Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle 1x4

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

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

3. I looked out the window.

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

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

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

7. And then Larry shot Monica twice in the back.

8. I think he had one bullet left,

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

10. and pulled the trigger and the gun misfired.

11. And so, we had the fight for the gun.

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

13. And I look down at the right side of my body

14. and my whole right leg is just blown up.

15. And I realize that I'm dying.

16. The adrenaline was running. I felt no pain.

17. I was in survival mode and I overpowered Larry Layton.

18. I went out through the pilot's door.

19. I could still hear the gunshots,

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

21. And I just started calling for help.

22. There are other people grievously wounded.

23. Some younger people

24. who were part of the group run into the jungle.

25. Other people are slightly wounded,

26. trying to hide in the grass.

27. The gunmen make certain that Leo Ryan is dead.

28. They could have continued

29. hunting for the wounded, finished them off,

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

31. Eventually, Guyanese locals get to the airstrip

32. and place me on the side of the airstrip.

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

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

35. and I oftentimes say, you know,

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

37. I don't recall how big the group of assassins were.

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

39. They were all people I knew for many years.

40. All the assassins,

41. including Larry as well.

42. I knew everyone.

43. There are five dead on the tarmac.

44. The five dead include Ryan,

45. members of the media, and one woman

46. who had been at Jonestown and was trying to escape.

47. Meanwhile, back at Jonestown,

48. a voice comes on the speaker

49. saying everyone needs to come to the pavilion.

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

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

52. What was going to be left to him

53. was to tell his followers that now is the time.

54. We're committing a revolutionary act.

55. The congressman's dead. They've killed people.

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

57. So he knows he's going out

58. and now he— he doesn't want to go alone.

59. As people were walking up from the cottages,

60. it was very quiet, it was very somber.

61. I see Jones in this conversation,

62. and it's very animated,

63. and it's obvious that something is going on.

64. He's saying that there are people

65. coming right now to attack us.

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

67. Maria Katsaris comes up,

68. whispers something in Jones' ear.

69. Maria Katsaris was one of Jones' true quote unquote lieutenants,

70. one of the people that was closest to Jim Jones.

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

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

73. And he said, "Does it taste okay?"

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

75. Somewhere in Jonestown, human guinea pigs were testing cyanide

76. that was mixed in a vat of Flavor Aid.

77. Flavor Aid was a cheap Kool-Aid knockoff.

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

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

80. As people are gathering in the pavilion,

81. Jones took the stage,

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

83. There was a tape running.

84. It's known now as the death tape.

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

86. I stayed at the compound.

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

88. I never liked Sharon. She was a fanatic.

89. My father was on the radio, and he said,

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

91. Then he said, the avenging angels have visited Leo Ryan

92. and we need you to avenge our actions.

93. In code, to break that up,

94. was we're gonna commit revolutionary suicide.

95. The congressman has been killed.

96. We need you to avenge our deaths,

97. so kill anybody in town and kill yourself.

98. I know when I was in Jonestown

99. and they were having these white night drills

100. and long meetings about dying for the cause,

101. I never took it serious.

102. I never thought we were gonna die for the cause.

103. I broke out of code.

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

105. The people in Jonestown can't die."

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

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

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

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

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

111. She's kinda tweaking out.

112. We quickly made our way back

113. the headquarters in Georgetown.

114. I knew that things were far worse

115. than they had ever been before

116. and I'm trying to manage the situation.

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

118. I knew she had to be watched

119. and that she was volatile and capable of terrible things.

120. We ran over to the U.S. Embassy

121. and we're talking to a little squawk box,

122. and they won't let us in.

123. We're saying, "Send us into Jonestown.

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

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

126. And they're saying, surely the embassy, if nothing else,

127. we can get a helicopter.

128. If we can get back to Jonestown before anything happens,

129. we can stop it.

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

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

132. You know, "It's Saturday."

133. So, we go back to the house.

134. Everyone's screaming and yelling.

135. Sharon Amos had tooken her kids...

136. into the bathroom with a guy named Chuck Brightman

137. and he took our niece inside, Stephanie,

138. and cut the children's throats.

139. What I came upon is not something

140. that I want to describe, but it was horrible.

141. You could still hear people gurgling.

142. Our friend Calvin Douglas busted into the bathroom

143. and pulled Stephanie out.

144. She still has the scar.

145. We called the police.

146. And the police came.

147. By then, the gurgling had stopped.

148. Back in Jonestown, Jim Jones is on the stage.

149. I don't know who fired the shot.

150. I don't know who killed the congressman.

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

152. You understand what I'm saying?

153. I killed him.

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

155. And as soon as the word gets out,

156. the army's gonna be parachuting in,

157. they're gonna come for us,

158. they're gonna kill us all,

159. they're gonna get our kids.

