Word: ryans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...approached the Pacific island in World War II had there been a comparable act of collective self-destruction. The followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, 47, a once respected Indianaborn humanitarian who degenerated into egomania and paranoia, had first ambushed a party of visiting Americans, killing California Congressman Leo Ryan, 53, three newsmen and one defector from their heavily guarded colony at Jonestown. Then, exhorted by their leader, intimidated by armed guards and lulled with sedatives and painkillers, parents and nurses used syringes to squirt a concoction of potassium cyanide and potassium chloride onto the tongues of babies. The adults...
...spring of 1977, Ryan, a liberal but maverick Democrat, spoke with a longtime friend, Associated Press Photographer Robert Houston. Houston, who was ill, told Ryan that Houston's son Bob, 33, had been found dead in the San Francisco railroad yards, where he worked, just one day after he had quit the Peoples Temple. Though authorities said his son died as the result of an accidental fall, Houston claimed the cult had long threatened defectors with death...
...loner who liked doing his own investigating of constituents' concerns, Ryan began inquiring about Jim Jones and his followers, who had just started clearing some 900 acres in the rain forests of Guyana. Other unhappy relatives of temple members, as well as a few people who had fearfully left the cult, told the Congressman that beatings and blackmail, rather than brotherly love, impelled the cultists to work on the new colony. Articles in New West magazine and the San Francisco Examiner in August 1977 further documented the temple's increasing use of violence to enforce conformity to its rigid rules...
...Ryan repeatedly asked the State Department to check into reports about the mistreatment of Americans in Jonestown. The U.S. embassy in Georgetown sent staff members to the colony, some 140 miles northwest of the capital. They reported they had separately interviewed at least 75 of the cultists. Not one, the embassy reported, said he wanted to leave...
That did not satisfy Ryan, who decided to find out what was happening in Jonestown by going there. Ryan wrote Jones that some of his constituents had "expressed anxiety" about their relatives in the colony. Back came a testy letter, not from Jones but from controversial Attorney Mark Lane, who has built a career on his theories of conspiracies behind the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Lane charged that members of the Peoples Temple had to flee the U.S. because of "religious persecution" by the Government and implied that Ryan was engaged in a "witch hunt...