Jonestown - Aftermath

Aftermath

Further information: Peoples Temple in San Francisco, Jim Jones, Peoples Temple, and Jonestown conspiracy theory

At the airstrip, journalist Tim Reiterman photographed the aftermath of the violence. Dwyer assumed leadership at the scene and, at his recommendation, Layton was arrested by Guyanese state police. Dwyer was grazed by one bullet in his buttock during the airstrip shootings. It took several hours before the ten wounded and others in their party gathered themselves together. Most of them spent the night in a café. The more seriously wounded slept in a small tent on the airfield. A Guyanese government plane arrived the following morning to evacuate the wounded. Five teenaged members of the Parks and Bogue families, with one boyfriend, followed the instructions of defector Gerald Parks to hide in the adjacent jungle until help arrived and their safety was assured. Thereafter those members were lost for three days in the jungle and nearly died. Guyanese soldiers eventually found them.

After escaping Jonestown, Odell Rhodes arrived in Port Kaituma on the night of November 18, 1978. That night Stanley Clayton stayed with a local Guyanese family and travelled to Port Kaituma the next morning. The Carter brothers and Michael Prokes were put into protective custody in Port Kaituma. They were later released in Georgetown. Rhodes, Clayton and the two lawyers (Garry and Lane) were also brought to Georgetown. Michael Prokes committed suicide on March 14, 1979, four months after the Jonestown incident.

Larry Layton, who had fired a gun at several people aboard the Cessna, was originally found not guilty of attempted murder in a Guyanese court, employing the defense that he was "brainwashed". Layton could not be tried in the United States for the attempted murders of Vern Gosney, Monica Bagby, the Cessna pilot and Dale Parks on Guyanese soil and was, instead, tried under a federal statute against assassinating members of Congress and internationally protected people (Ryan and Dwyer). He was convicted of conspiracy and of aiding and abetting the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and of the attempted murder of Richard Dwyer. Paroled in 2002, he is the only person ever to have been held criminally responsible for the events at Jonestown.

The event was one of the stories most heavily covered by the media and photographs pertaining to it adorned newspaper and magazine covers for months after its occurrence, including being labeled "cult of death" by Time and Newsweek magazines. In February 1979, 98% of Americans polled said that they had heard of the tragedy. George Gallup stated that "few events, in fact, in the entire history of the Gallup Poll have been known to such a high percentage of the U.S. public."

After the deaths, both the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the State Department itself criticized the State Department's handling of the Temple. Political opposition seized the opportunity to embarrass Guyanese Prime Minister Burnham by establishing an inquest which concluded that Burnham was responsible for the deaths at Jonestown.

The sheer scale of the event, as well as Jones' socialism, purported inconsistencies in the reported number of deaths, allegedly poor explanation of events related to deaths at Jonestown, and existence of classified documents led some to suggest CIA involvement, though the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence investigated the Jonestown mass suicide and announced that there was no evidence of CIA involvement at Jonestown.