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For about the last 30 hours, we here at NBC News

have been trying to establish what happened

last night in Guyana on the northern coast of South

America.

The searching American soldiers have

finished counting the bodies in Jonestown, Guyana.

910 died in the poison ritual of the Peoples Temple last week.

Among the bodies were those of the temple's

fanatical founder, the Reverend Jim Jones, his wife,

and at least one of their children.

Most had reportedly stood in line

to take doses of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid from a large tub.

People want to blame Jim Jones for the deaths,

and certainly, in many respects, it was his vision.

But he couldn't have done it by himself.

Carolyn, Maria Katsaris, Annie Moore,

Marceline--

they're Jim's girls.

They're almost as untouchable as Jim.

My sisters were certainly involved

in planning the deaths.

They were true believers.

They were in the leadership group.

They were on board.

That's for sure.

At the end, his nurses and mistresses

and secretaries were the ones who arranged things,

so it wasn't that Jim did was a mastermind and did everything.

I lay the suicide decision solidly

at the feet of that inner circle that made it happen.

There was really true goodness in Mom,

and I think Dad was latching on to something that made him more

respectable.

And I'm sure he adored her then.

He thought, wow, she's going to make me--

she makes me better.

I met Jim Jones when

he was an orderly in the hospital where I was in nurse's

training.

I knew there was something special about him.

I saw greatness.

In Mom's case, she saw the beauty in him.

She saw this big, fat, juicy heart,

and she felt like she could make him better.

We had been married about two years when

he decided to become a minister of the gospel.

We had no money, and so Jim borrowed the money

to put a down payment on the church in Indiana.

And that was the first Peoples Temple.

Heaven was created by poor people that

were working cotton fields and working in mines

and living in hell.

Peoples Temple in its Indiana stage was not yet a cult.

Jim and Marceline were the kinds of Christians

who felt very committed to a social justice gospel,

and so they took it upon themselves

to create this multicultural family.

They adopted a couple of children from Asia.

They gave birth to a son, and then they

adopted a Black child.

In fact, they were the first white couple

that had ever adopted a Black child in Indiana

up to that time.

We were spoken of as the rainbow family,

but everything Dad did was to impress.

You could've adopted a-- a Black child

without it having to be a big show

and tell everybody about it.

He was always aware of who was noticing

and what they thought of what he was doing.

Mom was more genuine in her compassion, more genuine

in her action, whereas Dad's was ostentatious and dramatic.

Jim wanted to have the kind of family

that people would look at and say,

how dare you fly in the face of white conventional society?

And he actually liked courting antagonism.

I don't know what Marceline's motivations were

except that they called her Mother Jones.

She felt herself to be a mother not just to her own children

but to the whole community.

That was one of the main connectors between her and Jim

Jones religiously, was this belief that God was actually

calling you to include more people within your community.

Ultimately, it was decided that they could do more of what they

wanted to do, which was reach out

to vulnerable, disenfranchised people

if they moved to northern California.

I don't believe that they knew when they left Indiana

that they were going to create such a large movement.

In retrospect, the time for her to have gotten out

would have been Indiana.

My sister Carolyn Layton moved to Redwood Valley

in the late '60s with her husband, Larry Layton,

and they started telling us about this great church

that they were attending.

I owe something to my people,

and that's to be a good pastor.

And that I am.

The minister seemed to be able to perform faith healings

and miracles.

The group was interracial, and it was integrated.

They were committed to social justice,

and these were all the things that Carolyn had been looking

for.

Carolyn was passionately

engaged and wanting to have social justice happen now,

and I think that her feeling of urgency

met up with this brand new kind of understanding of what church

could be when she walked into Peoples Temple.

God is a socialist [inaudible]..

He is one of the people.

He's an instrument of all that you ever desire,

all that freedom embraces, all that justice embodies.

I think that Carolyn and so many

of those people that joined in the late '60s

felt they were building a new society.

It seemed to be an activist church that

was actually working to change people's lives.

They had homes for people who'd been released

from the mental hospital.

They had places for senior citizens to live.

They had a ranch.

They were doing a lot of things, and it was quite clear

that it was worthwhile work.

As is often the case with charismatic leaders,

followers begin to get a lot of feelings of loyalty and love

flowing not just from the movement

but to the head of the movement as well, and so at some point,

Jim and Carolyn began having a physical sexual affair.

I remember, my dad took me out for a drive,

just me and him.

I was young.

I was 11, 12.

I felt really special and wonderful

and nice to have time with him.

That was a rare thing with my father.

I adored him.

And we ended up at Carolyn's house, and I was introduced.

He was just beside himself just with joy and just lit up.

She was the new woman.

I wanted to like her.

I wanted what she had, whatever it is she had that he clearly

adored, because I didn't feel that from him,

nor did I see him give that to my mother.

They ended up in her room.

I'm on the sofa right outside their room.

I can hear what's going on in there.

At first, I'm wondering what the heck it is,

and then I realise it's them.

And then when they finish, she sings a song to him

that I can hear through the walls.

It wasn't long after that that I came upon my mother distraught,

and I asked her what was going on with her.

She wouldn't tell me.

Eventually, she did tell me that she knew about Carolyn.

I could not believe my father would tell her,

so I figured she was just kind of guessing it or putting two

and two together and somehow speculating.

There's no way she could really know.

So the way she just put it to bed for me is she--

she hummed the song that Carolyn sang to him after they had sex.

Marceline Jones was aware

that Carolyn was Jim Jones's mistress,

but I actually don't think of her as being a mistress.

I actually think of her as being the northern California wife.

She was the wife that represented this new educated

group of people who had joined with Jim and his grandiose idea

about transforming the world, and I think, for a time,

it actually worked to the benefit of a lot of people.

Part of the tragedy of Peoples Temple

is that if we ended the story in 1974,

we would probably now be honouring

the great social justice work of Peoples Temple.

