James Warren Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in the rural community of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones (October 21, 1887 – May 29, 1951) and Lynetta Putnam (April 16, 1902 – December 10, 1977). Jones was of Irish and Welsh descent; he and his mother both claimed to also have some Cherokee ancestry, but there is no evidence of this. Jones' father was a disabled World War I veteran who suffered from severe breathing difficulties due to injuries which he sustained in a chemical weapons attack. He tried to augment his income by occasionally working on neighborhood road repair projects because the military pension he earned due to his wounds was insufficient to support his family.
James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader and mass murderer who led the Peoples Temple between 1955 and 1978. In what he termed "revolutionary suicide", Jones and the members of his inner circle planned and orchestrated a mass murder-suicide in his remote jungle commune at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. Jones and the events that occurred at Jonestown have had a defining influence on society's perception of cults.
His father's illness led to financial difficulties, which in turn resulted in intense marital problems between Jones's parents. In 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, the Jones family was evicted from their home for failure to make mortgage payments. Their relatives purchased a shack for them to live in at the nearby town of Lynn. The new home, where Jones grew up, lacked plumbing and electricity. In Lynn, the family attempted to earn an income through farming, but again met with failure when Jones' father's health further deteriorated. The family often lacked adequate food and relied on financial support from their extended family. They sometimes resorted to foraging in the nearby forest and fields to supplement their diet.
Tim Reiterman, a journalist and biographer of Jones, wrote that Jones's attraction to religion was strongly influenced by his desire for a family. Jones went to see the Kennedy family in 1942 when they spent the summer in Richmond, Indiana. They took part in services four times a week while attending a summer religious convention at a nearby Pentecostal church. When Jones returned to Lynn in the fall, he upset his neighborhood by explaining sexual reproduction in detail to young children. Jones's mother was urged to control his behavior by many individuals in Lynn, but she refused. Many parents decided to keep their kids away from Jones as a result of the issue. He had established himself as an outcast among his friends by the time he started high school and was progressively despised by the locals.
Jones' parents separated in 1945 and they eventually divorced. Jones moved to Richmond, Indiana with his mother, where he graduated from Richmond High School in December 1948 early and with honors. Jones and his mother lost the financial support of their relatives following the divorce. To support himself, Jones began working as an orderly at Richmond's Reid Hospital in 1946. Jones was well-regarded by the senior management, but staff members later recalled that Jones exhibited disturbing behavior towards some patients and co-workers. Jones began dating a nurse-in-training named Marceline Mae Baldwin while he was working at Reid Hospital.
Jones moved to Bloomington, Indiana in November 1948, where he attended Indiana University Bloomington with the intention of becoming a doctor, but changed his mind shortly thereafter. During his time at University, Jones was impressed by a speech which Eleanor Roosevelt delivered about the plight of African-Americans, and he began to espouse support for communism and other radical political views for the first time.
Jones and Baldwin continued their relationship while he attended college, and the couple married on June 12, 1949. Their first home was in Bloomington, where Marceline worked in a nearby hospital while Jones attended college. Marceline was Methodist, and she and Jones immediately fell into arguments about church. Jones's strong opposition to the Methodist church's racial segregationist practices was an early strain on their marriage, and throughout the duration of their relationship, Jones frequently emotionally and psychologically abused Marceline. Jones insisted on attending Bloomington's Full Gospel Tabernacle, but eventually compromised and began attending a local Methodist church on most Sunday mornings. Despite attending churches every week, Jones privately pressed his wife to accept atheism.
After attending Indiana University for two years, the couple relocated to Indianapolis in 1951. Jones took night classes at Butler University to continue his education, finally earning a degree in secondary education in 1961. In 1951, the 20-year-old Jones began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in Indianapolis. Jones and his family faced harassment from government authorities for their affiliation with the Communist Party during 1952. Jones later asserted that in one event, his mother was harassed by FBI agents in front of her co-workers because she had attended a communist meeting with her son. Jones became frustrated with the persecution of communists in the U.S. Reflecting back on his participation in the Communist Party, Jones said that he asked himself, "How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church."
Around this time in 1953, Jones visited a Pentecostal Latter Rain convention in Columbus, Indiana, where a woman prophesied that Jones was a prophet with a great ministry. Jones was surprised by the endorsement, but gladly accepted the call to preach and rose to the podium to deliver a message to the crowd. Pentecostalism was in the midst of the Healing Revival and Latter Rain movements during the 1950s.
