{"id":121000,"date":"2023-01-07T16:32:56","date_gmt":"2023-01-08T00:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=121000"},"modified":"2023-01-12T15:35:41","modified_gmt":"2023-01-12T23:35:41","slug":"what-happened-after-jonestown","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=121000","title":{"rendered":"What Happened After Jonestown?"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Editor’s note<\/strong>: This article originally appeared in Rolling Stone<\/a> Magazine on November 16, 2018.]<\/em><\/p>\n

In the wake of the mass suicide in 1978, friends, family and survivors had to face the heartbreaking aftermath of Jim Jones\u2019 cult<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
U.S. military personnel place bodies in coffins at the airport in Georgetown, Guyana, in November 1978<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Roughly 900 corpses lay before the Guyanese state pathologist Dr. Leslie Mootoo, one of the first on the scene at Jonestown. Arrayed in strangely uniform rows on the ground, the bodies were rapidly decomposing, thanks to tropical heat, a rainstorm and swarms of animals and insects. Some were so lost to putrefaction that the U.S. military clean-up crew used snow shovels to pick them up, and wore facemasks to block the stench.<\/p>\n

\u201cMootoo was called to a scene for which there was absolutely no precedent. They were completely overwhelmed with the\u00a0crime\u00a0scene they found. There was an urgency to process the bodies contaminated by a rainstorm and then rotting in the sun. Everyone was in a state of panic,\u201d says Fielding McGehee, who was with his now-wife Rebecca Moore when the news broke. Moore lost two sisters \u2014 Annie Moore and Carolyn Layton \u2014 and a four-year-old nephew Kimo, who was Carolyn and Jim Jones\u2019s son \u2014 to Jonestown.<\/p>\n

On November 18, 1978, over 900 members of the Peoples Temple died in what appeared to be a mass\u00a0suicide, drinking Flavor-Aid laced with cyanide and other drugs. Followers of religious\u00a0cult\u00a0leader Jim Jones, they had carved Jonestown out of the jungle in Guyana to build a community they considered a utopia. Others died that day in two related episodes. Sharon Amos, who was at the Peoples Temple headquarters in Guyana\u2019s capital, Georgetown, roughly 150 miles away, responded to Jones\u2019s radio call to kill themselves along with those at the settlement. She obeyed Jones, entering the bathroom with a knife to kill two of her children, Christa and Martin Amos. She slit her own throat, as did her 21-year-old daughter Liane. Another Peoples Temple member, a Marine veteran named Chuck Beikman, was left standing on the blood-covered floor, knife in hand, with 9-year-old Stephanie Morgan, who had several knife wounds on her throat but survived. Beikman was arrested and served five years in a Guyanese prison.<\/p>\n

At the Port Kaituma Air Strip several miles from the settlement, Congressman Leo Ryan was helping defecting members of the Peoples Temple board one of two planes leaving Guyana. He and current Congresswoman Jackie Speier, then 28, had traveled to the country, responding to reports of people held in Jonestown against their will forwarded from a group called the \u201cConcerned Relatives.\u201d As they waited to depart, a tractor from the settlement arrived towing a trailer filled with armed gunmen. Ryan, three newsmen and one Jonestown resident were killed, while nine others were injured. Speier was shot five times and crawled behind a wheel of the plane, waiting 22 hours for rescue.<\/p>\n

Jim Jones had created a controversial empire.<\/strong>\u00a0Despite working to racially integrate Indianapolis, where his ministry began, Jones kept a mostly-white leadership over his 70-percent African-American congregation. He sexually abused members and performed fake \u201chealings\u201d with chicken entrails. Yet he was dedicated to fair healthcare for the elderly and at-risk youth, establishing many residential care homes with his wife Marceline, a nurse. He took his followers to Guyana in part because he felt it was the best place to survive a nuclear apocalypse, and in part because a magazine expos\u00e9 of his mistreatment of Peoples Temple members was about to be published. In Jonestown, his drug addiction and paranoia deepened. Congressman Ryan\u2019s visit seems to have triggered Jones\u2019s push for the community to commit \u201crevolutionary suicide.\u201d<\/p>\n