Military officials say that although they are not

remaining to continue the search for survivors,

conditions in Jonestown were so bad,

they don't see how anyone could still be alive.

It's now four days since 400 suicides

and killings, one of the most astonishing stories

of our time.

Day by day, the newspaper

would report that more bodies were found.

It's believed that most of the cult members

killed themselves, but some may have been murdered.

And I'm thinking, my sisters were true believers.

If anyone's dead, they're going to be dead.

And in fact, in my diary, I had written, well,

if they were responsible for killing the children,

then-- then I hope that they are dead.

Carolyn invited us to visit her up in Redwood Valley.

We traveled up, expecting to see Carolyn and Larry.

Instead, she was there with a man who was introduced

as her pastor, Jim Jones.

My sister Annie and I were sent out on a walk.

When we got back, it was clear that everyone had been crying,

except maybe Jim, and that something terrible had

happened.

On the way back in the car, my parents

disclosed that Carolyn and Larry had gotten a quickie divorce,

and Carolyn was in a relationship with Jim.

Needless to say, we were devastated and shocked.

My mother just couldn't get over, well,

why isn't Jim going to marry Carolyn?

They didn't realise the dynamics of sex and power

in Peoples Temple.

Jim was not going to marry my sister

because Jim's wife, Marceline, was much beloved

by the congregation.

Carolyn wrote a letter to our family afterwards,

explaining that his wife could not relate to him, you know,

sexually, and that was why Carolyn was, you know,

stepping in to provide that service.

Perhaps you wonder

why I talk so much about Jim.

He is everything to me.

Total acceptance and communication make our love

deeper than I thought possible between two humans.

Carolyn told us that Jim's wife, Marceline, was totally OK

with their relationship.

So that was her rationalisation to us,

and I'm not sure that I entirely believed it.

I think even then I might have thought,

this sounds a little bit like a self-justification,

but nevertheless, that's what Carolyn was telling herself.

Marcy has been mentally disturbed

since childhood, but she has actually been better since Jim

and I have been leading.

As Marcy herself will explain, Jim was completely faithful

to a sick woman for 20 years.

She needed to believe Mom was OK with it.

There was an element of prestige, I guess,

that came along with that.

It certainly made her feel special.

This is the great leader of the organisations that's

going to change the world, and he picked me, you know?

That's intoxicating.

You know, Carolyn was not the first mistress Jim

had, nor would she be the last.

And now we have a father who loves each one of us

so much that we don't even have to ask,

and the blessings are there.

He wants to give us so much that everything we

need and everything we desire that's good

for us is there before we ask.

How thankful we are for you, Jim.

Thank you.

I think that it's a mistake to underestimate what women

received in return from the-- for the sexual favours that they

gave Jim Jones.

Some of these women slept with Jim Jones

so that they could have influence over him,

that the power actually flowed both ways.

These were women who would never have had the kind of power

and authority and ability to be hands on and making

a difference like they were in Peoples Temple,

and I think this is particularly the case with Carolyn Moore

Layton.

One of the things that made Carolyn different

is that she seemingly was OK with him

being sexual with other people, whereas my mother was not.

The women that were sleeping with Jim Jones were

aware that each other were sleeping with him,

and so I think that a lot of the women

entered into that relationship with Jim Jones

not thinking they would ever be his exclusive partner

or get married to him.

These were people who had joined with Jim and his grandiose idea

about transforming the world, changing the world.

That was a very difficult thing for Marceline.

Why would Marceline

stay married to a philanderer for all those years?

Is it that she got something herself, reflected glory

from her being the mother in Peoples Temple, Mother

Marceline?

No, I do not believe she stayed because it

felt good.

I am convinced that is not the case.

I hope that in today's, you know--

in these times, a woman can just grab our kids

and go and sort it out with them later,

that they-- they understand that,

that it's not about the kids being OK with it.

I don't think my mother knew that was an option then.

We don't know what went on between Carolyn

and Marceline behind closed doors.

What we do know is Marceline could have left

and could have probably even left with her children,

but she would have lost all these people

with whom she had been living her life for over a decade.

And it would have meant losing this possibility

to bring about a transformation in the world.

Just like everyone else,

it's painful for me to see the person I love with someone

else.

I realise that I have been very selfish.

I want to make a public statement tonight

that I am willing to share my husband for the cause

and that I won't resent it any longer.

She hung in.

Once she hung in, yeah, you look around and say, OK,

what good can I do here?

How can I be OK with this?

How can I get out of bed in the morning

and-- and sleep at night?

But she did the best with what she

had and tried to make the best of the decision she'd made.

She saw her sacrifice of the monogamy

in her marriage as part of what God was requiring from her

in order to make a difference in the lives of literally

thousands of people, but ultimately, once they moved

to Jonestown, tragedy unfolds.

Starting in 1970, Peoples Temple

was a movement that was taking off,

and so Carolyn Moore Layton, who'd been involved in Peoples

Temple and sexually involved with Jim Jones since 1969,

kept inviting both her sisters, Becky and Annie, to come and be

a part of Peoples Temple.

Carolyn was always

kind of a serious person.

She took life seriously and the world seriously,

and so it's not hard to see her in Peoples Temple.

Annie, on the other hand, she was funny,

and she was a practical joker.

So to see her transformation from being kind of this funny,

joking person to someone who's planning mass deaths is--

is really a struggle.

As soon as she graduated from high school,

Annie took a trip to Redwood Valley to visit Carolyn,

and the temple gave her the hard sell, showing them the projects

that they were doing, which are wonderful.

They were.

I visited Carolyn and Peoples Temple a week or so

ago, and I am convinced that it is a good place to be.

It seems like most of the people who go there stay.

Carolyn, I think, saw the temple

as a political movement.

Annie, on the other hand, seem to see this

as a religious organisation where people were actually

doing what Jesus told them to do.

I don't know if you or Mom and Dad

understand where my thinking is.

You see, I don't care if I have a so-called good time

and take time out for my personal pleasures.