Believing that the racially integrated and rapidly growing Latter Rain movement offered him a greater opportunity to become a preacher, Jones successfully convinced his wife to leave the Methodist church and join the Pentecostals. In 1953, Jones began attending and preaching at the Laurel Street Tabernacle in Indianapolis, a Pentecostal Assemblies of God church. Jones held healing revivals there until 1955 and began to travel and speak at other churches in the Latter Rain movement. He was a guest speaker at a 1953 convention in Detroit.
Jones and his wife adopted several non-white children. Jones referred to his household as a "rainbow family", and stated: "Integration is a more personal thing with me now. It's a question of my son's future." He also portrayed the Temple as a "rainbow family". In 1954, the Joneses adopted their first child, Agnes, who was part Native American. In 1959, they adopted three Korean-American children named Lew, Stephanie, and Suzanne, and encouraged Temple members to adopt orphans from war-ravaged Korea. Stephanie Jones died aged 5 in a car accident in May 1959.
As a child, Jones developed an affinity for Pentecostalism and a desire to preach. He was ordained as a Christian minister in the Independent Assemblies of God, attracting his first group of followers while participating in the Pentecostal Latter Rain movement and the Healing Revival during the 1950s. Jones's initial popularity arose from his joint campaign appearances with the movement's prominent leaders, William Branham and Joseph Mattsson-Boze, and their endorsement of his ministry. Jones founded the organization that would become the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955. In 1956, Jones began to be influenced by Father Divine and the Peace Mission movement. Jones distinguished himself through civil rights activism, founding the Temple as a fully integrated congregation. In 1964, Jones joined and was ordained a minister by the Disciples of Christ; his attraction to the Disciples was largely due to the autonomy and tolerance they granted to differing views within their denomination.
The Assemblies of God was strongly opposed to the Latter Rain movement. In 1955, they assigned a new pastor to the Laurel Street Tabernacle who enforced their denominational ban on healing revivals. This led Jones to leave and establish Wings of Healing, a new church that would later be renamed Peoples Temple. Jones's new church attracted only twenty members who had come with him from the Laurel Street Tabernacle and was not able to financially support his vision. At one point, he even sold pet monkeys to raise funds for his church. Jones saw a need for publicity, and began seeking a way to popularize his ministry and recruit members.
Jones began to closely associate with the Independent Assemblies of God (IAoG), an international group of churches which embraced the Latter Rain movement. The IAoG had few requirements for ordaining ministers and they were also accepting of divine healing practices. In June 1955, Jones held his first joint meetings with William Branham, a healing evangelist and Pentecostal leader in the global Healing Revival.
In 1956, Jones was ordained as an IAoG minister by Joseph Mattsson-Boze, a leader in the Latter Rain movement and the IAoG. Jones quickly rose to prominence in the group and organized and hosted a healing convention to take place June 11–15, 1956, in Indianapolis's Cadle Tabernacle. Needing a well-known figure to draw crowds, he arranged to share the pulpit again with Branham.
Through the Latter Rain movement, Jones became aware of Father Divine, an African American spiritual leader of the International Peace Mission movement who was often derided by Pentecostal ministers for his claims to divinity. In 1956, Jones made his first visit to investigate Father Divine's Peace Mission in Philadelphia. Jones was careful to explain that his visit to the Peace Mission was so he could "give an authentic, unbiased, and objective statement" about its activities to his fellow Pentecostal ministers.
Following the convention, Jones renamed his church the "Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel" to associate it with Full Gospel Pentecostalism; the name was later shortened to the Peoples Temple. Jones participated in a series of multi-state revival campaigns with Branham in the second half of the 1950s. Jones claimed to be a follower and promoter of Branham's "Message" during the period. Peoples Temple hosted a second international Pentecostal convention in 1957 which was again headlined by Branham. Through the conventions and with the support of Branham and Mattsson-Boze, Jones secured connections throughout the Latter Rain movement.
Jones made a second visit to Father Divine in 1958 to learn more about his practices. Jones bragged to his congregation that he would like to be the successor of Father Divine and made many comparisons between their two ministries. Jones began progressively implementing the disciplinary practices he learned from Father Divine which increasingly took control over the lives of members of Peoples Temple.
