Mother, mother, mother, mother, mother, please.
Mother, please, please, please.
Don't... don't do this. Don't do this.
Lay down your life with your child,
but don't do this.
Welcome to "very scary people."
I'm Donnie wahlberg.
The reverend Jim Jones is the darling of politicians
and Hollywood stars.
By the mid-1970s, the peoples temple has grown
to over a thousand devout followers,
but terrified by his erratic behavior,
members of the group begin to turn on the church,
telling stories of sexual and financial abuse.
Now reporters are looking into the truth
behind Jones' dark sunglasses.
In an attempt to maintain control,
Jim Jones is about to make a horrifying decision.
The peoples temple and Jim Jones
made their headquarters here in ukiah
about 100 miles north of San Francisco.
In 1971, Jones began to spread out.
His religion was a mix of faith healing
and revelations with radical politics.
He's doing fraudulent things.
He's a chameleon.
He can see what he needs to be, and he becomes that.
Many former temple members to speak out about
what was happening inside.
One woman wrote him a love letter saying, "I love you.
I want to be with you. I'll always follow you."
He led the group in mocking her naked body.
Jones was intimidating the congregation
with beatings and threats.
Jim was pointing a gun at me and he said,
"I'm going to shoot you."
There were a couple of times,
me walking in on him with a man or a woman in bed.
He said he was doing it for the cause
when really he was exploiting people sexually.
He turns to drugs.
That just increases his paranoia,
and he is more and more deceptive to his followers.
Jones announces there's a treat.
"Everyone, have a cup of wine."
We all drank it.
He announces it's poison.
It was really a test grooming us
for what was going to happen on November 18th.
On October 4, 1976, Bob Houston,
a former prominent member of the peoples temple,
died under mysterious circumstances.
Bob Houston was in peoples temple
with his wife, Phyllis, and their two children,
and he left the temple.
He fell off the train and was killed.
The authorities didn't know whether it was accident
or suicide or something more sinister.
And it turned out his father had been a college friend
of congressman Ryan.
He contacted Leo Ryan, who was his member of congress,
and asked Ryan, "would you look into this?"
Ryan was very garrulous.
He had a reputation of being sort of a Maverick,
a guy who liked crusades.
He was what I call an experiential legislator.
He didn't just take a bureaucrat's word for anything.
He wanted to find out himself.
He had a vast number of constituents
who had younger loved ones
who had gotten involved in peoples temple,
so he took it upon himself to start looking into it.
But by now Ryan wasn't the only one
looking into the people's temple.
A major exposé was announced by "new west" magazine on Jones
and the peoples temple.
You always got the sense that everybody knew
there was something off here,
but no one certainly wanted to talk about it.
It got me curious.
On August 1, 1977, the article was released.
It had everything in it from the beatings
to all the property people
give up to the millions of dollars that...
That Jones had stashed in foreign accounts,
all the laws that were being broken,
and it was great reporting.
And they're going to get him.
His followers will leave him, so pretty much on the spot,
he wants to move himself and the bulk of peoples temple
some place where they can't get at him.
And before anyone knew it, he was on his way to Guyana.
He has never returned.
There's also Jim Jones's pride.
He's chased out of California under humiliating circumstances.
Then, by god, he is going to make Jonestown
such a socialist triumph.
I left, I got ready to get to get on the plane,
and I just kind of looked back, and I said,
"it just feel like this is the last time
I'm ever going to see you guys again."
In August 1977, after an unfavorable article
was released about the peoples temple, Jones,
who felt he had a lot of enemies,
felt the only way he could keep his followers loyal to him
was to move them to South America, to Guyana.
So now Jones is going to make their entire world Jonestown.
We're going to the promised land, land of milk and honey.
I came down approximately a year in advance of the big push.
When it became clear that dad intended
to move the entire organization,
and we built most of what you see in any image of Jonestown,
and I had an amazing time doing it.
By the time I went to live in Jonestown in 1978,
there were probably 700 people.
Yay!
As you pull up to the settlement,
you hear over the loudspeakers, "ah, the new members are here,"
and whatnot, and people start,
"yay," clapping and running over to meet you.
Hi.