Remember, she's 18,

and she kind of talked in that way.

And everything was, you know, wonderful,

and she wanted to be part of changing the world.

LAURA JOHNSTON I knew Annie

better than I knew Carolyn she was always fun to be around.

She was, like, really funny, kind of like a colt.

You know, she was, like, lanky and just kind of-- kind

of awkward in a cute way.

All I want is to work hard

for the ultimate goal, brotherhood for all.

I'm the gladdest I have ever been to be in this church,

working for social justice and brotherhood.

She joined the temple right out

of high school.

Pretty soon after, she began attending college

to get her nursing degree.

She entered Peoples Temple almost as though she

were a nun entering a convent.

She sold her possessions.

She sold her guitar.

She cut her long hair, and she became at least outwardly

serious to us.

When Annie Moore joins Peoples Temple in 1972,

the group had expanded into San Francisco and Los Angeles,

and it numbered thousands of people.

At 15, I was

on a crew that would go down early

and start passing out fliers, go down to Market Street,

and preach about this incredible healer named Jim Jones.

It just started growing.

He bought more buses, and then we would go to San Francisco.

And then he bought the temple in Los Angeles,

and so we would go to LA and, of course, the bus

trips across the country that were recruiting trips.

We were going to the projects, knocking on people's doors

that were poor, and invite them to come to Peoples Temple.

So the first meeting was packed because we

had done all this pre-work to get people there.

Then of course it was a healing service.

Peace now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, the healings were fake, and we wouldn't know that

till later.

I knew-- wait a minute.

I know that guy or gal.

There's nothing wrong with them, so I knew this was being--

there was stuff being faked.

The healings were faked.

I don't know if Annie knew that or not.

I don't think she was involved in the fakery,

but certainly, there was a small group of people who--

who were involved and who knew that, you know,

cancers were not being healed and the lame were not suddenly

jumping up and walking.

The faith-healing stuff bothers everyone

at first, but that's not the most important part

of the church.

This is the largest group of people I have ever

seen from such different backgrounds, every color,

every age, every income group who are concerned

about the world and are fighting for truth and justice.

Jim Jones was continuing to preach a gospel of inclusion

for the poor and the elderly and a gospel of a totally

integrated power-sharing relationship between whites

and Blacks, but in actual fact, that wasn't happening

on a day-to-day basis.

Anyone of at all influence in that

inner circle was white because Dad was an insecure man

and, in his own way, a racist.

This is my opinion, strong opinion that he believed

the Black myth, and he was intimidated.

He didn't want to be measured up against the Black man in bed,

so he avoided Black women.

That's why the inner circle was mostly white.

It was all white.

So in 1973, there was a challenge mounted

by a group of young people wanting to call the Peoples

Temple leadership into accountability

for their hypocrisy for saying that they were inclusive when

in fact they weren't.

They wrote a manifesto before they left the temple.

It said white women would join the temple

and within a matter of weeks would be promoted to positions

of leadership, and one of the people they pointed out

in this regard was my sister Annie.

They also said that the rhetoric in Peoples Temple

was all about sex, and I can appreciate what they were

saying because the letters from Annie and Carolyn

talk about sex.

Annie said, you know, everyone's a homosexual,

and I'm a homosexual.

And Jim's the only person who has healthy sex.

Carolyn wrote about sex with Jim,

and since then, we've learned that he would have people

perform sex acts in front of the group.

Or he would humiliate people by making them undress.

I don't think that Carolyn and Annie joined Peoples Temple

thinking that they would be involved

in physical or sexual abuse.

I think that kind of little, you know,

morality problems along the way were

insignificant to the greater cause.

I think they had that thought that, you

know what?

It doesn't matter that there's a difference here.

There is not equality, because we're

helping those poor people.

You know, we're really doing good work for them.

I'm shining because I'm doing my part, even though I'm

taking advantage of them.

But how do you, as a human being,

know this and take advantage?

And you're taking advantage of little senior citizens.

Some of these Black women had horrific childhoods,

had horrific experiences, and they come to Peoples Temple.

And they're showed all this love, and it's fake.

It's fake.

We want your blood, and we want your sweat.

And we want your tears.

You want your money.

We want you to go out there, and we want you

to beg for money for the cause.

We want everything that you have to where once you give

everything, you don't have anything else but this,

and it worked.

Now, now will each of you give a very fond embrace,

a salutary kiss of greeting to your neighbour.

Let's fill this atmosphere with warmth.

Sometime in the summer of 1974,

Carolyn told my parents that she was pregnant with Jim Jones'

child.

She told them that she'd been on her way to an abortion clinic

but that Jim had stopped her because the child had

to be born.

And Marceline, Jim's wife,

had given public testimony saying, I understand.

I need to share my husband with the cause.

But privately, she died a thousand deaths

trying to deal with the fact that Jim was having

these relationships with these other women,

especially when he and Carolyn ended up having a child

together.

From the beginning,

he was called Kimo, which is "Jim" in Hawaiian.

As time wore on, Carolyn was somewhat

in the role of Jim's wife, Marceline, in that she also

came second to other lovers that Jim took on.

Maria stayed in the same commune

that I was in in Redwood Valley, and we

were both put on the planning commission on the same night.

She rose quite quickly into a position of leadership.

I knew Maria quite well.

She was much younger, much more naive than Carolyn

and really such a different personality.

Carolyn, you know, was not as easily manipulated as Maria.

I think Jim targeted her because she was 18 and a day old,

and so he liked young meat.

- HUE FORTSON, - Maria was one of the ones, also,

that was part of his inner circle.

From my understanding, she was a good bed partner

for him or something, and so she had privileges.

She was like one of the ones that you didn't talk to,

almost like Carolyn.

You didn't really talk to them unless they talked to you,

because if not, she would be bothered,

and if she's bothered, then he's going to be bothered.