In June 1959, Jones and his wife had their only biological child, naming him Stephan Gandhi. In 1961, they became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child, naming him Jim Jones Jr. (or James W. Jones Jr.). They adopted a white son, originally named Timothy Glen Tupper (shortened to Tim), whose birth mother was a member of the Temple. Jones fathered Jim Jon (Kimo) with Temple member Carolyn Layton.
As Jones gradually separated from Pentecostalism and the Latter Rain movement, he sought an organization that would be open to all of his beliefs. In 1960, Peoples Temple joined the Disciples of Christ denomination, whose headquarters was nearby in Indianapolis. Archie Ijames assured Jones that the organization would tolerate his political beliefs, and Jones was finally ordained by Disciples of Christ in 1964.
In 1960, Indianapolis Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones director of the local human rights commission. Jones ignored Boswell's advice to keep a low profile, however, and he used the position to secure new outlets for his views on local radio and television programs. The mayor and other commissioners asked him to curtail his public actions, but he refused. Jones was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and the Urban League when he encouraged his audience to be more militant, capping his speech with, "Let my people go!".
In 1961, Jones warned his congregation that he had received visions of a nuclear attack that would devastate Indianapolis. His wife confided to her friends that he was becoming increasingly paranoid and fearful. Like other followers of William Branham who moved to South America during the 1960s, Jones may have been influenced by Branham's 1961 prophecy concerning the destruction of the United States in a nuclear war. Jones began to look for a way to escape the destruction he believed was imminent. In January 1962 he read an Esquire magazine article that purported South America to be the safest place to reside to escape any impending nuclear war. Jones decided to travel to South America to scout for a site to relocate Peoples Temple.
Jones set up sting operations in order to catch restaurants which refused to serve black customers and wrote to American Nazi Party leaders and passed their responses to the media. In 1961, Jones suffered a collapse and was hospitalized. The hospital accidentally placed Jones in its black ward, and he refused to be moved; he began to make the beds and empty the bedpans of black patients. Political pressures which resulted from Jones's actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards.
In the fall of 1973, Jones and the Planning Commission devised a plan to escape from the United States in the event of a government raid, and they began to develop a longer-term plan to relocate Peoples Temple. The group decided on Guyana as a favorable location, citing its recent revolution, socialist government, and the favorable reaction Jones received when he traveled there in 1963. In October, the group voted unanimously to set up an agricultural commune in Guyana. In December, Jones and James traveled to Guyana to find a suitable location.
Unable to find a location he deemed suitable for Peoples Temple, Jones became plagued by guilt for abandoning the civil rights struggle in Indiana. During the year of his absence, regular attendance at Peoples Temple declined to less than 100. Jones demanded the Peoples Temple send all its revenue to him in South America to support his efforts and the church went into debt to support his mission. In late 1963, Archie Ijames sent word that the Temple was about to collapse, and threatened to resign if Jones did not soon return. Jones reluctantly returned to Indiana.
Jones arrived in December 1963 to find Peoples Temple bitterly divided. Financial issues and low attendance forced Jones to sell the Peoples Temple church building and relocate to a smaller building nearby. To raise money, Jones briefly returned to the revival circuit, traveling and holding healing campaigns with Latter Rain groups. Possibly to distract Peoples Temple members from the issues facing their group, he told his Indiana congregation that the world would be engulfed by nuclear war on July 15, 1967, leading to a new socialist Eden on Earth, and that the Temple must move to Northern California for safety.
In 1965, Jones moved the Temple to California. The group established its headquarters in San Francisco, where he became heavily involved in political and charitable activity throughout the 1970s. Jones developed connections with prominent California politicians and was appointed as chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission in 1975. Beginning in the late 1960s, reports of abuse began to surface as Jones became increasingly vocal in his rejection of traditional Christianity and began promoting a form of anti-capitalism he called "Apostolic Socialism" and making claims of his own divinity. Jones became progressively more controlling of his followers in Peoples Temple, which at its peak had over 3,000 members. Jones's followers engaged in a communal lifestyle in which many turned over all their income and property to Jones and Peoples Temple who directed all aspects of community life.
During 1964, Jones made multiple trips to California to find a suitable location to relocate. In July 1965, Jones and his followers began moving to their new location in Redwood Valley, California, near the city of Ukiah. Russell Winberg, Peoples Temple's assistant pastor, strongly resisted Jones's efforts to move the congregation and warned members that Jones was abandoning Christianity. Winberg took over leadership of the Indianapolis church when Jones departed. About 140 of Jones's most loyal followers made the move to California, while the rest remained behind with Winberg.
