Jonestown Massacre

In this episode, the hosts discuss the Jonestown Massacre, which occurred in the 1970s and was the largest loss of civilian life until 9/11. They explore the background of Jim Jones, the man behind the massacre, including his troubled childhood and the formation of his church, the People's Temple. Jones gained followers through fake miracles and instilled fear in them, eventually leading them to move to Guyana and establish Jonestown. The hosts also mention Jones' drug abuse and controlling behavior. Before this episode gets started today, I want to give you a trigger warning. This episode contains content such as mass suicide, torture, negligence, drugs, mental illness. If any of these topics make you uncomfortable, please skip this episode for this week. Thank you. I hope you enjoy. Welcome back, everyone. It's Diana. And Alayna. And you are listening to Dead Man Tells No Tales. Okay. And this week, we are going to cover the Jonestown Massacre. So, Alayna, what's the Jonestown Massacre? Yeah. So, the Jonestown Massacre, it happened around 1970s, and it was the biggest loss of civilian life up until 2001, 9-11. Oh. Basically, to know everything that went down, we need to go to the man that caused it all. And his name is Jim Jones. Ooh, I think I've actually heard of him. Really? Yeah. All right. So, Jim Jones was born May 18th, 1931. Two parents were James Jones and Lunetta Jones. James was actually a veteran of World War I, and he wasn't working. He was a victim of a gas attack in the war, so he was living from disability checks. He was very emotionally absent in his childhood and rarely showed any affection to Jim. So, like, daddy issues? Yeah. And Lunetta, she was a free spirit and did not care for religion, which was very uncommon at the time. It was like, oh, this weird woman doesn't have religion. It was very uncommon. And she didn't have any desire to have children originally, but she became pregnant with Jim Warren Jones. Wasn't that, like, strange back in the day because the women were just like, I don't get to have children? Yeah. It was very uncommon, so she had the religion and she didn't want to have kids on top of it. And Jim described his parents as loveless. His parents were never around, and he was always home alone, and his parents did not seem to care about him. Oh, so do you think this had, like, a big impact on the whole story? Definitely, that impacted a lot. So, in high school, Jim was known to wear his Sunday best every single day. He would wear a white pressed shirt and nice slacks. This was very uncommon because back in the day, people saved their best for only Sunday. Why do you think he did that? I don't know. Maybe he just wanted to look presentable for school every day, wanted to stand out. He would play—he played some sports, but he was not outstanding in any specific sport. But he was remembered by his classmates for being very good at forming teams and being a leader. And this is very important and later in the story, so keep this in mind. Jim would explore religion. He didn't have, really, family religion because his mom was not religious. And usually, you would just follow your family religion. He started to explore religions. He would attend different churches and carried a Bible with him everywhere. And would go out in the middle of the street and would preach the Bible, and he was very passionate. When he was 17, he got a job at a hospital. And at a hospital, he worked as an assistant, cleaned up vomit, handled deceased, disposed of limbs. Even though this may sound like an odd job, he really loved his job, and he considered getting into medicine. Interesting. Yeah. In 1948, Jim met a nursing student in the hospital, and her name was Marceline. Who? No. Marceline, they ended up dating, and she described him as very caring for others. He was a very loving person. She truly believed that he believed that everyone was equal, wanted to dedicate his life to others. So, in June of 1949, they got married, and they've only been dating around a year at this point. Marceline believed that he was Christian originally, but after they were married, Jim would tell her that he didn't believe in her God. And they would get into very heated arguments about it, trying to understand him and where he was coming from. That's kind of hard to wrap your head around, because of how he would preach and stuff, and how he was switching up. Yeah, I think it's very odd, especially, basically, kind of catfished, or like, he didn't outright say that, but he didn't correct her if she thought that. And just waited until after. Yeah. So, Marceline then took him to some African American churches, and Jim enjoyed these churches a lot. In his words, they weren't as strict as white churches were. Everyone was dancing, and it was just a very warm environment. Jim opened up a church in March 2nd, 1954, and it was kind of a blend of Christianity with modern spirituality and social justice. Instead of having separate churches, he had a blended, which was very uncommon, because he lived in Indiana. It was very segregated. The more people attended these churches, he needed a new place to host people, because it was getting so crowded in the run-down, like, it was a low-income area. And he needed money to get a new church. He's not going to outright ask