Jonestown: How Jim Jones Made 900 People Die in One Afternoon - and the Tape That Recorded It

There is a recording. It is about forty-four minutes long, and when the FBI catalogued the evidence, they labelled it simply Q-042. It was made on the afternoon of the eighteenth of November, 1978, in a clearing in the jungle of Guyana, in South America. It captured the last hours of a community of Americans called the Peoples Temple - as their leader talked more than nine hundred of them into dying.

Almost no atrocity in history is recorded from the inside like this. We have the tape because the people who died did not think of it as a crime. They thought of it as a meeting, and someone left the recorder running, the way they always did. This is the story of how those people got to that afternoon.

Who their leader was. How he built the thing that killed them. And what the tape - which you will hear, in his own voice, and in the voice of the one woman who stood up and argued against him - tells us about how devotion becomes death. To understand the end, you have to start with the man, because for twenty-five years he was the whole thing.

James Warren Jones was born in 1931 in a small town in Indiana, in the American Midwest, the son of a disabled First World War veteran. As a boy he was fixed on two things that would define everything he did: religion, and death. He held funerals for dead animals. He preached to other children.

As a young man he became a preacher, and in the mid-nineteen-fifties, in the city of Indianapolis, he founded his own church. He called it, eventually, the Peoples Temple - the name of the movement he would lead for the rest of his life. From the beginning it was built around one genuinely radical idea. Racial integration.

This was the American nineteen-fifties, in a country still segregated by law and by custom - Black and white Americans kept apart in schools, restaurants, hospitals, and churches. Jones built a church that was deliberately mixed, Black and white worshipping together, and he preached against racism at a time when doing so could get a white preacher run out of town. It was not a pose. He personally helped desegregate businesses in Indianapolis, and the city made him the head of its Human Rights Commission.

This is the part that is hardest to hold in your mind afterward, and it is the most important. The Peoples Temple drew good, idealistic people because, at the start, it was doing something good. That is not the exception to how these things happen. It is the rule.

There was a second draw, and it was theatre. Jones held healing services in which the sick were apparently cured in front of the congregation - tumours pulled from bodies, the lame made to walk. The healings were faked. The tumours were animal tissue; the wheelchairs held people who could already stand.

But they worked on the crowd, because a man who can seemingly reverse death is a man you do not question about smaller things. Faith healing - claiming to cure illness by religious power - was the engine that filled the pews and the collection plates. Before the jungle, before any of it, he was a voice from a pulpit that thousands of people trusted with their lives - and it did not sound like a monster. It was warm, and certain, and reasonable.

That is the voice that took a church from Indiana to San Francisco. Idealists did not follow a villain. They followed that. By 1965, Jones told his followers he had had a vision - a nuclear war was coming, and only one place on earth would be safe.

He moved the church across the country to a rural valley in northern California, near a town called Ukiah. Around a hundred and forty families went with him. They pulled up their lives and followed a vision. That willingness to uproot everything on the strength of his word was itself a kind of training, and it would be used again.

By 1971 the Temple had opened a large church in San Francisco. Jim Jones was no longer a small-town preacher. In San Francisco in the nineteen-seventies, the Peoples Temple became a political machine. It could do the one thing every politician needs and few can buy: it could produce people.

When a cause needed a crowd, the Temple supplied hundreds of disciplined, well-dressed volunteers. When a candidate needed votes, or envelopes stuffed, or a rally filled, the Temple delivered. In return, politicians gave Jones legitimacy. In 1976 the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, appointed Jones to the city's Housing Authority - the agency that runs public housing, the city's largest landlord - and Jones was soon made its chairman.

A faith healer from small-town Indiana was now a city official, photographed with senators and a first lady. To the outside world, he looked like a progressive hero. Inside the Temple, something very different was being built - and it was assembled piece by piece, so that no single step felt like the crossing of a line. Members were pushed to give more.

First a tithe - a share of income given to the church. Then their savings. Then their houses. Then their welfare and pension cheques, until many owned nothing and could not have left if they wanted to.

Confession was turned into a weapon: members were made to write down their worst secrets and their crimes, real or invented, and hand them to the Temple - letters that could later be used to destroy them if they turned. Loyalty was tested with public discipline, in sessions where a member could be denounced by the group, humiliated, even beaten, while everyone watched and learned. Each step raised the cost of leaving, and lowered the cost of the next demand. And there was a rehearsal for the end, though no one was told that is what it was.