In California, Jones took a job as a history and government teacher at an adult education school in Ukiah. Jones used his position to recruit for Peoples Temple, teaching his students the benefits of Marxism and lecturing on religion. Jones planted loyal members of Peoples Temple in the classes to help him with recruitment. Jones recruited 50 new members to Peoples Temple in the first few months. In 1967, Jones's followers coaxed another 75 members of the Indianapolis congregation to move to California.
In 1968, the Peoples Temple's California location was admitted to the Disciples of Christ. Jones began to use the denominational connection to promote Peoples Temple as part of the 1.5 million member denomination. He played up famous members of the Disciples, including Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, and misrepresented the nature of his position in the denomination. By 1969, Jones increased the membership in Peoples Temple in California to 300.
Jones grew the Temple by purposefully targeting other churches. In 1970, Jones and 150 of his followers took a trip to San Francisco's Missionary Baptist Church. Jones held a faith healing revival meeting wherein he impressed the crowd by claiming to heal a man of cancer; his followers later admitted to helping him stage the "healing". At the end of the event, he began attacking and condemning Baptist teachings and encouraging the members to abandon their church and join him.
The event was successful, and Jones recruited about 200 new members for Peoples Temple. In a less successful attempt in 1971, Jones and a large number of his followers visited the tomb and shrine erected for Father Divine shortly after his death. Jones confronted Divine's wife and claimed to be the reincarnation of Father Divine. At a banquet that evening, Jones's followers seized control of the event and Jones addressed Divine's followers, again claiming that he was Father Divine's successor. Divine's wife rose up and accused Jones of being the devil in disguise and demanded he leave. Jones managed to recruit only twelve followers through the event.
Jones began to receive negative press beginning in October 1971 when reporters covered one of Jones's divine healing services during a visit to his old church in Indianapolis. The news report led to an investigation by the Indiana State Psychology Board into Jones's healing practices in 1972. A doctor involved in the investigation accused Jones of "quackery" and challenged Jones to give tissue samples of the material he claimed fell off people when they were healed of cancer. The investigation caused alarm within the Temple.
Jones was fearful that his methods would be exposed by the investigation. In response, Jones announced he was terminating his ministry in Indiana because it was too far from California for him to attend to and downplayed his healing claims to the authorities. The issue only escalated however, and Lester Kinsolving ran a series of articles targeting Jones and Peoples Temple in the San Francisco Examiner in September 1972. The stories reported on Jones's claims of divinity and exposed purported miracles as a hoax.
In 1973, Ross Case, a former follower of Jones, began working with a group in Ukiah to investigate Peoples Temple. They uncovered a staged healing, the abusive treatment of a woman in the church, and evidence that Jones raped a male member of his congregation. Reports of Case's activity reached Jones, who became increasingly paranoid that the authorities were after him. Case reported his findings to the local police, but they took no action.
On December 13, 1973, Jones was arrested and charged with lewd conduct for allegedly masturbating in the presence of a male undercover LAPD vice officer in a movie theater restroom near Los Angeles's MacArthur Park. On December 20, 1973, the charge against Jones was dismissed, though the details of the dismissal are not clear. The court file was sealed, and the judge ordered that records of the arrest be destroyed.
Following a period of negative media publicity and reports of abuse at Peoples Temple, Jones ordered the construction of the Jonestown commune in Guyana in 1974 and convinced or compelled many of his followers to live there with him. Jones claimed that he was constructing a socialist paradise free from the oppression of the United States government. By 1978, reports surfaced of human rights abuses and accusations that people were being held in Jonestown against their will. U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation to the commune in November of that year to investigate these reports. While boarding a return flight with some former Temple members who wished to leave, Ryan and four others were murdered by gunmen from Jonestown. Jones then ordered a mass murder-suicide that claimed the lives of 909 commune members, 304 of them children; almost all of the members died by drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide.
By the summer of 1974, land and supplies were purchased in Guyana. Jones was put in charge of the project and oversaw the installation of a power generation station, clearance of fields for farming, and the construction of dormitories to prepare for the first settlers. In December 1974, the first group arrived in Guyana to start operating the commune that would become known as Jonestown.