I think that some women that

slept with Jim saw that they were considered special,

that they were chosen to be with him,

and therefore felt that they were better than others.

Absolutely, I believe that.

Absolutely.

I do think that Jim Jones took advantage of people

like Annie Moore and Carolyn Layton

and other women who came to join Peoples Temple.

He took advantage of their desire

to do a lot of good in society, and at the same time,

I think that they took advantage of the fact

that there weren't any checks and balances on the kind

of authority and power that they could wield.

I think it wasn't until criticism from concerned

relatives and the media started to mount that that sort of

began to fall apart.

My parents told me that some really bad news had come out

about Peoples Temple.

The writers for the article interviewed former members.

There were allegations of sexual activity

on the part of Jim Jones.

There were allegations about corporal punishment

within Peoples Temple.

There were allegations about financial wrongdoing.

Carolyn and Annie explained, oh, those people

have always been a bunch of liars,

or, oh, well, they're known child molesters.

Or you can't trust what those people say.

They embezzled money from the church.

All of the stories about us

are lies told to discredit the good projects we have done.

All I can say is I have never seen such atrocious

lies in my life.

And so for the leadership circle of Peoples

Temple, there was an awareness that as criticism mounted,

there would need to be a place where people could move

to in case the community was going to be disbanded.

Jim left before the article was actually

published.

There is no way that he could have withstood the backlash

and the investigations that this was going to cause,

and so he ran.

He ran, and that's when his entire world fell apart.

In 1974, this piece of property

was bought in Guyana, and an agricultural project

was set up.

And they called it Jonestown.

I mean, they used to sing this song,

going to the promised land, going to the promised land,

but he presented as a place to visit for a while, to cool out,

a vacation land, that type thing.

I was curious about Jonestown.

I wasn't overly eager to go.

And then Maria came up to me one afternoon,

and she told me that I was going to be going the next day.

And so I did.

People in Jonestown participated in creating a film,

playing up what Jonestown was supposed

to be like at the time.

Today, all the children of Jonestown

are having a fun-day parade, having a fun-day parade,

and they're going all around Jonestown

and showing their happiness and how-- how well they love it

here in Jonestown.

And if you can see how happy they are--

and they really love it here in Jonestown, as you can see.

These are potato chips made from plantain,

and they're more delicious.

They're a combination of potato chip and a French fry.

And radishes, mm, mm, mm.

Here are the people at the table,

eating an afternoon snack.

You don't know what you're missing down here.

It had dormitories.

There was a pavilion where public gatherings would take

place, a kitchen, an infirmary, school buildings.

It was like a small town right there

in the middle of the jungle.

Carolyn was in charge of a public school

system.

Annie was basically in charge of a medical center.

They lived in the cabin with Jim Jones

along with Maria Katsaris, another one

of Jim's main mistresses.

Dear Pop, how are you feeling?

I can honestly say I've never been happier or healthier.

I do different things around here.

I sort of help coordinate, but I also

spend time in the medical clinic and in the school.

By the end of the summer of '77,

a lot of people were coming over and more

all the time because Jim wanted as many people out of the San

Francisco area and away from the "New West Magazine" as soon

as he could.

When we went to Jonestown,

Mom came over much later because she stayed behind

to manage things.

Mrs. Jones, why has not your husband returned

to the United States to respond to any of these charges?

The organisation decided that if our people were going there

and any people were going there that his presence was

necessary in order to--

his leadership was necessary.

She was trying to manage what should not

be managed from a healthy point of view.

She got lost in it in that respect

because then she was just playing triage, the worst

kind of triage.

This wholesale move to Jonestown

served the purpose of keeping Jim Jones from being seen

by outsiders because by the time Jim Jones moves to Jonestown,

he is addicted to phenobarbital.

And that's when the women really took over

and where he began serving them instead of the other way

around.

While the people inside this Yucaipa home

say they fear for the lives of their friends and family

far away in that Peoples Temple in Guyana,

they say they fear for their own lives as well.

The Reverend Jim Jones works in some very unexpected ways.

This picture here is the picture for socialism.

What do you mean?

Well, everybody's supposed to be in this one,

and this is what he would preach when he put on that robe.

That's what he would say when he had his hand up like that,

socialism, socialism, socialism, but nothing but a lie.

Today, the Peoples Temple said that this is--

they had nothing to do-- that-- that the Peoples Temple would

never have anything to do with violence.

Do you believe them?

Oh no, that's the biggest lie ever was told.

Ain't nothing but violence.

By the time they transition to Jonestown,

Jim Jones became increasingly addicted to drugs,

and his behaviour of slurring his words,

stumbling around, being incoherent and disoriented

at times was explained away by Annie and other women

in leadership as him being sick.

He was a drug addict addicted to phenobarbital,

and so the women then were in charge.

Within the circle,

Carolyn was the one who organised everything.

I mean, I do think that behind the scenes,

she was kind of the mastermind of that inner circle.

My understanding of Annie's role in Jonestown

is that she did some nursing care,

but her primary role in Jonestown

was to be Jim Jones' personal nurse.

And what that entailed, I think, was, you know, giving him,

you know, uppers in the morning and downers at night.

It would have been very easy to undermine Dad at that point,

very easy if that was what folks wanted to do,

but apparently, those in his leadership circle

wanted to carry his agenda forward.

I really do believe that with Jim's insanity that his nurses

and mistresses and secretaries, they caught that same insanity.

you aware that you're rolling?

No, but I just want to tell you right now, OK?

I'm just telling you that you say there's a lot of this,

and you can't believe that.

I'm telling you that you have never met up

with a man like Jim Jones.

Are you saying Jones is a bad man?

Well, I think what he's done to the people is really bad,

so I guess, in that essence, either he's very bad,

or he's very sick.

And he's probably very sick.

The Concerned Relatives, which was a group that strongly

opposed Jim Jones and Peoples Temple,

was organised in part by Tim Stoen

along with his wife, Grace.