Jones began staging events he called White Nights. In the middle of the night an alarm would sound, the community would be assembled, and Jones would announce that enemies were coming to destroy them, and that the time had come to die together. Guards handed out cups of what everyone was told was poison, and the members - including parents holding children - drank. Then, after a wait for a death that did not come, Jones told them it had been a test of their loyalty.

They had passed. The point of a White Night was not the poison. It was to make the unthinkable familiar - to walk people up to the act of dying on command, again and again, until the day it would be real, and their bodies would simply do what they had practised. The same voice, a little later, had something else in it - the turn from we, to me; from a church, to a man you could not doubt.

Belong, or leave with nothing. By now, for most of them, leaving with nothing was no longer possible. By 1977, the outside world was looking too closely. A magazine was preparing an expose from former members - the beatings, the fake healings, the confiscation of money.

Rather than face it, Jones did what he had done before, only further. He left the country. He accelerated a plan already in motion: a settlement he had been building in the jungle of Guyana, a poor, English-speaking country on the northern coast of South America, more than four thousand miles from San Francisco. He called it the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project.

His followers called it Jonestown, after him. He told them it would be a paradise - a socialist utopia in the jungle, with no racism, no poverty, no police. Around a thousand people, most of them from the Temple's poorest and most loyal, sold what little they had left and flew to the other side of the world to build it. Very few of them would ever leave.

Jonestown was a trap dressed as a paradise, and its walls were distance and paperwork. When members arrived, their passports were taken and locked away, along with their money. Leaving meant getting past armed guards, through miles of jungle, to an airstrip, without documents or cash, in a country whose government Jones had carefully befriended. There were guards with guns.

Jones said they were there to keep enemies out. In fact, they faced inward. The work was long days of farm labour in tropical heat, on thin, starchy rations. The nights offered no rest, because a loudspeaker system carried Jones's voice across the whole settlement, for hours, day and night.

He read the news. He lectured. He interrogated. He warned of enemies.

People slept, worked, and ate to the sound of his voice. There was, literally, no getting away from him. Control at Jonestown was also chemical. Investigators who came in afterward found a pharmacy stocked far beyond the needs of a farming community - powerful tranquillisers and sedatives in bulk.

Thorazine, a strong antipsychotic. Valium. Chloral hydrate. Demerol.

A barbiturate called phenobarbital. There is evidence these drugs were used not only on the willing, but to subdue troublemakers - to flatten dissent into compliance. And there was one more thing in the supplies that no farm has any use for. Since 1976 - two years before the end - the community had been quietly receiving shipments of potassium cyanide, a fast-acting poison, ordered under the cover of a jewellery-making licence.

The means of the massacre had been on the shelf, restocked every month, for two years before it was used. Whatever else the end was, it was not a sudden decision. Not everyone could be held. A small number of people had got out over the years - defectors, people who escaped and left - and by 1978 they had organised.

In California, former members and the relatives of people still inside formed a group called the Concerned Relatives, and they began doing the one thing Jones could not tolerate: telling the outside world, on the record, what was happening. At the centre of the fight was a child. A former Temple lawyer, Tim Stoen, and his wife Grace, were trying to recover their young son, John Victor Stoen, whom Jones had kept in Jonestown and claimed - falsely - to have fathered. Jones treated the custody battle as an attack on his existence.

Losing the boy in an outside court would mean the outside world had power over Jonestown, and that was the one thing his entire structure was built to deny. Then, in the summer of 1978, one of the people closest to the centre got out, and told the truth in the plainest possible terms. Deborah Layton had been a senior Temple member - she handled its money - and she escaped through the United States embassy in Guyana. On the fifteenth of June, 1978, she signed a sworn legal statement, an affidavit - a written statement sworn to be true, used in law - and gave it to the U.S.

government. Its title said everything: on the threat and possibility of mass suicide by members of the Peoples Temple. In it she described the White Nights, the rehearsals, and stated, under oath, that Jones was preparing his followers to kill themselves and their children on his command, and that their lives were in danger. This was not a rumour, or a worried relative.

It was a former insider, warning the American government, in writing, five months before it happened, of exactly what was going to happen. And almost nothing was done. The pressure from the Concerned Relatives finally found a channel that could not be ignored: a member of the United States Congress - the national legislature. Leo Ryan was a Democratic congressman from the San Francisco area, known for going and seeing things for himself rather than taking briefings.

He had once had himself locked up in a prison, anonymously, to inspect the conditions. Constituents of his had loved ones in Jonestown, and the warnings had reached him. So Ryan announced he would go to Guyana in person, tour Jonestown, and find out whether the Americans there were being held against their will. In mid-November 1978 he flew down with a delegation: his own legal adviser, a young woman named Jackie Speier; a television crew from NBC News; several newspaper reporters; and members of the Concerned Relatives, desperate for a glimpse of their families.

Jones did not want them there. But turning away a U.S. congressman would confirm everything the outside world suspected. So he let them in.

For a few hours on the seventeenth of November, the visit looked almost like the paradise Jones had promised. There was a welcome, a meal, a concert by the community's own band. The delegation was watched every moment, and the residents said what they had learned to say. But the surface cracked.

During the evening, a note was pressed into the hands of the NBC reporter - two men, Vernon Gosney and Monica Bagby, asking for help to get out. Once it was clear that escape was possible, it spread. By the next morning, more than a dozen residents had said, in front of the congressman, that they wanted to leave. To an outsider, a dozen out of nine hundred might seem small.

To Jones it was a catastrophe - proof, in front of the press and the government, that people wanted out, and that the wall of loyalty had a hole in it. As the group prepared to go, a Temple member lunged at Ryan with a knife. He was stopped, and Ryan was unhurt. But the message was delivered.

The congressman left for the airstrip with the defectors, knowing the situation had turned dangerous. The airstrip was at Port Kaituma, a few miles from Jonestown, and it is where the killing began. As the congressman's party and about fifteen defectors waited to board two small planes, in the late afternoon of the eighteenth of November, a Temple tractor pulling a trailer came up alongside them, and the men on it opened fire. At the same moment, one Temple member who had posed as a defector to get aboard a plane - Larry Layton, Deborah Layton's own brother - began shooting passengers inside it.

When it was over, five people were dead on the airstrip. Congressman Leo Ryan, shot more than twenty times - to this day the only member of the United States Congress ever killed in the line of duty. Two members of the NBC crew, Don Harris and Bob Brown. A newspaper photographer, Greg Robinson.

And a Temple member who had chosen to defect, Patricia Parks. Ryan's aide, Jackie Speier, was shot five times and left for dead on the tarmac. She survived, and would herself later be elected to Congress. The gunmen climbed back on the tractor and drove back toward Jonestown, to tell Jones what had been done.

Jones already knew what came next. What happened next at Jonestown is known in more detail than almost any comparable event, because the meeting Jones called was recorded - the tape marked Q-042. He assembled the community at the central pavilion and told them what he had already decided: that the congressman would be killed, that the outside world would now descend on them, and that the only dignified answer was to die together, on their own terms. He gave it a name he had used before, a name that made annihilation sound like heroism: revolutionary suicide - his phrase, not a description anyone should accept.

A large vat had been prepared. Grape Flavor Aid - a cheap fruit drink - mixed with the potassium cyanide that had sat in storage for two years, and with tranquillisers. This is the origin of a phrase that entered the English language: drink the Kool-Aid, meaning to follow a leader blindly to your own ruin. It should be corrected, out of respect for the dead if nothing else.

It was not Kool-Aid. It was Flavor Aid. And for a third of the people there, it was not a choice at all. What you are about to hear is the recording itself - the tape the FBI marked Q-042, made in the pavilion on that last afternoon, as more than nine hundred people were gathered to die.

This is his voice, in that hour, telling them what it meant. There is nothing graphic in it. There is only the sound of a man making annihilation sound like courage. Revolutionary suicide.

He had rehearsed that phrase for years, so that when the afternoon came, it would already sound like a decision they had made themselves. It was not. It was his, and it always had been. And on the same tape, one person says no.

Her name was Christine Miller. She was a long-standing member, a Black woman in her sixties. As Jones pressed the crowd toward death, she stood up to the microphone and argued with him - the only sustained voice of dissent on the entire recording. Against him, one person refuses.

With everyone around her already resigned to death, Christine Miller walks to the microphone and argues - for herself, and for the children. This is what a choice sounded like, in the last place on earth you would expect to find it. He let her speak. He said he was listening.

And then he turned the crowd against her, until her voice was gone. Christine Miller was right, and she was outvoted, and she died with the rest. But the tape kept her argument - which means the record kept the truth: someone saw clearly, all the way to the end. The killing was done to the children first, and it must be said plainly, because the common word for what happened here - suicide - hides the worst of it.

