November 18, 2008, Seattle Times - AP, 30 years later: The legacy of Jonestown, by Tim Reiterman,

November 18, 2008, Seattle Times - AP, 30 years later: The legacy of Jonestown, by Tim Reiterman, The Associated Press,

With a small entourage, Rep. Leo Ryan, D-Calif., had come to investigate the remote agricultural settlement built by a California-based church. While he was there, more than a dozen people had stepped forward: We want to return to the United States, they said fearfully.

Dark clouds tumbled overhead on that afternoon 30 years ago, in the last hours of the congressman's mission deep in the jungle of Guyana.

With a small entourage, Rep. Leo Ryan, D-Calif., had come to investigate the remote agricultural settlement built by a California-based church. While he was there, more than a dozen people had stepped forward: We want to return to the United States, they said fearfully.

Suddenly a powerful wind tore through the central pavilion, riffling pages of my notebook, and the skies dumped torrents. People scrambled for cover as I interviewed the founder of 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 freakish 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 more than 900 people Jones led in a murder and suicide ritual of epic proportions.

And I would be wounded when a team of temple assassins killed Ryan — the first congressman slain in the line of duty — and four others, including three newsmen.

But by their wiles or happenstance, scores of temple members escaped the events of Nov. 18, 1978. Some 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.

They are, as they were before joining the temple, mostly ordinary people who wanted to help their fellow man and be part of something larger than themselves.

With time, differences between temple outsiders and insiders, defectors and loyalists have faded. They have experiences in common and share painful memories from a tragedy that has come to epitomize the power of a charismatic leader over his followers.

Tim Carter was spared to carry out one last mission for the temple. Almost 30 years after that horrible day, we spoke for the first time.

"We are inextricably linked," Carter said. "What you experienced at the airstrip is what I experienced at Jonestown. ... I cannot describe the agony, terror and horror of what that was."

Roots in heartland

Peoples Temple sprang from the heartland in the 1950s. Jones built an interracial congregation in Indianapolis. Moving his flock to California, the minister transformed his church into a leftist social movement with programs for the poor.

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.

Yulanda Williams was about 12 when she began attending temple services in San Francisco with her parents. Her father believed Jones helped him recover from a heart attack.

In 1977, as news media were beginning to investigate disciplinary thrashings and other abuse in the temple, Jones summoned Williams and her husband to Guyana.

Upon arrival in Jonestown, the couple felt deceived. It was far from the paradise Jones 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 U.S. politicians and met with future first lady Rosalynn Carter, had turned into a pill-popping dictator who sadistically presided over harsh discipline.

Because Williams' husband was an attorney whose skills could be better used elsewhere, they were permitted to leave after a few weeks. And months before the horrific end, she and her family cut ties with the temple.

Eventually, Williams joined the San Francisco Police Department. Fearing for her job, she kept her temple history secret for a decade. But later she confided in a superior and was given a job working with gang members.

"I told my story to young people," she said. "They were amazed because they never imagined anyone could beat these types of odds."

Congressman's probe

On the morning of Nov. 18, Ryan's party was about to tour the settlement, and investigate whether its inhabitants truly were free to go.

Leslie Wilson, wife of security chief Joe Wilson, took her 3-year-old son Jakari to the kitchen building where they met seven others who had endured enough of Jonestown's Spartan life and Jones' 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 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."

Trudging 35 miles along railroad tracks, they arrived sweaty and dirty that night in the town of Matthews Ridge.

Wilson, who lost her mother, brother, sister and husband that Saturday, would be 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 had to live, she decided, for the sake of her son.

She twice married and bore two more children. Now divorced, she goes by her married name, Leslie Cathey, and works in the health-care industry.

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."

Headed for airport

While a temple dump truck ferried the Ryan party and 15 grim-faced defectors toward the Port Kaituma airstrip six miles away, we were unaware that anyone had escaped.

We made it safely to the dirt strip. But then, a tractor with a trailer full of temple gunmen — Joe Wilson among them — soon bore down on us. Gunfire exploded as we boarded two small planes.

Ryan died. So did defector Patricia Parks, NBC newsmen Don Harris and Bob Brown, and photographer Greg Robinson, my colleague at the San Francisco Examiner.

I was shot in the left forearm and wrist.

Some survivors fled into the jungle but most took refuge in a cramped rum shop, fearful the assassins would return. "You're gonna see the worst carnage of your life at Jonestown," predicted one of the defectors the next morning. "It's called 'revolutionary suicide.' "

No hope, no future

By the time the gunmen returned to Jonestown, Jones had gathered his people in the pavilion and had begun preparing them for the end. He used news of Ryan's 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 potassium cyanide-laced Grape Flavor Aid 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, medical staff with syringes squirted poison down the throats of babies.

The killing already was under way when Carter was sent to the pavilion. Frozen in horror, he saw his own 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 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 authorizing transfer of millions from temple bank accounts to that government.

But the trio ditched most of the cash during the arduous hike to Port Kaituma, and they were detained by police there.

In the aftermath, Carter went to live with his father in Boise, Idaho. He landed a job at a travel agency and worked in the industry for many years.

He has had two long-term relationships and is the father of three children. He collects disability payments for post-traumatic stress from Vietnam, but he reflects on the nightmare of Jonestown each day.

"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."

Kill the betrayers

Late on the afternoon of Nov. 18, a coded radio message from Jones was transmitted to the temple's house in Georgetown: Some Jonestown residents had betrayed them and he wanted the faithful to kill temple enemies. Then members in the Guyanese capital and San Francisco — a couple of hundred people — should commit suicide.

Bay Area businessman Sherwin Harris had sat down for supper at the house with his teenage daughter Liane and his ex-wife Sharon Amos' two other children.

Oblivious to Jones' dire orders, Harris was hopeful. He had traveled to Guyana with the Ryan party to check on his daughter's welfare and, after several days of trying, was finally able to see her.

Harris and his daughter discussed plans to spend the next day together.

That night, after Harris took a cab back to his hotel, police informed him that his daughter, Amos and her two other children were dead.

"It felt like the swing of a sledgehammer full on to my chest," he said.

Amos killed her two youngest children with a butcher knife; then she and Liane died the same way. Harris clings to the belief that his daughter was killed and did not commit suicide.

Since that night, Harris' two surviving children have made him a grandfather four times over. He has become friends with his daughter's closest temple confidante.

"As I've met members over the years, I would hate to bet a cup of coffee on the differences between them and us," he said. "They were normal folks, mostly wanting to make a contribution to society."

Private reunions

Thirty years later, dozens of surviving members come together for private reunions. "I go because I feel so strongly about the need for and power of forgiveness and understanding," said Stephan Jones, the minister's son. He was 19, and in Georgetown with other basketball-team members on the temple's last day.

Today, he is the father of three daughters and is the vice president of a small Bay Area office-installation and services company.

In Jonestown's aftermath, Stephan Jones hated his father. But he has come to recognize that the capacity for good and evil, and mental sickness, coexisted in his dad.

"We don't want to face our own responsibility or part in what happened and feel ashamed for being duped or manipulated," he said. "We look for someone else to blame. I realized over time that there was a great need to forgive him, then I could forgive myself."

Tim Reiterman, San Francisco news editor for The Associated Press, covered Jonestown for the San Francisco Examiner. He is the author with the late John Jacobs of "Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People," published by Tarcher/Penguin.