Congressman Leo Ryan arrived at Jonestown on 17 November 1978 with a delegation of relatives and journalists. He had been asked to come by the Relatives Committee.
The first evening went reasonably. On 18 November, fifteen members asked to leave with him. That request was the event that ended everything: it demonstrated, publicly and in front of outsiders, that the community was not what Jones had described, and Jones understood the implications immediately.
At the Port Kaituma airstrip that afternoon, Temple gunmen opened fire on the departing party. Ryan was killed, along with three journalists and one defector.
At the pavilion, Jones convened the community. The recording of what followed — a tape running about forty-four minutes, recovered by the FBI — is the closest thing that exists to a real-time record of how a mass killing is talked into being.
The children were poisoned first. Cyanide and sedatives were mixed into a grape-flavored drink and administered to infants and children by syringe, by their parents and by nurses.
That ordering is the operative decision, and it is worth stating what it accomplishes. Once a parent's child is dead, the strongest possible motive for resistance has been removed and replaced with the strongest possible motive for compliance. There is nothing left to preserve and nothing to return to. Every account of the pavilion describes the acceleration after the children.
On the tape, one woman — Christine Miller — argues with Jones. She proposes that they fly to Russia. She says the children deserve to live. She is answered by Jones and then by other members, who tell her she is out of order, that she is being selfish, that Father has given her everything. She is not silenced by force. She is silenced by the congregation.
That is Asch's finding under the most extreme conditions on record. The lone dissenter is present, audible and correct, and the unanimity of the rest is sufficient.
The rest is the machinery this part has been describing. Obedience to an authority the members had accepted as legitimate for twenty years, with peers complying visibly first. Exit costs that were total: passports surrendered, property signed over, families cut off, an ocean and a jungle between them and anything else. And a rehearsal, performed many times, that made the actions of the afternoon procedurally familiar.
Nine hundred and eighteen people died, including three hundred and four children. Some were injected against their will, some were shot, and the great majority drank.
Jones died of a gunshot wound to the head, not by poison.