160. We can't let that happen.

161. We need to commit revolutionary suicide.

162. We can't go back.

163. They won't leave us alone.

164. They're now going back to tell more lies,

165. which means more congressmen.

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

167. As they are in the pavilion getting ready to commit suicide,

168. a woman by the name of Christine Miller begins to question

169. what the logic is behind letting 14 people who defect

170. cause the deaths of over 1,000 people.

171. I'm completely schizophrenic at this time,

172. because one part of me is saying,

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

174. And another part of me is saying,

175. this doesn't make any sense.

176. You don't kill everybody.

177. Everybody dies.

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

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

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

181. Tired of it.

182. By this time, the pavilion is filled up with people.

183. There's armed guards around the pavilion.

184. But the energy there was just...

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

186. It was kind of like people had been crushed.

187. At this point, I'm kind of intellectual.

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

189. How am I gonna die?

190. What's gonna happen?

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

192. when there's a tap on my shoulder.

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

194. So is his brother, Mike.

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

196. And they're taken to a back cabin

197. and there are three suitcases.

198. She goes, "We have suitcases of money

199. "that need to be delivered

200. "to the Russian Embassy in Georgetown.

201. Will you take them?"

202. She gave us each a gun.

203. She said, "If you're successful,

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

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

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

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

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

209. to the United States government.

210. I don't know.

211. But I said yes.

212. And in my mind, I was buying time,

213. 'cause I couldn't catch up.

214. I could not catch up with what was going on.

215. Who wants to go with their child

216. has a right to go with their child.

217. I think it's humane.

218. I want to see you go, though.

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

220. No more, no more, no more.

221. As the vats of cyanide-laced Flavor Aid are brought out,

222. they are instructed to give the drink to the children first

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

224. how can any adult live

225. after having watched their own children die?

226. Hurry, my children. Hurry. All I think...

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

228. Hurry, my children.

229. They have syringes,

230. and they're gonna squirt this stuff

231. in the babies' mouths.

232. No more pain now.

233. No more pain. No more pain.

234. Meanwhile, the adults are about to have their turn.

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

236. and they're held down and forcibly injected.

237. And we know this because later with the bodies,

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

239. on their skull, anywhere a needle could get jammed.

240. That's where the needles went in.

241. And everybody else is lined up to die.

242. So while Maria's getting the gold, I went to get water.

243. You don't go into the jungle without water.

244. As I'm approaching the back of the pavilion,

245. it's when people started dying,

246. and I cannot go through the rest of it today,

247. I just can't, but needless to say,

248. my wife and son were dying.

249. It was just darkness.

250. There was no light anywhere in my life.

251. As I'm walking back to Jones' cottage,

252. Carolyn Layton was coming up and she said,

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

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

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

256. Jones says it's going to be easy.

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

258. It keeps your body from absorbing oxygen.

259. You suffocate slowly.

260. The sounds I was hearing were screaming.

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

262. There was nothing joyous going on.

263. There was no grand hallelujah for Jim Jones.

264. Marceline Jones was screaming,

265. "Stop this! Stop this! Stop this!"

266. People were being massacred.

267. Mother, please, please, please.

268. Don't— Don't do this. Don't do this.

269. People have painted this picture that my mother was up there

270. doling out the poison, but that runs contrary

271. to what I know about my mother.

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

273. but she was also very strong-willed,

274. and my father ordered her restrained

275. and she struggled until the last child died.

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

277. I wanted to die.

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

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

280. We went back to the cottages, got the suitcases,

281. and left Jonestown.

282. At this point in time,

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

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

285. I wanted nothing to do with Russians,

286. I wanted nothing to do with money.

287. So I said, we can't do this.

288. We need to dump the suitcases.

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

290. that I just saw what I saw.

291. One thousand people say

292. we don't like the way the world is.

293. Take our life from us.

294. We laid it down, we got tired.

295. We didn't commit suicide,

296. we committed an act of revolutionary suicide

297. protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.

298. There's been a monsoon the day before.

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

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

301. And what they see, they find almost impossible to describe

302. over the radio to the superiors waiting back in Georgetown.

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

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

305. "Dead people."

306. As soon as these pictures from Jonestown

307. cleared our newsroom, everybody,

308. even a lot of hardened news people,

309. reacted in horror and disbelief.

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

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

312. The bodies seemed awful and orderly,

313. not flung about like corpses after a battle

314. but neat, hand-in-hand sometimes,

315. arms about each other's shoulders.

316. The death ritual was methodical.

317. Some of the syringes contained poison,

318. the rest had tranquilizers.

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

320. but this we do know— the Reverend Jim Jones,

321. the founder of Peoples Temple, is dead,

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

323. not of poisoning.

324. Jim Jones they find on the pavilion,

325. bloated, dead, a gunshot wound to the head.

