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The Airstrip at Port Kaituma: Ryan's Final Hours
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Congressman Leo Ryan flew into Jonestown to investigate the Peoples Temple cult — and was assassinated on a jungle airstrip before he could leave. This chapter covers the Concerned Relatives, the notes slipped to journalists, and the gunfire that triggered the massacre.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here is what we know about the final twenty-four hours of Congressman Leo Ryan's life. He flew into a jungle clearing in Guyana, walked into a settlement that Jim Jones controlled absolutely, and by the next afternoon he was dead on an airstrip.
The people who first raised the alarm weren't journalists or investigators. They were families.
Ryan arrived at Jonestown on the evening of November seventeenth with a delegation that included congressional staff, journalists, and representatives from the Concerned Relatives. Jones initially refused to let them in.
By the morning of November eighteenth, the situation had shifted in a way that couldn't be walked back. Sixteen people had asked to leave with Ryan's delegation.
The airstrip at Port Kaituma was a narrow strip of packed earth, small enough that two planes were needed to carry Ryan's group out. They loaded the luggage.
Within hours of the airstrip shooting, Jones gathered the population of Jonestown in the central pavilion. A tape recorder was running.
Guyanese authorities reached the compound on November nineteenth. What they found was a scene that took days to fully document.
The question this episode started with is what Ryan discovered in those final hours. The answer is that he found exactly what the Concerned Relatives said he would find.
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