That first night, Dr. Mootoo slept on the ground 50 yards away from corpses. He soon learned that not all of the poison drinkers had been willing. Babies and children had been dosed by mouth syringe, and some adults exhibited puncture marks between their shoulder blades or on the back of their arms \u2014 places a person could not reach for a suicidal injection. Photos of the aftermath clearly show abandoned hypodermic syringes. Two people died from gunshot \u2014 but perhaps not from the same weapon \u2014 Annie Moore, who was Jim Jones\u2019s nurse, and Jones himself.<\/p>\n

For four or five days, it wasn\u2019t even clear how many people had died. Those working to move the bodies would often find another layer of corpses underneath. Some of the handwritten cardboard tags identifying people, tied to their wrists, became illegible from rain. Although the U.S. government originally intended to bury the bodies in a mass grave in Guyana, \u201cthe Guyanese government wanted to get the bodies the heck out of there,\u201d says Rebecca Moore. \u201cIt was an American problem dumped in their laps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the Peoples Temple members came from Northern California.<\/strong>\u00a0The nearby Oakland Air Force Base \u2014 which had processed 50,000 bodies from the Vietnam War \u2014 would have been the common-sense choice to unite mourners and their dead. Moore recalls officials saying they didn\u2019t want to be \u201cbesieged by relatives\u201d and instead flew the bodies to Dover, Delaware.<\/p>\n

Jones\u2019s message of Socialist equality meant that many of his followers were from humble socioeconomic backgrounds. The cost of traveling to the East Coast to retrieve a loved one \u2014 or several \u2014 proved prohibitive to many families. Moreover, \u201cPeople were worried the government would come after them for the cost of bringing the bodies back from Guyana,\u201d says Buck Kamphausen, owner of Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California. \u201cThere was a lot of bad information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bereaved family members retrieved a little over half the victims. Kamphausen suggested his burial ground in the Oakland hills would take the 410 unclaimed bodies: \u201cEvergreen was sitting in a black neighborhood, an old cemetery without much business in a deteriorated area. We saw that there was more to this story than meets the eye. We could improve the cemetery and provide services to people being discriminated against for being in a cult.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few other cemeteries volunteered, but it was a fraught offer. \u201cThere were rumors that there were hit squads that Jim Jones had put together,\u201d says Kamphausen, \u201cand that there would be a cult following in the cemetery. People were afraid.\u201d Moving vans brought the bodies cross-country to California.<\/p>\n

Kamphausen had seen a trade magazine spread about how another cemetery had handled the influx of bodies from the 1977 Tenerife airplane disaster, which killed 583 people, and realized that using a hilly portion of land would permit him to \u201cstair-step\u201d the coffins. \u201cWe used a backhoe and premeasured the hole so we could get box on top of box at a double-depth,\u201d he says. \u201cWe could do 48 at a time, get the vault ready and then the caskets.\u201d The first 160 bodies were unidentifiable, he says, \u201ceverything from babies up to 18 year olds,\u201d because at their young age they had no fingerprints or dental records on file. A third of the Jonestown victims were children.<\/p>\n

In the years following this effort, roughly 20 more people were buried as close to the mass grave as close as possible. Of those, Kamphausen says five to seven are full bodies and the rest are cremains. They cannot be buried in the same plot because there is simply no more room. As recently as 2014, nine cremated Jonestown bodies were discovered at a defunct Delaware funeral home; four were claimed for private burial and the rest interred at Evergreen.<\/p>\n

The bodies were in place, but nameless. The Guyana Emergency Relief Committee, formed by interfaith leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area, placed a simple gravestone at Evergreen in 1979. It and a similar stone at the Jonestown site read, \u201cIn memory of the victims of the Jonestown tragedy.\u201d The catch-all phrase \u201cvictims\u201d failed to provide dignity and closure for family members who wanted to see their loved ones named individually. Planning began for a monument listing each person\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