They had left Peoples Temple and were seeking custody

of their son, John Victor, whom they had left behind in Peoples

Temple in the care of Carolyn, Maria Katsaris,

and other members there.

How is it that Jim Jones has your son?

It's easy for someone to stay out there and say, well,

if it was my child, I would have never left.

You know, I'm a mother, and I would have never left my child.

Well, I-- you know, I've been fighting this legal case

for two years, trying to get John,

and I'll just keep on trying and trying and--

you know, until it's a dead end.

The custody battle over John Victor was extremely bitter.

Part of the reason for this was because Jim claimed

to be the father.

Grace was one of those people who

had had a sexual relationship with Jim Jones,

but she was also married and having a sexual relationship

with her own husband as well.

And so in the beginning days of John Victor Stoen's life,

it wasn't really known who the father was,

and this was part of what was at the heart of the custody

battle.

Maria Katsaris was a kind of surrogate mom for John Victor

during the years after his mother and father defected

from Peoples Temple, and he was raised alongside Kimo, Carolyn

Moore Layton and Jim Jones' son.

And they were really raised to be like siblings of one

another, and from all accounts Maria Katsaris

loved this child like her own and really took

excellent care of him.

This custody battle

might have been a kind of turning point in the psychology

of those living in Jonestown.

Peoples Temple decided

to draw a line in the sand around the custody of John

Victor Stoen.

The issue of John Stoen

is not an isolated custody case to us.

If he were taken from the collective,

it would be number one in a series of similar attempts.

No child here would ever again feel secure

if we handed over John Stoen.

Nobody in Jonestown

would be safe if he were returned to Grace and Tim.

And so when the lawyers for the Stoens

attempted to serve papers in Jonestown,

Jim Jones freaked out.

There was mass hysteria.

Everyone in the community was up in arms,

defending what they thought was going

to be an attack by government forces or US forces.

It wasn't clear.

All that was clear was that they were very afraid.

He pulled everybody else into his drama

and his pathology.

I think that people were manipulated into believing

that we were in danger when we weren't necessarily.

I remember sitting there, looking out

at the jungle, thinking, how was I going to die?

Was it going to be quick, or would they, you

know, take us and torture us.

We wouldn't know till later that everything was staged,

and John Victor Stoen was probably,

you know, a pawn like everybody else.

So now the story had to escalate.

Dad came up with this whole staged thing

where they were really going to come and try

to take John Victor away.

And the plan was, I would take John,

and I would fake like he was--

somebody tried to abduct him.

I would personally somehow throw something over his head,

but then I would rescue him.

At some point, Maria and Carolyn just pulled me off to the side,

and they said, we can't-- we can't let him do this.

You've got to stop it.

Certainly, in this case, Maria was protecting John Victor.

She didn't want him to go through that terror.

If you just say, no, no way, they get somebody else.

What you have to do in situations

like that is to find a way to steer it in another direction,

and that's what they were doing.

And to me, that was kind of a glimpse into the--

they worked it whenever they could.

I think that Carolyn was probably

trying to manage things to a better end,

but at whatever point she had a chance to take a step back,

she was too heavily invested.

At any moment, the marshal could be coming in

to arrest Jim.

We've decided that we would die if that were required,

and it seems to us that it is.

In Jonestown, the leadership circle

knew that eventually the outside forces that were attempting

to tear them down would have success.

The whole dramatic focus of this

was this battle, this custody battle

to regain custody of John Victor Stoen,

and the entire community had been mobilised

against this threat, which was more in the--

created by Jim Jones than in reality.

Annie and Carolyn repeatedly said in their letters

that they were willing to die for what they believed in.

I think it was a gradual transformation

within the temple in which revolutionary suicide, which

meant dying for what you believe in,

became transformed into suicide committed by revolutionaries

to make a point.

I don't know at what level Mom facilitated

things.

Part of her was lost in trying to manage and mitigate

what my father did and perhaps right to the end.

I lay the suicide decision solidly

at the feet of that inner circle that made it happen,

and the people who were at the forefront of this

were Annie Moore, Carolyn Layton, Maria Katsaris,

and the other women in the leadership circle.

In Jonestown, Jim Jones would be speaking over the loudspeaker

during most waking hours.

It was horrible.

You just-- I just--

I would cringe when I hear it, and then I get angry.

Please, would somebody just, you know, end this?

We just went into this whole place of darkness and despair.

I think people were just so tired because you didn't know

what was real.

We had no news from the outside world except what he gave us.

If they had said there was a nuclear war,

we would have believed it because we had no contact

with the outside world.

We don't always factor in just how hard life

was in Jonestown, how exhausted people were,

and how there was no end in sight.

There was no way for that jungle commune

to be able to sustain that many people.

Plus, 2/3 of the people were elderly or children, which

meant that it was a small number of people who were actually

running the day-to-day operations of feeding

the community, doing laundry, cleaning up, disposal

of garbage, making sure that there was medicine available,

education, and all the other things that

make a-- make a town work.

Jonestown was a terrible place to live.

They were dire times.

Dad was deeply troubled and crazed

by the threat he perceived.

More and more, Jim Jones

was becoming a figurehead in his own movement

because he's not good at the bureaucratic, day-to-day

running of an organisation.

He was great at getting people to join,

but he was not good at maintaining

the health of the community on a day-to-day basis.

People wondered about him possibly

being on drugs because when he would

talk on the loudspeaker from his cottage,

he would slur his words.

Soon after Mom moved to Jonestown,

she came to me and said, we've got

to get your father off drugs.

We've got to isolate him, and we're

going to have to just get him off drugs, you know?

Even now, that's just such a crazy statement.

Like, and what I said to her was, Mom,

you don't tell God he's got a drug problem,

but she would even latch onto that as a possibility.

I don't know.

I think it's evidence of how lost she was in managing

that situation.

At that point, we saw less and less of each other.

And I think that that was in large part

that Dad wanted her way, and she wanted to be away.

