Obituaries 2023

The following people with connections to Peoples Temple have died since October 2022.

Gerald Parks, whose family left Jonestown with Rep. Leo Ryan on November 18, and whose wife Patty was the only Temple member slain during the attack at the airstrip, died November 1, 2022. An obituary is here. A remembrance by his daughter Tracy Parks Diaz is here.

C.A. “Skip” Roberts

Cecil “Skip” Roberts, Guyana’s Assistant Commissioner of Crime with the major police responsibility for that country’s investigation of the deaths in Jonestown, died September 2, 2023. An obituary is here.

Ron Cabral, who – together with his co-author Judy Bebelaar, wrote And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown – died on February 5, 2023. An obituary is here. A remembrance by Judy Bebelaar is here.

Dianne Feinstein, who became mayor of San Francisco after the assassination of George Moscone – an event ten days after the deaths in Jonestown – and who was instrumental in working with Jonestown survivors both to protect them from harm and to re-integrate them into American society, died on September 28, 2023. A remembrance by Jean Brown Clancey is here.

James Reston Jr, the author of the 1981 book Our Father Who Art in Hell – which in turn became the basis for for “Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown”, the 1981 NPR documentary on Jonestown – died on July 19, 2023.

Deaths noted from previous years

Eugene Cordell, the relative of more than a dozen people who died in Jonestown, died October 15, 2020 at age 91. He and his wife June, who died 10 years earlier, had been lifelong residents of Indianapolis.

Shirelle Zunita Evans (Jackson), who left Jonestown as part of the “picnic” group in the company of her parents, two sisters and four others, died on November 28, 2010 in Modesto, California. She was 36.

Aubrey Bishop, the Guyanese judge assigned to the custody case involving John Victor Stoen, died on February 6, 2013.

Vibert Mingo, Guyana Minister of Home Affairs and critic of Peoples Temple, died on July 4, 1991 (Stabroek News).

Lowell Streiker, who worked with Al and Jeannie Mills at the Human Freedom Center in Berkeley in the months before and after the deaths in Jonestown, and who wrote about his experiences in 1988, died in August 2022. A remembrance by Rebecca Moore is here.