Jonestown Massacre: 918 Die in Cult Murder-Suicide

Nine hundred and eighteen people died in the jungle of Guyana in the largest mass murder-suicide in modern history. Jim Jones, the charismatic and increasingly paranoid leader of the Peoples Temple, ordered his followers to drink cyanide-laced grape punch in what he called "revolutionary suicide." More than 270 of the dead were children, administered the poison by their own parents. Hours earlier, Temple gunmen had ambushed Congressman Leo Ryan and his party on an airstrip, killing Ryan, three journalists, and a defecting Temple member. Jones had built the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in the 1950s as a racially integrated church with a genuine commitment to social justice. He attracted followers, many of them Black, with a message of equality, community support, and apocalyptic Christianity. The church moved to California in the 1960s, where Jones cultivated political connections in San Francisco and became a figure of influence, appointed to the city's Housing Authority by Mayor George Moscone. Behind the public facade, Jones ruled through fear. Former members who escaped described physical beatings, public humiliations, forced confessions, and rehearsals for mass suicide that Jones called "White Nights." When investigative journalists began exposing conditions within the church in 1977, Jones relocated nearly a thousand followers to a remote agricultural settlement in Guyana he called Jonestown. Congressman Ryan traveled to Jonestown on November 17, 1978, after receiving desperate pleas from relatives of Temple members. During his visit, several followers passed him notes begging to leave. As Ryan's group departed the next day with about fifteen defectors, Temple gunmen opened fire at the Port Kaituma airstrip, killing five and wounding eleven others.