November 21, 1978, The Prescott Courier / AP, Guyana body-shuttle begins,

November 21, 1978, The Prescott Courier / AP, Guyana body-shuttle begins,

Suicide death toll tops 400

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) -- U.S. soldiers flew in today to begin a macabre shuttle ferrying out corpses of more than 400 American cultists who drank a lethal brew of Kool-Aid and cyanide in fanatic loyalty to a suicidal messiah. But the state of the bodies may force the soldiers to bury them on the spot in the jungle commune where they died.

Guyanese soldiers and police, meanwhile, searched the surrounding wilderness for hundreds of other members of the sect, the People's Temple, who fled from the Jonestown agricultural settlement after the mass suicide.

A reporter who visited the camp, 150 miles northwest of this South American capital, said it "looked like a garbage dump where somebody dumped a lot of rag dolls."

The bodies of sect founder, the Rev. Jim Jones, and his wife were among 409 corpses that a police spokesman said Guyanese troops had counted in and around the meeting hall in Jonestown. Jones and several others had been shot, presumably by their own hand. The others had drunk Kool-Aid into which the camp doctor mixed cyanide.

Jones ordered the mass suicide Saturday after sect members ambushed and killed a U.S. congressman and four other persons who were part of an investigative team that visited Jonestown.

Three U.S. Air National Guard C-130 transports arrived this morning carrying about 200 Army and Air Force personnel and food and equipment. Air Force officials said a C-141 Starlifter was expected later, carrying a dozen helicopters that would ferry the bodies out of Jonestown.

But Douglas Davidson, an official with the U.S. Embassy, said the bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition and authorities were considering burying them at Jonestown.

"The bodies are starting to swell and seem seem ready to burst," said embassy official Peter Londoner.

Afternoon temperatures the past three days have been in the 85-90-degree range, and the tropical sun has shone steadily the past two days.

The officials emphasized no decision had been made yet, but that the military contingent probably could not get to Jonestown until Wednesday.

The American contingent included 29 identification experts. To speed the process, the Guyanese government waived a law requiring autopsies in homicide cases.

Also found at the camp was a half million dollars in cash and some jewelry. Unconfirmed reports also said a half million dollars in gold

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CAPTION: This is a 12-year-old high school yearbook picture of Dr. Larry Schact who is believed to have made the cyanide-spiked fruit punch.

JONESTOWN

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and hundreds of Social Security checks had also been found.

Fifteen survivors were reported found, three in the camp and 12 who came out of the jungle. Estimates of the missing ranged from more than 375 to more than 775. An exact estimate was not possible because reports of the settlement's total population ranged from 800 to 1,200. Most were from California, the headquarters of the sect.

Jones, a former San Francisco city official, ordered the mass suicide Saturday after members of the cult attacked Rep. Leo J. Ryan, D-Calif., and U.S. newsmen who visited Jonestown to investigate reports that inmates of the settlement were being brutally treated and that would-be defectors were prevented from leaving.

Ryan and his party were attacked as they were boarding two planes at the Port Kaituma airstrip, eight miles from Jonestown, with 16 defectors from the settlement. Ryan, three U.S. newsmen and a woman fleeing from the settlement were killed, and 10 others were wounded.

One of the survivors found in Jonestown, a 36-year-old teacher named Odell Rhodes, said after Ryan left the settlement, Jones announced by loudspeaker that he had ordered the congressman and the journalists with him killed.

Rhodes said the the suicide was ordered after the killers returned to Jonestown with word that some of Ryan's party had escaped to report what happened and what they had found in the settlement. The survivor said the settlers had been rehearsing suicide for months so that they could kill themselves if their way of life was seriously threatened.

The body of the 46-year-old cult leader was found on the stage of the meeting hall, near the chair from which he preached. He was wearing black pants and a sport shirt, and there was a bullet wound in his head.

The hall was packed with bodies and more were piled up outside. Charles Krause of the Washington Post, who visited the camp as the representative of the foreign press reported:

"From the air, it literally looks like a garbage dump when somebody dumped a lot of rag dolls."

The Guyanese police said they arrested two of the survivors who came out of the jungle, but no charges were filed against them immediately. Presumably the police believed they were implicated in the killing of Ryan and his companions.

In Washington, the State Department set up a task force to inform the families of the cultists as soon as the department learned the identities of the dead and missing.

Some of the waiting relatives went to the locked headquarters of the People's Temple in San Francisco Monday. About 25 members of the cult were inside, guarded by police to protect them. Deputy Police Chief Clem DeAmicis of San Francisco said there was no indication that members of the cult there would try suicide.