Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

♪♪

[gunfire]

[static]

It does not even register to me that it's guns going off.

[gunfire]

I see Ryan running. All of a sudden, I'm hit.

[gunshot]

[shattering glass]

[people screaming in terror]

I looked out the window.

I said they're killing everyone, they're killing everyone.

And I turned to Larry and he shot me twice...

[gunshots]

...point blank, one in each side, once in the leg.

And then Larry shot Monica twice in the back.

[gunshots]

I think he had one bullet left,

and he took and pointed it right into Dale Park's face...

[gun cocks]

...and pulled the trigger and the gun misfired.

And so, we had the fight for the gun.

♪♪

I'm lying under the plane, pretending I'm dead.

[gunfire]

And I look down at the right side of my body

and my whole right leg is just blown up.

And I realize that I'm dying.

[suspenseful music]

[Vernon Gosney] The adrenaline was running. I felt no pain.

I was in survival mode and I overpowered Larry Layton.

I went out through the pilot's door.

I could still hear the gunshots,

and I ran to the side of the runway until I collapsed.

And I just started calling for help.

♪♪

[Guinn] There are other people grievously wounded.

Some younger people

who were part of the group run into the jungle.

Other people are slightly wounded,

trying to hide in the grass.

The gunmen make certain that Leo Ryan is dead.

♪♪

They could have continued

hunting for the wounded, finished them off,

but instead they get on the tractor and return to Jonestown.

[Speier] Eventually, Guyanese locals get to the airstrip

and place me on the side of the airstrip.

Unfortunately, I am placed on top of an ant hill.

So all of a sudden, I have these ants crawling over my body,

and I oftentimes say, you know,

you don't sweat the small stuff when you're dying.

♪♪

[Gosney] I don't recall how big the group of assassins were.

I don't know, four, five, six.

They were all people I knew for many years.

All the assassins,

including Larry as well.

I knew everyone.

♪♪

[Guinn] There are five dead on the tarmac.

The five dead include Ryan,

members of the media, and one woman

who had been at Jonestown and was trying to escape.

[air siren]

Meanwhile, back at Jonestown,

a voice comes on the speaker

saying everyone needs to come to the pavilion.

Jim Jones realizes it's no longer a matter of if, but when.

He's not gonna be able to go back to the States.

What was going to be left to him

was to tell his followers that now is the time.

We're committing a revolutionary act.

[Stephan Jones] The congressman's dead. They've killed people.

So, my dad at this point, he knows he's gone.

So he knows he's going out

and now he-- he doesn't want to go alone.

[Carter] As people were walking up from the cottages,

it was very quiet, it was very somber.

I see Jones in this conversation,

and it's very animated,

and it's obvious that something is going on.

[Stephan Jones] He's saying that there are people

coming right now to attack us.

They're going to take us out. This is our final stand.

[Guinn] Maria Katsaris comes up,

whispers something in Jones' ear.

[Carter] Maria Katsaris was one of Jones' true quote unquote lieutenants,

one of the people that was closest to Jim Jones.

Jim looks at her and he goes, "Is it supposed to be quick?"

And she goes, "Yes, it's supposed to be quick."

And he said, "Does it taste okay?"

She goes, "Yes, it's supposed to taste good."

♪♪

[Guinn] Somewhere in Jonestown, human guinea pigs were testing cyanide

that was mixed in a vat of Flavor Aid.

♪♪

Flavor Aid was a cheap Kool-Aid knockoff.

And I'm thinking, oh, my God, how do I get out of here?

How do I get Gloria and Malcolm out of here with me?

[suspenseful music]

♪♪

[Guinn] As people are gathering in the pavilion,

Jones took the stage,

and we don't have to wonder what was said that day.

There was a tape running.

It's known now as the death tape.

[congregants cheering and applauding]

♪♪

[congregants cheering]

[congregants cheering and applauding]

[suspenseful music]

♪♪

On November 18th, my brothers went to go see a movie.

I stayed at the compound.

♪♪

Early evening, I was called to the radio room by Sharon Amos.

♪♪

I never liked Sharon. She was a fanatic.

[radio static]

My father was on the radio, and he said,

"Jimmy, we're visiting Mr. Frazier," which was a code.

