As cult leader Jim Jones becomes more and more deranged and controlling, he hatches a plan to move his Peoples Temple from California to Guyana, where his socialist teachings will finally be on unbridled display for all to see. What develops is a communal way of life that, from the outside, appears to be a utopia of sorts. Unfortunately, the truth is that Jonestown was far from the dream Jim Jones' followers had been promised. A group of mostly urban folks now had to work the land, and Jones, becoming more and more dependent on drugs, begins talking more and more about what he terms "revolutionary suicide." In the end, over 900 people lose their lives in what Julia Scheeres, author of "A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown," calls not mass suicide but mass murder.
On the second part of this two-part series on Jonestown, we lay out what life was like in Guyana, what precipitated Jones' final descent into madness, the attempted intervention of congressman Leo Ryan that leads to his death, and the aftermath of a day that will never be forgotten.
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