Word: jonestown
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...final crash, the mob violence unleashed on a cult hero hints at others to be remembered. Maybe the Guru Maharah Ji's rock band will fail. Maybe Werner Erhard will marry Linda Renstadt. And maybe, thinking back on absent friends, "Dad" could have blown it. Jonestown could have gone the other...
First had come the numbing photos: nearly 900 colorfully clad bodies clustered near a vat of poison. Next, the anguished accounts of the bewildering tragedy by its few survivors. Last week, nearly four months after they had occurred, the mass deaths at Jonestown in the remoteness of Guyana's jungles took on a new and far more personal dimension. Americans sat in their living rooms and heard the actual sounds of the Peoples Temple dying...
Jones had called his followers together after a two-day visit by California Congressman Leo Ryan. The Temple leader was outraged by the fact that a score of the cultists had asked Ryan to help them escape the colony. Ryan's party and the defectors had left Jonestown to fly home from a nearby airstrip. Jones knew of a plot by his group to shoot the pilot of one of the visitors' two planes. He was not aware, at first, that Ryan and four others in the party had already been ambushed and slain at the airfield...
Eight newsmen crowded into the motel room in Modesto, Calif., to hear Prokes read his statement. A former TV reporter, he had gone to Guyana with Jones in August 1977. Prokes had fled Jonestown just before the mass deaths. While carrying some $500,000 of the Temple's cash through the jungle, he and two others were arrested by Guyana police. They claimed they had been ordered by Jones to deliver the money to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. Released by Guyana officials, Prokes had returned to California...
...cults issue was thrust into harsh focus by last November's carnage at the Peoples Temple commune in Jonestown, Guyana. The most dramatic moments of the four-hour hearing came from Jackie Speier, a legislative counsel who accompanied the late Congressman Leo Ryan on his fatal visit to the Rev. Jim Jones' headquarters and survived gunshot wounds. Speier stated that there are 10 million cult members in the U.S. and warned: "The most important fact about Jonestown is, it can happen again...