‘It wasn’t suicide … they were murdered’: inside the Jonestown cult massacre

In the world of true crime content, Jonestown is an infamous – if often misunderstood – Ur-text: arguably the most well-known, well-publicized and, ultimately, lethal of cults. The Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, is a case study of the worst possible outcome of megalomania, isolation, pressure, sustained coercive control and idealism curdled into paranoia. Jim Jones’s orders on 18 November 1978, are so famous that the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” has entered the American vernacular as a shorthand for buying wholesale into a dubious belief system – though as several survivors testify in a new documentary series, the phrase is misleading and offensive; the deaths of more than 900 people, including over 300 children, from cyanide poisoning was contemporarily characterized as a mass suicide, but the tragedy of Jonestown is more accurately described as a mass murder.

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Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown, a new National Geographic and Hulu documentary series on the four days surrounding the massacre, is an entirely archival – including an hour of as-yet-unseen footage of Jonestown taped around the massacre – and first-person account of the events that led to the deaths of, in total, 918 people. There were 909 at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, informally known as Jonestown, in the remote jungle of north-western Guyana; two at a Peoples Temple outpost in Georgetown, the South American country’s capital; and five, including the US congressman Leo Ryan and NBC News reporter Don Harris, shot on the airstrip at Port Kaituma as they were attempting to leave with a group of defectors. The three-episode series serves as “a historical record”, the series director Marian Mohamed told the Guardian, particularly for “a generation of people who don’t know about the Jonestown massacre”.

The series delves into what attracted people to the Peoples Temple, founded by Jones in 1954 in Indianapolis as a Christian church that mixed elements of religion with socialism and the civil rights movement. The church, with Jones as its unquestioned head, relocated to San Francisco and flourished in the counterculture of the 1960s, preaching a mix of new-age idealism, race-blind utopia and religious communalism. Jones was well-connected in San Francisco; archival footage in the first episode shows him hosting such political figures as Angela Davis and Harvey Milk at the Peoples Temple. Jones’s followers “weren’t crazy people”, said Mohamed. “In order to do justice to this story, and the victims and the survivors, you have to tell the wider story of why. Why did you follow this man to Jonestown?”

The answer, according to several former members and Jonestown survivors who participate in the series, was a mix of idealism and control. “We wanted everyone to be able to live peacefully and in harmony together,” said Yulanda Williams, who joined the Peoples Temple in 1969, at age 12. As a Black child in San Francisco, Williams was drawn to the church’s youthful, multiracial membership. Jones played the part of healer, at least at the beginning. “He made you feel like you mattered,” she said. “You felt like he was personally speaking to you, and to your heart, and to your mind.”

At Jones’s urging, Williams moved to Guyana as a teenager in 1976, in hopes of having a place “where we could exist with one another and without the involvement of law enforcement or any type of politics”. The pitch of moving to Guyana, where Jones began leasing land in 1974, seemed sublime: a lush paradise of fresh fruit and racial equality (never mind the locals), guaranteed private housing, an off-grid life built by the community without oversight. “Supposedly, we would have more freedom,” said Williams. “And it was everything but that.”

As soon as she got there, Williams realized: “We were sold a bill of goods that did not even exist.” There were no private homes. Instead, Jones deliberately separated families into men’s and women’s dormitories, and assigned children to surrogate parents, in order to weaken relationships. There was no fresh fruit; most people survived on limited, imported rations. Williams mainly subsisted on rice pudding, coconuts and peanut butter on bread, and required immediate medical attention when she returned to the US after just three months, on the promise to a drug-addled Jones that she would shut down the Temple’s critics.

And all decisions were made by Jones, who controlled all movement, activities and communications, and would incessantly address inhabitants on the settlement’s speaker system. “We had to listen to his voice 24/7. We did not have any access to newspapers, phones. All of the mail was censored,” said Williams. “You were just cut off from the rest of the world.”

Many residents were unaware that their loved ones were trying to get them home. Back in the US, Jones was under increasing press scrutiny for abuse, financial mismanagement and tax evasion. The pressure from families and a handful of dissidents, alleging that Jones would not let people leave Jonestown, led to an investigative delegation headed by Ryan, including a number of reporters and concerned relatives, to visit Jonestown. “I had premonitions about this trip,” said Jackie Speier, Ryan’s then-28-year-old legal aide. “I thought that what the defectors were telling us was more truthful than not.”

After days of tense negotiations, the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project greeted the group with chilling enthusiasm; the series includes footage of a dinner in the main pavilion, in which members aggressively cheer Ryan when he says it’s “clear” some people think Jonestown is the best thing that ever happened to them. Jones, glassy-eyed and tight-jawed, presides over the proceedings with palpable tension. Off-camera, a few members slipped the reporters notes, asking for help. “It just confirmed what we had feared,” said Speier.

The series proceeds briskly and chronologically, as the situation in Jonestown deteriorated over the course of the next day; Jones, perpetually surrounded by armed guards, let the delegation leave with some defectors, only to send gunmen to the airstrip, where they opened fire on the boarding prop planes. Ryan, Harris, the NBC cameraman Robert Brown, San Francisco Examiner photographer Gregory Robinson, and defector Patricia Parks were killed; Speier was shot in the arm and leg, and along with other survivors, went over 22 hours without medical attention.

Meanwhile, Jones called everyone to the pavilion in Jonestown, claimed there was no hope of survival, and urged his followers, to “cross over” through death. The series includes audio of Jones’s coercion, including protestations from followers. Some consumed poison under duress, others by force; retired general David Netterville, who helped lead the investigation and retrieval effort in the aftermath, attests to seeing bodies with forcible injections of cyanide. “I hate the references that somehow they did this voluntarily, that there was suicide – it wasn’t. They were murdered,” said Speier.

Those that survived Jonestown, either because they were not there that day or managed to leave before the poisoning began, faced intense stigma upon return to the US, including reporters asking whether they would have consumed poison had they been there. “When they returned home, they were looked at as freaks and murderers,” said Mohamed. Society is still quick to victim-blame, “but I think we are starting to look at victims a lot more empathetically than we used to”.

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Speier, who went on to be elected to Ryan’s congressional seat in California, sees a larger failure of government to intervene when Jones got too powerful and a “toxic stew” of megalomania. “Our state department failed American citizens abroad,” said Speier. “Local elected officials in San Francisco who were made aware of complaints against the Peoples Temple chose to ignore them, because Jim Jones was politically connected, because he had 2,500 members of his congregation that could go walk precincts for candidates.

“I hope that people in government recognize they have an obligation to protect American citizens abroad, to protect local citizens in communities where these cults may be cropping up,” she added, and urged young people – the type Jones preyed on for his church, the kind still preyed on by other more recent cults or groups with coercive control – to be aware that no amount of abuse is warranted. “That is not a church. It’s a cult. It’s illegal, and get the hell out of there.”

• Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown is now available on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ in the UK and Australia.