On October 25, 1978, Annie Moore wrote a letter to her parents, John and Barbara Moore in Reno, Nevada, and asked them to forward an enclosed letter to her sister Rebecca Moore living in Washington, D.C. It arrived at its destination in mid-November, a few days before the deaths on November 18.
On one level, the letter is typical of much of the correspondence emerging from Jonestown in its final months – the children are happy, Annie writes, the jungle is beautiful, her work as a nurse is both consuming and fulfilling – but it adds news about the conspiracy against them which the Jonestown leadership didn’t trust many of its residents to write about. It speaks of the efforts of Temple attorney Mark Lane and author Don Freed to expose the “activities planned against us – Peoples Temple,” and promises that “new and interesting things should be coming out soon that will show the different attempts to destroy our group.”
The letter also includes the ominous line, “What’s interesting is that it is all coming out before we are all dead, not the case with JFK, RFK, and MLK.”
Annie Moore’s Letter of October 25, 1978, California Historical Society, Moore Family Papers, MS 3802, Folder 02.
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