She also-- when she would come into town,

she did not make things easy for him.

I think he felt guilty, first of all,

so having her not around made it easier for him to just be

in his new life and other life.

- HUE FORTSON, - Jones said publicly, Marceline

and I no longer have a relationship.

Her cottage is over there on that side of Jonestown,

and he had just had one recently built

on the other side of Jonestown.

I think that Marceline Jones felt more

and more irrelevant the longer that Jonestown went on,

and the broader group did not see her

as being that important.

Long gone were the days of Indiana when

she was known as Mother Jones.

She was not the mother to the community anymore.

I remember one time, I'm awakened.

My father's calling, and he wants

to have a conversation with me.

He's just propped up in bed with that ridiculous hat of his.

His sunglasses are on.

Carolyn is hovering off to the right.

At some point, he looks at her, and she quickly scurries in.

And she shoots him up intravenously with something.

He says to me, don't worry.

It's just B12.

Within seconds, that B12 had him slurring words and nodding

and just wasted.

And I looked over at her, and she was crying,

looking just completely lost.

I feel it was that she recognised what they'd become,

that her dream was lost.

I think that Carolyn was probably

pretty lonely in Jonestown, that she didn't have any friends.

How can you be friends with the mistress of the leader?

Anything you said to that person would go back directly

to Jones.

So I imagine her living kind of in a cone of isolation.

The only alternative was interaction with her son, Kimo,

who is, like, engaging and funny and warm and loves her,

and it's not clear to her at that point who still might love

her.

I have no idea how Carolyn and Annie related to each other,

what it was like to, you know, share

the cabin along with Maria, but what's

interesting about Annie's relationship or role in all

that is that there was a letter that was found

in Jonestown that she wrote to Jim Jones in which she said--

I just wanted for you to know that I do not mind

being your nurse, and there is nothing more I would rather be.

I would rather be around you than anyone else in the world.

I will do everything I can think of to help keep you going.

You can't separate yourself from that--

that investment, that--

all that you've poured in there, how you're compromised

yourself, how you've colluded, and how you're

tainted by all of that.

It was only a matter of time.

Well, think that Jim Jones took his group

down there because he was afraid to face the publicity

and answer the questions here in this country,

and I don't think that he feels confident having people talk

to their relatives.

I think the only way he can survive and sustain

what he started is to isolate all

his followers from this country and from their families.

Back in the United States,

the Concerned Relatives, working with Maria Katsaris' father,

Steven Katsaris, and others, organised a very well-planned

strategy to heighten public awareness about what they felt

were the dangers of Jonestown.

They wrote a declaration of human rights violations.

Jones did this.

Jones does that.

Jones censors letters.

Jones won't let people leave, and so on.

These actions might well have been legitimate, but back

in Jonestown, it feels like they're under attack.

This declaration prompted a response

from Peoples Temple members, including Maria Katsaris.

OK, do you copy?

MAN I copy.

I don't think Maria was brainwashed at all.

I think she made a series of commitments

and that she lived within a community that could not admit

its mistakes.

Maria's only choice in order to stay loyal to her people

was to openly condemn her father.

Steven loved his daughter, and he

had a lot of high hopes for the kind of life

that she would lead.

And I think he represented, like so many

of the Concerned Relatives, this kind of horror at the idea

that their children or their loved ones

could turn their back on the outside world.

My father did not agree to be part of Concerned

Relatives, again, because both he and my mother

did not want to do anything that would rupture the relationship

that they had with Carolyn and Annie,

and this was definitely confirmed by the fact

that my folks visited Jonestown.

And the reports were pretty glowing because, as usual,

they only saw the positive aspects of life

in Peoples Temple and Jonestown.

They had a good visit.

They saw life in Jonestown the way

it could have been had things really gone well.

The work was hard, and the conditions were tough.

But there seemed to be enough to eat,

and people seem to be in good spirits.

That might have been a false impression,

but certainly, they were relieved

to see that my sisters were OK.

When they came back, the Temple leadership

asked them to have a press conference to counteract

the bad publicity that they had received from the Concerned

Relatives.

They felt that people were engaged in something

meaningful in Jonestown, and that-- that they were doing

something that they felt was important.

Even then, my parents were kind of unwitting pawns

or certainly unaware of what was happening behind the scenes.

Unknown to them, a couple of days before they were there,

Debbie Layton made her escape.

Debbie was treasurer, a secretary,

and she was sent to Georgetown, which is 150 miles away.

And she went to the American embassy

and let them know the man's crazy.

He's going to kill those people.

I want to go home back to California.

Debbie left and went public with her charges

that there were suicide drills, that people were mistreated,

that people were drugged, and that she left in order

to really save her own life but also to save the lives

of people who she left behind.

And that was a huge blow to the leadership of Peoples

Temple, and the way that Jim Jones and his leadership circle

reacted to it was dramatic.

- HUE FORTSON, - I remember we were weeding the pineapple

fields, and he just starts saying,

alert, alert, alert, alert, alert.

And I asked my leader, Jasmine.

I said, what is that?

She says, go immediately to the pavilion.

Do not stop.

He began to share with us that there had been a defection.

He won't let you.

He-- he won't let anybody out.

It's gone too far.

I mean, we were put through a suicide trial once.

What's a suicide trial?

He had a big meeting.

He said it was over, that the mercenaries were coming in.

There was very little time left.

Everyone stood in a line, went up, and drank this red--

you know, it was a kind of a--

tasted like-- what's this--

that thing-- the drink little children drink,

but you have to put a lot of sugar in it first?

Kool-Aid? - Kool-Aid.

Debbie Layton had come out and reported that there were

suicide drills, a lack of adequate food,

a general atmosphere of fear and terror

that were going on in the community,

but we just didn't take those reports seriously.

We never thought that they would kill themselves.

That never occurred to us as a possibility, I mean, really.

What I'm trying to say is, if we make a stand

or decide to die, how are we going to do it?

