Obituaries 2022

Glenda Randolph Bates was a former member of Peoples Temple and the sister of Darlene Ramey, who died in Jonestown. Her numerous articles for this site appear here. She died on March 29, 2022 of pancreatic cancer. A remembrance by Rikke Wettendorff is here. A remembrance by Fielding M. McGehee III is here.

MaryAnne Duffin Scheid Casanova, a Jonestown resident who survived the tragedy by being in Georgetown with her daughter Dianne, died on April 28, 2022. She was 80. Her other three children – Donald, Angelique, and Sophia – died in Jonestown. MaryAnne later married another survivor, Charlie Touchette. Dianne’s remembrance of her mother is here.

Ron Crawford, who left Jonestown with his wife Yulanda Williams in June 1977, died on January 4, 2022.

David Conn, who described himself as an “investigator of the Jim Jones Peoples Temple cult for nine years prior to the Guyana mass murder” – and whom Temple members described as a Treasury Department agent who worked with apostates Deanna and Elmer Mertle to sabotage Temple humanitarian efforts – died on December 31, 2021, of Parkinson’s disease. Along with George Klineman and Sherman Butler, he co-authored The Cult that Died (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980). His articles on this site appear here.

Peter Elsass, a Danish filmmaker who was the last person to visit Jonestown before the deaths in 1978, died in October 2022. His reflections on that visit, written for the jonestown report in 2018, appears here. A remembrance of his life by Rikke Wettendorff is here.