Official finding New religious movements North West District, Guyana · 1978

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

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Separate register

Evidence status

Official finding

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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.

Cited 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.

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Source and tier basis: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CPRT-96HPRT44542O Legacy citation preserved without a normalized source tier or evidentiary-role code. SHA-256 52fe37555cd3f19bf7ed34537841ddb67f0c11d14ae29a8cb3dc83b5613610c3
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/jonestown Legacy citation preserved without a normalized source tier or evidentiary-role code. SHA-256 69c790e46892ee705bb3fedc883d367eeacf904c516046da9538578c6b1db225
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/GuyanaInquest.pdf Legacy citation preserved without a normalized source tier or evidentiary-role code. SHA-256 96d371ab96fecdd6062750985c738850cf514c9fa04f83b610362ff6ed9f94d2
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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