Do you give everyone pills?

Perhaps planning is the answer to all this.

Carolyn was very involved

in organising at all because that was her role always.

She was very much the mastermind of what was going on.

I think that Annie, you know, would help out her sister

because she was the younger sister,

and they had that relationship.

If we killed ourselves,

maybe we would be categorised as lunatics,

but at least we would be assured that our people could not

sell out or be tortured or taken and brainwashed.

It's painful to relate, but I know that my sisters were,

you know, certainly involved in planning the deaths.

There were letters that went back and forth that while it

doesn't state the orders explicitly,

it was clear that poison was what--

the letter that Annie wrote to Carolyn.

Poison is what was suggested.

I never thought people would line up

to be killed.

I actually think a select group would have to kill the majority

of people secretly.

The way?

I don't know-- exhaust fumes in a closed area

while people are asleep, poisoning food or water supply.

There had to be a decision made about how much

cyanide per how much flavour aid that would be necessary to kill

all the people in the community, and the people who were

at the forefront of this were Annie Moore, Carolyn

Layton, Maria Katsaris, and the other women in the leadership

circle.

Jim's followers enabled him.

They reinforced his own delusions.

The leader corrupts the followers by telling them lies,

but the followers corrupt the leader

by pretending to believe the lies.

And so there's this dynamic relationship between Jim Jones

and Carolyn and Annie and everybody where they accepted

each other's delusions, and ultimately, it

led to the tragedy of Jonestown.

Congressman Leo Ryan and his party of people related

to cult members, reporters, and cameramen left the United

States for Georgetown, Guyana, hoping to get to Jonestown.

The Concerned Relatives, working

with Maria Katsaris' father, Steven Katsaris, and others,

got together and strategised about ways to rescue or save

their relatives in Jonestown, and their efforts ultimately

led to persuading Congressman Leo Ryan to visit Jonestown.

Congressman Ryan was one of these amazing larger-than-life

public figures.

Well, we're in the process of determining--

trying to determine the degree of concern we should have.

And so when he was approached by Concerned

Relatives, he organised a visit in order

to do some investigation into whether the things

that the Concerned Relatives were saying

were accurate or not.

In Jonestown, the leadership circle was not sure

whether Jim would be able to communicate adequately

with Congressman Ryan, and there was lots of planning for there

to be just brief meetings with Jim Jones but lots of singing

and lots of interactions with other people.

And Marceline was to give the tour,

and there was a lot of pressure on the leadership

to make everything look OK at Jonestown, even though they

knew that it was, in fact, falling apart.

The stage had been set long

before his arrival for the mass murders

and suicides in Jonestown.

The poison had already been ordered.

The poison had been tested on pigs in the community.

There were a few people who were in on the secret,

but the plan obviously had already been made.

The only thing that was in question

was, when would the plan be implemented?

Are you happy here?

Yes, I'm very happy.

Do you know that your father and your brother

are convinced that you're not?

I'm very happy here.

I don't know what else I can do to convince them.

I've talked to my brother several hours now,

and as far as my father's concerned,

you know, I-- so far, he has said what he wants to say,

which has not been the truth.

He's asking me to come back to the United States

to spend a week to convince him and my family

that I'm not being held here against my will,

and I don't plan to return at this time to convince anybody

because I know I'm happy here.

And I know my mind.

Maria previously had

been cheerful and easygoing, and she-- she became somewhat

hard and distant.

All that mattered was what was happening around Jim

and what she was told to do.

The leadership decided that what they needed

to do was put on an excellent program

so that they could turn down the volume on the criticism that

was coming.

That might have worked out fine, except that while Congressman

Ryan was there with his camera crew and some journalists

from San Francisco, a note got handed to one of them saying

that two people wanted to defect.

Last night, someone came and passed me this note.

Congressman Ryan asked if there was anybody else

that wanted to leave.

A family of eight and a family of six

who had been with Peoples Temple for 20 years had had it.

They were exhausted.

They were sick, and they were done.

And they asked to leave, and so they left with Congressman Ryan

and the rest of the news crew.

You get back here!

Hold on a second.

You are-- you bring them back!

One second.

Don't you touch my kids.

Hold on a second.

Mother, they on taking my kids.

Wait, wait,

No.

Wait.

And they went to the Port Kaituma Airstrip

in order to leave Guyana.

It was clear to the leadership of Peoples Temple

that these were enemies, that these were people who were

defecting, that these were people who were going to bring

about the disbanding of the community.

This was the moment when the real choice between are we

together in death or are we dispersed in life came to pass,

and it was because Congressman Ryan had come for this visit.

This is "NBC Nightly News" with Jessica Savage reporting.

Good evening.

The government of Guyana sent troops into the remote jungle

of that country, a jungle which was

the scene of a bizarre chain of events that

led to the deaths of an American Congressman and three newsmen.

They were gunned down as they tried

to escort unhappy settlers from the camp

of an American religious sect.

They were going back home.

The report came back that people from Peoples Temple

had opened fire on Congressman Ryan and his film crew.

Congressman Ryan, Don Harris, and two other journalists

died on the Port Kaituma Airstrip.

This is the point at which you realise that a plan was

in place for everybody to die.

At the time, I was representing the Peoples

Temple in-- in a basketball tournament in Georgetown,

and I don't know how things got out of control at the airstrip.

I don't know.

I'm sure the order came from my father.

So at that point, I think he knew he was lost,

so that's why the vat is brought out.

This time, it's real.

And so the conversation began by Jim Jones

saying the time for revolutionary suicide

has begun.

At that point, perhaps there still would

have been a moment where Marceline Jones might have

stood up and said, let's not do this.

I think Marceline's role in legitimizing the call

to suicide was in her silence.

I really do think that she was herself so exhausted from all

these years of having no privacy, no resources

of her own, sharing her husband with the women

of the community, seeing that this ideal had become instead

this insular, paranoid, violent community

that I think she didn't have it in her to fight anymore.

