American History Hit - Jonestown: The Death of a Cult

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Did you ever wonder where the phrase 'drink the Kool-Aid' came from? In this second episode about the Peoples Temple, we rejoin them in Jonestown, Guyana.How planned was the final 'white night'? Did anyone survive? And what happened to the notorious Jim Jones?Don is joined once again by author and scholar Annie Dawid, who has spent over two decades researching Peoples Temple.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Tim Arstall. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Hi, everyone, it's Don here. Jumping in to warn you that this episode contains details of mass murder and suicide that may be distressing to some listeners.

Please proceed at your own discretion. The Guyanese jungle is dense and tangled. The morning sun cuts through the trees, catching the rising steam from last night's rainfall. It is humid and sweltering hot. Soldiers from the Guyanese army move carefully through the vegetation, hacking at the underduring. They've journeyed here from the nearest town, Port Kytuma, over 10 kilometers away. Now they are on edge, tense, as they approach the site of the Jonestown encampment. After the shootings at the Kytuma airfield on the 18th, these troops have every reason to expect

hostile resistance from the settlers. But the further in they go, treading ever so quietly, the more aware they become of the absence of noise. But for the dew drips from the trees, the squelch and crack of their boots on the forest floor, there is only a strange silence. They've been told nearly a thousand people live here, and yet nothing, no sound. Not even from the 300 children who should be shouting, playing, crying for food. There is only an eerie quiet. And then the smell.

As the soldiers emerge into the open, they cover their noses as a sickly stench of human rot overtakes them. There is retching, groans. One soldier makes the sign of the cross. This is more than they are prepared for. This is more than any human being should bear. Hello there, greetings. Welcome to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman. Today we are heading back into the story of the People's Temple and Jonestown. Last week, Annie Dowett introduced us to the notorious religious leader, Jim Jones. We explored how Jones created his church, why so many followed him, and what led these people from Indiana to California to Guyana, South America.

If you haven't listened to this episode, I would recommend heading over to it now and then rejoin us later. We'll be right here. For those of you ready to go on, you'll remember, we left off on the airstrip in Guyana, where members of the People's Temple have shot California Congressman Leo Ryan dead, alongside four others. Confirming that the congressman is dead, the gunman returned to Jonestown. Annie Dowood joins me again to take us through the next 24 hours and the impact of Jonesdown to this day.

Annie, we left off with five dead on the tarmac and Jim Jones proclaiming that it is now time to commit revolutionary suicide. This was not an unprecedented event for them. I mean, obviously the suicide was, but they'd gone through this act several times, right? Yes. They had done these drills before suicide drills. Back in the States, they did at least one, and there was at least one in the jungle itself. So back in the States, already Jones had instituted these mock mass suicides, which she called White Knights. And people would drink a liquid.

and he'd tell them it was poisoned. And then guess what? It wasn't poisoned. It was just a loyalty test. Now, there's disagreement about how often this happened. It happened at least once in Jonestown, where Jones, I believe, and a lot of people believe, he kind of staged an attack on the compound a year earlier.

And this had to do with that custody dispute over the boy. who was supposedly Jones's son and the parents wanted him back and they had gone to the law and they'd gone to Guyana and so he staged this attack he said they were under siege and the only way they could get out of it

was to die and so they stayed up all night and Jones is, they have a PA system there in the jungle where Jones can yell at them all the time and if he's not yelling at them they can play tapes of him and so the shooters get back from the airstrip and they tell Jones, you know, mission accomplished.