Jones became active in San Francisco politics and was able to gain contact with prominent local and state politicians. Thanks to their growing numbers, Jones and Peoples Temple played an instrumental role in George Moscone's election as mayor in 1975. Moscone subsequently appointed Jones as the chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission.
Among the followers Jones took to Guyana was John Victor Stoen. John's birth certificate listed Timothy Stoen and Grace Stoen as his parents. Jones had a sexual relationship with Grace Stoen, and claimed he was the biological father of John. Grace Stoen left Peoples Temple in 1976, leaving her child behind. Jones ordered the child to be taken to Guyana in February 1977 to avoid a custody dispute with Grace. After Timothy Stoen also left Peoples Temple in June 1977, Jones kept the child at his own home in Jonestown.
Jones hosted local political figures at his San Francisco apartment for discussions. In September 1976, Assemblyman Willie Brown served as master of ceremonies at a large testimonial dinner for Jones attended by Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally. At that dinner, Willie Brown touted Jones as "what you should see every day when you look in the mirror" and said he was a combination of Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Mao. Harvey Milk spoke to audiences during political rallies held at the Temple, and he wrote to Jones after one such visit:
In January 1977, Jones travelled to Cuba with Carlton Goodlett in order to establish an import-export trading relation with Cuba for a San Francisco Bay Area company that he had founded. While visiting Goodlett's business contacts and touring schools and other facilities, Jones was annoyed that President Fidel Castro had not consented to see him, and remarked that Castro had to be living better than the people. While in Cuba, Jones visited the residence of Huey Newton in Havana for an hour, and they talked about Newton's family members who had attended the Peoples Temple. They also discussed his desire to return to the United States. Jones commented that Newton only "missed his luxurious apartment and his favorite bars in Oakland".
Jones left James to oversee Jonestown while he returned to the United States to continue his efforts to combat the negative press. He was largely unsuccessful and more stories of abuse in Peoples Temple were leaked to the public. In March 1977, Marshall Kilduff published a story in New West magazine exposing abuses at the Peoples Temple. The article included allegations by Temple defectors of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Jonestown had about 50 settlers at the start of 1977 who were expanding the commune, but it was not ready to handle a large influx of settlers. Bureaucratic requirements after Jones' arrival sapped labor resources for other needs. Buildings fell into disrepair and weeds encroached on fields. James warned Jones that the facilities could only support 200 people, but Jones believed the need to relocate was urgent and determined to move immediately. In May 1977, Jones and about 600 of his followers arrived in Jonestown; about 400 more followed in the subsequent months. Jones began moving the Temple's financial assets overseas and started to sell off property in the United States. The Peoples Temple had over $10 million ($42,707,304 in 2020) dollars in assets at the time. Despite the negative press prior to his departure, Jones was still well respected outside of Peoples Temple for setting up a racially integrated church which helped the disadvantaged; 68% of Jonestown residents were black.
The community members would remain at the pavilion throughout the drill, in which Jones told them that their community had been surrounded by agents who were about to destroy them. Jones led them in prayers, chanting, and singing to ward off the impending attack. Sometimes he would have his guards hide in the forest and shoot their firearms to simulate an attack. Jones's terrified followers were only told they were participating in a drill when the event was over. One drill, in September 1977, lasted for six days. Known as the 'Six Day Siege', this ordeal was used thereafter by Jones as a symbol of the community's indomitable spirit.
After learning that he might have a lung infection in 1978, Jones told his followers that he actually had lung cancer in an effort to gain their compassion and increase their level of support. Jones was said to be abusing valium, quaaludes, stimulants, and barbiturates. Audio recordings of meetings held in Jonestown in 1978 attest to the commune leader's deteriorating health. Jones complained of high blood pressure that he had had since the early 1950s, small strokes, weight loss of 30 to 40 pounds in the last two weeks of Jonestown, temporary blindness, convulsions, and in late October to early November 1978 while he was ill in his cabin, grotesque swelling of the extremities.
In the immediate aftermath, rumors arose that surviving members of Peoples Temple in San Francisco were organizing hit squads to target critics and enemies of the Church. Law enforcement intervened to protect the media and other figures who were purported to be targeted. Peoples Temple's San Francisco headquarters was besieged by the media, angry protestors, and family members of the dead. James, who returned from Jonestown to take leadership in San Francisco earlier in 1978, was left to address the public. At first, he denied that Jones had any connection to the deaths and alleged the events were a plot by enemies of the Church, but later acknowledged the truth.