I don't believe and it's not my understanding

that she was one of the people who orchestrated the suicide.

A part of her was lost in trying to manage and mitigate

what my father did and perhaps right to the end.

I don't know.

Truthfully, more than likely, I probably would have died,

too, because he had painted the picture that a mysterious

they was going to come in and take our lives,

that we had nowhere to go.

I think there would have been no other way out.

I wasn't even think about running because they had

the crossbows and ammunition and all the other stuff,

so I think I probably would have taken my life.

I think on the 18th was--

there's so many dynamics to that day.

And I believe that there were some people that

were just exhausted.

I believe some people didn't know that it was actually real.

I think people just thought, well, what am I going to do?

Who do I have to go home to?

The night before, my mother looked at me,

and she said, baby, I'm tired.

And she was 50 years old.

On the tape, you hear a woman's voice,

and she starts to tell people how to line up

to take the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid

and to instruct people to give it to their children first.

And then the dying begins.

I don't really know where Carolyn and Annie were

in Jonestown on November 18.

There are conflicting reports about Annie.

Some say that she was one of the nurses that was administering

the poison.

Others say, no, she was in Joan's cabin,

taking care of her nephew Kimo and John Victor Stoen.

Carolyn does not seem to be present anywhere,

neither in the pavilion where the deaths were occurring,

nor in Joan's cabin, but she was definitely

part of the planning process in deciding how people were going

to die.

I lay the suicide decision solidly

at the feet of that inner circle that made it happen,

because Jim Jones could have talked all day about committing

suicide, but he was not in a position to order the cyanide,

figure out the formula, mix it, and force it on people.

So that meant that he had people who

were complicit in that decision and in the carrying

out of that decision.

They were on board, that's for sure.

I don't know at what point the scales tip and you

yourself are lost in the--

the delusion and the extremism.

I don't know how that happens, where--

where you just completely lose yourself to the story,

but they clearly had.

There's debate about the extent to which

people were forced to take the poison,

and certainly, the children were murdered.

But most of them were murdered by their parents.

The masterful stroke was persuading or forcing

people to kill their children, and that's

quite clear on the tape that the children are brought forward

first.

And after they're killed, the tape ends with,

"and now the adults come forward."

After you kill your child, what's

your percentage in living?

I believe-- and many people agree with this--

there was one vat of poison.

It really only took one person to go up

and kick that thing over, and Dad would have been--

he wouldn't have gotten it done.

Once the dying had begun at the pavilion

and people were actually already dead,

and it was clear that everybody else was lining up in order

to get their cyanide-laced Kool-Aid,

then Carolyn and Maria went into the cabin

that they had shared with Jim Jones and Annie.

And they gave cyanide to their children,

and then they drank it themselves.

One of the autopsies that was done was of Carolyn,

and it was clear that she had both injected herself

and drank the Kool-Aid so that she was sure to die.

When the dying had stopped, still Jim Jones lived.

He did not himself drink the Kool-Aid of this organisation,

this church, this movement that he had founded,

and at the very end of the suicides,

the two people left alive were Jim Jones and Annie.

And so Annie Moore, his nurse, took a gun and shot him.

Annie presumably was one of the last people to die.

There's some speculation that she shot Jim Jones.

I don't know what to think.

On the one hand, that supposedly would prove what a coward

he is.

He can't even kill himself, or maybe that's his last power

trip, is to have someone else kill him.

But Annie left essentially a suicide note,

and then she shot herself in Joan's cabin.

I am 24 years of age right now

and don't expect to live.

I thought I should at least make some attempt

to let the world know what Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

is or was all about.

I would say that Annie Moore was the last loyalist

to the movement and to Jim Jones.

Jonestown, the most peaceful, loving community

that ever existed, Jim Jones, the one who

made this paradise possible.

She also was somebody

who had given her whole life over to the movement.

She believed that what they were doing was making a difference,

that they really had improved the lives of people,

and she was angry that the outsiders that were detractors

against Peoples Temple had not seen the good that they had

done.

What a beautiful place this was.

The children loved the jungle, learned

about animals and plants.

There were no cars to run over them,

no child molesters to molest them, nobody to hurt them.

They were the freest, most intelligent children I had ever

known.

We died because he would not let us live in peace.

Carolyn and Annie and, I think,

most of the members of Peoples Temple

were drawn to it by a strong desire to do good,

that they wanted to change the world.

They thought that by being part of Peoples Temple,

they could change the world.

It's sad.

I mean, how does a person get from one place to the other?

Some of the funniest,

intelligent, creative people that I've ever known

were in the Temple, and we knew how to have fun.

And we seized those moments for sure.

It doesn't mean that Jonestown was a happy place.

Jim was not standalone responsible

for every single thing.

I mean, at the end, his nurses and mistresses and secretaries

were the ones who put out the poison.

They were the ones who arranged things.

So it wasn't that Jim did was the mastermind

and did everything.

At the end, at the end, it was his secretaries

who went on and fulfilled his wishes.

People want to blame Jim Jones for the deaths,

and certainly, in many respects, it was his vision.

But he couldn't have done it by himself.

There were lots of enablers.

There were lots of helpers.

One of the people who survived--

and this woman lost her children in Jonestown.

Many years later, we got together.

And she came up to me, and she was talking about my mother.

And she said, your mother-- it was just all praise--

lovely person.

She's the reason I stayed.

And she meant that as a compliment,

but as she was saying it, she caught it

because, you know, them staying led

to the death of their children.

Maria Katsaris, Annie Moore, Carolyn

Layton, and, of course, Marceline took a situation,

and they gained power from it.

And they were able to manipulate a huge number of people

and influence Jim in ways that I'm sure that they did,

but they knew exactly what was going on.

They're accountable, also.

They're enablers, so I--

I don't have a lot of compassion for them.

And I don't pity them.

I just think I forgive them, though.

I-- I forgive them.