Parents' Guide to Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown

DEATH IN THE JUNGLE begins at the end of the story, as news reports begin to emerge about the mass suicide of as many as 900 American adults and children at a place called Jonestown in Guyana. American and Guyanese soldiers start the grim task of collecting bodies made unrecognizable by lying out in the heat and rain, sometimes having to scoop up remains with snow shovels. Jim Jones' own story begins in a small conservative farm town in Indiana. As a teen he was deeply affected by the racism he witnessed around him and began to reach out and engage with his Black neighbors, speaking out about racial equality. By the early 1950s, he was married and the founder of his own church in a poor section of Indianapolis, where he opened a soup kitchen and offered employment assistance. But he also began to use drugs and preach about nuclear war and the need to relocate to a safe place where church members could live as a community. That place was Redwood City in Northern California and eventually San Francisco. He now questioned the Bible, made corporal punishment for even minor infractions the norm, and spoke about members committing revolutionary suicide. In 1974, he sent a small group of members to Guyana to establish Jonestown, a new community that would literally have to be carved out of the jungle. In 1977, when a local San Francisco magazine began looking into exactly what was going on at the People's Temple, Jones ordered a mass exodus to Guyana and asked his closest advisers to research ways to kill 900 people. At Jonestown, evenings after long hard workdays were filled with Jones' drug-fueled paranoid rantings. In 1978, a group of concerned relatives asked California congressman Leo Ryan to investigate. When Ryan, a small group of relatives, reporters, and an NBC news crew arrived in Jonestown, they were welcomed, but when they tried to leave, they were ambushed at the local airport. At Jonestown, a vat filled with grape-flavored cyanide, Valium, and chloral hydrate was brought out. Children were the first to be killed, and anyone who refused was either forcibly injected or shot. Only a few managed to escape.