The situation at Jonestown was deteriorating in 1978. The community was exhausted and overworked. Most were required to perform manual labor from early morning until evening. Loudspeakers were installed around Jonestown and sermons were played on a constant loop for the entire community to listen to. Jones began to propagate his belief in what he termed "Translation" once his followers settled in Jonestown, claiming that he and his followers would all die and live blissfully together in the afterlife. Meals were meager and workers were often hungry. After spending all day working, the community gathered each evening at the central pavilion to listen to Jones preach. His sermons generally lasted for several hours; most of the community was sleep deprived. According to Teri Buford O'Shea, one of the few escapees from Jonestown, sleep deprivation was one of the most effective methods of controlling Jones's followers. O'Shea said, "One time Jim said to me... 'Let's keep them poor and tired, because if they're poor they can't escape and if they're tired they can't make plans.'" O'Shea also reported that Jones would maintain his control of Peoples Temple members using punishments such as keeping them in a coffin-shaped box several feet underground, while other members were assigned to constantly berate and reprimand them for their perceived slights against the cult.
In the autumn of 1977, Timothy Stoen and other Temple defectors formed a "Concerned Relatives" group because they had family members in Jonestown who were not being permitted to return to the United States. Stoen traveled to Washington, D.C., in January 1978 to visit with State Department officials and members of Congress, and wrote a white paper detailing his grievances against Jones and the Temple and to attempt to recover his son. His efforts aroused the curiosity of California Congressman Leo Ryan, who wrote a letter on Stoen's behalf to Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. The Concerned Relatives began a legal battle with the Temple over the custody of Stoen's son.
Most of Jones's political allies broke ties after his departure, though some did not. Willie Brown spoke out against the Temple's purported enemies at a rally that was attended by Harvey Milk and Assemblyman Art Agnos. Mayor Moscone's office issued a press release saying Jones had broken no laws. On April 11, 1978, the Concerned Relatives distributed a packet of documents, letters, and affidavits to the Peoples Temple, members of the press, and members of Congress which they titled an "Accusation of Human Rights Violations by Rev. James Warren Jones".
The drills served to keep the members of Jonestown fearful of venturing outside of the commune. Following two visits by United States Embassy personnel to check on the situation at Jonestown, and an IRS investigation in early 1978, Jones became increasingly convinced that the attack he feared was imminent. In one 1978 White Night drill, Jones told his followers he was going to distribute poison for everyone to drink in an act of suicide. A batch of fruit punch was served to everyone in the pavilion who sat by weeping and waiting for their death. After some time passed, Jones informed his followers that it was only a drill and there was not any poison in their drink. Through the White Nights, Jones convinced his followers that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was actively working to destroy their community and conditioned them to accept suicide as a means of escape.
With that reasoning, Jones and several members argued the group should commit "revolutionary suicide". Jones recorded the entire death ritual on audio tape. One Temple member, Christine Miller, dissented toward the beginning of the tape. Cries and screams of children and adults were also easily heard on the tape recording made. The Temple had received monthly half-pound shipments of cyanide since 1976 after Jones obtained a jeweler's license to buy the chemical, purportedly to clean gold. In May 1978, a Temple doctor wrote a memo to Jones asking permission to test cyanide on Jonestown's pigs, as their metabolism was close to that of human beings. A drink mixture of Flavor Aid and cyanide was handed out to the members of the community to drink. Those who refused to drink were injected with cyanide via syringe. The crowd was also surrounded by armed guards, offering members the basic dilemma of death by poison or death by a guard's hand.
In June 1978, Deborah Layton, a Peoples Temple member who escaped Jonestown six months before the massacre, provided the group with a further affidavit detailing crimes by the Temple and substandard living conditions in Jonestown. Layton's affidavit stated that Jonestown residents were being deliberately undernourished: "There was rice for breakfast, rice water soup for lunch, and rice and beans for dinner. On Sunday, we each received an egg and a cookie. Two or three times a week we had vegetables. Some very weak and elderly members received one egg per day." Jonestown stood on poor soil, so it was not self-sufficient and had to import large quantities of commodities such as wheat. However, Layton noted that Jones did not rely on the same diet as his followers. Instead, he consumed more substantial meals that frequently contained meat while "claiming problems with his blood sugar". He also permitted a few chosen members of his inner circle to eat from his personal supplies, and they appeared to be in much better health than the other residents.