I left the church in '76 I think,
but because my kids were in, it was kind of hard to stay out.
We went over to Guyana in July of 1978,
because the kids were scheduled to go
and so, I went over with them.
At the time, it was what they wanted,
it kept them off the streets, so I figured,
"yeah, they'll grow up, they're grow out of it."
It's the interior of the south American jungle,
and it is very, very beautiful.
Very tall trees, you have toucans,
there was a pavilion, there was a kitchen area,
it was quite a city in the middle of the jungle.
They had these little cottages.
It was kind of like a glorified tent,
but it was... It was... it was built nicely.
They had school for the kids.
Uh, five.
They had a pavilion where I guess they had programs
every once in a while.
Everybody seemed to be happy.
These are honey and coffee, cans of various syrups,
and, well, you can see the bleach.
These are all various different types of fruits, ketchup.
Here's the Milo, an extremely good drink,
that is unique to Guyana.
As is the pattern with Jim Jones,
the beautiful surface is just a façade
for the darkness that lurks below.
He and I argued quite a bit publicly in Jonestown.
Very few revered my father, if any.
They feared him.
The first thing that I saw,
when I approached the pavilion I was Jim Jones
sitting in his chair, his throne,
and a security guard on each side with rifles,
which was quite an escalation, and the pavilion was surrounded
with security guards with weapons.
Right away, I wanted to leave.
He was starting to get more paranoid.
Jim says, "listen, from now on, your everyday job
is to be my personal security, 24 hours a day.
As long as I'm outside of my house,
you guys are to be around me at all times."
We surrendered our passports,
surrendered any cash that we may have had.
Of the nearly thousand members at Jonestown,
nearly a third were children.
About another third were elderly people, many of them women.
They have pension checks, social security.
The money can start to add up.
There are expenses in running a big operation like this,
no doubt.
Jonestown had a steady income of about $39,000 a month.
The idea that they had found some sort of a paradise
in Guyana lasted only a short time.
You know, we weren't growing enough food,
so we had to buy all the food...
Almost all the food to feed 1,000 people three meals a day.
It's very difficult to farm jungle soils.
Jonestown was a mirage as a... As an operation.
They had too many people, too few places to sleep or live.
Jones himself was in worse and worse health.
It was very much running on fumes.
I worked in the fields.
I worked the orchards crew, and I woke up in the morning,
went for breakfast, which consisted of rice and gravy,
and we worked until lunch and had rice with gravy
and went to work until it was time for sundown,
so I was, like, skeletal.
I got ready to get on the plane, and I...
I just kind of looked back, and I said,
"it just feel like this is the last time
I'm ever going to see you guys again."
There was no religious services whatsoever.
It was all political.
Jim Jones spoke over 24 hours a day.
"Attention, attention, attention."
And we listened to his bemoaning
the state of affairs and the enemy,
and how they're out there in the jungle waiting for us.
It was just like the gestapo, I mean, under Hitler
that if somebody was negative about the third reich,
they would be disciplined for having negative thoughts,
and they would be turned in.
Our children were so, um, mind controlled,
they believed that Jim Jones was a prophet.
We were even afraid to tell them we were leaving,
because we were afraid they'd turn on us.
A few members escaped,
calling Jonestown a virtual slave camp.
Back in California,
relatives were becoming increasingly concerned
about what was taking place in Guyana.
You're under the supervision of the authority that's there,
and that's Jones.
It was a life and death situation.
Families and former members back in California
began meeting as a group.
They called themselves the concerned relatives.
They wanted to make sure that they were okay,
because you couldn't call them, and you couldn't really
write them a letter, because someone else
would probably read it first, to see what they were saying.
One of the people making a lot of noise was grace stoen,
the mother of Jones's 5-year-old son
who was back at the camp in Guyana.
The concerned relatives began filing lawsuits
for the custody of John Victor stoen.
In Guyana, the news of the court filing rocked Jim Jones.
He left the United States.
He couldn't go back there for fear of being prosecuted,
possibly going to jail.
He didn't want that to happen.
Then his lawyers were telling him, "you can't even the leave
the gate, the entrance of Jonestown
because somebody could legally just arrest you there.
You better stay right inside of Jonestown."