And the shooters have stopped one of the planes from leaving by shooting out the tires. So only the little plane takes off. And Larry Layton and the two pilots and one wounded person are on that plane. Larry Layton did shoot on the plane and then the gun malfunctioned and then somebody got it away from him. So he's no longer an active shooter when he's on the plane. So all the people on the flatbed get back, they tell Jones, okay, it's done. And then Jones needs to tell his congregation that this is it. There's nothing they can do except to die because the guineas forces will be coming for them. And he says, you know, our children will be taken and our seniors will be taken. And we can't

let that happen. So we're going to do revolutionary suicide. Now, important point of terminology is that he stole that term from the Black Panthers. And in the Black Panther literature, revolutionary suicide means you keep fighting until they get you. It does not mean you take poison and lie down and die. Right. You know, it's another kind of white people taking black people's language and perverting it. Right. But he keeps using that term and then it gets parroted by his disciples. And so what's really important to recognize, though, is that Jim Jones is not the sole

perpetrator of this deed. He has all of his henchmen who stay there with the guns. Okay, they don't put their guns away when they get back to Jones down from the airstrip. The poison has been prepared in advance. he's had a committee, like you were saying last time, about all these committees running things. He's had a committee about what's the best way for everybody to die, preferably with the least amount of pain. And what is most horrible is that it's the doctor who has prepared the poison. He did all the study, and there's the tranquilizers as well as the cyanide and some other stuff that's supposed to make it more pallioling.

especially for the children. And so everybody's there at the pavilion. He's on the loudspeaker. And as has often been the case through all of people's temples history, there's tape recording going on. And so that's why we know about things that happen. There's a tape going. And he's trying to convince them, okay, the congressman's been killed.

And, you know, I could turn in the people. but that everybody is me and you know nobody's different from anyone else here so we all have to die his quote is this uh in spite of all that i've tried a handful of our people with their lies have made our life impossible there's no way to detach ourselves from what's happened today if we can't live in peace then let's die in peace boy right in that nugget you get the narcissism the megalomania you know, the whole list of terms having to do with this cult leader who is seeing this, of course, as someone else has made this happen, not me, when he was the guy that created the whole thing in the first place.

Yes. Well, first of all, what is in this, it's not Kool-Aid. It's something else entirely, right? It's called Flavorade, and one survivor just calls it ghetto Kool-Aid. You know, it's like a knockoff of the Kool-Aid brand. And tell me what the chemical brew is here. Well, so the cyanide is the... poison. You've probably read about how cyanide has the smell of almonds. And so that's a kind of

weird side effect. So it smells good, but actually it tastes terrible. I mean, they tried to make it so it would taste good. So there's cyanide, there's valium, and then I think there's one other kind of tranquilizing element in the brew. So the typical way we recall this is that most of these people would have lined up and just taken a cup of the brew, the Kool-Aid, we called it, and sipped it and gone away and died. It was not as simple as that at all. Tell me about the system that they were following. No. Okay. So that is set up and there are cups. There's also at the table all these pre-prepared syringes that have been set up by the nurses with the poison for infants, infant doses, and child doses.

There's other syringes for injections that are prepared for people who are refusing to take it. And there are people who refuse. So it's really orchestrated. And it's orchestrated by all of Jones's top lieutenants, you could say. So thus begins this period of how long does it take for them? I suppose he's the last that goes, right? Yeah.

It's going to take a few hours. And before they start the poisoning, he gives his people some chance to talk back to him, right? Because he's the socialist and it has to be a group decision. And at this point, all these people, they're exhausted, they're malnourished, they've had not enough sleep. And a lot of them are just ready because he's been preparing them for a long time. But there's also a big contingent, though. the more silent contingent who don't want to die, who don't think death is the answer.

And one very brave woman starts saying, we shouldn't do this. There's no reason why all of us should die. And her name is Christine Miller. And I dedicated my book to her. And interestingly, when you listen to the tape, you know, he keeps letting her speak. And she's saying,

can we go someplace else? because he's talked about going to Cuba, like the whole group could go to Cuba or the whole group could go to the Soviet Union. She's rational and responsible talking to him about other alternatives. I think it should be an individual choice. And eventually, the other people shout her down.

And Jim McElvaney, who is top guy under Jones, he's saying, you're only here because Jim, Jim Jones gave you this possibility. And when he talks against her, then everybody else starts yelling out, like, shut up. And we don't know what happens to Christine. If she takes the poison willingly, there were approximately 70 people they found who had injections in the back. Other people were threatened by the men with the guns. And so that's how they ended up taking it.