326. You can suspect that Jim Jones,

327. having seen the terrible deaths his followers were suffering,

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

329. Police believe that most of the people went willingly,

330. but others were forced by armed guards.

331. When the poison was being passed out,

332. men were around this auditorium area here with crossbows.

333. They were acting as guards.

334. Clayton, 28, of Oakland, is one of four known eyewitnesses

335. to the suicide-murders.

336. He got away after more than 700 had died

337. by slipping past a guard.

338. A lot of people didn't want to die.

339. They was just sitting there. Frightened. Afraid.

340. In one case, she struggled pretty hard,

341. 'cause she didn't want to die.

342. And how did they kill her?

343. They injected her in the arm.

344. The soldiers, they're asked, can you count 'em?

345. And they try.

346. Four hundred suicides and killings,

347. one of the most astonishing stories of our time,

348. perhaps of any time.

349. Well, there's at least

350. 900-something people in Jonestown.

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

352. Maybe they've run into the jungle.

353. The morning that we left, my plan was to escape,

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

355. So, once we realized that the tragedy happened,

356. I'm just praying that one of my family members

357. ran into the jungle, if not all of them.

358. But the body count was wrong from the beginning.

359. Good evening.

360. The searching American soldiers

361. have finished counting the bodies in Jonestown, Guyana.

362. Nine-hundred-ten died in the poison ritual

363. of the Peoples Temple last week.

364. Why in the world would so many people

365. agree to kill themselves?

366. What kind of a leader

367. could order mass suicide and be obeyed?

368. The mass suicides happened

369. in this heavily forested area,

370. down there, in the compound.

371. The narrative is mass suicide.

372. Sheep. Drinking the Kool-Aid.

373. Voluntarily drinking the Kool-Aid.

374. And yet, a lot of people were murdered.

375. And if you've just seen your child murdered,

376. besides wanting to kill the motherthat did it,

377. would you want to live?

378. The answer is probably no.

379. If you believe that the only choice you have

380. is dying by drinking a poison or getting shot,

381. are you committing suicide

382. or are you taking the easiest way out

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

384. The bottom line is, what happened

385. in Jonestown, Guyana, was murder.

386. I lost my entire immediate family in Jonestown.

387. I lost my mother, Inez, who was 50.

388. I lost my brother, Mark, who was 16.

389. I lost my sister, Michelle, who was 24.

390. I lost Joe, who was 24.

391. Yeah, I lost them all at— in one moment.

392. They didn't want me to keep my hopes up for— for John Victor,

393. but finally one of the survivors said

394. that they had personally seen John and that he had evidently

395. been taken to— he was in Jim's cabin

396. and he had been injected and they actually saw.

397. So I knew, for sure...

398. that he was deceased, so...

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

400. My liver. My pancreas was removed.

401. When I came out of ICU,

402. I found out what had happened in Jonestown,

403. 'cause I did not know.

404. The psychiatrist just came into my room

405. and opened the paper like this,

406. to show me the pictures of the dead bodies.

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

408. and being asked to describe his clothing,

409. I think my mind just snapped.

410. I just think I just had a mental breakdown.

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

412. How are you gonna handle this nightmare?

413. I don't know.

414. I don't know.

415. It's a nightmare.

416. For the survivors, things were only gonna get worse.

417. The cultists try to forget,

418. but all know they can never escape

419. the stigma of what happened at Jonestown.

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

421. Tim, please, this is very important.

422. I lost two friends here, too.

423. I lost my wife and my son.

424. I don't want to talk right now.

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

426. there's just reporters everywhere.

427. So that was the beginning

428. of 36 hours straight of media interviews.

429. But the very first reporter said,

430. this is going on the evening national news

431. saying that you guys are hitmen.

432. You can respond if you want or not.

433. There was no place for us to go or hide.

434. This is private.

435. After everyone died, the media was everywhere.

436. It wasn't mass suicide, you know?

437. It was mass murder.

438. I wanted to stop it.

439. All of those people are my life.

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

441. What am I gonna do?

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

443. I didn't know what could happen.

444. I'm doing the best I can.

445. There were many people within the community that I loved.

446. We had just lost everything. We were devastated.

447. I know I felt complicit. I felt terrified,

448. horrified, grief stricken, hopeless, and ashamed.

449. I can almost say that I hate this man

450. for doing what he's done,

451. because he has destroyed everything I've lived for.

452. Moments after the latest 17 survivors

453. arrived at Kennedy Airport last night,

454. FBI agents escorted them onto buses

455. for the most intense questioning yet of returning survivors.

456. Included in the group,

457. the Reverend Jim Jones' adopted son, Jim.

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

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

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

461. We arrived penniless and hungry

462. and, you know, traumatized by our whole experience,

463. and then they kept up the questioning.