Then he said, the avenging angels have visited Leo Ryan

and we need you to avenge our actions.

In code, to break that up,

was we're gonna commit revolutionary suicide.

The congressman has been killed.

We need you to avenge our deaths,

so kill anybody in town and kill yourself.

♪♪

I know when I was in Jonestown

and they were having these white night drills

and long meetings about dying for the cause,

I never took it serious.

I never thought we were gonna die for the cause.

I broke out of code.

"Dad, we're not going to kill ourselves.

The people in Jonestown can't die."

But, "No, no, no, Jim."

Meanwhile, I'm like, "Go get my brothers."

So, they went and got them and Sharon Amos is like,

"Oh, we gotta figure out how to kill ourselves.

Do we have piano wire? Do we have, you know, thin wire?"

She's kinda tweaking out.

[Stephan Jones] We quickly made our way back

the headquarters in Georgetown.

I knew that things were far worse

than they had ever been before

and I'm trying to manage the situation.

I told someone, do not let Sharon Amos out of your sight.

I knew she had to be watched

and that she was volatile and capable of terrible things.

♪♪

[Jim Jones Jr.] We ran over to the U.S. Embassy

and we're talking to a little squawk box,

and they won't let us in.

We're saying, "Send us into Jonestown.

"We can stop it. We don't know what's going on,

but you need to send us out there right now."

[Guinn] And they're saying, surely the embassy, if nothing else,

we can get a helicopter.

If we can get back to Jonestown before anything happens,

we can stop it.

And they're trying to call in, you know,

"This is an emergency, it's--" "No, we're closed."

You know, "It's Saturday."

♪♪

[Jim Jones Jr.] So, we go back to the house.

Everyone's screaming and yelling.

Sharon Amos had tooken her kids...

♪♪

...into the bathroom with a guy named Chuck Brightman

and he took our niece inside, Stephanie,

and cut the children's throats.

♪♪

[Stephan Jones] What I came upon is not something

that I want to describe, but it was horrible.

♪♪

[Jim Jones Jr.] You could still hear people gurgling.

Our friend Calvin Douglas busted into the bathroom

and pulled Stephanie out.

She still has the scar.

We called the police.

And the police came.

By then, the gurgling had stopped.

[Guinn] Back in Jonestown, Jim Jones is on the stage.

[Jim Jones] I don't know who fired the shot.

I don't know who killed the congressman.

But as far as I'm concerned, I killed him.

You understand what I'm saying?

I killed him.

He had no business coming. I told him not to come.

And as soon as the word gets out,

the army's gonna be parachuting in,

they're gonna come for us,

they're gonna kill us all,

they're gonna get our kids.

We can't let that happen.

We need to commit revolutionary suicide.

[Jim Jones] We can't go back.

They won't leave us alone.

They're now going back to tell more lies,

which means more congressmen.

And there's no way, no way we can survive. Hmm?

[Mary Maaga] As they are in the pavilion getting ready to commit suicide,

a woman by the name of Christine Miller begins to question

what the logic is behind letting 14 people who defect

cause the deaths of over 1,000 people.

[congregants responding]

[child wails]

I'm completely schizophrenic at this time,

because one part of me is saying,

everybody's gonna die, you're going to die.

And another part of me is saying,

this doesn't make any sense.

You don't kill everybody.

[suspenseful music]

[suspenseful music]

[Jim Jones] Everybody dies.

[congregants respond]

I haven't seen anybody yet that didn't die.

And I'd like to choose my own kind of death for a change.

I'm tired of being tormented to hell, that's what I'm tired of.

[congregants respond]

Tired of it.

[congregants applaud]

[Carter] By this time, the pavilion is filled up with people.

There's armed guards around the pavilion.

But the energy there was just...

Um, I don't even know how to describe it. Defeated?

It was kind of like people had been crushed.

♪♪

At this point, I'm kind of intellectual.

It's like, well, how is this gonna come down?

How am I gonna die?

What's gonna happen?

Because I'm not gonna go down without a fight...

when there's a tap on my shoulder.

He's been tapped on the shoulder by Maria Katsaris.

So is his brother, Mike.

"Jim has a job for you. Come with us."

