November 21, 1978, The Washington Post, Survivor: 'They Started With the Babies', by Charles A. Krause,

November 21, 1978, The Washington Post, Survivor: 'They Started With the Babies', by Charles A. Krause, Washington Post Foreign Service, 

JONESTOWN, GUYANA When the Rev. Jim Jones learned Saturday that Rep. Ryan
had been killed but that some members of his party had survived, Jones
called his followers together and told them that the time had come to
commit the mass suicide they had rehearsed several times before.

"They started with the babies," administering a potion of Kool-aid mixed
with cyanide, Odell Rhodes recalled yesterday when I revisited Jonestown
to view the horrifying sight of 409 bodies — men, women, and children,
most of them grouped around the altar where Jones himself lay dead.

Rhodes is the only known survivor of Jonestown who witnessed a part of
the suicide rite before managing to escape. He was helping Guyanese
authorities identify the dead yesterday.

Most of those who drank the deadly potion served to them by a Jonestown
doctor, Lawrence Schact, and by nurses, did so willingly, Rhodes said.
Mothers would often give the cyanide to their own children before taking
it themselves, he said.

But others who tried to escape were turned back by armed guards who
ringed the central pavilion where the rite was carried out, Rhodes said.
They were then forced to drink the poisoned Kool-aid and shortly after
the mass killings began, Rhodes said, "it just got all out of order.
Babies were screaming, children were screaming and there was mass
confusion."

It took about five minutes for the liquid to take its final effect. Young
and old, black and white, grouped themselves, usually near family
members, often with their arms around each other, waiting for the cyanide
to kill them.

They would go into convulsions, their eyes would roll upward, they would
gasp for breath and then fall dead, Rhodes said.

All the while, Jones was talking to them, urging them on, explaining that
they would "meet in another place." Near the end, Rhodes said, Jones
began chanting, "mother, mother, mother" — an apparent reference to his
wife who lay dead not far from the altar.

Yesterday, a stilled Jonestown looked much as it must have moments after
the mass suicide ended two days earlier. The bodies were where they had
fallen, the half-empty vat of cyanide-laced Kool-aid was still on the
table near the altar in the open air pavilion. The faces of the dead bore
the anguished expressions of their terrible deaths.

More than 390 of the bodies were grouped around the altar, many of them
arm-in-arm. They were so thickly bunched together that it was impossible
to see the ground beneath them.

Even the dogs that lived in Jonestown had been poisoned and now lay dead
on sidewalks near the pavilion. The Peoples Temple's pet chimpanzee, Mr.
Muggs, had been shot dead.

In Jones' house, approximately 10 others lay dead. C.A. Roberts, the
Guyanese police commissioner in charge of investigating the killings,
said his men were "finding new bodies in isolated places" throughout the
Jonestown property.

It was a gruesome scene.

The bodies, which had been on the ground for almost three days in the
muggy climate here, were beginning to bloat. A Guyanese doctor was sent
in yesterday to puncture them because it was feared many would burst open
before today, when U.S. Army medical teams are scheduled to arrive at
Jonestown to begin identifying and shipping them back to the United
States.

Of the 405 members of the community who died, Jones and two others were
shot rather than poisoned, according to C.A. Robert, the chief Guyanese
police official at Jonestown yesterday.

Another who was shot was Maria Katsaris, whose brother, Anthony, had come
with Ryan Friday to try to persuade their sister to leave Jonestown.
Anthony Katsaris was one of those badly wounded during the Saturday
massacre that left five dead and approximately 12 wounded.

Rhodes said he managed to escape when the doctor said he needed a
stethoscope. Rhodes volunteered to go with a nurse to the infirmary,
about 300 feet from the open-air pavilion where the suicides were being
carried out.

Rhodes said the armed guards let him through with the nurse and he hid
under a building when she went into the doctor's office for the
stethoscope. At 7 p.m., when it seemed that the mass suicide had ended,
he left his hiding place and walked through the jungle to Port Kaituma,
five miles away.

It was Rhodes, according to Roberts, who gave the first hint to Guyanese
authorities that hundreds had died in a mass suicide. Rhodes said he had
hoped to reach Guyanese officials in time to stop more people from being
killed.

Rhodes also recalled yesterday that shortly after Ryan and his party left
Jonestown, Jones told his followers that Ryan's plane was going to "fall
out of the sky."

The plan, according to Rhodes and other information made available late
yesterday, was that one of the defectors, who really was a plant acting
on Jones' orders, would shoot the pilot of Ryan's plane after it left the
Port Kaituma airstrip.

The person apparently chosen for the task, however, boarded the wrong
plane and started shooting before it was off the ground. Two passengers
on that plane were badly wounded.

According to Dale Parks, a bona fide defector from Jonestown who was
aboard that plane, the man who did the shooting was Larry Layton, a U.S.
citizen who is so far the only person under arrest here in connection
with any of the violence.

In addition to the man sent to infiltrate the defectors and shoot the
pilot, Jones took the extra precaution of ordering a group of his
followers to go to the airstrip in a tractor and trailer loaded with
guns, apparently to shoot whoever was not aboard the congressman's plane.
The clear intent was that everyone who had gone to Jonestown with Ryan
was to be killed.

The assailants returned to Jonestown and reported, out of the hearing of
lawyers Mark Lane and Charles Garry, who had stayed behind, that the
congressman was dead but others had lived. It was then that Jones
announced that all his followers must come immediately to Jonestown's
open-air pavilion. There he told them Ryan had been killed and that there
would be "trouble."

"We've all got to kill ourselves," Jones told everyone, according to
Rhodes. One woman, Christine Miller, protested, Rhodes said, "but the
crowd shouted her down."

Roberts said that so far the only non-Americans found among the more than
400 known dead were seven Guyanese children adopted by the Jonestown
community.

As Guyanese police officials continued their search of Jonestown
yesterday they discovered more than 800 American passports loaded in a
trunk. They found cash, checks and valuable jewelry and metals, including
gold.

The most perplexing question left to be answered was the whereabouts of
the approximately 400 Jonestown residents whose bodies have not been
found.

There was speculation that hundreds of people fled to the jungle and
simply have not yet found their way out. But there was also another
theory that some of the Jonestown security men took hundreds of the
commune's residents to a remote area possibly to be shot.

Lending some support to that theory was the fact that Tom Kice, one of
those believed to have been among the gunmen who attacked Ryan's party,
has not been found.

Also, lawyers Lane and Garry, who escaped into the forest when the
killing began, reported yesterday that they heard scattered screaming and
shooting in the forest while they were in hiding.

According to several of the Jonestown residents who left with Ryan on
Saturday and survived the attack at the airstrip, residents of Jonestown
had gone through several rehearsals for a mass suicide.

The procedure even had a name. When Jones decided that his church was
finished, he had told followers here he would send a coded message to his
church's other headquarters in Georgetown, Guyana, and San Francisco that
they should join the Jonestown faithful in taking their lives.

They were to wait for the words "white nights."