Return to camp suicide: 30 years on, could the nightmare of Jonestown happen again?

It was a horror that defied all reason - 1,000 Americans brainwashed into taking cyanide by their deranged leader

The jungle stretches out below our twin-engine plane like some vast, luxuriant carpet that seems to swallow up everything in its path.

Yet some events are so heinous that nothing can obliterate them  -  and the unspeakable horrors that unfolded here, 30 years ago next week, fall into that category.

Below us, on the northern tip of South America, 914 brainwashed men, women and children died in agony after poisoning themselves on the orders of a power-crazed cult leader who convinced them he was the Second Coming.

The place where they fell was Jonestown, a remote commune in north-western Guyana named after its founder, Jim Jones  -  the evil architect of this terrible tragedy.

He promised them it would be Utopia, but it became a mass graveyard. To Jones, their deaths were an act of 'revolutionary suicide'. To those few who were fortunate to escape and tell their story, it was mass murder.

Jonestown bodies

Bodies litter the ground after the mass suicide of Jones's followers

History remembers it as the Jonestown Massacre  -  and, excluding acts of war and natural disasters, it was the biggest single loss of life in modern times.

The man who flew me there this week was among the first to have witnessed the nightmarish scene that remained after the self-inflicted carnage of November 18, 1978.

Now aged 53, Gerry Gouveia was an army pilot who had been sent on a reconnaissance mission the day afterwards, when the bodies were still scattered thickly across the ground. Thirty years on, the scenes he saw are still fresh in his memory as we fly above the jungle.

Having departed from the capital, Georgetown, we have been droning above the unbroken green canopy for almost an hour when he banks sharply left and swoops over an oval-shaped clearing. Here, there are no towering trees or tortuous creepers; just a sprinkling of sun-dappled daisies.

'This is the place,' Gouveia says grimly over the intercom. 'When I first flew over here it looked as though someone had laid out lots of brightly coloured clothes on the ground. It was only when I dropped lower that I could see it was actually a mass of people.

'It was quite surreal, like being in a dream. I thought they must be playing a practical joke. I kept expecting them all to jump to their feet and shout: "Gotcha!"'

The pilot adds: 'Isn't it strange that the vegetation has grown back so thickly everywhere else, but in the area where all those people died there are just those little daisies?'

It was, indeed, strange, but also fitting. For the community we were revisiting was created as Jim Jones's warped vision of the Garden of Eden, and the 1,000 or so devoted souls who followed him into the steaming tropics were the start of his warped new human race.

Cult leader Jim Jones

Jim Jones, founder of the People's Temple sect, in a photograph taken in Guyana shortly before the massacre in November 1978

Yet 30 years later, many questions about Jonestown remain only partly answered.

Who was Jones, and what was life like in the jungle community built by his followers? Why did they believe in him so unquestioningly? And were their deaths a random act of madness, or could a similar horror ever happen again?

The son of an abusive, alcoholic father, James Warren Jones was born in 1931 and raised in an anonymous town in Indiana, where he is said to have killed his friends' pets so that they would pay him to dispose of them in his first business venture  -  an animal burial service.

By his early 20s he and his wife, Marceline, had founded their first evangelical church, and by most accounts he appeared a well-meaning local pastor.

They also became the first couple in the state to adopt a black baby  -  rather a departure from Jones's father, who was in the Ku Klux Klan. They later expanded their 'rainbow family' to include a Korean child.

But the seeds for destruction were planted when the Joneses moved to northern California at the height of the Cold War, after reading that it was one of the few places in America that would be safe if the U.S. came under nuclear attack.

At the time, America was torn by the Vietnam War and civil rights disturbances, and their so-called People's Temple became a refuge for the disaffected.

How the 'Father' conned so many

A handsome, well-groomed figure with slickly parted black hair (and painted-on sideburns), a white robe and Hollywood sunglasses, which he even wore in the pulpit, Jones promised to fulfil all their needs.

He told followers to call him 'Father' or 'Daddy' and they were his 'Darlings'. He convinced them he was a reincarnation of historical figures, among them Jesus and Lenin, and offered them salvation.

In their desperation to find an alternative to the rampant materialism, social inequality and racial bigotry of the times, Jones's disciples were easily hoodwinked.

Such was the power of his personality that the Californian establishment were taken in by him, too. He was courted by politicians, such as the Mayor of San Francisco and President Jimmy Carter's wife, Rosalynn.

Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton

Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, who escaped and penned an account of events leading to the slaughter

By the summer of 1977, however, an investigative magazine journalist raised questions over his propriety. It was suggested that he was a charlatan who was abusing his position to enrich himself and take advantage of his flock.

The article prompted his swift departure to Guyana, whose socialist government welcomed him with open arms, not least because he promised to deposit $500,000 of the fortune he had amassed from his members' dole cheques in the nation's empty coffers.

His Darlings followed him unquestioningly. They decamped to Georgetown by the planeload and reached Jonestown  -  which is inaccessible by road  -  by boat.

Only after they had swapped the comforts of California for a life of toil in the unbearably humid wilds of South America did some begin to see their Messiah for the morally degenerate, drug-crazed megalomaniac he really was.

They also came to realise that his Promised Land was a concentration camp designed for the greater glory and enrichment (and sexual gratification) of its dictator.

The Father would regale them about the injustices of capitalism over a Big Brother-style loudspeaker as they worked from dawn till dusk in the snake-infested fields. Yet by then most of his followers were so cowed that they were in no mental state to question him.

The sheer size and scale of Jones's jungle fiefdom becomes apparent on entering the 3,900-acre site, six miles from the isolated mining town of Port Kaituma, in north-west Guyana.

On first inspection, little remains of Jonestown's infrastructure, which included rows of communal dorms for the disciples, a radio room from which Jones delivered his rambling propaganda broadcasts, his own relatively luxurious personal quarters, and a big central pavilion around which the suicides  -  or murders  -  were orchestrated.

U.S. military officers place Jones's victims in coffins

U.S. military personnel place bodies in coffins at Georgetown airport, Guyana, after the cyanide deaths

Since then, much of it has been destroyed by fire, and it has been often looted by local villagers  -  though no one appears to have found the gold nuggets rumoured to be stashed in the labyrinth of tunnels Jones is said to have dug in preparation for the nuclear attack he prophesied.

Rooting around in the undergrowth, however, one can still find macabre clues to the kind of place this once was. In one corner, I stumbled upon 'the box'  -  a 15ft-deep mud pit where people were often left for days on end for misbehaving.

This was certainly not the only form of brutal punishment, according to Deborah Layton, who was among the first defectors, and has since revealed Jonestown's dark secrets in a powerful memoir, Seductive Poison.

She describes how old people were sometimes stripped naked for disobedience, and children were dangled by the feet down a well for the slightest infraction, such as complaining of homesickness.

One day she watched a 66-year-old disciple named Charlie being ritually humiliated for daring to fall asleep during one of Father's interminable lectures. Incensed, Jones instructed the man's own son to drape a huge boa constrictor around his father's neck and leave it hanging there.

Jones's brutal mind games

But his preferred method of control was insidious mind games. Families and friends were taught to report one another's transgressions, and people were encouraged to purge their guilt by confessing at nightly mass meetings.

To heighten the climate of fear, Jones regularly dragged his exhausted minions from their beds in the early hours to act out his so-called 'White Nights'.

During these eerie alerts, alarms blared and they were summoned to battle stations bearing knives, sticks and, in some cases, rifles on the pretext that Jonestown was under attack from some outside invasion force.

As Jones constantly warned them that the CIA was planning a raid in which everyone would be rounded up and shipped back to a U.S. 'concentration camp', no one questioned these drills.

Until the all-clear sounded and they were permitted to troop back to their bunks, no one knew whether the attack was for real.

In today's information-driven world, of course, this level of ignorance seems preposterous, even in the jungle. But in 1978, there was no internet, and the only radio in Jonestown belonged to the Father  -  the sole source of contact with the outside world.

Then there was sex, and here Jones's capacity for manipulation and hypocrisy knew no bounds.

Jonestown victims after swallowing cyanide

Hundreds of victims lie face-down in the South American jungle after swallowing juice laced with cyanide

From the pulpit he branded making love a fatal weakness and banned couples from sleeping together until their commitment had been proved by a lengthy trial period  -  yet he was a shameless sexual predator.

Officially, he lived with Marceline, whom he had married at 18. But long before the great exodus to Guyana he more regularly shared his bed with his chief mistress, Carolyn Layton.

He also routinely took whichever of his Darlings caught his eye  -  the younger the better.

He would lure these innocents into his room and have his way with them, knowing they dared not resist. Then at the next meeting he would single them out and force them to admit they had seduced him. Their peers were urged to hurl insults, and even beat and spit on the hapless girl.

Meanwhile, Jones had become hooked on prescription painkillers, and would even confiscate his members' medication for his own use.

One of Jonestown's quartermasters, Laura Kohl, who was fortunate enough to be away in Georgetown when the suicide order went out, told me there were rumours that Jones was also suffering some unspecified brain disorder towards the end of his life.

If so, this may help to account for his bloated appearance and slurred words, and perhaps even the rampant paranoia that was making him increasingly irrational by the autumn of 1978.

As Jones became ever more unhinged, believing an invasion was imminent, he prepared to stage his own version of the Final Solution. Now life at Jonestown descended into dark farce.

The 'Final Solution'

Convinced that Guyana was no longer secure, he decided he must lead his Darlings to a new homeland inside the Soviet Union, and duly sent his most attractive female envoys to the Russian Embassy in Georgetown to plead for safe passage.

He also made overtures to the Cubans. But of course, neither country would accommodate him. In his addled mind, time was fast running out, so he dispatched couriers to secrete millions of dollars in offshore bank accounts.

Caches of weapons and cyanide were smuggled up river to the commune using the People's Temple's boat, the Cudjoe. Whenever Jones discussed these matters with his inner circle on the short-wave radio, they were instructed to use codewords. Guns were 'bibles', for example, the U.S. was 'Rex' and Cuba was 'Netty'.

To ensure his followers were ready for mass suicide, he staged a series of practice runs designed to test their loyalty and courage.

Whether or not most people believed he would carry out the act, Deborah Layton certainly did. She warned as much in a sworn statement to the U.S. authorities after making her daring dash for freedom in May, 1978.

With breathtaking complacency, no action was taken.

The only politician prepared to confront Jones with allegations that he was holding many people against their will and to demand that they be allowed to leave was a courageous Californian Congressman named Leo Ryan.

Accompanied by a group of journalists, Ryan arrived at the commune on November 17, and Jones feigned to welcome them.

Congressman Leo Ryan and three journalists killed on Jim Jones's orders

The bodies of Congressman Leo Ryan, three journalists and one cult defector lie on the ground beside an airplane after Jones ordered them to be killed

He gave them food and shelter for the night, and even allowed Ryan to use his personal address system to remind the Darlings that they were free to determine their own future.

The following evening, however, when 16 disciples opted to follow the politician rather than the preacher, Jones's rampant ego took over and the Apocalypse began.

First, he sent his guards to shoot Ryan and the defectors as they boarded a plane at the airstrip. The Congressman, three journalists and one of the disciples were killed in a hail of gunfire.

Shortly afterwards, back at Jonestown, the suicide order went out. The disciples were gathered around the central pavilion and ordered to drink fruit juice laced with cyanide handed out by the guards.

Some were still so devoted to Jones that they went willingly to their deaths. But many hundreds more refused his order  -  only to be forced at gunpoint to take the poison.

They included scores of old people who were apparently injected as they sat helplessly in their wheelchairs; and 276 children, whose parents were instructed to press hands over their mouths so they had no choice but to swallow.

'Don't fear death! It is nothing. Die with a degree of dignity!' Jones can be heard to exhort them on a chilling tape recording discovered later.

This nonchalant bravado was Jones's final act of deception. Repulsed by the sight of so many bodies, their faces fixed with the ghastly 'rictus grin' that cyanide poisoning induces, the preacher took the cowardly way out by shooting himself

For 30 years afterwards, the Guyanese government was so ashamed at having allowed him to build his state within a state that it tried to airbrush the massacre of innocents from history.

Next week, though, it will finally remember the atrocity by erecting rather gaudy green signs marking the site of Jonestown for the first time. Plans to make it a 'dark tourism' attraction complete with maps and models have also been discussed.

It is a measure of their utter isolation in Jim Jones's version of Utopia, however, that most of the dead are remembered by no one. When they were shipped home to the U.S., 546 of the bodies were never even claimed.

They are buried in a mass grave in Oakland, California, which stands as a pitiful testimony to one man's supreme act of madness.

DAVID JONES: Return to camp suicide: 30 years on, could the nightmare of Jonestown happen again?