Nine Hundred and Seventeen: How Jonestown Began

The Question Nobody Asks

Most people know one thing about Jonestown: the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid." They use it casually, usually as a joke. What they don't know is that the people who died on November eighteenth, nineteen seventy-eight, weren't naive.

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The Pastor Who Could Heal

Jim Jones was born in nineteen thirty-one in rural Indiana. He grew up in poverty, the son of a man broken by the First World War and a mother who spent most of her time working.

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San Francisco and the Machine

By the early nineteen seventies, Jones had moved the Peoples Temple's center of gravity to California. Indianapolis had become too small a stage.

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The Machinery of Control

What was happening inside the Peoples Temple during those years of public acclaim looked very different from the outside image. The shift from community organization to controlled institution hadn't happened overnight.

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The Jungle Utopia

In nineteen seventy-four, the Peoples Temple had leased land from the Guyanese government in the northwest of the country, deep in jungle territory near the Venezuelan border. The plan, publicly, was to build an agricultural commune.

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The Congressman Who Went In

In the United States, a group had been forming for years. The Concerned Relatives, as they called themselves, were family members of Peoples Temple members who were trapped in Jonestown.

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The Final Afternoon

Jones called the community together. A vat had been prepared.

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After the Jungle

Larry Layton, who had pretended to be a defector at the airstrip and had opened fire on his fellow passengers, was captured. He was tried in the United States, convicted of conspiracy and murder, and eventually released on parole in two thousand and twenty after serving thirty-two years.

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