If he was paranoid before,
he really had reason to be this time.
There was a moment in September of 1977
when a custody order was made in Guyana
seeking to obtain custody of John Victor stoen,
whom everyone in Jonestown
believed to be the biological son of Jim Jones.
A judge there ordered Jones to appear in court.
He was livid.
They came to believe that the concerned relatives
were seeking to destroy their community.
Jones continued making threats of revolutionary suicide,
calling it "the white night."
A white night was like an emergency calling,
like a 911 call.
And everyone was to report to the pavilion immediately.
Jones would tell us the latest life and death emergency
that was happening and how our community was threatened,
and the only choice we had was to commit revolutionary suicide.
The conversation was going to be,
"live or die," and I got to my mother first,
and I says, "I don't care what he says.
Don't argue with him. I want to see him squirm,"
because I never believed dad would go through with it.
Certainly it was psychologically abusive, emotionally abusive.
I was in dad's face about it, and he...
He said, "you're... You're just afraid to die."
Here I am this 19-year-old kid who has,
I feel, put my ass on the line for my town.
This man that I thought the most cowardly being
I'd ever known was accusing me of being afraid of dying,
and I'm screaming at him, "I'm afraid to die?"
And I actually take out a pistol, cock it,
and ram it up against my chin,
just a twitch away from blowing my brains out,
and dad gets a revolver from somebody,
and he puts it in his mouth uncocked.
That's a revolver, and that's a long pull away
from doing any harm,
but here we are screaming at each other,
you know, about who's afraid to die.
Back in San Francisco, the concerned relatives
were putting pressure on the media
and congressman Ryan to do something.
In November, right after the election, he's going to go over.
He's going to see for himself.
He'll bring with him the media, local reporters,
someone from "the Washington post,"
and a crack film crew from nbc,
and even some of the concerned relatives,
and they will go to Jonestown,
and they will demand to be let in.
Leo Ryan never asked for security protection.
It seems that he believed that he would be protected
by the news media, and the news media believed
that they would be protected by being with
the U.S. congressperson.
He certainly felt that he was doing something
that no one else was willing to do.
The conditions of the peoples temple in San Francisco,
the defectors who left the church
before Jim Jones went to Jonestown,
talked about many of these abuses, sexual abuse,
child abuse, physical abuse, and so he wanted to protect
his constituents.
What they don't know is after the white night
some months earlier,
where Jones said there was poison and there wasn't,
he had directed Dr. Larry schacht
to buy 1 full pound of cyanide powder,
and that's enough for 1,800 lethal doses.
It was pretty bad. I was in terror.
Welcome back to "very scary people."
On November 15, 1978, congressman Leo Ryan
arrives in Georgetown, Guyana.
With him are 17 members of the concerned relatives,
two staffers and nine members of the media.
The plan is to talk to the people of Jonestown
and to Jim Jones himself to determine
if people are free to leave
or are prisoners in Jones' twisted paradise.
It would take days for the congressman's group
to get into Jonestown,
and several of them would never get out.
The temple's strategy was to basically stall
and to try to keep us out of Jonestown.
We mysteriously had problems with our passports.
The U.S. embassy was somewhat helpless to get us in there.
I know there was a lot of back and forth,
and I think at some point, it became,
"we're coming whether or not you say we can."
There was intense preparation, intense drilling, questions.
The answers were all the same.
"Oh, we love it here, couldn't have been happier."
His sons and I, we were in Georgetown playing basketball.
We were all on a team, and a trip was planned for us
to go in and do some scrimmaging with the national team of Guyana
and then play in some Guyanese tournaments
where local club teams played.
Building up to that point when we left, you could...
You could sense a shift in the morale of our fellow members
that are in Jonestown like they kind of didn't want us to leave
as if we kind of made people feel safe there.
In retrospect, clearer eyes would have known
that was not a time to leave,
but I also wanted to just get away from the craziness,
and mom was always trying to get us clear of my father and...
And the madness.
We arrived in Jonestown
on the evening of November 17, 1978.
When we got to the gates, we were really elated,
and there were hundreds of people around.
Perhaps the most high-profile person
entering Jonestown aside from congressman Ryan
was nbc news correspondent Don Harris.