The poison was given to the babies and the youngest children first, squirted into their mouths from syringes by adults, in some cases their own parents, under the eyes of armed guards. Children cannot consent, and they did not. The doctor who examined the bodies afterward found injection marks on dozens of people - evidence that many did not drink willingly, but were injected. So the honest description is not that nine hundred people killed themselves.

It is that about three hundred children were murdered, and that the adults died in a mix of true believers, the terrified, the sedated, and the coerced, hemmed in by guards and by twenty-five years of conditioning that had stripped the word no out of them. In the space of a few hours, nine hundred and nine people died at Jonestown. Jim Jones was not among the poisoned. He died of a single gunshot wound to the head.

The dying was not confined to Jonestown. Two hundred and fifty miles away, in the capital, Georgetown, the Temple kept a headquarters, and a senior member there, Sharon Amos, received a coded radio message that the end had come. Following the order, she killed her three children, and then herself. Four people died in Georgetown.

Add them to the nine hundred and nine at Jonestown, and the five shot at the airstrip, and the total for that single day in Guyana is nine hundred and eighteen. It remained, for twenty-three years, the greatest single-day loss of American civilian life to a deliberate act - a record broken only on the eleventh of September, 2001. And yet it very nearly took everyone. It did not, because of the ordinary, accidental ways a few people slip through even the tightest net.

An elderly woman named Hyacinth Thrash simply slept through it. She had gone to lie down under her bed, and woke the next morning to find that everyone she knew was dead. A hard-of-hearing man in his late seventies, Grover Davis, missed the loudspeaker call, lay down in a drainage ditch, and played dead. Two men slipped into the jungle and hid.

And by pure chance, the community's basketball team was away in Georgetown that day, playing the national team of Guyana - and among them were two of Jim Jones's own sons, Stephan and Jim junior, who survived because they happened not to be there, and who have spent their lives since as witnesses. The survivors did not survive by resisting. Almost no one resisted. They survived by being asleep, or deaf, or absent - by falling, at the last moment, outside the reach of the loudspeaker.

That is how total the control was. So the question that will not go away is the one we started with. Why did they obey. And the answer is not that these were weak or foolish people.

It is the opposite lesson, the frightening one. The Peoples Temple recruited the idealistic, the compassionate, the people who wanted a fairer world - and then used those very qualities against them. The techniques were not exotic. Isolate people from anyone who could offer a second opinion - a valley, then a city, then a jungle.

Exhaust them, so they cannot think - endless work, endless meetings, no sleep. Take their money and their documents, so leaving becomes impossible in practice. Make them inform on each other, so no one can trust anyone but the leader. Punish dissent in public, so everyone learns to perform belief.

And rehearse the final act until it feels normal. Every one of those steps is a known method of coercive control - the step-by-step domination of one person by another - and they can be applied, in gentler forms, by an abusive partner, a fraudulent guru, an extremist movement. Jonestown is the extreme end of a spectrum that does not begin in a jungle. It begins with a single group that asks you to stop thinking for yourself, for the best of reasons.

There is one correction left to make, and it matters more than it seems. For almost fifty years the shorthand for Jonestown has been a joke - drink the Kool-Aid - a phrase people use lightly to mean a follower, a sucker, someone who bought in. It has let the world file nine hundred deaths under foolishness, as if the people who died were simply gullible and got what gullible people get. But the tape does not record a room full of fools.

It records exhausted, frightened, trapped human beings, many of them children who were given no say at all, and at least one woman arguing, clearly and bravely, for all of their lives, and being shouted down. They were not stupid. They were captured - slowly, by someone who was very good at it, who started by doing genuine good and ended by pouring poison for babies. The honest lesson of Jonestown is not that some people are foolish enough to drink the Kool-Aid.

It is that the machinery which brought them there can be built around almost anyone, if the first steps look kind enough. In the end, the tape is what remains, and it says the thing Jim Jones spent his life trying to make untrue. He wanted his people to believe they had no choice - that the enemies at the gate, the coming raids, the hopelessness, left only one dignified door. But Christine Miller stood at a microphone with everyone she knew already resigned to death, and she said there was another way.

She was right, and she was outvoted, and she died - but the record of her saying it survived, in an FBI evidence box, and it survives now. Jonestown was not a mystery, and it was not an accident. It was built, deliberately, over twenty-five years, by a man who understood that if you take enough small steps, people will follow you to the last one. And it ended in a single afternoon that someone, out of habit, left the recorder running to capture.

The drawer of evidence is open. The tape still plays. And the warning in it is not about them.