The 1978 mass suicide at the Jonestown commune was among the most infamous events
in cult history. What came after that horrific incident was a nightmare in its own right.
What became pastor Jim Jones' Peoples Temple commune started as Community Unity Church in
Indianapolis in 1954. The group moved to rural California in the mid-1960s before uprooting and
settling in Guyana in 1977 on land leased from the Guyanese government. That settlement was
officially called the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, but was colloquially known as Jonestown.
Congressman Leo Ryan was shot to death near the commune on November 18, 1978. Soon after,
Jones gathered the members the commune and told them that it was time to commit what he called
"revolutionary suicide." Commune members were asked — or perhaps forced — to consume a deadly
mixture of sedatives, cyanide, and Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid as many seem to remember.
"They didn't actually drink Kool-Aid. It was cyanide-laced Flavor Aid."
Survivor Odell Rhodes told The Washington Post that infants and young children were
given the concoction first. Children represented nearly a third of all
the dead at Jonestown. Rhodes himself survived by hiding beneath a building,
waiting a few hours, and then walking five miles through the jungle to the nearest town.
A total of 907 people are reported to have died at the commune from cyanide
poisoning. Two people, Jones and nurse Annie Moore, died from gunshot wounds.
Jonestown was populated almost exclusively by Americans,
so the U.S. government assumed most of the responsibility for managing the remains.
It took two days for military aircraft to reach the site and begin transporting bodies.
The heat and humidity of the tropical climate meant bodies had entered an advanced stage of
decomposition, to the point where transferring them into body bags became a gruesome task. Many
service members, as well as others who arrived at the commune in the days after the tragedy,
reported that the stench was all but impossible to forget.
Back-and-forth exchanges between the U.S. and Guyanese governments added to the delay.
Medic Jeff Brailey wrote in his recollection of the Jonestown response,
"The Ghosts of November," that buzzards avoided the mass of bodies. Perhaps, he speculated,
the animals understood that the remains were loaded with cyanide and avoided the scene.
Though many sources indicate that some portion of the victims at Jonestown drank the cyanide-laced
cocktail willingly, Guyanese pathologist Dr. Leslie Mootoo and other first responders
found evidence to the contrary. In 1978, Mootoo told The Chicago Tribune that, after personally
examining remains on site, he believed most people had been forced into their deaths.
The evidence included puncture wounds consistent with hypodermic injections,
which Mootoo believed he had found on at least 70 sets of remains. These marks were reportedly
discovered in places that were all but impossible to self-administer, such as at the back of an arm
or between an individual's shoulder blades. Hypodermic needles were also found scattered
at the scene. Author Leslie Wagner Wilson, who escaped Jonestown before the mass suicide, said,
"No, it wasn't all suicide. I've never believed that."
Survivor Odell Rhodes told The Washington Post that he witnessed less-than-enthusiastic
commune members who were pushed to consume the drink by armed guards. Most tragically of all,
responders encountered the horrific sight of
young children who could not have willingly agreed to participate in Jones' last order.
According to Sgt. David B. Netterville, he and other military personnel who initially
responded to the scene at Jonestown believed that about 400 individuals had died, with the rest of
the commune hiding in the dense jungle nearby. As service members began clearing the remains, they
realized that more dead were beneath the first layer. The grim count grew higher by the day.
Given that first estimation, many assumed that not everyone had died. Technical Sgt.
Wayne Dalton recalled that Jones' cabin contained plans outlining an escape into
nearby Venezuela. As a result, helicopters were called in to fly over the proposed route and play
commands to presumed fugitives to make their way out of the jungle. Almost no one emerged,
and it eventually became clear that nearly everyone at the Jonestown site had died.
Faced with a nearly incomprehensible amount of death and the reality of
moving seriously decomposed remains in the field, many service members faced trauma
that would haunt them for years to come. Some reported trouble sleeping and were
particularly disturbed by the sight of many young children who had died.
Patricia Edwards, a civilian Air Force employee who managed the details of the recovery effort,
told TIME that the logistics of the work could be overwhelming. First,
there was the sheer number of dead bodies. Collecting, attempting to identify,
and transporting more than 900 bodies from Guyana to the U.S. was a staggering task.
They were also in a serious time crunch. Edwards said the cleanup team was only
given about a week to clear the site when three weeks would have typically been the standard.
To support the mission, the team had to essentially construct a military base on
short notice. Professionals had to examine and treat remains, type documents, and process the
personnel who moved in and out of the base. Workers also had to provide basic services
like regular meals. And, of course, someone had to arrange for the many, many body bags and aluminum
containers that acted as caskets. Survivor Odell Rhodes was also escorted back to the site,
where he worked with authorities to identify the remains of 183 people he recognized.
By the time U.S. military personnel made it to the remote jungle site,
some remains were so decomposed that responders had a difficult time keeping them intact while
moving them into body bags, much less worry about visually identifying anyone.
A small number of individuals, however, were easy to connect to a name. Jim Jones was found
where he often was during life at Jonestown: on stage, apart from the crowd. Like others,
his body had entered an advanced stage of decomposition, but he was otherwise identifiable.
Other factors further complicated the process of connecting names
to remains. About a third of the dead were children who wouldn't have given
clear fingerprints and who would not have had fingerprint records.
"Many of the children could not be identified. Other victims went unclaimed."
Meanwhile, identification tags applied at the scene got wet from rain and humidity,
making the ink on them all but impossible to read. And because clothing was often shared,
name tags found on garments were practically useless.
No one was initially sure where the bodies would end up. Originally, there were plans to
bury the remains in Guyana, but local officials balked at the idea of having what would surely
become a notorious gravesite in their country. Ultimately, officials decided that all remains
would be flown to Delaware, which was chosen for its distance from California, where many family
members of the deceased lived. One official claimed that the physical distance would keep
family from flooding the operation and making an already complicated task even more challenging.
