DARK clouds tumbled overhead on that afternoon 30 years ago, in the last hours of the politician's mission deep in the jungle of Guyana.
With a small entourage, US congressman Leo Ryan had come to investigate the agricultural settlement built by a California-based church. But while he was there, more than a dozen people had stepped forward: We want to return to the United States, th
ey said fearfully.
Suddenly, a storm broke. People scrambled for cover as I interviewed the founder of the Peoples Temple.
"I feel sorry that we are being destroyed from within," intoned the Rev Jim Jones, stunned that members of his flock wanted to abandon the place he called the Promised Land.
That freak storm and the mood seemed ominous – and not just to me. "I felt evil itself blow into Jonestown when that storm hit," recalls Tim Carter, one of the few settlers to survive that day. Within hours, Carter would see his wife and son die of cyanide poisoning, two of the 918 people Jones led in a murder and suicide ritual of epic proportions.
And I would be wounded when a team of temple assassins unleashed a fusillade that killed Mr Ryan – the first US congressman slain in the line of duty – and four others, including three newsmen.
By their wiles or sheer luck, scores of temple members escaped the events of 18 November, 1978. Some of the survivors would commit suicide, die at the hands of others or fall victim to drugs. But many more moved on to new careers, spouses and even churches.
The Peoples Temple sprang from the US heartland in the 1950s. Jones built an inter-racial congregation in Indianapolis through passionate Pentecostal preaching and courageous calls for racial equality. Moving his flock to California, the minister transformed his church into a left wing social movement with programmes for the poor.
Political work by his followers elevated Jones to prominence in liberal Democratic circles by the late 1970s. He was head of San Francisco's public housing commission when media scrutiny and legal problems spurred his retreat to Jonestown for what would be his last stand.
In 1977, as the media were beginning to investigate disciplinary thrashings and other abuse in the temple, Jones left the US, along with several hundred followers, for a "commune" he had set up in to Guyana.
Upon arrival in Jonestown, many of his followers felt deceived. It was far from the paradise he had described. People were packed into metal-roofed cabins, sleeping on bunks without mattresses and using outhouses with newsprint for toilet paper. There were armed guards, and Jones warned that deserters would encounter venomous snakes and hostile natives.
The preacher who once charmed US politicians and met the future first lady Rosalynn Carter, had become a pill-popping dictator who sadistically presided over harsh discipline.
Once the congressman had visited the commune, it was clear he could not be allowed to take news of what was happening there back to the US.
A team was dispatched to kill him at the airstrip he was using to leave, along with 15 "defectors" he was taking home. We made it safely to the dirt strip. But then, a tractor with a trailer full of temple gunmen soon bore down on us. Gunfire exploded as we boarded two small planes.
Mr Ryan died. So did Patricia Parks, a defector; the NBC newsmen Don Harris and Bob Brown; and a photographer, Greg Robinson, my colleague at the San Francisco Examiner. I was shot in the left forearm and wrist.
By the time the gunmen returned to Jonestown from the airstrip, Jones had gathered his people in the pavilion and, weaving words of desperation, had begun preparing them for the end.
He used news of the shooting to convince the throng that they had no hope, no future, no place to go. "The congressman has been murdered!" he announced. "Please get the medication before it's too late … Don't be afraid to die."
When grape Flavor Aid laced with potassium cyanide was brought forward, Jones wanted the children to go first, sealing everyone's fate, because the parents and elders would have no reason to live.
With armed guards encircling everyone and with youngsters bawling and screaming, medical staff members with syringes squirted poison down the throats of babies.
The "mass suicide" that followed was the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of 11 September, 2001.
Survivors tell their stories and how they have managed to forgive but not forgetLESLIE WILSON, wife of the Temple security chief Joe Wilson, took her three-year-old son Jakari to the kitchen building, where they met seven others who had endured enough of Jonestown's harsh life and Jones's faked sieges and suicide rehearsals. The group told fellow settlers they were going on a picnic – but they just kept on moving through the jungle, with Jakari slung in a sheet on Mrs Wilson's back.
"I was so scared I was shaking in my tennis shoes," she recalled. "I was waiting for a gunshot and a bullet and me dropping."
Concealed by thick undergrowth, the escapees passed so close to the Jonestown guard shack that they could hear voices. Trudging 35 miles along railway tracks, they arrived sweaty and dirty that night in the town of Matthews Ridge.
Mrs Wilson, who lost her mother, brother, sister and husband that Saturday, was consumed with survivor's guilt.
On Mother's Day, two years after Jonestown, she thought about what it must have been like for her mother to see two of her children die. She put a pistol to her head.
She did not shoot. She had to live, she decided, for the sake of her son. After a bout with drug abuse, she twice married and bore two more children.
She finally has found forgiveness, even for Jones, but she cannot forget. "I pray my family did not think I left them," she said. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about it."
TIM CARTER was sent to the pavilion when the killing already was under way. Frozen in horror, he saw his 15-month-old son Malcolm poisoned. Then his wife Gloria died in his arms. "I wanted to kill myself," he said. "But I had a voice saying, 'You cannot die. You must live'."
He did live. Jones had one last mission for the Vietnam veteran. A top Jones aide gave Mr Carter, his brother and another temple member pistols and luggage containing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They were instructed to take the money to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown along with letters authorising transfer of millions from Temple bank accounts to that government. It was to be Jones's last gesture for socialism.
But the trio ditched most of the cash during the arduous hike to Port Kaituma.
Two days later, Mr Carter was brought back to Jonestown to help identify the bodies. "People still think everyone lined up in orderly fashion and drank the potion without protest," Mr Carter said. "It's not reality. I saw people who had been injected with poison."
In the aftermath, he went to live with his father in Boise, Idaho. Walking on the street, he felt others looked at him with loathing and fear. Friends from his youth on the San Francisco Peninsula, where he had introduced some people to the Temple, called him a murderer or refused to speak to him.
"The more time that goes on, the better it is," he said. "I can think about Gloria and Malcolm without feeling that knife in my chest."
STEPHAN JONES, the minister's son, was 19 and in Georgetown on the Temple's last day. Today, he is the father of three daughters.
In Jonestown's aftermath, Stephan hated his father. But he has come to recognise that the capacity for good and evil, and mental sickness, coexisted in Jones.
The unidentifiable or unclaimed bodies of more than 400 of Jonestown's dead, most of them children, are interred in a mass grave at an Oakland Cemetery overlooking San Francisco Bay. Each year a memorial service is conducted on 18 November.
"I go because I feel so strongly about the need for and power of forgiveness and understanding," said Mr Jones.
Dozens of surviving members also come together for private reunions because they still value their friendship, the temple's sense of community and their utopian dream of a world free of racism and injustice.
YULANDA WILLIAMS was about 12 when she began attending Temple services in San Francisco with her parents. Her father, lured by Jones's reputation as a Christian prophet with healing powers, believed that the minister helped him recover from a heart attack.
In 1977 Jones summoned Mrs Williams and her husband to Guyana.
Because her husband was an attorney whose skills could be better used elsewhere, the couple were permitted to leave after a few weeks. And months before the horrific end, she and her family cut ties with the Peoples Temple.
Eventually, Mrs Williams joined the San Francisco Police Department, where she thrived as a policewoman. The department needed officers to connect with gang members and other juveniles in trouble with the law.
"I told my story to young people," said Williams. "They were amazed because they never imagined anyone could beat these types of odds."