Jones attempted to negotiate for his commune to resettle in the Soviet Union. In October 1978, Feodor Timofeyev, Soviet consul to Guyana, visited Jonestown for two days and gave a speech. Jim Jones stated beforehand, "For many years, we have let our sympathies be quite publicly known, that the United States government was not our mother, but that the Soviet Union was our spiritual motherland." Timofeyev declared Jonestown in "harmony of theory" with "Marx, Engels, Lenin" and the "practical implementation of... some fundamental features of this theory," and personally thanked Jim Jones.
The majority of the community members were minors or the elderly, and the fewer people of working age found it difficult to keep up with the workload required to support the community. Healthcare, education, and food rations were all in limited supply and the situation was worsening. Jones's orders were increasingly erratic. He was seen staggering and urinating in public, but this was due to prostatitis for a short time towards the end of Jonestown in late October 1978, not the entirety of Jonestown. He found it difficult to walk without assistance around this time, but it cleared up by Leo Ryan's visit.
In November 1978, Congressman Ryan led a fact-finding mission to Jonestown to investigate allegations of human-rights abuses. His delegation included relatives of Temple members, an NBC camera crew, and reporters for several newspapers. The group arrived in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown on November 15.
Later the same day, November 18, 1978, Jones received word that his security guards failed to kill all of Ryan's party. Jones concluded the escapees would soon inform the United States of the attack and they would send the military to seize Jonestown. Jones called the entire community to the central pavilion. He informed the community that Ryan was dead and it was only a matter of time before military commandos descended on their commune and killed them all.
The Guyanese military arrived in Jonestown to find the dead. The United States military organized an airlift to bring the remains back to the United States to be buried. Jones was found dead on the stage of the central pavilion; he was resting on a pillow near his deck chair with a gunshot wound to his head. Jones's body was later moved for examination and embalming. The official autopsy conducted by Guyanese coroner Cyril Mootoo in December 1978 confirmed Jones's cause of death as suicide. His son Stephan speculated that his father may have directed someone else to shoot him. The autopsy showed high levels of the barbiturate pentobarbital in Jones' body, which may have been lethal to humans who had not developed physiological tolerance. Jones's body was cremated and his remains were scattered in the Atlantic Ocean.
The mass murder-suicide resulted in the deaths of 909 inhabitants of Jonestown, 276 of them children, mostly in and around the central pavilion. This resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until the attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington. Another four members residing in Georgetown died. The FBI later recovered the 45-minute audio recording of the mass poisoning in progress; the recording became known as the "Death Tape".
In a signed note found at the time of her death, Marceline directed that Jones's assets be given to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Peoples Temple secretary had already made arrangements for $7.3 million ($29 million in 2020 dollars) in Temple funds to be transferred to the Soviet Embassy in Guyana. Most of the money was held in foreign bank accounts and was transferred electronically, but $680,000 ($2,904,097 in 2020 dollars) was held in cash and three couriers were hired to transport the cash to the Soviets. The couriers were arrested before reaching their destination and claimed to have hidden most of the money.
Jones was ordained as a Disciples minister at a time when the requirements for ordination varied greatly and Disciples membership was open to any church. In both 1974 and 1977 the Disciples leadership received allegations of abuse at Peoples Temple. They conducted investigations at the time, but they found no evidence of wrongdoing. Disciples of Christ found Peoples Temple to be "an exemplary Christian ministry overcoming human differences and dedicated to human services." Peoples Temple contributed $1.1 million ($4,697,803 in 2020) dollars to the denomination between 1966 and 1977. Jones and Peoples Temple remained part of the Disciples until the Jonestown massacre.
In early 1952, Jones announced to his wife and her family that he would become a Methodist minister, believing the church was ready to "put real socialism into practice." Jones was surprised when a Methodist district superintendent helped him get a start in the church, even though he knew Jones to be a communist.
In the summer of 1952, Jones was hired as student pastor to the children at the Sommerset Southside Methodist Church, where he launched a project to create a playground that would be open to children of all races. Jones continued to visit and speak at Pentecostal churches while serving as Methodist student pastor. In early 1954 Jones was dismissed from his position in the Methodist Church, ostensibly for stealing church funds, though he later claimed he left the church because its leaders forbade him from integrating blacks into his congregation.