So it takes a long time. If it takes 45 minutes to die from this, an adult from this mixture and there's 900 plus people, it's going on and on and getting dark. It's hard to believe that there wasn't general panic, but this is the result of having been trained and psychologically prepared for this moment for many of them. But there's a report even that his wife, Jim Jones's wife, Marcelline, was screaming that he should not be doing this, right? That there's a lot of struggle going on during this time. Yeah, he says mother don't do this. So he could have been saying that to Marcellin, or he could have been talking to all of the mothers who were saying, I don't want to kill my child.

So we don't know. We'll never know. If that was Marcelain herself, Marcellan does die as a poison, however. So she took it eventually or was injected. And what happens to Jim Jones? Some of the people who escaped, there's a couple of people who escaped while it was happening. And eventually they hear some gunshots. And it turns out somebody has shot there were some dogs who were pets, shot the dogs. And they also had Mr. Mugged the chimpanzee who had been, you know, over the years, like the mascot, practically, of Jonesdown and the People's Temple. And he gets shot too. When the sun rises in the morning and finally the Guineas Defense Force arrives to investigate what has happened, because they knew about what happened at the airstrip, but they don't know what happened at Jonestown.

So they go from the airstrip where they help all the wounded because there's a lot of people who were wounded. And then they drive the seven miles out to Jonestown, and it's totally quiet. It's like an incomprehensible sight, all of these bodies. They eventually find two human beings who have been killed by gunships, shots in the head. And one of them is Annie Moore, who is like Jones's private nurse. And the other one is

Jim Jones himself. At any rate, Jim Jones did not die of the poison. He did not drink this horrible liquid, which made you suffer for 45 minutes. And so we don't know if he said, Annie, will you please kill me? And that she did so and then killed herself. Or they both both killed themselves with the same gun. There was one gun. And eventually all these American military come to get the bodies. And in the beginning, the American State Department's like, we don't want these bodies. You know, can't you just build a mass pet and bury in there?

That's what they say to the president of Guyana. And he says, no, we will not do that. You need to come get your American dead. These are American people killing Americans. So this is your problem. So for the next several days, these units from the first they come from a base in Panama and then some other bases. And they're people who are used to dealing with bodies, but not with 900 plus bodies of civilians. You know, they're used to dealing with the war dead.

And so it's a horrible, horrible few days, four days. Airmen in particular. And half the bodies weren't claimed, right? It was more like a third. A lot of these bodies could not be identified. They didn't do enough examinations. There was a Guyanese coroner who wanted to do them. But he's not going to be able to do 900 bodies.

I think he looked at approximately, you know, a hundred of them, which is already a lot of bodies. The identification issue is a total mess. I'm not saying there was some fantastic way they could have fixed it, given the circumstances. But that's a whole other element of the Jonestown story is what happens to those bodies. Some of them were shipped home. There is now a grave in Oakland that has a lot of bodies there, 400 or so, right? Yeah. But so all the bodies are shipped back to Dover Air Force Base.

And, you know, eventually some are claimed by family. But you have to remember a lot of the people were poor and getting a body shipped to you from Delaware to California is beyond the means of a lot of people. And they did some, you know, there was a whole other thing about kind of the jurisdiction over these bodies. So they're all Americans and they come back to Delaware, but first, like the Delaware people don't want anything to do with it. And they already know that this is going to have the worst history of like anything that happens up till that moment in American history. It's the largest death of American civilians in the 20th century. The count of the bodies has also been very unclear because the GDPF goes in there and they see

400 bodies approximately. So where's the other half of the Jonestown population? and everything is being reported like Guyana's flooded with international media. And they're sending these reports everywhere and sending the pictures of all the bodies. But only 400 people apparently are lying there. And so back in the state, everybody with family there is like, are my people among that 400 or a mine among the people who escaped into the jungle? Well, that actually never happened. There were bodies who were piled on other bodies, and that's why they got it so wrong, sadly.