464. They were suspected of being part of the plot.

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

466. They're all scarred in that way.

467. We were followed.

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

469. following me.

470. I think some of that was like,

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

472. After I escaped Jonestown,

473. I was still in Jonestown in my mind.

474. There was a lot of paranoia.

475. I saw a man from the back with black hair,

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

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

478. were Kool-Aid jokes, Jonestown jokes.

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

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

481. because we had believed so totally

482. in what Jim Jones was saying.

483. Jim Jones was a cult leader who was maniacal

484. and who was allowed to pursue this horrific cause

485. for his personal aggrandizement.

486. He had used the word "church"

487. in sanitizing his grotesque behavior.

488. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

489. Jim went into the deep, dark recesses of his mind

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

491. Jones put himself in the position

492. where no one could tell him no.

493. He was enabled.

494. This is what demagogues do.

495. And so, gradually,

496. the worst part of his nature took over

497. until finally it consumed him and, sadly,

498. it consumed all the people who had believed in him.

499. I felt it was my responsibility

500. to attend as many funerals as possible.

501. Especially for my friends, friends of mine.

502. One of my friends, I went to her funeral,

503. and I remember the mother coming out of the hallway

504. with a.38 caliber pistol and pointing it at me

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

506. And then everyone grabbing her,

507. and— and me kind of sitting there going,

508. pull the trigger.

509. You know? It was...

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

511. Little has changed in the settlement itself.

512. There are police guards patrolling

513. to keep visitors away.

514. The chair in which Jim Jones sat

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

516. along with the benches where they sat

517. and listened and obeyed.

518. My name is Larry Layton.

519. Most of the Temple survivors and defectors

520. who returned from Guyana have settled in San Francisco.

521. The Peoples Temple building was sold.

522. It is now a Korean Presbyterian Church.

523. Doctors say that almost all the former Temple members

524. live with anxiety, fear, and guilt.

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

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

527. for many of them, it'll— it'll be a lifelong process

528. trying to deal with that.

529. For many years, I wasn't healing.

530. I was battling demons on a daily basis,

531. using everything I could to quiet the noise inside me.

532. And around that time, my daughter was born.

533. That little baby cracked my heart open

534. in a way that pushed me toward life

535. instead of choosing the easy way out.

536. I went by James for a long time,

537. and it wasn't until many years after

538. that I even went by Jim Jones again.

539. After 40 years,

540. I've lived two lifetimes outside Peoples Temple.

541. I'm grateful that, um, I survived.

542. I was hospitalized for two months.

543. I had a lot of time to think.

544. I was so badly wounded that they thought

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

546. I had gas gangrene through my body.

547. I just made a commitment to myself

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

549. as a victim or survivor of Guyana,

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

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

552. When I came back to the United States, I was shattered.

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

554. Every day I was like, why did I survive?

555. Why was I allowed to survive?

556. Inside, I was so broken.

557. I didn't start healing until 20 years later.

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

559. He understands the sacrifice that I made.

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

561. I'm just not going anywhere.

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

563. I call Leslie Wagner my, uh, my hero

564. because she left with her son.

565. I see her as a person of great courage,

566. that she was able to do that,

567. she was able to get her son out,

568. and she was able to risk death.

569. I've come to peace with my journey,

570. except around my son.

571. That will be something that's always with me.

572. I still struggle to forgive myself.

573. The former Temple members try to comfort each other

574. and their Temple past is their bond.

575. Whatever their thoughts about Jim Jones,

576. they are all trying to rebuild shattered lives.

577. All of us, if we allow ourselves

578. to step into that story,

579. there's something there we can use.

580. And I pray that anyone watching this

581. can take away from it whatever is valuable to them

582. as a way of honoring those we lost.

583. There are many lessons to be learned from Jonestown.

584. I look at the world today,

585. I look at the environment that we're in,

586. and I see this— this parallel.

587. And I look at how Peoples Temple began.

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

589. but it was also based on fear.

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

591. that could generate something

592. much, much more dangerous than Jonestown.

593. It could happen again.

594. I put the blame for what happened in Jonestown

595. on my father.

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

597. I think the story is the people

598. who followed Jim Jones to— to Jonestown.

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

600. was Peoples Temple?

601. Because it was really the people that made that church.

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

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

604. A sense of belonging.

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

606. It's just really too bad

607. that we couldn't have gone down in history

608. as this great, wonderful humanitarian group that we were.

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

610. I wish that there was an easy answer

611. around Peoples Temple and Jonestown.

612. But there are no easy answers.

613. Anybody that has taken the time

614. to get to know the story has— has discovered that,

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

616. Nothing special about us, nothing unspecial about us.

617. Maybe even like me.

618. And I might have actually joined something like that.