According to Sgt. David Netterville, remains were first placed in body bags. Then, graves
registration personnel from the U.S. Army flew remains into Georgetown, the capital of Guyana,
where they were transferred into aluminum containers. From there,
they were flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and stored in a hangar.
Guyana's chief pathologist, Dr. Leslie Mootoo, performed on-site examinations on many of the
remains, but full autopsies were not conducted until the bodies were transported to Dover Air
Force Base. Only seven were conducted. Two individuals were randomly selected,
while the families of four others requested autopsies. Only one body was specifically singled
out to undergo a postmortem examination: Jim Jones himself. All autopsies took place on December 15,
1978, nearly a month after the deaths, and were conducted by military pathologists.
The results were all but useless. Findings confirmed that most had died from ingesting
cyanide, though Jones and close associate Annie Moore appeared to have died from gunshot wounds.
The advanced decomposition made more detailed examinations difficult. Some remains had been
embalmed in an attempt to slow the decay, so some evidence was likely destroyed by
embalming chemicals. Some remains may have also been splashed with kerosene
in an attempt to eradicate maggots, a move that may have damaged otherwise usable fingerprints.
Recovering the bodies of loved ones who died at Jonestown was also quite arduous. As mentioned,
there was the distance from Dover Air Force Base from most of the families
in California. Families were expected to cover the costs of traveling to Delaware.
The military also charged transport fees for remains that came out to almost $500. Moreover,
claiming an association with Jonestown and its notorious "cultists" carried
a serious stigma. Some cemeteries feared becoming pilgrimage sites.
"Not a single cemetery in the United States wanted the bodies buried there,
because they were going to have weird, cultist rituals."
Because of these barriers, some simply chose to leave bodies at the local funeral
homes where they had been deposited. It was then left up to funeral directors to decide
how to dispose of remains, sometimes without any direction from families.
The state of Delaware also offered no guidelines for what to do with the bodies. That's likely
how the Minus Funeral Home was found in 2014, two years after it closed, to be storing the cremated
remains of 38 people, including nine victims from Jonestown. Five other sets of remains
were unlabeled, though investigators doubted they belonged to members of Peoples Temple.
Funeral director Bill Torbert Sr., who oversaw the cremation of Jim Jones and the disposal of
his ashes, told Delaware Online that holding onto cremated remains indefinitely was the
ethical thing to do, especially if family members showed up decades later seeking
to claim the remains. The fact that family members didn't want to claim remains or didn't
know they were there was not, in his opinion, the fault of the owners of Minus Funeral Home.
In 1979, 410 unclaimed bodies from Jonestown were buried in a mass grave in Oakland,
California. Buck Kamphausen, who owned the Evergreen Cemetery that now hosts the mass grave,
claimed that he was helping out people who had faced discrimination after they had been
labeled as cult members. After studying how other cemeteries dealt with mass burials,
he told a crew to excavate a hill in the cemetery. They place a large number of burial
vaults and caskets into the grave in a stepped pattern. Fielding McGehee, whose nephew-in-law
and two sisters-in-law died at Jonestown, told Rolling Stone that there is only a light layer
of earth on top of the mass grave, making other burials or a heavy memorial stone ill-advised.
As such, marking the grave site proved to be tricky. In 1979, a San Francisco group
known as the Guyana Emergency Relief Committee arranged for a small marker to be placed on site,
but its lack of names proved troublesome for grieving friends and family. Two more stones
were set in place in 2008, but only listed some of the dead. Finally, in 2011, four
large monuments containing all of the names of the dead were unveiled by the Jonestown Memorial Fund,
which included one of Jim Jones' surviving sons, Jim Jones Jr., as a committee member.
"I wanted to say goodbye, and now I can."
Some observers were aghast to learn that it was a little too complete. The memorial included a line
dedicated to Jones himself. Jynona Norwood, who claims to have lost more than 20 family members
in the Jonestown tragedy, quickly sued. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2014, along with an
appeal a year later, and another commemorative stone was erected at the site in 2018.
Of the bodies that were claimed by families, most were buried or cremated with little
ceremony. Sisters Anne Moore and Carolyn Layton were cremated, and their ashes were quietly
interred in Davis, California. Layton's son with Jones, Jim Jon "Kimo" Prokes,
is presumably buried with many other unidentified minors in the mass grave in Oakland. Jones' wife,
the long-suffering Marceline, was buried in Richmond, Indiana, alongside her parents,
as well as two of her children who also died at Jonestown, Agnes and Lew Eric.
Jones himself was perhaps subject to the most hushed end. Torbert Funeral Chapels in Dover was
directed by Jones' family to cremate his body and scatter the ashes over the Atlantic Ocean. Funeral
director Bill Torbert Sr. told Delaware Online that he and a friend took a small airplane and,
once they were about a mile from the coast, simply scattered the ashes into the cold air.
For some family members of those who died at Jonestown, the long path the bodies took
from the compound in Guyana to graves or family members was agony. Rebecca Moore,
sister to Annie Moore and Carolyn Layton, wrote that the U.S. government was criminally
lackadaisical in its investigation. From her perspective, bodies were treated more
as problems than the remains of individuals who required care and justice. She further
suggested that perhaps the demographic makeup of the members — many of whom were Black and
also political leftists with little money or clout — contributed to this neglect.
Moore took particular exception with the mishandling of forensic evidence and the
scant number of autopsies. Many blamed the Guyanese government for passing on
its normal autopsy rules in its haste to rid itself of troublesome corpses.
Others pointed to the U.S. government's own haste in the wake of the tragedy,
exacerbated by confusion over who, exactly, was supposed to be in charge of the bodies.