The Jonestown Massacre

What could cause over nine hundred people to commit suicide together? In the United States’ biggest non-natural loss of human lives before 9/11, almost every member of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana died after consuming a poisonous drink. This was a fitting end to lives that were brutally controlled by the cult’s leader, Jim Jones. The Jonestown incident should be remembered as a mass murder at the hands of Jones.
At first, Jim Jones seemed anything but harmful. While living in Indianapolis in the 1950s, Jones opened the church that would later be called the Peoples Temple. The church was considered progressive due to its ethnically diverse congregation. In the 1960s, Jones and his wife moved to Ukiah, California, with over one hundred
Like the members of the Peoples Temple, which was originally part of the Disciples of Christ, the victims in California belonged to a religious group. Commonly called Heaven’s Gate, this group was founded in 1972 by Marshall H. Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, who thought they were the divine figures mentioned in Revelation 11. Heaven’s Gate members believed in UFOs and supported self-renunciation. Like Peoples Temple members, who were often lied to by Jim Jones, members of Heaven’s Gate were misinformed. They believed that a spaceship was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp. If they committed suicide, they could enter a higher existence on the spaceship. In three separate waves, all 39 members died by drinking phenobarbital mixed with vodka, a method similar to that used in
Police searching the site found illegal weapons. Only two people were charged for the events of November 18. Temple member Larry Layton was sentenced to life in prison in the United States for his connections to the murders of the visitors, but he was released in 2002. In Guyana, Charles Beikman spent five years in prison after pleading guilty to the attempted murder of a child. Over four hundred of the bodies retrieved from Jonestown were unidentified. They were buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, where many temple members were from. In 2008, a stone memorial was put up for the victims. Pastor John V Moore, who lost two daughters and a grandson in Jonestown, gave a sermon about it on November 26. “The death of hundreds and the pain and suffering of hundreds of others is tragedy….To see Jonestown as an isolated event unrelated to our society portends greater