And they're taken to a back cabin

and there are three suitcases.

She goes, "We have suitcases of money

"that need to be delivered

"to the Russian Embassy in Georgetown.

Will you take them?"

She gave us each a gun.

She said, "If you're successful,

"take what you need to live on and have a good life,

"but under no circumstances are you to be taken alive.

You're to kill yourselves if you're caught."

As to why he wanted it to go to the Russians,

I don't know if it was Jim Jones' final "eff you"

to the United States government.

I don't know.

But I said yes.

And in my mind, I was buying time,

'cause I couldn't catch up.

I could not catch up with what was going on.

[child crying, chatter]

[Jim Jones] Who wants to go with their child

has a right to go with their child.

I think it's humane.

I want to see you go, though.

I don't want to see you go through this hell no more.

No more, no more, no more.

[child wails]

[Mary Maaga] As the vats of cyanide-laced Flavor Aid are brought out,

they are instructed to give the drink to the children first

because, of course, once the children have been poisoned,

how can any adult live

after having watched their own children die?

[Jim Jones] Hurry, my children. Hurry. All I think...

Let's not fall into the hands of the enemy.

Hurry, my children.

They have syringes,

and they're gonna squirt this stuff

in the babies' mouths.

[Jim Jones] No more pain now.

No more pain. No more pain.

[suspenseful music]

♪♪

Meanwhile, the adults are about to have their turn.

People are lining up and some of them refused to do it,

and they're held down and forcibly injected.

And we know this because later with the bodies,

some of them had abscesses on their neck, on their arms,

on their skull, anywhere a needle could get jammed.

That's where the needles went in.

And everybody else is lined up to die.

♪♪

[Carter] So while Maria's getting the gold, I went to get water.

You don't go into the jungle without water.

As I'm approaching the back of the pavilion,

it's when people started dying,

and I cannot go through the rest of it today,

I just can't, but needless to say,

my wife and son were dying.

[somber music]

♪♪

It was just darkness.

There was no light anywhere in my life.

As I'm walking back to Jones' cottage,

Carolyn Layton was coming up and she said,

"What's wrong, Tim? Why are you crying?"

All I could say is, "They've murdered my son,

they've murdered my son, they've murdered my son."

♪♪

[Guinn] Jones says it's going to be easy.

But death by cyanide is one of the worst ways to go possible.

It keeps your body from absorbing oxygen.

You suffocate slowly.

[congregants screaming and crying]

The sounds I was hearing were screaming.

People were screaming in fear, in pain, in death.

There was nothing joyous going on.

There was no grand hallelujah for Jim Jones.

Marceline Jones was screaming,

"Stop this! Stop this! Stop this!"

People were being massacred.

[Jim Jones] Mother, please, please, please.

Don't-- Don't do this. Don't do this.

[Stephan Jones] People have painted this picture that my mother was up there

doling out the poison, but that runs contrary

to what I know about my mother.

She came from a stand by and slightly behind your man era,

but she was also very strong-willed,

and my father ordered her restrained

and she struggled until the last child died.

♪♪

At that point in time, I just wanted the nightmare to stop.

I wanted to die.

And there was a voice in my head that said, you cannot die,

you cannot die, you must go on, you cannot die.

[suspenseful music]

We went back to the cottages, got the suitcases,

and left Jonestown.

♪♪

At this point in time,

I didn't even know if I wanted to live.

But I knew I wanted nothing to do with Jim Jones,

I wanted nothing to do with Russians,

I wanted nothing to do with money.

So I said, we can't do this.

We need to dump the suitcases.

♪♪

And there's a part of me that doesn't even believe

that I just saw what I saw.

[Jim Jones] One thousand people say

we don't like the way the world is.

[congregants respond]

Take our life from us.

We laid it down, we got tired.

[congregants respond]

We didn't commit suicide,

we committed an act of revolutionary suicide

protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.

♪♪

[tape recorder whirs, clicks off]

[somber music]

♪♪

[Guinn] There's been a monsoon the day before.

Steam is rising up off the ground. It's like fog.

♪♪

And finally, the fog, the mist is clearing a little bit.

♪♪

And what they see, they find almost impossible to describe

over the radio to the superiors waiting back in Georgetown.

They start describing, there's just heaps of them.

And, of course, in Georgetown, "Heaps of what?"

♪♪

"Dead people."

[male reporter] As soon as these pictures from Jonestown

cleared our newsroom, everybody,

even a lot of hardened news people,

reacted in horror and disbelief.

The word on everybody's lips was "shades of Auschwitz."

[helicopter flying overhead]

As you can see, bodies are strewn all over the place.

♪♪

[male reporter] The bodies seemed awful and orderly,

not flung about like corpses after a battle

but neat, hand-in-hand sometimes,

arms about each other's shoulders.

[female reporter] The death ritual was methodical.

Some of the syringes contained poison,

the rest had tranquilizers.

Marcia, you have more.Yeah, of course, there's a lot we don't know,

but this we do know-- the Reverend Jim Jones,

the founder of Peoples Temple, is dead,

and he died as a result of a gunshot wound to the head,

not of poisoning.

[Guinn] Jim Jones they find on the pavilion,

bloated, dead, a gunshot wound to the head.

You can suspect that Jim Jones,

having seen the terrible deaths his followers were suffering,

at the last minute didn't want it for himself.

♪♪

[female reporter] Police believe that most of the people went willingly,

but others were forced by armed guards.

When the poison was being passed out,

men were around this auditorium area here with crossbows.

They were acting as guards.

[male reporter] Clayton, 28, of Oakland, is one of four known eyewitnesses

to the suicide-murders.

He got away after more than 700 had died

by slipping past a guard.

A lot of people didn't want to die.

They was just sitting there. Frightened. Afraid.

In one case, she struggled pretty hard,

'cause she didn't want to die.

[male reporter] And how did they kill her?

They injected her in the arm.

[somber music]

♪♪

[Guinn] The soldiers, they're asked, can you count 'em?

And they try.

♪♪

[male reporter] Four hundred suicides and killings,

one of the most astonishing stories of our time,

perhaps of any time.

♪♪

[Guinn] Well, there's at least

900-something people in Jonestown.

That must mean that there's 500 people who are still alive.

Maybe they've run into the jungle.

♪♪

[Leslie Wagner-Wilson] The morning that we left, my plan was to escape,

come back and get my sister and brother and my niece and nephew.

So, once we realized that the tragedy happened,

I'm just praying that one of my family members

ran into the jungle, if not all of them.

♪♪

But the body count was wrong from the beginning.

♪♪

[male reporter] Good evening.

The searching American soldiers

have finished counting the bodies in Jonestown, Guyana.

Nine-hundred-ten died in the poison ritual

of the Peoples Temple last week.

[male reporter] Why in the world would so many people

agree to kill themselves?

What kind of a leader

could order mass suicide and be obeyed?

[male reporter] The mass suicides happened

in this heavily forested area,

down there, in the compound.

[Carter] The narrative is mass suicide.

Sheep. Drinking the Kool-Aid.

Voluntarily drinking the Kool-Aid.

And yet, a lot of people were murdered.

And if you've just seen your child murdered,

besides wanting to kill the mother[bleep] that did it,

would you want to live?

The answer is probably no.

If you believe that the only choice you have

is dying by drinking a poison or getting shot,

are you committing suicide

or are you taking the easiest way out

'cause you know that you're gonna die anyway?

The bottom line is, what happened

in Jonestown, Guyana, was murder.

[somber music]

[Leslie Wagner-Wilson] I lost my entire immediate family in Jonestown.

I lost my mother, Inez, who was 50.

I lost my brother, Mark, who was 16.

I lost my sister, Michelle, who was 24.

I lost Joe, who was 24.

Yeah, I lost them all at-- in one moment.

♪♪

[Grace Stoen] They didn't want me to keep my hopes up for-- for John Victor,

but finally one of the survivors said

that they had personally seen John and that he had evidently

been taken to-- he was in Jim's cabin

and he had been injected and they actually saw.

So I knew, for sure...

♪♪

...that he was deceased, so...

♪♪

I was shot once in each side, my diaphragm, my stomach.

My liver. My pancreas was removed.

When I came out of ICU,

I found out what had happened in Jonestown,

'cause I did not know.

The psychiatrist just came into my room

and opened the paper like this,

to show me the pictures of the dead bodies.

[camera shutter clicking]

♪♪

I think at the moment when I knew that my son was dead

and being asked to describe his clothing,

I think my mind just snapped.

I just think I just had a mental breakdown.

I, uh, I didn't function really well for a very long time.

♪♪

[male reporter] How are you gonna handle this nightmare?

♪♪

I don't know.

I don't know.

It's a nightmare.

♪♪

[Guinn] For the survivors, things were only gonna get worse.

[male reporter] The cultists try to forget,

but all know they can never escape

the stigma of what happened at Jonestown.

♪♪

[camera shutter clicking]

My name is Tim Carter, but I-- I really don't want to talk right now.

[male reporter] Tim, please, this is very important.

I lost two friends here, too.

I lost my wife and my son.

I don't want to talk right now.

We get to the airport, and all of a sudden,

there's just reporters everywhere.

[camera shutter clicking]

So that was the beginning

of 36 hours straight of media interviews.

[Carter] But the very first reporter said,

this is going on the evening national news

saying that you guys are hitmen.

You can respond if you want or not.

♪♪

There was no place for us to go or hide.

This is private.

After everyone died, the media was everywhere.

It wasn't mass suicide, you know?

It was mass murder.

I wanted to stop it.

All of those people are my life.

All my 19 years, I've known no one else, right?

What am I gonna do?

You see what's happened when a few people tried to leave.

I didn't know what could happen.

I'm doing the best I can.

There were many people within the community that I loved.

We had just lost everything. We were devastated.

I know I felt complicit. I felt terrified,

horrified, grief stricken, hopeless, and ashamed.

I can almost say that I hate this man

for doing what he's done,

because he has destroyed everything I've lived for.

[male reporter] Moments after the latest 17 survivors

arrived at Kennedy Airport last night,

FBI agents escorted them onto buses

for the most intense questioning yet of returning survivors.

Included in the group,

the Reverend Jim Jones' adopted son, Jim.

Um, he... To me, he was sick.

I'm not no medical person, but if I was to look at him,

I would look at him and say, that's a sick man.

♪♪

[Laura Johnston Kohl] We arrived penniless and hungry

and, you know, traumatized by our whole experience,

and then they kept up the questioning.

[Guinn] They were suspected of being part of the plot.

People all think they're nuts, they might be murderers.

They're all scarred in that way.

♪♪

[Jim Jones Jr.] We were followed.

I would go to work, I'd have a plainclothes car

following me.

I think some of that was like,

what the hell's going on with him? What is he gonna do?

[Gosney] After I escaped Jonestown,

I was still in Jonestown in my mind.

There was a lot of paranoia.

I saw a man from the back with black hair,

I thought it was Jim Jones and I would start running.

♪♪

One of the hardest things to deal with, among many,

were Kool-Aid jokes, Jonestown jokes.

I was treated by people that thought I was very stupid.

We all felt like we had been made fools of, in a way,

because we had believed so totally

in what Jim Jones was saying.

♪♪

[Speier] Jim Jones was a cult leader who was maniacal

and who was allowed to pursue this horrific cause

for his personal aggrandizement.

♪♪

He had used the word "church"

in sanitizing his grotesque behavior.

♪♪

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Jim went into the deep, dark recesses of his mind

and what came back out was scary. It was terrible.

♪♪

[Guinn] Jones put himself in the position

where no one could tell him no.

He was enabled.

This is what demagogues do.

And so, gradually,

the worst part of his nature took over

until finally it consumed him and, sadly,

it consumed all the people who had believed in him.

♪♪

[Jim Jones Jr.] I felt it was my responsibility

to attend as many funerals as possible.

Especially for my friends, friends of mine.

♪♪

One of my friends, I went to her funeral,

and I remember the mother coming out of the hallway

with a .38 caliber pistol and pointing it at me

and saying why are you alive when my daughter's not?

And then everyone grabbing her,

and-- and me kind of sitting there going,

pull the trigger.

You know? It was...

At that-- At that point, I didn't want to live.

[hammering]

[male reporter] Little has changed in the settlement itself.

There are police guards patrolling

to keep visitors away.