Harris had earned the nickname
Mr. Lucky because he had had several close calls
while reporting in Vietnam.
Introduction to Jim Jones
was really the most sobering thing
because he appeared to be sallow and weak,
but what struck me was that this entire community
was in the hands of this man who appeared to be ill.
There's a lavish dinner provided for them.
There's pork. There's Greens.
There's even dessert.
And we got an opportunity to interview him during a dinner.
When you asked him a question, he would just...
Just take off on tangents.
A lot of it came across as paranoia,
and he also railed against the press and said,
"you don't need to shoot me.
Your words have that effect."
Then that evening, there was a performance
by the singers and the dancers.
Congressman Ryan gave his famous speech.
But I can tell you right now that from the few conversations
I've had with some of the folks here already this evening,
that whatever the comments are, there are some people here
who believe that this is the best thing
that ever happened to them in their whole life.
And the applause just burst out and continued to thunder.
It went on for an uncomfortably long period of time.
If you really listened to it,
there's a frantic desperation in that.
They had to convince him of their loyalty.
I passed a note to one of the newspaper reporters.
I wrote on the note, "Vernon gosney, Monica bagby,
help us get out of Jonestown."
He dropped the note, and this little boy said,
"oh, he passed a note!
He passed a note!" I was dead.
Jim Jones is now very well aware
that at least some people are going to want to go.
Don Harris showed the note to congressman Ryan,
so he approached me after the event,
and he said, "you were the first to ask to leave.
You will have the first seats on the plane."
Ryan made a plan.
They were going to come back the next morning
and take with them anyone who wanted to leave.
Congressman Ryan couldn't comprehend the danger
he was in at all.
He would say, you know,
"you have the congressional shield of protection over you."
He was bequeathing me this protection
that he himself didn't have.
I was in terror the next day.
I thought it was all over for me.
We returned to Jonestown Saturday.
More and more people had come forward.
They wanted to leave,
and the mood of the place turned extremely dark.
And then suddenly, the skies turned dark,
and a wind whipped up, and torrential rain came down.
It was almost like an omen.
Ultimately, 15 people want to go.
Things are turning ugly.
Don't you take my kids!
I'm walking down this pathway, and a mother is screaming,
pulling the child one way, the father screaming,
pulling the child the other way, and I was stunned by it.
I recognized that we were in a powder keg.
Jones was just licking his lips
and sucking his cheeks in and out.
You could see how nervous he was getting.
At the very end of the visit,
Don Harris actually confronted Jim Jones
with the note on camera.
Last night, someone came and passed me this note.
As a journalist, he was looking for that moment.
You know, "okay, Jim. Here's... here's the note."
People play games, friend.
They lie. They lie. What can I do about liars?
Are you people going leave us?
I just beg you. Please leave us.
Don Harris showing him that note ensured
that he would be definitely be killed
because he just humiliated Jim Jones on camera.
So we boarded a large dump truck.
The last defector in that line was Larry Layton.
He was a longtime church member and trusted Jones' aid
whom the defectors feared wasn't really one of them,
and then there was this tremendously loud cheer
from the pavilion.
Ryan is jumped from behind by a man named Don sly
who has a knife, screaming that, "I'm going to kill you.
You're going to die."
Temple members quickly pulled Don sly off of congressman Ryan,
and in the process, sly's hand got cut,
and congressman Ryan
ended up with a lot of blood on his shirt.
A short time later, congressman Ryan was escorted to the truck,
and he was looking rather shaken and ashen.
And then we started to leave Jonestown.
At that moment, I am sure that congressman Ryan
knew the danger he was in.
Someone had just attempted to kill him.
Jim has a plan for what's going to happen back at the airstrip.
I never thought I was ever going to really leave.
There was a really strong sense of foreboding.
I saw people who had been wounded
and people who were dead.
On November 18, 1978, congressmen Leo Ryan
left Jonestown with members of his staff,
members of the media
and 16 defectors from the peoples temple.
I noticed that Larry Layton skirted the...
The frisking that congressman Ryan did
and went around the other side of the plane and boarded it.
As they were getting ready to board the larger plane,
Don Harris wanted to do a quick interview with the congressman.
