, 1978 only nine days before the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in their City Hall offices by former Supervisor Dan White. Just this year the cremated remains of nine Jonestown victims were found in deep storage in a funeral home in Delaware, near where the bodies returned back to the U.S. via military transport.

But as the Reverend James D. Richardson writes, the mass-suicide story is a result of a cruel misunderstanding.

The first murdered at Jonestown were senior citizens, children and babies; the poison was squirted into their mouths. Others thought they were participating in a drill. ... Harangued by Jones, the residents at Jonestown had rehearsed a mass-suicide for weeks, and now Jones ordered his followers to carry it out. Some ran into the jungle, others hid under beds, but most were intimidated into drinking the poison. Allegedly, the drink was grape Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid, though some reports say both drinks were present.

In addition to those who died on site at the People's Temple compound, five others including Congressman Leo Ryan were massacred on a nearby airfield the same day, and four other Temple members took their lives in the city of Georgetown, Guyana.

While it's easy to dismiss all Jonestown residents as brainwashed cult members, this is also inaccurate. Many of those who had joined Jones' People's Temple in San Francisco were poor African Americans, as well as idealists disheartened by the end of the 1960s and inspired by Jones' message of love, interracial unity, and faith. The People's Temple promised a utopian, socialist, integrated society that appealed to a broad swath of Bay Area residents in the early 1970s, and it was only near the end that Jones began taking drugs and becoming increasingly, disastrously paranoid that the American government was trying to destroy what he had built.

Parents of young children, forced to watch their children die in their arms that day in 1978, may have willingly (and at gun-point), drank the cyanide-laced drink out of devastation, and this was part of Jones' horrible plan. But as one of the survivors, Congresswoman Jackie Speier says,

There was nothing about it that was a suicide … They were killed, they were murdered, they were massacred. You can’t tell me that an infant or a two-year-old child that was injected with cyanide does so voluntarily. And that horrible phrase now that is part of our language ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ is always one that sends me into orbit because I think people so misunderstand what took place there.

It's probably impossible to scrub away an idiom that's so ingrained in American culture, as Richardson suggests. But nevertheless people should revise their thinking about what truly happened at Jonestown, and how one man's drug-induced delusions and megalomania ended the lives of 909 people.

The 2006 documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People's Temple, which you can watch below when you get a minute, tells the complicated story well, through the stories of the handful who were there and lived to tell it.

In an update to the sad and morbid story about the trove of labeled and unlabeled cremains from Jonestown victims, five more of the nine unidentified remains have now been ID'd.

As USA Today reports, those belonged to Ottie Mese Guy, Katherine M. Domineck, Tony Walker, Irene Mason, and Ruth Atkins. Officials are releasing the five names in the hopes of finding family who want to claim the remains.

So far, the remains of four other victims were already returned to families, and those names were already released to the public. Those were Irra Johnson, Wanda King, Maud Perkins, and Mary Rodgers. Irvin Ray Perkins, who was 28 at the time and married to Maud Perkins, told the AP he had never known what became of his wife's remains until officials in Delaware called him.

The nine unidentified remains were with a group of 28 others, all clearly labeled, that had gone unaccounted for in the aftermath of the Jonestown tragedy. As reported earlier, they belonged to bodies of the highly decomposed dead that originally arrived back in the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base following the mass murder and suicide at Jonestown, in Guyana, on November 18, 1978. The remains were then recently found while a storage area in a former funeral in Delaware was being cleaned up.

According to a statement released by Delaware officials, expertise in identifying victims came with the help of "the Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, the California Historical Society and other Jonestown survivors."

[USA Today]
[AP/Examiner]

Previously: Cremated Remains Of Nine Jonestown Victims Discovered In Delaware

More than 30 years after the tragic mass suicide that took the lives of 911 Bay Area residents at Jonestown, in Guyana, the cremated remains of nine of the dead turned up in storage at a defunct funeral home in Dover, Delaware. The reason they ended up there is because all the bodies of the dead originally arrived back in the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base, which is home to the nation's largest military mortuary, as the AP reports. These nine unclaimed cremains were clearly lost in the shuffle, and were among 38 containers of remains discovered at the former funeral home this week.

At the time, in November 1978, after multiple cemeteries refused to accept the remains of those unclaimed and/or unidentified victims (many of the bodies that came back to the States were badly decomposed), Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland accepted 406 of the bodies, many of them children. A memorial to the victims was unveiled there in 2008.

Per the AP:

The remains [found in Delaware] were clearly marked, with the names of the deceased included on death certificates, authorities said. But Kimberly Chandler, spokeswoman for the Delaware Division of Forensic Science, declined to release the names of the nine people to The Associated Press. Chandler said officials were working to notify relatives.

The massacre/suicide at Jonestown took place shortly after a visit from California Congressman Leo Ryan and his then aide Jackie Speier, along with a news crew from NBC, visited pastor Jim Jones and his flock of followers at the Peoples' Temple on November 17, 1978. Jones had relocated the Temple and many of his diverse group of parishioners to Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, after facing heightened media scrutiny in San Francisco and allegations of physical and sexual abuse from Temple members. While many joined the Temple for its radically integrationist, Christian, and Socialist values, they were ultimately caught up in Jones' drug- and ego-fueled delusion, and on November 18 were ordered to drink cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid grape punch, and to give it to their children first. The few members who managed to escape reported seeing anyone who resisted either get shot, or they were forced to consume the poison. It remains the largest mass suicide in human history.

Jones himself died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and groin, most likely self-inflicted.

If you haven't seen it, the 2006 documentary below, produced and directed by Stanley Nelson, is a great one, and deals well with the nuances of the Jonestown tragedy beyond the suicide headline. Watch it.

[AP/Examiner]

Today was the 30-year anniversary of the Jonestown massacre.

Days before more than 900 member of the Peoples Temple church committed suicide or were murdered in Guyana, former congressman Leo Ryan was killed at Jonestown by sect members. Sen. Jackie Speier, an aide to Ryan in 1978, and was also shot in Jonestown.

Speier, Ryan's daughters, and a few surviving members met in San Mateo today at a ceremony renaming a post office after the late congressman.

A memorial wall was also unveiled this morning at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland.