Other New religious movements North West District, Guyana · 1978

Jonestown and Peoples Temple: coercive control, official investigations and mass deaths

Record class

Separate register

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

See cited record

Organization

No organization assigned

Spiritual nexus

Official and archival records document forced labor, beatings, confinement, drug-based control, rehearsals for collective death, the murder of Representative Leo Ryan and more than 900 deaths. A Guyanese coroner's jury classified 910 deaths as murders attributed to Jim Jones. The dossier preserves the distinction between those findings and the separately recorded suicides of named inner-circle members rather than describing every death as voluntary.

Primary record

Sources

U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, The Assassination of Representative Leo J. Ryan and the Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy (May 15, 1979).: The congressional staff investigation reconstructs Representative Ryan's inquiry, the Port Kaituma attack and the Jonestown deaths and reviews the official response and warning record.
Federal Bureau of Investigation, 'Jonestown.': The FBI history records reports of beatings, forced labor, imprisonment, drug-based control and rehearsed mass suicide; it describes the airstrip murders, the deaths of more than 900 people including more than 200 children, and Larry Layton's later federal conviction.
Coroner's Inquest into the Jonestown deaths, Guyana (Dec. 1978), archival reproduction.: The reproduced official inquest record contains survivor and official testimony. The jury returned a verdict that 910 people were murdered by Jim Jones while separately classifying the deaths of named inner-circle members.

Related record

Related cases · New religious movements

← Explore all cases