Things Found At Jim Jones' Death Scene

The Guyanese soldiers, who'd just marched through the dense jungle, cautiously entered Jonestown on November 19, 1978. They were expecting a firefight with armed members of the religious sect that had carved out an agricultural commune in the small South American country, where more than 1,000 converts to Jim Jones' People's Temple lived. They moved slowly through thick fog and then suddenly staggered, tripped up by what they thought were logs laid on the ground as a trap. But as the mist parted, they discovered they'd been clambering over bodies — hundreds stretched out before them. The soldiers began to scream.

In the initial shock and confusion as they searched for the dead amid an overwhelming stench of quickly decaying bodies from the jungle heat, the army believed Jones, the cult leader whose word was law in Jonestown, had possibly escaped. But with the help of Jonestown residents who had been elsewhere at the time of the deaths, they soon identified Jones. He lay sprawled on a raised platform surrounded by dead bodies piled three deep, with children on the bottom, older people in the middle layer, and young people on top. He had a bullet wound to his head, which led the authorities to believe that while most of his followers had died by either poison, being stabbed, or were gunned down, their leader most likely shot himself.

Jim Jones, born in Indiana in 1931, was a charismatic breakaway Pentecostal minister who initially preached about racial unity. In the 1970s, Jones had relocated his church, the People's Temple, to San Francisco, which at its height had around 5,000 members. "Dad was dynamic at times," Stephan Jones, one of Jim Jones' sons who survived Jonestown, told National Geographic. By 1978, when the minister and more than a thousand of his followers had moved to Guyana to build what he'd promised would be utopia, community had been replaced by cruelty. Even before Jonestown, he had become a megalomaniac who beat, humiliated, and manipulated his adherents. 

Isolated in the thick jungle, Jones became worse. He would hold "White Nights," in which the members huddled in the main pavilion as he told them that the United States government was coming for them. He also made them practice dying by suicide by drinking a punch he told them was laced with poison. 

Then, on November 18, 1978, he ordered the killing of California Congressman Leo Ryan, who had come to investigate human rights abuses at Jonestown. Gunmen ruthlessly murdered Ryan, three journalists, and a People's Temple defector as they waited for planes to pick them up. Eleven others were wounded. Afterward, Jones ordered his followers to the main pavilion to commit "revolutionary suicide." Many of the 912 people were forced to drink the grape Flavor Aid laced with cyanide, tranquilizers, and sedatives at gunpoint.

Guyanese officials found Jim Jones' body on the stage of the main pavilion near the wooden chair he used when preaching. A reel-to-reel tape machine with a microphone sat on a table next to the chair, and Jones had used it to record the final harrowing chapter of Jonestown. As reported by The New York Times, the tape captured the sounds of children — who were force fed cyanide — crying and screaming as Jones tells his followers "let's get gone" and chants "mother, mother, mother," among other statements urging on the deaths.

Jones' body lay on the ground, with his head on a pillow with a striped pillowcase, his left arm thrown over his shoulder, and his short-sleeved shirt pulled up exposing his belly. An autopsy of Jones' body later determined he had a bullet wound that had entered the left side of his head and exited the other side. The pistol lay 20 yards away, which led some to believe he had been killed by someone else rather than having shot himself. Still, the general consensus remains that Jones died by suicide. The body of his wife, Marceline, was found nearby. Above Jones' body a banner proclaimed: "Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it."

For further reading, here's what it was really like the day of the Jonestown massacre.

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