I'll be back with more from Annie Dowwood after this short break. There were survivors. Jim Jones Jr. and brothers Stephen are in Georgetown visiting compound. As you mentioned before, there was a basketball team there. They receive a radio report from Jonestown essentially saying, we are doing this. We're committing suicide. Yes. You should kill the defectors in Georgetown. and then yourself. Yes.

It's so nefarious, Annie. I mean, it's so creepy how organized this was. It strips it of all the possible spiritual qualities, whatever you might think of that, and just gets downright nasty. Yeah, you can't take away that element. So Stephen and two or three of his adopted brothers are playing basketball, and they're staying at the compound in Georgetown, and that message comes in. And Stephen, who's very, who's been speaking since then, you know, almost 50 years talking about it.

You know, he was furious and there was no way he was going to kill anybody or kill himself. And sadly, this one woman who kind of ran the compound, she decides, yes, we have to die. And she kills her three children and herself in Georgetown. There were a small number of survivors at the site themselves, including one elderly woman who slept through the event, right? Yes. Her name is Hyacinth, the rush, and there's an autobiography that you can read about her experience in the People's Temple. So they had these bunk beds that were stacked really high, which is crazy for old people, but nevertheless, there were old people. So she's in this top bed, the third tier. And when the guards and everyone else goes to make sure everybody's out of the dorms, they don't see her.

And she does. She sleeps through it. Another older man runs and hides in a ditch. Two younger African-American man managed to escape while it's happening. And earlier in the day, before anything happened, a whole group, a family group, a bunch of kids and a few parents, they say, say, oh, we're going to have a picnic. I mean, this is completely unheard of this sort of behavior. But because the congressman is there and the media are there, they figure they can get away with stuff they wouldn't normally get away with.

And they walked out. No one is ever charged for this tragedy criminally except for Larry Layton, the man who pretended to defect onto the plane. Charged for the deaths of the airstrip. Is he still with us or has he passed away? Yeah, he's still alive. and he served time in prison in Guyana. And then when he's brought back to the states, he served some time in the states.

And he was released, I think, in the early 2000s. He actually didn't tell anybody. He injured some people on the plane. But he didn't tell the congressman. He didn't tell anybody out on the airstrip because he was in the little plane and shot a couple of people in the little plane, but did not kill them.

So it's another of the great ironies. And those people who did the shooting at the airstrip, I imagine, are part of those who were suicided, right? Yes, that's correct. But they could never really know. The complex remained in the jungle sort of lost to it after a while. They tried to make it, put it, the government again, try to put it to use in some way. Well, it was just, everything got swallowed up by the jungle and the Guyanese government, I mean, they were furious. And the way I see it is, there's another brand of colonization where these foreigners come.

to their country and make this horrible spectacle. And then for many decades after that, if you said Guyana, the next thing was, oh, isn't where all those crazy Americans killed themselves? So this brand new independent country comes to be known for this horrible tragedy. It becomes the very definition of a cult in our generation. Yes, yes. This is as much as you get. But that's why we covered it with such detail.

And thank you very much for this. There's so much more to the story than meets the eye because there's all this other, you know, it's all about Jim Jones, of course, and it's fitting that the town is called Jonesdown because that's, it's all about his ego. It's all about his own odyssey that he's on within himself, which he then projects upon his followers. And there we are. You know, they all go the way. He goes.

So, Annie, you write about this. You've studied this for so many years. Where do you land on this story? It's such a depressing story for me, but I imagine that isn't where you're feeling from. Yes, it is a very depressing story. I'm a realist, and I like looking at parts of American history that are forgotten and to bring to light what has been left in the shadows. And what has been left in the shadows is 917 people who died that day, who were not Jim Jones. almost all of the attention has been on the man, you know, more feeding his eagle after his death. And I wanted to study the other people.

Author and scholar Annie Dowwood has published a book called Paradise Undone. It's a novel, actually, about the tragedy in Jonestown. Thank you so much, Annie. It's been so nice to meet you. Thanks for telling us all about it. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. As you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts?

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