Fundraising for such a memorial stalled over the decades. Jynona Norwood, a preacher who has claimed she lost 27 family members to Jonestown, solicited donations at the annual anniversary services at Evergreen. She raised enough money for two stones, and unveiled them in 2008. Made of glossy black granite, the monuments listed a sampling of victims\u2019 names and ages, one name per line. In order to capture all the adult names, she planned to erect another four slabs, as well as a red granite central stone to list the 305 children.<\/p>\n

The plan for these monuments, though, was flawed in vital ways. Given Norwood\u2019s fundraising rates, it would have taken another 70 years to get the remaining stones made. More importantly, the Evergreen site could not support the weight of the upright slabs, which would require six feet of stabilizing foundation to be poured. \u201cThere\u2019s essentially a sprinkling of grass atop the graves,\u201d says McGehee. \u201cSo you can\u2019t dig very far down before you run into graves.\u201d Only plaques laid flat on the ground would work, and thus Norwood\u2019s monuments could not be placed. (Norwood did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)<\/p>\n

In 2010, the Jonestown Memorial Fund, a three-person committee including McGehee and two Jonestown survivors \u2014 Jim Jones, Jr. and John Cobb \u2014 announced that it was fundraising for a memorial. Within three weeks, the committee had raised the necessary $15,000 for four flat plaques.<\/p>\n

On May 29, 2011, a service was held to dedicate the memorial. Some people objected to Jim Jones\u2019 name being included on the memorial. In partial concession to these concerns, he was formalized as James Warren Jones. The alphabetized order lists his name last on his particular stone.<\/p>\n

At the dedication, Rev. Moore, father to Rebecca, Annie and Carolyn, gave an opening blessing. Wreaths were laid and those in attendance were invited to come to the front and give remembrances. Rev. Hue Fortson, the associate pastor of the Peoples Temple in L.A. who had been in the U.S. on that fateful day in 1978 but lost his wife and son in Guyana, closed the service with a benediction. \u201cStanding there listening to people speaking about their losses in Jonestown, I experienced a strange sensation,\u201d says Ken Risling, a friend of Annie Moore. \u201cIt was the feeling of belonging. Out among normal people, even my own family, I hadn\u2019t really noticed the loneliness riding in the sidecar of my grief. I wept with relief.\u201d<\/p>\n

The closure brought by the laying of the stones<\/strong>\u00a0was marred by the lawsuit Norwood filed the day after their placement. Norwood objected to Jim Jones\u2019s name being incorporated into the plaques. On her website and in multiple news interviews, she has said that including him is tantamount to putting Hitler\u2019s name on a Holocaust memorial. Rebecca Moore and the members of the Jonestown Memorial Fund think of the stone as a historical document; it lists everyone who died in Guyana on November 18, 1978.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we exclude Jim Jones from that marker, maybe we should consider excluding the people who assassinated Leo Ryan,\u201d says Moore. \u201cThen maybe we should exclude people who were complicit in murdering their children. Maybe we should exclude all the adults who did not overturn the vat of poison.\u201d (The lawsuit was dismissed in 2014, and Norwood\u2019s appeal was rejected in 2015)<\/p>\n

Why didn\u2019t parents protect their children? No one can say. At Jonestown, nuclear families didn\u2019t live together. Children slept in their own bunkhouse and babies spent the day together in a nursery. As heard in a partial audio recording from that day, Jones\u2019s lover Maria Katsaris came to the microphone to reassure parents about their children\u2019s reactions. \u201cThey\u2019re not crying from pain. It\u2019s just a little bitter tasting,\u201d she said. However, Dr. Mootoo said in the December 1978 inquest that, \u201cA lethal dose of cyanide could kill a child in five minutes and a baby less. From what I saw most person [sic] died between twenty and thirty minutes after taking lethal dose of Cyanide poison (This is drinking [rather than being dosed by hypodermic syringe]).\u201d<\/p>\n