I don't know. What the... what he said
was he intended to kill me.
A number of us felt that there was some trouble ahead.
Don Harris and others were on high alert.
The matter now just kind of falling back and regrouping
and seeing what we have.
When they look, and here's the tractor coming,
and the men on it are armed.
The nbc cameramen very bravely keeps his camera running.
I sprinted for the far side of the plane.
I got hit, got shot.
That's when I looked out the window and said,
"they're killing everyone," and I turned,
and Larry Layton shot me three times.
Knowing I was in a place where there was no shelter,
sprinted for the jungle.
And I ran until I got to the edge of the runway,
and I collapsed on the ground.
I saw blood all over, and I just thought,
"well, I'm dying," and passed out.
I continued to hear some gunfire.
It was more slow and deliberate gunfire.
I turned around.
Congressmen Ryan had been hit,
and there was blood coming out of his neck,
and I started to move towards him,
and then he was shot again and fell,
and I ran under the plane and hid behind a wheel,
and then the shots just kept ringing out,
and I was playing dead with my head down,
and then all of a sudden I was hit,
and I was shot five times.
When the gunfire stopped entirely,
I worked my way out to the edge of the jungle,
and I saw people who had been wounded
and people who were dead.
Congressman Ryan was dead.
Don Harris was dead, and there were wounded people,
some of them in really serious condition like Jackie speier.
Five people are dead at the scene.
The others are critically wounded.
They're left there not knowing
if someone's going to kill them off
or if someone's coming back to help them.
Back at Jonestown, Jones called a meeting
and called everybody to the pavilion.
They all gather, and Jones is up on stage,
but they notice something that's different
because there's guards with guns all along the perimeter.
And he said, "life will never be the same,
and we've killed a congressman."
He made everybody complicit.
"The government's going to blame us,
and they're going to come parachuting in here,
they're going to kill all of us, even the children,
and what we need to do is we need to make this gesture."
And that was the call of death.
That's when they called Georgetown, where I was,
saying that everybody was killing themselves in Jonestown.
We got the message that orders had been sent
that we were to get revenge.
That message back was clear signal to us
that something terrible was happening.
Things were going farther and...
And much worse than had... Had ever happened before.
He said, "we're going to all kill ourselves."
We're like, "no, we're not doing that."
He gave us those final orders, and he got off the radio,
and there was radio silence.
It was a harrowing night of trying to find out
what the heck was going on.
So we go down to the police station,
and we're asking questions, and, you know,
the police officers there really can't tell us much.
Stephan and maybe a couple of other guys
went to the American embassy.
They're over there banging on the doors
trying to find out what's going on.
They wouldn't let them in the embassy.
They wouldn't even address them.
Back at the compound, some of Jones's most ardent
followers have prepared a poison-laced kool-aid drink.
It's not kool-aid.
It's flavor aid, a cheap knockoff.
Jones asked family members and mothers
to line up with their children first
and to administer this potion.
It was a mixture of cyanide, flavor aid,
and various tranquilizers in a huge vat.
They're going to do the babies and the children.
They bring out syringes.
His mistresses and secretaries gave all of children the poison,
squirted the poison in their mouth.
Not only were we not there to stand up for them,
stand up, and maybe stand against my father,
but by... by their understanding of things,
we were out killing people.
My mother was standing against my father,
trying to fight it, trying to take him on,
and when you hear over the loudspeaker,
"mother, mother, mother, please don't do this,"
she was resisting and was restrained
trying to steer things away, certainly away from,
you know, some of the crazy things he was...
He was saying and doing but also away from suicide.
Jones is telling everyone, "it's painless."
"It's easy," and of course, death by cyanide
is one of the worst possible ways to die,
robs your body of the ability to take in oxygen,
and so you froth at the mouth.
You go into convulsions. You... you suffocate.
It... it takes a while.
It's... it's terrible.
So by then, you know, what are parents going to do?
Like, how could you have your child 20 feet away dying?
I mean, he just took whatever possibility of people
responding away from them and killed the children.
They don't want it, and Jones is screaming at them.
And the ones who don't want to cooperate
are held down and forcibly injected.
There were guards surrounding the perimeter.
A few people try to run for it.
One or two escape. The rest are captured.
