Wednesday Rewind: Jonestown

·35 min·2 clips

Over 900 Jonestown residents, including 304 children, died from cyanide poisoning on the same day as the airstrip shootings.

1. Mystery Murder & Mayhem revisits Jonestown through the hosts’ memory of the 1979 film Guyana, Crime of the Century. 2. The host and Alex frame Jim Jones as the central figure because his name, church, and followers drove the story. 3. The episode asks how Jim Jones built the People's Temple and why hundreds of followers followed him into Jonestown. 4. Jones was born James Warren Jones on May 13, 1931 in rural Indiana and grew up in a shack without plumbing. 5. He read about Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Mahatma Gandhi, and Adolf Hitler while still a child. 6. The hosts say his friends described him as obsessed with religion and death, and they mention funerals for small animals on his parents’ property. 7. Jones left his father after a fight over race and later moved with his mother to Richmond, Indiana. 8. He graduated early from Richmond High School with honors in 1948 and then worked as an orderly at Reed Hospital. 9. At Reed Hospital he met nurse Marceline Baldwin, whom he married in 1949. 10. He studied at Indiana University in Bloomington, attended night classes at Butler University, and earned a degree in secondary education. 11. The hosts say Jones attended Communist Party USA gatherings in Indianapolis and decided to infiltrate the church with communism. 12. In 1952 he became a student pastor at Somerset Southside Methodist Church, then left after saying it would not allow integration of African Americans. 13. He organized a June 11-15, 1956 revival in Indianapolis and shared the pulpit with Reverend William M. Branham. 14. After that event he founded the People's Temple Christian Church Full Gospel, later shortened to People's Temple. 15. During the 1960s he led integration efforts at churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the Indianapolis Police Department, a theater, an amusement park, Indiana University, and Methodist Hospital. 16. The hosts note that people responded with a swastika on the temple, a stick of dynamite on a pile of coal, and a dead cat thrown at Jones’s house. 17. Jones and Marceline adopted non-white children and called their household the Rainbow Family. 18. They adopted Agnes in 1954, three Korean-American children in 1959, and became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt an African-American child in 1961. 19. The tone is chatty, sarcastic, and story-driven, with the hosts interrupting each other and reacting to the details in real time. 20. People who want a chronological account of Jim Jones and Jonestown will get the most from it, while listeners wanting a brief, polished history lesson may skip it.

As heard by us

A plainspoken Jonestown recap that keeps the timeline moving even when the details turn grim.

Wednesday Rewind: Jonestown starts from a childhood memory of Guyana, moves through Crime of the Century, then follows Jim Jones, the move to Northern California, and the chain of beliefs that led toward disaster.

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Why you'd press play

You want a Jim Jones walk-through that sounds like somebody talking straight at your kitchen table.

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