Rep. Leo Ryan & Jonestown Victims

Case background and investigation

In November 1978, U.S. Representative Leo Ryan, a Democrat from California, led a fact-finding delegation to Guyana to investigate reports that members of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple were being held against their will at Jonestown, the church's agricultural settlement in the South American jungle. According to the historical record, Ryan traveled as chairman of a congressional oversight subcommittee and was accompanied by aides, several journalists, an NBC television crew, and a group of relatives of Temple members known as the Concerned Relatives. The delegation arrived in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown on November 14 and reached Jonestown on November 17.

During the visit, a number of Temple members indicated they wished to leave, and Ryan agreed to escort them out. On November 18, 1978, as the group prepared to depart from the airstrip at nearby Port Kaituma, gunmen who had followed the delegation from Jonestown opened fire on the party and the waiting aircraft. Congressman Ryan was killed, shot more than twenty times, along with four others: NBC reporter Don Harris, NBC cameraman Bob Brown, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and Temple defector Patricia Parks. Roughly nine to eleven others were wounded, including Ryan's legislative aide Jackie Speier, who survived and later became a U.S. congresswoman. Ryan is the only sitting member of the U.S. Congress to be killed in the line of duty.

Later that same day at the Jonestown settlement, more than 900 Peoples Temple members died in what the historical record describes as a mass murder-suicide carried out at Jones's direction. Members drank or were forced to consume grape Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and sedatives; the poison was administered to infants and children first, some by syringe, before adults consumed it. Reported figures place the death toll at Jonestown at 909, including some 304 children, with additional deaths in Georgetown bringing the overall total to 918. Jim Jones himself was found dead in the settlement's central pavilion with a gunshot wound to the head, determined by investigators to be self-inflicted. It remained one of the largest losses of American civilian life in a single non-natural event prior to September 11, 2001.

Larry Layton, a Peoples Temple member who had posed as a defector and boarded one of the aircraft, drew a weapon and fired at members of the departing group, wounding two people before being subdued. He was the only person tried and convicted in U.S. courts in connection with the airstrip attack. Layton was initially acquitted in a Guyanese court. In the United States, his first federal trial in 1981 ended in a mistrial; he was retried and convicted in 1986 by a federal jury in San Francisco of conspiracy and aiding and abetting in the murder of Congressman Ryan and the attempted murder of U.S. deputy chief of mission Richard Dwyer. He was sentenced in March 1987 to life in prison and was released on parole in 2002.

The Jonestown tragedy left a lasting imprint on American culture, giving rise to the phrase 'drinking the Kool-Aid' and prompting congressional and public scrutiny of new religious movements. The case is considered closed. Larry Layton's conviction stands as the sole criminal conviction obtained; the other identified gunmen died at Jonestown, and no further prosecutions followed. Jackie Speier's survival and later political career, along with continued scholarship and the recovery of unclaimed victims' remains decades afterward, have kept the events in public memory.