We heard, "well, they found 300 bodies in Jonestown."
The first number I heard was 400 maybe, and I thought,
"god, surely you wouldn't take them all."
By Saturday night, there was an eerie quiet in Jonestown,
but at the airstrip,
the survivors were struggling to stay alive.
After the shooting, a number of the villagers came out
and asked to help us.
We had bottles of rum and other spirits to help ease the pain,
but there weren't painkillers.
I remember saying to Jackie speier,
"there's one pain pill here.
Do you want it now, or do you want it later?"
And she decided to take it later.
When I awoke some hours later, I was in excruciating pain,
more pain than I'd ever experienced in my life.
A bunch of Guyanese came,
and they all carried me to the tent,
and that's where I stayed that night.
It was a difficult night.
They would come occasionally into the tent
where they had me on the airstrip
and give me swigs of Guyanese rum which is very strong rum.
That was the sedative I had.
As daylight approached, Guyanese soldiers arrived
and secured the airstrip
so that additional medevac planes could come in.
We were 19 hours in the jungle.
Guyanese defense force came.
They had a doctor, and he gave me two aspirin,
and small planes started coming,
and they started evacuating the injured
back to Georgetown along with the newspaper reporters.
I had Greg Robinson's camera gear,
and walked around to a place where I had a vantage point
of the plane and the bodies around the plane.
And, uh, that's the last shot I took.
Larry Layton was taken by villagers to the local jail
and held there until the Guyanese defense forces
came the next day and arrested him.
For the surviving temple members in Georgetown,
that Saturday night was just as terrifying.
I was in shock even as I was out wandering,
trying to find out what was going on.
Knowing all the while, something terrible
is happening but knowing...
Not knowing what else I could do.
We heard, "well, they found 300 bodies in Jonestown."
At dawn, the Guyana defense force raided Jonestown.
At first, the body count was less than 300.
The families in the U.S. and Georgetown
hoped that their loved ones would be found alive.
As for Jim Jones himself,
they found his body the next day.
Only two people among the dead in Jonestown
didn't die of cyanide poisoning.
One was Jim Jones.
The other was his personal nurse, Annie Moore.
Yeah, I know dad was shot in the head.
He saw the way everybody else was dying,
and he couldn't bring himself to die that horrible death,
so he had someone shoot him in the head.
Good evening. Here's what's happening.
We're interrupting our special
broadcasting to bring you this special report.
Bodies are strewn all over the place.
The death toll at Jonestown now stands at 405,
but it is rising as more bodies are, in fact, being found.
I think the first number I heard was, like, 250, 250,
400 maybe, and I thought, "okay."
"God, surely you wouldn't take them all," you know?
And then the next thing I knew, the number had doubled.
Then the U.S. army came in and found more bodies,
children underneath their parents,
husbands on top of their wives.
It was years and years of putting up a good front,
but every night, all night, devastating dreams,
and in the dreams, everyone's alive
and those people that I'd felt I'd failed the most,
and every morning, I'd wake up and learn all over again
they were dead, and...
And so I'd have to go through that grief again.
You never get over it. You know, you never...
You just live with it.
Jim Jones based his own ego on how people responded to him.
He got his sense of himself from other people.
If you left the church, you were essentially indicating to Jones
that you thought he was worthless.
I shall do all the miracles that you said
your god would do and never did.
I think Jim was sick.
He needed those people around him.
He couldn't just go off and die by himself.
He needed... he needed to take a bunch of people with him.
I've maintained to be and declared to be your only savior.
The massacre at Jonestown remains
one of the most haunting chapters in American history.
On December 6, 1978, survivors in San Francisco filed papers
to officially dissolve the peoples temple,
ending Jim Jones' twisted vision that mixed self-glorification
and social good.
There was almost $10 million dollars in the church's accounts
and another million in cash and gold at the Jonestown site.
In his will, Jones left most of the money to the Soviet union.
Instead, it was paid out to family members
who filed wrongful death claims
and for the removal of the bodies from Guyana.
Forty years later, nothing remains of Jonestown.
Within weeks of the tragedy,
the local people tore the place down.
I'm Donnie wahlberg.
Thanks for watching "very scary people."