people for money. Jim decided he was going to perform miracles. Oh. Jim would call random people out in the crowd. He would say, your headache is gone. Then, he would yell and say these people were healed. More people heard about this, and they were very curious. They came, and then Jim would pass around collection plates, making more and more money. Did these miracles actually work? No, they did not. They just did this as kind of a performance act. Would the people, like, tell everyone that the miracles didn't work? Since he was so just forward, and they just, they believed him. Did more people believe that he was actually doing miracles, or that he was just pretending? It's kind of a mixture of things. I think more people were, like, curious as time went on, eventually saying that he can cure cancer. That is a big jump. More people came, obviously. And this new church was able to hold 700 people. And the church originally was called Community Unity, but he changed the name of the church to the People's Temple, because the church already had Temple Garden to the name. Throughout this church, he would present himself as the voice of reason. So he was pretty well known and a pretty big person. Yeah, he started getting very well known for his miracles. That was a big thing that everyone was like, I can't believe this. So while all this was going on, it was not all sunshine and rainbows. Jim would instill fear into his followers, saying racists were trying to shut them down and threatening to harm them and were going to shoot him. Yeah, that's what I was kind of getting from this. I feel like he has more followers because they're just scared of him and scared of how much power he has. Yeah. Because he carries himself with so much confidence. Yes. To the point where, like, people are scared to doubt him. Mm-hmm. Yeah. A saying that he said and his church members said, it was, if you don't agree with us, we'll convince you. And if we can't convince you, you're the enemy. Which is, like, very, like, telling. Jim, when he was doing his miracles, he would read from index cards and announce this person has cancer that they were unaware of. And then a quote-unquote temple nurse would go into the crowd and swab the cheek of the person. But while the nurse was doing this, they would put a little bit of chicken liver in their mouth, and that would cause the person to cough it up, and the nurse would present it and say, this is the cancer, you're cured. And that was kind of all the tricks. Like, there was many more tricks, but this was the big one that stood out of how he got people. How did they get the liver in their mouth? So while they were swabbing the cheek, they had the chicken liver kind of clutched in their hand, and while they were swabbing it, like, when their hand was in their mouth, they would drop it. And in 1971, Jim started to regularly abuse drugs to provide boosts of energy, and at night, he would take something to help him sleep. It was really easy to get access to these drugs because he had followers that could prescribe it to him. He would become very short-tempered around, and his eyes became red and watery, which is why you see him with dark sunglasses in a lot of photographs. That is kind of around when he became more controlling and paranoid and aggressive, and he said that he couldn't take off his sunglasses because his holy powers were so great that if the members looked at him directly without the sunglasses, they would die. And the members, they believed it. How old was he at this point? At this point, I think 35. I'm not too sure. And he never got remarried or anything? No, he never divorced Marceline, and he never remarried. So what was she doing at this point? Um, I think, well, she was still bedridden, so I don't think she could do too much. She was just, she would support the church, and her job in the church was to set up sermons, organize which Sunday's going to preach what, be in charge of the money and all the receptionists. And she knew everything that he was doing with the drugs and stuff? I think she might have known about the drugs. No one else knew. And he would constantly tell his followers that there was some paradise awaiting, and so after searching for this place, they landed on Guana in South America, and this was a really good place because it was very isolated. There is lots of forests, and it has a really small population. Oh. And so after less than a year of planning, the crew of People Temple, they decided to negotiate with the Guana government for over 3,800 acres of jungle. And they agreed to this? Mm-hmm. And this was 250 kilometers west of the capital, and that was Georgetown. And eventually they would bribe Guana's customs to import firearms and drugs into Jonestown. What were all the firearms for? Well, you'll find out soon. So September 12, 1975, Jones was named one of the top clergymen in the nation in America by Religion in American Life. Now, by this point, he was very popular. He was widely known, especially in California. July 6, 1776, Jones obtained a jeweler's license, and this license allowed him to import monthly shipments of cyanide into Jonestown. Oh, and can you tell me what that was for? So cyanide, that is very poisonous. It's a very poisonous drug. Yeah. And so he's importing a lot of it into Jonestown. Did this make people suspicious of him? No one knew this was going on at the time because Jonestown did not have anyone in there yet. They were still preparing. And because he was such a big icon, people trusted him to come to his Jonestown? Yes, people did. And they were very excited for Jonestown to finally open. And they were giving up all their land and everything, wherever they lived, to go and live in Jonestown? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So June 5, 1977, with more media investigations in San Francisco, Jones and several hundred temple members permanently relocated to Jonestown. So the media started kind of getting more suspicious of him, not because of the cyanide or anything. No one knew about that, but just because victims that were starting to come out and the media, he was starting to get persecuted, and that's his worst fear. Yeah. So he and his followers all permanently went to Jonestown. Mm-hmm. To, like, get rid of all the suspicions? Yeah, just to escape them. He left California the same night he read an article that would be published containing abuse allegations by former temple members. Jonestown, a lot more people came than originally was. Planned? Planned, yeah. Eventually 900 people, even though all the money he had, it was really expensive to get all these lodges. So there was only, like, four or five lodges for 900 people. So was it, like, really crowded? It was super crowded, and Jones still had his own lodge that had showers, refrigerators, food, light, very nice stuff. Meanwhile, the people in other lodges, it was very crowded. There wasn't refrigerators. It got to the point where the followers were eating PB&J sandwiches every single day, and they were running out of clean water. Did any of them try to leave? It was really hard to leave. You could leave. To leave, you would need to pay a sum of money, and they're doing all this labor, but they're not getting paid for it. When they arrived into Jonestown, they get their passports taken away. They get all cash that they brought into Jonestown taken away. They get most of their items are all taken away except clothes. The audacity. Yeah, they're stranded. I mean, they could send out letters to their families, but they were all read, and if it said any slightly negative thing about Jonestown, then it wouldn't be sent. It would be read in front of the whole town, and they would have to rewrite it again, saying only positive things. What are some of the labor that they had to do? So the labor they had to do was building more lodges or huts because there's still people coming in. He didn't stop people from coming in, and so they would be constantly doing long labors, chores, just so many things. Meanwhile, Jones, he wasn't really doing anything. He could sit in his lodge, and he had an intercom system to talk to the people, so he wouldn't even have to leave his bedroom. So how would he see what everyone was doing? He had people watch. He would have reports coming in, and in his lodge he had tons of mistresses that he would sleep with as well. What were some of the punishments that they had? So the punishments for if you acted up, you would get violently beaten. Like in front of everyone? Public beatings. There was also a chamber, and it was a dark box, and you'd be locked in there for hours on end. Depending on your punishment, it could go from like one, two days. It really just locked stimulation for your brain, and it was a form of torture nonetheless. Did any of the temple members ever question his actions? So the temple members, there was some temple members that could raise flags, but really if you even questioned him, dozens of people were still kind of brainwashed and believed that he was a literal god, that they wouldn't say anything because they would get beaten, and they did. And they didn't have any way to contact the outside world because he was the only news source they had. So he would make up there was nuke threats, or the government was going to come and kill everyone. And another form of punishment as well was he would threaten this. I don't have any information if he actually did so, but since they were in a jungle, like jungle surrounded them, he said if there was any really bad people, they would tie them up and they would leave them in the forest for tigers. Wow. Yeah. And if you tried to escape with not paying and just running out of Jonestown, well, he would say you can run, but it's thick forest and you would die trying. So he purposely chose a spot like that? Yeah, very isolated. So September 1st, 1977, Temple Defectors, these were people outside of the temple, and they really worried for the safety of their family and friends for just disappearing with no explanation. And so September 1st, 1977, Jones staged a sniper attempt on himself. On himself? Yeah, so he was doing a sermon, and he was constantly telling his followers that the government was after him. So he pretended that there was a sniper attempt on his life, and this was all staged. This began the series referred to as White Nights. What does that stand for? So White Nights, they were basically nights where he would have, he would already have everyone come in every night, but there would be certain nights where no one would know but him, but he would all say, you know, just drink this. It