Ever since the Temple\u2019s early days in Redwood Valley, California,<\/strong>\u00a0Jones had been enacting \u201cWhite Nights,\u201d mass-suicide test runs of drinking beverages falsely claimed to be poison to confirm his congregation\u2019s loyalty.<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of an event that caught the world\u2019s attention, mourners were often loath to explain losing family members to Jonestown. Their personal tragedy became a morbid joke: \u201cDon\u2019t drink the Kool-Aid.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of the embarrassing question, \u2018Do you have any brothers or sisters?\u2019 and I have to go through my mind and say, \u2018Well, do I say yes?\u2019\u201d says Moore. \u201cCan you imagine what a terrible burden that would be to have such a stigmatized death that you couldn\u2019t even talk about your loved one because then you\u2019d have to go into the big explanation about Jonestown and \u2018Why were they fanatics? Were they brainwashed?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Some emphatically assert that the victims had been manipulated. \u201cJim Jones is among the most evil leaders of all times; he made his worshippers love him unconditionally, then ordered them all to die for him, which is brainwashing at its most extreme,\u201d says Philip Zimbardo in an email. He\u2019s the originator of the Stanford Prison Experiment \u2014 in which college students cast in the role of prison guards became sadistic to fellow students who were \u201cprisoners,\u201d to the degree that the experiment was canceled after only six days \u2014 which predated Jonestown by seven years. He has taken an interest in the Guyana tragedy\u2019s elements of mind control and brainwashing, the latter a term Rebecca Moore objects to.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were caught up in [Jones\u2019s] pathology, but I deny that people were robots, brainwashed or drugged,\u201d Moore says.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>She and her husband Fielding McGehee started the academic website\u00a0Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and the Peoples Temple<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>in 1999. It\u2019s hosted by San Diego State University where she used to be a professor in the Department of Religious Studies. She\u2019s made it her life\u2019s work to archive everything related to Jonestown, and since 2003, McGehee has managed the site full-time. The two met at journalism school at Antioch College in Washington, D.C., where they were living when the news from Jonestown hit the U.S.<\/p>\n

The website catalogs everything from autopsy reports and her sister Annie\u2019s open letter to those who would come across the bodies, to remembrances from survivors and families. Moore says daily requests for information come through the site. It even hosts the archives of a website that directly opposed her and the Jonestown Memorial Fund, called the\u00a0Jonestown Apologist Alert<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t agree with probably the majority of stuff on the site,\u201d she says, \u201cbut we see it as our task to collect all the materials that are out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Annie and Carolyn were cremated and buried in a family plot in Davis, California. \u201cKimo is presumably at Evergreen,\u201d Moore says. He was one of those children who could not be identified. His birth name, Jim Jon, is also carved on his mother\u2019s stone as if he lies below with her.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t like to use words like healing and closure and all that,\u201d says Moore. \u201cThe language I prefer to use is, we have incorporated those losses into our lives. The dead are part of our lives; they are part of who we are, forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

She adds, \u201cI don\u2019t want Jim Jones to have a double victory by making me angry over something I have no control over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Forty years later, the community of grievers still gather on the anniversary, with varying reactions to the bewildering tragedy. Some even long for Jonestown \u2014 Ken Risling remembers hearing a survivor once say, \u201cI was there, and I\u2019m not happy to be here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were not allowed to grieve because of the terrible nature of the deaths, and to bring it full circle, that\u2019s why the memorial is so important,\u201d says Moore.<\/p>\n

A new stone placed this year in front of the four plaques commemorates the 2011 dedication and in part thanks Evergreen Cemetery. Buck Kamphausen, the cemetery owner who donated landscaping and accepted the unclaimed bodies 40 years ago, says, \u201cYou could see the dramatic change and profound release of emotions when people finally did come to the cemetery and face things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine on November 16, 2018.] In the wake of the mass suicide in 1978, friends, family and survivors had to face the heartbreaking aftermath of Jim Jones\u2019 cult Roughly 900 corpses lay before the Guyanese state pathologist Dr. Leslie Mootoo, one of the first on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":16576,"menu_order":49,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-121000","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/121000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121000"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/121000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121206,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/121000\/revisions\/121206"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}