30 years after, the legacy of Jonestown

Ordinary people joined the temple
Because her husband was an attorney whose skills could be better used elsewhere, they were permitted to leave after a few weeks. And months before the horrific end, Williams and her family cut ties with the temple.

Eventually, Williams joined the San Francisco Police Department. But she told no one about her temple involvement for a decade because she feared the loss of her job. When she finally confided to a deputy chief, "He said, 'No way,' because everybody had this stereotype" about the kinds of people who were members of Peoples Temple, she recalled.

In fact, these were mostly ordinary people who joined the temple because they wanted to help their fellow man and be part of something larger than themselves.

Williams thrived as a policewoman. The department needed officers to connect with gang members and other juveniles in trouble with the law. "I told my story to young people," said Williams. "They were amazed because they never imagined anyone could beat these types of odds."

An impending tour of the settlement
On the morning of Nov. 18, Ryan's party was about to tour the settlement, and investigate whether its inhabitants truly were free to go.

Leslie Wilson, wife of security chief Joe Wilson, took her 3-year-old son Jakari to the kitchen building where they met seven others who had endured enough of Jonestown's Spartan life and Jones' faked sieges and suicide rehearsals. The group told fellow settlers they were going on a picnic — but they just kept on moving through the jungle, with Jakari slung in a sheet on Wilson's back.

"I was so scared I was shaking in my tennis shoes," she recalled. "I was waiting for a gunshot and a bullet and me dropping."

Concealed by thick undergrowth, the escapees passed so close to the Jonestown guard shack that they could hear voices. Trudging 35 miles along railroad tracks, they arrived sweaty and dirty that night in the town of Matthews Ridge.

Wilson, who lost her mother, brother, sister and husband that Saturday, would be consumed with survivor's guilt.

On Mother's Day, two years after Jonestown, she thought about what it must have been like for her mother to see two of her children die. She put a pistol to her head.

She did not shoot. She had to live, she decided, for the sake of her son.

After a bout with drug abuse, she twice married and bore two more children.

Now divorced, she goes by her married name Leslie Cathey and works in the health care industry. She finally has found forgiveness, even for Jones, but she cannot forget. "I pray my family did not think I left them," she said. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about it."

A frantic search for family
While a temple dump truck ferried the Ryan party and 15 grim-faced defectors toward the Port Kaituma airstrip six miles away, we were unaware that anyone had escaped. But at Jonestown's front gate, Joe Wilson inspected the crowded truck bed, looking for his wife and toddler.

We made it safely to the dirt strip. But then, a tractor with a trailer full of temple gunmen — Wilson among them — soon bore down on us. Gunfire exploded as we boarded two small planes.

Ryan died. So did defector Patricia Parks, NBC newsmen Don Harris and Bob Brown, and photographer Greg Robinson, my colleague at the San Francisco Examiner.

I was shot in the left forearm and wrist. That night those of us who were ambulatory took turns tending to the most severely wounded in a tent by the airstrip: The NBC soundman. A temple defector who someday would become a policeman. A concerned relative whose sister was a Jones mistress. And Ryan aide Jackie Speier, who would go on to a long career as a California lawmaker before being elected to his seat in Congress this year.

Some survivors had fled into the jungle but most took refuge in a cramped rum shop, fearful the assassins would return. "You're gonna see the worst carnage of your life at Jonestown," predicted one of the defectors the next morning. "It's called 'revolutionary suicide.'"

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