has cyanide in it or poisoning in it. And that's what he would bring in with the shipping? Yeah, but it didn't actually have poisoning in it. It was just a loyalty test. And he was preparing for, if they ever needed to, a mass suicide. So he would pressure them and say, you know, just drink this, just drink this. And they thought they were going to die, but a lot of people did drink it, and it was just a loyalty test. And these were referred to as White Nights. White Nights. These happened every so often. Another thing, too, is drunk town people. Did the people, like, start to trust you because of the White Nights? This just gave fear, if anything, and some people were so, you know, realized they were being so abused that they just thought this was a way of... Living with their religion? Yeah, to prove they're religious. Every night there would be a mass sermon, and so he would go and he would preach for hours and hours on end, and this could go all the way until 2 a.m. And everyone would have to be there, children, mothers, fathers. And if they fell asleep, they would, you know, be brought up on stage and whipped in front of everyone falling asleep. And these sermons would go on for hours late into the next morning, and then when they would finally get called off, they would have two hours of sleep, and they would have to get up and do long hours of labor, and this would repeat. And what was the point of those sermons? The point of the sermons, just to preach. He preached about everything, and he would perform so-called miracles, and, yeah, he preached for hours and hours on end, and people are just so, they were malnourished, tired. It's getting so bad, and there's, I mean, you have to realize that there's families there. There's babies there. And, like, everyone has PB&Js, and it's just, it's horrible. Did he have anything special for children? To my knowledge, a lot, some of the moms were, yeah, some of the women, they didn't get, like, they had a couple PB&Js, but it was, they didn't get a lot of food for the babies. On December 2nd, 1977, Grace and Timothy Stillen and other temple defectors started meeting with relatives of Jonestown. They formed a group referred to the Conserved Relatives. The Conserved Relatives wrote a series of letters to Washington, D.C., and they traveled to Washington, D.C., to convince the FBI to open an investigation on Jonestown. January 1978, Timothy Stillen and the group catch the ear of United States Congressman Leo Ryan. He decided that he wants to go on an investigation, so they started the investigation on Jonestown. For how long did Jonestown happen until people started investigating about it? Jonestown at this point, hmm. How old was it? Four years before they started investigating. Wow. There is still a stream of people coming into Jonestown, and just, they're running out of food. So August 8th, 1978, Jones, he was told he could possibly have a lung infection, and then Jones... I'm going to see him and try to clean that up. And then Jones falsely told his followers that he had lung cancer. Jones abused injectable LSD, Valium, Qualidods, and stimulants for years. There's audio tapes, because he would record every sermon he's ever had, so there's hundreds of tapes. But one of those tapes, it was found he would complain about high blood pressure, rapid weight loss, insomnia, temporary blindness, and small strokes. And his mental health started to rapidly decline. He started to have increased paranoia and megalomania. And megalomania, megalomania is the obsession with the exercising of power. The delusion belief that he is important, powerful, or super famous. That feels like a freak show. And October 10th, 1978, At this point, Jonestown has reached new heights of 1,000 members. November 14th, 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan and a delegation of 18 people decided it was time to fly into Jonestown. Jones was very unwilling to allow entry into Jonestown at the beginning, but he was informed that Ryan would visit regardless of whether he wanted to or not. Jones said okay, and he arrived at the Port Kinamuna Airstrip. So this airstrip was 10 kilometers from Jonestown, and it's very popular with the association of Jonestown. So keep this airstrip in mind. But Jones only allowed Ryan and three others to come in, and then he let the rest of the delegation in after sunset. In Jonestown, Ryan interviewed 60 town members, and they showed no desire to leave Jonestown. He eventually went up in front of everyone in Jonestown and said, you have a very warm community here. I love what you guys are all doing. But as he was eventually going to wrap up and leave, 14 members came up to him discreetly, like flipped him notes or whispered like, please get us out of here. We're being abused or we're being tortured. But Ryan still noted that 14 out of 900 people was a small percent, and even 300 out of 900 people wanted to leave. It wouldn't be a huge deal, but that's what he told Jones, probably just to not escalate the situation. The first plane that they came in was originally a 19-seated plane. The U.S. Embassy arranged for a second plane, a six-seat, to come and chase the following people. Most of the delegation and the defectors left on the truck, heading to the airstrip. Meanwhile, Congressman Ryan and one other remained in