30 years after, the legacy of Jonestown

By TIM REITERMAN

Associated Press Writer

updated 5:54 p.m. ET Nov. 16, 2008

Dark clouds tumbled overhead on that afternoon 30 years ago, in the last hours of the congressman's mission deep in the jungle of Guyana.

With a small entourage, Rep. Leo Ryan had come to investigate the remote agricultural settlement built by a California-based church. But while he was there, more than a dozen people had stepped forward: We want to return to the United States, they said fearfully.

Suddenly a powerful wind tore through the central pavilion, riffling pages of my notebook, and the skies dumped torrents that bowed plantain fronds. People scrambled for cover as I interviewed the founder of Peoples Temple.

"I feel sorry that we are being destroyed from within," intoned the Rev. Jim Jones, stunned that members of his flock wanted to abandon the place he called the Promised Land.

'I felt evil itself'
That freakish storm and the mood seemed ominous — and not just to me. "I felt evil itself blow into Jonestown when that storm hit," recalls Tim Carter, one of the few settlers to survive that day.

Within hours, Carter would see his wife and son die of cyanide poisoning, two of the more than 900 people Jones led in a murder and suicide ritual of epic proportions.

And I would be wounded when a team of temple assassins unleashed a fusillade that killed Ryan — the first congressman slain in the line of duty — and four others, including three newsmen.

By their wiles or happenstance, scores of temple members escaped the events of Nov. 18, 1978. Among the survivors: Members of the group's basketball team who were playing in Georgetown, 150 miles away. A woman who escaped Jonestown with her young son, hours before the carnage. A family that had left Peoples Temple months before.

Some of the survivors would commit suicide, die at the hands of others or fall victim to drugs. But many more moved on to new careers, spouses and even churches.

Kiichiro Sato / AP Leslie Wilson, now Leslie Cathey, walked out of Jonestown 30 years ago with her baby on her back on the final day.

With the passage of time, differences between temple outsiders and insiders, temple defectors and loyalists have faded. They share painful memories, guilt-filled feelings, loss of loved ones and psychological scars from an event that has come to epitomize the ultimate power of a charismatic leader over his followers.

Tim Carter was spared to carry out one last mission for the temple. Almost 30 years after that horrible day, we spoke for the first time about one of the worst American tragedies of the last century.

"We are inextricably linked," Carter said. "What you experienced at the airstrip is what I experienced at Jonestown. Somebody was trying to kill us. And my family was killed as well. I cannot describe the agony, terror and horror of what that was."

Sprang from the heartland
Peoples Temple sprang from the heartland in the 1950s. Jones built an interracial congregation in Indianapolis through passionate Pentecostal preaching and courageous calls for racial equality. Moving his flock to California, the minister transformed his church into a leftist social movement with programs for the poor.

Political work by his followers elevated Jones to prominence in liberal Democratic circles by the late 1970s. He was head of San Francisco's public housing commission when media scrutiny and legal problems spurred his retreat to Jonestown for what would be his last stand.

Yulanda Williams was about 12 when she began attending temple services in San Francisco with her parents. Her father, lured by Jones' reputation as a Christian prophet with healing powers, believed that the minister helped him recover from a heart attack.

In 1977, as news media were beginning to investigate disciplinary thrashings and other abuse in the temple, Jones summoned Williams and her husband to Guyana.

Upon arrival in Jonestown, the couple felt deceived. It was far from the paradise Jones described. People were packed into metal-roofed cabins, sleeping on bunks without mattresses and using outhouses with newsprint for toilet paper. There were armed guards, and Jones warned that deserters would encounter venomous snakes and hostile natives.

The preacher, who once charmed U.S. politicians and met with future first lady Rosalynn Carter, had turned into a pill-popping dictator who sadistically presided over harsh discipline. "I felt like I was in a concentration camp and he was Hitler," Williams said.

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