1978-1988 SPECIAL REPORT: "JONESTOWN AFTERMATH" (PART II)
The Temple’s San Francisco headquarters came under siege by national media and relatives of Jonestown victims.
The mass killing became one of the best-known events in U.S. history as measured by the Gallup poll and appeared on the cover of several newspapers and magazines, including Time, for months afterward.
In addition, according to various press reports, after the Jonestown suicides, surviving Temple members in the U.S. announced their fears of being targeted by a “hit squad” of Jonestown survivors. Similarly, in 1979, the Associated Press reported a U.S. Congressional aide’s claim that there were “120 white, brainwashed assassins out from Jonestown awaiting the trigger word to pick up their hit.”
Temple insider Michael Prokes, who had been ordered to deliver a suitcase containing Temple funds to be transferred to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, killed himself in March 1979, four months after the Jonestown incident. In the days leading up to his death, Prokes sent notes to several people, together with a thirty-page statement he had written about the Temple. Caen reprinted one copy in his Chronicle column.
Prokes then arranged for a press conference in a Modesto, California motel room, during which he read a statement to the eight reporters who attended. He then excused himself, entered a restroom, and fatally shot himself in the head.
Before the tragedy, Temple member Paula Adams engaged in a romantic relationship with Guyana’s Ambassador to the United States, Laurence “Bonny” Mann. Adams later married Mann. On October 24, 1983, Mann fatally shot both Adams and the couple’s child, and then fatally shot himself. Defecting member Harold Cordell lost twenty family members the evening of the poisonings. The Bogues family, which had also defected, lost their daughter Marilee (age 18), while defector Vernon Gosney lost his son Mark (age 5).
The mass suicide of the Peoples Temple has helped embed in the public mind the idea that all new religious movements are destructive. Bryan R. Wilson argues against that view by pointing out that only four other such events have occurred in similar religious groups: the Branch Davidians, the Solar Temple, Aum Shinrikyo and Heaven’s Gate.
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