Jonestown in case there were any more defectors. So just as the smaller plane was about to take off and as the bigger plane was boarding, the passengers were shot by Larry Layton, and he wounded two passengers before he was disarmed. One of the people hired by Jonestown, yeah. So while the larger plane was boarding, everything was going so fast, but a tractor with a trailer attached to it arrived at the airstrip, and this had the Red Brigade security squad, and they opened fire at the aircraft. A few seconds of this was caught on video. NBC cameraman Bob Brown, before he was fatally shot. Two other members of the delegation and one church defector were killed just within a minute of the shooting. Congressman Ryan was killed. He was shot more than 20 times. Nine others were injured and left behind on the airstrip. There was a family that we're leading to, and the kids watched their mom die in front of them. The dad was wounded, but the dad told the kids to go into the forest, but not too far. We're back at Jonestown in what are called the death tapes. So the death tapes were the last sermons or the last conversations. So the death tapes were the last tapes ever taken of Jonestown, of Jones talking to his followers. Like his sermons? It was like a talk about what they were going to do, but you'll find out what happened. Okay. So Jones said on the death tapes, he's like, I know one of the people on that plane is going to shoot the pilot. I know that. I didn't plan it, but I know it's going to happen. And this death tape was 44 minutes long. The first, like, massacre kind of that happened then? This was just the start of the killing. So this was just the start of his day. So in the 44-minute consent, it was a meeting held in Jonestown. He urged the temple members to commit mass group suicide. He said, you can go down in history, choose your own way, refuse capitalism and support socialism, and many other things. One temple member in the tape suggested going on an airlift to Russia, but Jones dismissed this as it was not possible, even though in his previous sermons, he said if they ever were in trouble, he claimed he was talking to the Russian government, that if anything ever happened, that he could get them out of there. Yeah. The Red Brigade returns to confirm Brian had been killed. Adults lined up to drink this mixture. Was this the end of another night, or was it just something else? So this mixture was in a large metal barrel, and this had thallium, chlorhydrate, pomegranate, and cyanide. But this taste was covered up with grape-flavored Kool-Aid. So when they started drinking this, adults lined up to drink this mixture, and even the infants had this injected in their mouths by syringe without the needle. But anyone who did not want to drink the mixture, they were held down by members, and they were forcefully given it through a needle. And he said to die with a degree of dignity, and he encouraged everyone to drink the poison. During this whole tape, you could hear the whole drink before and them drinking the Kool-Aid. This is all recorded. And during when everyone is drinking this, he said death is a million more times preferable to ten more days of this life. In the background, you can hear children crying and screaming, and it's very disturbing. Some temple members thought this was another loyalty death. So within about 30 to 40 minutes of drinking, people died. They were dropping dead. Jim Jones, he did not have the guts to drink this himself. He shot himself in his left temple, and he was the only one besides his mistress to die in Jonestown by a shooting, which is very telling that he will not die by his own medicine. 918 people died that day between Jonestown and the airstrip. There was very few survivors. So the kids in the forest I mentioned earlier, when America came into Jonestown after seeing what happened, because Guam government eventually checked up on this and found everyone. FBI agents flew into America. The dad of those children, he did survive. And so they did a mass search in the forest to find those kids. Eventually, they did. And they are still alive to this day. And I believe the dad is too. So they did indeed survive. I think there's like maybe three or five. There's very few survivors. Out of 1,000? Out of, yeah. That's crazy. And this was the biggest deliberate loss of American life until attacks on 9-11. Did we ever find out what happened to Jones' first wife? Jones' first wife, they never got divorced. I believe she died there too because, yeah, he brought his family over, so they died there too. 400 people, their identities were never found out because this was due to how humid it is in Guam, and this fed up the decomposing process. So there is actually a cemetery in Indiana, I believe. Or, no, I believe it's in California. It's a marked grave for all the Jonestown people that were not identified yet. And this was the story of the Jonestown Massacre. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed this story. And that you can come back next week for our next episode. Yes, you can listen to the death tape online. I did. Just be prepared. It is very disturbing. And you can also find pictures, too, if you want to see what Jonestown looked like for yourself. But also just be cautious. Yeah, I hope you guys have a good day. Bye-bye.