Jim Jones

James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader, mass murderer, political activist, and self-professed faith healer who led the Peoples Temple, a new religious organization which existed between 1955 and 1978. Jones and his inner circle orchestrated a mass murder-suicide of himself and his followers in his remote jungle commune at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978.

Jones founded the organization that would become the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1955. Jones distinguished himself with his civil rights activism, founding the Temple as a fully integrated congregation. In 1965, he moved the Temple to California, where the group established its headquarters in San Francisco and became heavily involved in left-wing politics through the 1970s. Jones then left the U.S. and established Jonestown, compelling many of his followers to live there with him.

By 1978, media reports had surfaced of human rights abuses at Jonestown. Deciding to investigate these reports, U.S. Representative Leo Ryan led a delegation to the commune in November of that year. While boarding a return flight with some former Temple members who had wished to leave, Ryan and four others were murdered by gunmen dispatched from Jonestown. Jones then ordered and likely coerced a mass murder-suicide that claimed the lives of 918 commune members, 304 of them children, almost all by cyanide-poisoned Flavor Aid.

James Warren Jones was born on May 13, 1931, in a rural area of Crete, Indiana,[1][2] to James Thurman Jones, a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam.[3][4] Jones was of Irish and Welsh descent;[5] he later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, but his maternal second cousin said this was untrue.[5][note 1] In 1934, the economic difficulties during the Great Depression forced the family to move to the nearby town of Lynn, where Jones grew up in a shack without plumbing.[6][7]

Jones was a voracious reader who studied Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Mahatma Gandhi, and Adolf Hitler.[8] He also developed an intense interest in religion. One writer suggests this was primarily because he found it difficult to make friends.[5]

Childhood acquaintances recalled Jones as a “really weird kid” who was obsessed with religion and death, alleging that he frequently held funerals for small animals on his parents’ property and that he had stabbed a cat to death.[9] One childhood acquaintance noted that, after German prisoners-of-war arrived in Lynn during World War II, one patted young Jones on the back of the head, to which he responded by giving the Nazi salute and shouting “Heil Hitler!”[10]