The chair in which Jim Jones sat

when he called on his people to die is still there,

along with the benches where they sat

and listened and obeyed.

[somber music]

♪♪

My name is Larry Layton.

[shutter clicking]

♪♪

[male reporter] Most of the Temple survivors and defectors

who returned from Guyana have settled in San Francisco.

The Peoples Temple building was sold.

It is now a Korean Presbyterian Church.

Doctors say that almost all the former Temple members

live with anxiety, fear, and guilt.

I think that they will be able to build a life for themselves.

The fears, the memories, and some of the scars,

for many of them, it'll-- it'll be a lifelong process

trying to deal with that.

[Stephan Jones] For many years, I wasn't healing.

I was battling demons on a daily basis,

using everything I could to quiet the noise inside me.

And around that time, my daughter was born.

That little baby cracked my heart open

in a way that pushed me toward life

instead of choosing the easy way out.

♪♪

[Jim Jones Jr.] I went by James for a long time,

and it wasn't until many years after

that I even went by Jim Jones again.

♪♪

After 40 years,

I've lived two lifetimes outside Peoples Temple.

I'm grateful that, um, I survived.

♪♪

[Speier] I was hospitalized for two months.

I had a lot of time to think.

I was so badly wounded that they thought

they were gonna have to amputate my arm and/or my leg.

I had gas gangrene through my body.

♪♪

I just made a commitment to myself

that I did not want to spend the rest of my life

as a victim or survivor of Guyana,

and I made a commitment then to spend the rest of my life

in public service, to continue Congressman Ryan's legacy.

♪♪

[Leslie Wagner-Wilson] When I came back to the United States, I was shattered.

Came back with survivor's guilt and I wasn't diagnosed.

Every day I was like, why did I survive?

Why was I allowed to survive?

Inside, I was so broken.

I didn't start healing until 20 years later.

♪♪

My son, Jakari, calls me his, you know, warrior queen.

He understands the sacrifice that I made.

He knows every step of the way, I'm there.

♪♪

I'm just not going anywhere.

And I know a lot of it is because of Jonestown.

♪♪

[Gosney] I call Leslie Wagner my, uh, my hero

because she left with her son.

I see her as a person of great courage,

that she was able to do that,

she was able to get her son out,

and she was able to risk death.

♪♪

I've come to peace with my journey,

except around my son.

That will be something that's always with me.

I still struggle to forgive myself.

♪♪

[male reporter] The former Temple members try to comfort each other

and their Temple past is their bond.

Whatever their thoughts about Jim Jones,

they are all trying to rebuild shattered lives.

♪♪

[Stephan Jones] All of us, if we allow ourselves

to step into that story,

there's something there we can use.

♪♪

And I pray that anyone watching this

can take away from it whatever is valuable to them

as a way of honoring those we lost.

♪♪

[Wagner-Wilson] There are many lessons to be learned from Jonestown.

I look at the world today,

I look at the environment that we're in,

and I see this-- this parallel.

And I look at how Peoples Temple began.

It began in a time when there was a socio-political change,

but it was also based on fear.

We are in the same type of environment, if not worse,

that could generate something

much, much more dangerous than Jonestown.

It could happen again.

♪♪

[Jim Jones Jr.] I put the blame for what happened in Jonestown

on my father.

♪♪

But I don't think the story is Jim Jones.

I think the story is the people

who followed Jim Jones to-- to Jonestown.

♪♪

You know, I always said, I go, how appropriately named

was Peoples Temple?

Because it was really the people that made that church.

Some of the best years of my life were in Peoples Temple.

It wasn't Peoples Temple, it was a sense of community.

A sense of belonging.

A sense of doing the right thing when no one was looking.

[Stoen] It's just really too bad

that we couldn't have gone down in history

as this great, wonderful humanitarian group that we were.

We could've been a force to be reckoned with.

♪♪

[Carter] I wish that there was an easy answer

around Peoples Temple and Jonestown.

But there are no easy answers.

Anybody that has taken the time

to get to know the story has-- has discovered that,

oh, my gosh, these were, like, real folks, you know?

♪♪

Nothing special about us, nothing unspecial about us.

Maybe even like me.

And I might have actually joined something like that.

[somber music]

♪♪